It's that time of year again: The next Call of Duty is on deck, and Activision's got the beta dates to prove it. Modern Warfare 4 won't hit the streets until late October, but the multiplayer beta begins a full two months ahead of time.

As usual, Activision is holding two beta weekends: One for those who pre-order the game and one for everyone else.

• Weekend 1 (August 21-25): For those who pre-order Modern Warfare 4 on PC, PS5, or Xbox (no Switch 2 beta)
• Weekend 2 (August 28 to September 1): A proper public beta on all platforms (including Switch 2)

Fairly expected for a CoD beta calendar, except for a few abnormal details, like how Switch 2 players will be left out of that first weekend (that version might be coming in a little hot compared to the others). There's also the fact that pre-order weekend is five days instead of four—further stretching the definition of "weekend." That means pre-order players can start the same day as the Call of Duty Next livestream and won't have to watch streamers enjoy a 24-hour headstart.

Less surprising, but surely disappointing for many, is that Game Pass subscribers will not be entitled to early beta access this year. They were for both Black Ops 6 and 7, but apparently Microsoft's decision to exclude new CoDs from its service also extends to betas.

Sounds like the Modern Warfare 4 beta will be a decent tasting menu for the full package. Players can unlock "19 different weapons before deploying into everything from small-scale 3v3 skirmishes to massive tactical battles featuring tanks and more," a blog post published today reads. "Test your mettle across new and returning modes, from Search & Destroy to the brand-new Kill Block, plus the Training Mobility Course."

Kill Block is a modular multiplayer map made for both small and medium-sized modes. The map is divided into chunks that dynamically swap between rounds. It's the sort of experimental gimmick that seems unlikely to catch on in a big way, but 10v10 Gunfight on Kill Block was a highlight when I played Modern Warfare 4 back in May. During one round, the map became a 1:1 recreation of Crash from the original 2007 Modern Warfare—charming.

Of the many remarkable abilities possessed by Dishonored hero Corvo Attano, perhaps the most remarkable is, well, possession: Corvo can possess creatures, most famously the game's plentiful rats, to get up to all sorts of trouble, including accessing locations that would be inaccessible to his full-sized body. As it turns out, this wasn't an entirely original idea. More than a decade earlier it had been considered for use in Dishonored's masterpiece progenitor, Thief: The Dark Project.

Thief basically is Dishonored, speaking very broadly: A guy who's good at sneaking around gets caught up in a bunch of political nonsense he'd really rather avoid because of a woman he can't admit to being in love with because it'd be weird. One chief difference is that Garrett, the titular thief of the Thief games (the ones that matter, anyway) doesn't have any powers.

He almost did, though. In a 2018 PC Gamer magazine interview marking the 20^th anniversary of Thief's debut, lead designer Tim Stellmach said Looking Glass Studios had pondered giving Garrett the ability to shrink himself and travel through small passageways like drains. The idea was ultimately dropped, though, for eminently practical reasons.

"We just decided it was gonna be way too much work to do it right," Stellmach explained. And, maybe more importantly: "It started raising questions that we didn't want to answer."

Stellmach didn't expand on the nature of those questions, but it's not too difficult to guess. As a pure stealth game (another big difference between Thief and Dishonored: Garrett is not great in a fight), getting from point A to point B without being seen is central to the experience: Being able to transform into a small, innocuous rodent might make traversing Soulforge less of a brain-crushing grind, but it'd also suck the fun out of the whole thing, right?

Thief is, in many ways, an unforgiving experience, and as we noted a few years back, many of its innovations have been left behind in favor of mainstream accessibility. Stealth is an option in games like Dishonored, but there's always a Plan B of 'kill everyone' if you blow it or just get bored of sneaking around. That's just not an option in Thief, where Garrett can generally handle one guy at a time but no more than that. But it worked: As Richard Cobbett wrote in his own retrospective on how Thief defined the stealth genre, the game's singular focus resulted in a singular immersive sim experience.

Thief is back in the news these days thanks to the Nightdive remaster announced at the PC Gaming Show in June, which despite being called Thief: The Dark Project Remastered will also include the additional missions from Thief Gold, along with a beefy slate of other improvements and upgrades. To ensure it's done right, Nightdive has brought back Thief artist Daniel Thron to help revamp the game's cutscenes, a vital part of any serious Thief reconstruction effort.

There's still no release date on the remaster but as PC Gamer immsim weirdo Joshua Wolens correctly stated when the game was revealed, "Oh hell yes."

I'm not sure who thinks we need a Call of Duty movie, but it's officially a thing, and it's coming out on June 30, 2028. It's "an authentic and exciting experience for longtime fans and newcomers alike." While this tidbit was confirmed earlier in the year, Activision and Paramount gave us little more than that in the months since. The big question was whether it will be set in the Modern Warfare or Black Ops universe, or something more unexpected, like WW2, Advanced Warfare, or Infinite Warfare (although probably not that last one).

The answer is it's going to be set in the Modern Warfare timeline, revealed with a very short teaser trailer at FanaticsFest over the weekend. With Modern Warfare 4 coming up this October, presumably a Black Ops game next year, and then another Modern Warfare game in 2028, it lines up.

Even as far as Call of Duty goes, Modern Warfare is easily the most generic setting Activision and Paramount could have picked. It's basically already a pastiche of bog-standard military films diluted into a game. At least Black Ops plays with perception, history, and tech to add something on top. While we're yet to get any specifics, I bet we'll see the usual Modern Warfare suspects—Captain Price, Ghost, and co.—bending the rules to do what they do best, which is usually a lot of war crimes, truth be told. I wouldn't be surprised to see the actors from the game reprise their roles, even—Captain Price actor Barry Sloane recently popped up as Ser Adrian Redfort in House of the Dragon.

It's previously been revealed that Peter Berg will be helming the project. I don't expect you to remember, but he directed things like Battleship, Deepwater Horizon, and Spencer Confidential, among others. More notably, he directed Lone Survivor in 2013, which is about a group of soldiers on a mission to eliminate a Taliban leader—sounds rather Call of Duty to me.

In a 2013 interview, Berg made his views on military videogames pretty clear, calling them "pathetic."

"Can't stand it. The only people that I give a Call of Duty get-out-of-jail-free card to is the military. They're out there serving and they're bored and they want to entertain themselves? Okay, maybe. Kids? Uh-uh."

So despite his track record for making war films portraying the US military as Hollywood heroes, military shooters like Call of Duty aren't up to his standards. But that was 13 years ago, and now he's got a gig turning those games into a movie, so perhaps he's changed his mind.

LawBreakers was, by many accounts, a great game. But the 2017 shooter was a commercial failure, and developer Boss Key shut it down just a year after release. There's been much speculation about why it stumbled, including from Boss Key co-founder and Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski himself. In a new interview with 80.lv, he offered his latest theories.

For one, a desire for Boss Key to be 'his' studio cost him an opportunity to work with Rod Fergusson, who he worked with on Gears of War.

"I could have used Rod, but I wanted it to be my show, and that was the first step of my ego creeping in right there," Bleszinski said, "believing that ... if I built it as Cliff, people will come. I thought there was this brand loyalty from the people who knew who I was, but it turns out people are loyal to the game, but they're not necessarily loyal to the person."

Bleszinski went on to say that the publishing deal Boss Key secured with Nexon had the wrong priorities. That deal included Boss Key retaining the rights to its IP, but as Bleszinski recalled it, "When the deal is so good for one side, the other side isn't as incentivized … they're not going to make it the next big thing because they're really not going to see that much of the profit."

Bleszinski offered a few other causes too, calling Boss Key's demise "death by 1,000 paper cuts." LawBreakers' art could have stood out more, an earlier launch on Xbox would have brought over more Gears of War fans, his struggle with alcoholism played a role, and he felt he was less involved than a lead should be, going home when others stayed late.

Despite all the turmoil, Bleszinski told 80.lv he still has a craving to make games again. "At the end of the day, I want to create characters and worlds," he said. "I want to make stuff that people will cosplay as and get tattooed on their bodies."

I'd completely forgotten Valve is working on an update for Team Fortress 2's cooperative Mann vs. Machine mode, though in my defence, it's been a long time since we last heard about it. The prospective patch was announced in June last year, via a blog post on TF2's official website that requested map and mission submissions from the community in time for this update—with a "fictional deadline" of August 27.

After that deadline passed, a brief progress report was provided in September. But for the past ten months there's been radio silence. Now though, Valve has provided another snippet of info on the patch's status on its blog. "We wanted to give everyone an update on the update we already gave on the update we're working on, and here it is: We're still working on the MvM update."

That isn't everything Valve had to say on the matter. But it is about half of it. Valve elaborated that "it's taking a lot longer to sort through the new content and changes that we'd originally planned, but we promise we're making progress. Thanks for being patient!"

This tracks with the progress report Valve gave back in September, where it explained that its request for community contributions resulted in "way more" submissions than it expected. At the time, Valve admitted it didn't "have a release date for the update yet" but it would be "going through the submissions and working on it".

Obviously, Valve could allocate more resources to getting this update out of the door if it wanted to, given that Steam alone has raked in an estimated $11.1 billion in revenue this year—not to mention the money Valve makes from Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and the tens of thousands of players still involved with TF2.

But that isn't how Valve operates. The company's flat structure means staff tend to drift between projects through a blend of desire and demand, and there's been a lot happening this year that is likely to be of higher priority than updating TF2. This includes the launch of the Steam Machine and the upcoming release of the Steam Frame, alongside the ongoing development of Deadlock.

Yet while major updates for TF2 are sporadic, with the last arriving in 2023 and pushing player counts to an all-time high, the game does get minor patches on a regular basis. Earlier this month, TF2 received an update that added a bunch of community maps, cosmetics, taunts and so forth, with a flurry of smaller patches following to fix bugs and tweak parameters related to that update.

Just four months after the release of Marathon, game director Joe Ziegler has announced that he's leaving the game, and Bungie, effective today. His role will be filled by Del Chafe III, previously the assistant game director, who along with creative director Julia Nardin will "guide Marathon into the next chapter with an even better and brighter future."

"As for me, I'll be heading to something new, somewhere else, and will update you on where and what soon," Ziegler wrote on X. "I just want to say a deeply heartfelt thank you to all of you for supporting me and Marathon in our windy mission to bring a dark and terrifying space survival frontier to your screen.

"The mission will continue in new and surprising ways so stay tuned for what this team has in store for you! It's been a pleasure seeing all the stories you've created, all the clever ways you've found ways to murder robots and one another. Hopefully as I move onto new things, you'll join me for those adventures as well."

Ziegler's departure, coming so soon after Marathon's release and while it's still struggling to find its footing, is a shock. Bungie is rolling out big changes to Marathon, including an embrace of PvE gameplay in the upcoming Vault Breaker mode, which will debut—temporarily—next week and then roll out in full sometime in season 3.

It's the worst possible time for instability at the top, in other words, particularly given that a turnaround for Marathon is essential. It isn't a Concord-esque disaster, but Marathon's concurrent player counts on Steam are nowhere near what Destiny 2 was (or is even currently) putting up, even when it was in its deepest doldrums.

With the studio gutted and no other releases imminent, Marathon is an existential game for Bungie. Even just as a matter of public perception, losing Ziegler—a highly-regarded developer who only joined Bungie in 2022 and took the reins on Marathon just two years ago—is a major blow: The more it looks like you're in a spiral, the tougher it is to pull out of it.

Compounding Bungie's troubles, Ziegler isn't the only high-profile Bungie employee to leave in recent weeks: Former Marathon design lead Lars Bakken, a storied Bungie developer in his own right, left in June after more than 20 years at the studio and is now "retired from the videogame industry."

When I heard the that Team 4 would be stopping work on Overwatch's Stadium, I didn't feel very surprised. Then when I learned that only 6% of the playerbase actually engaged with the game mode, and I was even less so. But that doesn't mean I'm not really sad to hear the news.

I didn't take to Stadium at first, I found its third person perspective to be a bit jarring, and its huge number of items were something of a hurdle to get over. But that quickly changed after some time spent in the mode, figuring out its intricacies.

I spent 100 hours in Stadium—even with its ridiculously long support queues—it became something more than just a game mode I'd dip into when I was bored of the regular queue. I appreciated how it offered something else for players to enjoy, and how it showcased all the creative and innovative ideas that Team 4 has to offer, but didn't have a chance to add to the game.

See, much of Stadium was made from ideas Team 4 had been mulling over for years before it was announced. There were even elements included which were initially meant to be a part of Overwatch's now controversial PvE mode. I was just happy to have these fun and creative ideas recycled into something fans could appreciate and experience, but it seems like history is repeating itself.

I didn't mourn the loss of PvE as much as others. I always preferred the competitive side, so I didn't give much thought to the story modes—playing against bots just wasn't as fun. But I was sad to see it go, because I saw it as one less area of experimentation and opportunity the devs could use to better showcase the great attributes of Overwatch—in this case, its story and characters.

But it's easier not to miss something we never really had, which is why I feel that this is an even bigger fumble—Stadium got much further than PvE ever did, and it had proven traction. It became Overwatch's most popular mode with 2.3 million matches played during launch week. Even with scaled back involvement, I think a different approach to balancing and more time would've been good for Stadium as extra heroes (aka reasons to play) would be added and players got a better feel for it.

More leeway may have also given the devs time to iron out some of its discrepancies, namely how bloody long a match takes. Team 4 did change the format a few seasons ago to be first to three, but switched it back to best of seven quite quickly after the change.

I'd love to see Team 4 build on what it's created over the last 10 years, and not just be tied to the same old modes. But that's a wish that isn't realistic, especially given that there's been so much pressure on Xbox-owned studios, especially over the last few weeks, to capitalise off the best areas on the game. I'd wager it'd be harder to justify hard work on such a small area of the game now more than ever.

