While I wait for Diablo 4 to figure out its messy new season, the only game that has managed to tear me away from playing more Path of Exile 2 is Hell Clock.

I should've known it would: Hell Clock's new Cursed War expansion was delayed to give PoE 2's season some time to breathe. The developers at Rogue Snail know their audience because they're part of it too: Action RPGs players cycle through games on a seasonal basis, and Hell Clock is perfect for filling in the gaps.

It's a run-based roguelike with an action RPG engine under the hood. There's loot, but you don't need a degree to understand how it all works. You stack on everything that promises more damage after clearing each room and watch screens of monsters explode. There's depth in its buildcrafting of course, but I suspect min-maxing your items is more important in higher difficulties. On normal, I never hit a wall during the original three-act campaign by simply tossing stuff together on the fly.

Hell Clock has had some major updates since I played it the first time, so my trip through the campaign almost felt like playing a new game. Movement is smoother now (you can go full WASD or click-to-move) and bosses are much meaner than before. Rogue Snail also implemented an entire set of crafting items that borrow basic ideas from Path of Exile's crafting system. It took a few nail-biting boss fights for me to realize how important they are for creating items that beef up your defenses so you can survive more than a hit or two.

The Cursed War expansion adds a fourth act that tells the origin story of main character Pajeu, and it's just as bloody as the others. One of the reasons Hell Clock works at all is that it's not an action RPG where you kill demons for the thrill of it—it's a fictionalized revenge story for a real-life massacre that happened in Brazil. Pajeu watched the First Brazilian Republic slaughter an entire town during the War of Canudos. The game takes place years later as Pajeu revisits the town in its hellish, tormented form, armed to the teeth to face the undead soldiers that haunt still it.

Cursed War rewinds the story back to when he was recruited into the Brazilian army during the Paraguayan War as a slave. This is where the fury Pajeu carries in the base game was born, and it makes the sting of the third act—which shows how the atrocities have bled into the present day—last longer than it already did the first time I played through it. Hell Clock feels like a grown up's version of Diablo's Sanctuary, where the demons have names and uniforms.

I felt no remorse for picking up one of the new skills, Tupã's Wrath, and frying every last one of them. Rogue Snail basically put my favorite PoE 2 skill into the game, letting me unleash a flood of lightning bolts in every direction. Each run I stumbled into new ways to scale its damage up, like a relic that causes it to empower your skeletal minions. I found an unstoppable combination on my first run of the new act, that builds a defensive layer over my health as I spam thousands of lightning bolts. Nothing but bosses can touch me now.

At least they couldn't in the normal difficulty mode. Hell Clock also has two harder modes to climb through if you're interested in finding some of the game's most powerful items. There's enough roguelike randomness to challenge even a build like mine in there, especially as monsters gain elemental resistances and other threatening bonuses. And, just like in Hades, there are plenty of mid-run boons I've not even tried yet, let alone the other skills that came with the expansion.

Hell Clock is so good that I don't want to squeeze it dry in a week of non-stop blasting. I want to savour it between all the other things I'm playing. A run here or there while I think of another new combination of relics or skills to try. As much as I am still in love with PoE 2 at the moment, I'm always excited to close it and see how a quick 20-minute rampage through Hell Clock will go, and the $10 expansion has just given me a whole new box of toys to play with.

No hit or no damage playthroughs have become an increasingly common badge of honor online, especially in precise, timing-driven action games like the Souls series. But what about in a dice rolling, stats and RNG-heavy CRPG? Davey Gunface on YouTube not only proved it's possible, he did so in perhaps the most tedious circumstances: Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' Unfair difficulty.

WotR and its predecessor, Kingmaker, are two all-timer CRPGs for me. But even die-hard fans recommend them with caveats. Wrath, especially, is kinda bullshit. Once every two to five hours or so across its marathon runtime, a guy who by all rights should be a miniboss is just out of nowhere the strongest guy who ever lived. It's like when Battle Beast first shows up as some guy's goon in Invincible and he solos all the strongest heroes of earth.

Crazy difficulty spikes, Armor Classes through the stratosphere, save-or-die spells, level drain, damage immunities, literal minutes-long hard crowd control, Wrath embraces these and more. Its normal difficulty will make a Baldur's Gate 3 Honour Mode veteran sweat a bit, while completing the "Core" difficulty is a real CRPG achievement in my book⁠—you should get your picture on a wall at Owlcat HQ like you finished a Paul Bunyan Big Boy meal at a roadside steakhouse. The "Unfair" difficulty? It's unfair.

I can only assume Gunface allowed for reloading in this challenge due to the random chance and marathon nature of a WotR playthrough⁠—it really is, consistently, a 100+ hour deal. Gunface set the challenge of getting through without taking any avoidable damage. There are a few instances of story or cutscene-derived, unavoidable hits that just feel unsporting.

He took the definition of "avoidable" to some admirable extremes though, like managing to sidestep a "supposed to lose" fight at the beginning of the game by uncovering a rare sequence gated as the failure state of a specific moral choice. That's pure RPGs, baby.

WotR, like Neverwinter Nights: Swordflight, already sits at the end stage of optimization and powergaming for a Core playthrough. Unfair, let alone hitless, demands you escalate to primeval outer reaches of buildcrafting psychosis.

One example: Gunface got through WotR's infamous Shield Maze prologue with the popular Unfair tactic of sacrificing your starter companions' builds, multiclassing them in ways that are ruinous in the long run, but life-saving in the hyper-specific hell of levels 2 through 4. The one-shot master Rowdy Rogue came in handy, and everybody loves giving companions Lann or Wenduag a Sabertooth Tiger pet.

Across the whole of the game, Gunface opted for a Human (gotta get that extra feat) Witch of the Veil 10 / Loremaster 9 / Rowdy Rogue 1, parlaying the Witch's game-changing early hexes but booboo spell list into the Loremaster prestige class' expanded spellbook. He also picked the "eviler than the bad guys" Swarm That Walks path, making for a fun pairing with his custom portrait, a picture of his dog.

Truly, this is a "beyond the impossible" sort of challenge, one better suited for precise, input-driven games where you actually control whether you get hit or not. Doing so in a game built on d20 rolls feels avant garde. Gunface's full video is a three-hour long runner if you're looking for something to come back to over a few days, and you can also follow him on YouTube or support via Patreon.

While former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider won't play The Veilguard, he knows enough to realise that the series ain't looking too hot right now. He's pretty sure it's dead, at least under EA.

When we asked if he saw a future in the series he considers "his baby", he wasn't hopeful.

"From Electronic Arts? Unlikely. Throughout the entire time I was there, we were always one breath away from the project being shelved. The thing that happened is that we kept releasing games, and it would sell much better than they thought it should, and it kept surprising them."

EA never seemed to understand Dragon Age, as evidenced by the Origins trailer that used a Marilyn Manson track and was filled with blood. Instead of a mature fantasy RPG, it was presented as some edgelord nonsense for teen boys. This misunderstanding continues to this very day. EA CEO Andrew Wilson, for instance, blamed The Veilguard's failings on a lack of live service features. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad.

Things were different with Mass Effect, EA's favourite RPG.

"It was funny," says Gaider, "because if Mass Effect releases didn't sell as well, they got excuses, because it was an action-oriented game. They thought it should sell more. It was slicker."

Gaider has nothing bad to say about the sci-fi RPG, and counts Mass Effect 2 as one of the "best RPGs of all time", but the differences in the way Dragon Age and Mass Effect were treated by EA must have stung.

"The way EA looked at it was that Mass Effect was the slick, modern RPG that had action, and they could sell really easily. Whereas Dragon Age was old-fashioned and focused on story. Our action, ranging from Dragon Age: Origins, was a little bit on the slow, cumbersome side, and then was too fast. They never knew what to do with it. So whenever a Dragon Age game sold well, we got excuses on the opposite side. Basically that it was a fluke."

It's worth noting that Dragon Age: Inquisition beat EA's sales expectations and became BioWare's most successful game. But EA has always treated Dragon Age, as Gaider says, like "the redheaded stepchild".

"They gave us a head of marketing at one point who literally talked about having to put lipstick on a pig in order to sell it. When you're on a team and you're hearing this, you're like, ‘Alright, what am I supposed to do with this?’"

Despite all of this, Gaider is interested in working on Dragon Age again—albeit not with EA. Though this is a more recent development.

"If you'd asked me that in the past, I would have said absolutely not. That I’d done my time. I left the Dragon Age team before I left BioWare. After Inquisition came out, I went to Mike Laidlaw and I said, ‘I've told all the stories with mages and dragons and what have you that I have in me. And I could keep going, but if I keep working on this, it's going to become rote, and I think that would be a disservice to the team. So I should step aside, let fresher voices rise’. I don't know if that was the right decision, but it felt right at the time."

If someone gave him the keys to Thedas now, though, he might be up for it.

"I do like a challenge," he says. "So if, out of some weird alignment of the stars, somebody handed the Dragon Age franchise back to me and said, ‘Breathe the life back into this baby’, that'd be a tough one, but I think that'd be an interesting thing to do. To go back to the basics of what made Dragon Age appeal to so many people in the first place. And go somewhere dark and dangerous, and do things that will make people upset. I think that’s what I would want to do with it."

If Richard Garriott can get his hands on Ultima again, who knows? Maybe there's still hope for Dragon Age.

Bandai Namco's next anime action game is just on the horizon as it gears up for another Sword Art Online release, Echoes of Aincrad. It was one of the top played demos during Steam's most recent Next Fest, and that demo is available for those of you who can't stand to wait just a few more hours.

The anime souls-like is is releasing for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, but its console launch times don't exactly line up across platforms. So, here I am to break it all down with details on the Echoes of Aincrad release date and time.

When is the Echoes of Aincrad release date and time?

Echoes of Aincrad launches on Thursday, July 9, at 3 pm PDT for all players on PC around the world. The base game is available on Steam for $70/£55, or you can upgrade to the deluxe edition for an extra $20/£20 and tack on the expansion DLC launching later this year.

The Echoes of Aincrad launch time in more regions for PC

If your timezone isn't listed above, check out this handy time and date site to sort all of the tedious timezone math for you. I've already adjusted the calendar for Echoes of Aincrad's launch time, so you'll just need to plug in your city.

Echoes of Aincrad launch times for PlayStation and Xbox

Does Echoes of Aincrad have preloading?

No, Echoes of Aincrad does not have pre-loading for players on Steam. Pre-loading is only available for consoles.

Back when Microsoft acquired Bethesda, our first thought was, 'I wonder if this will be bad,' but our second thought was, 'Ooh, maybe now Obsidian will make Fallout: New Vegas 2.' And when the Fallout TV show turned out to be a hit, we scratched our heads over the continued absence of a new Fallout game.

Now it looks like a new Obsidian-made Fallout RPG may actually happen. Word on the street is that Microsoft has put Obsidian's Josh Sawyer—who directed Fallout: New Vegas—at the helm of a new Fallout game as part of the "Xbox reset" shakeup, which will see 3,200 people lose their jobs.

The situation is "still in flux," according to the Bloomberg report that broke the news, and could change. But supposing that Obsidian and Sawyer do dive into this project, are you excited? There's a poll below, and the comments are open.

I'm feeling ambivalent. I like Obsidian and Sawyer, and a new Fallout game seems like a perfectly good pursuit for the developer and director, and a good thing for fans of the series who've been asking for just this for years.

But the news comes alongside thousands of layoffs across Xbox, including a substantial number at Obsidian itself, which has reportedly cancelled an Avowed sequel and other projects to make way for Fallout. It's not exactly an auspicious way to kick off a new project, and it's hard to sustain feelings I'd describe as positive after a bunch of people were just put out of work.

A Bloomberg report says Obsidian Entertainment, which was recently hit hard by mass layoffs at Xbox, has cancelled projects including a sequel to Avowed and will instead begin working on a new Fallout game.

The plans are "in flux" and could change, according to the report.

A California WARN report shared by GameFile says 52 employees at Obsidian were let go in the layoffs, which Bloomberg says represents roughly a quarter of the studio's workforce. The sequel to Avowed, the outstanding 2025 first-person RPG set in the studio's Pillars of Eternity universe, is one of multiple unannounced games in development that have been cancelled amidst the bloodletting.

Instead of that, a new Fallout game is reportedly being headed up by Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer. Sawyer has an enviable record of RPG credits to his name, most notably in this moment as the lead designer and director of Fallout: New Vegas.

