You've got to give Crimson Desert kudos—it's been getting hit with free update after free update, including, most recently, an overhaul to the game's story. But that'll be slowing down in coming months, as Pearl Abyss gears up to release the game's first major paid piece of DLC content.

"While there still will be updates," says director of marketing and PR Will Powers in an interview with IGN at Gamescom 2026, "I don't think the scope and scale and pace of them will be as consistent past this point. What we're taking this opportunity to do is shift our development resources from these regular updates to focus on the upcoming DLC."

And you know what? Good. Crimson Desert was already a systems-heavy game at launch with an absurd amount of stuff to do—but just look at what's been added already. 20(!) small critters, a shotgun, a ton of different chest types, difficulty options, new animal mounts and inventory management, the ability to have your own hoard of pets, boss rematches and legendary creatures. Birdwatching? Why not, put it on there.

This game is an everything bagel that has only had more everything bagel seasoning heaped on top. It is a glorious leaning tower of mechanics that somehow hasn't collapsed under its own weight. It is a monument to game development hubris and as much as I respect Pearl Abyss' energy and commitment, I think it's probably for the best that it slows down.

Not too slow, though. As Powers confirms, the paid DLC will still be aiming for a release sometime in the final quarter of this year, which is wild to me. I wouldn't have even blinked if Pearl Abyss decided it was coming later, but no—the Kliff train stops for no-one.

By the time the studio finally puts Crimson Desert down, it's going to be a mammoth of a videogame. This thing takes around 250 hours to complete, baseline. I suspect that by 2036, Crimson Desert will have created infinite energy, cured every illness in existence, and given Kliff a railgun or something.

After 11 years, The Witcher 3 is getting a new story expansion and a remaster. CD Projekt Red has announced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered, which is coming in 2026 and will be a free upgrade for all current owners of the game, paving the way for the shiny new DLC coming next year. It isn't just a technical update, either: CDPR is making changes to The Witcher 3's combat, skill system, and hey, transmogs!

Witcher 3 Remastered release date

The Witcher 3 Remastered release date

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered launches on September 29, 2026. That's only a month away from the day it was announced, which is a treat! It was revealed just before the teaser trailer for the new expansion Songs of the Past, but that's not coming until 2027.

The remaster is a free update and the original DLCs are now free

The Witcher 3 Remastered will replace the current "Complete Edition" on storefronts when it launches in September. It will also be a free upgrade for anyone who already owns the base game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The original two story expansions Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine have also been made free for all base game owners in an update the same day as the remaster announcement.

There's a good chance you do already have those expansions either from the Game of the Year edition years back or the more recent Complete Edition that's been the default version for sale since 2022. If not though, they're yours now!

Witcher 3 Remastered features

Here's what CDPR told PC Gamer about the remaster

Our own Josh Wolens got to see The Witcher 3 Remastered (and the Songs of the Past expansion) played at Gamescom in August and talked with CDPR about the upgrades a bit.

CDPR's executive producer of external projects Jakub Kutrzuba told Josh that it wanted to think about what The Witcher 3 would play like if it were launching in 2026.

"We put a lot of our time into how the game actually plays," says Kutrzuba. "So, the animation system, the camera work, small quality of life improvements, accessibility changes, enemy behaviour in combat, maybe the pathfinding for the roads, etcetera—these are areas of the game which we know could cause some frustration here and there.

"We went through all of them and asked ourselves, 'What can we do about it, without rebuilding the game from scratch?' And we have changed a lot… the game just plays smoother, you know? There's no immersion-breakers anymore, I would say."

What's new in the remaster?

At the end of its announcement trailer, CDPR listed a ton of changes coming in the remaster. A lot of the inscrutable acronyms here are graphics tech to do with making the game prettier, which is great, but does pad out the list with relatively minor changes like "improved motion blur."

• Enhanced combat
• Improved traversal and movement
• New Witcher signs FX
• Revamped mount handling
• Enhanced monster behaviors
• Skill tree revamp
• Armor transmogrification
• New combat finishers
• Expanded photo mode
• Cross platform mod support
• Immersive meditation
• Refined animations
• New quest tracking
• UI improvements
• Looting rework
• Refreshed motion blur
• New accessibility features
• Updated textures
• Foliage shading rework
• Tutorial modernization
• HDR improvements
• GTAO
• Improved menu navigation
• Ray tracing improvements
• Global lighting rework
• New shading model
• Subsurface scattering
• New tone mapper
• PlayStation 5 Pro support
• Xbox Play Anywhere support
• Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive features
• Nvidia DLSS 4.5
• AMD FSR 4
• Intel XESS 2.0
• Path tracing on PC
• Ray reconstruction on PC
• Raytraced hair
• Native DX12
• Rendering parallelization

When Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi left Square Enix in the early 2000s, he started a new studio, Mistwalker, to keep making RPGs. For the last 20 years, every single one of his games with the exception of Fantasian has been stuck on one defunct console or another, never ported or re-released. And that's a shame, because some of them are great RPGs.

Or I should say it was a shame, until now—because as of Friday, Blue Dragon will be playable on PC thanks to a fan-made port that's likely far more impressive than an official release ever would've been.

re:Blue, a static recompilation of the Dragon Quest-inspired JRPG, follows in the footsteps of the unofficial Sonic Unleashed PC port that proved how effective fan-made ports can be. These projects cleverly translate the original game code to run natively on modern PCs, but don't include any of the original assets to avoid copyright issues.

This technique has proven so popular that it's inspired a wave of AI vibe-coded ports that don't take the time and care to thoroughly adapt the original game to PC. But in spite of that, the good projects—like the recent Zelda: Twilight Princess port—have made it one of the most exciting things happening in games right now.

"My standards have always been pretty high when it comes to this kind of stuff—I like to make quality products," says Tom, the programmer behind re:Blue as well as ReXGlue, a toolset meant to help developers create more recompilations of Xbox 360 games like Blue Dragon. Tom introduced ReXGlue earlier this year, but has spent much of 2026 working on his port of Blue Dragon as a showcase for what his tools are capable of.

Some other ports have beaten Tom to the punch by quickly releasing rough works in progress, but re:Blue is by far the most polished and fully featured recompilation built using ReXGlue. And the game deserves it: while it looks very much like Dragon Quest thanks to Akira Toriyama's art, there are some fun RPG class system ideas and turn order jostling hiding within what at first appears to be a rudimentary turn-based system. More importantly for Tom, he's got backup from several superfans helping develop the port, and it presented a juicy technical challenge: a three-DVD game built on an engine that has never been documented.

I've been playing early builds over the last month, and have been surprised by how much better it looks and runs on my PC than many Japanese PC games did in the 2000s.

Just take a glance at the feature list:

• Resolutions up to 4K, windowed or fullscreen
• Aspect ratios 16:9, 4:3, 16:10, 21:9, 32:9, plus auto and stretch
• Four quality presets, Low through Ultra
• MSAA up to 8x or SSAA up to 4x
• Anisotropic filtering
• Shadow quality and draw distance
• Field of view adjustment, 45 through 120 degrees
• Unlocked frame rate, with optional caps at 30, 60, 90, or 120
• The field HUD can fade out once you stop pressing anything, or stay off entirely
• Achievement list viewable in game, with eight new re:Blue achievements alongside the original ones
• Fully native keyboard and mouse support with cursor and look modes supported by mouse
• Custom input based icons/glyphs for HUD elements, following the device you last used or pinned to Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, or Steam Deck

It works on the Steam Deck. It has a mod manager. It seamlessly combines the game files from Blue Dragon's original 3 DVDs into one executable. Itt fixes up tons of funky graphical effects that didn't scale well from the Xbox 360's original 720p resolution.

And all the new features Tom built for re:Blue integrate into the original UI so seamlessly that you could mistake them for elements that were there when the game released in 2006.

Inside the recompilation

"Going into this, I was fairly naive that a lot of this could be generalized," Tom says. "But [now] I don't know how much of that is true. When it comes down to making it look nice, and the features, that's all going to be game-specific. I think that's the beauty and the distinguishing factor between emulation and recomps. With emulation you're going to get the original thing, and it's probably going to play pretty damn well. Good enough for most people. But if there's a group of people crazy enough to want to port a game to PC, this is where they would come and find ReXGlue and spend the time to make it look good. Put the effort in, and not just make it a standalone emulator, really, which I think there's no value in. There is value in adding extra quality of life features."

Prior to re:Blue, ReXGlue ports have technically been using a hybrid of recompilation and emulation—to grossly simplify things, the CPU code was recompiled to run natively while the graphics were handled by an implementation of Xbox 360 emulator Xenia. Much of the work for Blue Dragon has gone into building a native renderer tailored to the game engine and modern PC graphics cards.

"When we talk about game-specific engines, we're thinking about: How does this build a scene, how does it simulate that scene, render that scene, and how is it presented? What are the subsystems? How do they talk? You start naive. To add the config menu, I started digging into the assets, seeing if I could get a window to pop up. Then I started digging into the functions to see how the game creates windows; that's a pretty involved process that can take days, months for some people.

"That's probably the hardest part about this: how you get the recompiled code in a way that you can inject extendable parts to make it a true PC port. The more you iterate, the more you're going to understand the engine, its quirks, how it works, and these small building blocks start to build a larger structure and the architecture starts to form. Then we're getting pretty close to a decomp, and that's when stuff starts getting really fun. That's happened in the last month or two: We've got a lot of these building blocks that are making something cool. How can we take that next step? And that next step became increasingly easier the more we had reverse-engineered and reimplemented."

For re:Blue, Tom and his collaborators had to tackle visual elements like bloom, gamma, and even overscan—because Blue Dragon was originally released in late 2006, it was still designed with CRT TVs in mind—to look correct on modern displays. They also had to work around its hard-coded 30 fps lock with frame interpolation to support smooth animations at higher framerates even as the logic still ticks along at 30 Hz.

He credits Unleashed Recomp as a big inspiration for ReXGlue and a marvel of optimization that pushed him to make re:Blue run as efficiently as possible.

"Skyth, the guy who worked on a lot of the rendering backend, is incredibly smart, an absolute wizard," he says. "They set the precedent on what performance and compatibility should be like, so we tried to strive for that. A lot of his stuff was the basis for how I optimized… to achieve the lowest [system specs] we could compatibility-wise."

If you have a GPU with at least a gig of VRAM, you should be set for re:Blue—and it'll run at a nice 1080p, 60 fps on the Steam Deck without taxing the handheld.

After months of iteration and testing, the 1.0 release of re:Blue is out Friday and will be available on GitHub, timed to the 19th anniversary of Blue Dragon's release in the US. But it won't mark the end of the project. While Tom will be porting some of the work he's done for re:Blue back into ReXGlue, his team also has plans for more updates and mods for Blue Dragon, including one that will insert the Nintendo DS sequel's characters into the original game.

They hope that mod will be just the start of a vibrant scene focused on Blue Dragon now that it's finally playable on PC.

Surprise! Songs of the Past, The Witcher 3's third expansion, isn't kicked off by some Ciri-centric weft in the space-time continuum, nor another curt and urgent letter from Yennefer. As for Triss, well, I didn't spot a single red hair of her in the hands-off demo that CD Projekt Red and Fool's Theory gave us.

It's Dandelion. Geralt's lute-plucking biographer has gone missing, and who better to find him than his best pal in the whole wide world? So when Songs of the Past releases next year, he'll be back on the path in a region of The Witcher's world we've never seen before—Dandelion's family home of Letten, in the kingdom of Redania.

And he's got another surprise for you, too: a full Witcher 3 remaster that aims to make the 2015 classic feel like it released in the modern era, due for release on September 29.

Over a decade since The Witcher 3's last expansion, the boys are back in town.

There's No Place Like

Where better to get a glimpse of Dandelion's true face than his family home? Dandelion's real name is Julian Alfred Pankratz, Viscount de Lettenhove, and it's to Lettenhove he invites Geralt for Songs of the Past's opening—to the sumptuous manor that marks the seat of power for his blue-blood forebears.

To hear the devs tell it, this is a Dandelion-centric expansion all the way through: the focus is on Geralt and the bard's relationship—their "bromance," as multiple people I spoke to put it—and not so much on, oh I don't know, Ciri, for example.

"[Letten is] a completely new region in northern Redania, where Dandelion comes from," says Karolina Kuzia, Songs of the Past's vision director. "We visit because of personal matters that put a toll on him, so he needs his best friend at his side. Imagine you enter a lush green valley, hidden in a mountain range."

"This place was never touched by war, never ravaged like the rest of the continent," continues Kuzia. "People here are peaceful. They live their lives together with nature."