It's the loss of this creativity and innovation that I'm sad to see dialled down, more so than the game mode itself. I also don't think this kind of experimentation can be undervalued, not at a time when Overwatch has more competition to deal with and players to keep engaged. But I'm sure we'll still see it in other areas of the game, not least the Hacked Quickplays, the most recent of which carries the promise of a new kind of 6v6.

In an attempt to fix the bloated Gunsmith system of recent Call of Duty games, Modern Warfare 4 is introducing a new feature, Gunny. It's a little widget in the bottom right of the loadout screen that you can use to create loadouts for you. For example, it'll say "Hello, I can help you build a weapon when you have more attachments unlocked. Keep levelling your weapon," if you've got a brand-new weapon.

Naturally sceptical of a weird widget that communicates with you, Infinity Ward has been accused of using AI for this new system. In a post which instigated a lot of the uproar, retired Call of Duty leaker TheGhostofHope said: "They got an AI chat bot in the game now to help mfs with their loadouts as if it’s not the same shit used every year."

Infinity Ward fired back, saying "Wrong (again.) Gunny is handcrafted by our developers, not AI. It recommends builds based on the attachments you’ve unlocked for each weapon. It helps make quick loadout changes between matches. Give it a shot in the Beta." For those out of the loop, that snarky 'again' refers to various incorrect leaks made by Hope which Activision has called out in the past. There's history.

I, for one, am glad that Gunny isn't an AI chatbot that can't play Call of Duty, telling me how to play Call of Duty. Instead, it's effectively just a personified auto-equip button that collates dev-made weapon builds for those players who don't want to create their own, or even search online for player-made setups.

However, it's not the first time that Call of Duty has been accused of using AI. Players had suspected Activision was using AI to generate cosmetics back in Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops 6, and this was confirmed last year once Valve's mandated AI disclosure appeared on the Call of Duty Steam page. Later that year, Black Ops 7 also came under fire after players found what looked like AI-generated art.

So these calling cards are DEFINITELY AI generated right? from r/CODBlackOps7

In fact, as reported by Destructoid from a group presentation, Infinity Ward co-studio head Mark Grigsby confirmed that the team is using AI in MW4. “We use whatever tools we have to enhance and help our developers to complete [tasks] on time,” explained Grigsby. “For the game, there’s developmental things. We use whatever we can, whatever tools we can [in development].”

This is backed up by the game's Steam page, which has an AI usage disclosure, reading "Our team uses generative AI tools to help develop some in-game assets."

So, while Gunny thankfully isn't an AI chatbot despite the vibes, its developer certainly is using this maligned tech elsewhere in its creation. I would not be surprised to see more shoddy AI-generated calling cards popping up in premium bundles once again.

It took nine months, but Battlefield 6 is about to get its most requested feature. Naval warfare returns to the series on July 21 with the introduction of Tsuru Reef—BF6's new biggest map—a pair of boats, and more guns.

Perhaps more interesting is what's coming in phase 2 of Season 4 on August 18: OG Battlefield map Wake Island gets a modern update, complete with its aircraft carrier spawn points and beach assaults. At the same time, Battlefield 6 is hosting a Top Gun crossover that adds a new two-seater jet (styled like the films) and brings back a mode that first debuted in 2006's Battlefield 2142.

Top Gun: Carrier Strike—based on Battlefield 4's Carrier Assault, which is based on 2142's Titan mode—tasks two teams with sinking the other guy's aircraft carrier through the language of Conquest. Capture flags to launch missile barrages at the enemy carrier, culminating in an on-foot boarding assault on the carriers themselves. At least, that's how it worked in the old games. BF Studios says Carrier Strike has been reworked for BF6, which could mean anything from "it takes fewer missiles to win" to "there's no boarding phase anymore," which would be a shame.

It's funny and a little sad that old features are being reintroduced as brand crossovers, as if the only way to justify making a cool mode is to get Paramount to sponsor it, but at least Top Gun is an aesthetic match for Battlefield. It already makes more sense than when Battlefield 6 had an (admittedly fun) motocross course sponsored by Red Bull a few months back.

One other Top Gun-themed mode is coming as well, though this one's on the Redsec side. Top Gun: Fighter Sweep is a jets-only Gauntlet mission that takes place on a "modified Tsuru Reef." If you find Redsec as tedious as I do, the jets will also be usable on jet-only servers in Portal.

EA's press release has more quotes from Top Gun: Maverick actors (sans Cruise) than details about Carrier Strike. Miles "Rooster" Teller says it's "a huge honor to appear in a long-running franchise like Battlefield with its millions of fans, and talented people working on it," adding that "with Top Gun, it's like two titans meeting."

There's a zero percent chance Teller meant to reference the relevant name of the 2142 mode right? Battlefield's Top Gun festivities don't start until August, but the return of naval warfare next week should be a pretty big deal.

Ever since Overwatch let the 5v5 cat out of the bag in 2022, it's spent most of its time trying to get it back in. The format has been met with a lot of backlash over the last four years from those who don't see it as a good alternative to the classic 6v6. It's a problem Team 4 has tried to solve by bringing in 6v6 open queue as an alternative mode. But that hasn't stopped the developer from trying to find a compromise between the two modes.

The latest attempt at compromise falls in the current Quickplay Hacked Event, a limited time mode where Team 4 trials ideas to make the game better and looks to the community for feedback.

For those who want to test it out, you can now play a new form of 6v6 which attempts to utilise certain characteristics from 5v5—it's the 1-3-2 flex mode where teams can have one tank, three DPS, and two supports with the catch that one of the DPS can also flex to the tank role if they want to.

I get what it's trying to do. With there only technically being one tank needed for a game you'd keep the shorter queue times that 5v5 promises while also adding an extra person into the mix for more team-based and chaotic skirmishes that 6v6 offers. On paper it seems like a good fix, but in practice it just feels like a bad compromise.

I only played this hacked mode last night and after the first few games a trend emerged: teams that had two tanks stomped those that only had one—who'd a thought? Me, and honestly most players.

Because there's a capacity to have two tanks on a team, it means the role is balanced on the side of a 6v6 game with the tanks having slightly less health and abilities which are tuned down (aka Zarya having one bubble not two). This is okay if you have two tanks, but painfully weak if you only have one.

In one match where my team had two tanks and the enemy team only had one, we rolled through them, pushing the payload to the first two checkpoints with no issue. But the enemy team flexed to two tanks right before the final objective and managed to stall the point from there. I played games where I was the solo tank against two tanks and it sucked—every time one of the enemy tanks made a mistake the other one would correct it before I could capitalise off of it. The only way to win against a 2-2-2 comp with a 1-3-2 comp is to have vastly better players, which isn't a reliable option. Without fail the team with one less tank lost.

This makes the 1-3-2 flex mode completely redundant, no matter the tweaks or balances it will almost always be better to have two tanks rather than one. And if that's the case having a 1-3-2 option is entirely redundant, with its only use being it may make for shorter queue times.

Needless to say I don't think this is the answer to the 5v5 or 6v6 debate. Unfortunately, these two formats are just too different to find any useful common ground. I play both formats, and I like them for different reasons—the chaos of 6v6 can be fun to navigate and manage but I prefer the 5v5 matches because you can make more of an impact on games and it rewards a more deliberate and skilful approach to fights as mistakes are easier to capitalise on.

So, I'll say the same thing I always do when it comes to the 5v5 vs 6v6 debate: I think Overwatch should prioritise 5v5, its new direction is better for what the game is now. 6v6 certainly has a place and should still be an option for those who want it. But, a compromise between the two—at least in how this hacked mode frames it—should not be on the table, it is just the worst of both modes.

Before Modern Warfare 4's official hands-on gameplay premiere yesterday, Infinity Ward had to clear the air regarding visual recoil. Effectively, it's aware of the concerns it's buck wild, and will be monitoring feedback during the beta before launch. So what I wasn't expecting soon after was to get blinded by a severe case of muzzle flash every trigger pull while watching the new gameplay yesterday.

Several content creators were invited to play and livestream an early MW4 alpha build, including the new Kill Block mode. But what's gotten more attention online has been the over-the-top effects whenever you shoot: a bright flash and a big puff of smoke that covers the entire screen, almost warranting sunglasses. It was especially prevalent on high-power weapons like snipers, though it was visible on other weapons too, especially in darker environments. It's hilariously distracting in the clip below, where it feels like it would light up my face like Ben Starr at The Game Awards if I were playing in a dimly lit room.

After a clip of Skyrroz showcasing it spread around, Infinity Ward once again had to step in to confirm that, no, this isn't intentional. But it sure is a shame that it's marred the first proper hands-on gameplay the community's been privy to.

"These are pre-release Alpha builds and are still very much a work in progress," the post reads. "The muzzle flash VFX issue in today's Alpha gameplay is a bug that will be fixed for Beta."

This is backed up by previous behind-closed-doors hands-on, including by our own Morgan Park, who played it earlier this year. CoD content creator JGOD also had this to say about that same clip being shared around: "What happened to the version I played and why is he getting flash-banged with every shot?".

Infinity Ward followed up today with more details, confirming that this issue was specifically caused by a bugged suppressor attachment. After the feedback, however, it has also decided to reduce the muzzle smoke opacity for all weapons.

Combined with the already controversial visual recoil, this unfortunate bug has quickly given people the wrong impression. "Nice, need an epilepsy warning to come on every time you shoot a gun," one commenter wrote. "Bruh…..WHAT THE F*CK is that muzzle smoke," said another. Similarly, "That muzzle flash lmfao what im getting flashbanged each shot wtf." You get the picture.

Hopefully the beta, expected to begin in September, won't suffer any other heinous bugs to further sour the mood. Though that's what a beta's for, I suppose.

I was pretty excited when I read about Marathon's Vault Breaker PvE mode in June: I like shooting things, and I love the Marathon aesthetic, but the grind of extraction shooters just isn't my thing. In an update released today, ahead of next week's mid-season update, Bungie revealed more about the upcoming "experimental" PvE mode, including that its initial iteration will only be available for two weeks.

Vault Breaker will go live alongside the mid-season update on July 21, and will be playable until August 4. The full rollout is currently set to happen in Marathon season 3, which begins on September 22—although that won't necessarily be the date it goes live.

It's understandable that Bungie would want to go slow with Vault Breaker, at least to start. As "a roguelite PvE experience inside Cryo Archive," it makes significant changes to the Marathon formula: Players will access Vault Breaker with unique Sponsored Kits, and instead of extracting with the loot they've gathered, it will all be left behind. Instead, players will upgrade their equipment with a new kind of in-game currency collected during runs called Vault Data.

One new detail revealed in today's update is that there will be two tiers of Vault Data. Tier One Vault Data is found in vaults and must be exfilled in order to be collected, and will also be awarded for killing a UESC Commander regardless of whether or not you successfully extract; Tier Two Vault Data is only earned by successfully solving consecutive vaults on the same run, and then extracting. Bungie warned that "this will be especially tough for solo Runners," although you'll also be able to take the mode on in duos or trios, if you're into that sort of thing.

There will also be two tiers of Vault Data items offered on a weekly rotation, as well as a "daily deluxe weapon," Prestige weapons, and other items. However, while this equipment can be purchased with Vault Data, they're only for use in standard Marathon modes, and won't be available in Vault Breaker, which as mentioned is only accessible with Sponsored Kits.

"At the start, the kit is at its weakest, offering only one standard weapon along with a small amount of equipment and consumables," Bungie explained. "As you earn Vault Data, different upgrade paths will begin to open. You might want to focus on weapon quality. Others may want more survivability, or they may want to get started with a wider mix of implants and cores. The path is entirely up to you."

It's a long shot, but even so I hold out some small hope that Vault Breaker will be such an immediate success that Bungie decides to keep it around, rather than pulling it until season 3. PC Gamer Marathon man Rory Norris had similar thoughts about the new "PvP-lite" Sponsored Survival mode, an experimental queue that ran for a week in June: He said the mode is so good, "it should remain a permanent fixture and be expanded to the other maps once the test wraps up next week."

Bungie is in a tough spot right now. Destiny 2 is dead, the studio has been gutted, and the only bullet it has in the chamber is Marathon, which has not been a blockbuster success. I don't know how likely it is that the addition of a proper PvE mode will turn that around, but I'm eager to try it, and I hope that opening the door to players who want to engage with the setting but aren't big fans of extraction shooters proves a successful strategy.

In a rare reversal of live service demise, a beloved but "dead" live service FPS will not shut down, but instead receive custom server support that ensures it'll be playable forever. Long live Deceive Inc.

The story of Deceive Inc. played out like countless other live service games. The PvP Hitman-like shooter launched to good reviews, was beloved by a modest community (including yours truly), and received substantial seasonal updates for over a year. Then in 2024, the updates suddenly ceased and its developer, Sweet Bandits, closed its doors.

"After a long and difficult road of trying to get Deceive Inc. in a state where it could thrive, we have reached the breaking point for the studio," Sweet Bandits wrote in a December 2024 Steam update.

At the time, Sweet Bandits said it was "exploring options" for maintaining the game long term, but noted that the path would be "charted by our partners at Tripwire Interactive." Servers remained online, but for how long was anybody's guess.

That was a year and a half ago, which is why I was surprised to find a fresh Deceive Inc. update on my Steam home page dated July 16.

"Although Sweet Bandits had to close their doors, we don't believe Deceive Inc. should quietly disappear because the services behind it aren’t sustainable forever," the unsigned post reads. "We're actively rebuilding Deceive Inc.’s backend to be sustainable indefinitely and support community-hosted dedicated servers.

"When this work is complete, you'll be able to host your own servers using a dedicated server application, browse community servers directly from within the game, and join community-hosted matches just as you do today."

