About once a week I head on over Steam to peek at the most wishlisted games because I want to know: what are PC gamers looking forward to most? Are there any highly anticipated games on the brink of release? And is anything new blowing up

This week I definitely spotted something new: Dear Passengers, a co-op game about running "the world's worst airline" with your friends, is now seated comfortably at number 12 on Steam's top wishlists. That's impressive because the chaotic friendslop game was only announced a week ago. Here's the trailer if you missed it:

"You and your friends are the crew," says developer Flexus. "Your job is to deliver passengers and cargo to their destination. Preferably in one piece. While one of you pilots the plane, the others keep the cabin together, serve the passengers, and deal with whatever goes wrong before it gets much worse."

And things definitely look like they get worse. Turbulence, bad weather, bird strikes, and dangerous cargo can lead to all sorts of disasters while in flight, and of course there's no greater threat than your friends who might open the doors at altitude and get everyone sucked out of the plane.

It looks like chaotic fun, and the internet agrees: Dear Passengers was added to 700,000 wishlists in just 36 hours after the trailer premiered on July 14, and has more than doubled that since, collecting over 1,500,000 wishlists a couple of days ago.

It's not an entirely smooth takeoff to Mount Wishlist, however: in the same week, the Kyiv-based studio also received some backlash over its edgelord humor—players in the trailer are named "Epst.J" and "PDaddy," not-so-subtle references to the notorious sex traffickers, and one passenger on the plane appears to be modeled after Donald Trump. (He is thrown out of the plane by Epstein.)

"All characters are fictional, and any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental," a developer posted in the game's official Discord. "Flexus Games strongly condemns the actions of Jeffrey Epstein, as well as any crimes and individuals involved in breaking the law."

More backlash came following a job advertisement posted by Flexus on its website looking for a "2D Artist skilled in bringing game ideas to life and adept at using generative AI for concept creation"—which led to speculation that Dear Passengers uses AI-generated assets despite the game's Steam page displaying no AI disclosure.

The developers had a response to that, too: "No AI was used in the creation of Dear Passengers," Flexus said on Steam. "That was an old job posting related to marketing assets for some of our mobile projects. It has nothing to do with Dear Passengers. This game was created without generative AI."

The job posting has now been revised to state "Looking for a 2D Artist skilled in bringing game ideas to life."

That's a whole lotta stuff to happen in just one week, huh? We'll see how the rest of the year goes: Dear Passengers is set to release sometime in 2026.

It's taken centuries of human advancement, but soulslikes and demanding third-person action games have finally reached a level of cultural proliferation where we as a society can ask the all important question: What if the dinosaurs could have simply parried the meteor?

That's the tantalizing possibility suggested by Dinoblade, a probably paleontologically accurate soulslike launching on Steam later this week that portrays dinosaurs just as the fossil record tells us they lived: As big lizards getting into sick as hell swordfights by swinging around weapons they're holding in their teeth.

"Step into the role of a young Spinosaurus, wielding a colossal Great Sword forged from ancient power," says developer Team Spino in Dinoblade's store description. "Confront rival dinosaurs, some armed with brutal weapons of their own, all in a desperate fight to prevent a looming extinction."

The latest Dinoblade trailer is like a highlight reel of all the coolest things we would have daydreamed about as dinosaur-obsessed youths before society taught us how to be ashamed of imagination: There are tyrannosaurs with battleaxes. There are tyrannosaurs with halberds. There are tyrannosaurs biting down onto ankylosaurs to use them as weapons. Meanwhile, the spinosaurus player character is unleashing some of the wildest combat animations anyone has ever caused a spinosaur animation rig to perform.

And, as alluded to earlier, the trailer ends with that heroic spinosaurus seemingly preparing to enter a boss battle with the very meteor that wiped out all of dinosaur-kind.

Unfortunately, dinosaurs didn't know about i-frames. But that might change! And I'm clearly not the only one eager to see how it might: Earlier this month, Team Spino announced that Dinoblade has amassed over 500,000 wishlists on Steam. And frankly, I'd be concerned for us all if it hadn't.

Dinoblade launches on Steam on July 23, but there's a demo available now if you can't bring yourself to wait.

In a depressingly predictable turn of events, the reveal God of War Laufey came under fire from certain corners of the Internet, as it centres around a female protagonist rather than mad lad turned sad dad Kratos.

Much of this negative reaction has centred around Laufey's actor Deborah Ann Woll, who also played Laufey in the 2018 reboot. But Woll, who also plays Karen Page in Marvel's Daredevil and its reboot Daredevil: Born Again, isn't fazed by the impotent rage of misogynistic online trolls:

Woll was asked about the backlash to the game's reveal by TikTok influencer quinnphobic at Florida Supercon (via Eurogamer) who recorded the actor's response for TikTok:

"Genuinely, I thought I was going to be much more affected by it, but one, I'm not on social media, so that helps, and two, I don't know, I feel totally unbothered," Woll replied. "Because I just know it's great. It's okay if it's not your cup of tea, but in no universe is it bad."

I'll admit to being surprised by Sony Santa Monica's direction for the next God of War, since Kratos has been at the centre of it since the very beginning. But having watched the lengthy reveal trailer/game demo, you can hardly say it isn't in the spirit of the franchise. The idea of carving my way through the afterlife with a big wobbly cube companion seems rad, and if anything, Laufey is truer to the series' original design philosophy than the more recent reboots, returning to a more traditional combat system

I felt like the Norse setting had run its course by the end of God of War: Ragnarök, and some new blood was needed for the series to continue. Besides, Sony Santa Monica has said that Kratos will return in future games anyway. So why be mad? Of course, we know why some people are mad, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the game.

What I will be mad at, however, is if God of War Laufey doesn't come to PC. Both God of War and Ragnarök saw a delayed PC release after Sony discovered that launching its PlayStation exclusives on Steam et al is like printing money. But in May, Sony said it is retreating from the PC as a platform as it recommits to PlayStation exclusives being, well, exclusive.

This would suggest that Laufey will be stuck on PS5 (or possibly PS6 by the time it launches). Personally, though, I don't see this decision lasting all that long. PC is just too big a platform to ignore nowadays, and games like Laufey are so expensive to make that they need as wide a distribution as possible to succeed.

I still remember cursing aloud when I was first sent to prison in GTA 5 roleplay.

You see, unlike in regular Grand Theft Auto—story mode or Online—getting arrested in RP has consequences. Sure, you face the same trigger-happy cops when you fall foul of the law, where you're pursued until either dead or in cuffs, and are then hit with the same 'Wasted' or 'Busted' mandates depending on the outcome of the chase. Assuming the latter transpires, however, you don't simply receive a fine and a reset wanted star meter—in the majority of GTA RP servers, you instead respawn in the Bolingbroke penitentiary.

The magnitude of your crime determines the length of your stay as you pace around the recreation ground doing everything you can to avoid contact with anyone else, lest you find yourself punching lumps out of one another and extending your stay. Now, XmanStudios has introduced the whole ordeal to GTA 5 singleplayer by way of their mod, Jailbreak.

"Jailbreak is a GTA 5 script that adds a prison sentence system to singleplayer," reads the mod's description. "If the player dies or gets arrested while wanted, they are transported to Bolingbroke Penitentiary and must serve a sentence based on the wanted level they had at the time.

"The current version includes prison bus transport, prison processing, prisoner outfits, sentence timers, cell entrance and exit markers, lockdown triggers, guard reactions, baton-based cell returns, and basic escape behaviour. During normal prison time, guards and prisoners roam around the prison. If the player causes trouble, enters restricted areas, or tries to escape, the prison can enter lockdown and guards will respond."

Through all of that, players can expect visible cell entrance and exit markers, a prison lockdown system, restricted area lockdown triggers and a brutally violent so-called 'baton-based return-to-cell system' which leaves very little to the imagination. Updates in recent weeks include basic jailbreaking features, such as Shawshank Redemption-style digging, bed dummies and stealth mechanics that only kick into gear after lights out.

A quick glance at the mod page's comments reveals the warm reception Jailbreak has received so far (a few weeks on from launch and it's cracked 3,000 downloads), however there is one that immediately caught my eye. Crazyboy4881 says: "GTA 6 NEEDS THIS." And, given the prominence of prison in the scant snatches we've seen so far of the next Grand Theft Auto adventure, I really couldn't agree more.

hen I played 007: First Light earlier this year, one element of it stood out to me as unusual—and that is the arc relating to Bond's fellow 00 trainees, Cressida Bright and Lennox Monroe. IO Interactive puts a huge amount of work into building these characters, successfully selling you on the inherently bizarre concept of James Bond having flatmates.

Yet just as you warm to these characters, they vanish from the story, and after MI6's failed operation to eliminate the rogue 009 in Slovakia, Bond primarily teams up with his mentor, Greenway.

All of this is well portrayed. But the cadence of it nonetheless struck me as odd while playing. It turns out there might be a reason for this. IO Interactive initially intended for First Light to be less squarely focused on Bond, while his pals would have played a much bigger role in the story.

Speaking to Eurogamer, First Light's lead writer Michael Vogt explained how the game's first act came together. "During the training sequence, we make a false promise," Vogt said. "Basically, we're saying 'This is going to be an ensemble piece, all the 00s working together, as they do in Slovakia'.

"And then we pull the rug out from under you when most of them die, and serendipitously, [Bond's], the last man standing. He could have died in that explosion but he doesn't, and so he emerges as the top agent. But in my very first pitch I think we were actually toying with the idea of making it an ensemble piece, that you had the different agents working together."

Logically, this makes sense. You're not going to put a newly trained agent out in the field on their own until you're certain they can handle it, which given Bond's roguish tendencies would probably take a while. But IO ultimately cut the ensemble concept short to kickstart Bond's character development.

"The story beat that it serves is of course that it goes from all fun and games for him—he's a young kid, he's on an adventure, and he's out globetrotting and playing secret agent—but after that explosion, he wakes up to the harsh reality. When M says that [00] life expectancy is very short, it's like 'Oh, right''. He gets it, and he matures from that, of course, and also from the guilt—maybe the survivor's guilt—of being the one who made it."

Vogt can't recall when exactly this change was made, but it would explain why Cressida and Monroe feel so much like companions who are going to accompany Bond through the entire game. For at least a part of the game's development, that was the plan.

Making money in GTA Online has basically always been a game of whack-a-mole, with players finding the latest and greatest trick, and Rockstar promptly shutting the loophole down. With Grand Theft Auto 6 on the horizon, Rockstar has decided to nerf heists, which were one of the most popular ways to make a good buck in Los Santos.

The latest update added the Kortz Center heist where you're tasked with stealing an art collection. The first hurdle is that it costs at least $16.2 million to get a mansion and art studio upgrade you need to unlock it, and it only pays out a measly $2 million per completion for all your hard work—lower than most existing, easier-to-access heists. If you don't already have a mansion at least, it's not worth the investment.

Compare this to the Doomsday Heist, which can be started by purchasing the cheapest facility, worth $1.2 million, and then a low $25,000 setup fee for Act 1, which previously paid out $975,000. By the time you'd beaten the Acts 2 and 3, you'd be raking in the money.

Alongside this, Rockstar has nerfed multiple other heists' payouts and introduced a weekly bonus to compensate, which I assume is to encourage players to engage with a more diverse array of activities. For example, completing the Kortz Center will only reward you with a bafflingly low $400,000 on your second run of the week. The Diamond Casino's maximum $3.3 million reward has been cut to $2.3 million, and it now goes as low as $1.4 million.

Sure, if you're completing each of the heists every week to earn the first-time bonuses, then it's technically a buff, but most players don't have the resources to do this given the high setup fees. And if you're doing every heist every week, then chances are you're not a casual player anyhow.

Unsurprisingly, these sweeping nerfs haven't gone over well with the community. "Prices go up, paychecks go down. I thought a game would let us escape the world a bit," one player wrote on Reddit. And it's true, all the sought-after vehicles cost a couple of million bucks each, steadily increasing over the past few years, and since Rockstar capped most vehicle resales at $500,000 earlier this year to combat duplication exploits, it's tough to recoup any cash. The new Grotti Veleno GT costs $3 million alone. Buying property is similarly pricey. While payouts have, in practice, been slashed for most players, flashy new rides and facilities are as expensive as ever.

"Wtf are they doing?" another player said. "This will not encourage people to do these heists more. It does the opposite."

Likewise, "If people want to grind the same heist, let them, why discourage it?," said yet another frustrated player. "If it's to make players change up what content they do, maybe change the unpopular heists. Weekly bonus is cool but not enough to make up for the nerfs. Definitely feel like nerfs just to try and push as many players as possible towards GTA 6."

And they make a good point. We still don't know what Rockstar has planned for GTA Online when GTA 6 arrives. Is it to be replaced by a brand-new, completely separate online mode for the long-awaited sequel? Is the current GTA 5 online mode simply going to continue like it is now? Will it be updated for the new era in a similar fashion to Call of Duty's battle royale mode, Warzone? If it's the latter, perhaps these economy tweaks are to set the stage for what's to come. Only Rockstar knows, and it's rarely one to tell.

Aaand relax.

Having fought the first three bosses, slain a familiar parade of public domain monsters, and enjoyed many a crack of Castlevania's new whip, I can confirm that Evil Empire hasn't followed up The Rogue Prince of Persia with its first bad game. If you've been longing for this series to confidently get back to its Symphony of the Night-era glory days, you're in luck. Frankly, I'm happy just to see Castlevania finally back from the dead.

"It was completely crazy," says Emmanuel Nouaille, creative director at Evil Empire, when I ask how it feels to make a new Castlevania game. "It was a blast of course. Just a dream come true." Tsutomu Taniguchi, the game's producer at Konami also assures us that he's happy to be making the first new Castlevania after 12 years of coffin rest.

"But at the same time, I feel a lot of pressure," he says. "It's a happy pressure." Tanighuchi's translator urges us to look at his smiling face so we know he's telling the truth.

Putting on a brave face? No, there's plenty to smile about here. Belmont's Curse introduces Rose Belmont, daughter of Trevor 'star-of-ancient-Vania-games' Belmont. Let's hope Rose hasn't read her game's subtitle, eh? Father and daughter arrive in the ruins of Paris, which has been overtaken by the forces of darkness, naturally. Trevor goes off to make his own investigations while Rose starts exploring Paris and smacking monsters around, occasionally taking a break to cryptically refer to her unnamed mother.

Intriguing…

A dull, tedious part of me will always want my 2D Vanias to be pixel art affairs, but I'll begrudgingly concede Belmont's Curse is a looker. Backgrounds pack so much detail into its far-too-on-fire take on Paris that often it's borderline 2.5D. Castlevania has also never felt smoother to play, and certainly never this welcoming. You start off with three health potions, and can even stack more on top of that. Floor slide and wall jump platforming techniques are available right from the start instead of being stingy unlocks. Enemies drop health-restoring food infrequently, but not as ridiculously rarely as in the earliest games, where you could easily forget they contained a food system at all.

Blasphemy? Possibly, but from the first boss onwards, Belmont's Curse grows a fine set of fangs.

Kid Dracula?

As in '80s and early '90s Castlevania bosses hit suddenly and hard, punishing even the most minor mistakes by snapping your health bar over their knee. Fights outside these behemoth bouts scale up quickly, too: Belmont's Curse loves needling cowards by having threats constantly pursue you across the screen. Fail to deal with some flying gargoyles and they'll stalk you right into your next battle with a big flame shooting horror, multiple harpies, and bats so irritating they must have flapped right out of Pokémon's caves.

For the first time since Order of Ecclesia way back in 2008, a year so distant it might predate Dracula, the series is finally a proper metroidvania again. Given that Evil Empire has never made one and is known for roguelikes, surely the studio must have considered giving Castlevania a similar spin? "It's the first Castlevania we've released in quite some time, so we really did want to give homage to the 2D action exploration games," explains Taniguchi. He stresses that Konami still gave Evil Empire plenty of autonomy, but it looks like everyone aligned on making a metroidvania pretty swiftly.

"We had a lot of discussions at the beginning as to what makes Castlevania special," says Nouaille. "We have a lot of different gameplay styles in the history of Castlevania." But the team decided it had to be what Konami officially calls a "2D action-exploration game" early on. "We didn't talk a lot at the beginning about doing another style of gameplay."

Belmont's curse hits all the metroidvania staples with gusto. Weird hooks in the walls and other progress blockers have you covering the map screen in reminders to make a return trip. There's a vast amount of secrets to discover, with a pleasing frequency of surprisingly smashable walls. Best of all, it rewards you for taking the time to examine its map screen properly, connecting routes in your head and then whipping and swinging your way to the treasures they're hiding.