Not too peaceful, though. "Letten, albeit a land of plenty, has a dark underbelly," says game director Jakub Rokosz. "It wouldn't be a Witcher adventure if Geralt didn't have anything to do."

The morning after

That dark underbelly was there from the jump in my time with Songs of the Past. Geralt awakens, hungover and far from home, in the aftermath of the local Belleteyn celebrations—a kind of Easter-style celebration—but in the party's afterglow, Dandelion is nowhere to be found.

A pretty walk later and the witcher is sat at a long mahogany table in Lettenhove itself, playing mediator between two of his best friend's most fearsome relatives, his grandmama and his cousin Lilla, as they argue over whether Dandelion is truly missing at all and, if so, what to do about it.

Yes, we absolutely asked if you can romance grandmama, and I'm sorry to say it sounds like the answer is no.

Anyway, it's not long before Geralt's Belleteyn turns into a busman's holiday. He and the almost-definitely-romanceable Lilla venture out into Letten's gnarled, dark, and foreboding woods on the trail of a de Lettenhove family legend: the curse of Dandelion's ancestor, the mad Count Humbert de Lettenhove.

Given that it's been a while since The Witcher 3 last got an expansion, it might be worth saying something obvious: this is still The Witcher 3 at its core, with the loops and mechanics you remember.

Soon after starting, the dev playing the demo I saw was dropping into his witcher senses to find lost items and people, and the expansion's first contretemps—an argument between Geralt and a bearded Letten-ite who had snaffled Dandelion's lute—let the player choose between trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement or resorting to the diplomacy of fists. We picked the latter.

"I wouldn't say that [Songs of the Past] will feel different," says Rokosz, "simply because Witcher 3 aged really well, as a game. It's still very relevant—it became a staple for RPGs back in the day when it came out, and even now, when you replay it, you don't really feel it's an old game."

Chain reaction

But while it's still The Witcher 3, it quite literally has some new tricks up its sleeve. Geralt picks up a new weapon in the course of his time in Letten: a silver chain that wraps around his arm and can be used to handle crowds of enemies. You might recognise it. In The Witcher 1's intro cinematic (and in the first book), Geralt used exactly this weapon to fight off a monstrous striga.

And if you don't remember that, you might recall this: Ciri wields an identical weapon in cinematic trailers for The Witcher 4. Cue raised eyebrows.

How does it work? I saw Geralt make use of his new weapon against a couple of different enemies in my time with him. First up, swarmions, a new enemy type and example par excellence of nominative determinism. They're big on swarming, you see, which means having a long chain to handle them with—yanking individual foes from the pack to deal with mano a mano, or whipping it around to keep foes at bay—comes in useful.

The chain is selected much like a sign or bomb in combat, and can either be quickly deployed with a button press or, if you want to give someone special treatment, you can manually zoom in to target specific body parts on your enemies, an action which slows down time to give you time to aim, much like the base game's crossbow.

I also saw the chain used in my demo's concluding boss fight. Having hacked their way through centipedes, swarmions, and a few other nasties, Lilla and Geralt finally come to a mystical well that seems intricately tied to Dandelion's disappearance and the de Lettenhove curse. First things first, though, Geralt has to put down the Slumbering Knight guarding the place, which means plenty of familiar fancy footwork while, at the same time, using your new toy to break the boss's guard and get some licks in.

(Re)master Witcher

That familiar fancy footwork isn't too familiar, mind you. A new expansion isn't the only work being done on CDPR's masterpiece—the studio is preceding Songs of the Past with a full-on remaster too. It's not just a graphical gussy-up, the devs are reworking parts of the game to smooth out the little points of aggravation that might drive players away.

When it comes to gameplay changes, "We're mostly thinking about new players, you know?" says Jakub Kutrzuba, CDPR's executive producer of external projects. "We're looking at The Witcher from that perspective—so what would be the biggest pain points? What would a player expect to be changed in order to enjoy the game?" What would The Witcher 3 look like "if it was a game which released in 2026"?

In practice, that means working on The Witcher 3's combat, movement, and animations to make the whole thing feel more responsive and dynamic and less, well, janky.

"The remaster includes so many improvements, so many fixes, so many changes and gameplay improvements," says Badowski. "All the improvements make the combat much more smooth, much more natural. You can change target while playing the animation or performing strikes, and it gives the game a kind of freshness."

"We put a lot of our time into how the game actually plays," says Kutrzuba. "So, the animation system, the camera work, small quality of life improvements, accessibility changes, enemy behaviour in combat, maybe the pathfinding for the roads, etcetera—these are areas of the game which we know could cause some frustration here and there."

"We went through all of them and asked ourselves, 'What can we do about it, without rebuilding the game from scratch?' And we have changed a lot… the game just plays smoother, you know? There's no immersion-breakers anymore, I would say."

I can't verify that without playing myself, but I can verify that it looks killer. The Witcher 3 was never an ugly game, and it looks better than ever after its 2022 next-gen update, but it's something else now. Letten is gorgeous from all angles, whether you're watching the sunrise crest the hills or stepping into the oppressive darkness of its sinister woods.

But it's the more technical, nitty-gritty simulation stuff that really appeals to me. Geralt's stroll to Lettenhove at the beginning of my demo felt lively in a way that few places in the original Witcher 3 did. People were, simply, up to stuff. Shepherds guided sheep across roads, carts trundled around, a child played on a high railing to the chagrin of their parents, and all around life seemed, in general, to proceed.

"When you think about the remaster features that we apply in Letten," says Rokosz, it concerns in large part "how our community behaves, what you can do, what can they do. They can now use boats, they can drive carts, this is all to bolster the feeling of the area where you are, in Letten."

"We wanted to make it compare with any other game which is launching these days," says Kutrzuba. "We are touching aspects of the game which haven't been touched since we launched it." From what I've seen, it pays off.

While gameplay footage of the upcoming D&D game shows off a solo warlock, if you'd like to play a warlock as a member of a classic party of adventurers then Solasta 2's next update has got your back. Early access update 1 will add the warlock class and two subclasses (the timekeeper and the dreamer), as well as co-op multiplayer.

Up to four people will be able to join the same multiplayer session, whether starting a new game or joining one already in progress. The host can assign a new player an existing character, or they can bring an existing one, or create a new one on the spot. Control of companions who join your party can also be split up as you go. Every player gets a vote on the big story and dialogue choices, and there's a ping system being added to help you communicate.

New features for people like me who want an entire gang of characters to ourselves include expanded customization (with more hairstyles, tattoos, warpaint, and beards), the option to roll your stats randomly, spell component rules being made optional so you can choose between accuracy to the rulebook or something simpler, roughly 30 extra world events to find while exploring, cloud saves, and a way to switch into cautious mode while playing with a controller.

And of course the warlock, joining the current class roster of fighter, wizard, rogue, cleric, paladin, and sorcerer. Solasta 2's warlock subclasses sound a bit different to your standard hexblade/archfey options. The timekeeper can buff allies to make them act faster as well as robbing enemies of their reactions, while the dreamer controls nightmares and can inflict exhaustion on enemies as well as putting them to sleep. In both cases I suspect they'll be falling back on the classic eldritch bolt a lot, because an endless supply of decently damaging ranged magic is the warlock's whole deal.

Early access update 1 will be out on September 10, and will also include various fixes and stability improvements. The update after that, adding another class, two more ancestries, the start of act two, an increased level cap, and a crafting system, is scheduled for the last quarter of the year. Solasta 2 is currently available on Steam.

It brings me no joy to admit this, but recently I've begun thinking that I'm finally nearing my fill of ARPGs. I've gotten a lot of great years out of clicking a mouse button and exploding full screens of skeletons, but the prospect doesn't quite spark joy like it used to.

Or at least that's what I thought until roughly 45 minutes ago, when I saw the announcement trailer for Tarae: The Unbound that had been slipped into a Gamescom 2026 Opening Night Live Montage.

The problem, I now realize, is that I've mostly spent my time with ARPGs looking at the same kinds of things. Most games downstream of Diablo tend to flow into the same basin of interchangeable demons, dark cultists, and piles of weird meat. But looking at the brief clips of Tarae, I realize now I'd just been aching for a jolt to the ARPG aesthetic palette.

Developed by Boundary and published by Krafton, Tarae's Steam page says it's set in "a world that reimagines Eastern myth, folklore, and traditional aesthetics, where beauty and mystery are entwined with darkness and brutality." It shows in the listings screenshots and embedded gifs, where enemies are being fought in Buddhist temples and player characters are battling bosses with hauntingly distended features plucked from East Asian monster illustrations.

If that's not enough, Tarae: The Unbound also includes one of my favorite character class conceits: Just an old guy with a matchlock gun. Although this particular handgunner seems to know something I don't about how historic firearms work, because he's able to pump out rapid fire gouts of firebomb explosives. Good for him.

From the sounds of it, Boundary is aiming to offer a variety of buildcrafting systems: "The balance and conflict of the Five Elements, the harmony of Yin and Yang, karma and the cycle of reincarnation all shape your leveling, equipment, and combat style," the developer says. "Even within a single class, different choices lead to entirely different builds."

I can't begin to guess how that will all work in practice, but I'm eager to experience our K-Diablo future when the time comes. It likely won't be for a bit, however: Tarae: The Unbound doesn't have a release date, unlike the full release of Path of Exile 2 now pegged for December 11, but you can wishlist it on Steam now.

CD Projekt Red showed up to close out Gamescom Opening Night Live with two big announcements: a first look at The Witcher 3's final expansion, Songs of the Past, and a surprise "Remastered" patch coming to the base game on September 29.

If you're just hearing about this now, yes, The Witcher 3 is getting a big expansion 12 years after its release, though we got no firm release date today. To hold us over, we caught a glimpse of the new region that Geralt will explore, Letten, and a weapon type new to the games: the chain whip.

I was wondering if CDPR would ever let the White Wolf wield his favorite weapon from the books. What a nice surprise.

It'd take a bigger Witcher nerd than I to glean much from the trailer story-wise, but I'm willing to bet Geralt has been contracted to kill a thorny, druidical monster. The YouTube description for the trailer says a bit more:

"This full-fledged third expansion takes the White Wolf on a new adventure to the peaceful realm of Letten, where dark secrets lurk beneath the surface."

Songs of the Past, sadly, has no imminent release date. It's out "next year," according to the trailer.

The Witcher 3 got a "Next-Gen Update" back in 2022, and CD Projekt Red is doing it again: The developer announced at Gamescom today that The Witcher 3 Remastered is coming September 29 as a free update for all owners of the RPG.

Aside from graphical updates (of which there are many), The Witcher 3 Remastered makes changes to combat, movement, Roach riding, monster behaviors, the skill tree, and the photo mode.

The kicker: Alongside the update, owners of The Witcher 3 will also get its two expansions, Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone, free if they don't already own them. For newcomers, the expansions will be bundled with The Witcher 3 Remastered.

The remaster arrives well in advance of the next expansion, Songs of the Past, which releases sometime next year.

"My favorite [new feature] is the visuals. That's new textures, updated rendering, advanced path tracing, foliage, you name it," said CD Projekt Red level design lead Miles Tost at Gamescom's Opening Night Live showcase. "Geralt has never looked this good, even after all those years of retirement.

"And then the other thing, definitely, is combat. It's more modern, smooth and precise. We updated the camera, the targeting system, added new animations, and what I like a lot, new finishers. And then, last one, The Witcher 3 is a full-fledged RPG, right? So we completely revamped the ability system to give players more options."

One thing I'm left curious about is how much can be toggled on and off—ie, can players accept the graphical changes but turn off the combat tweaks if they prefer the original combat?

It's finally time for the one thing every Path of Exile 2 player has been waiting for: swords. A new class and weapon type is coming to the action RPG later this year—oh, and the full 1.0 release of the game.

On December 11, PoE 2 will leave early access behind and go full free-to-play, just like its predecessor. While developer Grinding Gear Games has several previously announced classes to get to eventually, the 1.0 release will at least include the one many players have been waiting for.

The Gamescom Opening Night Live 2026 trailer doesn't actually give the man with the sword a title, but a post on the GGG forums calls him the duelist, which lines up with the class that was teased a while ago. It's possible he's gone through a few iterations over the last few years, but he's definitely using a sword for all the new skills.

Swords are a big deal in PoE 2 because weapons are class agnostic, meaning a new weapon type is like getting a big drop of new skills for everyone to play with. I'm more of a caster player, but I can't deny how good some of them look. At one point, the mysterious swordsman pulls up a cone of icicles and slams the sword down in the middle, turning the poor monsters in the middle into bloody ice cubes. That specific attack is borrowed from a campaign boss and part of me wants to use it against him to get revenge for how many times he's killed me with it.