Still, I'll be the first to say it, in this story at least: This sucks. I'm as down for a new Fallout as much as the next guy, but I could also really go for more Pillars, or whatever non-Fallout RPG Sawyer was reportedly directing before his attention was diverted to this.

I also can't help wondering how the circumstances will impact what ultimately comes out of this. Sawyer has previously said he'd head up a new Fallout game if Microsoft asked, if he could do it on his own terms, but I doubt his terms would ever have included seeing a quarter of the studio put out of work, or that the mood among those who remain is going to contribute positively to the project.

I've reached out to Obsidian for comment on the report and will update if I receive a reply. In the meantime, if you want to see what Sawyer and Obsidian can do when they don't have shareholder-obsessed overlords breathing down their necks, I would urge you to check out Pentiment, an astonishingly good slow-burn journey through 16th century Bavaria. It's currently on sale for $10/£7.49/€10—that's half-price—in the Steam Summer Sale. (Also, a bit of advice: Don't spoil it for yourself.)

Less than three years after it went live on Steam, Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis is calling it quits. Square Enix said in an end-of-service announcement that the sale of Red Crystal in-game currency has already been halted, and the game itself will be taken offline on October 6.

Square Enix apologized for any disappointment in its shutdown announcement, saying that it has "worked to provide the best possible experience for our players" since the game went live in 2023. However, for reasons unspecified, "we have determined that it will be difficult to continue doing so and have made the decision to end service."

A tepid response to the game may be a big part of the issue. Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis holds a "mixed" rating on Steam, and its player numbers have been in a slow, bumpy, but overall steady decline since it launched on that platform. Android and iOS versions of the game have considerably better ratings, but player numbers aren't known.

PC Gamer Final Fantasy fan Mollie Taylor described Ever Crisis as "a retelling of Final Fantasy 7's overarching story, offering the narrative from the original game, the movie Advent Children, and spin-off games Before Crisis, Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus," which seems to me like a lot of Final Fantasy. She seemed a little bit dubious about its gacha game mechanics, though (or maybe just tired of it as a concept), and that can be seen in the Steam reviews too, many of which complain about its monetization and relentless grind.

In-game events will continue to run until Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis shuts down—Square Enix dropped a final roadmap leading into the closure that you can check out below. It also makes clear that once the servers close, it is over: "To protect users' personal information, account information will be deleted once all procedures associated with the end of the service have been completed."

If you've played a new Elder Scrolls game anytime since 2002, you've seen Christiane Meister's work: The senior character artist spent 27 years at Bethesda, contributing to games from Morrowind to Skyrim. As of this week's round of Xbox layoffs, however, her tenure is over.

The news came to my attention via a post by Lady Nerevar on Bluesky, though I double-checked Meister's LinkedIn and, sure enough, she is currently looking for work: "I was in charge of design, creation, and management of character art assets throughout all of the Elder Scrolls projects, starting with Morrowind to our latest title, Skyrim.

"This included drawing concepts and seeing the art piece through to the final stage of getting the object in the game as well as handing off concepts to other artists in the character group. I also oversaw outsourced assets from design to final in-game models."

As for her role in Skyrim, Bethesda still (bitterly) has a 'meet the artist' blog from 2022, wherein Meister talks a little bit about how she gave the khajiit and argonians a facelift between Oblivion and Skyrim:

"The beast races have always been a challenge, technically. In Oblivion, we went the route of everyone having the same face and using FaceGen to morph that face into the beast races. That was a… look. In Skyrim, I just [made] the faces how I wanted and then provided them with their own facial features to change. This looked much better! The only thing that it required was that we make separate helmets to fit their heads."

To me, it speaks to the depths of Xbox's cuts that such an incredibly crucial part of The Elder Scroll's visual identity has been let go. As some have pointed out, Asha Sharma, the current CEO of Xbox (who bravely claimed she'd steer the company towards an improbable 1 billion daily players), would have been either nine or 10 years old when Meister started working at Bethesda for the first time.

If you were to be a ruthless capitalist about it, you could argue that long tenures in game development lead to higher salaries—which'll often be the first in the crosshairs when layoffs inevitably come calling. The 'if' there is important, though, as I cannot think of a single situation in which booting someone with this much experience and expertise is the right move.

It's no wonder the industry writ large is spooked. There's no real world in which any of these layoffs and studio closures are a sign of good health—especially given the industry isn't exactly poor, right now. Global games revenue surpassed $200 billion in 2025; the money is there, it just seems to belong to the shareholders, and not the people who've been making games for nearly three decades.

There's a common thread amongst former BioWare developers: They are proud of what they worked on, have a lot of love for their former studio, and they have few good things to say about publisher EA. For understandable reasons.

David Gaider was with BioWare for a long time, joining the studio after the success of Baldur's Gate. He started as a writer on Baldur's Gate 2 and worked his way up to lead writer for Hordes of the Underdark, Neverwinter Nights' best expansion. But he's best known for Dragon Age.

Thedas is Gaider's creation, and he served as lead writer on Origins, Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, before leaving BioWare in 2016. He also wrote several novels and comics based on Dragon Age. "It was my baby," he tells us.

This is one of the reasons that the chances of him playing The Veilguard were always going to be slim—"no matter what".

"Whether it was successful or not, it was always going to make different choices than I would have made for it. The team took it, and they did their own version of it, and I don't really want to see what's changed. It's totally selfish—I just don't want to see what they've done with my baby, good or bad."

Regardless, it was not successful. At least not in the way, say, Inquisition was. It sold well and had plenty of positive reviews, but it's never been able to escape its Mixed user review rating on Steam, and it didn't meet EA's expectations.

EA's expectations, of course, are part of the problem.

One of the other reasons Gaider hasn't played it is that he knows "too much about what went on behind the scenes," characterising development as an "ordeal" where EA "handicapped" the team right from the beginning.

"Electronic Arts really did a number on them in terms of setting them up to fail, honestly. From everything I've been told about the game, it seems like that's exactly what happened. It didn't deliver on a creative level. It didn't deliver the sales. That's part of what EA likes to do too. They require a certain level of sales, and if you don't match that, it doesn't matter how good the game is. If it underperforms, you're essentially dead."

The Veilguard was not a great Dragon Age game—or at least it failed to capture what I found special and exciting about the series. And a great deal of the blame must be placed on EA's shoulders, as a company that is almost pathologically incapable of understanding what players want.

Take, for example, CEO Andrew Wilson's assessment of The Veilguard's failings. Was it because the quality of the writing took a dip? The shift to action-RPG? The companions who showcased a complete lack of agency? No, says Wilson, it's because it wasn't a live service game.

EA didn't just set up The Veilguard to fail, it also threw BioWare under the bus when the predictable happened, while completely misunderstanding what went wrong in the first place.

Unfortunately, Gaider hasn't had a smooth ride since leaving BioWare. He joined Beamdog and pitched a Planescape: Torment sequel to Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, which they liked but refused to fund. He's now creative director at Summerfall Studios. Its first game, Stray Gods, unfortunately launched around the same time as Baldur's Gate 3.

"Not to suggest that Stray Gods was in any way competition, but Baldur's Gate 3 came out and was such a huge hit that it was all anybody could talk about," he says. "So whatever chance there was of Stray Gods getting noticed disappeared."

Gaider is now working on a heist RPG, and while publishers have been enthusiastic about the pitch, nobody is funding it yet. Gaider says it's "make or break" for the studio.

I had the pleasure of playing four hours of The Blood of Dawnwalker last week—and while I can't say it'll knock my socks off just yet (RPGs that claim to have impactful choices just require more sitdown time to prove their worth) it has absolutely got its teeth into me, because I experienced something rare: I ignored a quest. On purpose. And I liked it.

You play as Coen, a humble yet hero-coded villager who, over the course of the prologue (and the game's first day, more on that later) is turned into a titular dawnwalker, thanks to your incidental siring within a silver mine. A human by day, a bloodthirsty monster by night.

Your moment-to-moment dispatchment of corrupt guards and obligatory wolves (plus the occasional bear) is very action-RPG standard, with the delightful inclusion of a For Honor-style directional block and attack system with timed parries and direction-based counter-hits, with some options to just auto-attack if you don't want to deal with all of that.

This system wobbles a bit in crowds of enemies, but that's likely just a result of not being able to gather enough skill points during my play session to get into the game's ability system, which is a little more standard RPG—flinging dust in your opponent's eye, vampiric teleports, bites, and so on.

I don't have much else to say about the combat, other than it's just pretty competent with some rough spots, shining in duels and being just serviceable elsewhere, at least in the early game. The part of The Blood of Dawnwalker that really intrigues me is its time management system—because Coen's got a deadline to meet.

Tick, tock

After the prologue, Coen has 30 days and 30 nights to save his family from the vampire lord Brancis, who has taken an entirety of Vale Sangora hostage—on the plus side, he doesn't charge taxes. Unfortunately, he does ask for blood, and will cull members of his cattle who he thinks are weak. This sucks, both literally and figuratively, for everyone involved.

This core system feeds into the rest of the game's mechanics, even the combat. Rather than keeping a stopwatch running, The Blood of Dawnwalker splits up your days and nights into time segments, a sort of pseudo-currency—in that you've only a limited amount of it—that you can spend on completing quests, scouting areas, and so on.

The proof of concept lies in the prologue, which had me making interesting roleplay choices that I wouldn't have otherwise made in a bog standard RPG. See, I'm a bit of a completionist. I want to go down every corridor, experience every dialogue option, and pick up every leaf and lamb offal I possibly can before moving on.

But I didn't do that during my preview, because I needed to get medicine for my mother and I only had a single day to do it. This led me not only to turn down a lovely witch's book club invitation, sadly spurning romance so my mum wouldn't, y'know, die. But I also let a villager hurling insults at me get away without a beating. Normally I would have gotten my revenge, but with the clock ticking down, it felt like a literal waste of time.

In a chat I had with game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, he said this is all very much on purpose: "The idea was to add this sense of urgency to the game … When you're playing, you are more aware of what's happening around you, and you're choosing the content, and you have more emotions connected when you play."

It's genuinely really interesting, because it forces you to weigh up your actual priorities. If all my little tasks are just waiting for me to come back for them, I'll obviously spend time with the cool witch lady. But if NPC lives are on the line? I'll sadly say no—and then immediately have my instincts verified as two steps from her door, a man's brother had gone missing, and I was directly able to save him because of my decision to not play hooky with the local potion peddler.

This impact on your roleplaying is by far the most interesting part of this time-based system, but there are some cool ways it impacts game mechanics, too: Vampires only drink blood, so you can't eat regular food to heal your injuries during the night—swapping up your playstyle from hoarding snacks to biting necks.

During the day, you don't have vampiric powers. Certain gear is only beneficial to your human or vampire forms, respectively, to the point where you get two different gear loadouts that auto-swap when the sun sets and rises. And the world shifts around a little, as well.

For instance, I made the tactical error of diving into an enemy camp to rescue a prisoner just in the nick of time—however, the moment I did so, dawn broke and the camp gained reinforcements, meaning I had to fight my way out of it, too.

The main point of this system, however, is to create a web of action and consequence that spans the entirety of the game. And in the prologue, at least, it holds up tremendously well.

Gosh darn these vampires

The Blood of Dawnwalker has a chance to pull off its core premise with flying colours—and if it does, it might be one of the most intriguing open world RPGs of the decade, one where you aren't just ticking off objectives on a world map checklist, but making deliberate, calculated choices to try and min-max your odds of saving your family.

To do that, the full version will need to keep giving interesting webs of choice and consequences to the player, keeping the pressure on while causing your decisions to have a meaningful, lasting impact on the game's story. Easier said than done, but I'm optimistic so far.

Even if it doesn't pull it off, though, The Blood of Dawnwalker is going to be very interesting, and in a sense, that's already enough to have me thirsty to play more. I'll vastly prefer a slightly wonky experience with unique ideas to a mediocre game that's just okay—and The Blood of Dawnwalker's already had me switching up my usual completionist instincts into something far more immersive.

I've spent weeks playing Task Bar Hero as part of my daily work routine, and after pouring over 300 hours into the desktop auto-battler, it's safe to say it sits among my favorite idlers. Micromanaging the tiny pixel heroes at the bottom of my screen has also brought out the best worst parts of my 'number must go up' broken gamer brain, so I have some thoughts on what a Task Bar Hero tier list looks like.

Task Bar Hero tier list

After clearing all four difficulty modes and micromanaging my little guys all the way to max level (level 101), this is my definitive Task Bar Hero tier list for the current meta. While I bought both DLC classes, I want to highlight that both of my top picks (Ranger and Priest) are free.