Once upon a time, most multiplayer games were built with a flexible server infrastructure that made custom lobbies a natural fit, but today's standard practice of dedicated server stacks and integrated matchmaking means redoing a lot of backend work. The effort is extensive, but worth it.

"Replacing the backend for a live multiplayer game means rebuilding much of the technology that players never normally see. This touches nearly every part of how players find matches, join servers, manage progression, unlock content, and more," the post reads. "Our goal is that when everything is finished, all of your account progress, unlocks, and stats are maintained—even though much of what's happening behind the scenes has changed."

The post shares screenshots of the rudimentary custom server tools coming in the update, and also sets expectations accordingly. "Right now, our priority is completing this migration successfully. Because of that, we have very little room to incorporate extra feedback or requests while this work is underway."

The cherry on top? The new version of Deceive Inc. will also remove "as many technical barriers to modding as we reasonably can," which could open the door to long-term fan updates down the road.

It's a feel-good development for a brilliant game. Deceive Inc. was never going to rake in millions of players—it's too strange for the mainstream, yet too skillful and complex to qualify as "friendslop"—so this is the best case scenario.

"This work is ultimately about one thing: making sure the future of Deceive Inc. is in the hands of the community that continues to play it," the post concludes.

Every year, Call of Duty either tries to reinvent the wheel, or undo the reinvention it tried last time. With the upcoming Modern Warfare 4, it's attempting the latter—Morgan has played MW4 multiplayer at Infinity Ward recently, and he's not convinced it's a leap forward, despite being confident it'll be the best-playing Call of Duty in years.

MW4 has the monumental task of living up to MW 2019's reinvention of the series, while trying to fix Modern Warfare 2's controversial changes. One of the biggest criticisms was its absurdly strong visual recoil, which made its guns feel, frankly, quite messy and unresponsive. This was somewhat fixed in MW3, but that half-sequel is a whole other can of worms that the devs are steering clear of.

In the latest "From the Ward" developer doc, Infinity Ward has laid out its philosophy with MW4. "We talk a lot about making the game more immersive," explains weapon designer Cody Pierson. "The goal for Modern Warfare 4 is to really put the player in the boots of their operator, make it feel like they're really behind their gun."

What this means in practice is some admittedly cool features, like more realistic depth of field that's actually a helpful improvement over past games. Most players will likely still turn it off, though. Muzzle effects have been toned down by a creative masking solution, specifically cutting out the cloud of smoke that would typically block your view. Or how about the dynamic weapon position, like lowering your weapon as you approach a wall or angling it against a corner as you poke around. Very cool. Very immersive.

While I think Infinity Ward's changes are pretty spot on, this deep dive has proven to be divisive. For some, the (seemingly) strong visual recoil and hefty weapon sway are bringing back bad memories of MW2. So much so that the developer has made a statement on the topic in direct response to a fan raising their concerns:

"We’ve seen the early conversations around visual recoil. The Beta will give players a chance to get hands-on, and we'll be monitoring feedback closely throughout both weekends."

It's a sentiment I've seen shared among the community in the wake of the video. There's been some surprisingly nuanced discussion on the game's Reddit page. It's rightly pointed out that, while smoke and weapon bounce could still be toned down, it's not helped by the lower FOV on display.

Content creator TheGamingDefinition posted on social media, saying, "Did you muppets not learn your lesson from MW2022? Fix your game, this visibility is shocking." And to be fair, it's a pretty muddy screengrab. Likewise, Frizzeyes called MW4 "MWII 2.0".

Metaphor, a very good Warzone player, highlighted the fact that these changes specifically kneecap PC players more: "Insane visual recoil + gun smoke. Mouse and keyboard is OFFICIALLY DEAD."

Ultimately, I'd say it's too early to know how the guns in MW4 will feel without actually having them in your hands—every weapon is different, and your settings can influence things too. But so far, it's clear that Infinity Ward is aware of the shortcomings of MW2, while still being dedicated to the idea of immersion and realism. It's certainly more passionate about those tenets than its players are, though.

Every publisher and developer has been trying to avoid the black hole that is Grand Theft Auto 6—easier said than done, given that Rockstar has shifted the GTA 6 release date several times now just to bait the entire industry. Even Call of Duty is giving it a wide berth, with Modern Warfare 4 opting for a late October launch rather than the typical November debut, though it's not a first for the series.

But Call of Duty's got nothing to worry about—at the very least, one of the best-selling games every year isn't 'free' on Game Pass anymore. After all, it's still one of the behemoths that rolls around every year, GTA 6 be damned. In an interview with Destructoid, co-studio head of Infinity Ward, Mark Grigsby, said going head-to-head with arguably the biggest game in the industry's history isn't any extra pressure.

"I always feel pressure. I’ve been in this industry for 28 years, and every product that I have put out, I have the weight of the world, even not as a studio head, as a developer," Grigsby explained. "It’s a lot of pressure to make sure that you’re creative enough to entertain the masses."

"I’ve been a fan of GTA since the top-down [games] back in the day. And I’m looking forward to playing it. Afraid of it? No … I think it’s healthy for the industry to have juggernauts like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty and Fortnite, and whatever other major studio or product that comes out, to uplift … And, you know, it’s a little head-to-head, that’s great."

"Pressure is pressure," Grigsby adds, "but we’re always trying to maintain and make sure that we are delivering a top-notch, top-of-the-line product."

Our own Morgan Park got to play Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer at Infinity Ward recently, and while he's not convinced it's a leap forward, he's confident it'll be the best-playing Call of Duty in years. At the very least, it's trying to fix Modern Warfare 2's controversial changes.

We often talk about Doom—the original 1993 shooter from the young upstarts at id Software—as one of the most influential videogames of all time. But the Washington Post, one of the country's most highly-regarded papers of record, has elevated it to an even higher plateau: It has selected Doom as one of the 25 most influential works of American culture, representing the absolute pinnacle of its era.

The list, assembled to commemorate the 250^th anniversary of the United States of America, covers a remarkable breadth, from Thomas Paine's Common Sense to the Star Spangled Banner, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Levi's jeans, Mickey Mouse, and the recordings of legendary blues man Robert Johnson: One selection marking the highlight of each decade of America's existence, bolstered by a handful of honorable mentions.

And there, for the decade of 1986-1995, is Doom—beating out heavyweight competition including Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and the MTV reality series The Real World.

"In December 1993, Id Software gave away part of its new videogame free over the internet. College networks buckled under the traffic, and bulletin boards lit up, as the game eventually was installed on more computers than Microsoft Windows 95 at the time," Washington Post videogame critic Gene Park wrote.

"Doom was foundational in digital entertainment—a 3D world viewed in first person, self-published, with no gatekeepers and no retail store, as it gave rise to user-generated content years before anyone had a name for it. Programmer John Carmack handed the audience the tools to build their own corners of hell."

Park acknowledged the negative perceptions of Doom over the years in his ode to the game's impact, saying it "was a scapegoat for the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, ground zero of America’s ongoing nightmare." But, he added, "It was people with guns, not a game, that took lives. A grieving nation feared a new form of entertainment it misunderstood. Hearings were held on games and music, a template that would replay after nearly every mass shooting since."

Ultimately, in Park's view, Doom embodies America: "The game’s spirit of sharing and community, along with its pioneering approach to guiding players through abstract environments in 3D space, is rooted in the upbringing of designer John Romero, who is Native American (Yaqui, Cherokee) and Mexican."

Quoting Romero, Park continued, "'A lot of Doom’s design, especially the level design, was really influenced by just that understanding of the environment, the world, and that comes from my dad, my grandma, everybody'— generations, he says, 'where people lived on the land' they believed to be shared."

Romero himself seemed pretty excited about it:

So was his fellow id co-founder Tom Hall:

It's a reflection of the way we perceive time and history, but more recent entries in the list definitely feel more like pop culture fluff than culturally significant works: Keeping Up with the Kardashians was selected for the 2006-2015 decade, for instance. But the Post says it's not meant to be a "best of" list, but rather a series of historical signposts, each defining its time.

"No decade can be summed up any more than a country can be summed up, but if we wrote an autobiography not of words but of works—books, music and art, ideas, dress and culture—these 25 would be among the most momentous," the Post's culture critic Philip Kennicott wrote. "These are not necessarily our proudest moments, but they are defining acts of culture. It is an imperfect list, and incomplete, but then that is America, imperfect and unfinished."

This is the second time Doom has been recognized as a culturally important American work in recent months. In May the Doom soundtrack was added to the country's "national playlist" in the US Library of Congress.

Despite the surge in Overwatch players since Blizzard's decision to drop the 2 and take the hero shooter in a new direction earlier this year, the noise around its MOBA-inspired Stadium mode has died down. And so has its popularity, which has prompted a halt in development plans according to a new blog post by game director Aaron Keller.

Keller provided daily player counts for each mode as of June 28. The data shows that around 54% of players queue up for 5v5 unranked, while only 3% of them head into unranked or ranked Stadium. Even the 6v6 modes are more popular.

Because of this, Blizzard has decided to stop adding new heroes and maps to Stadium. Keller says "we'll continue supporting Stadium with seasonal balance updates, rank resets, and rewards," but the team of developers previously focused on it will be moving on to other projects.

Stadium is basically an over-the-top version of Overwatch where you create MOBA-style builds with items and powers that transform your hero's abilities, like shrinking Ashe's robot sidekick B.O.B. into a mini killing machine. People ate it up in the first few weeks it was out, making it one of Overwatch's most-played modes. But with only a portion of the game's roster available to play, it started to fall behind on updates as Blizzard began rapidly releasing new heroes for the rest of the game. Season 1's Jetpack Cat was the last hero to be Stadium-ified.

Although the most recent midseason patch was filled with plenty of balance changes for Stadium, it seems like the effort it takes to translate new heroes and maps to the mode is too much for Blizzard to juggle alongside the rest of the game. Part of me is glad to see that Blizzard won't be deleting Stadium outright, but another part of me is surprised that it's already effectively over. I'll be curious to see how substantial future balance changes will look if the team focused on it has largely moved on.

The news was tucked into a blog post about two upcoming experimental 6v6 modes Blizzard will be testing soon. From July 16 through July 19, Quick Play will turn into a "Flex Queue" where every team will have one tank, three damage dealers, and two supports. At any point in the match, however, a single damage dealer will be able to swap to a tank hero. Keller says Flex Queue will help improve queue times and add a little more strategy compared to the regular 2-2-2 team compositions.

The second test will run from July 28 to August 3 and will use the same Flex Queue format but only when the matchmaking system fails to find two tank players. The goal with this so-called "Dynamic Queue" will be to see how people handle shorter queue times in exchange for varying team compositions. Right now, queuing up for multiple roles tends to just make you a tank because it's the least popular. This is supposed to alleviate that a bit.

Keller says both tests are to gather data about various things and won't "necessarily mean that we're going to be changing the main format of the game." He said they could lead to tweaks to regular modes or entirely new Arcade modes. "Like with any good experiment, we won't know the results until we complete all the steps."

Although it certainly wasn't pitched as one, it seems like Stadium will go down as one of the many experiments Overwatch has conducted in the last few years. Overwatch's perks system—which lets you choose two of four ability modifiers mid-match—was inspired by it and changed the game for the better. Stadium might be more or less over, but it probably won't be be the last time we see pieces of it show up in the rest of the game.

Don't scoff at it being a DLC: Revelations is the best Doom has ever been. Hell, it would be worthy of being a standalone sequel if it weren't so tightly woven with the base game in ways id Software joyfully refuses to do with its full-fledged follow-ups. While I adored The Dark Ages' visceral demon-crushing, its level design fell flat. Some levels were too linear; some were needlessly open. So I wasn't expecting to enjoy the DLC too much before I went in.

Turns out, Revelations is a perfect blend of Eternal's movement and level design, and The Dark Ages' timings-based combat. And you know what? I think it's the most fun I've ever had in Doom—and it's almost the size of a full game, clocking in at about 10-15 hours. A damn shame considering Xbox laid off id Software developers just days before its release. Talk about the dark ages.

Tip of the spear

Only a short way into Revelations, Doom Guy loses all his gear, including his Shield Saw—but don't worry, it's getting replaced with something even better. Enter the Chain Spear. This is the big gimmick of the DLC, trading the defensive power of the shield for massively increased mobility. And in typical id fashion, this new weapon is a multifaceted tool that's so creative that it could support an entire game on its lonesome.

You can attach it to enemies to launch yourself around, even upgrading it to let you orbit them while you blast away. You can slash enemies, destroying metal and shields. This can also parry green Hell Surge attacks if you time it right, similar to the Shield Saw in the base game. The bricks tied to Doom Guy's feet have been untethered now too so you can dash in any direction.

The spear is just as gnarly and badass as you'd expect, but it's home to a remarkable amount of depth, especially when you start unlocking the various upgrades. Dodging and parrying attacks earns you Empowerment, which you can use to throw a stunning spear (great for flying and spectre enemies), stab it into enemies to superheat metal and cause explosions, or, my favourite, groundpound to cause enemies to drop health.

You'll regain access to your old weapons and, soon enough, the repaired Shield Saw, opening the door to yet more combos. Revelations encourages you to master the flow of combat more than ever with tougher demon encounters and more tools to play with.

It's a hell of a lot of buttons to juggle at any given time, but it's one of the most rewarding, satisfying combat systems in the genre.

Level up

While your mileage with the combat still largely hinges on how much you like the gimmick of countering specific attacks, the level design is a clear step up in every regard. For one, I was consistently amazed by how cool Hell, Purgatory, and the Lovecraftian-inspired Cosmic Realm look. Hands and faces protruding from medieval castle walls. Cosmic beasts in unfathomable, shifting labyrinths. It's rad.