Even though we're still a few months away from the full release, GGG has said it will kickoff a mini-league focused on tightening up the balance across its classes. That update, 0.5.5, is expected to be released within the next month.

Many players were that's when swords would finally be leaving the scabbard, but the new trailer suggests we might have to wait. GGG will have a stream to announce more details on the full release and the upcoming mini-league on Thursday. Every now and then someone posts on the PoE 2 subreddit that they found an unusable sword as a drop that clearly wasn't intended. Maybe, just maybe, swords will be useable before the full release. Fingers crossed.

Exodus is not beating the "boy, that sure looks like Mass Effect" charges, but the more I see of it, the more I mean that as a term of endearment. Archetype Entertainment shared another peek at its sci-fi RPG during this year's Opening Night Live showcase, along with its April 7, 2027 release date.

The latest trailer offered a better introduction to Salt, one of Jun Aslan's otherworldly companions. I'm sensing more of that BioWare companion magic with her reveal, and assuming she's the part of the crew I'll lovingly refer to as my child, à la Grunt.

Salt is an Awakened, humanity's self-aware animal neighbors with their own organized societies, hailing from an ocean planet inhabited by an intelligent race of octopuses. She's also a cutie patootie, sassy, and (seemingly) tragic. At the end of the trailer, my new octopus daughter is left sifting through what looks like dried-up ocean life.

Hell no, that's not happening under my watch as Jun. Well, at least I hope it's not.

While she's the star of the show, Salt isn't the only Exodus companion we see more of in the trailer. There's also new footage of Emrys, another of Jun's alien companions, but this one isn't an Awakened. Emrys is a member of a Celestial species "defined by many consciousness," the Deva. I reckon I don't have to keep doing the "like xyz" from Mass Effect, but if you know, you know.

As much as I like what I see from Salt and the gang, I was already warming up to Exodus after flipping through a few recent YouTube uploads from Archetype. The studio's latest preview was another track, Elegy for a Forgotten World, from the RPG's score. It's a chorus of ethereal chanting and otherworldly synth tied together by an appropriately dramatic orchestra. All the usual ingredients you need for sci-fi adventures.

Exodus is available to wishlist on Steam now ahead of its launch early next year on April 7.

We've still got more than a year to wait for The Witcher 4. In a video ahead of this year's Gamescom show, CD Projekt co-CEO Michał Nowakowski spoke a bit about the upcoming Witcher 3 expansion as well as the game's long-awaited sequel.

"We have more than 500 incredibly talented developers working to create something truly special for you," he said. "The Witcher 4 features a huge and immersive open world, intense and action-packed gameplay, and a deep impactful story that we hope will stay with you for a long time. Simply put, this is our biggest, boldest, and most ambitious game to date."

But when? When when when? Well... not super soon, as you may not be shocked to hear.

"That's the question we're hearing from you all the time," Nowakowski said. "We're not ready to share an exact date, I can tell you this: The Witcher 4 is targeting a 2028 release window."

To our beloved fans, players, and community:As we near #gamescom in just a few days, CD PROJEKT RED Joint-CEO Michał Nowakowski would like to personally invite YOU to join us there, and hear about the future of The Witcher franchise!

— @thewitcher.com (@thewitcher.com.bsky.social) 2026-08-24T16:12:27.004Z

"Targeting" there certainly gives CD Projekt plenty of wiggle room for the eventual release date, a lesson no doubt learned from The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077's multiple delays.

"I know it's a bit of a wait, but let the team cook," Nowakowski said. "It will be worth the wait."

Last month, Final Fantasy 10 turned 25 years old—a fact that has utterly shaken my perception of the passage of time, leaving me to slowly decay into a pile of dust. It remains one of my favourite JRPGs of all time, even if PC only has the significantly weirder-looking, plastic-faced HD remaster. The romance! The belts! The turn-based battling! The cutscenes! Things that all still very much hold up two-and-a-half decades later, in my humble and not at all biased opinion.

But one aspect that has endured above all others is the game's soundtrack. It's this immaculate blend of genres, something we'd see happen more in future games like Final Fantasy 13-2. From the all-out rock of Otherworld that blasts your ears during the introduction of Blitzball rockstar Tidus, to the wonderfully ethereal Besaid. Or even the game's overarching theme, To Zanarkand, which is the perfect musical embodiment of its melancholic narrative.

When I think about Final Fantasy 10, though, one song always comes to mind: Suteki Da Ne. It's the song that plays during a hugely pivotal moment in the game. Yuna has become increasingly conflicted over her role as a summoner—one which is destined to end in her death—but her desire to quit is outweighed by her commitment to her duty.

The scene culminates in her and Tidus together in the springs at Macalania Woods, a gorgeous glittering landscape painted in shades of blue, while the two descend under the water and share a kiss. It's the first display of romantic intimacy between the two, capped off by the delicate Japanese vocals and sweet orchestra of Suteki Da Ne.

It wasn't the series' first attempt at a vocal track. Final Fantasy 6 had pseudo-vocals during the famous opera scene. Final Fantasy 7, of course, had One Winged Angel, and Final Fantasy 8 was the first time I recall a vocal song in the series going more pop-focused with Eyes on Me.

But Final Fantasy 10, being the first to release on PlayStation 2, felt like a huge step up in terms of how hard composer Nobuo Uematsu could cook. It's a song that's needed little-to-no rearrangement in the years since, because it remains so dang good from its initial conception.

It's the first vocal track I remember really resonating with in a Final Fantasy game, one that brought me to tears the way no other videogame had up until that point. It feels beautiful and tragic at the same time, and it's a track I don't think a game in the series has ever come close to matching since—though Final Fantasy 14's Flow is probably the closest contender.

I'm not sure we'll ever get another soundtrack quite like Final Fantasy 10, and 25 years later I still find myself going back to its music time and time again. And while Suteki Da Ne might not be my most listened to of the bunch, I maintain it's one of the best composed pieces—a diamond in a huge stinkin' pile of gold. And one that still brings a little tear to my eye every time I listen to it.

We don't really need more Baldur's Gate 3, given how vast and replayable Larian Studios' RPG already is. That said, I'd never say no to more adventures within Larian's highly flexible adaptation of the Forgotten Realms. And while Larian itself has sworn off expanding BG3 any further, the modding community is still plugging away with new stuff, including the recent release of a 6-hour campaign revolving around everyone's favourite nefarious vampire elf Astarion.

A Dream of Silence ReVamped (via GamesRadar) is a mini-campaign based on a text game of the same name created by developer Abigail Corfman. The mod is divided into three acts which have been released separately over the last twelve months. With the release of the third and final act, however, the mod has been packaged and released as a single story.

The story itself takes place in Astarion's mind. But before you dismiss this as a hackneyed 'it was all a dream' narrative—the dreamscape of this particular tale is under the control of a Bastellus—essentially living nightmares that feed on dream energy. To help Astarion escape the Bastellus' grasp, your character—who is projected into Astarion's mind—must accompany him through an even more twisted version of Cazador's dungeon.

The campaign includes four different endings and six all-new companions to chat with. And like Baldur's Gate 3 itself, each of the three acts is structured very differently. Act One is primarily dialogue based, while Act Two features new mechanics, introduces the companions and lets you fight as well as talk through your problems. Apparently, Act Three changes things up further too, though the mod's creator, lizardphunk, doesn't specify how.

Lizardphunk says they created ReVamped to showcase the power of Baldur's Gate 3's modding tools, so hopefully it will lead to further custom campaigns being developed for Larian's RPG masterpiece. If you'd like to check it out yourself, you can download A Dream of Silence: Revamped over on Nexus Mods.

It seems likely that mods like A Dream of Silence are the closest we're going to get to more Baldur's Gate for the foreseeable future. Hasbro, which owns the Baldur's Gate license, is still on the hunt for a studio to make Baldur's Gate 4 as developers shy away from the scale of the challenge—though Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader developer Owlcat Games has expressed an interest in taking it on. Larian itself, of course, is busy working on Divinity, which we haven't heard much about since last year's reveal trailer.

Honestly, I'm surprised nobody thought of this sooner. Via Kotaku, Stray Dog: Nobody Cares is a soulslike directly inspired by Dark Souls, which asks: "What if you played as Great Grey Wolf Sif?" It's an idea that seems painfully obvious in hindsight, and I can only credit developer Parry Frames Studio for doing the hard work of making it a reality.

Obviously, you don't actually play as Sif in Stray Dog: Nobody Cares. But Knight Artorius' lupine companion is clearly the archetype behind Parry Frames' four-legged protagonist. Even the backstory is similar, with you playing the faithful friend of a knight-errant in a dark fantasy kingdom. When its master is captured, the hound takes it upon itself to track him down and release him.

In its basic structure, Stray Dog appears to be a straightforward dark-fantasy soulslike—offering a world of crumbling ruins, undead enemies, bonfires and boss fights. Much like Sif, your hound fights with a sword in its mouth, and its acrobatic combat style strongly recalls Sif's own balletic sweeps and pirouettes.

Developer Parry Frames says there will be "multiple" combat styles that players can learn, and they'll be able to parry, backstab, and perform deathblows on enemies in the classic Dark Souls style. Stealth will play a role too, though Parry Frames doesn't provide much detail on this front.

Indeed, the announcement of Stray Dog appears to have caught Parry Frames off guard. In a Steam post, the developers explain that the game "suddenly became popular on X", after the studio posted some early test footage of the game to its account. Parry Frames released its debut game— the soulslike Crimson Oath—earlier this year, which it has been making over the course of eight years and was partly funded by an Epic Megagrant.

Crimson Oath has a 'very positive' rating on Steam, with some players praising how it harks back to FromSoft's earlier titles, while others compare it to Sekiro and even Piranha Bytes' Gothic. At the very least, it demonstrates that Parry Frames understand the fundamentals of the genre, which is a good foundation upon which to build something more distinct.

Given that it's only been four months since Crimson Oath released, it's unlikely that we'll see Stray Dog any time soon. But Parry Frames says it has "completed the development of the game's combat framework" and that element certainly looks robust in the available footage. In any case, it's a splendid premise to build a soulslike around, and let's hope Parry Frames can bring the concept home.

The game whose full name I forget and have to copy-paste every time—here goes, it's called Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart—was scheduled to release on September 17. It's been delayed until next year because developer Snoozy Kazoo's previous games—hang on, let me warm up Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V again—Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion and Turnip Boy Robs a Bank have sold better than expected. Now Snoozy Kazoo can afford to make Rizz Dungeon the game they really wanted it to be from the start.

"This delay allows us to both add more content and avoid crunch. As a tiny studio of five people, there were quite a few features (and Monster Girls!) we were cutting in order to hit this September 17th release date, and we were starting to crunch to ensure this game was something we were proud of," says Snoozy Kazoo's founder and director Yukon Wainczak. "While we understand the delay likely comes as a disappointment, we hope that you can be reassured by the fact that we are making a better—and healthier made—Rizz Dungeon with this delay."

Rizz Dungeon is an RPG about exploring a dungeon to get loot from a dragon, only the dragon is your ex-girlfriend and the loot is all the stuff she took. Also, you have put all your points into Charisma instead of combat stats and have to charm your way out of fights until you can recruit monster girls to handle the fighting for you. It sounds kind of like Pokémon if the creatures you were collecting were hot. (If you think Pokémon are hot already I don't want to know about it.)

Given that September still has—don't give up on me now, copy-paste friends—The Blood of Dawnwalker, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Silent Hill: Townfall, and a bunch of other games coming out, and I'll probably still be playing Star Wars: Zero Company as well, it's going to be a busy month. Probably a good thing Dawn of War 4 has also shifted out of September, though presumably in that case it's not to add more monster girls. (If you think necrons are hot I don't want to know about that either.)

It's weird to say that FromSoftware, a studio previously known for its singleplayer gauntlets (and very good mech series), has made some of the decade's most solid middleweight multiplayer games. But given Elden Ring: Nightreign's success, and the fact that The Duskbloods is shaping up to be pretty solid—boo, Switch 2 exclusive, boo—it's a true statement.

You might be wondering, then, if the undisputed king of gritty singleplayer RPGs where you dodge roll sometimes has gone all live service on us. Not so, says president Hidetaka Miyazaki, the combo of Nightreign and Duskbloods is literally just a coincidence.

Speaking to IGN, Miyazaki says: "It's not necessarily some big reveal saying this is the direction we plan to go in moving forward. We still have a heavy focus on single-player content as well. This is just something that happened to work out the way it did. It's funny, because there was never really any big plan that these two games would both release next to each other."