There's no waypoints or guide arrows here (now that would be blasphemy). Instead, ghosts tell morbid stories that offer clues as to where you should go next. One spirit tells us a tragic yarn about seeing someone dragged under the roots of a cursed tree. Aha, so there's a route beneath those roots! Score! Oh, and, er, sorry for your loss. It's nice to know that if we're completely stuck we can scroll through these hints, even if some are a little patronising. It's not a good idea to look Medusa in the eyes, you say? Hope you didn't notice how hard I just rolled mine…

Old rope

Only Indiana Jones rivals this series for most iconic whip, and Evil Empire has probably given us its best incarnation yet. This whip lets you swing over gaps and yank yourself towards enemies, the latter obviously being something of a mixed blessing. "The whip is not just a tool for traversal," explains Nouaille. "It's used for both combat and traversal. We focused on having something simple to use with a lot of responsive aspects. We like to create a movement like a dance." The idea was to give the player a whip that they actually "use like wings."

Staying airborne as long as possible by whipping from enemy to enemy is like playing the Spider-Man: Vampire Hunter game I never knew I wanted. Swinging off enemies gets steadily more vital in the increasingly cruel platforming sections, too, pairing beautifully with another power that can morph certain platforms and walls in and out of existence.

Leap-whip-whip-morph-whip-morph-slice-leap is incoherent gibberish to you now, but trust me; that's exactly what'll be playing through your head just a few powers in.

The game constantly chucks new weapons at you. I thought I was committed to the fast swipes of the basic sword, until I cheated on it with the lovely chuckable spear. Each weapon and spell has criteria you can fulfill to upgrade it, too. At the most basic this is simply a case of killing enough enemies, but more interesting challenges stand in the way of the bigger unlocks.

These pair nicely with unlockable talismans that offer boons, like more damage delivered when you're airborne, gently pushing you into trying different playstyles. Evil Empire can't simply smash up your toys each run like it could in Dead Cells and Rogue Prince. But it's great to see the team still knows how to encourage you to experiment regardless.

My only issue so far is that, in the nearly two decades since Order of Ecclesia, metroidvanias have been through about five renaissances. The whip is a fine weapon, but it doesn't challenge Nine Sols' revelatory talisman-slapping or even Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown's sublime swordplay (at least, not yet). Getting turned to stone by Medusa's flying heads raises a smile of recognition, but I instantly know to waggle the analogue stick to break free.

Should an epic battle against the forces of darkness feel this much like slipping into a favourite pair of comfy slippers?

At least one of the bosses being Joan of Arc is new, and certainly a novel way to try to butter up a British games journalist.

After three hours of play, Belmont's Curse is a very good metroidvania, and full of potential to be an outstanding one. If it's 'merely' a greatest hits collection then that'll only be a mild disappointment. But I'd be delighted if Evil Empire has some more tricks up its sleeve and whackier weapons worthy of Dead Cells' almighty arsenal. I've got everything crossed for something as sublimely silly as Aria of Sorrow's soul-sucking vacuum cleaner.

If Belmont's Curse can deliver on that, then never mind Dracula; this could well be the entry that finally dethrones the almighty Symphony of the Night.

A man who was found liable for multiple high-profile hacks including a major leak of Grand Theft Auto 6 footage in 2022 has reportedly been released from the secure hospital where he'd been held since 2023, and is now in prison awaiting a retrial.

Arion Kurtaj, who was 18 at the time, was found by a UK court to be part of the Lapsus$ hacking group that had carried out attacks on companies including BT, Uber, Nvidia, and mostly famously, Rockstar, which suffered what we called "one of the biggest leaks in videogame history": 90 Grand Theft Auto 6 videos of varying lengths were uploaded to the GTAForums fan site, more than a year before the first official GTA 6 trailer was released.

A psychiatric assessment of Kurtaj determined that he has "acute autism," and more relevantly, that he was "highly motivated" and "continued to express the intent to return to cybercrime as soon as possible," even as he was in custody for previous such crimes. He was also more than capable of following through: The Rockstar hack was carried out while Kurtaj was under police protection at a Travelodge hotel, reportedly using only an Amazon Firestick, the television in his room, and a cell phone.

The results of that assessment meant the jury in the case was only asked to determine if Kurtaj had committed the hacks, not if he'd done so with criminal intent. After it was found that he had, Kurtaj was sentenced to a secure hospital, for life or until doctors determined that he's no longer a danger.

That determination has apparently now been made. BBC correspondent Joe Tidy, who covered the case and initial sentencing, said on Bluesky that Kurtaj is out of the hospital and "in a normal prison awaiting retrial," currently scheduled for November—ironically, the same month that Grand Theft Auto 6 will finally launch on consoles.

How Kurtaj can be tried now for crimes committed while his mental state was such that he required multiple years of institutionalization isn't clear to me. In response to a similar query on LinkedIn, Tidy said that he is pursuing that line of inquiry as well, but added that police aren't currently saying anything about it: Just getting them to confirm that Kurtaj is out of hospital "was like getting blood out of a stone," he wrote.

Getting lost in history in Assassin's Creed Origins

By Andy Kelly

In Assassin’s Creed we usually visit civilisations at their peak, whether it’s Renaissance Italy or London at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Ubisoft could have done this for Origins too, taking us to the golden age of Ancient Egypt. But instead we visit this period of history in its twilight years. The pharaonic line is coming to an end and the Greeks have dramatically transformed the landscape, culture and religious practices of this part of the world.

This makes for a fascinating architectural contrast. In the largest cities you see statues of Egyptian gods crumbling and forgotten, outnumbered by pristine, polished marble statues of Greek legends. And even monuments, like the pyramids of Giza and the Great Sphinx, are already falling apart. There’s a tragedy to seeing this grand civilisation fade away as foreign invaders erect gleaming temples and acropolises across the desert.

It might be the best open world Ubisoft has ever created. While riding through the barren Green Mountains region on horseback, idly exploring with no specific goal in mind, I crested a hill and saw a sprawling Roman city resting in a misty valley below. It stopped me in my tracks. The scale is breathtaking, making even the vast cities of previous Assassin’s Creed games seem small in comparison.

Size isn’t everything when it comes to open worlds, of course. Just look at something like Just Cause, which is enormous but consists of little more than large swathes of dull, featureless countryside and a few unconvincing cities. Origins keeps things interesting by splitting its world up into distinct regions, from the oasis town of Siwa and the rocky canyons of the Black Desert, to the ruin-littered sands of Giza and the cultural epicentre that is Alexandria.

Crocodile tears

Faiyum is one of the prettiest and most interesting locations in the game. Founded to worship Sobek, who takes the form of a crocodile, this city is built around a network of canals and dominated by a beautiful, ornate temple dedicated to the god.

Inside, the priests worship a giant crocodile adorned with gold and jewels who they believe is the embodiment of Sobek, and one quest involves hero Bayek trying to find out why the sacred creature has mysteriously started weeping blood.

It took me a hefty 27 hours to finish Origins and there are still areas on the map cloaked in black, indicating that I haven’t travelled there yet. It’s obscenely huge, although the length is artificially extended somewhat by forcing you to reach a certain level before attempting the next story quest.

Exploring Egypt isn’t as thrilling as sailing the Caribbean in Black Flag, which remains my favourite entry in the series. But it’s a much richer, more convincing world overall, and a precious chance to step into history and experience it firsthand.

One of the largest and best changes in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is the new combat system. It's still faithful to the original's lethality, but it's no longer just about standing still waiting to counter an attack.

But you know what I don't love? The confusing removal of hidden blade combat and the ability to pick up enemy weapons. It's dual cutlasses all the way, matey, which gets old pretty fast. In fact, it's been a pretty big point of contention for fans of the original game ever since the remake was revealed.

Black Flag Resynced game director Richard Knight has spoken on the topic in a new interview with YouTuber JorRaptor, revealing why these mechanics were cut and if they're ever coming back.

Firstly, don't stop asking for it: "We can't make any promises [but] we're listening to the community," Knight explains. "We're interested in what people want the most," he adds, and I'd say that these missing features are surely high up the list.

As for the second bit, their absence came down to prioritising resources, Knight says. "During development, if you looked at Edward—he's so powerful right now and has so many tools—and so we prioritised core combat because we needed to nail that."

"Something like throwing weapons, while it's cool, it's just like 'he already has ten ways to kill somebody'. So, given the cost to reinvent the feature and rebuild it from the ground up with today's characters, rigs, and animations, there's a lot more that goes into it. It was just lower priority for us."

Core combat is, obviously, the most critical part of Edward's kit—I love the kick, sweep, and easier access to the rope dart—but these were iconic features of the original Black Flag. It means you can't steal a musket and do a cool, running takedown with it, for example, or pick up an axe and start swinging.

But there's hope yet that Ubisoft will figure out how to add them to Resynced post-launch. I suppose that's one of the benefits of Ubisoft cramming an expanded cash shop and weekly challenges into the remake: more incentive to expand on the base game and keep us all sailing the high seas.

My train spins through the air after launching off a skyscraper-high vertical ramp, swiftly twisting onto another bolt-upright bit of track, my view smothered with speed lines, Japanese onomatopoeia, and sparks as enthusiastic allies yell encouragement. A gorgeous vista stretches out below me, Japan's countryside filled with cherry blossom trees and bright blue water.

In these brief and highly curated moments Denshattack appears to be an exciting combination of Jet Set Radio's cel shaded style and Tony Hawk's tricks and challenges, with an added dash of Taito's arcade classic Densha de Go for good measure. It's an impression that sadly soon goes off the rails, any interaction longer than a social media clip's worth of action revealing a fully loaded freight train's worth of issues.

I may technically be controlling a train, but bar a token nod to not derailing on curves the metal box I'm in charge of never behaves anything like one, even if I temporarily set the acrobatics aside. There's no inertia, no weight pulling me back on steep slopes, no assistance from gravity on the way down a ramp, no careful adjusting of a virtual mascon to smoothly slow down for a corner or push for flat-out bursts of energy on a long straight.

It could be anything. A person. A dirt bike. Shadow the Hedgehog. Tracks themselves are broken into tiny chunks and discarded as often as the game's whims deem necessary, replaced with anything from half pipes to trampolines and ferris wheels.

I never expected Denshattack to play anything like a serious sim, but I did hope the train aspect of the game might involve more than letting me pick and decorate a few train-like shapes, especially as the (Japanese) word is literally in the title.

Ignoring the game's self-chosen focal point entirely and pretending it's purely a futuristic trick-based score attack experience does little to improve things. There's an inescapable feeling while I play that it would be happier if I didn't get in the way. Personal creativity is constantly pushed to the side, unwelcome in spite of all the combo multipliers and flips I can do. Every stage wants to tell a story at all times, to be a wild string of events where pure-hearted people shout nice supportive things as structures crumble and wacky scenarios pop up around them: A giant mech. A laser-spewing kaiju. A kabuki play. There are even playable Rock Band and Ikaruga homages to work through.

I'm rarely trusted to make my own fun. There's always some weird quirk to work around (at the most basic, optional rainbow tracks that are completely invisible, and therefore, unable to be spotted and planned for, until a gauge fills up). I can't strategise or create combos on my own terms.

Or guarantee I'll react in time to whatever "fun" eye-catching stunt is coming up either. The game may haphazardly offer icons warning of upcoming dangers, but when a red "!" can mean anything from "obstacle on the line" to "a giant shadow monster is about to rise out of the sea" and I've got half a second at most to react, they're of little practical use. Occasional poor colour choices only exacerbate these issues, long strings of orange lanterns hanging right beside orange grind rails, lines of yellow lights near yellow track, green air currents set against a sea green background. I'm constantly fighting the stages themselves. Failure does little beyond setting me a short way back so I can try again, the rote repetition only leading to increasing irritation instead of a meaningful opportunity to learn.

I either do what I'm told when I'm told to do it or… Denshattack has no "or," too much of the game playing like a string of QTE-like gimmicks. Me being in complete control is never the game's priority.

Attempting to make do and master what is in here is routinely thwarted by the game's wobbly sense of internal consistency, my capabilities and even plain old physics only intermittently available. My ability to race at odd angles and perform Titanfall 2-like wall runs flickers on and off like a faulty lightbulb—that bit of track, that vertical surface—and attempts to think outside the box and perform these stunts outside specific moments is brought to a crashing halt, Denshattack tut-tutting about my balance and deciding any contact with smooth perpendicular walls is a punishable offence. The water's surface must never be touched except in the occasional stages where I'm allowed to ride underneath it for extended periods of time. Crashing into things is an instant fail unless the game decides that actually crashing is OK for this bit or this particular object.

It doesn't feel fair, and the lack of clarity makes it difficult to improve my own skills when what is and isn't allowed varies so drastically from one section of a stage to the next.

Denshattack doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. For a game with such strong anti-corporation/environmentalist themes—freeing Nara's famous deer is a stage-long event—it's a little odd to see so many optional challenges involve some variation of "scare the animals by honking the train's horn." Trains are surprisingly irrelevant to a story full of them. Tricking struggles to rise beyond the level of a simple distraction: Abilities gained throughout the story don't broaden my toolset or scoring capabilities, and retrying an earlier track completely disables any later abilities gained. Tricks are just a way to survive the latest set of scripted setpieces.

It isn't clear and consistent enough for serious score attack play, yet it's also far too fussy to allow the raw absurdity of moments like controlling a shark or countering giant baseballs with aerial tricks to sweep me up in a wave of comedic positivity. This train has gotten lost somewhere between two diverging tracks.

Exciting news: it is officially Garrett summer. Just recently, Nightdive announced it's been cooking a Thief remaster at the PC Gaming Show, bringing modern resolutions, controller support, and myriad other modcons to the venerable 1998 stealth game. But if that's not enough for you—or you just believe the sacred brooks no improvement—the original game is getting some love too: GOG is inducting Thief Gold into its Preservation Program.

The Preservation Program is GOG's name for its expanding roster of games that the storefront is committed to keeping running from here until the heat death of the universe (or a catastrophe of similar scale, like the store going under). From Windows 11 to Windows 8,000, GOG is pledging to sell you a copy of Thief that you can simply boot and play on modern systems, with GOG offering technical support in the event it doesn't work.

GOG's pushing the boat out on this one a little. Where some games that get folded into the Preservation Program get little more than a kick of the tyres and a statement of ongoing support, Thief is getting some extra goodies as part of its induction. GOG's adding "German, French, and Polish localizations, updated graphics and audio defaults, improved UI scaling, optimized controls, and the latest NewDark 1.27 engine update". GOG's also bundling in the game's original, pre-Gold version, The Dark Project, should you want to play that.

Even more dramatically—if, like me, you are old and haggard and like playing videogames on your television—is the addition of gamepad support. "We’ve integrated the Gamepad Mod into the game and paired it with the GOG Input Wrapper," says GOG, "bringing full support for modern controllers—including radial menus, customizable controls, rumble, and compatibility with PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Logitech, and Amazon Luna controllers." Oh, and as ever, no need to buy the game again to get this stuff if you already own it on GOG.

I'm rather impressed. It's like Thief got a mini-remaster ahead of Nightdive's full-fat remaster. I suppose GOG felt like it needed to put some welly into this one: not only is Thief a classic, but this is the first game to get added to its Preservation Program as a result of GOG Patron voting. That's the system whereby those who sign up to chuck GOG $5 a month (a little walkin' around money) get to vote on which games get added to the Preservation library.

The voting on the next game to get the Thief treatment is already live. Patrons can choose between Nox, Lands of Lore 1 & 2, Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honour, Silver, and Albion.

18 months after release, Capcom is slashing the price on Monster Hunter Wilds and discontinuing three of its bundles in favour of… three different bundles. Okay, cool.

The change is coming in starting from August 3 or August 4, depending on where you are in the world. For the bundles, it seems like a little bit of shuffling and consolidation is happening. Its Deluxe Edition, Premium Deluxe Edition, and Cosmetic DLC Pass are being retired in favour of the following:

• Gold Edition: Base game plus the below Cosmetic DLC Collection
• Cosmetic DLC Collection: Has everything from the first four DLC packs, Festival Accord DLC, Deluxe Pack, and the below Extra Cosmetics DLC Pack
• Extras Cosmetic DLC Pack: Includes "select paid cosmetic DLC only previously available as standalone products."

It's all a tad confusing—probably thanks to the fact there are almost 200 extra items you can fork out money for, according to the Steam DLC page for the game—but it mostly seems like Capcom is trying to stuff all the microtransactions into a bigger bundle, since the Premium Deluxe Edition currently only offers everything from the first two packs.

The more interesting thing here, though, is what comes at the end of Capcom's announcement. "In addition, the Monster Hunter Wilds base game will receive a permanent MSRP reduction starting August 4, 2026."

There's not even a hint to how much Capcom will skim off the current price, which stands at a whopping $70. Its price point has been a bit of a point of contention since its release—you can scoop up both Monster Hunter: World and Monster Hunter Rise for less than one copy of Wilds, and some will argue that the former two are far more enjoyable games than the latter.

We do have another Capcom game as a loose frame of reference, though. Dragon's Dogma 2 recently underwent a permanent price cut—going from $70 to $40—though the game's been out almost an entire year longer than Wilds, so I'd imagine something a little less severe. Perhaps in the $50 to $60 range, I'd wager.

Either way, this feels like a net positive all around. I'm not a fan of endless, silly microtransactions, but neatening them up into a bigger bundle feels like a safe play. And a permanent price cut seems like a sensible choice for a game that, despite huge launch concurrents, never really found its footing and has ultimately settled into the realm of distinct averageness.