The new missions are among Doom's greatest. They're intricate and layered, striking a great balance between mandatory encounters, optional puzzles, and endgame clean-up. The boring binary choice of going one direction to progress or the other to find the obvious secret path is, thankfully, gone. Though that does mean backtracking is common if you're not stalking the map screen, and you can't return to levels until after you've beaten the story. It's pretty punishing if you miss some Platinum on your first run through. Given the focus on combat mastery and perfect flow, having to retread old encounters isn't a bore, at least.

I was pretty surprised by how good most of the puzzles are. You're still moving blocks and finding keys, but there are more layers and some of them actually had me stumped for a minute or two. It's the polar opposite of the base game, which felt like it begrudgingly included them out of an obligation to its predecessors.

I loved returning to the main puzzle box hub area after each mission to see what else I could access, such as lowering the water level or pulling down obelisks for treasure. This area contains a lot of the endgame challenges as well, which you'll unlock after beating the story, like time trial combat challenges, silly levels inspired by the original Doom, and tough bosses.

The rewards from exploring are also much improved, harkening back to the satisfaction of checking every nook and cranny in Doom 2016. Frankly, I got fed up with most of the secrets being barely hidden, boring Life Sigils and Codex pages in The Dark Ages' main campaign. Here, you're assembling relics for Platinum to grab those meaningful upgrades and getting new skins and toys on a consistent basis. Revelations realises how fun it is to navigate and comb over well-crafted Doom levels.

Revelations is, on the surface, just more Doom. You shoot a hell of a lot of demons in a boxed-off room. But the new and existing tools at your disposal are perfectly intertwined, while the smart level design elevates the combat and exploration. Even the story is great here, something I usually don't care for in Doom—I love the retro stylings of the flashback levels, and how being a prequel lets it retroactively tie into its predecessors in cool ways.

It's just a crying shame that such a refined, full-throttle Doom experience is not only relegated to a DLC for the most controversial entry in the series, but that the team that made it has lost talent thanks to Microsoft's studio-crushing hammer.

Back in 2013, EVE Online creator CCP Games attempted an ambitious FPS to tie in with its legendary galactic economics MMO. Dust 514 didn't end up having legs⁠—not the least because it was a PS3 exclusive⁠—but the developer, now known as Fenris Creations, didn't give up on the vision.

Fenris' London office is carrying on the cherished (in certain circles) memory of Dust 514 with EVE Vanguard, whose developers hope to pair extraction gameplay with cross-game integration to make something special. Think the ongoing storytelling of Helldivers but powered by the perpetual motion machine of EVE's player corporations and alliances.

Game director Scott Davis knows they'll have to get it started with authored content, but the end goal is something self-sustaining. "The lead designers on EVE Online, they don't describe themselves as 'dungeon masters.' They describe themselves as 'caretakers,'" he told me at this year's EVE Fanfest. "What if everyone just decides to go and [enlist] with one empire? They completely snowball the campaign? We're like, that'd be fucking cool."

Vanguard's current alpha playtest, Operation Avalon, is taking the first furtive steps at that cross-game integration with a concurrent EVE Online event. It's still largely theoretical and in the future, but coming from a studio that's proven it can deliver on its unique, ambitious promises. What's far more concrete is that Vanguard is a good FPS: I enjoyed my time with it, and it surprised me with some sharp, interesting design choices that stand it up independent of its older sibling MMO.

Murderhobo Monday

One thing I loved right away about the playtest: It kinda just drops you right in the thick of it. I started playing Warhammer 40K: Darktide recently, and while I love it, god damn does it take a while to get to the action when you're first starting out. Vanguard loads into your "war barge" menu, and while you can futz around with all the sub-menus and merchants, the deployment button is right there.

This game has so many different kinds of upgrades and materials, the sort of stuff that usually gives me hives in multiplayer shooters, but it's almost like Vanguard is saying, "You know what? Forget about all this nerd shit. You can worry about that later." I hope it never loses that immediacy as it develops further.

The first objectives are to kill some guys and loot some boxes, which I like as a low pressure entry point to exploring the lone map in the playtest. Part of me wanted some more structure or direction to funnel me into the cooler encounters around the map, but it also felt particularly special when I stumbled on something cool, like a lucrative climb up a loot and enemy-filled tower. It's a balance that Fenris still has time to perfect, but I'll always prefer "go figure it out" to "have another waypoint, you thick-headed baby."

In my first deployment, I got bodied pretty quickly by another player and was stuck with the grey rarity, loaner, poop tier default assault rifle on my next few runs. The good news: Even the Scootie Puff Junior AR felt great to shoot with⁠. Its biggest handicap was a punishingly, hilariously glacial reload animation. All of the guns I've used in Vanguard boast great sound, feedback, and models. My favorite so far was easily the Halo Covenant-looking laser sniper rifle you have to charge for each shot, but the shotgun's fun too.

Gun game

Over the course of a couple deployments, I really got it: The specifics of enemy spawn rates, economy, EVE Online integration, and tutorials can all be dialed in. The base layer of explore, shoot, run away here is just fun. I kept wanting to play more of it.

Davis told me this was his goal with the game's alpha, to have something where people would play it and want to come back. "We want to make things that people will miss if the game gets canceled," he said. "When you ask anyone about Dust [514], 'What do you miss about Dust?' It's not 'Oh, I just liked that it was a nine vs. nine team deathmatch game.

"They [say] 'I miss bombardments and I miss suit fitting' and all of that. It's just the little cool things that they added into that game that people miss, and I think we want more of that."

I dig the lone playtest map: It has a good variety of arenas and points of interest, while the look of it is very enticing as well. EVE Online has an underrated sci-fi aesthetic, and Vanguard does a good job of translating it to a human scale. It's a lot of grim, utilitarian, industrial structures strewn about a rugged, volcanic terrain draped in moss⁠—think Prometheus, Death Stranding, or, indeed, Fenris' native Iceland. The bright yellow, holographic livery of an interstellar industrial concern makes for a final visual flourish that really set Vanguard apart for me.

When you deploy to the map, there are a number of extraction sites that close one-by-one as a timer ticks down, while PvE mobs spawn in great numbers to hunt you down once there's just one left. It feels a little abrupt at the moment, the contrast between quiet for most of a match vs. how frantic it gets right at the end, but hoo boy, that final bit is pitch perfect.

My matches ended with mad dashes to the last extraction point, enemies hounding me across the map with a surprisingly dogged persistence. There's already a strong interplay between NPC mooks and rival players⁠—band together against the grunts, or use them as a distraction while you're on the hunt?—and that's only magnified in the final stretch as the remaining squads try to scramble for the last extraction. At this early stage, you're already getting the emergent player behavior that makes Tarkov and Arc Raiders sing.

This is my third time trying out Vanguard⁠—I played once before at last year's EVE Fanfest, and again at this year's⁠—and I've observed a marked improvement each time. "We had a shooter that was good enough, and that shooter needs to be great," Davis said of Vanguard's first playtest. "Pre-alpha is a weird development phase. You don't normally see it. [It normally] happens behind closed doors, sometimes before some games even get announced. But we were like, no, we're going to do things differently.

"This is the game looking and playing like we wanted to, and so come in, give it a shot if you were sitting on the fence waiting for something a bit more polished, because we got that a lot."

There has maybe never been a more uncertain time in the multiplayer shooter space, but Vanguard already feels worthy of consideration. And that's even before it can deploy its real ace in the hole, cross-game integration with EVE Online. You can check out EVE Vanguard via Fenris' official website or Steam, where you can also wishlist the game.

Agent 64: Spies Never Die, a lovingly-crafted homage to the classic Nintendo 64 James Bond game GoldenEye, made quite an impression when it turned up at the PC Gaming Show in 2022, but all hasn't gone quite according to plan since then. An early access release expected later that year didn't come together, and updates on Steam have been few and far-between since then.

But today we got the update we've been waiting for—developer Replicant D6 announced that Agent 64: Spies Never Die is set to launch on August 11.

"After a grueling five and a half year of work, I can finally put a final release date down," the dev wrote in a short-but-sweet update on Steam. "Everything is almost ready and set. Let's make it worth it!"

There was no multiplayer in Agent 64 when we first laid eyes on it, but that changed a year later when Replicant D6 announced plans for split-screen multiplayer, and then again in 2025 when online multiplayer was revealed.

That's a big deal: Multiplayer was a major part of GoldenEye's success, so it was a bit surprising that such a spot-on remake intended to move ahead without it. Replicant D6 said earlier this year, however, that "singleplayer remains the main focus of the game," which as a fan of singleplayer shooters I take as good news.

Another big deal: The Agent 64 singleplayer demo that was slated to be pulled earlier this month is being left online until August 9, just a couple days ahead of the game's release, so you still have time to give it a rip. The demo, available for free on Steam, includes the first two missions of the game, so it should provide a pretty good sense of what it's all about.

I Counter-Strike 2, small changes can have huge ramifications. There aren't many games where the addition of volumetric smoke grenades would be a headline feature. But in CS2's hyper tense battles, true 3D smoke cover has game changing consequences.

Now, with the advent of Season 5, Valve has made another tiny-yet-huge change. Put simply, it's changed how the bomb works, giving players more of a chance to survive after it detonates. Valve detailed the changes in a Steam post (via PCGamesN). "Now, when the bomb detonates, an explosive wave of destruction will flow from the bombsite through the map."

This won't make much difference if you're standing close to the bomb, with Valve emphasising that "you're toast". However, Valve explains that "the shockwave dissipates around corners and doesn't go through walls" meaning that a bit of canny positioning will keep you alive after detonation, preserving your precious gear into the next round.

But how will you know if your hiding spot will keep you alive? Well, Valve has thought about that too. As the bomb counts down, your health bar will flash to highlight how much damage you'll receive in your current position once it goes off. The shockwave effect has been pre-calculated for all defusal maps, which presumably means it'll be the same each time.

Valve hasn't posted any clips showing the new bomb tech in action, but Valve YouTuber Gabe Follower has uploaded a video detailing the changes in Season 5, alongside some footage of the shockwave. He also discusses another new feature which, currently, is only available in private testing: A new console command that enables players to detonate grenades remotely by shooting them. You can imagine the knock-on effect such a system would have in a Counter-Strike match, so it'll be interesting to see whether Valve implements it more widely.

Alongside the bomb changes, Season 5 also introduces two new weapon and sticker collections, one with an Arabian theme and another that's all about spy tech. There's also a new map, Cache, which replaced Overpass in the active-duty map pool, plus five community maps that have been added to various modes.

While Counter-Strike 2 remains the biggest game on Steam, it's not the only entry in the series that's doing well for itself at the moment. Its predecessor, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, has racked up an impressive player count after it was de-absorbed from CS2, attracting tens of thousands of players despite not being listed on the steam store.

Amongst all the news of brutal layoffs, studio divestments, and ironic task force appointments at Microsoft this week, over in the Call of Duty corner of the megacorp, something kinda cool happened. Activision released updated ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) and Black Ops 2 (2012).

They come with caveats, of course: At $40 a pop, the Call of Duty tax is firmly affixed to these elderly shooters. They're also PlayStation only, sadly, so the millions of fans who originally played them on PC are cut off from the reinvigorated scene. But they are nearly complete updates of those original games, now upscaled to 1080p, with few exceptions. Players were especially surprised to learn that even the emblem editor—a beloved and somewhat controversial feature of Treyarch's early games—made the cut.

Because, well, people are making swastika emblems with it. And depictions of 9/11. And Charlie Kirk's assassination. And a KKK member. And that's just all that fit into this tweet from influencer JakeSucky.

As you can see, the emblem editor is surprisingly powerful—its stock of primitive shapes, symbols, colors, and layers let dedicated thumbstickers depict just about anything. Most often, custom emblems ended up looking like the trash bin of an early South Park animator, but it was a regular occurrence to glance at a profile and be treated to a remarkably convincing Mona Lisa, cartoon character, or yes, something naughty.

I'm also quite surprised the feature made the cut. Even with player moderation, there's no policing photoshop, so a tool that allows for high expression assumes that sometimes your killer will flash you with cartoon racism. There are normal, cool, creative emblems being made as well, but in keeping with the Call of Duty community, terrible behavior is more the norm.

As others have pointed out, they should've done the work to let people turn off custom emblems entirely—there wasn't an option back in 2010 and there isn't one now.

Weirdly, the only major change to the ports is the omission of some modes. Wager matches are gone from Black Ops 1, so clearly developer Iron Galaxy did some surgery here, but you won't find modern options like FOV sliders or high refresh rates. Pretty barebones ports, all told.

Destiny 2 is done: The final patch is out, Bungie is decimated, and the game will remain playable but the story of one of the biggest, best and most influential online shooters ever is over. To memorialize the moment, Bungie has rolled out one last gift for players: A new emblem, free for everyone, called Gloriabundus.

The emblem, shared on X (via Eurogamer), is a simple one, but elegant: The Destiny logo, and a distant city skyline, bathed in light. It's a small thing overall, but the restrained styling is, I think, appropriate for the moment.

Bungie communications lead Dylan Gafner, known to the community as dmg04, also reassured players that while the end has come, Destiny 2 won't be completely abandoned and left to rot. "There may be moments where we break glass for highest priority issues (game crashes)," Gafner wrote in a separate message.

"There will indeed still be downtimes for general server maintenance/upkeep. If we have the opportunity, a small fix could sneak in here or there."

Some Destiny 2 fans have held out hope that Sony will reverse course on the game's end, particularly given the resurgence in players on Steam that followed the end-of-development announcement. But that seems extremely unlikely: Bungie's been on thin ice with Sony for at least the last couple years, and in June it laid off "most of the Destiny team" at the studio.

Update: It turns out that the Gloriabundus emblem wasn't the final final farewell after all. In the noble spirit of "we gettin' fired anyway," the Destiny 2 Team followed up the next with a whole bunch more freebies. Gloriabundus indeed—get 'em all below.