That's not to say FromSoftware hasn't been enjoying itself, though—Miyazaki seems enthused by the opportunity to break from the formula every once in a while: "Personally, it's very fun to make a multiplayer game like this. It's not something we've done a lot and we're looking forward to seeing players' reactions and getting feedback."

But that enthusiasm doesn't override his love for what FromSoftware is provably good at: Making you throw your controller because goddamn Promised Consort Radahn's lazers keep filling up the goddamn screen and how am I supposed to dodge that, this is bullcrap. Ahem.

"If anything, it's like the more you work on something multiplayer for a long time it scratches that itch only to want to make something single-player again," Miyazaki concludes—which is great news for me, as I'm personally excited to get stuck into whatever the next Elden Ring is. Sekiro 2, maybe? A parry-loving cretin can only hope.

According to former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida, turn-based RPGs, particularly JRPGs, were so unpopular several years ago that he would tell indie developers to avoid using the term altogether in their marketing—even for a game like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Yoshida recalled giving the Clair Obscur developers this advice during a lecture at the Busan Indie Connect Festival 2026 (via Automaton). He was impressed by a demo he played a couple of years before the game was out, particularly its similarities to The Legend of Dragoon, a game he produced, but recommended the developers at Sandfall Interactive find alternative ways to describe its combat.

"It's incredibly well-made, but it would be better not to call it a turn-based RPG," he said. "That alone might cause players to overlook it."

Sandfall listened and started describing Clair Obscur's combat as "reactive turn-based battles" in its marketing. It's hard to tell if that actually had an impact on the breakout success of the game, but it probably didn't hurt.

Even if you set aside the supposed genre stigma, I think calling Clair Obscur a turn-based RPG does undercut how active the combat actually feels. It isn't the kind of game where you can get up and grab a snack in between turns. You're encouraged to study how enemies move so you can time all your dodges and parries, as if you're playing a soulslike.

Did adding a single word before "turn-based" change everything? I'm not convinced it was the sole reason the game caught people's attention when it already looked fast-paced in trailers. But it does speak to the tendency for many games in the genre to only appeal to people who grew up with them, and the number of people who fall asleep when threatened with having to take turns during the action.

Thankfully, Clair Obscur has helped make turn-based games cool again. It sold 3.3 million copies in the first month and has since surpassed eight million copies as of April. Yoshida believes Clair Obscur is a great example of why chasing industry trends isn't always the right move. He also said that publishers have started to see a slew of turn-based games pitched to them in the wake of Clair Obscur's explosive success.

In a recent video on his YouTube channel, legendary developer Tim Cain weighed in on one of the great RPG debates: Turn-based, or real time? But Cain doesn't see it as a zero sum game, instead staking out a sensible, radical moderate position on a topic that can prompt forum knife fights.

One unique aspect to Cain's perspective: He zoomed out to "real time" period, not just the OG Baldur's Gate-codified "real time with pause" (RTWP) where you can queue up commands to multiple characters while the game is stopped. The specific contrast of turn-based and RTWP is more often the center of debate, given that they have both been ways of digitizing tactical, often tabletop-adapted combat.

But Cain doesn't see one style as being inherently superior to another, pause or no pause. He thinks each has pros and cons, and reflects on them more as tools available to devs rather than ends in and of themselves. Regarding real time, Cain argued:

• It's naturally superior for first person games (excepting very specific edge cases).
• Combat moves faster, and allows for more characters on-screen without dragging things out.
• But it's more difficult to control multiple characters, and the "pause" in RTWP can feel like a bandaid: "It doesn't solve all the problems," according to Cain.

Cain sees the slow pace of turn-based games as a major drawback, a sentiment you might connect with if you've ever reached the modern era in a game of Civ or gotten an entire town hostile in a 2D Fallout. Conversely, he doesn't seem to be much of a fan of adapting turn-based tabletop rules to a real time game, even if you add in a pause.

He proffered the example from Baldur's Gate of enemies moving out of range from your area of effect spells while you're still casting them as one big disconnect. As an aside, Cain was project lead on the defiantly turn-based, post-Baldur's Gate D&D adaptation, The Temple of Elemental Evil.

More of a neutral observation from Cain: He sees real time games as allowing for (and sometimes requiring) a greater degree of raw player skill and reaction time. On the one hand, this can allow for a greater degree of player expression⁠—I thought of "The Ultimate" challenge in Pillars of Eternity, and how high it raises that game's skill ceiling by prohibiting both the turn-based mode and pausing.

But Cain's also a bit of a purist when it comes to RPG gameplay, seeming to prefer that buildcrafting and strategy take center stage over reaction speed and precision, unless you're making a dedicated action-RPG hybrid.

"They both have their loud, vocal advocates," Cain cautioned fellow developers, but he sees a place for both styles. Cain has, indeed, made games in both styles. However, he firmly does not recommend trying to design for both and allowing players to switch between them as in Arcanum, Pillars, or Owlcat's Pathfinder games, because you'd be "setting yourself up for a lot of work."

I can appreciate Cain's agnosticism on the topic, even though I generally prefer turn-based (at least over RTWP). For other developers' perspectives: Cain's Obsidian colleague, Josh Sawyer, thinks turn-based initially fell behind due to a lack of "tactical variation." James Brawley, a lead designer on upcoming turn-based tactics game Star Wars Zero Company, still believes that RTWP has a place, and that its star will rise again.

Bethesda Game Studios is warning owners of Fallout 4 to either log into a save or manually save their mod load order, because a new patch "focusing on general Creations improvements" is incoming.

Bethesda's got a bit of interesting history when it comes to Fallout 4 patches. 2024's "next gen" update didn't really improve anything but did manage to break quite a lot, and the best solution to come out of that whole thing was simply to roll it all back with a "Downgrader Tool." A year after that, Bethesda did it again, although on a somewhat smaller scale, except that ended up causing a surprise new round of headaches, resulting in much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and of course another update.

All of which is to say that if you're a Fallout 4 fan, you should probably pay heed to Bethesda's latest heads-up.

"As a precaution, prior to these updates we encourage players to log into your game save if you haven't done so in a while or manually save your load order," the studio wrote (via Polygon). "Once your load order is saved, you'll be able to re-download your entire Creations list at once when the update is live."

The response to the post is an interesting mix of gratitude that an 11-year-old game is still being actively supported, concern about the damage that ongoing support might cause, and bemusement/outrage that Bethesda is dicking around with Fallout 4 instead of working on Elder Scrolls 6. My guess is that the studio is capable of doing both, but sometimes you just have to get this stuff off your chest.

In any event, this will hopefully not cause any major headaches, but it's still good advice. And speaking of The Elder Scrolls, Bethesda also said that it's working on a new Skyrim update, details of which will be revealed later. You might as well take that as a warning to back up your Skyrim saves too: Bethesda's recording on breaking mods in its fantasy RPG series is pretty much in line with its post-nuclear one.

First reported by Game Informer, Warner Bros. Discovery provided the slightest of acknowledgements that a sequel to 2023's Hogwarts Legacy is in the works as part of a recent letter to its shareholders.

It's the sort of victory lap / "Gentlemen, to money!" deal you usually expect of the form, and I cannot overstate how tiny the HogsLegs mention is. "We expect Games [capitalization theirs] to more meaningfully contribute to segment profitability going forward as our pipeline expands," the company wrote, "including the second installment of Hogwarts Legacy."

So, it exists⁠—which you probably could have guessed based on the first game's' explosive sales success back when it launched. God willing, the sequel will meaningfully contribute to segment profitability going forward.

PCG news writer Morgan Park liked Hogwarts Legacy well enough in his review, but found the experience soured by the real world context of its release. The wholesome adventures of Harry Potter and his assorted demi-human companions (who may or may not have been buried under an oil pipeline) have taken a darker cast with each passing year due to the strident anti-transgender political activism of Potter author J. K. Rowling, who still owns and profits from the Potter IP.

It's not just icky public statements or whatever: Rowling has been a leading voice in the global movement to get so worked up about trans people and bathrooms that you pass discriminatory laws about it. She has put that Potter money where her mouth is as a financial backer of anti-trans causes in the United Kingdom, and recently threatened to sue Amnesty International over its criticism of a Rowling-funded, trans-exclusionary women's support network.

Nasty stuff, and Rowling's agenda has already cast a pall over HBO's coming adaptation of the original books. The nastiness certainly didn't hurt Hogwarts Legacy's own prospects back in 2023, but anti-trans persecution has only grown more acute⁠—and Rowling more personally associated with it⁠—in the intervening years.

While union members outside Bethesda's Maryland office celebrated a recent Microsoft visit by positioning a field of red flags representing laid-off workers and a giant inflatable rat on the lawn, inside the building CEO Asha Sharma was apparently having a delightful time watching a playthrough of The Elder Scrolls 6. So that's nice.

"The scale and grandeur are incredible", Sharma said, referring to the game and not the huge blow-up rodent covered in scabs.

Sharma was careful to refer to the game's subtitle with a string of asterisks—eight asterisks to be precise, which sent us down a rabbit hole of trying to guess what eight-letter name it could have.

Coming in with 14% of the votes in our subsequent poll on the subject was Sentinel, which is the name of a prominent city on the Iliac Bay and also the kingdom it's the capital of. Sentinel is a strong contender because the rumored development codename for The Elder Scrolls 6 is Guardian, a synonym for Sentinel, and naming the game for a city would make for a nice throwback to The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall—which was also named after a city and is still beloved by hardcore fans of the series.

It's now an ever stronger contender thanks to an easter egg in Starfield, as unearthed on Reddit. During character creation in Bethesda's sci-fi RPG, your employee number is displayed on the bottom of the screen: 190514-2009140512. Divide those numbers into pairs and you get 19, 05, 14, 20, 09, 14, 05, and 12. The 19th letter of the alphabet is S, the fifth letter is E, the 14th letter is N, and you get the idea. Yep, it spells Sentinel.

This might not be the only hint hidden in Starfield. Eagle-eyed watchers noticed a suspicious scratch on a spaceship console in the trailer, and suggested it was shaped like the Iliac Bay, sometimes called Starfall Bay all the way back in the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena. To find any more easter eggs we'd have to go back and replay Starfield, though. Er, you guys have fun with that.

At the finale of Deus Ex: Human Revolution you choose which button to press to trigger one of its endings while an AI explains the differences between them. It was not a well-liked way to wrap up the game, and when just over six months later Mass Effect 3 came along with a remarkably similar structure for its ending we were all a bit baffled it came down to this. Three games' worth of agonizing decisions would all be resolved by the simple mechanistic choice of a button press?

It wasn't the only thing about Mass Effect 3 people found worth complaining about, but it was right up there. It remained a pain point even after the free extended cut DLC expanded the endings to make them a little more satisfying, and a fourth option where you refuse to choose was added to satisfy players who got to the end and wanted to flip a middle finger at the whole arbitrary concept.

The other three options were to destroy the Reapers, with the downside that all synthetic life including the geth and EDI would also be wiped out, to control the Reapers, with the downside that Shepard would have to become one, and to synthesize all organic and synthetic life in the galaxy, with the downside that it worked by baffling space magic.

It's been over a decade now since Mass Effect 3 came out and our blood has dropped below boiling point, so hopefully we can look back on it without cartoon smoke coming out of our ears and have a sensible discussion about what we chose and why. I've finished the trilogy three times now and pressed all three buttons, but which did you choose—or did you refuse to choose at all—and were you satisfied by the ending you got?

If you've ever fancied giving PC game modding a go but have struggled for motivation, maybe a share of €30,000 will provide the incentive you need. Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord developer TaleWorlds Entertainment has just announced a modding contest for its War Sails expansion, inviting players to create the best add-on for its nautical DLC.

The competition is actually three competitions, with players asked to submit mods in a trio of different categories. The first is the Conversion Mod contest—which asks players to create "total or partial conversion mods" using War Sails, reimagining the expansion's ship battles and naval campaign travel.

Conversions are something of a speciality within the Mount & Blade modding community, with huge overhauls like Shokuho and Eagle Rising giving players whole new historical settings to explore. So it's no surprise the contest would have some focus in this area. The top prize for this one is €12,000, with €6,000 and €3,000 available for second and third place respectively.

If a complete rework of War Sails seems a little ambitious, there's also a 3D art contest and a scene design content. The former revolves around building new ship types for War Sails, while the latter challenges modders with creating "Seaborne Village Raid scenes"—plotting out an exciting coastal assault by placing navigation meshes, spawn points, environmental details and so forth.