The lack of a Grand Theft Auto 6 PC port at launch is a sore spot for those of us faithful to the ol' mouse and keyboard. Sure, it's not new for Rockstar to prioritise console over PC (it's got a marketing deal with Sony, after all), especially with new game launches, but I thought we were beyond that. But we've got Phantom Vice Auto to look forward to on November 19 instead, and that's probably just as good, right?

So, why is Rockstar passing on a simultaneous PC launch for its games, including the upcoming GTA 6? According to former Rockstar producer John Ricchio in an interview with Reece 'Kiwi Talkz' Reilly on YouTube, it's not because the studio doesn't "care about PC".

Ricchio describes a time when games were typically made for PC first, focusing on the strongest hardware, and then downsized for consoles before launch. Naturally, this led to some shoddy console ports cramming optimisation for weaker hardware at the last minute.

"So you're much better off starting with the constraints," Ricchio explains. "Shrinking is a lot harder than extending" to more powerful hardware. "Oh, we've got extra room. Cool. We can de-optimise some things or make them more shiny."

Ricchio then punched us in the gut, noting that back when the first Red Dead Redemption was in the lab, they had a PC port working "very early" in development. Those who patiently waited will know that the PC version came in 2024, more than 14 years later. And you can blame GTA 5.

According to Ricchio, getting PC versions ready is more about development priorities. "It's not that we don't care about PC. It was just 'is it worth spending time getting a PC port going versus working on GTA 5?' … It's never any specific, anti any platform." So, he adds, "If you're working on that, you're not working on something else usually … There has to be enough of a business reason to do some of those ports, or the lift has to be so light that it'll be super easy to do. And it's rarely super light."

It still feels like Rockstar is having its cake and eating it too, though. Ricchio points out that in the past, there were cases of "legitimate hardware limitations" when developing for console compared to PC. That power gap is "definitely closer" now.

While I'll likely be taking the hit and playing GTA 6 on console (then playing it again when the PC version eventually arrives), it turns out you lot are actually quite patient—39% of our readers are more than happy to wait. Patience is a virtue, but Rockstar knows what it's doing.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is, naturally, a modern Ubisoft game—and as modern Ubisoft games are wont to do, it had some really annoying DLC wrapped up into it alongside an in-game cash shop. One point of contention was a day-one map pack DLC for five bucks, which reveals the location of every collectible in game, thus defeating the purpose of… y'know, looking for and collecting them.

What did Ubisoft reap as a reward for this chicanery? Well, aside from a brief dent to its overall Steam review score—one that's evened out to a respectable "very positive" 80% at the time of writing—not all that much.

According to the analysis work of Alinea Insight, the remaster made a whopping $35.1 million on Steam alone over the first four days. Its day-one DLC, which totals at an eye-watering $85 of cosmetics (and the aforementioned map pack), is responsible for around 2.8% of that number.

Which doesn't sound like a lot, but that's still $1 million that Ubisoft otherwise wouldn't have snagged—and still a tremendous amount of purchases on aggregate. And while my inner gamer naturally balks at the prospect of this DLC, it's almost hard to blame Ubisoft for the move when this is how it's rewarded.

Like, looking at these cosmetic packs—yes, the concept art, modelling, and implementation probably costs quite a bit, but certainly nowhere approaching $1 million. And the map pack, though it galls me, is likely just a few lines of code.

I still think it's deeply cynical, but just like that $90 World of Warcraft dinosaur that made Blizzard $15-$17 million, gamers are not great at actually voting with their wallets in a way that would dissuade companies like Ubisoft, which have no obligation to operate on principle, from basically printing a bunch of free money.

Assassin's Creed Unity, it hardly needs to be said, had its share of problems. At launch, the game which was intended to be Ubisoft's big technical showcase on the then-new PS4 and Xbox One was rife with sometimes-hilarious bugs, filled with map barf, crammed with microtransactions, had a rather odd emphasis on co-op gameplay in a historically singleplayer series, and was—a little garnish—venomously reactionary about its setting: the French Revolution.

And yet, and yet, I maintain it was actually one of the best Assassin's Creed games, and represented a much more interesting avenue the series could have gone down had Ubisoft not embraced full Witcher 3-ification in games like Odyssey, Origins, Shadows, and Valhalla.

I would like to call Jean Guesdon, former AC brand content director, as witness to Unity's defence. In a chat with the most recent Retro Gamer magazine (via GamesRadar), he came to the game's defence, hailing it as an overlooked entry in the series that fell victim to its own ambition.

Unity is "one of the most underestimated games in the series," says Guesdon. That's not to say it's unfairly underestimated—Guesdon is clear that the game had its troubles: "Sadly, Unity’s launch was a huge challenge because of several reasons," he says.

"Like Assassin’s Creed 3 with AnvilNext, Unity’s development was impacted by the incredible new tech allowing for 1:1 scale, interiors, massive crowds, a brand-new parkour system and an integrated multiplayer component."

All that whizzbang tech gave the devs a lot of plates to spin: "Pushing content and tech at the same time is always very demanding, and this opus maybe pushed too many things at once," says Guesdon. But dammit, it had ideas—"Unity’s team decided that the key component would be Paris, one city only. Hence all decisions were made in order to make the setting shine and ensure players would experience the French Revolution like never before.

"This is why all mechanics and systems were more dense and focussed," says Guesdon. "Maybe we could have done better in terms of progressive introduction but overall I don’t think the experience was too complicated."

I adore Unity's humid Paris streets, thronged with sans-culottes, and I love the fact that it's the only Assassin's Creed game I've ever played where stealth felt like it served a purpose—where combat carried any actual risk. Will Ubi ever try to pick up those ideas, and return to the dense, one-city game format of yore? Well, it sort of tried that with Mirage, and people didn't like it, but I'm holding out hope regardless.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has been a massive success for Ubisoft, having sold two million copies in a day and breaking the series' concurrent player records on Steam by nearly 40,000. Despite this good news, the company is planning to lay off 51 developers at Ubisoft Barcelona. These layoffs were announced last month, alongside reductions at Ubisoft's teams in Winnipeg and Belgrade.

Ubisoft Barcelona has a long history of supporting the publisher's larger studios, including Assassin's Creed, The Crew, Ghost Recon, and Immortals: Fenyx Rising. Of course, its latest efforts have been on Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, where it was responsible for all the underwater sections. Those beautiful (terrifying) diving bell sites? Brought to life by Ubisoft Barcelona.

"Ubisoft Barcelona did all the underwater levels," explains Manel Cota, a tech and gameplay animator on the team, on social media. "And that same team is being fired right now because Ubisoft thinks that's what we deserve :)"

This frustration from a blow right as you should be celebrating is echoed by quality assurance lead Isabel Codina García. "Today is a bittersweet day," García said on social media. After having worked on the Black Flag remake for over two and a half years, "the whole AC team at Ubisoft Barcelona was informed of a collective redundancy plan."

"After seven years at Ubisoft Barcelona, this is not how I imagined it would end. But I am genuinely grateful for the people I have met and everything I have learned along the way."

Ubisoft Barcelona will ne holding a strike for three days from r/gaming

But the team isn't going quietly. The Spanish union La Confederación General del Trabajo has called for a three-day strike, starting today, over the planned cuts at Ubisoft Barcelona. "After an intense production, the company claims a 'strategic shift' to justify these layoffs," the flyer reads. "After years of dedication to our team, the company has turned its back on us. We will never see the fruits of our labour, and the reward for our hard work will be the loss of our jobs."

From the archives: This feature was originally published in PC Gamer #302 (UK, March 2017). You can still subscribe to PC Gamer to get new issues of the magazine (in print!) every month.

My playthrough of the first game was more disaster than Dishonored. At the time, I didn’t quite grasp that slitting every throat I met in those early Dunwall levels would send me spiraling toward the dreaded High Chaos ending, never to return.

As the hours rolled on and the increasing swell of rats began to gnaw on Corvo’s bootstraps, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I might be able to redress the balance by going full stealth, stifling the screams of my foes without shuffling them off their mortal coil.

Alas, Arkane’s Chaos system was more severe than I’d anticipated. The rats continued to scoff their way through the mounds of decaying flesh strewn about the city, and poor Emily might as well have been crowned Queen of the Dunwall rodents by the end, her citizens having long since been digested in a million tiny rat stomachs.

No wonder Corvo felt so sluggish when he possessed them—his hosts had been binging on the Great Dunwall Rot-off. Fortunately, Arkane evidently managed to get the exterminators in before the events of Dishonored 2, and I finally got my chance to do things right.

In a fit of madness, I decided to embark on a perfect, no-kill, no-detection run—a tall order for someone whose last attempt at stealth ended up elbowing half of Prague to death in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

40 hours later, I finally succeeded, but not without having doused my trigger finger in several vats of anti-itch cream first. Indeed, there were several moments during the Clockwork Mansion mission where I almost gave in.

After five hours of quick-saves and hasty restarts (yes, five), I could have happily shot Kirin Jindosh in the face during our eventual confrontation, but the opportunity to strap him to his own electric chair and reduce him to a babbling idiot felt like better revenge.

Even the Grand Designs team would struggle to piece his house back together, let alone someone who can’t even spell their own name anymore.

Little did I know that Jindosh would have one last laugh, as just a couple of chapters later I encountered his infamous Jindosh Lock, a sealed door that you can only open by solving a riddle. I could have squeezed some hints out of the local neighbourhood gang lords, but I was determined to solve it peacefully. So I sat there, staring at it. I don’t know how much time passed, but even my monitor got bored waiting, going into sleep mode long before I cracked the combination.

Paper case

Damn you, Jindosh, I thought. This scrambled brainpan isn’t going to get the best of me. So I put my keyboard aside, grabbed a pen and reached for my dusty gaming notebook, something I haven’t touched since scrawling my way through The Witness earlier in the year. I tore out several scraps of paper and made cards for every last variable, shifting them around until, at last, my brain whirred into life.

Admittedly, it was immensely satisfying solving Jindosh’s last remaining masterwork, but it did make me wonder whether I should have been so merciful just a few hours before. I won’t spoil the solution here, but I will say you should definitely start with the alcohol (both literally and figuratively). It helps. A lot.

I've sunk legendary galleons, sailed across the Caribbean procuring plunder, and I've experienced Edward Kenway's redemption arc from start to finish. But upon rolling credits on Ubisoft's nostalgia-fuelled remake, I came to a realisation: almost everything good in Black Flag Resynced exists in the original game.

Sure, it's prettier and quality of life changes do help sand away the rougher edges, but removing all friction from a game isn't necessarily a good thing. Take stealth sequences, for instance—Black Flag Resynced now allows you to crouch anywhere, but it also removes all fail conditions from stealth missions, making the system somewhat redundant.

This give-and-take is something I experienced frequently with the remake. Resynced makes climbing far faster, but this means you no longer have to think about movement as you zoom up the side of almost every structure in sight. And don't even get me started on removing hidden blade combat, fisticuffs, and temporary weapons. The new cutlass-only fighting may be slightly harder, but it's ultimately bland thanks to fewer options.

I've now spent 40 hours with Black Flag Resynced, but I find myself unconvinced it ever needed a remake, especially one which more often chooses to change core components over retaining the feel of the original. It'd be a lie to say Resynced isn't good, but almost everything good in it is still good in Black Flag. Better, in fact, if a fond nostalgic adventure be your wish and you'd prefer not to toss a handful of dubloons in the sand for a game you likely own.

Hopping into the original Black Flag after playing Resynced, I was shocked by how remarkably well the game has aged. The combat still feels fluid (albeit easy thanks to chain finishers) but it benefits from the classic high profile, low profile control scheme that came to define the first three Assassin's Creed games—something the remake also does away with.

The movement and climbing also feel far more grounded. Instead of zipping up the sides of cathedrals, you've got to route yourself somewhat, especially since Black Flag includes a bunch of tailing sequences that require you to keep a target in sight at all times. Many players despised these, but after playing Resynced where stealth never mattered and I could murder my way through every situation, the challenge felt positively refreshing.

Alongside the visual upgrade, one of the few unequivocally positive changes is that ship combat feels far more dramatic in Resynced. The Jackdaw (Ed's ship) has new firing modes and officer upgrades, but naval battles are also significantly harder. Where, in the original, you could feasibly defeat a legendary ship without a fully upgraded Jackdaw, that feels almost impossible in the remake—ships fire fast, accurately, and use mortars more.

If you found naval combat in Black Flag too easy, this is definitely a good change. For my part, I found that the tough ship battles came to revolve around Lucy Baldwin (one of the new officers) and her Perfect Brace ability, which all but mitigates damage when you time a brace appropriately.

Even 13 years later, Black Flag's story is still first-rate, exploring, as it does, a man driven by greed and personal ambition, qualities that still make him a breath of fresh air by comparison with Assassin's Creed's usual goody two shoes protagonists. It's so well-written, in fact, that the new quests Resynced adds can't help but come off poorly by comparison.

The same goes for retaining the in-game shop that lets you purchase cosmetics that look like they're right out of Skull and Bones, or even buy the locations of in-game collectibles for real money. And don't forget the inexplicable addition of the weird Animus projects from Assassin Creed Shadows. I'm not sure who thought adding a battlepass mechanic to the remake was a good idea, but honestly, it sucks.

Ubisoft added many of these elements to modernise Black Flag, but ultimately creates a juxtaposition between old and new which really doesn't reflect well on either Ubisoft itself or the state of our industry. Black Flag was a formative game for me, arguably the beginning of open world bloat for the series, but a fun, well-written adventure with some of the best side content around—no wonder it's one of the few Assassin's Creed games I 100%-ed.

But Resynced ultimately doesn't feel like the same game to me. I thought it did, but then I went back and played the original Black Flag and remembered what it was actually like. I suppose it depends why you're playing a remake. If your goal is to revisit your past experiences and nostalgia, the original will serve you far better in that endeavor.

I'd never considered the prospect that some people might cheat at playing Helldivers 2. But I suppose it's inevitable given some people will find ways to cheat at anything. In this case, rogue Helldivers have found ways to game super credits—the premium currency used to buy Warbonds—to earn them at impossible rates, and it's become such a problem that Arrowhead has implemented new ways to tackle it.

"You've told us that cheaters and exploiters ruin the experience that it feels unfair when someone games the super credit system while you're out there earning yours the hard way," Arrowhead wrote in a Steam post. "We heard you, and we're starting to implement changes that will tackle issues like this."

Arrowhead only explains these changes in the broadest terms, stating they include "improving our monitoring methods for suspicious super credit activity." Basically, if Arrowhead sees a player earning credits "at an unreasonably high rate" there are "now steps in place to counter this."

The developer stresses that players who earn super credits the traditional way—grinding maps, clearing POIs, looting bunkers etc "will never experience any change". Instead, the system is targeted at "Cheaters. Botters. People using automation and duplication exploits to hoover up super credits at rates no human Helldiver could ever reach legitimately."

Ultimately, Arrowhead claims that "A healthier economy means the super credits you earn through honest service to Super Earth stay worth earning". This could be a joke, but it is a slightly odd way to frame the solution in any case given Helldivers 2 doesn't really have an economy. At least, not one that players have any real say in. It isn't like you can buy and sell items from other players, or that the price of Warbonds is affected by the game in any way. Not to mention, the main benefactor of these changes would be Arrowhead, as it is the studio which ultimately profits off of super credits.

Which isn't to say that cheaters should be allowed to roam freely, especially if players' games are being clogged up by bots. But I do wonder if the prevalence of credit cheaters in Helldivers 2 is symptomatic of a broader problem—namely that earning super credits is tremendously boring.

As has been the case since launch, players can only acquire super credits from the same dozen or so points of interest that appear randomly on a map, and scouring those POIs time and again grew tiresome ages ago. Compounding the problem is that the fastest way to earn super credits is to play on easier difficulties, creating a contradiction between natural player progression and unlocking premium items.

To be clear, I'm not saying that earning super credits should be easier—although given Helldivers 2 is a premium game that has sold 20 million copies by this point, Arrowhead could afford to be a bit more generous with them. But I would like earning super credits to be more fun, perhaps tied to some new side objectives or combat challenges rather than blithely hoping they appear in some random bunker or shipping crate.

Super credits aside, Arrowhead's broader efforts to address player concerns with Helldivers 2 appears to be working. The studio has adjusted and reworked many different aspects of the game lately, from performance to player progression.

As a result, recent Steam reviews have shifted from mostly negative to mostly positive in the space of a couple of months. While I wouldn't say we're in the "We're so back" phase of the game's turbulent relationship with its community, Helldivers 2 is kind of back, which is good to see.

After Traffic and Breaking Bad used it for scenes set there it became know as "the Mexican filter", though it's sometimes used for scenes set in South Asia or anywhere a bit tropical. You may recognize it as "the piss filter" that stained the original incarnation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It's the yellow gradient that's usually intended to make things look warm, and it's not to everyone's taste. Like piss, I guess.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is the latest videogame to fall under the stream, making Edward Kenway look a bit more tanned and the waters look a bit more green. I didn't think it was particularly excessive until I saw some before and after screenshots with it removed, and yeah, it does seem a bit dehydrated actually.