Class tier list

Choosing your Task Bar Hero(es)

• Ranger is the definitive best Task Bar Hero class right now, but I'll get into more of that below
• Priest is incredibly versatile, easily fulfilling the roles of both tank and healer
• You can swap Ranger for Hunter, though I wouldn't recommend it unless you've gotten lucky gear drops
• Sorcerer is the perfect third hero for double DPS teams with his beefy AoE
• If you want a more traditional tank, spend the $5 to invest in Slayer over Knight
• Avoid blowing resources on Knight. As it stands, he's painfully outclassed in harder difficulties and a literal deadweight in Torment

Task Bar Hero best teams

A few notes on assembling your team

• Redeem the free Priest DLC for access to a perfectly serviceable F2P team
• DPS is king in the current meta. Tough fights rarely call for heavy investment into armor upgrades, and even with better pieces, extra sustain won't last long
• Build for attack speed on Ranger and Hunter, or cast speed on Sorcerer
• Add elemental resistance to armor. It doesn't hurt to hit the 75% cap, especially on tanks
• Use one of the three-man teams for the early to mid-game, then swap to the ranger solo strategy for Torment difficulty

The DPS Heavy, for a Priestly carry to the end

Priest starts to out-tank both the Slayer and Knight with very little investment. You may struggle early in some of the mid-tier difficulties, but with a few lucky gear upgrades she should start holding on just long enough for Ranger and Sorcerer to chew through enemy waves. Prioritize leveling her Blessing of Might skill to rush a damage boost for the entire team.

While your Sorcerer burns through the entire enemy wave's HP, a speedy Ranger should have no problem finishing off the frontlines within one or two shots.

The Holy Trinity, for safely cruising through early to mid-game

Pick Slayer over Knight for his party buffer, Commander's Cry, and an easy ticket to more damage. With him in the tank position, funnel your better armor into keeping him alive and leave gearing Priest for last. She should survive hanging back in the middle while casting heals and Blessing of Might.

Ranger is the best pick in a single DPS team and the star of the show. Prioritize her for any damage upgrade materials, and remember to boost her attack speed whenever possible. Sorcerer won't carry a 3-man team as the only DPS, but if you've gotten lucky with Hunter weapon drops, you can swap her in over Ranger. She's not my first pick, but she'll work until you find better upgrades for Ranger.

More Task Bar Hero tips

Polish studio Rebel Wolves hasn't been shy about The Witcher 3's influence on its open world vampire RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker. Based on the four hours I've spent with it, I think the resemblance is unmistakable, but tasteful. It's far better than a clone, and this new studio has a kit bag of ideas of its own. I came away feeling like The Blood of Dawnwalker is better than a studio's first blockbuster RPG has any right to be.

The three-hour prologue sets the game's lockjaw tone. Protagonist Coen, before he becomes a Vrakhiri—basically a vampire—lives in a small village with his family. The village is ruled over by Brencis, a deteriorating husk of a being who nevertheless, compared to his tyrannical predecessors, is a fairly liberal fellow. The community need not worry about "taxes, tithes or chores" under his rule, which is exceedingly rare in this medieval approximation of eastern Europe.

But there is one significant rub: the gaunt, wraith-like Brencis requires every citizen to bleed out a pint of their blood every full moon. Which, I mean, you'd prefer not to. It may be slightly easier than a life of meaningless toil, I guess, but many understandably consider it objectionable. We meet Coen one morning as he tries to spoon feed his mother Esme her breakfast: she's been rendered mute and nil by mouth by the panic of having to give her blood that evening.

Funeral in Carpathia

Like The Witcher 3, the prologue of Dawnwalker works as a microcosm of the ensuing 40-odd hour experience: it sets me loose on a small open map with a sample of choice-based conundrums. The most urgent order of the day is to retrieve some natural medicine for my mother from local herbalist Anca, all the better to keep her alive, but there are very many other stories unfolding in this village.

This is where Dawnwalker's promising time system comes into play. Every day is split into eight segments, and most quests or activities I do "spend" one or more of these segments. I have a full day to spend in Coen's hometown before the bloodletting ceremony, but since every quest spends a segment I can't hope to do everything.

Think of it like Persona's calendar system, except more substantial: my time spent in Coen's hometown felt like a featureful day and not just an interminable runthrough of sidequests. I'm also compelled to prioritise based on my interests and temperament, rather than just do everything because I don't want to miss out. It feels more substantial, yes, but I can't tell yet how consequential my choices will be.

So keeping in mind the time system and my mother's ailment, of course I'm drawn into a fishing expedition with my siblings. Alas, it turns into a confrontation with one of Brencis' oafish denizens. The dialogue options permit me to give this standover lout a whole lot of impertinence, which I do, but thankfully I still manage to talk my way out of a fight.

The morning irrevocably wasted, I mosey back to town and meet Gremla, who advises of the mysterious disappearance of a banner she's been instructed by the vrakhir to display (“The vrakhir will rip me to shreds when he finds out!” she implores). Via the careful interaction with things that glow orange when using investigate mode, I gradually discover who the culprit is.

Time passes. By the afternoon I've met Vasil, a flat-jawed prat who's been following me around, cussing out my mother. I catch the little turd and go to beat him before his father turns up. Rather than intervene, this father—bloodshot eyes, coarse throat, sallow, pitted expression—encourages me to give Vasil a beating. Via dialogue options I'm given at least two opportunities to back out of beating Vasil, but for morbid curiosity I insist. When, at his father's demand, Vasil removes his shirt for a flogging across the back, the skin is deeply scarred by many previous flayings. My harasser has evidently lived a miserable life.

Just a regular day in the life of a 16th century Romanian peasant under vampiric rule!

It's an oft-performed trick in the gritty RPG playbook: you go to do the right, or seemingly logical thing, only to discover that, well actually, that's bad too! The misery of pre-enlightenment is peddled to an almost fetishistic degree in Blood of the Dawnwalker, which invites me to ponder whether subservience to a suss but mostly accommodating power is preferable to the bloodletting of resistance. As Coen's father succinctly puts it: "It’s knights who yield. Peasants like us just die".

Bloodlust

This is a dark game, but it can be arch. Later I finally get to herbalist Anca, with whom Coen has some unmistakable chemistry. It starts to rain, so she invites me to stick around and pass the time via the learning of Latin, which I think is historically what Romanian peasants did in their medieval downtime. She insists on Petronius, but—thanks to the option to do so, and then to persist—I insist on Catallus. A little knowledge of your Roman tomes can make the difference between a dry or fraught lesson.

I can see The Blood of Dawnwalker being a very spicy horror-tinged fantasy RPG, but like The Witcher 3, I think the combat is boring. By dint of being a Dawnwalker, Coen can fight as either human or vampire. As a human the combat is reminiscent of Kingdom Come Deliverance: I have to issue longsword strikes and blocks in the right direction, in a simulation of real swordplay. It's easier than Deliverance, albeit neither revelatory or especially engaging. When fighting packs, my enemies tend to take gentlemanly turns swiping at me.

There's blocking of course, and perfect blocking, and unblockable attacks. You'll manage stamina, gradually unlock abilities from three major skill trees (Witchcraft, Swordmastery and Vampirism) and circle strafe around many a locked-on enemy. I don't think it's fair to expect a new studio to reinvent action RPG combat, but scrapping was the aspect I liked least about The Blood of Dawnwalker.

I enjoyed Coen's vampire beatdowns a whole lot more, mostly because it's where Rebel Wolves let their freak flag fly a bit. Coen's survival and effectiveness as a vampire naturally rests on his blood consumption, which can also be used to pull off some neat tricks: I can dash a good five metres ahead of me in the blink of an eye, and I can warp to the rear of an enemy all the better to suck the life out of 'em. Aside from these neat tricks, moment-to-moment hand-to-hand combat still works mostly the same.

Outside of combat, as a vampire, Coen can planeshift onto walls and traverse them vertically, or claw ride down surfaces to descend treacherous drops. Of course, being a vampire means craving blood, and if I failed to feed for long out in the open world I'd run the risk of perishing. Amusingly—though I didn't see this in action—if you enter dialogue as a hungry vampire you run the risk of draining the person you're talking to, even if you're buddies.

I can tell Rebel Wolves has spent the majority of its creative labour applying painterly detail to this ancient and sordid realm. The open world is gorgeously gothic with its grey silhouetted ruins, its mulch green bogs, lonely fir forests, and distant snowy peaks. I already feel invested in its grimy, unflinching narrative. Failing disaster or technical wobbles—it ran perfectly on Namco Bandai's extremely well-endowed PCs—I reckon it could be the RPG of 2026, so long as I'm allowed to talk my way out of at least some of the combat.

Special effects go off like fireworks, my screen a constant blur of colour. Gushes of golden numbers—some of them in the millions—accompany every sword swing and magical burst. AoE patterns light up the floor, warning me about the maelstrom I'll soon have to dodge my way through. And while all of this is going on my party's endlessly chatting away to each other, remarking on every activated skill and buff.

I've done all this before. Hours and hours of it, even.

And I'm happy to say I'm enjoying myself just as much now as I did in 2024. Endless Ragnarok, Granblue Fantasy: Relink's expansion, doesn't reinvent the action RPG, but it definitely makes taking it for another spin a lot of fun. I may have seen much of this before, but I've not experienced it in this way, or at this relentless white-knuckle level of intensity. There are multiple new quest difficulty tiers to tackle, new playable friends to recruit (and enhance), and even new mid-battle summons to unleash. At first the flurry of new systems, items, unlocks, and upgrades is a little overwhelming, but as they essentially all boil down into new ways of making all of my big numbers even bigger, and often replace something I've already cleared (a character's skill tree, for example), coming to grips with them all doesn't take long.

There is an excuse for this hefty slice of postgame fighting and upgrading; an ominous figure fond of dramatic poses and booming monologues, bringing new and ever more dangerous threats to the skies with them. It's just enough energetic nonsense to make progress meaningful, to make me believe I'm doing more than clearing another screen's worth of quests, without it feeling like I'm narratively back at square one and nothing I achieved before mattered.

The real star of this newly extended show is Conflux mode, mysterious gates that lead to roguelite-ish gauntlets stuffed with helpful upgrade materials and shiny new treasures. No two runs are ever the same, and half the fun is adapting to whatever gets thrown my way, and daring myself to pick more challenging battles for greater rewards.

As someone who is deathly allergic to min-maxing anything other than my consumption of tea and biscuits I half-expected my party to get instantly crushed into a fine paste by these new trials. But Conflux's difficulty curve is actually surprisingly smooth. The early quests are laid back enough to give returning players the space to shake off the rust, and by the time Endless Ragnarok really kicks off my main team are all powered up and ready to go. This expansion's something new for people who have seen the original credits roll, not an ultra painful mode designed exclusively for people who salivate at the thought of planning out their builds in a spreadsheet.

I can rush in with a team I like, rather than a team I know synergise well, and get on with mowing down hordes of enemies and opening treasure chests. Promising myself one more quest often turns into an additional hour or two's play.

Every Conflux dive is made up of a series of micro-stages, each featuring mashed up bits of pre-existing levels and enemies. Such obvious recycling is no more irritating than Monster Hunter insisting I fight a Rathalos one more time, familiarity an opportunity to further refine my approach and exploit weaknesses.

These mini challenges tend to take under a minute to clear, rushing me from one to the next with only the smallest of pauses to choose a path and which of three randomised buffs I'll take into the next stage. These range from simple, straightforward options (a no-frills 20% boost to my health) to more esoteric yet potentially greater aids. These might stack based on the number of a particular status effect I've inflicted, or only come into play when I have a shield active (or if that shield breaks).

In spite of the constant barrage of status effects and triggers and buffs intertwined with specific types of damage, and all the ways I can combine these separate enhancements to my benefit, it still feels obvious that my own direct contribution to every battle—how I use my skills, how I dodge attacks, how aware I am of a particular enemy's abilities—matter at least as much as anything else. A warning my party is underpowered for the next quest isn't a polite notification to go away and grind materials, it's an invitation to test myself.

I may not clear the fight that follows against something the size of a house that's capable of shooting laser beams out of every orifice in record time and with a perfect grade on my first attempt, but even a skin-of-my-teeth win feels worthwhile. I get a clear screen full of loot, and the feeling that I'm not a button-mashing passenger while my equipment and masteries do all the real work.