The winner of each of these competitions will take home €2,000 for their efforts, with awards of €1,000 and €500 for second and third place. The submission deadline for all contests is November 22, while TaleWorlds says that winners will be announced in January next year.

If you're curious why the competition has been announced, it mainly seems to be a way to showcase War Sails' modding tools, which were released a few days prior to the competition announcement. But there are likely other motivations too. War Sails is controversial among Bannerlord players, with a Mixed review rating on Steam.

Many of these negative reviews complain about bugs, technical issues, and difficulties getting the expansion running. But others suggest War Sails would have fared better as a standalone experience rather than an addition to Bannerlord. This is because the naval features tend to exist around the periphery of the game and so don't receive the attention they perhaps deserve on a conventional playthrough.

Moreover, War Sails' additions like ship navigation and naval combat required significant rewrites of Bannerlord's code on TaleWorlds' part, thus rendering many mods incompatible with the DLC. While some modders have strived to address these compatibility issues, they nonetheless make the expansion a harder sell for players who are heavily invested in Bannerlord's mod scene.

War Sails having some enticing mods of its own may go some way to resolving this divide among the community, so it makes sense for TaleWorlds to incentivise modders to focus on the expansion. But it does seem like some TLC for the DLC wouldn't go amiss, either, especially now that work on the modding tools is done.

Four long years after it was announced, we finally have some idea when we'll be able to play Kingdom Hearts 4. At Disney's D23 fan event, Square Enix revealed that the sequel will arrive sometime in late 2027.

That isn't everything new that Square Enix had in store for fans either. The reveal was accompanied by a new trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 that showed off a new world the sequel will take players to—Coco's colourful land of the dead. The trailer shows Sora fighting enemies in the crowd of a concert and riding sky rails, as Mickey, Goofy and Hades strive to reunite with the series' errant hero after he disappeared at the end of Kingdom Hearts 3.

Obviously, it would have been nice if Square Enix had committed to a specific date. But even having some idea of when the game will be released is a big deal after years of near-total radio silence from Square Enix. It was only in June that we received our first glimpse of the game since the sequel was announced in 2022, so going from that to knowing roughly when we'll be able to play it in the space of two months is quite the surprise.

Despite the dearth of information about the game over the years, we do have a rough idea of what Kingdom Hearts 4 will involve. The sequel will commence a new story arc which Square Enix is calling the Lost Master Arc, and will be primarily set in Quadratum—Kingdom Heart's Equivalent of Tokyo. As the latest trailer demonstrates, however, it will still involve the usual jaunt through various Disney worlds

While Square Enix has kept the lid on Kingdom Hearts 4 over the years, series director Tetsuya Nomora has repeatedly reassured fans that the game is on track. And both Square Enix and Disney have plenty of reasons to continue supporting it, since Disney recently revealed that Kingdom Hearts ranks among the company's "billion-dollar franchises". Turns out players really love it when you combine Disney characters and Final Fantasy-style JRPG action. Who knew?

It might seem silly to ask in our post-Red Dead horse testicles world, but how much exacting detail is too much? How much is not enough? Gamedev can go on forever if you don't prioritize the things that players actually notice, but if you're making an immersive fantasy RPG, it's critical that the intended illusions—bustling towns, lively taverns, festering dungeons, and so on—not shatter.

This tightrope walk is something CDPR has gotten better at over the years, but it loomed over The Witcher 3's development, as CD Projekt Red's Philipp Weber told Edge Magazine (via Gamesradar). The reason why is simple: wherever possible, gamers love to try and peek behind the curtain.

"If a village only has eight houses, people will want to see if the people truly exist in the world or if it's just fakery," Weber told Edge. "Lots of people nowadays are interested in those kinds of details, and it really came to haunt us."

"Today, if you said 'give me a Witcher 3 village that has eight houses', I could give you that in two hours," he said. But there was a time that "when it came to actually reacting to the player, there wasn't that much detail."

An example case named in the article is that when the player starts using combat moves in the middle of town, NPCs were programmed to drop whatever they were holding and scram. This mostly worked, except for the fact that mothers swaddling their babies would do the same: "For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies, left and right."

A big component of believability is just giving the NPCs apropos things to do, and cycling between those unpredictably. "We don't give them specific paths," Weber said. "We give them spots of interest that are available and then they're the ones doing the pathfinding ... for the 50 sailors at Novigrad harbour, for example, we made 200 possible spots, so even if all 50 were active at the same time, they would have options."

It seems like the human touch goes a long way here. Cyberpunk 2077's stylish and detailed NPCs are a great case study showing the value of a hand-crafted moment here and there. And while systems-driven simulation is a big part of why these digital nobodies are believable in the first place, CD Projekt has said in the past that the quality gap between manually programmed NPCs and their controversial AI counterparts is "like a canyon."

In my Honour Mode playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, I romanced Gale—you can see my full thoughts on our under-appreciated wizard boy here. What solidified him as one of my all-time RPG romances, however, wasn't his wit or his very nice hair. It was a conversation in which he acted like a petty little bastard.

After your first amorous night together, Gale—like any self-conscious bloke might do—asks you how he performed in the bedroom. If you respond: "It was fine," he fully has a sulk, stopping just short of making a thread on r/AITA.

"Nobody weeps because the weather is fine," he says while his voice actor, Tim Downie, puts as much quiet, brooding petulance as he can into his words. "No monarchs were overthrown because their ruling was fine. No artworks were burned because they were masterpieces, but merely fine."

Then he threatens to blow himself up, calling himself "a fragile vessel in which to place potentially world-ending power. Perhaps it would be better to not shake such a vessel."

I want to point out, Gale sucks for this—it's an absolutely toxic, unpleasant, and thorny response to being told you were just acceptable in the bedroom, so much so that it horseshoes around to being meme-able. But it also cemented why I liked his romance, why I liked him—because it makes him three-dimensional, fleshed-out.

It helps that it works for his character, too. Gale was essentially groomed by the god of magic. In his first relationship since trying to impress someone who has complete and utter power over him, he's going to be sensitive to criticism. Especially after his ex told him to blow himself up—his insecurity is believably petty, because he's measuring himself to perfection.

It's this willingness for companion characters to be unpleasant that makes BG3's cast fly off the screen. Larian's writers weren't afraid of people hating or disliking their characters—many of them are actively hostile to you, or have moments where they can turn against you entirely. And the more I thought about it, the more I've come to realise that that is, in fact, the point.

Hate-love relationships

The strength of any RPG's structure, story-wise, is in its genre conventions. Simply put, most RPGs have the following set of circumstances:

• There is a world-ending threat (or at least, something that will muck stuff up on the regional/continent level).
• You have companions who'll accompany you on all your adventures.

Now, if you're a writer, you might think to yourself: Well, I better make these people bearable to get along with. If you're going to be spending 50-100 hours with somebody, they need to be pleasant to be around. And while that has to be true of some of your party members—an RPG cast benefits from having a Karlach, Minsc, Tali, or Wynne in it—it's a terrible assumption to make for your entire crew.

It's throwing away gold, for one: You have a reason to put the most eclectic, weird mix of strangers into a huge 'get along or the world ends' t-shirt. Characters who'd otherwise have absolutely zero reason to so much as look at each other, who would otherwise hate each other, must interact for the greater good.

This friction is the fuel for any great RPG—no, more than that. It's why they work in the first place. The grinding of flaw against flaw is the mill that makes the bread of some of the genre's best banter. Take Alistair and Morrigan for instance. On paper, these characters would be the worst two to form a party with. But you should put them next to each other, because Morrigan's dry cynicism and Alistair's cheerful wit is extraordinarily entertaining when they're inches from ripping each other's throats out.

And listen, I hate to harp on Dragon Age: The Veilguard more than I already have—especially since, given the development hell it went through, its writers may have wanted to do more with its cast, but simply couldn't. But it's unfortunately a good illustrative example of where this goes wrong.

As our own Lauren Morton pointed out, the cast doesn't argue with you, they don't bicker with each other, they don't have conflicting or impactful beliefs that dent the narrative (or your opinion of them) in any way.

They are all just blandly kind of likeable—or if they are unpleasant, they're unpleasant in ways that are vaguely-defined and blurry around the edges. Taash comes the closest to having an abrasive personality, and at the end of everything, they're really just sort of headstrong and opinionated in a way that'll make some people annoyed. And because of the story's resistance towards engaging in darker themes, they just come across as immature.

In a way, Veilguard's characters feel like empty vessels designed for the indistinct glob of fandom to project onto. Large fanfiction nets built to trawl for as many diehards as possible—and don't get me wrong, I've nothing against fanfiction. On the contrary, I think if your game has the sauce, you're going to have a smut-happy fandom whipped into an eager frenzy.

But there's a level of insecurity that radiates off characters who are built this way, a Netflix-esque, focus-tested glazed-over look in their eyes. And it's why I just can't love them.

It's all about bias, baby

Human beings are weird creatures. We'll project emotions and feelings onto inanimate objects if we have to—slap a pair of googly eyes on a roomba, and guarantee you'll come up with a nickname for it within the week, if not the next hour.

This affection for imperfection applies to how we form social relationships, as well. There's a name for it—the "Halo effect". Basically, if you form a positive opinion of someone, you're more likely to rationalise or dismiss their less pleasant behaviour further down the line.

The dark side of this is that we sometimes overlook awful behaviour from the people we love—but it's not an inherently terrible thing. Human beings are messy, we're flawed, we make mistakes, and if we didn't have a little softness for the people we care about, we probably wouldn't get much done. Giving grace to those closest to us is natural.

And I think this is why RPG characters that are thorny, unpleasant, and flawed tend to be treated with more affection than ones that are written to be frictionless—they map to a more accurate experience of what it's like to actually be friends with somebody.

You form an initial impression of them, negative or positive, and then when you get to know them better—when you're all socially bonded—the emotional systems we've developed for group cohesion kick in and give you the same chemical punt. Without those flaws to challenge our impressions of that NPC, they don't feel "real" in the same way.

There's even some science backing this up. Studies have shown that oxytocin, a chemical responsible for social bonding, kicks in when we read stories. Much of the same neurological processes we use to form connections in real life apply to a stellar narrative, too—it's why people get so attached, and why a good yarn can bring you to tears.

Which, I think, is why frictionless RPGs characters just don't work. If you don't create the same feeling of growing attached to someone—a strong first impression, later counterbalanced by discovering flaws or virtues—then there's an uncanniness to it that forces us to disconnect.

The term "immersion" gets bandied around a lot, but it really applies here. The success of a good story, particularly a character-focused one, is in how it pulls you in—and if I don't feel like I'm playing an RPG with real, vivid characters who I might dislike on occasion, I'm going to start tuning out.

You need to add scenes that rub people the wrong way—actions that are genuinely questionable, beliefs that are genuinely unpleasant. Not for every character, and not to every harsh extent, but that variety is still mandatory. In other words, in order for them to be loved, you need to be okay with your RPG characters being hated.

In an investor-focused article on the Walt Disney Company website, the entertainment giant revealed an achievement that caught me off-guard: Kingdom Hearts, the mesmerizingly strange Final Fantasy x Disney crossover series, numbers among the company's "billion-dollar franchises."

The article, "How Games Are Helping Shape Disney's Next Chapter," looks to be a combination victory lap/game plan meant to be read by the market-minded individual. It's shareholder chic, touting the company's numerous sales-related achievements in the gaming space, such as its increasingly close relationship with Epic Games and the Fortnite Creative platform, or Marvel Rivals' success among Gen Z. Also, the Kingdom Hearts thing.

Disney executive vice president of games and digital entertainment Sean Shoptaw explained that the company boasts "nine games that have grossed over $1 billion at retail." Among that nine: Mobile game Marvel Strike Force, and Kingdom Hearts.

I truly do not know what to say about this development or its wider implications for Spaceship Earth. The Kingdom Hearts phenomenon passed me by, even though I am in a maximum risk demographic for being a Kingdom Hearts fan (late millennial, owned a PS2). I've always assumed it's the sort of thing you can't be initiated into past a certain age. It's like an elf I just can't see because the magic of childhood has left my soul.

Kingdom Hearts is still popular, though, and weirdly cross-generational. Its release chronology has it firmly being "a millennial thing," but it also feels like "a zoomer thing" as well, judging by the frenzied reactions whenever that big-shoed Sora reappears.

And it makes sense that it has accumulated $1 billion after 15 mainline games—a solid chunk of which are repackaged collections of past games—over a quarter century. To the big mouse, that's small potatoes (the new Spider-Man movie alone will clear over a billion before its theater run is done). Congratulations to the Walt Disney Company, Square Enix, and their respective shareholders.