These images come courtesy of Blu, a modder who has cooked up a reshade called ACBlackFlag Natural Colors: "A simple reshade preset that removes the ugly yellow filter from the game and corrects oversaturated colors."

You'll need the latest version of Reshade to install it. While you're at it, the ACBlackFlagFix will let you uncap the cutscene framerate, set cloth to animate at 60 fps, and remove pillarboxing, while Fast Launch will get you through those annoying startup videos at a rate of knots.

It's a miserable time in the upper echelons of game development right now, but in the midst of all the layoffs, cancelled games, and legendary studios being horribly and inexplicably gutted, one company at least is riding high—Saber Interactive.

Previously known for vehicle simulators and middling action games like World War Z, Saber found itself with a monster hit on its hands two years ago, courtesy of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. Saber saw colossal success with the license, and according to Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits, the sequel put the studio on the map for other licenses seeking the videogame treatment.

In an interview with The Game Business (via RPS), Willits said that Space Marine 2 "literally changed everything" for Saber's fortunes. "It not only changed the way that the team looks at making games, it changed how people look at us," he explained.

Willits said that Space Marine 2's success has been a huge boost to Saber's confidence and their ambitions. "I've seen this in my career. When you have a huge hit, when you go to make the next game, everything has to be awesome. It's like, 'This has got to be the most awesome toaster ever.' And it fuels success."

The studio's confidence has been further bolstered by other potential partners now approaching them to collaborate, with Willits stating that numerous "major license" holders have been in touch with potential deals. "We are in a very fortunate position to turn down more than we can accept. I can't say the name, but … you know you're successful when you've turned down those guys."

Following Space Marine 2's success, Willits said that Saber's plan is to continue adapting other licenses, in games like Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, simply because having that pre-existing fanbase generally makes those games a safer bet: "Let's talk about Hellraiser. If we wanted to make a survival horror game and it was our own IP, it would be more of an uphill battle. But people have heard of Hellraiser. People have heard of Space Marine, and Space Marine 2 was a huge success. World War Z, a great book, okay movie, and a super good video game."

Grand Theft Auto 3's Ghost City was my first proper experience of community discovery.

I was too young to fully appreciate game-breaking in the likes of Super Mario and Alex Kidd, so the idea of flying the clipped-wing Dodo aircraft from the runway of Frances International Airport at a very specific angle in order to break the 3D map and wind up in an otherwise inaccessible area—the section which housed the game's opening bank robbery cutscene, floating well beyond the playable map—blew my teenage mind.

In 2004, modder Eliano86 built a bridge that allowed players to more formally access the area with less of the faff, however the project's original hosting platform (gta-downloads.com) has long since disappeared from the interwebs. Now, hobbyist creator Mod_Saver has resurrected that project well over two decades down the line. Enter Ghost City Available.

"For over a decade, this specific alternative bridge mod was considered 'Lost Media'," says Mod_Saver. "The original hosting platform went completely offline, and the original link was dead forever. Even the Wayback Machine couldn't recover the downloadable files. This mod was gone.

"Instead of letting it fade into history, I decided to fully recreate and resurrect it from scratch based on an old 2012 video (GTA 3 - Tips & Tricks - How to Reach Ghost Town by GTA Series Videos) footage. But I didn't just clone it: I fixed its biggest flaw. The original 2004 mod was strictly visual (you would fall straight through the Ghost Town floor). 22 years later, I have finally built the missing collision files (.col) to make the entire island solid and fully playable for the very first time."

Which is pretty beautiful, truth be told. I'm a sucker for game preservation, for unearthing secrets and for the passion that drives each and every hobbyist endeavour—in this case in relation to a game now 25 years old and an OG mod just a few years younger.

I gotta hand this one to the suits: I thought gamers might find a $60 price tag on a rehash of a 13-year-old Assassin's Creed game to be a bit much, and apparently I was wrong. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced sold more than two million copies in just one day, and has handily surpassed Steam player counts of newer games in the series, including Assassin's Creed Shadows.

"Dash my Buttons... Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has already passed 2 million copies sold!" Ubisoft wrote on X the day after the overhauled Black Flag launched. "Whether you're sailing with us again, or stepping aboard the Jackdaw for the first time: THANK YOU from the bottom of ARR hearts."

It's notable here that Ubisoft refers specifically to two million copies sold, as opposed to the "one million players" it used to characterize the success of Assassin's Creed Shadows in its first day of release. As Joshua Wolens noted at the time, it left us uncertain as to how Shadows was really doing compared to Valhalla, although Ubisoft later said Shadows had put up the "second-highest day one sales revenues in Assassin's Creed franchise history."

A more straightforward comparison can be found in the concurrent player numbers on Steam, where Black Flag Resynced stands head and shoulders above the rest. Here too, some differences need to be accounted for: Ubisoft had a years-long no Steam dalliance so Valhalla didn't arrive on that storefront until a couple years after its debut on the Epic Games Store, and Shadows was weighed down by coordinated culture war nonsense over the presence of the Black samurai Yasuke. Shadows also costs $10 more than Black Flag Resynced.

Still, it's about as close to apples-to-apples as we're going to get, and the numbers make it clear: Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

(These are ordered by their all-time peak concurrent player count.)

"Black Flag has always held a special place in the heart of the community, and ours." Assassin's Creed brand boss Martin Schelling said. "Bringing it back with Resynced was a promise to that passion for Edward’s adventures, and to the unique sense of freedom players experienced back then. Seeing two million players set sail on day one, along with the great reviews from critics, is the greatest reward we could have hoped for."

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is here and violently colon-less, despite my deep-rooted ancestral urge to fill every gap between those words with dots and dashes, as our forefathers did in the days of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.

But it's not Ubisoft's crimes against grammar that prompted the game to hit Mixed Steam reviews at launch (it's picked up since, and at time of writing is at Mostly Positive). It was the fact that, in typical Ubisoft fashion, the game's store page ripples with microtransactions for outfits, weapons, and the obligatory 'Pay $5 to play less of the $60 game you just bought' map-reveal pack.

The reviews were home to a lot of people who felt nickel-and-dimed. "What's the point of getting the deluxe version when, immediately in game, there's $84.91-worth [of] 'DLC' that you don't own" asked one. "I want a single player experience I can enjoy WITHOUT microtransactions," wrote another.

Ubi, perhaps inadvisably, is actually responding to some of these reviews, though. The studio's boilerplate response to a bunch of complaints about the game's microtransactions reads as follows:

We've seen your feedback since launch, and we're reading all of it. Thank you for caring this much about Black Flag Resynced. We want to be clear on one point: the standard edition is the full, complete experience. Every mission, every island, the full story and the complete world are all there, with nothing held back. The additional packs are entirely optional extras for players who want them, never a requirement to enjoy or complete the game.

We'll keep listening as you play!

At least one positive review that mentioned the microtransactions got a differently-worded but similar "We hear you" response. "The frustration around day-one DLC is something we take seriously," Ubi said in that one, while reiterating that the game's DLC isn't a 100% necessary purchase.

Which certainly strikes me as a little odd! I can think of two possible explanations here. Either Ubi genuinely thinks people are going to experience some sort of Damascene conversion upon being confronted with the corporation's unassailable logic—which would be very silly—or it's just coating a fairly catty 'You control the buttons you press' response in anodyne marketing speak. Which would also be silly, but at least in a kind of amusing way.

I've not touched the remake myself, but our Rory wasn't happy with how Ubisoft had tried to relentlessly monetise the Black Flag remake when he was playing it. Somehow, I doubt a copy-paste assurance that the DLC isn't necessary to beat the game will make him feel any better about it.

Our reviewer Morgan actually agrees with Ubi that the DLC is entirely ignorable outfits and weapons, but therein lies the tackiness of the whole affair. What's actually annoying, he reckons, is how easy it is to accidentally end up on the store page during normal play—when you press Start to pause, pressing Start again to unpause will actually take you to the store tab. To leave the pause menu, you actually need to hit B/Circle. Diabolical stuff.

For the most part, the long-awaited and worst-kept secret, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, is very faithful to one of my favourite games from 13 years ago. And anything that's brand-new, like some islands, the ship officers, and an extended story, fits in pretty seamlessly, almost like they were there in the original.

But you know what I don't remember from the original Black Flag? A microtransaction store filled with obnoxious outfits, faux battle passes, and weekly challenges. You know where I've seen that before? The RPG era of Assassin's Creed. Where I hated it.

In a full-priced remake of a 13-year-old swashbuckler, and a single-player game no less, Ubisoft decided to tack on one of the most distasteful cases of monetisation. You're greeted by the store on the main menu, little adverts when you pause the game, and it's actually fewer buttons to access the shop in-game than it is to save your progress. That's neat.

Inside this store you'll see very immersion-breaking outfits that I'm sure must appeal to someone, otherwise they wouldn't exist. I'll stick to my pirate outfits. Though I suppose it is being faithful to the original Black Flag in letting you buy resources and the 'Map Pack' that just reveals all of the treasure maps, Mayan stones, and so on. I mean, you could just Google that if you're lazy.

So, you might say that I shouldn't complain because it doesn't really affect me. True, to an extent—I won't buy exploitative map packs or these gaudy skins, so I won't see them in my game. But there's still a cash shop shoehorned into a "faithfully enhanced remake". That's not what I'd call faithful or enhanced.

More importantly, it undermines one of the key areas I'd have liked the remake to improve—the lack of new outfits in Resynced is one of my main disappointments. I want more costumes to find while exploring the world, especially now that it's bigger. Instead, the original outfits have simply been shifted out of the merchants and into chests across the map. The new skins Ubisoft has created, you've got to pay for separately.

Then there are the Animus Projects and whatnot directly lifted from Assassin's Creed Shadows. There are free (thankfully) reward tracks that look like battle passes, and you progress them by completing weekly Anomaly challenges. There's the Exchange store where you can trade Keys for Connor's iconic robes—I can only assume that Altair's and Ezio's robes, which were present in the original and are now mysteriously absent, will appear in the store in the future update.

Now look, Ubisoft, I'm not logging on each week to complete mindless challenges like it's a live-service multiplayer shooter. Just let me find the damn outfits by exploring the beautiful open world you've created and diligently expanded on in Resynced. Please.

Ubisoft was presented with the perfect opportunity to iterate on what many, myself included, would claim is the best Assassin's Creed game. And in as many ways as it has, it's also taken a step back. Content locked behind unnecessary, mindless challenges and microtransactions could instead have been fun rewards for the new activities and locations the team has added. If Black Flag Resynced is faithful to anything, it's Ubisoft's obsession with trying to pinch my dubloons. Talk about the golden age of piracy.

Black Flag Resynced has finally launched, and with it, a reprisal of the eternal debate surrounding the different stripes of Assassin's Creed combat. As Morgan notes in our review, Resynced ultimately "loses more than it gains" thanks to its wide-ranging changes masquerading as quality of life, and I'm inclined to agree.

For me, the most glaring offender here are the fights. Now don't get me wrong, Black Flag's combat was a bit of a joke, an almost cinematic experience of watching an endless array of beautifully brutal finisher animations play out before your eyes, as Edward terminated his fifth ship crew that day. It was cakewalk combat, and it's even easier to see that if you return to Black Flag after playing Resynced.

The counter window is absurdly long and you only have to kill one enemy to chain finisher everyone else around you. But what Black Flag did have was choice. You could whip out your hidden blades and decimate enemies in a more low profile manner, pick up a massive axe and swing it about your head, or even carry and reload a musket, and each weapon had its own bespoke melee animations. I remember being amazed the first time I killed a fella with a musket in Black Flag that they'd even made animations for it.

Resynced, by comparison, only lets you use boring old cutlasses, and I struggle to see how removing a vast swathe of situational weaponry is an upgrade. For my part, I almost exclusively used hidden blades, throwing knives, and the occasional musket in the original—I literally would've unequipped my cutlasses if I could have. So playing through Black Flag Resynced in its entirety with them didn't really feel like the same game to me.

Not to say that Resynced doesn't have some decent ideas combat wise. Its kicks-on-demand are fun, and it's certainly a tad more challenging than Black Flag ever was, but what I struggle to understand is why that increase in difficulty couldn't have combined with the original's weapon choice? All Black Flag's combat really needed to be better was removing the endless chain finishers and reducing the counter window—that alone would've made a huge difference.

I feel like the removal of temporary weapons also fundamentally misunderstands that combat isn't their only use. Having a musket, for instance, lets you take out troublesome sharpshooters in towers or on ship tops—the only way to do that now is get close and hope your pistol has the range, or climb up and kick them off. Throwing knives let you quickly kill enemies that spot you at a distance, so are useful in stealth, but also slick as hell.

These were never only weapons for pure combat, but tools that changed how you approached situations, which is the core premise of Assassin's Creed, and something you kind of needed before Resynced removed fail conditions for stealth missions. The saddest part is that we have a new enemy with a blunderbuss. I feel like that would have been an incredible temporary weapon to pick up and use. What did we get instead? A rope dart.

Resynced's combat is certainly passable, it just isn't Black Flag combat. You can't remove viable playstyles from a game and then claim it's a true remake. If I can't play a remake the same way I played the original, it's something else entirely. But that's ultimately my issue with Black Flag Resynced—it may be beautiful and have better ship combat, but its myriad changes mean it doesn't retain the feel of the original, something I realised when I went back and played Black Flag after finishing Resynced.

Is there anything more piratey than searching for buried treasure? I think not. Digging up the treasure map locations was one of my favourite side activities in the original game, and that's not changed in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. If you completed everything in the original and thought you knew it like the back of your hand, you don't now. The tectonic plates have shifted, as the remake has moved the location of major islands, and the clues are different too.

All Black Flag Resynced treasure map locations

There are 27 treasure maps in Black Flag Resynced, most of which line up with the original game, plus a few extras. If you're wondering where the old Anotto Bay to Principe map has gone, that's more or less been replaced by Blackbeard's Treasure quest.

To be able to dig up the buried treasure, you need to have the associated map—you can't skip straight to the reward, sorry. That's why I've also included where you can find each map.

Speaking of booty, buried treasure chests generally include a handful of Reales and either an Ultimate Ship Plan upgrade, a Design Plan, or some art for the Great Inagua collection, making them a worthwhile distraction while not murdering Templars and boarding ships.

Here's where to find each buried treasure chest via their coordinates and the rewards you'll get, sorted into the order you're likely to encounter each clue (some are locked behind story progress or the Treasure Dealer at Great Inagua):

Cape Bonavista

• Rewards: 1,500 Reales

Havana

• Rewards: The Queen Anne's Figurehead design plan, 3,000 Reales

Salt Lagoon

• Rewards: Serpent Figurehead design plan, 3,000 Reales

New Bone

• Rewards: Maize Deity, 3,000 Reales

Abaco Island

• Rewards: Earth Monster relief, 2,500 Reales

Andreas Island

• Rewards: Harpoon Strength ultimate plan, 3,000 Reales

Nassau

• Rewards: Elite Sails design plan, 3,000 Reales

Isla Providencia

• Rewards: Governor Outfit, 1,000 Reales

Anotto Bay

• Rewards: Crimson Cloak outfit, 2,400 Reales

Kingston

• Rewards: Gilded Hull design plan, 3,000 Reales

San Juan

• Rewards: Fire Barrel Strength ultimate plan, 3,000 Reales

Petite Caverne

• Rewards: Heavy Shot Storage ultimate plan, 3,000 Reales

Pinos Isle

• Rewards: Ivory Wheel design plan, 3,000 Reales

Matanzas

• Rewards: Mortar Storage ultimate plan, 3,000 Reales

Tulum

• Rewards: Fire Barrel Storage ultimate plan, 3,000 Reales

Jiquey

• Rewards: Baroque Guitar, 2,500 Reales

Cumberland Bay

• Rewards: 4,000 Reales

Princípe

• Rewards: Standard Bearer art, 1,000 Reales

Cayman Sound

• Rewards: 4,800 Reales

Ambergris Key

• Rewards: Pirate Captain outfit, 2,400 Reales

Misteriosa

• Rewards: Heavy Shot Strength ultimate plan, 3,600 Reales

Long Bay

• Rewards: Scottish Broadswords (rare cutlass)

Mystery Island (Weathered)

• Rewards: Persian Scimitars (legendary cutlass), Gargoyle's Breath (legendary pistol)

Sacrifice Island (Preserved)

• Rewards: Shade and Shadow Robes, Wooden Eyeball (legendary trinket)

Florida (Tattered)

• Rewards: Elite Ship Wheel, Gilt Lined Sails, Sleek Crew Attire

Santanillas (Digested)

• Rewards: Hunter Outfit, Hunter's Amulet (rare trinket)

Finding all the Mayan stone locations is one of your big distractions while sailing the Caribbean in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, and it's mostly unchanged from the original game. You still need to solve 16 of these stele to complete the Mayan Mystery task and unlock the Mayan Armour, one of the best outfits. But just like the treasure maps, a few locations have shifted around in the remake.