Destiny 2 has entered its long goodnight. Despite earlier assurances that Destiny 2 will "remain playable" for the foreseeable future, the studio now seems to be signaling that its ability to ensure the game's ongoing health is constrained. Even if Bungie and Sony had the will to ensure Destiny 2's sandbox stays fulfilling in its sunset years, they'd struggle to find someone to make it happen—because most of the Destiny team was cut loose last month.

But don't let that convince you that Destiny 2 can't still deliver magic. Even in its purgatory, Destiny 2 is capable of wonders to rival the heights of its prior years of live service—by which I mean players have found a new transmog combo that makes it look like your hunter has yucky poopy pants.

Magnificent.

The groundbreaking discovery in Destiny fashion comes courtesy of @GetGudder on X, who found that pairing the hunter's Scavenger Suit leg armor appearance with the Cobwebbed shader—unlocked at rank 30 in the current premium rewards pass—leaves the player character with an unfortunate diarrheal flair. Maybe you can get away with calling it avant garde?

For the sake of journalistic integrity, I hopped into Destiny 2 myself to confirm the transmog's viability, spending my own hard-earned synthcord savings to unlock the Scavenger Suit appearance just to properly preview the shader. And sure enough: That's a one way ticket to brown town.

You'll need a shortened cape transmog to pair it with, though; otherwise, your cloak will obscure the desired fecal effect. Can you imagine? Going through all the trouble of shitting your pants without anyone being able to see the results? Embarrassing.

As you might expect, the finding has produced plenty of gleeful reactions. "Bro wearing the SH1T-EE5," said one X user. Another wondered whether these were the unlucky alternative to the exotic Lucky Pants.

My personal favorite response, from user @TailledT, presents Guardians with a hard truth: "The ghosts can revive you but they cannot unshit your pants."

While @GetGudder asked Destiny's remaining staff for a confirmation of whether or not the downstairs mistake transmog was an intended use case for the shader, an official response has yet to materialize. For now, at least, it's a heartening reminder that—even in its twilight—Destiny 2 players are still more than capable of entertaining themselves with what remains.

Either that, or it's a poignant visual metaphor for—well—any number of things going on in videogames, really. I'll let you decide.

The reasons behind the decline and ultimate end of Destiny 2 will always be a topic of discussion. It's, in my opinion, one of the biggest fumbles in entertainment history. No one thing is to blame, but former Bungie CEO and avid car collector Pete Parsons, who retired in August 2025 as sentiment was at an all-time low and pressure from Sony grew, is the focus of much of the ire. "I hope all your cars break down," one player wrote in a cheerful farewell to the departing CEO last year, in a rare moment of community unity.

I'm surprised it took this long, but this distaste for ol' Parsons has manifested into the most on-the-nose thing it could have done for the Destiny community—one final raid poking fun at him. Created by parody account Pete Carsons on X, you're invited to The Vault of Cars, a play on Destiny's first-ever raid, The Vault of Glass.

"Do you have what it takes to face Pete Carsons in the Vault of Cars and stop him from purchasing all of the remaining cars in The Last City?" I don't think any die-hard Destiny player is gonna say no, now, are they?

It's a browser game that starts with Pete Parsons talking like a Canadian in South Park before he turns into the flying machine, the Destroyer of Guardians. Then the fight begins. It's satire obviously, but it's got genuine mechanics lifted from the source material, to its credit:

1. Fling tomatoes at a collection of classic cars (named things like Micro Management, Crunch Enforcer, Bankruptcy Expert, and so on) to stack the Contaminated Fuel buff.
2. Complete a parody of the iconic Oracles puzzle from the actual Vault of Glass.
3. Beat the powerful Investors that Pete calls to his defence.
4. Hurl tomatoes at Pete Carsons until your Guardian's Desire buff runs dry and you need to repeat the process.

Mimicking Bungie's tradition, the account hosted a World's First completion for faux raid, requiring players to submit a video of their full clear of the raid, including the final cutscene. About two hours after it launched yesterday, the account claimed that players had completed the raid and submitted their clears: "Please give us some time to review all the submissions to verify which came first." Sadly no cool raid belt for the lucky winner to commemorate the occasion.

The cult classic Half-Life 2 mod series Entropy: Zero has another entry in the works, and speaking as a fan of Thief, Deus Ex, and all things immersive sim, Entropy: Zero 2 - Progenitors may be the most exciting one yet.

Entropy: Zero has always presented the bad guys' side of things in Half-Life, but Progenitors trades the first two episodes' standard Combine trooper for a super sneaky assassin type⁠—she strikes me as a riff on the black ops ninjas from Half-Life 1.

Progenitors takes place an indeterminate amount of time after the Seven Hour War where the Combine took over the Earth, and our assassin protagonist is charged with taking out the rogue Progenitor from which the Combine's soldiers were first cloned or otherwise derived (or something). If Mr. P turns out to be Adrian Shephard from Opposing Force, I'll think about eating my shoe.

It's a neat take on the Half-Life lore bolstered by some great visual direction. All of the Entropies: Zero have done a great job of blending and homaging various eras of Half-Life⁠—Zero 2 took place in an Aperture Science facility and paired you with a snarky turret companion⁠—and Progenitors looks to be turning its gaze toward Opposing Force. I'm particularly fond of the evil Combine United Nations logo⁠—it's giving the dark Nazi future gags from MachineGames' Wolfensteins.

As for gameplay, developer Blixibon has been sharing clips of new weapons and mechanics on YouTube, and Progenitors looks incredibly ambitious⁠—practically an immersive sim, or at least a shooter-immsim hybrid like Dark Messiah or the aforementioned neo-Wolfensteins. Blixibon's latest clip shows a player pickpocketing an enemy soldier then throwing a beer bottle to distract him. We have Dishonored 3 at home, god bless it.

Progenitors does not have an estimated release date, and the latest blog post on its ModDB page alludes to development difficulties and creative burnout on the part of some team members.

But it sounds like the worst of it is behind them, and this is an incredibly exciting project. You can keep up with Entropy: Zero 2 - Progenitors via its ModDB page and Blixibon's YouTube channel.

Do you know what makes Warhammer 40k so special? It's not just the Space Marines. No, it's the setting's sense of mystery. Even after burying my head in hundreds of Black Library novels, there's still plenty I don't know about its vast and enigmatic universe, and even more I've simply forgotten. No matter how hard I hoard names and events, they invariably spill from my ears only to be replaced with less vital info, like what day it is, or my credit card pin.

If you don't know something about 40k, and the diehard fans don't appear to know either, there's a good chance Games Workshop never set that detail in stone. That's how it came to pass that nobody knew how the Skitarii's most iconic rifle reloaded—a topic that's been debated by many Mechanicus-loving subreddits. Games Workshop never had to decide until Fatshark rocked up wanting to make a Skitarii class for Darktide.

Nobody had ever seen a Skitarii naked before either and so "that was a mystery which we needed to solve," Lucas Örström, Darktide's Associate Art Director, notes. While the pallid, augment-infested, barely-human cadaver that hangs before you in character creation is a harrowing claim to fame for the studio, it's lore, the curtain of a mysterious setting being drawn back, ever so slightly.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: naked Skitarii excite me, and they should excite you too.

So why should you perk up for this class versus the Arbites or Hive Scum that Darktide added previously? Skitarii are cyborg warriors, toaster-worshipping cultists who burble binharic cant as they make enemies poorly from too much electric, shank them with a comically retractable claw arm, or revive allies, solve puzzles, and provide fire support with their Servo-Skull minions.

The Skitarii is a swiss army knife, a jack of all trades, master of none class who prioritises supporting allies and the team at large over thriving as a solo. It's a very different playstyle to anything Fatshark has introduced before, where previously a class lived and died (quite literally) on its ability to kill and survive. It's understandable that many players aren't gelling with this playstyle, though the class could definitely do with a few tweaks.

I, however, love it, and genuinely think it's one of the best classes to play through Darktide's campaign with, even if it is a little harder for new players. The Skitarii gives you tools to solve Data Interrogation puzzles, revive allies at a distance in tricky situations, and just generally carry your team of Rejects from a support position. It teaches you the vital importance of teamwork and coherency versus running off on your lonesome to try and be a hero.

Darktide is fundamentally a game about coping with hordes of enemies, so it makes sense that good classes are good at killing, but I'm glad Fatshark is trying something new to address that, frankly, boring approach to class design. It's fun to have a character with a versatile skill tree, plus more strategic and supportive elements versus one who is simply good at blending every enemy on-demand.

Even the new class creation elements for the Skitarii, such as getting to design your character's voice, or pick what parts are welded to you, are wonderful little loreful touches that make me hopeful Fatshark will continue to focus on making each new class unique instead of a power-creeping escalation in an endless game of "who's the better killer?"

That's the best way to showcase what makes Warhammer 40k special; unveiling the mystery of the setting and its bonkers lore through strange new classes that feel unique. It's taken a while to get here, but I feel like Fatshark is starting to make good on the promise of Darktide and stake its claim as the 40k FPS to watch—at the very least, the Skitarii is a fun and loreful step in the right direction, even if detractors say it'd be better off as an OP killing-machine.

Anytime you're talking about the hottest game on Steam, there's an evergreen unspoken caveat: 'after Counter-Strike, of course.' CS2 is unquestionably Steam's killer app—it has well over a million concurrent players as I write this according to SteamDB, and it's showing no signs of slowing down. But don't count out the game it once absorbed and then spat out: its predecessor, Global Offensive.

According to SteamDB, it hit an all-time (post re-release) concurrent player peak just three days ago. That's a bit more than 68,000 simultaneous terrorists and counter-terrorists. While that's small potatoes compared to the original game at its peak or CS2 right now—SteamDB appears to only go back to earlier this year when CS:GO un-merged from CS2—it marks a sudden upward trend, a pretty impressive showing for a game you can't just search up on Steam normally. It's drawing similar numbers to Deadlock, another (much newer) Valve game you also can't simply browse for and download.

As the 28th most played game on Steam right now, it's bigger on the platform than Baldur's Gate 3, Rainbow Six Siege, Battlefield 6, and all sorts of other blockbusters. It's no Meccha Chameleon, but not shabby for a game that's 14 years old, and interesting to note that it's growing beyond the initial hype it attracted back when the standalone version was first restored earlier this year.

It seems like further evidence of what PC Gamer's Andy Chalk observed in his story back then: that this town is, in fact, big enough for two Counter-Strikes. It's honestly big enough for much more than that: the original Counter-Strike and Source both have healthy playerbases of their own all these years later, and that's to say nothing of similar games that aren't even on Steam like Valorant. The landscape for tactical FPS is as diverse as I can remember, and that remains true if you only play games with "Counter-Strike" in the title.

One of the more intriguing announcements for shooterheads this summer was Crossfire. A new milsim from the minds behind Call of Duty's last great reinvention—the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot—it boasts an innovative cover mechanic and an evolving emotional connection between the two leads in its campaign. At long last, a new idea in mainstream solo shooting.

Or is it? Crossfire is backed by Smilegate, the publisher made rich by a long-running multiplayer FPS sometimes referred to as Korea's Counter-Strike. That game's name is Crossfire, too. And as it turns out, it got a different singleplayer mode just a few years ago. From none other than Remedy, the undisputed industry leaders in Finnish Weird.

That's right: Sam Lake's beloved oddballs produced a pair of three-hour FPS campaigns firmly in the Call of Duty model. There's something perversely intriguing about the prospect—of seeing the studio's famously leftfield storytelling style constrained by the conventions of a military spectacle shooter. "I'd never been much of a dreamer," narrates Captain Hall in the opening minutes of the first campaign. "In this work an active imagination can kill you."

The project was named CrossfireX, and much of it set in a generically unstable country with a vaguely Eastern European flavour. There, you're thrown between street-to-street firefights, typically with at least one other squaddie—who tells you where to go and who to shoot at. You're not five minutes in before your first helicopter crash. And in what might generously be considered a tribute to Max Payne, you can activate a simple form of bullet time at comically frequent intervals.

Watching playthroughs of CrossfireX on YouTube, I couldn't help but be reminded of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace—the parodic British TV series in which, the joke goes, episodes were slathered with slo-mo in order to meet their expected running time. "Anything without dialogue was considered for slow motion," deadpanned Richard Ayoade at the time—his future as a giant in Fable very much ahead of him. I wonder whether, by hitting the bullet time key enough times, you could significantly elongate CrossfireX's short campaigns too.

There are some smart bits of setpiece design: at one point, your squad fights in the kitchen of a hotel, the bullets pinging off hanging pots and pans, which oscillate wildly under the impact. But then, the one-liners kick in: "This hotel's getting a shit review from me," Private Moralez yells. "The service sucks!" From a tonal standpoint, Remedy seems to have decided that its trademark subtlety doesn't quite belong in this brief sojourn to the Crossfire universe, where the two vying factions are named Global Risk and Black List. Melodrama rules the day, and to some degree it feels as if the job of the campaigns is only to provide moments of badassery—empty posturing that can straightforwardly complement the bombast of multiplayer.

What follows that first level, though, is a flash of vintage Remedy. By that point, Captain Hall is unconscious, wandering through a dreamlike rendering of his own house. Wooden train tracks trail across the children's room, as a radio reporter mutters indistinctly about the risk of terror attacks. An out-of-place photo depicts all of Hall's squadmates—minus a member who was MIA at the end of the last mission. The stairs from the landing stretch out, Backrooms-style—the wall lamp repeating many more times than it ought to.

"I was back home," Hall narrates. "My house, my wife Evelyn and the kids. But everything felt off, askew, as if it was somebody else's memory of my home." It's a lot like being in Max Payne's nightmares—if Max was busy reciting the subtext out loud.