Not every Conflux stage is about making the most of my martial might. A wide variety of completely combat-free alternatives pop up along the way, covering everything from high-speed slime chases to gem collecting, people watching, and even the occasional game of spot the difference. If I'm especially lucky I'll encounter a rare treasure-packed room, a little treat along the way. Between the fast pace, unpredictability, and sheer variety of challenges, Conflux runs quickly become an entertaining loop that I'm happy to play just for the sake of playing them, no matter what my current objective actually is.

Endless Ragnarok? Yes please.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a game of many excellent parts, and some of its most excellent are lead characters Henry of Skalitz and Lord Hans Capon. That's in no small part down to the fact that both of them have great voice actors: Tom McKay for Henry and Luke Dale for Capon, who both turn in fantastic and memorable performances.

Just, not memorable enough for the games industry, I guess, because in a recent appearance on Firezide Chat, Dale said that—for as lauded as his work as Capon was—"I wish I could say that Kingdom Come 2, the work I've done and the fact it's been played by millions of people led to more work, but it didn't."

Dale had, he says, hoped that his work in KCD1 and 2 would lead to more work in more games, but no dice. "I always hedge my bets because I don't think the industry has been particularly kind to me," he said. "Warhorse have been absolute gems. They're so supportive and really believed in me the whole way through. But the industry at large has never really given a fuck."

Since first starring in KCD1, Dale has appeared in only two other videogame roles, per his IMDB: voices in Battlefield 5 and a role in the VR game TaVRn's Takedown – Naheulbeuk.

His attitude regarding the industry is what has led Dale to start streaming (he currently has 72,000 followers on Twitch). "I thought, 'How can I turn this into something really cool for me?' That's where streaming came in. I thought, 'People seem to want me to do it, so let's do that.'

"If more acting work comes from this, great, but I'm not going to rely on that. I know people want me to stream, and I can build a community here if I choose to and work really hard. So I did, and that's worked incredibly well."

Dale isn't the only KCD actor to fire up a Twitch channel—McKay has too, and has been playing, well, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

"I've seen a lot of actors who've had these big opportunities to stream the game they're in as the lead character, and I'm thinking, 'Why aren't you doing that?'" said Dale. "It's not for everyone, so I get that, but give it some thought. Don't just let it pass you by, because it could be the best thing you ever did. It certainly was for me. It changed my life completely."

First reported by GamesRadar, CD Projekt Red has thanked thousands of fans for doing something exceedingly rare in today's entertainment space: Not spoiling a hotly anticipated new show even though they got advance access.

6,000 fans showed up to the advance premiere of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 at LA's Crypto.com Arena (lol) as part of Anime Expo 2026, where they got to see the first episode of Studio Trigger's follow-up to its explosively popular 2022 anime hit. And while there are almost certainly descriptions of the plot somewhere out there on the internet, CD Projekt Red was sufficiently satisfied with the lack of spoilers and footage on the World Wide Web.

"So far, the first episode streamed at Anime Expo hasn't leaked," wrote CD Projekt Red's Japanese associate country director, Satoru Homma, on Twitter. "Thank you so much for keeping your promise properly."

CDPR global PR director Radek Grabowski concurred. "We really appreciate everyone’s understanding and for helping us keep the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 episode one screening at Anime Expo spoiler-free by not recording any footage," he wrote. "Let’s all experience it and the rest of the season together when the show launches this fall!"

Edgerunners was at least as much of a phenomenon as the game it was based on, and even a stepped-on cam rip of the second season's first episode with a watermark for a gambling website would prove a hot commodity. If there really isn't one out there on the information superhighway, you gotta respect the Anime Expo attendees' restraint on the matter.

As for the rest of us, we have to wait until the fall to get a load of Edgerunners 2. It seems like it will be worth the wait: I seriously dug Edgerunners 2's first trailer, while its story and character previews tickle the Cyberpunk lore-loving parts of my brain.

Larian didn't want to make Baldur's Gate 4, BioWare veteran James Ohlen didn't want to make Baldur's Gate 4, so who's going to make it? I'm not going to answer that question, not just because I don't have a clue, but because I'm starting to think that nobody should make it.

Please stop throwing rotten veg and goblins at me—at least until the end of the article. Then you can chuck away. Thank you.

Anyway, James Ohlen is to blame for putting this idea in my head. When we interviewed Ohlen a wee while ago, he said something that stuck with me. "I wouldn't want to compete against that. Doing Exodus is hard enough, but having to compete against Baldur's Gate 3? That would be insanity."

Ohlen went on to shower Swen Vincke and Larian with compliments, but his hesitancy wasn't exclusively down to how talented the team was—it was also uniquely positioned to create BG3. It had the engine, the infrastructure and the institutional knowledge required to make something like this.

He believes that BG4 would need fresh faces. Developers with the confidence of old BioWare, back when the studio didn't know its limitations and just wanted to do its own thing.

"That was me back in Baldur's Gate. I was like 'Everyone else sucks and we're going to crush it.' It was us against all the other game studios, we're going to outdo them. And because none of us had built games before, we were all like, 'We're going to do everything different.' And sometimes you need that."

Ohlen makes a compelling argument, and I'd love to see a new team take some big, bold swings. But I don't think that's what people really want for a new Baldur's Gate. They're going to be expecting, or at least wanting, something massive, elaborate and polished. Something that favourably compares to BG3. That's way too much to expect from a studio's first game.

When BioWare made BG1, it wasn't weighed down by all these expectations. It could throw out the rule book and almost wing it. But in 2026, the name Baldur's Gate could become a crushing weight for a new studio—it would be a disaster.

The problem is that I don't think one of the more experienced RPG studios would fare much better. Take Beamdog, for example. It's been the custodian of BioWare's classic RPGs since 2012 and has even added to them. It's effectively BioWare's offspring. But it's never been able to step out from the bigger studio's shadow.

Beamdog's Enhanced Editions are great, but the road to these remasters was bumpy, and some of them launched in less than ideal states. I just don't see it managing something as ambitious as Baldur's Gate 4 would need to be—as evidenced by founder Trent Oster's pitch to Hasbro for BG3.

"Our Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't as big picture as what Larian pitched," Oster told us. "Obviously, we were doing it at a much smaller scope. It wasn't going to be a $100 million game. I think we were pitching it in the $20 million range."

Then there's Owlcat. The Pathfinder games are strikingly similar to BioWare's excellent Infinity Engine games, and after some post-launch polish Rogue Trader became one of my favourite CRPGs. But with the studio already dividing its attention between Dark Heresy and its Expanse RPG, Owlcat's busy enough.

Regardless, I don't think it would be right for Baldur's Gate 4. Its approach to RPG systems is very 'more is more', to the point where I eventually found managing my crew and levelling them up in Rogue Trader a chore. And while the move from Pathfinder's RTWP system to a turn-based combat system was very welcome, it was still bloated and plodding.

The thing is, I just don't think we'll get a better Baldur's Gate. Or at least, I don't think there's currently a studio out there that could do a better job, or even a similar job, to Larian. And this isn't a criticism. We're enjoying a golden age of RPGs right now, from expensive behemoths like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, to weird experiments from tiny teams like Esoteric Ebb. But this very specific kind of RPG? Larian utterly dominates it.

With that in mind, I wish Hasbro would take a risk and try something different. Not a new Baldur's Gate, not a new Icewind Dale, not even—and I hate myself for saying it—a new Planescape: Torment. I know I'm being extremely brave for even thinking this, but maybe not everything needs to be a sequel.

Hasbro is in charge of an entire multiverse. D&D is so all-encompassing that you could do pretty much anything with it. Instead of putting all the eggs in the Baldur's Gate basket—especially since OG BG remakes are coming—it should be trying something new. Smaller projects that aren't trying to one-up BG3. These projects could then give the teams working on them the knowledge they need to tackle bigger games, and allow them to develop new tools that could be used to forge ever more impressive worlds.

Larian spent years building up to Baldur's Gate. It had successes, failures, weird pivots, and it almost shut down—all of this contributed to BG3. This is a singular developer, and Hasbro simply isn't going to find another Larian.

But if Hasbro went down the route of nurturing talent, of playing the long game, who knows? Maybe in 10 years we'd get a Baldur's Gate 4 that could meet our incredibly high expectations.

A new Fallout 4 mod, Double Feature, is the fourth collaboration by modders Kinggath and co. with Elder Scrolls icon Wes Johnson—the man behind characters like Molag Bal, Sheogorath, and a whole lot more—as well as Fallout actors Jan Johns and Leer Leary. It's part of Kinggath's annual modding for charity project, which led to the creation of similar mods like Shady Motives and Trunk's Malfunction.

The mod's associated Alzheimer's fundraiser has raised just over $5,000 as I write this, with a current goal of $6,000; far past its original goal of $2,500. Combined with the other modders' supporting campaigns, it's up to $7,895. While Wes Johnson seems up for all sorts of RPG fan projects and shenanigans, it seems like the cause to end Alzheimer's is a particular passion: this is just part of Johnson's broader Fallout-themed "Voiceapalooza" effort, a partnership with the Fallout For Hope charity.

The mod itself features a unique dungeon and offers some custom rewards: a plyaer home, a new companion, some Vault Boy-themed power armor, and a new weapon. For details on how to start the quest and all the modders involved in Double Feature's creation, check out the Nexus page (you can also download it for free there). As with previous mods made for the charity event, it was all done in a weekend.

The Kinggath Creations website shows off the modders' other projects, which includes the previous charity mods as well as larger projects downloadable through Bethesda's creations library. One you might find familiar is the Sim Settlements mod for Fallout 4, which we named the best mod of 2017. Back then, PC Gamer's Christopher Livingston said it's "so good it should be an official part of the game."

At the bidding of BioWare's bosses, David Gaider created the world of Thedas, the setting of Dragon Age. And lo, it was beautiful, for a time. But he left the company after an abortive spell on Anthem, and today he's working on a new RPG.

"You play a crew of rogues in an airship that go around performing heists," he says. "And this leads you into a plot that becomes, maybe, your more typical RPG."

Gaider is best known for his dark riffs on sword and sorcery—beginning with the half a million words he wrote for Baldur's Gate 2, before taking on the all-timer Neverwinter Nights campaign Hordes of the Underdark. Then there was the decade he spent steering Dragon Age. But this time, he's shooting for something a little more lighthearted.

"I wanted to do something that was not full-on comedy, but something that could make me smile," he says. "It seems like at this point in the world, we could use something like that. I know I could. So that's what we've been working on, and it's been getting a great reception."

The trouble is, the games industry is currently on fire. "It's been almost three years it's been going through this weird contraction," Gaider says. "The most obvious effect of that is all the layoffs, but that's just really a symptom of all the studios clenching at once. On the funding side, nobody wants to actually commit to a project unless they think it's a sure thing, and that boils down to existing IPs, sequels, that sort of thing. New projects, almost nothing's getting funded."

And so, the praise that Gaider's heist RPG has been getting from publishers hasn't yet resulted in the cash needed to complete it. "Our first prototype was a much simpler version," he says. "We had our vertical slice, roughly of the quality level that we would release at, and a bit more of the game at a simpler version to show the publisher what we were thinking. And then they're like, 'Well, we want to see this further along'. So we had to take that and expand on it quite a bit more."

A lot of publishers today are looking primarily to fund games that are already 80% completed—minimising their risk as they help projects across the finish line. "With one publisher, we said to them, 'Are you really waiting for us to finish the project before you commit to it?' And they embarrassedly were like, 'Well, in so many words, I guess, yeah.' There's a lot of smaller studios like ours that are really struggling at this point."

Gaider co-founded Summerfall Studios in Australia almost a decade ago, and spearheaded the development of Stray Gods—which played like a classic Telltale story, only with musical numbers that adapted according to your choices. Though not a full-fledged RPG, it left me with the same queasy sense I'd felt playing Dragon Age: Origins—that perhaps my love of its characters had led me to make indefensible decisions.

Ironically enough, Gaider believes that Baldur's Gate 3 torpedoed any chance Stray Gods had of commercial success. "I don't think Larian were expecting Baldur's Gate 3 to be a big hit," he says. "They were hoping, maybe, but they were nervous. In fact, they moved their release date because they were really nervous about, of all things, Starfield."

Larian pulled the launch date of Baldur's Gate 3 forward—a move almost unheard of in game development—and plonked it right on top of Stray Gods. "I was kind of raw about that," Gaider says. "Would Stray Gods have been a hit if that hadn't happened? I don't know, but it certainly meant that we had a real hard time getting noticed."