All Black Flag Resynced Mayan stone locations

While you might have stumbled upon some of these Mayan sculptures beforehand, you need to complete This Old Cove during the main story to be able to interact with the stele. James Kidd will explain how they work but, basically, you just need to climb to the top of the sculpture, interact with it, rotate the pattern until it aligns with the glowing objects, then grab the Mayan stone.

You need to collect 16 Mayan stones from the stele across the map in order to open the door guarding the Mayan Armour in Tulum, which you'll have access to after completing the main missions Nothing is True and Overrun And Outnumbered. This unique outfit now comes with a charm that houses its old perk of deflecting projectiles. That means you can gain the benefits of the armour without necessarily wearing the silly costume.

You'll find them on the following islands:

• Great Inagua, Gibara
• Cat Island, Eleuthera
• Cape Bonavista, Dry Tortuga
• Misteriosa, Serranilla
• Santanillas, Chinchorro
• Matanzas, Dry Tortuga
• Sacrifice Island, Conttoyor
• Tulum, Conttoyor
• Tortuga, Punta Guarico
• Pinos Isle, Castillo de Jagua
• New Bone, Serranilla
• Long Bay, Charlotte
• Isla Providencia, Serranilla

Here's exactly where to find all 16 Mayan stones via their coordinates and how to solve them in the remake:

1. Great Inagua, Gibara

You complete this one during the main story mission This Old Cove, so you can't miss it. It's a simple one to start you off, but just in case, rotate the overlay so that the squares line up with the square pillars on the left and top right.

2. Cat Island, Eleuthera (703,670)

On the northern beach, just a short distance from the warehouse that you'll have raided earlier in the main story. Flip the overlay so the large circle covers the rubble on the left and the oval is around the narrow rock.

3. Cape Bonavista, Dry Tortuga (159,583)

To reach it, head up into the mountains from the northernmost synchronisation point. Rotate and shrink the overlay so that the largest circle surrounds the bottom pillar, while the two smaller circles are around the top two posts.

4. Matanzas, Dry Tortuga (311,617)

This one's in the hills in the far southeast of the island, past the warehouse. Rotate it left so that the large circle near the cross on the overlap lines up with the tree, and the two medium-sized circles match the rocks on the far right side.

5. Misteriosa, Serranilla (265,171)

The first Mayan stele on this island is on the western beach, with Spanish soldiers on the walls above it. All you need to do is rotate it left so the two circles cover the posts at the bottom, and the arches line up with the broken arches on the wall.

6. Misteriosa, Serranilla (272,175)

The second sculpture on this island is on the ramparts leading up to the synchronisation point in the northeast, next to a treasure map. Rotate it left so that the largest circle lines up with the biggest rock on the left, next to the boat.

7. New Bone, Serranilla (400,92)

This stele is in the northwest of the island, conveniently where the warehouse guard and his muse will be talking. It's one of the easiest to solve: flip the overlay so that the four rectangles cover the rocks at the bottom.

8. Santanillas, Chinchorro (187,221)

There's only one Mayan stone on this island, but there were two in the original game, located in the ruins near the centre of the occupied island. Flip it so the thicker, parallel lines connecting two of the circles are around the two pillars at the top.

9. Sacrifice Island, Conttoyor (18,548)

Next to the synchronisation point in the centre of the island. All you have to do is flip the overlay so that the thicker, parallel lines of the triangle join up the two rocks at the bottom.

10. Tulum, Conttoyor (30,382)

This one's on the west side of the island, not far from where you finish the Overrun and Outnumbered mission (which immediately follows Nothing is True). To solve the puzzle, flip it almost fully so that the two circles on the same line match up with the top and right pillars.

11. Tortuga, Punta Guarico (846,352)

Just up the hill from the plantation's northern beach, you'll find another Mayan stele, not far from the island's synchronisation point. Solving it is as simple as flipping the overlay so that the smallest circle is on the rock at the bottom, and the line shoots off towards the ocean.

12. Pinos Isle, Castillo de Jagua (303,452)

There are two Mayan stones up for grabs on this island, the first of which is just a short walk south of the synchronisation point in the northwest. Rotate the grid left to match the rectangle with the collapsed pillar at the top.

13. Pinos Isle, Castillo de Jagua (312,454)

The second stele on Pinos Isle is east of the synchronisation point, on the hill overlooking the shipwreck on the shore. And solving it is very simple: flip it so the rectangle aligns with the wall at the top.

14. Long Bay, Charlotte (502,216)

You need to progress the main story until you gain access to Long Bay and reach the Observatory. Once there, the stele is to the left of the main entrance to the Observatory.

15. Isla Providencia, Serranilla (487,33)

You also need to progress the main story to unlock Isla Providencia, which houses the final two Mayan stones. The first stele on the island is in the northernmost temple ruin area close to the beach where the Jackdaw fast travels to.

16. Isla Providencia, Serranilla (476,16)

The second stele on Isla Providencia is just to the right of the synchronisation viewpoint in the southernmost temple.

As mentioned, once you've gathered all 16 Mayan stones, return to the locked door back on Tulum, Conttoyor, near the beach in the northeast. You'll be greeted by a short climbing section in the temple before grabbing the Mayan Armour. You'll also get the Yax Tun pendant, which absorbs all gunshots without you having to wear the (frankly, kinda ugly) Mayan fit like you had to in the original game.

The Elite Ship Upgrades from the original game have been renamed in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. Now called Ultimate Ship Plans, these schematics still serve the same purpose: fully upgrading the Jackdaw. So you'll want to find each and every one of the locations if you're hoping to take on the legendary ships.

All Black Flag Resynced Ultimate Ship Plan locations

There are 12 Ultimate Ship Plans for you to find, locked behind either dives or treasure maps. You'll need to complete the first Sequence 6 main mission, Diving for Medicine, before you can start hunting for the plan locations in earnest, since this unlocks the diving bell, and most of the plans are located underwater.

Once you've found the plan, you then need to head to any shipmaster to purchase the upgrades for your ship—they're not free, unfortunately, costing both Reales and materials.

Here's where to find all 12 Ultimate Ship Plans in the remake:

Finding Blackbeard's Treasure in Black Flag Resynced is actually a lot tougher than the game's other treasure maps, mainly because it doesn't give you any coordinates, forcing you to rely on your knowledge of the Caribbean. This is a new quest that was added in Resynced, but you won't get it until after you complete the Do Not Go Gently main quest.

Edward finds the treasure map hidden in Blackbeard's hat, which starts the hunt, so you can't miss it. Below I'll explain where the map points to, and how to navigate the area it's contained within.

Where to find Blackbeard's Treasure in Black Flag Resynced

The location Blackbeard's Map points to is Anotto Bay (coordinates 590,245) to the north of Kingston on the north coast of the island, in the Charlotte region. When you arrive, you'll find a bunch of pirate ships also laying claim to the treasure, who you'll have to sink before landing the Jackdaw.

Finding the treasure is relatively straightforward. From where you land, hop across the boats to your left and dive down, looking for the sunken mineshaft. You'll have to navigate these tunnels, dodging sharks and sea anemones until you reach an area with wooden platforms, gunpowder barrels, and a bunch of enemies. Pick up one of the kegs and take it over to the far side of the room where the rubble is (this will glow green when you hold LT on controller).

Place the barrel down and shoot it to blow up the rubble. Continue on until you reach the cave where you have to confront Blackbeard's former sailing master, and then grab another gunpowder barrel and carry it up the path to the right of the waterfall, where you'll find a second pile of rubble to destroy.

Inside, you'll find the treasure, though you'll have to head back to Great Inagua afterwards to actually complete the quest. As a reward, you'll get Blackbeard's portrait, which you can hang in the loot cave area of the manor.

Legendary ships were the pinnacle challenge of the Caribbean in the original, and they return even stronger in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. These boss battles now have more unique gimmicks and phases, and pack a serious punch. But you've got a lot more tools of destruction to deal with them, the rewards have changed, and they now respawn so you can fight them again.

Black Flag Resynced legendary ships explained

Just like in the original, there are four legendary ships, located in each of the corners of the map. They'll be revealed once you destroy the fortresses in their respective regions:

• El Impoluto (Dry Tortuga)
• HMS Fearless & Royal Sovereign (Eleuthera)
• La Dama Negra (Serranilla)
• HMS Prince (Nevassa)

These are extremely tough battles that will require an almost, if not fully, upgraded Jackdaw to take on. I recommend at least having the best armour, broadside cannons, swivel cannons, and ram—check out the Ultimate Ship Plans, some of which are hidden behind treasure maps.

In fact, the legendary ships are even harder in Resynced compared to the original game, having more health and dealing more damage, as well as having clearer phases as you whittle their health down. Your biggest advantage, though are the three new naval officers, who you should recruit before going after the legendary ships:

1. Padre, recruited through the A Second Chance quest after Sequence 4: This Old Cove, lets you charge ram for bonus speed and damage.
2. Lucy Baldwin, unlocked in A Proper Shipwright after Sequence 4: This Old Cove, allows you to brace at the last second to almost nullify damage taken.
3. Tobias 'Deadman' Smith, unlocked in No Box Dark Enough after Sequence 11: Everything is Permitted and A World Without Gold, lets you maximise broadside cannon damage and completing his quest also gets you a powerful multi-shot mortar variant.

The major difference in the Resynced remake is the reward. You'll notice that the old Ram Dash upgrade you got for beating all four legendary ships is now unlocked by recruiting Padre. Given that these are endgame challenges, you can now get and use Ram Dash much earlier—it's been buffed, too. In its place, legendary ships now reward you with ship cosmetics for the Jackdaw's figurehead, hull, wheel, and sails.

Legendary ships are also repeatable now—they'll respawn after a period of time if you fancy a rematch.

Here are all four legendary ships and how to beat them:

El Impoluto

• Location: Dry Tortuga (161,804)

Despite stalking the seas of the starting region, I'd argue El Impoluto is the second-hardest legendary ship. It's incredibly tanky and deals obscene amounts of damage from its lengthy cannon barrages, which make it hard to perfectly brace and nullify the hits. Plus, while it favours close-range ramming, it's got very long-range cannons, so you can't just sail away from it.

Here are some tips for the fight:

Once you beat El Impoluto, you'll earn the following rewards:

• 12,000 Reales
• El Impoluto sails
• El Impoluto wheel
• El Impoluto hull
• El Impoluto figurehead
• El Impoluto ship model

HMS Fearless & Royal Sovereign

• Location: Eleuthera (811,858)

The HMS Fearless & Royal Sovereign legendary ship battle is unique in that it's actually a two-on-one. Rather unfair, if you ask me, and it's the one I had the most trouble with. Since you'll have to contend with two ships at once, they have reduced health compared to the other legendary ships. And once you destroy one of the pair, the other will set itself ablaze and chase you down.

Here are some tips:

Once you beat this legendary ship battle, you'll earn the following rewards:

• 12,000 Reales
• HMS Fearless sails
• HMS Fearless wheel
• HMS Fearless hull
• HMS Fearless figurehead
• Brothers in Arms ship model

La Dama Negra

• Location: Serranilla (241,73)

La Dama Negra is armed to the teeth and, in fact, the only ship with armour, too. Metal plates of the hull reduce damage you deal to the sides of the ship and prevent swivel gun critical hits. Your positioning is very important here.

Here are my tips:

Once you beat the ghost ship, you'll earn the following rewards:

• 12,000 Reales
• La Dama Negra sails
• La Dama Negra wheel
• La Dama Negra hull
• La Dama Negra figurehead
• La Dama Negra ship model

HMS Prince

• Location: Navassa (854,55)

Described as the ghost ship, HMS Prince is arguably the easiest of the legendary ships to fight, though it certainly drags on once you reach its second phase and it starts hiding in the fog.

Here are some tips to take it out:

Once you beat the ghost ship, you'll earn the following rewards:

• 12,000 Reales
• HMS Prince sails
• HMS Prince wheel
• HMS Prince hull
• HMS Prince figurehead
• HMS Prince ship model

Completing the Art Lover quest in Black Flag Resynced sees you finding art pieces from Great Inagua's scattered collection to return them to the manor. This is one of the new quests that was added in Resynced, alongside a new character, Bernard. This aged butler served the previous owner of the house before Du Casse took it over.

There are lots of different ways to gather the Great Inagua art collection and the reward is one of Ezio's outfits, so I'll run through the easiest ways to gather what you need.

Black Flag Resynced art collection locations

To complete the Art Lover quest, you'll need to find 30 art pieces across the Caribbean, though you'll have to return to talk to Bernard once you've found 15 and then 25, before completing the quest at 30, earning yourself the Master Assassin outfit (One of Ezio's outfits) and the Obsidian Hull ornament.

There are many ways to gather art, but it's worth noting the Templar and pirate portraits you hang in the manor don't count towards this quest. Here's how to gather the art collection:

1. Collecting ship models

Every time you board a ship for the first time after defeating it, you'll earn its model, and these models count as part of the Inagua art collection since you can display them on a shelf in the main room. Since there's a British and Spanish variant for each ship type, that's ten art pieces you can easily earn, not to mention that you'll unlock extra ship models as you complete the main story.

2. Buying art pieces

You can buy six art pieces from any General Store, though since these cost Reales, you might want to hold onto your money and leave these as a last resort. It depends how quickly you want to complete the quest and get Ezio's Revelations outfit.

3. Looting plantation warehouses

The first time you loot a plantation warehouse, you'll get a painting you can hang in the manor, which counts towards the Great Inagua art collection. Plantations are easy to find; simply look for the island symbols that have three plants growing out of some soil. You'll have to head inside, find the key, and unlock the warehouse door. These can also contain treasure maps.

4. Kenway's fleet missions

Some of Kenway's fleet missions (the ones you organise via the map in the manor or Jackdaw's cabin) provide art pieces as rewards, specifically, the Piracy and Trade missions. They also have a scale and skull symbol on the map and list their type below their title.

You'll need a brig for Piracy and a schooner for Trade. Simply look for the missions that have a little furniture or art piece image in their listed rewards—they're usually pretty easy to recognise as, besides map pieces, they're the only rewards that have "1x" next to them.

5. Treasure maps

While not all do, some buried treasure maps contain art pieces as their rewards. Specifically:

• New Bone treasure map (722,607)
• Abaco Island treasure map (543,694)
• Jiquey treasure map (812,114)
• Principe treasure map (605,132)

That last one is locked by the main story until you go to the island of Principe, since it's not on the main map. If you're struggling with any of these, check out our treasure map guide linked above.

With all of these, you should easily be able to cobble together the 30 pieces you need, just make sure to return to Bernard when the quest marker reappears in Great Inagua. If you want to know your progress, open the world map, press X to open the quest list via the prompt in the top right, and cycle through sidequests to find and toggle it active.

I'm not sure who asked for daily quests and what is essentially a battle pass in Black Flag Resynced, but here we are. Similar to Shadows, you can earn Data Fragments to spend on unlocking special cosmetics and keys in your Animus projects.

First off, make sure that you have the Eyes in the Dark project active, as this one gives you rewards in Black Flag itself versus AC Shadows. Otherwise, here's how to earn Data Fragments so you can spend them on new cosmetics and keys, which you can use to unlock further items in the exchange.

How to get Data Fragments in Black Flag Resynced

The main way you get Data Fragments is by completing anomalies located around the Caribbean. These activities first unlocked for me after I completed Sequence 4: This Old Cove, where you take over Great Inagua. If you open your map and press tab (X on controller) to open your quest log, you can cycle down to anomalies and look at all the different ones available.

The range of activities depends on which project you have active in the Animus, but generally they are quite straightforward, and either involve sinking corrupted ships and convoys, or completing short puzzle sections, such as the rifts. Once done, you'll earn the amount of Data Fragments listed, which you can then spend to unlock rewards on your active project track.

These rewards include cosmetics, weapons, but also keys, which you can spend in the exchange to purchase items themed around other Assassins Creed games, too. You'll get new anomalies to complete based on the timer above each one. So, if you complete one, you'll have to wait a while for another to replace it.

Though it makes a variety of changes to the original, Black Flag Resynced adds quite a lot of new content to the much-beloved Assassin's Creed instalment. There's a boatload of new sidequests, including a whole new chapter you unlock later in the game. There are also tweaks to combat, stealth, the Jackdaw, and legendary ships.

The point of this guide is to walk you through the new content as you play, so you know what unlocks when, and don't miss anything along the way.

How to access all new content in Black Flag Resynced

Before I run through how to access all of the new stuff in order (so you can use this guide while playing), there are a few more general changes to the game.