Evelyn's face appears on a widescreen TV in the living room, speaking with an inappropriate smugness reminiscent of an actor in a toothpaste advert. "We're pros. We know anybody can catch a bullet, whether it's one with your name on it or one simply addressed 'to whom it may concern,'" she smirks. "We know how easy it is to just not come home. You just stay over there, and you miss out on lazy Sunday afternoons, on birthday parties and going to the pet store. I don't know. Skinned knees, hurricanes, funerals. Everything."

It's a genuinely eerie juxtaposition of white-picket fantasy with surrealist horror—evoking both David Lynch and Remedy's own long history of lighting up the television with arresting imagery. Who could forget in-world Max Payne programming like Address Unknown, Lords and Ladies, Dick Justice, and The Adventures of Captain BaseBallBat-Boy?

Before long, though, you're back in Azkharzia for a rollercoaster ride in which every corkscrew and hammerhead turn can be anticipated. Losing comrades in the first mission is something of a cliché of the military FPS—Battlefield 6 hit the same note to lacklustre effect just last year. Similarly, in CrossfireX, any genre veteran will quickly suss out what's really going on; which of the supposed dead are still living, and who on the team is hiding something.

Perhaps with more episodes of CrossfireX under its belt, Remedy might have hit its stride and flexed more creative freedom. But the game was extremely poorly received—and not just on the singleplayer side. Smilegate had intended CrossfireX to be the series' introduction to consoles, but wound up shutting it down little more than a year after launch. Like a helicopter crash, the disaster took down Remedy's work with it.

That's right: the strangest thing about these campaigns is that they no longer exist. Although wholly singleplayer, they were swallowed up in another egregious example of live-service shutdown syndrome. Perhaps they're no great loss—an unlikely blot on the otherwise excellent record of a studio that has delivered surprising singleplayer stories for decades. Perhaps they served their role in helping to keep said studio afloat during one of the most turbulent periods in games industry history. But I wouldn't mind if, one day, a feed of CrossfireX appeared on a telly in a Control or Max Payne sequel—suggesting a wider world just beyond our reach.

It is time to do war crimes in a cool way. Battlefield 6, EA's big loud military-themed shooter that earned a coveted 82% from PC Gamer FPS czar Morgan Park, is free-to-try for a week. The trial period runs from yesterday, June 30, up until July 6.

The trial gives you access to five modes and four maps, which I will lay out in a conveniently bulletpointed form below.

Modes:

• Tactical Obliteration
• Breakthrough
• Conquest
• Escalation
• Casual Breakthrough

Maps:

• Railway to Golmud (Which, again, our Morgan really quite liked)
• Cairo Bazaar
• Contaminated
• Eastwood

Actually accessing the BF6 free trial is a little weird. Or at least, it seems slightly odd to me, as a man to whom the live-service world is scary and alienating. You don't get it by visiting the Battlefield 6 page on your PC storefront of choice (which is Steam, let's be real), you get it by heading to Battlefield Redsec (also available on the Epic Games Store and the EA App) and downloading that.

Redsec is, ordinarily, EA's portal to its already free-to-play version of the BF6 experience, but now you'll find some of the premium, full-fat stuff in there too. For a limited time only, of course.

I think you might want to check this one out. Why? Well, let me shamelessly quote our Morgan once again, who sang the following paean to BF6's unfussy chaos: "Place your palm on the pavement, and you can feel the low rumble of a hobby yearning for what we loved 15 years ago: the spectacle of scale, the unserious chaos of vehicular warfare, red grunts vs. blue grunts, the permission to make your own rules, and an environment where the guy obsessed with metas is having the least fun."

And if you fall in love with things exploding on big maps, then whaddya know? Battlefield 6 is 50% off on Steam for the ongoing summer sale. Almost like they planned it.

In an update early last month, Battlefield 6 accidentally made a change everyone loved. The in-game description of XP Boosters was changed to say that they would now count down only while you're actively playing a match, rather than in real time, as they have since launch. Wasting your precious boosts because you've had to log off is, unsurprisingly, annoying as hell.

Naturally, instead of formally making this highly requested change a reality, Battlefield Studios decided it didn't want the easy PR win, explaining: "We’re working to correct the in-game text in a future update and apologize for the confusion."

Unfortunately that wasn't the end of EA shooting itself in the foot and handing away the easy wins. Alongside the latest update on the final day of June, which overhauled gunplay, came a sequel to the slip-up.

Players were greeted by an official pop-up message claiming that XP Boosters would now work on in-game time. "We will track what percentage of the length of the match you have an XP Booster active, then multiply the final match bonus XP by the appropriate percentage for each," the alert reads. "Plus, for easier tracking and activation, the Booster menu is now located in the Lobby."

Battlefield Studios quickly followed up on social media with a correction: "Earlier today, an in-game message about XP Boosters was sent in error. That message has now been removed, and there are no changes to how XP Boosters currently work."

That's a neat surprise! from r/Battlefield6

"That's a neat surprise!" cheered player UltimateGamingTechie on Reddit, elated by the goodwill of such a change, only to be shot down by the revelation that this in-game message was, in fact, a cruel, cruel lie. Sorry bud.

I'm not sure how—in the span of just one month—you accidentally make the right decision twice, and immediately turn it down twice, but it's happened. The one silver lining is that the developers "appreciate all your feedback on this topic" and will share it with the team, so maybe it'll see the light of day eventually. It could very well do, given we've been living in the 'we've heard your feedback' era of Battlefield Studios, following a rocky few months post-launch.

Visionary artist Viktor Antonov defined a small but unforgettable selection of games with his unmistakably bold visual style, including Half-Life 2, Dishonored, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and Weird West. (He also did Redneck Rampage, but that was way back when.) He died in 2025 at just 52 years old, but before his tragic passing he put his stamp on one final game, revealed today as a fantasy Wild West soulslike shooter called Guns of Eschaton.

Set in a darkly twisted 19^th century, Guns of Eschaton is "inspired" by historical figures, legends, and archetypes of the Old West, but is filled with bizarre enemies and powerful bosses who players will encounter on their journey from the West Coast to the East Coast of "a dying America."

Gunplay is obviously a central part of combat, but in typical soulslike fashion, parries, dashes, effective use of limited special ammunition, and taking advantage of enemy weaknesses will be core to success.

Guns of Eschaton promises deep character customization with "a vast arsenal of firearms, ammunition types, occult powers, talismans, armor, and consumables," and of course numerous passive and active abilities. Full co-op multiplayer will also be supported.

Which is all very nice, but for me—just as it was with Elden Ring—the real hook is the game world. I'm actually not much of a Western fan (unless we're talking about the Clint Eastwood oeuvre, in which case, maybe) but the American Frontier as envisioned by the guy who gave us City 17? Yes, I would like to know more.

"We are incredibly honoured to be revealing Guns of Eschaton, the final project shaped by the extraordinary vision of Viktor Antonov," said Fuad Kuliev, head of Guns of Eschaton developer Eschatology Entertainment. "From the earliest stages of development, I had the privilege of shaping this world together with Viktor: where ideas, themes, and concepts evolved through his talent into the world players will see today.

"Viktor's imagination and creative legacy have been a constant source of inspiration throughout development, and this game is the result of an incredible collaborative effort from our entire team to bring that vision to life."

Swanky visuals don't make a great videogame, and soulslikes in particular, where precision timing, movement, and reactions are paramount, live or die on mechanics. So how Guns of Eschaton will ultimately come together remains to be seen. But one last game built on Viktor Antonov's unique vision is definitely something I can get behind.

A release date for Guns of Eschaton hasn't been announced, but it's up for wishlisting now on Steam.

In its recent history, Xbox has accomplished few esteemed deeds worth commemorating. Even as it attempts to pivot into a new era under new CEO Asha Sharma, it's still suffering from the fallout of a persistent strategic malaise, having achieved little more in the current decade than acquiring a sizable chunk of the games industry just to lay it off, spinning up a games subscription service that served as a division-wide money pit, and briefly insisting that everything is an Xbox before realizing that gave everyone a reason not to own an Xbox.

Now, as its new leadership seems poised for another round of sweeping layoffs and studio closures, Microsoft's gaming division has released a set of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 ads—spotted by Resetera user CloseTalker—that distill its years of dysfunction into one embarrassing disclaimer: "NOT ON XBOX GAME PASS THIS YEAR."

According to the Meta ad library, the ads in question started running across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads on June 27. In a vacuum, the business decision clarified in their series-standard tactical coolguy font is a defensible one: In April, Xbox announced that Call of Duty games would no longer appear on Game Pass at launch after reporting emerged in October that the service had generated an estimated $300 million loss in sales of Black Ops 6.

Presumably, that's because giving people an option to pay for a month of Game Pass instead of your best-selling series means you sell a lot fewer copies of your best-selling series. Especially once customers lose patience with the service's prior habit of maddening pricing tiers, increasing subscription costs, and arcane restrictions.

It's no surprise, then, that dropping CoD from Game Pass and lowering its pricing demands has led to improved revenue growth for the service. But while delaying new CoD entries' addition to Game Pass libraries until a year after launch should help sales figures, the fact that ads must now disclaim YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THIS ONE NORMAL-STYLE instead of 137 NEW WEAPON ATTACHMENTS or whatever feels like a surrender, brought about by pathologically confused brand messaging that hasn't improved under the new regime. We used to have FAQs for these kinds of things.

But hey, at least we're clear on how many of the letters in "Xbox" should be capitalized in official communications.

In a new episode of Nightdive's Deep Dive podcast, host Locke Vincent, producer Daniel Grayshon, and studio head Stephen Kick got into some of the more granular details of Thief: The Dark Project Remastered, including that they brought on an original Looking Glass artist, Daniel Thron, to help revamp Thief's cutscenes.

"We have one of the original artists back who did work on the original game," said Grayshon. "When you look at the cutscenes [in the 1998 release], they're in a very low resolution, have a limited frame rate. But now, we have the original artist back, and he's really helping us nail down that look.

"It looks the same, but 4K⁠—so much better. The animation is smoother. I don't think there would be anybody⁠—and I'm making a bold prediction saying this⁠—I don't think anybody would be unhappy with what we're doing."

I reached out to Vincent via email, and he confirmed that Grayshon was specifically referring to former Looking Glass developer Daniel Thron. In addition to directing, animating, and producing art for Thief's cutscenes, Thron was one of three primary artists credited on Thief alongside Robb Waters and lead artist Mark Lizotte.

Thron also voiced a number of characters throughout the game⁠. Devs pulling double duty on VO was a thrifty practice of Looking Glass' that I've always found charming, Thron in particular did great work, and it also lead to iconic performances by writer/designer Terri Brosius (Viktoria, Shodan).

So it sounds like the cutscenes are in good hands. Thief has a deliciously '90s intro movie and full cutscenes at a few key story beats, all in this very distinctive, 2D-animated style⁠. I've never seen anything else quite like it.

In addition to fully animated cutscenes, there are Thief's essential mission briefings narrated by Garrett himself, the inimitable Stephen Russell. The parchment illustration motion graphics of these sequences could also use some love from Thron and the team.

The cutscenes and briefings all helped contribute to Thief's one of a kind atmosphere, but have been stuck at primeval resolutions since 1998. Thief itself ran at 480p, but one cutscene upscaling mod on the Thief Nexus cites the cutscenes as running all the way down at 320x240 and 15 fps.

I'm elated to hear of Thron's involvement, but I was never really worried about the cutscenes in the first place. Nightdive already showed its command of the Dark Engine and Looking Glass' visual style in the System Shock 2 remaster.

What's more, that remaster did a phenomenal job of recreating Shock 2's own pre-rendered cutscenes⁠ in a "the same, but better" manner, as Grayshon put it. Retired Nightdive VP Larry Kuperman informed me that this was also done without the use of AI upscaling.

Thief: The Dark Project Remastered might be my most anticipated game of the coming months: It currently has a release window of "this winter," which I'm hoping lands more toward the "this December" end of things rather than "next February."

It's been established that Doom can run on produce, but porting wizardry doesn't start and end with blasting cacodemons on increasingly ludicrous hardware setups. It's sometimes the simple things that stick out most, like this web browser port of Half-Life 2. Not as silly as potatoes, but impressive all the same.

It's got some kinks—my frames are a mite inconsistent and certain animations seem to be broken—but it is, in fact, Half-Life 2 in the browser. You can play the game as normal, use console commands, and send your working hours down the drain with a spot of entertainment slightly more sophisticated than the average Flash game.

The project has garnered lots of attention thanks to a post on X from Gabe Follower, which states it was "created by Slqnt and 98006 in just three months." A follow-up post shared that the project was based on a similar browser port of the original Portal, just in case you don't have enough browser-based Valve gaming in your life yet. Maybe try and get through these while waiting to respawn in Deadlock.

Fans seem happy that the game is playable in a new, novel setting. A reply on X from ripplesworld reads, "Shit gonna go triple platinum in middle schools nationwide." The less-convinced HivoltageCS replied, "I don’t think the children are playing half-life anymore, bro."

Either way, it's neat to see a big Source engine FPS running in a tab on my browser. Maybe Half-Life 2 can be the next thing programmers get running on potatoes, earbuds, pregnancy tests, and whatever else is lying around in a given programmer's house. I assume that's how they pick this stuff.

When Operation Flashpoint launched in June 2001, it was one of the most ambitious games I'd ever played. One of the earliest military simulators, for me it was significant for being an open world game before the concept of open world games really existed.

Operation Flashpoint's intensely simulated combined-arms warfare took place across massive, freely explorable islands, all at a time when most other first-person shooters had barely crawled out of their corridors. You could drive tanks, fly helicopters, or command entire squads of soldiers. You could even lie down. It was janky. It was ugly. It was harder than a steel-plated honey badger. But it was also light years ahead of its time.