Afterwards, Summerfall made DLC, and built a narrative-focused deckbuilder named Malys, starring an exorcist on a motorbike. "We really didn't expect Malys to make any money, actually. It was a little side project we did to keep all hands at the studio busy while we were working on this project," Gaider says. "If Malys had sold better, maybe we could have had a bit of a longer runway to get this prototype finished up. But you know, we're doing what we can." Finding further funding for the heist RPG is "make it or break it for the studio," Gaider says. "So, lots of stress."

Meanwhile, at BioWare, the series Gaider helped birth has continued in his absence. Dragon Age: The Veilguard came out in 2024, though Gaider didn't play it. "I know too much about what went on behind the scenes," he says. "The ordeal that the team that remained went through to make it. And I know that they were handicapped from the get go. Electronic Arts really did a number on them in terms of setting them up to fail, honestly."

In PC Gamer's largely positive review of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the major complaint was that there wasn't enough friction in its world; too few of the conflicting ideologies which, in previous entries, had caused head-on clashes in beliefs between would-be allies.

"In terms of having characters with agency, I think that's vital," Gaider says. "They need the ability to be unhappy with your decisions, and possibly even turn on you. If you don't follow it to its natural conclusion, it's like playing a D&D game where you know that the DM will never kill your character."

Without that potential for real loss, Gaider reckons, a game loses its tension and capacity to convince. "Is that what the writing team on Veilguard intended? I don't know that's necessarily the case. I think that's what they were kind of forced into, would be my guess, without knowing details."

Back in Baldur's Gate 2, companions could betray the player, or become so appalled at their actions that they drew their swords and fought their former comrades to the death. And even later, in Dragon Age: Origins, a disagreement with a party member might mean losing their support right before the final battle—scuppering your well-honed battle strategies and spell synergies in the process.

But over time, BioWare shifted towards the path of least upset to the player. Companions became less like human beings, corralled into uneasy cooperation, and more like foils you could simply send to camp or a waiting spaceship—ready to be dusted off and reactivated at the hero's convenience.

"That sort of sentiment was getting stronger and stronger even as Dragon Age went along," Gaider says. "This idea that, 'Oh, we can't let the player accidentally screw themselves.' I think that was part and parcel with, 'We need to have as broad a player base as possible, so we can't make it too difficult. We can't let the player get themselves into a position where now they can't finish the game.'"

Gaider thinks that kind of thinking was backwards. "This idea that we can't permanently take someone out of a group, that followers have to be agreeable for purely gameplay reasons, runs contrary against the thing that made BioWare games most popular," he says.

"The earlier games, all the reviews that came out, they always talked about the amazing characters. So why not just lean into what you do best, rather than trying to lean away from it in order to make other things more broadly acceptable? If you're not making a game for the audience that loves those games, you're trying to make this game acceptable to some action gamer who, what, doesn't like difficulty? Who is that?"

If Gaider gets to finish his heist RPG, it's fair to assume it'll hew close to the long-held philosophy hinted at here. A commitment to imbuing characters with inner lives which, at times, override the immediate desires of players.

"We tried 'all the romances are available to everyone' in Dragon Age 2, and I didn't like what effect that had on the characters," he says. "I get it, players want what they want. But from a project level you have to answer the question: why are these characters here? Are they there just to provide enjoyment for the player? And if the answer is yes, perfectly valid answer. But if the answer is, 'No, our goal with this writing is to create believable characters that have agency of their own, and that's part of their appeal'? Then you should follow through with them having identities of their own. They should have the ability to turn down the player. This is not about wish fulfillment."

Of course, if a publisher doesn't bite, Gaider might not get to make his heist RPG at all. "I'm kind of philosophical about it," he says. "Not everything lasts forever. Seven or eight years is a nice long run, and it's been fantastic. As to what I would do afterwards, if that was the end of Summerfall, I don't know. Is it even possible to find a job in the industry these days? Would I be competing with people of my own seniority, and begging for a job?"

One upside, in that scenario, would be setting aside the responsibility of running a studio and letting someone else handle the pitches. "Oh, what I wouldn't give to work on Owlcat's The Expanse game," Gaider says. "The Expanse is right in there with my core interests. I've watched the show a few times, I've read the books. That'd be great. If I could find something that lit a fire under me, that'd be the ideal."

And Dragon Age? News recently circulated that Richard Garriott might get his hands on the copyright for Ultima, so it's not impossible to imagine that Gaider might one day have an opportunity to play in Thedas again.

"If you'd asked me that in the past, I would have said absolutely not. That I'd done my time," he says. "But I do like a challenge. So if, out of some weird alignment of the stars, somebody handed the Dragon Age franchise back to me and said, 'Breathe the life back into this baby'? That'd be a tough one, but I think that'd be an interesting thing to do.

"To go back to the basics of what made Dragon Age appeal to so many people in the first place. And go somewhere dark and dangerous, and do things that will make people upset. I think that's what I would want to do with it."

Before Black Myth: Wukong or Phantom Blade: Zero, there was The Scroll of Taiwu, a Chinese indie game that attracted millions of players since it debuted in early access on Steam in 2018. Now, eight years later, it has hit 1.0, marking the end of a long journey that started before Chinese-developed games became all the rage.

The Scroll of Taiwu isn't an action game, and there's nothing soulslike about it other than the trials you have to survive in its opening hours—especially if you're not already invested in Chinese mythology. The game's own publishing advisor, Leye "Yager" Yu, admits that "the first two hours of gameplay is kind of boring," but says once people get hooked, they're in for life.

Looking at the Steam page for The Scroll of Taiwu doesn't quite do the game justice. Yager describes it as a mix of Crusader Kings 2, Kenshi, and Baldur's Gate. You travel around an open world learning martial arts, meeting people, managing towns, and resolving conflicts that will affect the future. The simulation goes so deep that there is an entire community of players who share strategies and advice with each other in the Discord server.

Going big

Despite finding success with Chinese players, The Scroll of Taiwu's lack of English localization made it tough for Western players to understand. Yager says the game has over 5 million words in its script, which made it almost impossible for devoted fans to translate in full. Its recent full release finally added English localization, and while it's still a work-in-progress, Yager hopes it'll open the door for more players to discover what's appealing about its mix of Wuxia and Chinese mythology.

Part of the reason this was so important for the team at ConchShip Games to finally add was the rising interest Western players have for Chinese-developed games. Black Myth: Wukong's explosive success and the recent flood of Chinese games on Steam is the kind of momentum The Scroll of Taiwu was able to draw upon, Yager says.

While the game hasn't taken over the Steam charts, it's joining a wave from China in showcasing the rich history and culture many of its developers imbue their work with, something Western players haven't had access to in the same way they have for, say, Japanese games. Yager knows it's going to be difficult to sell a game like The Scroll of Taiwu to people outside of China, but hopes to use its striking art and characters to reel people in.

Something special

Despite initially refusing to help publish the game due to how hard it was to pitch the overwhelming number of systems, Yager says he's personally spent over 1,200 hours with the game. He believes in it—no matter how much he says he had to hold the development team back from delaying the release by adding more stuff. Yager says creator Zheng Jie is a "stubborn guy," but "only a stubborn guy like him can make a game that unique, that contains that many mechanics, that much text, gameplay, and joy for players."

Going forward, Yager wants to spread awareness about The Scroll of Taiwu through streamers and word-of-mouth. He knows it'll take a while for English-speaking players to notice it, but is confident that it'll happen with time. To prepare for that, the developers are busy fixing bugs and improving the English localization even now that it's hit 1.0.

Yager, a huge fan of Wuxia, says if he could make his own game, it would probably be like The Scroll of Taiwu. He joined the community around the game eight years ago and is proud to be able to be there now helping the developers of a game he loves. "This game didn't just inspire the indie game developers in China," he says, "the game gives them the idea that if you do something really deep, if you do something really concentrated with indie games, you can have success."

It's hard to imagine now, but Cyberpunk 2077 was an unmitigated disaster when it launched back in 2020. The PC version wasn't too bad, relatively speaking, but the console version was so wretched that Sony literally kicked it off the PlayStation Store. It was so far gone that several months after launch, with CD Projekt just beginning to start the work of cleaning up the mess it made, we recommended that it just fix the bugs and move on. Whoops.

I mention all this because that was then and this is now, and now Cyberpunk 2077—which these days sits comfortably with a "very positive" user rating on Steam—has surpassed 40 million copies sold.

Night City population: 40 million dreamers 🌃Thank you all for helping us reach this amazing milestone! 💛

— @cyberpunk.net (@cyberpunk.net.bsky.social) 2026-07-03T17:23:36.711Z

"40 million copies sold shows the incredible, lasting strength of Cyberpunk 2077 and is a testament to what CD Projekt does best—creating high-quality, immersive stories that keep players returning for years," co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said. "It's a great foundation for our upcoming projects in this universe, including the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 anime arriving this fall,"

It's a fairly typical corpo rah-rah statement, but you gotta hand it to him: It's also true. In an industry where companies typically opt to cut their losses when a new game faceplants off the starting line, CD Projekt kept hammering on it, ultimately turning Cyberpunk 2077 into a genuinely outstanding game and then capping it off with a brilliantly devastating expansion. More than once we declared the game's redemption arc complete, but CD Projekt kept going—maybe in part because studio leadership still doesn't entirely believe it.

"I'm not 100 per cent convinced we went through the full redemption arc," Nowakowski said in June. "I'm convinced that we lost the faith of some people indefinitely, and that's a fair thing. But I do hope we will be able to make it back—if not with The Witcher 4, then with whatever comes next."

A big chunk of Cyberpunk 2077's sales came via the power of pre-release hype—despite its multitudinous troubles, Cyberpunk 2077 sold 13 million copies in just 10 days, and maybe there's a lesson in that but probably not—and it's still well off The Witcher 3, which recently sailed past 65 million copies sold.

Be that as it may, you can't argue with numbers, and 40 million copies sold is a hell of an achievement, especially for a game that once looked doomed to end up like Mass Effect: Andromeda: A nice idea gone horribly wrong that we'd all just rather forget.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, in my humble opinion, deserves the laurels it got—it's a gorgeous, inventive, personality-filled romp with an ending that rips your heart out and stomps it into a pulp fine enough for use in paint. But I'd hesitate to call it 'perfect', mostly because I don't believe in perfection as a concept, but also because there were a few moments where it lost me—like those freaking mimes. Hate those guys.

Anyway, in a recent interview with the YouTube channel Konbini, creative director Guillaume Broche says that—among a lot of other inspirations—he was inspired by games with clear and glaring imperfections, jokingly referencing the infamous Devil May Cry scene where Dante screams: "I should've been the one to fill your dark soul with light!"

"I think these games are really endearing," says Broche. "You see their flaws and think to yourself, 'yeah, it's lame, but I don't care. It's part of the character's flaws, and that's what makes them'. You're not looking for a perfect game. A perfect game is boring anyway."

As a matter of fact, Broche has a theory of perfection that games with a bit of jank are better than games that try to cover them up: "Games that try to be perfect, that try to fix all their flaws—they're usually just really boring."

Generally speaking, I couldn't agree more—neither could my colleagues, who are often ardent defenders of eurojank: "My theory is that it's just like people. People who try to be perfect are boring because they have no personality. Whereas people who embrace their slightly weird side—in the end, are the interesting ones."

As far as the purposeful jank that made it into Clair Obscur, Broche brings up its intentionally-obnoxious minigames: "We knew when we were making them: it was going to be unbearable, people were going to lose it, but it's part of the fun. We thought it was funny. And, well, it's imperfect, but whatever—we're putting it in.

"With Clair Obscur, there are plenty of design decisions that are fundamentally flawed. What we heard a lot before we released the game was: You're making a game that mixes the challenging aspects of an action game—with dodging and parrying—with turn-based gameplay. No-one's going to like it."

I liked it quite a lot, but I'm both an RPG-lover and a parry fanatic, so Clair Obscur was so deeply designed for me it felt almost targeted. Still, Broche admits, "fundamentally there are a lot of design decisions [in Clair Obscur] that, from an outside or business perspective, make no sense at all."

Diablo 4 is easily in the best spot it's ever been. The Lord of Hatred expansion gave it depth where it sorely needed it without ruining its strength as a straight-forward action RPG where numbers go up and loot rains from the sky. It's never had a better foundation for Blizzard to build on as it sets course for whatever's next.

The newest season, the Season of Death Awakening, is essentially a test run for another foundational change that, while controversial, is probably a healthy decision in the long run. But everything else in the season feels like a step back.

Lord of Hatred restructured Diablo 4 around customization. It gave every class powerful (and flavorful) new skill trees, the bones of an incredible item crafting system, and a bunch of ways to curate the endgame into a loop of activities you like the most.