First off, combat and stealth:

• A new blunderbuss-wielding enemy
• The ability to crouch anywhere by pressing X and a visibility meter
• You can perform Heavy Strikes by holding the attack button
• There are now Trinkets you can equip with unique buffs. For example, finding all Mayan Stones now also gives you a Trinket that absorbs gunfire as well are the Mayan Armor it used to
• You can't pick up enemy weapons anymore
• No more hidden blade combat beyond finishers
• No more fail conditions for stealth missions if you are found

And in terms of the Jackdaw and ship combat:

• Three new officer quests that provide upgrades, such as firing double broadsides, enhanced brace, and the ram ability you used to get by defeating all legendary ships
• New secondary firing modes for ship weapons, including:
  • Continuous Heated Shots for broadside cannons
  • Double shot for the bowchasers
  • Shrapnel barrels for the barrels
  • Deadman's Cohort for the mortar (unlocked via his officer quest)
  • Swivel guns can now be manually aimed AC Rogue-style
• Legendary ships are tougher and respawn over time
• New sea shanties, some of which you unlock via sidequests (like Captain Stede Bonnet)

The way you get many of Black Flag's outfits has also changed, the Jackdaw's Ship Plans are now called Ultimate Plans, and the Treasure Maps have changed somewhat, too. All that said, here's everything new in order of when it unlocks during the game.

1. Rope Dart (Sequence 3: Sugarcane and Its Yields)

This is Black Flag's new combat tool, a rope dart you can hang enemies with, or throw at them to pull them towards you, though it has a cooldown.

2. A bunch of quests, Rifts, and two new pets (Sequence 4: This Old Cove)

This is the first major set of unlocks once you take the cove at Great Inagua. This includes:

• Art Lover quest: You'll meet the butler, Bernard, during This Old Cove, and he tasks you with collecting art pieces to restore the manor's lost collection.
• Two new officer quests: A Second Chance and A Proper Shipwright will appear to the southeast and west respectively. These quests see you recruit two officers to the Jackdaw who provide special abilities and a nice pair of pistols if you complete their questlines fully.
• Rifts and Animus Projects: Rifts are new narrative activities that explore Edward Kenway's choices. The first one appeared for me on the south coast of Great Inagua after I finished This Old Cove. From this point on you can also earn Data Fragments for Animus Projects, unlocking cosmetics and gear. As you progress the story, you'll unlock more Rifts, so keep an eye out.
• Two new pets: The first new pet is Soot the Cat in the town of Great Inagua, marked by the Cat Distribution System local event. The second is Albert the Monkey, who you can find at the Monkey Business local event marker in southeast Havana, off the shore on a ship. Your equipped pet in your loadout will sit on the railing as you sail.

3. Blackbeard's Treasure sidequest (Sequence 8: Do Not Go Gently)

This sidequest unlocks after Do Not Go Gently in Sequence 8 and sees you tracking down Blackbeard's treasure via a special map. This quest automatically starts through the main story, so you don't need to worry about activating it yourself. This acts as an epilogue for Ed Thatch's character.

4. Captain Stede Bonnet sidequest (Sequence 8: Marooned)

Once you complete Marooned, you'll find the Captain Stede Bonnet sidequest marker in the manor in Great Inagua. As with Blackbeard's Treasure, this quest is about the merchant-turned-pirate, Stede Bonnet, who you encounter throughout the game.

5. A World Without Gold chapter and one more officer quest (Sequence 11: Everything is Permitted)

Though this is a very late unlock, it's actually most significant for my money, adding an entirely new chapter to the game. Once you complete Everything is Permitted, you'll find the That Bastard Maynard quest marker by the tavern in Great Inagua, after you leave the Assassin's Compound with Anne. As you might have guessed, this quest is about Maynard, the pirate-hunter you briefly met in the original game.

You'll unlock the officer, Tobias Smith, via this questline when you complete I Just Want to Talk as well as his upgrade. His quest then continues separately to A World Without Gold. If you then complete No Box Dark Enough (which you'll find in Great Inagua) and then his subsequent quests, you'll unlock a new mortar type for the Jackdaw which fires a continuous stream. This is the final major new unlock in Black Flag Resynced.

Just like the original game, getting all the outfits isn't simple in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, but for a slightly different reason. Most outfits are still bought from the merchants or crafted, but a few have moved locations for no apparent reason.

Everyone's favourite Crimson Cloak, for example, is no longer available from the General Store. Likewise, loyalty outfits like Ezio's robes are now behind quests. The remake also borrows a few tricks from Shadows to further complicate your wardrobe collection.

How to get all Black Flag Resynced outfits

There are 33 outfits in Resynced, or 35 if you're counting the exclusive pre-order and Deluxe Edition bundles, and more if you want to include the premium shop skins you can buy. You'll get at least two outfits by default a short way into the story. You start with Duncan Walpole's Robes for your trip to Havana, and when you leave, Cap'n Kenway will modify them, unlocking Edward Kenway's Robes. Unlike the original game, you can swap back to Duncan's Assassin robes if you'd rather they not be replaced.

If you've pre-ordered the game, you'll be able to equip Blackbeard's Crimson Outfit, and those with the Master Assassin pack (included in the Deluxe Edition) will also have the black and gold robes of the same name.

If you've played the original game, you'll notice a few odd absences, despite Ubisoft stating that every legacy outfit would return. For example, we didn't find the Explorer outfit, nor Ezio's and Altair's robes. I suspect the latter two will be available in the Exchange store in the future, however, similar to Connor's outfit.

Here's every other outfit you need to unlock in Black Flag Resynced:

Brown Cloak

The first outfit you can get is the Brown Cloak from the large chest in the Governor's compound in the southeast of Havana, Dry Tortuga, at the following coordinates: 204,573. You can grab this while you're sneaking around during the main mission, or return later.

Pirate Cloak

Purchase it for 600 Reales from the General Store after completing the main mission This Old Cove to liberate Great Inagua, Gibara. It's basically the Brown Cloak but with a cool skull on the back.

Captain Drake's Outfit

Loot the chest in the ocean off the northeast coast of Sacrifice Island, Conttoyor, at the following coordinates: 18,547. It will be marked when you use the nearby sync point.

Merchant Outfit

Purchase it for 3000 Reales from the General Store after completing the Sequence 4 main mission Overrun and Outnumbered.

Politician's Outfit

Purchase it for 3,000 Reales from the General Store after completing the Sequence 4 main mission Overrun and Outnumbered.

Privateer Outfit

Purchase it for 3,000 Reales from the General Store after completing the Sequence 4 main mission Overrun and Outnumbered.

Feline Pelt Outfit

Build the Treasure Dealer at Great Inagua, Gibara, after completing the Sequence 4 main mission This Old Cove, and trade the following items:

• 2x Ocelot Pelt
• 6x Jaguar Pelt
• 1x White Jaguar Pelt
• 2x Black Jaguar Pelt

Whaler Outfit

Build the Treasure Dealer at Great Inagua, Gibara, after completing the Sequence 4 main mission This Old Cove, and trade the following items:

• 2x Humpback Whale Skin
• 2x Killer Whale Skin

Shark-Hunter Outfit

Build the Treasure Dealer at Great Inagua, Gibara, after completing the Sequence 4 main mission This Old Cove, and trade the following items:

• 1x Great White Shark Bone
• 2x Bull Shark Skin
• 2x Hammerhead Shark Bone

Stede Bonnet's Attire

Masquerade as the one and only merchant (or gentleman pirate) Stede Bonnet by looting the largest chest on the east hill of Mystery Island in the far east of Navassa, at the following coordinates: 913,123.

Captain Morgan's Redingote

Part of The Black Island DLC pack in the original game, this content is included in the remake. You need to loot the large chest overlooking the shore in the hills north of Black Island, northeast Gibara, at the following coordinates: 915,618.

Pirate Captain Outfit

Complete the Ambergris Key treasure map. You can find the map next to the campfire on the northeastern beach of Corozal, western Chinchorro (31,230). Then head to Ambergris Key, southern Chinchorro (30,157) to collect the chest.

Crimson Cloak

Complete the Anotto Bay treasure map. You can get the map by looting the warehouse in the northwest of Havana (205,600), then sail to Anotto Bay, northeast Charlotte (590,245) to collect the chest. This outfit was available immediately from the General Store in the original game.

Governor Outfit

Complete the Isla Providencia treasure map. Grab the map from the warehouse in the south of Nassau (594,750). You then need to progress the main story until you gain access to Isla Providencia, where you'll find the buried treasure near boat wrecks on the southern beach (487,11).

Shade and Shadow Robes

Complete the Sacrifice Island (Preserved) buried treasure map. You'll need to restore this map at the Treasure Dealer in Great Inagua by raiding warehouses multiple times until you get four Preserved Map Pieces. Then follow the map to the northwest beach at Sacrifice Island, Conttoyor (14,554). You'll also get the Wooden Eyeball legendary trinket, which makes it so that quick shooting instantly kills brutes.

Hunter Outfit

Complete the Santanillas (Digested) buried treasure map. To restore this map at the Treasure Dealer in Great Inagua, you need to kill and skin the white jaguar at Great Inagua twice to get two Digested Map Pieces. Then use the map to find the treasure underneath the Mayan ruin to the south of Santanillas, Chinchorro (188,215). You'll also receive the Hunter's Amulet rare trinket, which reduces the detection range of animals. It's pretty terrible, sorry.

Haytham Kenway's Overcoat

Find all 11 portrait collectables (the final few require completing Sequence 12: A Governor No Longer) and hang them in the manor at Great Inagua to receive Haytham Kenway's Overcoat and a secret treasure map. This map leads to The Fortune legendary weapon.

Officer's Outfit

You can find the classic Officer's Outfit in the chest at the docks on Principe Island once you've unlocked it through the story, at the following coordinates: 116,11.

Explorer Outfit

The Explorer Outfit isn't missing after all, just extremely well-hidden—likely part of a community treasure hunt that's been uncovered early. It's in an unmarked chest under the ocean north of Corozal in Chinchorro, at the following coordinates: 28,293.

Sail here, past the rock jutting out of the water, and dive down to find a rocky mound covered in coral where you'll see the chest. You'll also get the Aveline Figurehead for your ship.

Stealth Outfit

Just like the original game, you need to complete 16, just over half, of the Assassin Contracts. You'll get the Stealth Outfit, plus the Hidden Ones Sigil legendary trinket. Completing every contract will net you the legendary Spring-Steel Swords.

Foreign Diplomat Disguise

You'll get this fancy red overcoat as a disguise during the Sequence 12 main mission Governor No Longer and keep it afterwards.

Mayan Armour

Find all 16 Mayan stones to recover the stones required to complete the Mayan Mysteries side quest and open the locked door on Tulum.

Templar Armour

After completing Sequence 3: A Single Madman and taking Julien du Casse's Templar Key, complete the four Templar Hunts and use the keys from each to open the gate in the manor in Great Inagua, Gibara.

Master Assassin Outfit

To get Edward's Master Assassin robes, you need to complete the Art Lover quest by collecting art, such as paintings from raiding warehouses, ship models from boarding enemy vessels, and sculptures from chests or merchants.

Edward the Legend

Fully restore and upgrade every building at your base, including the manor, in Great Inagua, Gibara, unlocked after beating This Old Cove. You'll need heaps of resources and Reales, so don't expect to do this quickly.

Naoe's Robes

Reach level 12 in the Riptides Animus Project to get Naoe's outfit from Shadows. This is a free battle pass progressed by earning and spending Data Fragments. These contain items available in both Black Flag Resynced and Shadows.

Yasuke's Yoroi

Reach level 12 in the Undertow Animus Project to get Yasuke's outfit from Shadows. This is a free battle pass progressed by earning and spending Data Fragments. These contain items available in both Black Flag Resynced and Shadows.

Dark Animus Corsair Robes

Reach level 18 in the Eye in the Dark Animus Project, a free battle pass progressed by completing Anomaly challenges. Unlike the other Projects, all the rewards here are exclusive to Black Flag Resynced.

Connor's Outfit

To get Connor's cool robes from Assassin's Creed 3, you need to purchase them for 3,000 Keys from the Animus Exchange store. This is effectively the replacement for Uplay challenges which used to be the home of legacy Assassin outfits.

Nomad's Bronze Ensemble

You can get the Nomad's Bronze Ensemble for free at the bottom of the in-game store. You should also grab the Rustic Flintlocks and Shipmate Monkey while you're here.

"Just when I thought I was out," Al Pacino hissed in The Godfather Part 3, "they pull me back in!" I'm starting to feel that way about MindsEye, the infamously bad action game from Build a Rocket Boy: I played it, I had an accidental good time, the expansion was abysmally bad, and it was over. But now, for suitably bizarre reasons, it's back in my life.

We're talking about MindsEye today because, as reported by Eurogamer, Build a Rocket Boy is bringing in an unknown number of community members for an on-site playtest at its studio in Edinburgh. And by "bringing in," I mean the studio is paying for their flights to Scotland, two nights' accommodations, and flights back home. I would guess that at least one meal is also being covered, given that attendees will take part in a meet-and-greet with Build a Rocket Boy staff.

How bizarre, I thought to myself, particularly given the game's minuscule player numbers. What could Build a Rocket Boy possibly have to show that justifies an in-person event, and more to the point, why would anyone care?

But one group cares very much: Build a Rocket Boy developers. The studio is holding this event, and more to the point paying for round-trip flights and hotel rooms, after repeated rounds of layoffs—the most recent in May—that left the studio gutted, and that just doesn't sit right with at least some of the workers at the studio. So they're going to protest the playtest at Build a Rocket Boy headquarters this Saturday, July 11, while the playtest is happening.

To be clear, this all seems legitimate and true. Build a Rocket Boy did indeed announce an in-person playtest for "a small group of community members" on its Discord back in June, promising to pay for "flights to Edinburgh, flights back home after the event, and hotel accommodations."

And there is indeed a protest planned, according to a Town Spot post: "Build A Rocket Boy execs are spending thousands on an unnecessary playtest event after laying off over 400 staff over the last year—come join affected workers and supporters outside their offices to show we're organised and ready to fight for jobs."

It's serious enough that the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain—the group that's currently embroiled in legal action against Rockstar over the 2025 firing of 31 employees—is getting involved.

"With their latest release labelled the worst game of 2025, and surrounded by allegations from their workers of secret surveillance, mishandled redundancies and union blacklisting, BARB management are now desperately turning towards fans to save them," the union wrote on Instagram. "As well as trying to buy fan favour with prize holidays, they are handing over work, both paid and unpaid, from the BARB workforce to the BARB fanbase, during a game sector job crisis.

"The playtest, which will see fans take on testing duties usually carried out by professional staff, follows another recent decision to cut longstanding staff members on the community team and hire a player, with no sign of a formal interview process or role advertisement."

The union, which is also in the midst of legal action against Build a Rocket Boy over allegations that the studio was "recording individuals in their homes and without their consent" via surveillance software installed on employee PCs without their knowledge, confirmed that it will be taking part in the July 11 protest.

What happens next, I can't even guess. MindsEye itself is enough fun that it's not a bad pickup for, say, a tenner or less, as long as you enjoy "fun" in the MST3K sense—but for some reason, it's still holding at a $35 regular price. The long awaited Blacklisted expansion that promised to reveal evidence of sabotage against the game, meanwhile, was just straight-up garbola, lacking even the high school drama club earnestness and occasional bits of absolutely bonkers bullshit that made MindsEye itself entertaining. As someone who's played more MindsEye than most, this dogged, determined effort to salvage MindsEye is beyond baffling, akin giving CPR to Lenin: People might talk about it, but probably not for the reasons Bulid a Rocket Boy wants.

Arkheron, a game that had an exclusive interview with the PC Gaming Show back in June, will finally be releasing in closed beta next week—per an announcement on the game's Steam page. In case you're unfamiliar, Arkheron is an isometric PvPvE battle-royale type squad-based action game (try saying that ten times really fast) wherein you climb a tower in the afterlife.

Games are mostly broken up into two segments—a floor, where you and two other mates fight and loot, and showdown arenas that fill me with a deep nostalgia for Battlerite, a lost love I'm yet to find a replacement for (though some have come close). Beat the enemy players, and you'll get to ascend, rinse and repeat until you reach the tippy top.

The exciting bit is, in part, the blend of extraction-shooter style sound awareness with a camera you can rotate on a swivel, though it wasn't always that way initially: "As we iterated, that kind of that point and click style didn't really work as much as we wanted it to," says Rob Pardo, CEO of Bonfire Studios in an extended version of the PC Gaming Show interview, which you can find below.

"We kind of went through a few different prototypes until our game director, Jeremy, at one point kind of hacked the camera in a particular way and allowed us to swivel it," says Pardo. Jeremy Craig, the aforementioned game director, continues: "As soon as we unlocked that rotation, it started to play like something different."

The closed beta will run from July 15 to July 26. As the news post reads: "It's a focused two-week test where we’re looking to understand how the game holds up with a larger group of players, and whether the changes we’ve made since Next Fest actually land the way we hope."

Bonfire will first be going through the Steam and FirstLook waitlists, but you can also sign up via the game's Steam page. If you happen to get invited, you'll be able to bring your mates along, too: "When you get invited to playtest, you’ll automatically be granted three Steam friend invites."

Spires, the game's arena-like game mode, will run for the full two weeks—but the competitive Ascension gamemode will only be available during limited tests on Friday and Sunday. If you're interested in giving them a go, the announcement post has a full schedule.