Now, Operation Flashpoint is 25 years old. It's no longer called Operation Flashpoint of course, as that license is lying dead in a ditch somewhere near the Codemasters office. Nonetheless, beneath its new title, ArmA: Cold War Assault remains the same game it ever was, and developer Bohemia Interactive has a bunch of plans to celebrate.

For starters, Cold War Assault is getting a remastered edition, with a rebuilt version of the original Poseidon engine bringing features like widescreen support and improved compatibility for modern machines. The full version of this hasn't been released yet, but there is a demo that offers a "self-contained slice" of the full game. This apparently doubles as a "sanctioned asset pack" that fans are "free to study, modify and build new Arma content from."

To that end, Bohemia has also released the full engine source code over on GitHub. Bohemia notes that "the code has been modernized to C++20, built with CMake and Clang, with cross-platform support for Windows x64 and Linux x64." Bohemia says the license does not extend to the ArmA or Operation Flashpoint trademarks and their logos, so any fork of the engine should clearly define itself as separate from those brands. But otherwise, modders and programmers are free to utilise the code as they wish.

I'm keen to see what the full Remaster looks like. While I've enjoyed all the ArmA games up to this point, there's something about that original Cold War setting that just fits perfectly with the type of game ArmA is, and I don't think Bohemia has ever bettered it, at least thematically. Players have, of course, had the opportunity to revisit some of Cold War Assault's locations in ArmA Reforger, which recreates islands like Everon in the developer's new engine. ArmA Reforger is also designed as a testbed for ArmA 4, which is supposed to release sometime in 2027.

Steam is an elephant, and we are all trying to describe it blindfolded. To bring order to this economic chaos, I have curated a list of must-play games—indies, cult hits, no brainer classics, all ones I like personally—that are $5 or cheaper in the 2026 Summer Sale.

Five bucks is my threshold for "not a big deal," and unless the economy is even worse than I thought, it's likely yours too. If you got everything on this list together, it would be about $100 total, which is none too shabby for 31 games.

RPG

Divinity: Original Sin

• Sale Price: $3.99
• Developer: Larian
• Released: 2014
• PCG Review: 87%

The start of modern Larian. I'm more bullish about its comedic tone and lighter story than a lot of other RPG fans, but no one can deny that it's still got genre-leading turn-based combat, even as the studio has only improved on its own work.

Divinity 2

• Sale Price: $2.99
• Developer: Larian
• Released: 2009
• PCG Review: I know we did I just can't find it

No, not Divinity: Original Sin 2. Despite some of the worst self-inflicted SEO out there, Divinity 2 is well-worth revisiting to this day. It's a relic of a different time, when Larian was following BioWare's lead rather than setting its own pace, resulting in something that visually calls to mind Dragon Age: Origins, but plays more like, I dunno, Jade Empire? That attempt at console-ization does make it a bit more approachable than Larian's other pre-Original Sin work these days.

Divine Divinity

• Sale Price: $0.89
• Developer: Larian
• Released: 2002
• PCG Review: 84%

Notable as perhaps the purest expression of Larian's vision for RPGs before the first Original Sin, Divine Divinity arrived at the tail end of the CRPG's late '90s golden age. Even at this early stage, you can still enjoy the studio's unique sensibility, and it's an important text for anyone with an interest in the history of RPGs.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker

• Sale Price: $3.59
• Developer: Owlcat
• Released: 2018
• PCG Review: 69%

A deranged, cruel, and irresistible RPG. Wrath of the Righteous and Rogue Trader are perhaps better introductions to Owlcat's work, but Kingmaker still got its hooks into me. I'm not a huge fan of this one's DLC, and honestly recommend skipping it unless you really gotta optimize your builds, so there's no sleight of hand to that $3.59 number.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

• Sale Price: $4.99
• Developer: Owlcat
• Released: 2021
• PCG Review: 76%

One of my favorite games of the 2020s, a vexing RPG with one of the deepest class systems I've ever seen, as well as some truly aggravating encounters. Still somehow a gentler and easier to grasp entry point than Kingmaker, by my reckoning. Unlike Kingmaker, I highly recommend the DLCs, even if it brings us over $5. Please don't tell anyone.

Dragon Age: Origins

• Sale Price: $2.99
• Developer: BioWare
• Released: 2009
• PCG Review: 94%

Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened at all.

Dragon Age 2

• Sale Price: $2.99
• Developer: BioWare
• Released: 2011
• PCG Review: 94% (and proud of it, baby)

Copy and paste environments, annoying enemies, a truncated development, and the best script BioWare's ever done. The studio was always better at characters than plot, so trading the hero's journey for something that felt more like three seasons of a TV show was a masterstroke. We may never see its like again.

Dragon Age Inquisition

• Sale Price: $3.99
• Developer: BioWare
• Released: 2014
• PCG Review: 87%

Does anyone else remember the multiplayer for this game? Did I hallucinate that? It was actually pretty brilliant: Repeatable co-op wave survival stuff that felt a lot like Left 4 Dead. It was smothered in its crib by the most deranged monetization I have ever seen anywhere, ever. Paying for gear and classes in a full-price retail game, the hubris is staggering.

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

• Sale Price: $3.89
• Developer: Troika
• Released: 2001
• PCG Review: 90%

A crusty game par excellence, a "realheads know" RPG that has never gotten the love it truly deserves. At its most basic level: 2D Fallout with worse combat but even deeper elements of simulation and reactivity, all set in a Forgotten Realms fantasy world going through its industrial revolution. Don't forget Drog Black Tooth's Unofficial Patch.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition

• Sale Price: $4.79
• Developer: BioWare
• Released: 2007 (original) 2021 (remaster)
• PCG Review: Various

Firmly in the "no duh" bucket of games to get, but no matter how many times I see it on sale, the Mass Effect trilogy for five bucks feels special to me. If you are unfamiliar with Mass Effect: Think Bush-era Star Trek, but Kirk is a spec ops commando operator who doesn't play by the rules. Turn off the part of your brain that makes it difficult to talk to strangers about politics and just enjoy yourself.

Disco Elysium

• Sale Price: $3.99
• Developer: ZA/UM
• Released: 2019
• PCG Review: 92%

Still one of the GOATs, and no amount of post-launch creative turmoil can change that. It has been the #1 or #2 game on our Top 100 list every year since it came out, and I think that says a lot.

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

• Sale Price: $3.49
• Developer: Obsidian
• Released: 2005
• PCG Review: 87%

Still the best Star Wars story ever told as far as I'm concerned, and if you don't trust me, why not hear out former PC Gamer editor Richard Cobbett instead? Be sure to grab the Sith Lords Restored Content Mod from the Steam Workshop. I'm currently replaying KotOR 2 myself on Steam Deck—I recommend grabbing Gravy's public controller profile to help with some camera wonkiness. I can also vouch for user revonvenom's cutscene crash fix outlined on Reddit.

First Person Shooter (and more!)

Max Payne

• Sale Price: $3.49
• Developer: Remedy
• Released: 2001
• PCG Review: They gotta make these easier to look up, man. It was probably pretty high.

An unassailable classic of a shooter. Max Paynes 2 and 3 improved the storytelling and shooting, but there is a one-of-a-kind atmosphere to be found in the first game's snowy bloodbath.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

• Sale Price: $2.49
• Developer: Remedy
• Released: 2003
• PCG Review: Please email me if you know.

Looking back, this feels like a turning point, when Remedy started getting quirky. One can observe the aspirations of a surreal shared world that we're now seeing come to fruition with the Control-Alan Wake continuum. The level set in the abandoned theme park of a Twin Peaks/Twilight Zone pastiche is an all-timer, and feels like it rhymes with the killer amusement park level in Alan Wake 2.

FEAR

• Sale Price: $1.99
• Developer: Monolith
• Released: 2005
• PCG Review: It's out there, somewhere

One of the original GOATs of bullet time, alongside Max Payne. It's funny: The thing I remember most from coverage at the time was how terrifying it was supposed to be. These days, fans seem to roll their eyes at Alma and stay for the tacticool shootouts. The sheer amounts of lore introduced by later games certainly didn't help.

Cruelty Squad

• Sale Price: $1.99
• Developer: Consumer Softproducts
• Released: 2021
• PCG Review: 93%

A game that still feels like the future of FPSes, five years on. It's abrasive, complex, and singular, despite tons of indie shooters cribbing off its notes in the intervening years. Thief or Hitman-style "real place" level design, but with zippy, movement-heavy shooting and some of the best level secrets and hidden stuff of any game.

Deus Ex: Invisible War

• Sale Price: $1.74
• Developer: Ion Storm
• Released: 2004
• PCG Review: 92%

A game doomed by circumstance: Virtually everything that made Invisible War feel inferior to Deus Ex was a result of console compromise design on behalf of the then-cutting edge Xbox. It's still an entertaining immersive sim nonetheless, as well as a work of sci fi storytelling that feels fresh and prescient to this day. All the love to the Eidos Montreal games, but Deus Ex and Invisible War are simply smarter works of science fiction.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

• Sale Price: $2.49
• Developer: Arkane
• Released: 2006
• PCG Review: 88%

Still the best kick in gaming, an all-time piece of melee combat design at the heart of one of the most slapstick games ever made. Dark Messiah's booby trap and bottomless pit-laden arenas still make it one of the GOATs of physics as gameplay. Even Arkane itself has never managed to fully recapture this aspect of Dark Messiah in its excellent later work.

Chop Goblins

• Sale Price: $1.99
• Developer: David Szymanski
• Released: 2022
• PCG Review: N/A

A snack of an FPS that still managed to steal my heart. It's the only boomer shooter David Szymanski has made since the much-beloved Dusk, and it has a similarly impish, pitch-black sense of humor. Chop Goblins' levels are few, but substantial, with tons of secrets and side paths. This is a great game to get with a friend too, thanks to its time trial-centric replayability and global leaderboard.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

• Sale Price: $1.64
• Developer: Headfirst Productions
• Released: 2006
• PCG Review: I know we did.

One of the jankiest commercial products ever made with Valve's Source Engine, a game I and many others can't help but love despite its many, many flaws. The more horror and adventure-focused early areas alone are worth at least two bucks, before it all devolves into mediocre shooting.

Arx Fatalis

• Sale Price: $1.64
• Developer: Arkane
• Released: 2002
• PCG Review: 85%

Where it all began for Arkane. Arx Fatalis is a prickly, complicated game that rewards patience. The one of a kind atmosphere and attention to detail in its underground society make it an all-time videogame locale for me, with the trappings of "normal" medieval fantasy life desperately masking the harsh reality of an existence deep below the surface. This is all that remains of a world whose sun went dark just outside living memory.

Star Wars: Dark Forces 3 - Jedi Knight 2—Jedi Outcast

• Sale Price: $3.49
• Developer: Raven Software
• Released: 2002
• PCG Review: 91%

The fourth game in the Dark Forces series of FPSes and the second game in the Jedi Knight series of hybrid FPS/lightsaber combat games. Jedi Knight proved a strong foundation, but Raven produced a style of FPS-inflected lightsaber combat that's never been replicated, and only recently, arguably been matched by Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor.

Star Wars: Dark Forces 4 - Jedi Knight 3—Jedi Outcast 2; Jedi Academy

• Sale Price: $3.49
• Developer: Raven Software
• Released: 2003
• PCG Review: 70%

Jedi Outcast's even better sequel. About the only thing that took a dip was the storytelling, and even then, Outcast was hardly Shakespeare. Otherwise? You get your lightsaber from the get-go, and while Outcast's levels could be hit-or miss visually and from a design perspective, every stage of Academy is a heater with some Star Wars juice. My favorites are probably the early train mission, Darth Vader's castle, and the late game Jedi tomb complex.

Uncategorized esoterica

Blasphemous

• Sale Price: $2.49
• Developer: The Game Kitchen
• Released: 2019
• PCG Review: 70%

Bloodborne, but it's a 2D platformer trading Cthulhu for Catholicism. The Game Bakers took inspiration from early modern Spain to produce something truly captivating and unique in Blasphemous' visuals and story.

Card Shark

• Sale Price: $3.99
• Developer: Nerial
• Released: 2022
• PCG Review: 86%

The original "deckbuilder" was actually getting caught cheating at lansquenet during the ancien régime then killed in a duel. Aside from a wonderful setting that's underrepresented in games, Card Shark boasts a swashbuckling story and unique core mechanic: Actually cheating at cards with complicated controller combos.

Norco

• Sale Price: $4.94
• Developer: Geography of Robots
• Released: 2022
• PCG Review: 94%

An utterly haunting point and click adventure set in a cyberpunk Louisiana even closer to climate oblivion than the one in real life. Beautifully written, memorable, and boasting some of the most gorgeous images anyone's ever made in pixel art.

Iron Lung

• Sale Price: $3.99
• Developer: David Szymanski
• Released: 2022
• PCG Review: N/A

The movie the game.

Hypnospace Outlaw

• Sale Price: $4.99
• Developer: Tendershoot, Michael Lasch, ThatWhichIs Media
• Released: 2019
• PCG Review: 81%

Explore the internet I wish we had, a surreal, psychedelic expanse of GeoCities-esque webpages where something strange is afoot. Hypnospace remains one of the best "desktop simulation" games, even as others have attempted their own spin on the concept.

Halls of Torment

• Sale Price: $4.99
• Developer: Chasing Carrots
• Released: 2024
• PCG Review: 90%

Still my favorite Vampire Survivors-style game, which dresses the familiar format in the clothes of classic Diablo. I hit a wall of all the objectives and questlines I felt like completing a long time ago, but I still keep this one on my Steam Deck to noodle around in whenever I get that itch.