For the first time, Diablo had me excited to experiment with everything as I pushed a character to max level. I finally got to see my best friend—who I convinced to give the game another shot—see how fun it is to slowly build a character up into a demon-slaying god without resorting to a guide. For a lot of people, Diablo 4 finally felt like an action RPG with a vision that wouldn't be thrown out and reworked in a few months.

Almost nothing in season 14 acknowledges this massive leap forward for the game. All of it is still there and just as good as it was a few months ago, but it's largely the same experience with some new enemies tossed into the mix. I'm not asking for another expansion's worth of stuff to do; I just want Blizzard to let me play with all the new toys it's given us.

Missed opportunities

The new "Ruptures" that appear in the world are easy to understand: All you do is stand in a circle and kill monsters until they stop crawling out of the ground. They're a fun little event that brings players in the open world together and supercharges your journey to max level. They lose all value the moment you don't need a boost in XP and want to hunt down specific upgrades for your character.

I had no problem with these mini events losing all relevance in the endgame in past seasons. Diablo 4 simply wasn't built to do much more than funnel you into higher and higher difficulty tiers for better and better loot. Seasonal events were usually appetizers for the main course, whether it was a reworked dungeon type or a set of build-modifying powers.

In a post-Lord of Hatred world, however, season 14's Ruptures feel like a missed opportunity for Blizzard to utilize the excellent systems it just brought to Diablo 4. Ruptures are completely left out of the endgame loop where you cycle through a random set of activities given to you by the War Plans table. They also don't have a skill tree or any way of increasing their challenge beyond raising the difficulty level. As a result, they feel like a leftover from an older version of the game, one that was frequently criticized for lacking meaningful depth.

Instead of doubling down on a new mechanic, season 14 does what older seasons did and abandons them as soon as you hit max level. Unless I'm fishing for junk items to salvage into crafting materials, I've started to skip every Rupture I see. There's nothing uniquely valuable from doing them that I can't get anywhere else in the game.

The same goes for the new world boss encounter—a return of the big Realmwalker demon—and the "Deathtoll Chamber" you can enter afterward. Both of them are opportunities for the same amount of loot you can get by doing all of the standard endgame dungeons. Even if Blizzard swoops in with a significant buff to the quality of items they drop, they still won't be anywhere as robust as everything else in the game. The only thing worth doing is the new boss fight for more chances to craft one of the newly-reworked and super powerful Mythic Uniques, but even that just reminds me that I would've loved to see more shakeups to the crafting if only for the length of the season.

A better way

Blizzard has said that creating new seasons takes quite a while, which means it was working on season 14 well before Lord of Hatred came out. I'm sure it's tough for developers to predict what's going to be a hit with players when you're completely in the dark. But I would've waited another month or two to play a season that properly follows up on the best parts of the expansion.

It's a shame because Diablo 4 is still as good as it was last season, if not better, with the amount of bug fixes and balance changes Blizzard made in the last few months. Season 14 might be a sign that its approach to seasons needs to change so that there's no glaring disconnect between the current state of the game and what's being added. And if that means untethering stuff from requiring the expansion, then so be it.

I usually can't stand the way people online compare Diablo 4 and Path of Exile, but Grinding Gear Games has proven that it knows how to repeatedly expand on a seasonal action RPG. I appreciate that Blizzard found a way to add systems clearly inspired by PoE, like item crafting, without ruining Diablo 4's relative simplicity. But it's disappointing to play a new season that doesn't even attempt to expand on what's there.

Lord of Hatred proved Diablo 4 needed more to chew on and exceeded my expectations for all that it did to a game I already enjoyed quite a bit. New seasons should serve as both an opportunity for new players to jump in and a chance for Blizzard to experiment with new ways to improve the game. I still believe Blizzard is capable of doing that, but season 14 misses the mark.

Just over five years since its early access launch, Valheim will hit 1.0 on September 9. When that happens, the $20 Viking-themed survival crafting game will cost $30, and a new ice-themed Deep North biome will be added.

Iron Gate has confirmed as much in a new FAQ addressing most of the community's pertinent questions, among these being: does this spell the end of major content updates? The answer is ambiguous, verging "yes".

"We will continue to improve the game with bugfixes and quality of life stuff, though for exactly how long the game will continue to receive updates is currently too soon to say," Iron Gate writes. "Likewise, it is too soon to say whether or not there will be more content added to the game in the future—but as always, we will be sure to announce any news on our channels!"

The biggest sticking point among devout Valheim players—or at least, those who post on Reddit—is that the FAQ rules out an update to the ocean biome in 1.0. Given the possibility that no major content updates will roll out after 1.0, and that the ocean biome update was listed in the initial roadmap, some people are peeved. "Hundreds of km on boat just for the ocean to have three things in it and being empty for the most part," mourns one user.

1.0 will also add Steam achievements, but if you want them all you'll probably need to go and do stuff you've already done before (like killing Eikthyr, to name an example given by Iron Gate). The new biome will be available to current save files, but it's recommended you start over.

As for those with sprawling builds that tank performance, the optimisations made to 1.0 won't necessarily improve matters. "While 1.0 includes optimisations to some areas of the game, large builds in particular would not be highly impacted by these changes," the FAQ reads.

"We do however plan to continue working on making the game run even smoother after 1.0. Some of the optimisations that will make it into 1.0, however, include decreasing the microstutters that occur when loading new zones in and out of memory, faster saving, and many other minor optimisations here and there."

Valheim is currently $10 as part of the Steam Summer sale. If you're even vaguely interested in it, I'd recommend snapping it up before the September price increase.

Oblivion Remastered is coming to the Switch 2 on August 11, as Bethesda announced with a trailer featuring a live-action Adoring Fan that conveniently shows as little gameplay as they can get away with. I would love it if, after all the work that's presumably gone into getting it to run on the Switch 2, the PC version saw just a little more love.

Oblivion Remastered was patched on PC a couple of times after release, which is why the wonky khajiit tails and the Dark Brotherhood's lore-breaking door got fixed. But it still hitches when you're roaming around, and characters have weird dark lines across their eyelids whenever they blink, and there's a whole list of other bugs at the UESP.

Even some of the bugs from the original, like Brother Holger suddenly talking like a completely different character, still haven't been fixed—despite other NPCs being revoiced. Maybe like Tandilwe's voice actor saying 'Let me do that one again' it's been left in for the meme? These are the things that start to bug me, 60 hours into a Bethesda RPG.

The Switch 2 version will apparently integrate motion controls and the touch screen and have the full game on its cartridge, which is a surprise given how many games are going digital-only these days. It'd be nice if the PC version was worth playing on the Steam Deck, but right now you're better off with a modded version of the original.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, PC Gamer's 2025 game of the year and absolute all-timer, has hit the 6 million copies sold landmark. If you recall, this is the game that implemented a shoe-stealing system because of a PC Gamer article. So, if you think about it, it's almost like we've reached 6 million copies sold, right? Congratulations to us (this is a joke).

For reference, the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance took six years to reach this milestone, while Henry's second outing has managed it in about a year and a half. It's no surprise: KCD2 is, in many ways, KCD1 with more spit and polish (but with just as much obsessive attention to detail and humour).

"None of this would have been possible without the passion and support of the ever-growing Kingdom Come: Deliverance community," said publisher Deep Silver. "From day one, players have ridden alongside Henry on this journey, and Warhorse Studios looks forward to celebrating with fans throughout the summer at events, concerts, and community gatherings."

Oh, and just in case that community's attention was starting to wander, it reminds us that "Warhorse Studios looks to the future with two newly announced open-world RPGs—including a new Kingdom Come adventure and a journey into Middle-earth."

If you don't remember, Warhorse revealed that it was working on something new and Kingdom Come-branded last month, and also announced a new "open world Middle-earth RPG". That's all the info we have so far, but you can consider me very eager to hear more. I want to beat Feanor at Farkle so hard he declares a blutrache that lasts for 6,000 years. Then I'll utilise my high Thief skill to steal his big stupid gems, too.

A day after revealing that Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is finally coming this fall, Netflix has dropped the first real trailer for the anime's second season. It has all the gnarly neon action I was hoping for, plus enough shocked-looking, crying, or mid-cyberpsychosis main characters to have me thinking we're in for another bummer of an ending⁠—but at least we'll have fun along the way.

This may be "Teaser 2," but Teaser 1 was entirely composed of shots from Edgerunners' first season, so I don't know if that counts. The action on display has the same vibrant, gory, kinetic quality that set the original Edgerunners apart, and I love the touch of having 4:3, scanline-laden footage from the character Roman, who looks set to film much of the series' events on a little retro-futuristic camcorder.

The trailer is pure vibes, but Edgerunners 2's official website has more context for everything going on. "Weak, a washed-up cyberpunk legend, is now forced to live without chrome as he searches for a sense of purpose in a world that's passed him by," reads the site's story synopsis. "Meanwhile, the deadly nomad D sets out on a path to revenge that brings him close to corpo secrets never meant to be found."

Alongside those two, there's also Talia, a member of Cyberpunk 2077's Maelstrom gang⁠—basically nasty cyborg orcs. In the proud tradition of orc sexual dimorphism, she appears to be some kind of sexy waif in contrast to the real freaky boys like Royce we saw in-game. Rounding out the revealed cast is Roman, the aforementioned boy wonder video journalist. I'm sure nothing bad will happen to him.

It's nice to get pulled back into this world, especially with such a long wait in the cards for Cyberpunk 2, CD Projekt Red's next game in the setting. This Edgerunners 2 build-up is making me want to reinstall 2077 and finally replay it for the first time since reviewing Phantom Liberty, though I'm holding out hope CDPR might have a free DLC tie-in in the works⁠—there's precedent in both Cyberpunk itself and The Witcher 3.

Obsidian studio design director Josh Sawyer has made, if you don't mind my saying so, some pretty cool videogames. New Vegas is a classic, the Pillars of Eternity games are some of my favourites ever, and Pentiment is a beautiful story about history and failure that also includes the line "A whole lot of inconceivable shit happens on this hell of an Earth." Which is true.

With all those under his belt, what's he got his eye on next? Well, the answer has less to do with the content of the game than with the people he makes it with. "I don't even know anymore," said Sawyer, when asked what his dream project is on a recent episode of the Human Can Opener Podcast.

"I got to make the games that I wanted to, that I really wanted to make. I wanted to make a D&D game—which I got to make immediately. I wanted to make a Fallout game, which took me another 10-ish years. And then I wanted to make a historical game, and I just got to do that."

So, no worlds left to conquer? Maybe a little, but it's more that the ideas Sawyer has are "not big. I feel like so much now is about working with the people that I like to work with. This is the thing: working even on a game that you're not that jazzed about, if you love the people that you work with, can be awesome." Conversely, "working on a dream game in an environment that sucks—it's never going to be fun. Your dreams are gonna be nightmares."

It means Sawyer says he doesn't "carry around this idea of like here's the one game" that he wants to make. But that doesn't mean there's nothing left that he'd like to try his hand at. "I do still think it would be cool to make some sort of spiritual successor to Darklands—it's a historical fantasy roleplaying game from the early '90s… I don't know if there's any market for it at all, but yeah, if someone just wanted to throw money at me to burn, I'd probably try to make something like that."

Speaking personally, I would devour a Sawyer take on Darklands, which is set in 15th-century Germany and has a big emphasis on (a version of) realism, like a kind of proto-Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Sawyer actually discussed it pretty recently himself, as an inspiration on how he thinks about armour design. I'd be very eager to see what his approach to a full Darklands(-esque) game would be.

After the stratospheric success of Baldur's Gate 3, Hasbro was naturally keen for a follow-up. The only problem? Larian wasn't interested in doing Baldur's Gate 4. And it turns out the second person Hasbro asked didn't want the job either.

Larian famously decided to move on from Baldur's Gate and get back to working on properties it owned. This wasn't a decision made in haste, either. When the call was made, it was still committed to supporting BG3—netting players DLC-sized updates doled out for free—and it had even started work on Baldur's Gate 4.

Swen Vincke told me that he was "vulnerable" after the launch of BG3, and in that state agreed to make a sequel. "You tend to be prone to do the obvious thing, which was really just make an add-on, or a standalone add-on, or start working on a sequel, because it's the easiest route to take."

Larian even had a partially-playable build up and running. But Vincke realised that Larian would be stuck "doing the same thing" if it continued with Baldur's Gate 4—years of working in someone else's sandbox, iterating, throwing stuff out, early access, everything the studio had just finished. So he spoke to his teams, and they agreed: "We should be looking at how we can do stuff that we get excited about." And Larian's BG4 was no more.

But Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast were lucky enough to have former Baldur's Gate developers on the payroll, working at Archetype Entertainment on Exodus, including both of Baldur's Gate 2's co-lead designers, James Ohlen and Kevin Martens.

It was Ohlen, Archetype's studio boss, who Hasbro turned to.

"The day [Chris Cox, Hasbro CEO] knew they weren't going to do it, he called me. 'Hey James, what do you think about doing Baldur's Gate 4?' And I was like, 'I don't, I would fail, and here's why I would fail.'"

Ohlen thought he'd struggle to achieve what Larian did. It had been the perfect studio for BG3, because it already had all the tools and the people. BG3 was really born out of the work done on Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel.

"I wouldn't want to compete against that. Doing Exodus is hard enough, but having to compete against Baldur's Gate 3? That would be insanity."

BG3 was built in Larian's proprietary engine, so Ohlen would have needed to start from scratch. "We're talking about at least half a decade of horror, building all that stuff." He actually asked Cox if he could get Larian to license out the engine, like Black Isle did with BioWare's Infinity Engine. But even if that had happened, he believes, it would have been too much of a challenge.

Basically: Swen Vincke is too hard to dethrone. "Swen's always going to be the master of building those kinds of things. It's really hard to take him off that throne, just because of everything—the tools, institutional knowledge, team."

Ohlen thinks the best team for the job would be one that throws out the rulebook and does its own thing. "That was me back in Baldur's Gate. I was like 'Everyone else sucks and we're going to crush it.' It was us against all the other game studios, we're going to outdo them. And because none of us had built games before, we were all like, 'We're going to do everything different.' And sometimes you need that."

It definitely sounds like the right choice for Ohlen, as he has since left Archetype, and game development, since Cox made his offer, citing burnout as his main motivation.

The fate of Baldur's Gate 4 remains unknown, but a remaster of Baldur's Gate 2, and likely the original game, is apparently in development, sources tell us. And while Ohlen is no longer working on games, it looks like his former colleague Kevin Martens, the other BG2 lead designer, is on board.

Great news: if you were gearing up to deliver a searing oration against something Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and Pentiment director Josh Sawyer said a decade ago, he'd like to hear it too. In a recent chat with the Human Can Opener Podcast, the RPG vet discussed the ways that game developers all draw inspiration from one another, and how he's downright certain he doesn't have all the right answers when it comes to RPG design.

"We learn from each other," said Sawyer. "One of the writers on Disco [Elysium] wrote to me a little while after Disco came out and they were proposing a talk that was, in a way, a sort of updated response to a talk [I gave] in 2012 about narrative choice. From what I recall he was somewhat apologetic about, like, 'Hey, I'm gonna suggest this talk that's sort of—hey, we can do better than this now'."

Sawyer, of course, did not mind. "I'm like, 'I certainly hope, fuckin', 10 years we can do better!' I wrote that a long time ago and also I don't think I have all the answers on this stuff. I'm doing the best I can. If this is useful, hopefully it inspires other people."

After all, Sawyer does the same kind of critical appraisal to other devs' work. "I look at stuff and I go, 'Hey that's cool, but I have an idea how to make it better,' and then I do something and someone sees that and says 'Hey that's cool—or it's not cool—I have a way to make it better.' This is just gonna keep going on."

Sawyer points at branching dialogue as an example of an RPG tradition that feels very "locked" in terms of how RPG devs approach and structure it, but notes that, even there, "We still find new ways to do it, and other people after I'm gone are going to figure out other new ways to do it.

"We just keep inspiring each other. It's not an animosity thing. It's just, do the best you can, [and] get inspired by other people."

Baldur's Gate 3 might be the greatest D&D videogame out there, but Planescape: Torment—with its potent mix of exceptional writing and fever-dream setting—is a close second. And we almost got a sequel, Planescape: Unraveled, but nobody had the courage to fund it.

Unsurprisingly, Beamdog—which has become something of a custodian for BioWare and Black Isle's classic RPGs—was involved. Beamdog boss Trent Oster, along with former BioWare scribe David Gaider, pitched his vision of a sequel to Wizards of the Coast, and initially it went well.

"We actually had some great meetings with their creative team," Oster tells us. "We were down talking with Chris Perkins and Mike Mearls about it, and they were really into what we were doing. We were talking about how we could tie it in with a source book and everything. It was an exciting concept."

Despite the concept being well received, says Oster, Wizards wanted someone else to foot the bill and take on all of the risk.

"When we pitched it to Wizards, they were like, 'We don't have money for external development, we're not doing that right now.' Over time, Wizards has kind of gone through these cycles where they’re like, 'Oh, we'll do all the internal development.' And then, 'Oh my God, internal development's so expensive, we'll just licence it all out. We'll let partners take all the risk.' [And then] 'Hey, wait, these guys made a ton of money, let's bring it internal again.'"

Unfortunately, nobody else fancied taking the risk, either. "We searched around for funding, and nobody would fund it," says Oster. "Everybody we pitched at that time was like, 'Well, why would we spend our money making their IP worth more money?'"

Gaider shared his own perspective on the saga last year, saying, "Whatever the problem, we couldn't sell it... and by the end of 2016, we had to put Planescape: Unraveled on the shelf and start something new. Which killed me, and I almost moved on right then."

It's tragic but par for the course: we keep being robbed by risk-averse publishers. And Planescape: Torment deserves a sequel more than most. Sure, it wasn't a money-maker. Despite ultimately being profitable, it was considered a commercial disappointment at the time. But it's one we're still talking about, one we're still craving more of.

And it's a setting of near limitless potential—a creative dream. A modern sequel could better realise this intensely weird multiverse with the ever-shifting city, Sigil, at its heart. If it was given the BG3 treatment, with a stronger combat system and more tabletop-inspired roleplaying, I think we'd have a new top dog.

Maybe one day. And if you can't wait, Torment: Tides of Numenera, which serves as a spiritual successor, is more than worth your time. The likes of Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb also share a lot with Planescape: Torment, especially the latter, and are just exceptional RPGs as well.

As reported by Polygon, we now have a release window for the second season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. We'll finally see more episodes of the explosively popular anime adaptation of Mike Pondsmith's tabletop setting and CD Projekt's 2020 RPG sometime this fall.

I had to do a double take when I noticed it's been a whole year since Edgerunners season two was first announced, but Netflix has finally begun spinning up the marketing machine for the highly anticipated continuation. The series is taking an anthology approach, following a new cast of characters after the events of the first season.

Edgerunners played a big part in Cyberpunk 2077's redemption arc: I've long maintained that, before the game's 2.0 update actually transformed its systems for the better in 2023, the universal goodwill around the Edgerunners anime led players to approach the game with a more open mind⁠

The power of anime is greater than that of memes about bugs and console framerates, apparently. CDPR had already done some tweaking and bug fixing by the time of Edgerunners' 2022 release, but it was sheer good vibes that got people to realize Cyberpunk 2077 was always good.

I'm curious to see when this new story will be set. I'm less familiar with where R. Talsorian Games has taken things in sourcebooks, but this could be the first new story in the chronology since Cyberpunk 2077. The Phantom Liberty expansion takes place contemporaneously with the main game, but does have one potential ending set many years in the future.

Edgerunners' first season, meanwhile, took place before Cyberpunk 2077 and is referenced ingame⁠—it's equally likely that Edgerunners season two will be a pre- or interquel of some form. CD Projekt, meanwhile, is firmly in a Witcher epoch: The Witcher 4 is on its way soon, and we probably can't expect Cyberpunk 2 any sooner than 2030.

In a recent appearance on the Human Can Opener podcast, Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer talked about how the studio approached balance in Fallout: New Vegas, particularly with skill checks in dialogue and making sure different character builds got unique, cool reactivity throughout the game.

"Some people think I'm preoccupied with balance," said Sawyer. "I want people to build characters and have a good time with them. You have to think a little bit, but I don't like it when players have a character concept that they build, and it's like 'Oh, you just built a fundamentally bad character.'"

After Troika closed and before the likes of Owlcat, ZA/UM, and Larian really took off, Obsidian was practically peerless when it came to this sort of design in RPGs. Much love to BioWare, but it would typically just rely on a persuasion skill to win conversations and avoid fights.

Obsidian's always been great at letting you deploy odd skills in dialogue and the world, like recruiting a new sheriff for Primm with Science, Barter, or Speech in New Vegas. This also extends to combat: Sawyer cited New Vegas' removal of the Big Guns skill and divvying the relevant weapons into Guns, Energy Weapons, and Explosives as an example of design supporting build diversity.

"I don't want people to have to invest in the skill, and then [we] try to support it throughout the game," said Sawyer, referring to the steady flow of relevant big guns a separate Big Guns skill would have required. "Or worse, not support it throughout the game, which is kinda how Fallout 1 worked. If you tag Big Guns in Fallout 1, you're not gonna see a big gun until The Hub⁠—good luck!"

As for skill checks, Sawyer said that he endeavors to make sure a given RPG's skills are always "useful in a really meaningful and unique way." He argued that designers have to build trust with players in this regard—I flashed back to all the times I've sat before a character creation screen and wondered "Is this a game where persuasion matters at all? Will I be punished for wanting to be a sneaky rogue?"

Sawyer pointed to how former Obsidian designer Eric Fenstermaker, who built the starting town of Goodsprings, ensured New Vegas made a good first impression to build that trust. Sawyer didn't cite specific examples, but I thought of how, in the quest Ghost Town Gunfight, a player's Sneak, Explosives, Barter, Speech, and Medicine can all be used to influence how things play out.

"We just wanted to set up the player to believe, however you built your character, it's not gonna be the same experience, but we're not gonna let you down," said Sawyer. "We're not gonna leave you out to dry and not give you something to be excited about.'

The developer caveated that "it's not about perfect balance," and went on to describe one of the practical measures Obsidian takes to ensure each skill gets sufficient play throughout a game. "We have an informal job on the design team called 'Karma Police,'" said Sawyer. "At a few points during development, we'll ask a designer to go through all the scripts⁠—usually in dialogue, but also everywhere in the game⁠—and see 'How often is Guns being checked? How often is Charisma being checked? How often is Barter being checked?

"It's not about 'perfect.' Let's say there's 40 [checks] in Medicine, and there's like, 28 in Science. Great! Get in the ballpark. You don't want to go huge stretches of the game and be like, 'Man, I invested in this skill and it never comes up.'"

Sawyer also touched on one of the great tensions in designing videogame RPGs versus tabletop ones: This sort of reactivity and accommodation is something a game master can do on the fly, rather than having to anticipate player needs years in advance. He recalled a college friend who "bent over backwards" to work with one of Sawyer's RPG characters, an architecture specialist.

"I think that what good DMs and good game designers do is, in RPGs, they want you to feel like, 'Yeah man, I did a Survival run and I got all these cool interactions,'" Sawyer concluded. "We just want players to have that experience."

There's one thing all videogame adaptations in film and TV have in common: they stink. Or at least, that's how it felt for a long time—personally, I stopped adding the caveat 'good for a videogame adaptation' after I watched the Fallout show and learned these things didn't have to be somewhere between middling and godawful. But what do Fallout's designers and developers think of the show?

We know series co-creator Tim Cain loved it thanks to his YouTube channel, and more recently, New Vegas director Josh Sawyer said in an interview with The 41st Precinct that he enjoyed both seasons, watching them as they came out—and Sawyer specifically had some love for the show's interpretation of his game's factions and setting.

"I think it's an amazing adaptation, honestly," he said in the interview. "I know that the bar is not always very high for TV or film adaptations of videogames, but I think it's one of the best that I've seen, certainly." While there are things he might have done differently, he dismissed those as personal nitpicks: "Any writer is gonna look at something and be like 'meh, I don't know if I'd do that.'"

As far as the show's take on New Vegas itself is concerned, Sawyer said he loved Justin Theroux's take on the character and wasn't "too bent out of shape" about changes that were made to suit the script, like the Dinky the Dinosaur landmark being turned to face a different direction than it is in the game (that might sound like an extremely small detail if you haven't played New Vegas, but trust me, people have opinions on this stuff).

"I get why people get upset about that, but also the scene wouldn't work at all [if Dinky's orientation matched the game]," he laughed in the video. "Maybe people will say I'm a traitor to Fallout now, or something. But I don't know, I thought it was a good representation of a lot of the iconic stuff."

That lines up with what Sawyer has said in previous interviews, where he noted he thought of himself as "a guest" working on Fallout rather than someone who'd need a say in how it's represented in a TV show a decade and a half later.