As a documented remaster liker, it was a real black day for me when Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition came out, back in 2021. It was a complete mess, filled with bugs, shoddily upscaled textures, weird models, and at least one alarmingly smooth hexagon. It was shoddy treatment for a series of legendary games, and the outcry was immediate and intense—in a perhaps telling sign, the remasters' original developer, Grove Street Games (GSG), found itself unceremoniously removed from the game's splash screen in a 2024 patch.

Now, in a chat with Wccftech, GSG CEO Thomas Williamson has chatted a little about how he now reflects on the GTA Trilogy debacle. In short: he agrees they were busted, but says the metrics showed that many players enjoyed them anyway.

"Regarding GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition, I agreed with most of the people's reactions," said Williamson. "But unfortunately, I feel like we did not agree with how the game was released and the response to it from a development side, and I think that would have changed the narrative significantly.

"However, at the end of the day, looking at the behind-the-scenes metrics on those games, there were a lot of people who were playing them and really enjoying them." I must confess, I'm a little sceptical about this. I don't doubt that GSG and Rockstar's metrics showed a lot of people playing the GTA Trilogy, but I'm not sure they were able to gauge their level of enjoyment or satisfaction with the work that had been done. Just because people were playing the remasters doesn't mean they were happy with them; they may have had no alternative—the original GTA trilogy has been delisted on numerous storefronts.

But Williamson says he understands the disappointment, and reckons a truly ideal set of remasters would need to be done in-house at Rockstar, not outsourced. "There was also a lot of people who wanted more, and I don't blame them. We all view these games as these really, really important milestones in gaming history, so I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to work on them… I don't think there'll ever be a perfect redux of those that's not done by Rockstar proper. If their Rockstar North team took it on and did some crazy thing, that would be awesome."

The GTA Trilogy last got a patch—which added a very popular classic lighting system—in 2024. I maintain a forlorn hope it will some day get another one. It's not the catastrophe it was at launch, but games as important as GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas deserve better than what we have currently. At the very least, Rockstar could plump to put the complete original soundtracks back on the in-game radio.

Black Flag Resynced, the much-anticipated remake of the classic pirate-themed Assassin's Creed installment, is set to release shortly, letting us revisit Edward Kenway, kill a million British soldiers, and sink a navy's worth of ships. It's all in the name of plunder, though.

The remake is visually quite impressive, but there's also a bunch of new content, such as quests, pets, improved ship battles, and all sorts. Below, I'll run through when you can play, but also explain about preloading so you can hop right in on launch.

Assassins Creed Black Flag Resynced release times for each region

Black Flag Resynced releases on July 9 with the exception of just a few regions. The console release times are slightly different, since it comes out midnight local time on those platforms, but as for PC, here's when you can play the game:

• West Coast US: 7 am PDT
• East Coast US: 10 am EDT
• UK: 3 pm BST
• Europe: 4 pm CEST
• Australia: 12 am AEST (July 10)
• New Zealand: 2 pm NZDT (July 10)

For any other regions, the image above lists most locations. You can find Black Flag Resynced's technical requirements on the Steam page.

Does Assassins Creed Black Flag Resynced have a preload?

Yes, Black Flag Resynced does have a preload option available and it's active right now, having started on July 7, meaning you can download it in advance on both PC and console. A good thing, too, since the game is reasonably large, requiring 65 GB available space.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced might go down as one of the more puzzling remakes ever conceived. Not only is it bizarre that Ubisoft decided to kick off a likely streak of remakes with the sixth game of the series, but it also chose a game so recently and universally enjoyed that the only way to "remake" it is to simply put out the same game again.

A cleaned-up remaster might have been better than what Ubisoft has done here. Resynced is tirelessly faithful to the qualities that set Black Flag apart in this series—sailing the Jackdaw is as great as ever, now distinguished by a newer Anvil engine that enables dynamic weather, time-of-day, and a truly seamless open world—but fundamental changes to combat, stealth, and encounter design reveal that this is essentially Black Flag stuffed inside Assassin's Creed Shadows.

Resynced is good. It's slick, ridiculously beautiful, and improves on the original Black Flag in several ways. I'm impressed by Ubisoft's Singapore's obvious love for the source material—every story beat and cutscene has been recreated shot-for-shot with original performances intact. If you've never played the second-best Assassin's Creed game ever made, Resynced will get the job done.

For a while, I even believed it would outshine the original Black Flag—I was wooed by Resynced's breathtaking Caribbean vistas that stretched further than my PS3 could be asked, taken by its swashbuckling ship-to-ship showdowns, and impressed by the return of "advanced parkour" mechanics like back and side ejects. Ubisoft spent a generation transforming Assassin's Creed from a stealth-action power fantasy into a loot-driven RPG with spammy combat, and only now is it trying to make amends. Resynced feels like Ubisoft teaching itself how to make a proper Assassin's Creed again, and graded on that curve, it's quite good.

But then, after rolling credits, I reinstalled that original game. Even though I was retreading missions that I'd literally just played newer versions of, I had so much more fun in Black Flag 2013 that I just kept playing… and playing, and playing, until I'd completed both games front-to-back in the same week.

This turned out to be a useful exercise (I told my fiancé, puzzled by a second round of sea shanties emanating from my Steam Deck), because it took a return to old Assassin's Creed to properly appreciate mechanics, design choices, and an entire storyline that, according to internet consensus and Ubisoft, weren't worth preserving. Now having braved Black Flag's dreaded tailing missions, indulged in Ezio-era chain killing, and hacked the computers of my Abstergo coworkers, I reckon this 13-year-old game has aged quite gracefully.

I'm glad Resynced is here, but honestly? The original is better.

Jumper

Take parkour and climbing. Ubisoft is making a big deal about Resynced's parkour being a step up from Shadows, Mirage, and Valhalla, and while that's true, that's setting the bar on the floor. Compared to the original, Edward's updated movement is stilted and floaty. Classic maneuvers are there, but they don't flow very well, resulting in freerunning that looks like bespoke animations playing on a timeline rather than a fluid sequence. Whatever black magic Ubi used to hide these animation seams in the 2010s was lost in the remake process.

Perhaps Ubi is satisfied with less convincing parkour as long as it's faster. Resynced's locomotion is designed as if Black Flag's meticulous animations were a nuisance. Remake Edward wallruns straight up single-story buildings like he's Spider-Man, then proceeds to expedite larger climbs through silly-looking vertical leaps that have more in common with Sly Cooper than Ezio Auditore. When I should be punished for chancing an unwise jump, Edward suddenly gains springs in his boots to clear the gap.

For as much guff as the old AC games get for finicky climbing, Black Flag represented six games of refinements—steering Edward over rooftops, through branches, and across highwires in 2026 is still expressive, and less prone to accidents than the first few games. Climbs are smooth, but weighty and methodical. It takes some time and a little brainpower to crest a church tower or fort. In my unscientific test using the same building in 2013 vs 2026, remake Edward flew up this church twice as fast:

I find the part where original Edward carefully climbs around a window overhang, followed by remake Edward phasing straight through it, to be illustrative.

Resynced is functional and quick, but it's not cool or (dare I say) immersive. And man, that used to be a core appeal of this series. Neither system is complex, but the old climbing at least feels intentional—like we're meant to experience the effort and time it takes to scale a structure that was never meant to be climbed.

That pace has a grounding effect that extends beyond walls. Remake Edward no longer runs with any simulated momentum, meaning he can instantly change direction or flip a u-turn like he's a Dark Souls protagonist. It's a very artificial, videogame-y feel that I ended up resenting the more I played the weightier original.

Blade dance

Even when Resynced's systems are objectively better, Ubi has failed to respect the rule of cool. Black Flag's reimagined combat carries over Shadows' dodge/parry and light/heavy attacks, with the addition of Edward's signature chain kills. It's more engaging than the original's simplistic "counter and instakill everybody" approach, but confusingly, the remake actually reduces Edward's combat options by a lot.

Hidden blades are no longer a primary weapon, now relegated to finisher animations. You can't steal enemy muskets, sabers or heavy axes—temporary pickups that carried their own advantages, drawbacks, and cool finisher animations in the original.

No, remake Edward is strictly a cutlass man, except now he can kick enemies. I don't think the tradeoff was worth it, because Black Flag was never lacking challenging combat. I remember liking Edward as a terrifying pirate terminator soloing the crews of rival brigs, and that impression was backed up by my replay. It's not cerebral stuff, but the weapon pickups gave me more ways to play with my food, and fluid chainkills are gratifying for the same reasons the Batman Arkham games still kick ass.

With respect to some new, freshly gruesome Edward finishers, the remake combat is too mushy and spammy to accomplish the same fantasy. Old AC is about messing dudes up and looking awesome doing it, but new AC is about cleaving away at a health bar.

This is especially true in Resynced's occasional forced boss fights, which replace moments where you're meant to stealthily assassinate targets. You know, like assassins do.

The chase

At least Resynced wins in the sneaking department. The arrival of Shadows' crouch button instantly elevates both the complexity and fantasy of stalking targets from rooftops. The majority of Black Flag's missions involve infiltration and neck-stabbing, so this is a significant upgrade. I felt empowered to explore compounds and avoid guards more often than I killed them, which I attribute to a gracious window between guards seeing Edward and actually pursuing him. Stealth within compounds was the highlight of Shadows, so this is no surprise, but I'm disappointed that Ubi has also repeated that game's mistakes with the cities surrounding those compounds.

The remakes of Kingston, Havana, and Nassau are faithful and, in some cases, even expanded, but Ubi has rendered them less dynamic by nerfing the British and Spanish troops that patrol them. Rooftop guards are completely absent in neutral areas, which kills all the tension of freerunning from A to B. If you do manage to piss off guards, they won't even try to chase you outside of their immediate station. Caught trying to steal booty in a restricted zone? Just run outside and they'll forget you exist.

Ubi has lost the art of the chase, and it sucks. Chases were once a fun, unique feature of Assassin's Creed that forced you to take paths that guards could not easily follow, break line-of-sight to avoid gunshots, and keep your cool long enough to lose a tail in a haystack, bench, or closet. Ubi had already started to deemphasize notoriety systems by the time Black Flag came around—guards will quickly forget about Edward once he loses them, and you don't have to tear down posters of your face—but chases themselves persisted. Resynced lovingly recreated all of those benches, wells, and closets, then gave me exactly zero reasons to use them.

It's one of many ways that Resynced subtly changes the original Black Flag in the name of "quality of life," but ends up blander for it. The series' infamous tailing missions are now much easier. Thanks to no rooftop guards, you can just follow from above with zero worries, and if you do get spotted, just skip to the end of the mission by killing your target and looting the relevant info instead. I know these missions were unpopular with the impatient, but the occasional round of enforced stealth gave AC's repetitive infiltrations some variety while utilizing city space that was otherwise just there.

They also reinforced that, occasionally, stealth is the entire point. These games aren't as fun when every problem can be solved by a hidden blade.

Ship combat has been grazed by the easy beam, too. The Jackdaw is significantly more maneuverable in the remake, a small but consequential player buff that makes follow-up cannon volleys easier while in motion. I also noticed that enemy ships were generally less aggressive on normal difficulty—when I returned to 2013 Black Flag after 25 hours with the remake, I got my ass handed to me by a level one pirate hunter.

The Abstergo of it all

And, oh yeah, Resynced also surgically removes a huge chunk of Black Flag's story. The entire conceit of the original game is that you're an Abstergo Entertainment employee rummaging through Desmond's DNA so that a fictional Ubisoft can turn Edward's memories into a videogame while the Templars covertly seek the precursor technology at the heart of the story. Those sequences are just totally gone, replaced by an Animus interface only used for battle pass unlocks. What a downgrade.

I'm surprised that the removal of all Abstergo business was universally cheered upon announcement. The present day stuff was never my favorite part of these games, but I've always considered Black Flag's a net positive. The interludes were short, semi-optional, and rewarded fans with a mountain of worldbuilding through emails, voice logs, and hidden videos. My recent playthrough reminded me that the ending of these episodes is pretty terrible, but so reveals a lost opportunity. Ubisoft could have directed resources at making this integral part of the original game better, but they just deleted it and replaced it with nothing at all.

It's revisionist history that nobody liked this part of the game—I did, for one, and plenty of reviewers did too. Are we meant to take this as Ubi retconning this series as nothing more than historical action games? Assassin's Creed is a sci-fi world, damn it!

Back-to-back

50 hours across two back-to-back Black Flag playthroughs left me with a lot to chew on. It's a testament to Black Flag's triumphant sailing that it was fun enough to do twice with minimal changes. Time has not been as kind to Edward Kenway, who I'm now convinced is a dull character with an unearned hero arc I was not smart enough to see through at 17 years old.

But the long gap between playthroughs was also long enough to miss a version of these games that was getting a bit tiresome by 2013. There's a comfort to the original's plodding pace, myriad collectibles, and simplistic swordplay that actually stands out more in 2026 than Resynced's "break yet another posture meter" combat and entirely optional stealth.

Resynced's advantages are plain to see. Its world is one of the most gorgeous and realistic depictions of nature ever put to videogame, and its simplifications will likely prove broadly appealing. This is also the better PC port, offering loads of graphical options and features with relatively chill system requirements. It's even Steam Deck verified at launch, though if it's roughly as performant as Shadows, expect a jittery 30 fps target. The original, on the other hand, is finicky in ways that many early 2010s console games were on PC. There's no borderless fullscreen, it doesn't like being alt-tabbed, and will hang for 20 seconds on startup trying to load ancient Uplay stuff unless you cancel it each time. It's also locked at 60 fps by default, but there's a mod for that.

Photoreal graphics are nice (especially on my RTX 5090/9800X3D machine), but man, have you seen the old Black Flag lately? The faces are rough, but that world is still a looker. It's a bit more stylish and grimy than Resynced's polished look, and I prefer it for a pirate adventure.

I just don't think Resynced's marquee features are all that important to me. I kept going through this exercise with Resynced where a new feature would be introduced and I'd assume it was new to the remake—"Oh wow, a home I can customize and improve over time! Neat, they added more ship ammo types! I don't remember these Mayan statue puzzles. Naval contracts? That's definitely new"—only to realize all of them existed in the original, untouched by the remake process.

Resynced is decent, but it takes away more than it adds, as if Ubisoft wasn't confident in the hit game it made 13 years ago. It's a conflicted remake that's worth a look, but is ultimately inessential.

We're in the endgame now for Grand Theft Auto 6, and with just 139 days to go players are beginning to scrimp and save for its anticipated release—if they haven't pre-ordered the standard or controversial ultimate edition already. We've seen some resourceful players utilise Bing and Microsoft Rewards to get an impressive discount, but that's not the only way you can get some dollars off the price.

Another fortunate gamer managed to save $77.87 for their pre-order, cutting the price of GTA 6's standard edition from $79.99 down to just $2.12, all thanks to cash back on Best Buy.

Got my pre-order for $2 from r/GTA6

"Upgraded to the PS5 Pro a few months ago just to make sure my setup was ready for launch," tangyredapple explains. "Totally forgot I used my Best Buy card for the console and racked up a ton of cash back from it.

"I checked my account today when the pre-orders went live, stacked my reward certificates with a 10% off coupon, and walked away paying less than three bucks for the game. Just a heads up to check your Best Buy reward points or other cash back! If you bought a console recently to prep for the game, you might basically have this paid for already. See y'all in Vice City."

For those who are curious as to why they didn't splurge out the extra $20 for the ultimate edition, physical pre-orders (sans the disc, rip) are only available for the standard edition. But you can subsequently pay for the upgrade after the fact.

These kinds of money saving tricks may sound fairly obvious, but it clearly pays to pay attention and check out discounts wherever possible. GTA 6 isn't as expensive as I thought it would be, although that's a low bar, but it's still a hefty price if you want to be able to access all the content there is. So my advice would be to check out Microsoft Rewards, use Bing (I know, I'm sorry), and keep an eye out for any other way you could get some money off, every little helps.

I have a couple of very vague memories of playing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League back when it released a couple of years ago. Mostly, I remember thinking 'meh'. Some of the action was quite fun—although it quickly lost its charm—I didn't mesh with any of the characters and their hit-and-miss humour, but its worst feature was undoubtedly that it was just so desperate to be played.

That may seem like a attribute to pick out, but from the get go it was painfully obvious that the Suicide Squad game had been concocted by a bunch of suits with the sole intention of being replayable and earning stacks of cash. Something that, to no one's surprise, was later confirmed by the devs at Rocksteady after the dust settled on its release, as it was revealed that the botched game cost Warner Bros. $200 million.

Axel Rydby and Johnny Armstrong, two devs who worked on Suicide Squad retold this same story again in a recent interview with Bloomberg, and boy does that development sound like hell.

"There was definitely a sense when we first moved on to it—arrogance is the wrong word, but a confidence," Armstrong says. "We’re coming back off hit after hit. Of course we’ll be able to do this." But then came the slew of delays, which racked up the cost and the pressure for the game to make its money back.

"That’s when I started feeling like I wasn’t making games anymore," Rydby explains. "I was following a spreadsheet, some elusive marketing-analysis spreadsheet that no one could present clearly. I kind of felt like this isn’t the gaming industry I wanted to work in."