We finally got another trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 in June, four years, two ages of man, and one geological epoch after its initial 2022 reveal. Perhaps the next billion in Donald Duck keyblade revenue is nearer at hand than any of us suspect?

I’m supposed to be stealing keys from several merchants in Leyawiin, but things haven’t exactly gone to plan. I accidentally wore my Grey Fox mask, a piece of armour that immediately marks me as a wanted criminal to every guard I pass. Even after finally sorting out my armour situation and making my way into Southern Books, the shopkeeper Bugak gro-Bol isn’t in bed when I enter and won’t stop following me around and trying to kick me out of his shop, because it’s midnight and I look like exactly the kind of shady character who might be breaking in to steal from him.

These are the same hapless adventures that I remember going on in Oblivion, but this time my Khajiit character isn’t out thieving at the behest of Cyrodiil’s Thieves Guild. I’ve already worked my way to the top of that organisation and become the Grey Fox myself. I’m back at the bottom of the totem pole now, working for a brand-new guild based in the modded territory of Elsweyr.

Meet the Khajiit

Wherever game developers leave loose lore on the ground, modders are always sure to pick it up and incorporate it. Khajiit lore in the Elder Scrolls games is varied and colourful, but has almost always been relegated to tomes and dialogue from cat-like merchants. Although the Khajiit homeland did appear in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, it didn’t show up again in a proper Elder Scrolls game until an expansion to The Elder Scrolls Online in 2019. In the meantime, modders have soaked up all the spare Khajiit facts available and designed the territory themselves.

One of the earliest fan-made forays into the Khajiit homeland is Elsweyr The Deserts of Anequina, originally published in June of 2009 by a Nexus Mods user called Iliana and including the work of dozens of other modders. I didn’t play Oblivion in 2006 when it released, but even 13 years later I can still intensely feel the awe that its opening fanfare and drawn-out 3D pan around the Imperial City must have inspired. In the same way I can appreciate how great a feat Elsweyr Anequina’s giant open expanse and huge cast of NPCs and quests are, despite playing through them 10 years later.

Anequina begins with a book, as plenty of mods do. It appears in my inventory to describe all the cities and quests available to me in the new territory. I also have to make sure I’ve turned off Oblivion’s default in-game borders that prevent me from exploring beyond the normal bounds of Cyrodiil. With that done, I’m able to wander across the southern border of the world and directly into Elsweyr over a bridge west of Bravil.

The first town I travel through is Riverhold, just over the southern border. It’s not immediately different from Cyrodiil—still lots of green, with bushes and waterfalls like other areas of Oblivion’s base game. Inside town though, I’m quickly face to face with all the various ‘furstocks’ of Khajiit. Most had never been seen in an Elder Scrolls game before, only described, and were left up to the imagination and resourcefulness of modders involved with Anequina.

Riverhold is full of Khajiit that lore-buffs will recognise, though they can’t possibly compare with the renditions from Bethesda’s own creations in The Elder Scrolls Online. Cathay, one of the playable races of most Elder Scrolls games, mingle with Ohmes, which have physical and facial features of Bosmer elves, just with fur on top. The house cat-like Alfiq and big cat Senche both seem to be based on the same cougar-esque large cat model, but scaled down and up respectively.

Whether by design choice or technical concern, neither Alfiq nor Senche can be spoken to. Other Khajiit speak plenty, though of course their voiced lines are only greetings like “Hello there!” and other small phrases that already existed in Oblivion’s base game for its Khajiit characters. Their more specific lines for quest giving are all text only. Elder Scrolls lore suggests that the scholarly Alfiq dislike speaking in front of outsiders, creating rumours that they are actually mute. I suppose my Khajiit thief is an outsider to them after all.

Local Color

Other mods that pair well with this dish

Beyond Riverhold, green shrubbery gives way to the arid desert that the northern region of Elsweyr—Anequina, as the mod is named after—is known for. Grassy hills quickly turn into steep sand dunes ringed with narrow walking paths that, to Anequina’s credit, feel as if they belong with the rest of Oblivion’s topology. Thanks to its notoriously floaty physics, it’s easy to break a leg stumbling down a dune while pursued by one of the many new monsters added in the mod.

The desert is dangerous, it turns out. In true Oblivion fashion, I learn the region’s fauna by running away from them at full tilt, turning back every so often to fire arrows into their knees. The desert is swamped with giant tarantulas, aggressive Alfiq, elephants that seem majestic and calm but absolutely are not when you get close enough, orc bandits, and many other things that want to kill me. It brings back fond memories of being chased by two very persistent wolves all the way from Bruma to Skingrad. Even a few remote villages of tribal Khajiit are hostile as soon as I got near their gates.

In between running from oversized arachnids, Anequina’s fully featured towns each have their own distinct design. In Dune there are camels for sale, and giant golden towers that look like a mosque on a postcard presiding over the open market in the lower half of the city. Riverhold is a treetop city of wooden homes all climbing the same waterfall topped with a modest lodge that calls itself a palace. Corinthe is a small town maze of back streets all branching from a central market, and its mostly single-story architecture crisscrossed with makeshift plank bridges between rooftops is the perfect hunting ground for the local Thieves Guild.

Compared with the Elsweyr I know from The Elder Scrolls Online, Anequina offers something a bit different. ESO’s wide-open world and detailed cities are beautiful, but all give me architectural fatigue. The steeply curved roofs that I’ve come to associate with the Khajiit thanks to that game are a constant presence in all of its cities in Northern Elsweyr.

Anequina features so much more contrast and more varied sources of inspiration thanks to all the different modders contributing to the buildings and city designs of the area.

Khajiit has quests

It isn’t all just exploration, of course. There are two dozen new quests and a few guilds to join. As in Oblivion, not all quests are of grand scale. In Riverhold my first encounter is with a man looking for his lost child. Solving this small mystery involves asking around town and using Oblivion’s odd speechcraft minigame to increase residents’ disposition towards me to eventually pry information out of them.

Outside town is a Khajiit highwayman not so committed to his task who simply gives up when I refuse to hand over the 400 gold coins he demands. Further into the desert I stumble over the dead body of a Khajiit lying next to a golden lamp. Having learned no lessons from pop culture whatsoever, I pick up the lamp and a dremora genie pops out to offer me a wish. Apparently I’m not averse to deals with demons because I wish, of all things, for love. I’m granted a random NPC friend for my trouble and the genie, now contractually freed from caring about my wants or needs, proceeds to attack.

With that problem behind me, I pull out my Anequina guide book again, the tome that started it all. I seem to remember seeing mention of the Thieves Guild. As the Grey Fox of Cyrodiil I find it only right that I should visit the local chapter and see what dark work needs doing. That’s where my great struggle lifting keys from the pockets of merchants in Leyawiin begins. In all my time traipsing about Elsweyr I’ve entirely forgotten how to be a proper thief. I do eventually manage to steal all three requested keys and return them to my new dispatcher Jinsiraga in Corinthe. After that I’m off to steal some horses, naturally.

These are only the beginning of my adventures in the Oblivion version of Elsweyr. Anequina understands Oblivion’s playfulness with its lazy highwaymen and desert genies. If not for having to install Anequina, I’d have never known it wasn’t part of Oblivion in the first place.

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, a WB Games-published 2011 action RPG about a different fellowship that went the other way, recently reappeared on Steam in a polished-up Legacy Edition package. While the modernizations are getting a favorable reception—it's currently enjoying a Very Positive rating on Steam—its original launch 15 didn't earn much attention for something with "The Lord of the Rings" in the title.

War in the North didn't review well, but looking back, there's a certain Bethesda-sized factor that might have stolen some of its thunder: Its original release date was November 1, 2011—just 10 days before The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim came out. On X this week (via IGN), a former Warner Bros. dev said that unfavorable matchup might have been avoided if the publisher had taken his advice back in 2011.

Christian Allen—current design director on Project Zomboid and former design director at WB Games Seattle, which coordinates Warner Bros. development and publishing efforts—responded to the Legacy Edition's reveal to share how he'd tried without success to get the publisher to revise its launch plans.

"Wow this is cool. 15 years ago I argued vociferously not to release this up against Skyrim, as it wouldn't get a fair shake. I got overruled," Allen said. "Nice to see it get a proper release."

In follow-up replies, Allen noted that, in addition to the oppressive cultural gravity of Todd Howard, War in the North also suffered from a strangely thin marketing campaign. Either WB Games "wrote it off," or it "thought hardcore LOTR fans would just know about it, somehow," he said. Unfortunately, even the Lord of the Rings doesn't sell itself.

Not long after War in the North's disappointing launch, its original developer—Snowblind Studios—was merged with Monolith Productions in 2012. There, many former Snowblind studio staff would contribute to Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, a production that Allen had initially overseen as WB Games design director. After releasing the sequel, Shadow of War, in 2017 and working for years on a Wonder Woman game, the studio was eventually shuttered by Warner Bros. in 2025 as part of "a strategic change.

As for War in the North, Allen's overall assessment is that it was ultimately a casualty of corporate shortsightedness.

"Quarterly revenue motivations drive more decisions than people realize. It's a big challenge with stock-price driven organizations," he said. "Must be hard to be an exec and go, 'Well, this game will do better if we hold it until March, but my bonus will take a 50% hit.' 🤷"

Maybe the games industry of today isn't all that different from those of previous decades, despite how often it feels otherwise.

CD Projekt has confirmed that nine employees working on The Witcher spinoff Project Sirius have been laid off, saying it has "adjusted the size of the Sirius team to reflect the project's needs at this stage of development."

"As a result, four people in Boston and five in Warsaw are leaving the company, while nine others have been invited to internal recruitment processes for potential roles on other CD Projekt Red projects," a rep said of the cuts, first reported by Kotaku.

It hasn't been a smooth ride for Project Sirius, which we first learned about in 2021 when CD Projekt acquired The Molasses Flood to work on an "ambitious project" based on one of CDPR's existing properties. The plan at the time was to keep The Molasses Flood operating as a distinct entity with its own "identity," but that fell to the wayside in 2025 when CD Projekt fully absorbed the studio into its own structure.

That move followed trouble with Sirius that ultimately led to a reboot and "updated direction" for the game. Five years after The Molasses Flood acquisition, we still know virtually nothing about the game—its proper title hasn't even been revealed yet.

And while the number of people being laid off is small compared to the massive cuts at companies like Xbox and Electronic Arts, 18 employees represents a significant chunk of the Sirius development team. CD Projekt said in its Q1 2026 financial report that 83 people were working on the game, meaning that more than 20% of the team has been cut.

Oblivion Remastered has led a rather odd post-release life. The closest we've got to a new Elder Scrolls since 2011 released in April last year, received a fair amount of acclaim, then essentially went silent. It twitched into activity a couple of times in the months following its release for patches 1.1 and 1.2, but since then? Nada, and the game still has its fair share of performance woes and missing quality-of-life features.

But take heart, because a year after its last patch, Bethesda has remembered it released an Elder Scrolls game. In the wake of Oblivion Remastered's Switch 2 release—which reportedly runs rather well—the studio took to X to promise players that it's working on getting the improvements it made for the game's Switch version ported over to other platforms.

"We've heard your feedback asking for an additional patch for Oblivion Remastered," wrote Bethesda. "The Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game has a number of optimizations that we are looking into bringing to other platforms and we will share more when we are able."

Which is good, of course, but it is a touch absurd that an Elder Scrolls release has spent a full year in stone-cold silence, with fans unsure as to whether anything was going to happen to the game ever again. Bethesda even maintained a 'suggestions for Oblivion Remastered' channel in its official Discord that whole time, which gradually went from earnest suggestions for new content and improvements to players imploring the studio not to abandon the game entirely.

I would hope, but not expect, that porting over the optimisations from Oblivion Remastered's Switch 2 version would not be the last we hear of the game. Oblivion's a classic—and one of the funniest games ever made—it deserves more care and attention than it's getting right now.

Good news for the Bethesda RPG-starved: The Elder Scrolls 6 is significantly more corporeal now than it was eight years ago, when Todd Howard appeared at E3 (RIP) to announce it with nothing but a logo, a mountain range, and some rousing music. A couple months after Xbox CCO Matt Booty said the game "looks amazing," CEO Asha Sharma went to Bethesda to watch a "live playthrough" that she has now called "incredible."

This praise may come as a shock to the approximately zero people who expected the head of Xbox to publicly say the publisher's one guaranteed upcoming blockbuster looked like doggy doo doo. (Xbox's CEO also notably did not address the hundreds of flags placed outside the office by the Bethesda Game Studios union, each representing a worker from the studio laid off in Xbox's recent, brutal cuts).