FlyKnight

• Sale Price: $4.79
• Developer: Wabbaboy
• Released: 2025
• PCG Review: N/A

Tons of indie devs are turning their hands to homages of FromSoftware's foundational King's Field series, but I've always loved how focused FlyKnight is. I beat it in about six hours, but it still sticks with me. Already a steal at six bucks, a 20% discount has made it relevant to this list of recommendations on an arguable technicality.

Divinity: Dragon Commander

• Sale Price: $3.99
• Developer: Larian
• Released: 2013
• PCG Review: 85%

I'm not much of an RTS guy, but this one lets you hop on the back of a dragon and intervene in the fights, which I've always thought was sick. I wish more strategy games would let me do this, just go Dynasty Warriors mode on a line of Napoleonic Musketeers in Total War or something.

Back in 2025, Starbreeze turned its venerable heist-shooter Payday 2 over to a new studio, Sidetrack Games, so it could focus exclusively on trying to salvage the still-struggling Payday 3. Today we got our first look at the fruits of those efforts, and it's big news—not for Payday 3, to be clear, but for Payday 2, which is getting a major overhaul to its game engine.

The engine update will see Payday 2 ported to a 64-bit architecture, which should eliminate out-of-memory crashes that have persisted over the years, and upgraded to DirectX 11 rendering—that won't make the game look any better but it will use significantly less VRAM and thus run better on lower-end hardware. The install size has also been reduced by more than half, from 86GB to 32GB.

The downside to all of this will sound familiar: As Leon from Sidetrack Games says in the video, "Sadly, it's inevitable that some mods will break." He encouraged mod makers to "repair what can be repaired" during the beta test for the engine upgrade, and promised that "we will be there to help out with new file formats where we can."

And yes, there will be a beta test for those who want to check out the engine overhaul before it's fully cooked: It's set to start on June 30 and run until the end of July, and will be open to everyone who wants in. Details on that—including how to get in, I would assume—will be posted on the 30^th.

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For now, the pressing question is the same as it ever was: What does this mean for Payday 3? Payday 2 continues to fly high on Steam while its supposed successor lags far behind with a small fraction of players.

And while shunting Payday 2 off to Sidekick was ostensibly meant to enable Starbreeze to "focus on Payday as a whole and Payday 3 in particular," all we've really seen since then from the newer game are crossovers with PUBG and Roblox, and the launch of peer-to-peer support—which is always good, yes, but also makes me wonder if Starbreeze is weighing whether those dedicated servers it's maintaining are really worth it. As we said when the Payday game in Roblox went live, Starbreeze hasn't declared Payday 3 dead yet, but it sure does seem to be paying a lot of attention to other things.

EA's had a hard time juggling Battlefield 6 since launch. It was a record-breaking release for the series, but it quickly dropped off amid frustrations over map design, gunplay, and its seasonal structure.

Six months later, the team was hit with layoffs. Since then, we've been living in the 'we've heard your feedback' era, with Battlefield Studios promising seven new maps in 2026, including the remakes of your old favourites. While the playerbase seemingly hasn't recovered (at least looking at Steam concurrents), the community has perked up.

And the developers have just announced one of the biggest changes yet: overhauls to gunplay coming in update 1.3.3 on Tuesday, June 30. It's looking to address all of the complaints we've had with Battlefield 6 since launch. "Growing a game like this means more than just adding content: it’s about revisiting your initial vision and having honest conversations about how it should change," the blog reads.

Firstly, all of your weapons will feel different. Random bullet deviation is officially out (well, "significantly" reduced), and more predictable recoil patterns unique to each gun are being introduced instead. Guns will also have a greater spread while holding the trigger down to encourage burst and tap firing, and bullet velocity is being decreased.

It's exactly what I wanted back at launch, and should make each weapon much more distinct, especially at range—right now, lots of them kinda blur together, or there's one weapon that's the obvious choice.

My favourite change is the introduction of limb damage to the series at long last. Limb and lower torso shots will deal less damage, generally increasing the shots to kill in most firefights. However, headshot multipliers are going to be increased to compensate. So, you'll be more rewarded for hitting enemies in their centre of mass, and especially in the head.

Of course, this will be more felt at longer ranges, demanding more precision while close-range time-to-kill remains almost unchanged.

"Our TTK benchmark in close-quarters runs between 200 and 300 milliseconds for automatic primary weapons, similar to the TTK in Battlefield 3 and 4, but with some room for outliers. This is key to allowing players to have a chance when they're outnumbered," the developers explain.

Snipers in particular are getting significant changes to make them more distinguishable. The one-hit 'sweet spot' range for most snipers overlapped and was far too generous, so they're being tinkered with.

These new overhauls come as part of the developer's new 'Battlefield Combat' series of behind-the-scenes blogs aimed at improving the core pillars. This, of course, starts with the gunplay tweaks I've outlined above, but the developers mention that future updates will tackle vehicle play, gadgets, and more. It sounds like more ground-level changes are in the works.

After a year of struggling to pull in players, the PvPvE game Wildgate is calling it quits. Game director Dustin Browder said in a Steam update posted today that despite the best efforts of developer Moonshot Games, "Wildgate hasn’t found a large enough audience to sustain ongoing development," and so it's ending further updates.

"Wildgate is not going away," Browder wrote. "Wildgate will continue to receive occasional updates like bug fixes, balance updates, and small events, activations or rewards that generally repurpose existing content. And new players will still be able to buy the game on all platforms

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(Steam, EGS, Xbox, and PS)—and we plan on participating in as many sales and discounts as we can."

Despite landing with unmistakable finality, Browder appeared to leave the door open for a comeback, writing that the new patch coming in July will be the game's "last big patch for a while." The update also aims to ensure "you can keep playing," with changes including additional information on game modes, additional player-controlled options for custom modes, new sprays and items in the in-game store, and a range of balance changes and bug fixes.

It's not clear how the end of Wildgate development will impact Moonshot Games. Browder said "a small core team will keep an eye on servers," but "community management and player support for the game will be reduced," and the Wildgate Discord will be turned over to members of the community. That doesn't sound good for the future of Moonshot, but a spokesperson told PC Gamer that layoffs are not planned.

"All of us at Moonshot put a lot of love into Wildgate as well as the community that has formed around it," the rep said. "The core Wildgate team will continue to spend some time reviewing issues and supporting the game long-term.

"No layoffs are planned. Members of the Moonshot team are transitioning from Wildgate to work on new projects. We're not ready to talk about them yet, but we're excited to share with players when the time is right."

It's an unfortunate but not really surprising outcome for yet another multiplayer shooter trying and failing to find space in an overcrowded genre. Wildgate showed early promise but couldn't quite stick the landing: "It's one of the most creative shooters I've played in a while, but at times I think the entire concept is better on paper than it is as a game," Tyler Colp wrote in his 60% review.

"At its best, Wildgate can create an entire story arc as your team rises in power, overcomes unforeseen obstacles, and eventually beats the odds. At its worst, Wildgate gives you 30-minute slogs where nobody is quite sure what to do until another more coordinated team dismantles your ship before you can even react."

And while Wildgate was pretty well received by players on Steam, where it holds a "mostly positive" user rating, the audience tailed away quickly after launch, and despite multiple subsequent updates including PvE-focused modes and the launch of a free trial version, it never came back. Hopefully the studio will have better luck with its next endeavour.

I know my Doom, and its many derivatives. I've been covering it for years. It has almost never left my PC in over three decades, so I do not say this lightly. End of Starchild—a completely free, standalone game from prolific musician and indie dev Em Essex—might be the single coolest thing built on Doom's venerable, time-tested foundations.

Play it.

If that's not enough to convince you to download a whole 36 megabytes of game, then how about this; End Of Starchild (standalone sequel to 2021's Time Tripper, which you should also play) is Doom refined and polarized into a finely tuned, ultra-stylish bullet hell arcade game. It's a brisk six levels of blasting through ornate eldritch environments at ludicrous speeds (even faster than Doomguy's 60mph sprint), weaving through blankets of shmup-styled neon bullets thrown your way by an all-new cast of enemies. They each drop single-use consumable sub-weapons, adding an improvisational edge to the action.

Every map feels truly distinct, with a distinct aesthetic, pacing and rhythm, from dancing between ambushes in the wings of a surprisingly cozy cult library complex to a psychedelic neon arena rave accompanied by chaotic battle-chatter. It's bookended by gorgeous animated title cards for each level ("Her Warm Words In Winter" is a hell of a name for a Doom map), and after each sortie you return to your protagonist's inner-city apartment, which gradually fills up with unlockable decor and unsettling yet poetic letters in your mailbox.

The weapons are familiar, for the most part, but punchier than their OG counterparts. The shotgun (singular) hits like a truck. The machine gun deals more damage if you keep the fire button held down. Rockets hit almost instantly and explode in a skull-shaped cloud inspired by some classic shmups.

Each enemy feels like an arcade reinterpretation of a classic Doom archetype, often firing a mixture of pink (directly aimed) or blue (radial/random) bullets to be navigated. A few concepts feel entirely new for Doom, like a cosmic wizard who warps around evasively every time he takes damage, while opening lingering portals to Saturn's rings to pelt you with micro-meteorites.

If that sounds unnecessarily cool, End of Starchild carries that vibe through the whole game. Even the save system is stylish. Instead of quicksaving freely, you can create checkpoints at kiosks run by a gravelly voiced gremlin of a shopkeeper, who'll remember your progress if you trade in a little blood (health), sweat (your score) or tears (resolve, the game's equivalent to armor) for a second chance. There's character to every action, no matter how small—difficulty selection is handled through the elevator panel in your character's apartment building.

And if you're good, you might be done in three hours or less. But that's the first layer.

Sure, the levels are designed to be replayed. The Hard mode gives all enemies new, distinctly more evil behaviors (the Cacodemon equivalents become Pain Elemental hybrids), and there's a shmup-inspired ranking system that subtly cranks up the difficulty if you're scoring especially well, or dials it down if you're dying repeatedly. But that's just the surface.

The second layer is a nonlinear scavenger hunt. End of Starchild is also an almost Yume Nikki-like oneiric exploration game. How much is real and how much is allegory is up to interpretation, but once you've cleared out the worst of the enemies in a level you can scour the maps for secrets and really get to grips with the quirky air-dashing mechanics to explore off the main path. Not to spoil too much, but don't forget to rest your weary head, and seek to remember when you've the option to.

Most important are areas of fragmented memory that your protagonist (a purple-haired, horned, non-binary demon-slayer named Elph) is having trouble reconciling, and which have permanent, unsettling effects on the rest of the game. Hidden threads and riddles to solve abound, leading towards a new, bombastic finale that is absolutely worth the effort to find. Honestly every major secret feels individually significant, as if you're pulling back the veil on something that doesn't want to be looked at directly.

That alone will add another several hours of exploration, puzzling and combat to End of Starchild. But there's a third layer.

Sonata.

Sonata is a whole second game. Specifically, a NES-styled JRPG. And yes, this is all still somehow running in the GZDoom engine, albeit a slightly customized version.

Sonata feels like an 8-bit echo of the game it's nestled within. Low on directly delivered story but with throbbing masses of ominous flavor text, unsettling enemy designs and tough, unusual combat that plays a little bit like a more claustrophobic version of Mega Man Battle Network, both you and your enemy attacking in real-time on a shared 3x3 grid.

Sonata, too, is a warren of secrets (including a brutal optional super-boss), made all the more tense by having no save system. Knowledge and experience can get you back up to speed after a death, but panicking and dying to a boss can cost you a lot of time and progress, which is why health potions (and the item that lets you increase your chance of escaping fights) are good investments for your early-game gold. It's a whole new unsettling facet to the game that slowly evolves and reveals itself as you explore the 3D worlds above.

To plumb every depth of End of Starchild and see all of its endings (so far as I'm aware) took me around 15 hours, and has landed the game on my 2026 GOTY shortlist. While small in scope (there are much bigger Doom campaigns out there), the layered design gives it the same texture as my 2023 top pick Void Stranger. A game where it feels like every time you think you've seen the bottom of the well, a false wall shifts open to reveal yet darker depths.

Even if you don't do Doom, I cannot recommend this one enough. Just don't be afraid to dial it down to Easy mode or use the Accessibility options. This one's tough.

Final PSA: Some overzealous virus scanners are insistent that the game contains a trojan. After extensive testing across multiple heuristics, this is almost certainly a false positive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been playing competitive online games—mostly competitive shooters—for nearly two decades now. And I'm very fortunate in having been able to try a bunch of competitive PC gaming peripherals, monitors, and so on, to figure out what's worth its salt for actually improving my in-game performance.

From sifting through various discounts and deals from different retailers during this Amazon Prime Day, I've been able to pick out a few that I'd be happy staking my name to as a recommendation for fellow compet-FPS-ers.

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Almost all of these are products I use, or have used, personally. The 400 Hz KTC monitor, for instance, sits in front of me right this minute, and is what I'll be booting up Counter-Strike 2 on later this evening. Ditto those IEMs, which are a wonderful pair of budget drivers that are great at audio imaging to place enemies on the map (just ensure you've got enough motherboard audio juice to power it, or have a DAC—even a cheap one).

I've also thrown in something many of you might not consider: aftermarket mouse skates. If yours feel nice and smooth, there might be little point switching. But if you fancy an upgrade, good dot skates like those X-RayPad ones can make for a super quick, easy, and affordable upgrade. Just remember they might take a little wearing in.

Amazon Prime Day competitive peripheral and monitor deals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best Darktide Skitarii build

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

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

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

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

Best Skitarii weapons and relics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Curio bonuses: Toughness, max health, sprint efficacy

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

Best Skitarii talent and keystone levelling path

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

Skitarii build playstyle

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

1. Regularly use Chordclaw for tough foes and bosses

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

2. Snipe annoying specialists with your Galvanic Rifle

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

3. Switch Paired Transonic Blade modes for different foes

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

4. Use the Integrated Refraction Emitter in tricky spots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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