"It was a big culture shift," Armstrong adds. "We put all these hours in, but it didn’t feel like it was tangibly getting better. Everyone felt like they were having to run to stand still."

To add to the stress the devs were given ridiculous deadlines: "Six months isn’t enough to do any fundamental changes," Rydby says. "That’s just enough to just fix as many bugs as you can and see if you can squeeze in a bit of feature tweaks here and there." But in this time they were expected to fix everything and find the answers to questions like "How many players can we reach with the feature?" and "How can we twist this design into something that can be more replayable?" asked by executives.

It was all too much, and the unrealistic expectations and pressures of creating an infinite money machine disguised as a live service game was too much. "I felt everything drained from me," Armstrong says. "I said, 'I can’t do this again. I don’t know if I’m done with the industry, but I’m done.' I could feel myself coming apart at the seams."

Armstrong and Rydby ended up leaving Rocksteady and teaming up together to make Secret of Circadia, an RPG deckbuilding game, that has just had its Kickstarter release in hopes of raising $11,404 to help develop the game.

"I think as an industry we are severely losing our way," Rydby adds. "It used to be passion projects that you loved and hoped other people loved too. When they did, it was such an amazing feeling. It became less and less of that. It became: 'Let’s hope it sells. Let’s hope we get money from it.'"

The worst part of all this? I don't think the suits learnt their lesson. It feels like we've been saying this for a while, but games should be made out of love and passion, not because shareholders finally figured out they can make a quick buck from them. The powers that be should just learn to give talented developers the resources and space they need to make cool shit. Swen Vincke once said, the formula for making good games is stupidly simple: "A studio makes a game because they want to make a game they want to play themselves."

Grand Theft Auto 6 releases on November 19, 2026… but not on PC. When is the biggest game in history actually coming to PC? Who knows? More importantly… who even cares?

We don't need GTA 6 on PC because we've got something that promises to be just as big launching the same day. That's right, brace yourself for the highly-anticipated arrival of the self-described "entertainment blockbuster" called, um… Phantom Vice Auto. And it's releasing on Steam on November 19.

Hell yes, fellow PC Gamers! We are going to eat on November 19. I've already forgotten about GTA 6 because the trailer above shows that PVA 1 has everything you could want from an open world action game:

1. Man walking
2. Man driving
3. Man still driving
4. Man driving more
5. Man running
6. Man walking again
7. Man has guns
8. Man shoots man and man and man
9. Man drive more
10. Up to 1 outfit for man

What's not to get excited about? Phantom Vice Auto has it all: nearly empty streets for hassle-free driving, a slick radial menu for guns that definitely isn't going to get them C&D'd by Take-Two, the word "Wasted" on the screen when you get killed (how'd they think of that???), a small section of map featuring beach and palm trees that makes you think "Miami, I guess?"—all packed into a trailer that looks like it's 720p even when played in 4K.

That's not all. Sure, Rockstar released 63 new GTA screenshots last week, but so what? Phantom Vice Auto has five screenshots. Let's look at all of them right now and dig into the thrilling details!

Hell yeah! PVA has a pedestrian system! Just look at all those pedestrians. Both of them! And way, way off in the distance, do you see what I see? A third pedestrian, no doubt part of the same system. You think Rockstar has a pedestrian system? Haha, nope!

Well, I mean, they do. They have for like almost 30 years now. But PVA also has one, and that's definitely notable enough that it should be highlighted in the game's very first screenshot on the Steam store. Checkmate, Rockstar!

Look at this screenshot! I don't know what it is, but it's something! I suspect it shows all the moving parts of these models that were presumably purchased from an asset shop, and that's a lot of moving parts: neck, shoulder, gun part, knee, trigger… mouth, gun part, elbow, pelvis.

What else? Another gun part, ankle.. you name it! If you were thinking models in Phantom Vice Auto wouldn't move, you're a damn idiot! There's gonna be stuff swiveling and moving and rotating all over the place! Rad!

That's a watchtower in a prison. Probably because GTA 6 had a scene with someone in prison. So the message Phantom Vice Auto is sending is: also prison! And it's not all cluttered with people like it probably is in GTA 6. That is one sweet, empty prison. Man, I would hate to be Rockstar Games right now.

Now we're cookin'! Autos, just like in the title (I forgot the title while writing this, but I checked and the title is Phantom Vice Auto). So many cars to drive here! This game auto sell a million copies!

Well. Most of these are the same cars with different colors, now that I really look at them. So, to count them up, there's a buggy, an SUV, a sedan, and a sports car, and… yeah, there's four cars. But that's one more car than pedestrian (there were three), and the colors are several. And hey, remember the prison?

I don't know why this is a screenshot in the Steam store. It's a guy jumping and the menu suggests it's inside some sort of 3D model editing software, maybe? It's not even a guy jumping in Miami. He's jumping in a void. Why is this one of the five screenshots? Why are any of the five screenshots one of the five screenshots?

OK, I can't go on. It just plain sucks that we're not getting GTA 6 on PC on November 19 and no amount of pretending to be excited about Phantom Vice Auto is going to change that. Maybe I'll just play something altogether different on November 19... Cats and Pillows is looking pretty nice—even if it doesn't have a pedestrian system.

Capcom has announced a new release date for Onimusha: Way of the Sword: instead of September 25, the PS2-era reboot will now release on September 4. It's the second time Capcom has pulled this move in 2026, because Pragmata also got moved forward at the eleventh hour.

But unlike Pragmata's April release window, September is pretty damn busy. Previously Onimusha was butting heads with Silent Hill: Townfall and Control Resonant, both of which are scheduled for September 24. Now its only meaningful competition is The Blood of Dawnwalker, the debut action RPG from Rebel Wolves, a Polish studio helmed by former CD Projekt devs. It's definitely wiser for Onimusha to go up against a new series rather than two beloved ones, though Rebel Wolves might see things differently.

And look: I thought this Onimusha reboot would be a pretty niche concern, but my PC Gamer colleagues are pretty impressed by what they've seen. Morgan Park thought it was the best thing he saw at the 2025 Summer Game Fest, so much so that he went back for more this year. The recent demo was received well by the public.

That said, a certain kind of RPG enthusiast won't let a Capcom parry-fest get in the way of Blood of Dawnwalker, which lets you kill any NPC you like. If that's not incentive enough to stick with the vampire RPG, I don't know what else to say.

If you happen to have pre-ordered Onimusha already, or plan to, that arrangement has changed slightly: the pre-order bonus is now called an "early adopter bonus", and is available until September 25.

September is busy, October is busy, but November? No one's going up against GTA 6, except Devolver and this delightfully '90s looking base-builder.

It feels like the whole world is on tenterhooks for the release of Grand Theft Auto 6, if not because they are excited for a videogame then because it feels like Rockstar is propping up that part of the global economy not propped up by AI. But I'll tell you one guy who isn't going to play: Vitaly Milonov, a deputy of Russia's Duma from the United Russia party, who recently lambasted the game for carrying "the stench of Americanism."

In a recent chat with Russian radio station Govorit Moskva, Milonov gave Rockstar a piece of his mind: "GTA, from its very first version, has been about violence and hooliganism," Milonov told the station. "The last version doesn't differ at all from those before it, in terms of deviance."

What does he mean by "deviance"? Well, a little about Milonov: a member of Russia's ruling party, Milonov has long made a name for himself as a blowhard campaigner against gay rights and 'non-traditional values' in Russian society. He has, in the course of his career, spearheaded laws banning "gay propaganda," lost the plot over gay Finnish stamps, slung anti-semitic insults at Jewish political opponents, and called LGBT rights activists "non-human". He is deputy chairman for the State Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children.

But despite his lifelong commitment to persecuting innocent people, Milonov actually doesn't seem worried that the GTA 6 hype will end up converting innocent Russians to lifestyles he disapproves of.

"I do not think that the game can strongly persuade anyone to adopt such a lifestyle," he continued, "if only because a normal person understands that it's about the world of the USA. There—violence, sex and drugs really reign. You immerse yourself in the stench of Americanism when you play GTA."

Milonov actually seems to welcome the regular ultraviolence of GTA's world, given that it only impacts Americans. "Any violence in GTA is violence against a potential enemy, so if they all tear each other apart—even just in GTA—it will only be for the better."

Rockstar's probably not going to put that on the back of the box.

We're yet to see a single drop of gameplay footage, but I can promise you Grand Theft Auto 6 is very real and definitely happening. At least, I certainly hope it is. Rockstar opened the door for pre-orders last week with its $80 and $100 versions, the latter of which I'm not overly jazzed about.

But we're a mere five months out from exploring a modern-day Vice City and everything Leonida has to offer. Well… I say we. As far as PC goes, Rockstar has decided to not include us in what might be one of the most fervorous videogame events of the decade. Worse still, we have no idea when a PC version of GTA 6 is actually going to happen.

The sad fact is that Rockstar simply doesn't deem us a core audience. I could sit here and rant and rave about how archaic that feels in the big 2026, but our own Harvey Randall has already gone ahead and done that for me.

So instead, let me go ahead and take a peek at the results of the poll I put out to you all last week: Are you going to buy GTA 6 on console, or wait for a PC version? And I say this in the least clickbait-y way possible, but the results did genuinely surprise me.

39% of you said you're simply going to bunker down and wait for the game to come to PC. And you know what, I get it, Double-dipping on a game that expensive feels ridiculous, especially when we can wait a little longer and then (hopefully) get a superior experience—from both our hardware and also months of patches Rockstar will inevitably be pumping into the game.

I do have to admire your patience though, especially as someone who suffers from a bad case of FOMO. I'd like to get up on my high horse and declare myself perfectly capable of waiting. But, erm, I won't. Because I definitely cannot wait.

That wasn't the result that was entirely surprising to me, though. It is, in fact, the second most-voted option that really caught my attention: 28% of you said you have no interest in GTA 6 whatsoever, and so won't be buying it.

Perhaps I've simply been spending too long in the eye of the Rockstar storm, but I had expected a good deal more of you to be in the FOMO camp alongside me. Or at least, to have some modicum of interest that had you side-eyeing a lack of PC release. Has the hype grown so feral that it's turned you off entirely, or have you never been much of a Grand Theft Auto gamer to begin with? I'd love to know why you aren't interested in the game down in the comments.

As for those of you who are interested, 16% of you said you'll be picking up a copy on console. Whether that means you've already preordered or plan to scoop up the game closer to launch, at least a few of you will be diving into the action alongside our console pals. And a further 8% of you would buy GTA 6 on console… if you had one, that is. I'll be manifesting a swift PC release for you.

A few of you are on the fence too, though—8% of you have said that you're going to wait until the game is out and then make a decision. Pretty reasonable if you ask me! A game this big certainly runs the risk of being a veritable hotbed of bugs, glitches, or external discourse, so holding out to gauge initial reaction is probably the smart thing to do. Or, y'know, you'll last a few hours before the hype train's power becomes too much and you cave on the first day anyway.

Whatever you're planning to do, let me know your reasons. Or lambast me for my terrible lack of self control and very real fear of missing out. Either one'll do.

Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders went live last week. To some it was a moment of joy, finally after all these years we find ourselves a step closer to the videogame that has been promised to end all other videogames. But for others the one look at the price tag was enough to reality check all previous hype.

And then there was another, smaller camp of players, who were able to have their cake and eat it too, as they pre-ordered GTA 6 and essentially paid nothing for it. Some clever folks had been planning for this day months, even years in advance, and had spent their time searching on Bing (stay with me) to rack up Microsoft points.

Thanks to Bing's reward scheme a few players managed to save up enough points to pre-order GTA 6 at no extra cost; other than the mental and emotional cost of using Bing, which in hindsight may be greater than $100.

"I pre-ordered [GTA 6] using 98,000 Microsoft points," player HugoWheynow explained. "Thank you Rockstar for all the delays, which allowed me to have all these extra months to save my Microsoft points." While another Bing user posted their Microsoft points-paid pre-order depicting the full amount being deducted from their Microsoft account balance.

Thank you, Microsoft Rewards. 😎 from r/MicrosoftRewards

Honestly, those players deserve a free copy of GTA 6, not just for braving Bing, but also for having the forethought to min-max it over the half a year or so. At a push you could earn up to 10,000 Microsoft points (roughly equates to $10) a month, which means if you start now you could at the very least shave some money off of GTA 6's price tag. Who knows, maybe you could even turn it into a reasonably priced game?

Searching on Bing alone can get you around 5,000 points every month. Combine that with opening the Bing app on your phone, playing any game on Xbox Game Pass, complete extra tasks under the 'More Activities' category, and even selling your friend's soul by referring them to Bing and you could be on your way to getting a decent chunk of money off on your GTA 6 pre-order or flat out purchase.

Once you have enough points, or are happy with what you've earned, you can head over to the Microsoft Rewards dashboard, select get my rewards and redeem your points into an Xbox Gift Card which you can then use to purchase GTA 6. All you have to do is weigh up whether using Bing is worth it or not.

Grand Theft Auto 6 feels a little more real this week after Rockstar dropped over 60 new screenshots and opened the floodgates for pre-orders. My cynical feelings around its $100 Ultimate Edition aside, it's hard to not at least have one toe on the hype train—just about everyone's talking about it, both the good and the bad.

So it feels like a great time to revisit a question I asked you lovely folks a few weeks back around what you want to see out of Grand Theft Auto 6's radio stations. For me, music is such an integral part of the series—its radio stations are a hotbed of parody and their music serves as wonderful time capsules for the time period each game is set in.

That's why I'm so interested to see what these stations will bring in GTA 6. As for what you guys want, you had some very insightful responses.

AgentZee is absolutely on the same wavelength as me, saying they'd love to see Something Good by Alt-J make an appearance, commenting: "This is a great song to listen to while driving". I absolutely fell in love with this track when it made an appearance in 2015's Life is Strange—a game with a soundtrack I still adore over a decade later—and I'm already envisioning late-night drives around Leonida while this blasts in my ears.

And speaking of Leonida, some of you want to see its Florida influences shine in its musical choices. Neogunhero said "Real Florida Jit" music is a must, citing artists like Denzel Curry (who I'm a big fan of), Kodak Black, Smokerpurpp, Trick Daddy, and Ice Billion Berg. Viddy echoed that sentiment, saying it'd "be a real shame if they didn't" have some kind of Florida roots station, including "other FL natives who'd understand the realistic absurdity this game is surely going for."

Lucky said: "I want to be able to drive the stand-in for a convertible Ferrari at night while In The Air Tonight plays," which is an image I can totally picture. Wind blowing through Lucia and Jason's hair, those classic Collins drums kicking right in. Plus, the song was already in Vice City Stories, which makes GTA 6 the perfect game to bring it back, since we'll be revisiting the iconic area in all its modern-day glory.

Some of you focused more on the parody side of things, too. XoRn said they "could drive around for hours" listening to a parody news channel, while Jimfurbath said stand-up comedian "Tim Dillon hosting a conspiracy talk show radio is what GTA6 needs!"

My favourite of the whole bunch, though, has to be what Ianik has in mind for the game: "Only radio station with monks and Gregorians chorals. Without options to turn off". Incredible cursed energy, which somehow makes it the perfect choice for a game like Grand Theft Auto 6. Bring on the chants.

PS1 mascot Spyro the Dragon has a surprisingly strong presence on PC these days. All three of the original games are available on Steam in remade form through the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. Developer Toys for Bob is also working on Spyro: A Realm Beyond, the first new Spyro game in almost 20 years.

One thing you can't do, however, is play the original versions of the PS1 games on PC. At least, not yet. But a PC port of Spyro the Dragon is in the works by fans of the series, and will likely release soon.

This was revealed by Spyro speedrunning specialists lumilaura, who posted a video to X of what appears to be Spyro The Dragon running on PC (via GamesRadar). "You're not dreaming, this is Spyro 1 running natively on Windows 11," she wrote, having been asked to test the port by its creators.

The PC port is the product of an "OpenPETE decomp + recomp hybrid" by porters Amec/tyscorp. The decompilation project—the process through which such PC ports become viable—was started last year by The Moby Collective. Thus far, 88% of its functions have been decompiled to source code, as has 58% of its bytes.

In addition, Lumilaura notes that the PC port is capable of running at 60FPS, supports "true widescreen", features perspective correct textures, and has "no polygon wobble" (which depending on your level of affection for those watery PS1 polys, could be a positive or negative). In a follow-up post, Lumilaura also stresses that the project is being made with "no AI", because that's a thing developers have to say, now, tragically.

The clip Lumilaura posted to X shows Spyro running around a field, collecting a few gems and battering a few enemies. The same clip was also posted to Reddit, where Lumilaura provided a few extra details in a separate reddit post. She says that while the clip was recorded at 60FPS, the game itself was "running at 320fps and looked gorgeous." That said, she also says that the port is still "very unfinished and currently presents with a lot of visual artifacting such as camera flashes" as well as "awkward camera motions that can cause motion sickness."

This is why, currently, the port has not yet been made public. But lumilaura says it's likely to arrive "much sooner than we all think". But will it arrive before A Realm Beyond? The next Spyro game is due to launch sometime in 2027, so there's every chance it might.