Sharma praised the "scale and grandeur" but said "the story is even greater," which feels like a borderline preposterous statement to make after a brief live demo of an RPG destined to be dozens of hours long. Her tweet offers no actual new information about the game, but does reaffirm that the head of Xbox is going to rizz up Xbox games whenever the opportunity arises.

But wait... does her tweet actually contain a tiny scrap of new information about The Elder Scrolls 6? That depends on what you make of the eight asterisks that follow the name and colon. Do they merely symbolize a placeholder for the title, or do they represent a cryptic clue that whatever the game's subtitle is, it's exactly eight letters?

PC Gamer's Elder Scrolls loremaster Jody Macgregor took his best guess as to where TES6 will be located back in 2018, with High Rock and Hammerfell the two leading theories. With those in mind, we've got a few of our best guesses at the title in a poll for your approval.

If you're not up on your Elder Scrolls lore, allow Jody to explain the meaning behind a few of these candidates:

• Dominion: The Aldmeri Dominion was heavily foreshadowed as a future threat in Skyrim, and the name Dominion nicely mirrors Oblivion.
• Sentinel: The rumored codename for The Elder Scrolls 6 is Guardian, a synonym for the name of this city (capital of a kingdom of the same name) on The Iliac Bay.
• High Rock: As teased in Starfield, a strong candidate for TES6's setting.
• Redguard: While already used as the subtitle of a spinoff, the name of the people who inhabit the area it's set in would fit here as well.
• Evermore: A city in High Rock close to the border of Hammerfell, it would make a convenient starting location and its name sounds cool.
• Balfiera: These islands in the Iliac Bay might be part of The Elder Scrolls 6, but as a videogame name it doesn't look great on the page.

That's all we've got until the next cryptic clue comes down the pike. If you've got your own idea, let us know below.

We're up to our necks in Persona. Whichever entry you're keen on, there's something for you. Persona 3? Enjoy the port of Persona 3 Portable, or the Persona 3 remake, or its Episode Aigis DLC. Enjoy Persona 4? Why, that's getting a flashy remake of its own. Or maybe you're a Persona 5 fan? Revel in the veritable mountain of P5-themed stuff that is sprinkled all across videogames like the fallout of a meteor strike.

Oh, unless you like Persona 1 and/or 2, of course, in which case please return to your hole and cease speaking.

So it goes. Despite being the games most obviously in need of a gloss-up, Persona's PS1-era games have never gotten much love from Atlus and Sega. But maybe that could change? In a recent chat with GamerBraves, Persona series producer Kazuhisa Wada said that—so far as he's concerned—Persona 1 and 2 remakes are damn-near a necessity.

"At this point, I can’t say for sure [if Persona 1 and 2 remakes will happen]," said Wada, but added that "personally, I think it’s something we should definitely do. I think we have to do it."

Of course, right now, Wada and Atlus are preoccupied with Persona 4 Revival, which comes out in February next year. “Persona 4 is, personally, a very important work for me, a very important title, and I think it’s a title that speaks to a lot of people within the series as well."

It's not shocking that the Persona team's focus has been fixated on 3, 4, and 5. P3 was the game that knocked the series into the social sim high school drama we all associate it with. P1 and P2, meanwhile, were different beasts, more in line with the Shin Megami Tensei games the Persona series originally sprang from than later entries. I'd be very keen to get a chance to play them on modern systems.

Sovereign Tower is so much more than it seems—which feels rather appropriate for a game where you play an itinerant leper who accidentally becomes the ruler of a magical kingdom, the titular Sovereign. Nobody is quite sure what to make of you, especially if, like me, you start suggesting eating cats or recruit a literal wolf to join your Knights of the Roundtable.

At first glance this is a cosy visual novel management game with a soft colour palette and handsome art. You sit on your throne listening to requests, demands and grievances, and then you send out your growing gaggle of knights on quests in an attempt to keep everyone happy.

But Sovereign Tower quickly reveals itself to be a complicated juggling act where nearly everyone needs your help, and those who don't probably want to kill you. There are fires everywhere, and you'll never have enough knights to put them all out.

It takes some of the fundamentals of the excellent Reigns series, but stretches them out, filling the space with more elaborate storylines, surprisingly meaty roleplaying systems and, most importantly, time travel.

Time to kill

Time is the dreadful spectre looming over Sovereign Tower. Most quests can be completed whenever you want, or simply ignored, but each act features main quests and random emergency quests that must be tackled within an allotted timeframe. Sometimes these are also tied to the satisfaction level of the various classes of your citizenry—scholars, merchants, nobles and the people—or the wealth contained in your treasury.

So you'll need to send out your knights in time, and keep your people happy and your economy strong. That's easier said than done.

If you want to get more nobles on your side, you might have to piss off the merchants. If you want a full treasury, how are you going to pay for your knights' armour to be repaired, or equip them with expensive magical equipment and fast horses? And if you're too cheap, how are your knights going to succeed in their quests?

Quests also challenge specific abilities—strength, agility, charisma, luck, magic and wit. You're not going to want to send a scrawny magical knight on a quest that involves lifting heavy objects. And your brawniest warrior might have a tricky time taking down a rogue necromancer.

Each adventure also contains certain keywords that relate to the attributes and preferences of your knights. Angelica, the first knight you'll recruit, loves animals. So if the quest involves killing a bunch of critters, she might not be your first choice. On the other hand, she might be the perfect choice, with her attribute allowing her to pacify the animals without bloodshed. Quests can have unexpected outcomes, which means that it's worth sometimes going with your gut and taking a risky punt.

Preferences work differently. One of Angelica's preferences is diplomacy, so if you send her to end a dispute between some druids and a mob of angry peasants, this will make her happy. She loves mediation (yes, she's a dork). Keep their satisfaction high and your knights will be loyal even as you make the worst possible decisions. Let it drop, however, and you might notice some empty spaces around the Roundtable.

There's one more wrinkle: you don't automatically get a full list of everyone's attributes and preferences. As the Sovereign you might have a lot of power, but that doesn't mean you immediately know everything about your employees. You'll need to hang out with them, then—spend a bit of time getting to know them. Or you can just get one of your advisors to spy on them.

Sovereign Tower manages to make what could have been disparate management, roleplaying and relationship systems feel incredibly cohesive—and crucially, fun to explore and exploit. Key to this is the fact that all your knights have a degree of agency that elevates them above mere pawns. They can surprise you on quests, or even come to you with alternative solutions to difficult problems.

It's exclusively thanks to one of my knights that we defeated an intimidating rival. He suggested we kidnap the guy's son to put him off his game. He's also the reason I got the option to assassinate a rebel leader instead of negotiating with her. And, off the record, that horse race I won? Where all the other competitors mysteriously died? Yeah, he might have had something to do with it.

OK, so your people dig you, you've got an enviable roster of talented knights, you're fabulously wealthy, that must be all you need to worry about, right? Sorry, no. Life is unfair.

Those time-sensitive quests I mentioned before will sometimes just appear out of the blue. A village is about to be destroyed by a flood! Send your knights to help in one turn! But, oh dear, all the knights who could save the day are already busy on a three-day adventure. I guess the village is going to become a water park.

Give me more time

It can often feel like you're only ever a few turns away from a daunting crisis. The murder of a knight, a betrayal, a kidnapping, a civil war—sometimes you'll be able to resolve them, sometimes you won't. Luckily, a lot of crises allow you to just carry on even if you don't find a solution. But you might not be happy with the results. And that's where time travel comes in.

Locked in a crypt in the bowels of your tower sits a magical artefact possessed by a powerful demon. Specifically, it has the power to turn back the clock—whenever you want. If, you know, you're cool with working with a demon who is maybe a little bit too enthusiastic about breaking the timeline.

The beauty of this time travel system is that the game acknowledges your foreknowledge constantly. New dialogue options and actions appear, allowing you to use what you learned in the now-defunct timeline to make changes big and small. There's a lot of "I know what you're going to say", which can result in some entertaining reactions, and it also means you get to skip a lot of exposition and dialogue you've already read before. But the big stuff is game changing.

You can thwart murders, end wars before they begin, unite warring factions, and simply make different decisions that completely change the character of your playthrough. But it's not as simple as just fixing all of your mistakes.

Sure, you probably don't want one of your knights to get murdered. But if you turn back time, then you're killing off all the possibilities that stemmed from that event—and some of them might have been positive. Fiddling with the timeline means you might never meet certain knights, or you might miss out on alliances or magical artefacts that would bolster your power considerably.

So you can ignore this tantalising power, letting the cards fall where they may, and just deal with the consequences. Developer Wild Wits has taken a big risk by letting you simply not engage with the game's strongest mechanic—but its confidence in the rest of its systems has paid off.

In my first playthrough, I only fiddled with time once. I was constantly being tempted, wrestling with these cosmic, ethical conundrums, so it's not like the time travel system ceases to have an impact just because you abstain. Even without mucking around with Sovereign Tower's big hook, I was still smitten.

The playful writing, eccentric characters and tense juggling act left me riveted. It's simply a great management game, visual novel and RPG.

Now, though, I am taking a leaf out of The Master's book, always asking myself what Doctor Who's archrival would do. At the end of my first playthrough, I opted to travel right back to the start, using my knowledge of the future to change everything. But even with this power, I can't always predict how the new paths will play out, prompting me to keep hopping back, over and over again, until the timeline is just right. For me, at least.

Playing Sovereign Tower has been a damn delight—the most fun I've had at my desk all year. And I fully intend to keep playing. I've got mistakes to fix, and an adorable wolf barking at me, wanting to bound off on another adventure.

In a new episode of The Examined Game podcast (spotted by GamesRadar), longtime Bethesda environment artist and The Axis Unseen dev Nate Purkeypile spoke about his time at the legendary studio, including what he found to be Starfield's biggest design misstep.

Purkeypile had the title of "environment artist" at Bethesda, but his work seems to have extended into what would traditionally be considered level design. In addition to setting up the layout for Starfield's city of Neon⁠—which remained largely the same in the released game, according to Purkeypile⁠—the dev spoke about his contributions to Little Lamplight and Diamond City in Fallouts 3 and 4. He left Bethesda a year into Starfield's development, and released his first solo game, The Axis Unseen, in 2024.

Purkeypile spoke about the importance of deliberate design and points of interest in making areas late in the interview. "I think it's good to spend as little time as possible in menus, especially when it comes to exploration like that," said Purkeypile. Host Steven Lake asked if this was an issue Purkeypile saw coming in Starfield's development, a more disjointed, menu-driven system of travel.

"It's very accurate that if I was in charge of Starfield, I would not have done it that way at all," the developer asserted. "I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts," something that sounds like Obsidian's approach to The Outer Worlds. "Even early on, I was drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those procedural planets with repeated dungeons panned out.

"I was like, I don't think this is a good idea. If you're going to do the thousands of planets thing, you really need to go the full No Man's Sky route and have it actually be generating unique content all the time, not just stitching stuff together in slightly different ways. That's not procedural. You go to like the major city in Starfield and it's huge, but then like outside the city, there's nothing. And it's like this doesn't even make sense as a world."

This is certainly a big stumbling block I encountered playing Starfield, but I'm bummed to see Mass Effect 1 catching strays⁠—it feels like I'm the only person in the world who liked ME1's uncharted worlds. But even here, I see a distinction from Starfield. There were maybe two dozen procedurally generated planets in Mass Effect, and they contrasted sharply with the more structured gameplay in the main story.

Back to Starfield, this has been a frequent topic of conversation on the PC Gamer team: There's not really a Starfield equivalent to being on your way to Riften, only to get distracted by a dozen different sidequests en route. It's a problem that, hopefully as a matter of basic structure, we won't encounter in Fallout 5 or The Elder Scrolls 6. Elsewhere in the same interview, Purkeypile talked about how he's looking forward to how the Fallout 3 remaster will change the game.

So I've recently given in and decided I won't be waiting for Deltarune's final chapter before I played it all in one go—too many of my mates were talking about it, so I sat my butt down to get ahead of the invariable, accidental spoilers and chew through chapters one to five.

You don't need me to tell you that Toby Fox, developer of Deltarune (and Undertale preceding it) is an excellent composer. The dude made Megalovania, which has somehow survived being piledrivered into memedom, even by the Pope of all people, and still, inevitably, slaps. But the rest of his discography is flooded with bangers. The man can work a leitmotif, lemme tell ya.

Deltarune is no different, though for this Soundtrack Sunday, I want to focus heavily on one song from it: The Third Sanctuary, because this song might be one of my favourite tunes in a videogame ever. I cannot stop listening to this thing, even if it's a nightmarish affront to rhythm.

Spoilers for Chapter 4, if you've not played it yet.

The Third Sanctuary plays in Chapter 4 during the recreation of the church dark world, spawned from the hands of your good time pal and occasional chalk-eating high school dinosaur friend (I promise you this makes perfect sense if you play the game) Susie.

This attempt at recreation is somewhat flawed—see, a dark world in Deltarune is a reflection of the objects around it, who turn into its inhabitants, but it's also a reflection of the person who created it. Susie is uncertain and conflicted for so many reasons I could write a whole other article on them.

An uncertain, mysterious prophecy weighing overhead that Susie has sworn to defy. A realisation that her new mentor figure died years ago, his ashes scattered over a hammer in the next room over. The dark world she creates is a mirror to the one the chapter primarily takes place in, reflecting this—and The Third Sanctuary represents this fragile ground by, well, just give it a listen.

Even if you don't know anything about how music is constructed, you can sense the trepidation and strangeness in it—the starting, the stopping. The next bar of the song starts just a half-heartbeat before (or after) you think it's gonna.

That's due to its use of unusual time signatures, which I'll try my best to explain. A time signature is a representation of rhythm in a song, the most ubiquitous form being 4/4, four beats in each bar. The second (bottom) number represents what kind of beats they are, also known as the note value, and the first (top) number represents how many of them are in a bar.

Britney Spear's "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is a good 4/4 song to get your brain around the concept—sing the titular line to yourself while counting to four, and you'll feel the rhythm: Hit(1) me Ba(2)-by One(3) more time(4)!

Another time signature you might be familiar with is 3/4 time, where there are three beats in a bar—this is what most waltzes are constructed out of (bum-BAH-BAH, bum-BAH-BAH). There's also 5/4, which is most famously associated with the Mission Impossible theme tune.

I won't go too far into the second number, but to keep it very simple: It's always 2, 4, 8, or 16—2 is a half-note, 4 is a quarter-note, and so on. These can be interchangeable, for instance, you could write a 3/4 song as a 3/8 song, if you wanted—you'd just have to adjust the length of the notes accordingly, but because the number of beats in a bar isn't changing, they can be functionally identical-sounding.

So, what time signature does The Third Sanctuary use? Yes. Yes is the answer.

The Third Sanctuary starts out in 9/4 time, then jolts to 11/8 time with a random 4/8 thrown in there (because why not), interludes with 5/4, back to 11/8, jumpscares you with two bars of 12/8, back to 5/4 for a bit, and then the finale: A dance between 12/8 and 11/8, alternating, because who needs to be able to keep track of anything.

You can use an excellent visualiser, created by YouTuber 17a and embedded above, to keep track—and while this might seem like utter madness, Toby Fox isn't just goofing off here and attempting to make drum cover artists have a heart attack, he's using it to tell a story.

This chapter's been out for a while now, so I am by no means the only person to come up with this analysis. But The Third Sanctuary's time signatures of 12/8 and 11/8 don't just clash with each other, they slowly come together over the course of the song, as though comforting each other in the darkness of Chapter 4—quite fittingly, finding each other in the dark.

The melodies present in those final bars swell and grow hopeful, despite the uncertain, stuttering strangeness of the time signatures they're trapped in. More importantly, the main melody bridges the gap between those time signatures and flows over them in a determined way, just like Susie herself after discovering the grim truth of a (yet-to-be-revealed) prophecy.

The Third Sanctuary is incredible not just because it sounds good in spite of its time signatures, but because through them it tells the story of the entire chapter. When a friend of mine showed their musician pal the track, their analysis pretty much accurately summed up the major themes of the story despite the fact they'd never played it.

And then there's the covers and the fan songs that have spun out of it. For the former, I'd like to share this lovely rendition by the Live Videogame Orchestra—something about hearing actual, breathing musicians manage to get a handle on the track is kinda magical.

But there's also fan-inspired renditions. The hilariously-named 5ndth Sanctuary by IamDaDogeOfDaFuture is one of my favourites, having a wild run from 11/8, up to 15/8, up to 29/8—and still somehow managing to tickle my brain in a pleasing way. Here's the song impossibly mashed into 4/4. Here's the song in 5/4. People are playing with time and it's awesome.

Toby Fox has successfully created his own little genre-pod of Math Rock enthusiasts in Deltarune's fanbase, and I couldn't be more delighted. The Third Sanctuary is an utter mess, it's a drummer's nightmare, and it's also one of the most thoughtful moments of storytelling in a videogame, one that's inspired countless of time-signature mad renditions.

I leave you with 4rd (not a typo) Sanctuary. This actually isn't a fan-song, it's a version Toby put in Chapter 5. I'm not analysing it in this article, I've got other things to do, but I'd like you to listen to it anyway.

A Game of Thrones CRPG is such an obvious licensing fit and yet, culturally and corporately, always appears to be two zigs and a zag away from actually happening.

Perhaps Warhorse Studios was the most likely candidate, in the wake of two unflinching medieval simulations under the Kingdom Come banner. But the Czech studio's owner, Embracer, is also cradling the clumsily named Middle-earth Enterprises, and so Warhorse's future belongs to The Lord of the Rings. As for that other RPG powerhouse, Obsidian? I've seen Josh Sawyer complain too many times from his social media armchair about HBO's unrealistic battle formations to expect that will ever happen.

And so we turn to history, just as George RR has done so many times when sourcing inspiration for his novels. Turn the clock back to 2012 and you'll discover the largely forgotten Game of Thrones—its place in the annals not helped by the fact that Telltale released a game with the exact same name just two years later.

2012's Game of Thrones was a Cyanide production, one of the Parisian developer's long list of eurojanky projects with a fantastical bent. Though today best known for Styx and Blood Bowl—the latter of which manages to be both mechanically and thematically crunchy, down to the bones—the studio was experimenting at the time with CRPGs. In the same year as Game of Thrones came Confrontation, set in the universe of a French tabletop wargame, and Of Orcs and Men, a Styx predecessor in which you played a chunky greenskin.

All three launched to mixed reviews, but it seems to me that Game of Thrones is the pick of the bunch—low-budget and coarsely textured, but elevated by its commitment to weaving a story through the dense fabric of Westeros. This is, I suspect, partly down to the fact that it wasn't conceived as a television tie-in.

Yes, you'll come across the voices and likenesses of HBO actors while pottering around the Gift and King's Landing. A smug rendering of Lena Headey is stinking up the throne room. The Night's Watch is held together by James Cosmo's Commander Mormont. And at a critical moment, you'll benefit from being swept up in the mystery machinations of Conleth Hill's Lord Varys. But otherwise, it's evident that Cyanide's staff had their noses buried deep in the novels.

That's most apparent in the Game of Thrones RPG's structure: you'll flit back and forth between two perspectives, chapter by chapter. It's a common device in fantasy literature, but far less so in our own medium, and has a profound impact on the way the game is experienced. For one thing, you're embodying two different character classes: a fire-flinging priest of R'hllor, who shares his unusual choice of god with the red witch Melisandre, and a brother of the Watch who deals in mace-swings and headbutts.

Cyanide takes full advantage of the split to tell its tale from different angles. While you begin the game battling apparently unconnected plights, the two gradually intersect, and it becomes apparent that your dual protagonists might not share the same interests. The priest loses his titles, and must become a Lannister lapdog if he has any hope of regaining his seat as a lord of the realm. Meanwhile, your man in the north finds himself hunting down lapdogs to protect the Night's Watch from coming apart at the seams. As it turns out, a handful of gold can be all it takes to turn a Brother against his fellows. And the Lannisters are famous for their access to gold.

The action kicks off a month or two before the opening stages of HBO's Game of Thrones, which gives you a front row seat to the events that precipitate war in Westeros. Robert Baratheon is still stumbling around, filling his belly with boars that haven't yet managed to gore him. And Cersei Lannister is busy moving chess pieces around the board. You might not be a pawn, but you certainly play one of her knights, and quickly wind up complicit in dark schemes.

Game adaptations often take place in the margins of their parent properties, and the Game of Thrones RPG might have felt peripheral to the point of triviality. But George RR Martin has always embraced the agency of bit players, expanding rather than reducing the cast of his stories over time, and that spirit allows you to feel part of something bigger here. It helps that Cyanide's storytelling is surprisingly tight for a studio which, up til this point, hadn't been known for narrative. Its dialogue is direct and upfront with its intrigue—a necessary frankness against the backdrop of a world dense with knotted histories. The lead performances, meanwhile, are dripping with theatrical, bassy resonance.

Mind you, a lot of the other voice performances are quite rubbish—presumably recorded by a tiny cast, desperately looking within themselves for a fourth or fifth accent that could feasibly be ascribed to a peasant in Flea Bottom. And I'd be lying if I said the budget couldn't be felt in other ways: the unremarkable streets of a King's Landing that's more Doncaster than Dubrovnik; the repeated visits to nondescript parts of Westeros; the fuzzy aesthetic tricks that developers often used to cover a multitude of fidelity sins during the Xbox 360 era.

But I'm quite fond of an element that was singled out for some of the strongest criticism in reviews of the time: the combat system.

Granted, I grew up on real-time-with-pause brawls. It came in the millennial starter pack with MSN Messenger and a now-defunct AOL email account, so I'm forgiving where others might be frustrated. But if you ask me, Cyanide squeezes real tension out of throwing you into scenarios where you're sweaty and surrounded—desperately trying to tagteam stuns and knockdowns with some temporary companion who unhelpfully spent his youth perfecting archery before joining you shoulder-to-shoulder in a tight dungeon. I even quite like the bits where, as a shapeshifter, you take control of a dog to rip the throats out of unobservant guards, and follow scents to root out betrayal in the Night's Watch.

Like a clutch of dragon eggs, Cyanide's Game of Thrones is a bag of mixed blessings. Sometimes when I'm strolling through Castle Black, I hear that giveaway sign of an underbaked noughties RPG: a supposed old man, speaking with the voice of an overworked 30-year-old voice actor. And in those moments, I wonder whether I might eventually ditch this genre also-ran for good.

But then I remember that one positive quality of noughties RPG fandom was that we accepted imperfection when presented with peculiar mechanics and fascinating worlds. And that, when I look at the far more lavish spectacle fighter Game of Thrones: Kingsroad, launched last year, I see almost nothing of the spirit of George RR Martin. Stories set in Westeros should not be smooth and slick. They should shudder and clunk into place, slowly and then all at once, like the tectonic events they depict. And that is what CRPGs are for.

Mark Darrah was a programmer on the original Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, along with Neverwinter Nights and Jade Empire, and served as executive producer of the Dragon Age series from Origins through Inquisition before leaving in 2020—and coming back in 2023 to kick in on The Veilguard. He knows a thing or two about BioWare RPGs, in other words, and speaking to FRVR he said he also knows why Baldur's Gate 3 was such a great sequel—so great that it has overshadowed the games that came before it, made mounts of money, and is still among the most popular games on Steam three years after release.

Darrah reckons that's a direct result of Larian's willingness to do its own thing with the sequel. Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity "feels like an Infinity Engine game," Darrah said (and he's 100% correct on that), and they're great, but Darrah says that's also a very limiting factor: "The reality is that the industry has moved on so much since then that I was like, oh yeah, this is a really faithful adaptation of that and it turns out that I didn’t actually want that anymore."

Larian, on the other hand, "are Baldur’s Gate 2 and Baldur’s Gate 1-flavoured, but they’re also Divine Divinity-flavoured. They are flavoured by their own track record, they are flavoured by what CRPGs have become in the intervening 20 years. So I think it’s a great sequel. I think they did what is the right thing to do given that large of a gap."

Baldur's Gate 3 really is more akin to Larian's Divinity games than its namesakes, and those Divinity games are brilliant RPGs too. Original Sin 2 took our Game of the Year crown in 2017: PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon said at the time that "there's never been an RPG with a story or characters this interesting that you can play co-op with four players," which is also a pretty spot-on description of Baldur's Gate 3.

The problem for Baldur's Gate owner Hasbro is that Larian's work was maybe a little too great: The company now finds itself in possession of a massively lucrative videogame property that nobody wants to touch because, basically, who wants to go on after The Beatles? Darrah has thoughts on that too—basically, do a Fallout: New Vegas with it.

"Get Larian to agree to license out the Divinity Engine and essentially let someone make an oversized expansion pack for Baldur’s Gate 3 and call that Baldur’s Gate 4," Darrah said. "That could work."

Conversely, it could take the approach suggested by PC Gamer editor Fraser Brown: Just don't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take the reigns

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time crime

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

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

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

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

But should you?

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

Killing time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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