It's been a long time since we last saw an Elder Scrolls or Fallout game from Bethesda. Fallout 4 is now 11 years old, while it's been nearly 15 years since Skyrim—the same timeframe between that game and the release of Daggerfall in 1996. It's wild that two of gaming's most popular series have been left on the shelf for so long, and one of Microsoft's few understandable decisions lately is a resolution to make these games quicker.

But one former Bethesda designer urges caution on this front. Bruce Nesmith, Skyrim's lead designer who also worked on Oblivion and Starfield, thinks that going too hard could end up disappointing fans, as he explained to FRVR (via GamesRadar).

"There's an adage in software development about the process having three corners: resources, time and quality," Nesmith told the site. "The studio decides two of them, which determines the third. If you lock down the resources and the schedule, that decides the quality you will achieve. If you lock down the quality and the schedule, that determines the resources you will need to complete the project."

Nesmith observed that "The three corners need to be roughly balanced. You can't ask the project to be done in a month by throwing a million people on it." Likewise, "allowing ten years for a project creates a cycle of endless reinvention and ultimate failure."

He argued that the problem faced by modern game developers—at least in the triple-A space—is that "resources in most big studios are already quite large". Modern game dev teams are typically in the hundreds, while budgets are in the hundreds of millions. Starfield, for example, had a core team of around 500 and an estimated budget between $200-400 million. At that scale, pumping more money or people into the project is only likely to make it more unwieldy.

Consequently, in Nesmith's view, if you want Bethesda to make its games faster, the only solution is to cut resources. "In my opinion, the biggest risk of shortened schedules is quality, reduced features, polish or bugs," he explained. "The things that are done last end up getting set aside to complete the game on time. And, of course, faster dev times would result in faster sequels. But that's the wrong question. Those sequels risk disappointing fans."

The obvious solution would be to hand the various licenses to different developers. Microsoft, for example, owns both Bethesda and Obsidian—the developer of what most fans consider to be the best 3D Fallout game. Nesmith concedes that "if the right studio is available, it's a great solution". But that "you can't just hand it to anyone."

He also believes that it's good to let a series "lie fallow" for a while. "A franchise that releases too many titles too quickly risks fan fatigue. Of course, too much time between releases can also be a problem."

At present, I would say that neither Elder Scrolls nor Fallout is at risk of receiving new games too regularly. But I appreciate Nesmith's points here. You can't make these games happen faster just by throwing more money and people at specific projects, which could well be viewed as the solution when you have the resources of a company like Microsoft. Managing a project like that is a huge challenge, and even if you had an entire team dedicated to each series, it would still probably take five years minimum between the start of the project and its end.

You're forgiven if you'd forgotten about Star Wars: Eclipse. After being revealed with a flashy cinematic trailer in 2021, all we heard about Quantic Dreams' Star Wars game was the briefest of mentions in a blog post by studio founder and CEO David Cage last year, in which he said, "Of course, development of Star Wars: Eclipse continues, and we are eager to share more with you in the future."

Quantic Dream was also working on a live-service game at the same time, a MOBA called Spellcaster Chronicles, which suffered a fate all too common in the genre when the plug was pulled on it back in May. 115 staff who worked on it came in line for the inevitable layoffs.

As reported by French outlet Gamekult, Quantic Dream's employees say those staff are needed to help with a struggling Star Wars: Eclipse, and laying them off will hurt its chances of ever being finished. They went on strike during a studio visit by LucasFilm to get their point across.

"It's far from being an act of sabotage. On the contrary, we're trying to save Star Wars Eclipse," a developer identified as Jules said, via Google Translate. "We could manage to release it with 115 additional people, and that wouldn't be 'overstaffed': it's what's needed. We're understaffed, like in many other companies in the sector, because bosses know very well that passion will lead people to crunch time and that games will eventually be released. But it's impossible to run a sustainable industry like that. "

Things are complicated by the fact Quantic Dream is owned by NetEase, having bought the studio in 2022. "We've already indicated that we want to talk to NetEase," said an employee identified as Théo, "but Quantic Dream's management is preventing us. We've explicitly asked for them to be at the negotiating table, since we're often told: 'Oh no, that decision depends on NetEase, that's NetEase's budget…' Fine, then bring NetEase in!"

Employees claim that it was NetEase who made the call to end development of Spellcasters Chronicles, while Quantic Dream's management though it was a good idea to continue throwing time and money down the live-service hole. Which certainly makes it seem like NetEase is the organ grinder and management the monkey.

The initial strike is apparently step one in a series of protests planned to run until some time near September under the umbrella of the "Summer Strike Fest" with the aim of making management aware that Star Wars: Eclipse can't be completed without the additional staff who were working on Spellcasters Chronicles. "David Cage keeps saying that Star Wars Eclipse is a particularly ambitious project. So let him give us the means to achieve his ambitions," Theo said.

Grinding Gear Games is on a roll. Despite announcing that the most recent expansion to Path of Exile 2 would be its last update before it leaves early access later this year, the patches keep coming.

Earlier this week, the developer surprised everyone with a whole new box of toys to play with: an entire skill tree for one of its new side activities and a massive upgrade to Unique items that opens the door for tons of new ways to play through its campaign. The final pieces of PoE 2 are starting to fall into place and it's shaping up to be one of the most ambitious action RPGs I've ever played.

I've never had the pleasure of watching an early access game come together like this before. A year and a half ago, I played the debut version of PoE 2 and wasn't entirely sure it would pull me away from Diablo 4. Its stingy loot drops and abrasive complexity didn't feel worth it. But the last few expansions got their hooks in me, and now I'm thinking of skipping the next Diablo 4 season to keep playing PoE 2 instead.

It's hard to tear myself away from a game that perfectly blends my two favorite types of action RPG: Weighty soulslikes and loot-heavy hack-and-slashers. PoE 2 doesn't feel like anything I've played before, and watching the developers start to put the final touches on it has me anticipating a generational addition to the genre.

For awhile, I doubted Path of Exile 2 was going to get there.

Secrets galore

The recently released Return of the Ancients expansion let me finally understand the vision for PoE 2. Like my favorite FromSoftware games, it's an action RPG that refuses to budge on the core pillars of its design. This isn't the kind of game where you quickly turn into a god and mow through monsters like they're nothing. You're an underdog for most of the campaign, scrounging for any tiny advantages you can find to help you survive. And that tension now continues into the endgame, where the world of Wraeclast unfolds before you and guides you toward its greatest secrets and toughest challenges.

PoE 2 reminds me of the way Elden Ring's brutal difficulty encouraged me to navigate its byzantine systems so that I could keep exploring a world I was so eager to understand. Both games demand that you learn their language so that you can start to piece together the logic they operate on, like how the different item tiers are the same form of categorization used for monsters and endgame maps.

Deep complexity isn't a bad thing when nobody expects you to learn everything in one go. I remember when everyone discovered you can land on top of Elden Ring's fire-breathing chariots for a unique way to take them out in one hit—a neat little trick that gives experienced players a way to deal with an otherwise annoying enemy. PoE 2 has a similarly hidden mechanic that was only discovered several months ago when people realized certain monsters drop valuable crafting materials only when you drag them outside the cloud of darkness they create. Neither of these secrets are necessary to know as a new player, but they make you curious to find what else the tutorials didn't tell you.

Return of the Ancients is the update that added a room that only exists for a max-level player to sacrifice their character so that everyone else on that version of the game can receive a free skill point. It also introduced one of the best wands in the game by locking it behind a quest that begins with a seemingly useless item that makes the 'out of mana' sound when you try to use it. I was too young to experience the allure of Diablo 2 at its peak, but PoE 2 seems to be carrying that spirit forward into the modern era.

Finishing touches

I thought the launch of Return of the Ancients would be the last time PoE 2 would dramatically change before its full release, but the developers have proven me wrong in the weeks since. GGG keeps dropping hefty patches that polish the game's roughest edges into a shape that actually feels ready to be released soon.

Not only has it fixed tons of bugs, it's cleaned up late-game mechanics that were either too fussy or way too hard. I don't normally play early access games consistently enough to appreciate how everything gets refined in the final months before release, so watching PoE 2 come together has been fascinating. GGG has managed to carefully improve things without derailing the current league, or season.

Small but crucial tweaks have been made to keep the game's endgame activities more intuitive and consistent as you encounter them. Much like Path of Exile 1, you're intended to pick your favorites and use all the tools at your disposal to specialize in them. An endgame boss that only players trying to unlock the secret Lich ascendancy class once cared about was given guaranteed drops that everyone can use, which means anyone who loves killing gods from the underworld will now have easier access to powerful crafting items.

The recent patch just gave players who fancy strategically laying down explosives to unearth treasure and powerful monsters a skill tree full of cool options. One example: a node that spawns a sentry that strengthens nearby enemies to juice their rewards.

The last few updates have filled in the gaps where PoE 2 felt the most unfinished. I'm impressed by the scope of some of the biggest additions as well as the attention the small things get. I noticed in the first of these patches that there's now a brief tutorial to teach you how the endgame loop of running maps while exploring the endless world map works, which is knowledge experienced PoE players might take for granted.

Even if PoE 2 is a live service game that will continue to expand for years to come, it's promising to see how much effort is going into making it approachable for people who haven't spent decades playing these kinds of games.

All of this is why I think PoE 2 raises the bar for the entire action RPG genre. It isn't aiming to recreate all the classic action RPGs that came before, nor is it catering to PoE 1 players who hate that it never lets you melt through monsters at the speed of light. GGG has a vision for an action RPG that challenges you just as much as it surprises you and I know that because I've seen it evolve slowly over time.

PoE 2 is shaping up to be a one-of-a-kind game that has convinced me the last year and change of early access updates was worth the wait.

Who could forget Dispatch's release and subsequent explosion of popularity, as hordes of gamers gathered to run and romance their own superhero squad; not me. But months later, after stumbling on a new upcoming medieval narrative RPG, those memories came flooding back.

Sovereign Tower's Steam demo released a couple of months ago, and I loved it. It follows the same format as Dispatch, except you play as a newly-appointed sovereign who's managing the realm with the help of some loyal knights who you look after, kit out, and send off to do quests.

The more they complete, the higher level they'll become, becoming more efficient at completing certain tasks. You can also give them trait boosts with varying items, like smelly cheeses and swords imbued with magical power.

Clearly, the meat of Sovereign Tower is nothing like the superhero managing game Dispatch, but the skeleton beneath is still familiar enough for the devs to have taken a look at Dispatch for inspiration, giving some things a second thought.

"There were a few mechanics that we wish we had, and obviously we couldn't add any more," Antoine Tabouret-Loudeac ("Gobert"), creative and art director tells me. "Then there were some of the mechanics that we were hesitating on that we had planned, and when we saw it done on Dispatch, we're like, we need to have it, we cannot cut this mechanic because it's working too well. So it was very useful to us because it's a super useful way to see what works and sticks and what doesn't work as much."

Initially, Sovereign Tower's devs were umming and ahhing about the level up mechanic, which Dispatch clearly cemented. Then there were the character traits, Sovereign Tower's knights originally had long lists of traits, but after playing Dispatch, the devs whittled them down quite a bit: "It was much easier to remember what your character has and to identify what each of these tags does."

But Dispatch didn't just affirm game mechanics, it also showed the studio that there was a real audience for a game like this. "It comforted us in the direction that we were taking," Tabouret-Loudeac says. "Before [Dispatch], when I made the concept for the game, there was nothing like it at all. Then a few months after I started working on the on the gameplay side of things, I saw the first trailer for Dispatch, and I sent it to Courto (Laly, co-founder and director of Wild Wits Games studio), and I told him, 'look, this might be a game that's similar to us, maybe we should take inspiration from it', and Courto told me 'this doesn't have anything to do with what we're doing', and then it really did and so I often make fun of him for it."

It's also just an easy comparison to make for marketing purposes. "It's very easy for people to understand the concept of the game now that Dispatch exists," Tabouret-Loudeac adds. There's also been enough time between Dispatch and Sovereign Tower for fans of the former to try the latter out as I did. It would perhaps have been a lot harder to contend with Dispatch had Sovereign Tower come out at a similar time.

Thankfully that's not the case, and fans of this style of narrative management sim can now enjoy yet another fantastic game—talk about the best of both worlds. "We're happy that Dispatch exists," Tabouret-Loudeac ends with. "And I hope that the Dispatch devs also play our game."

Fallout: New Vegas is an incredible game, and its factions are its best part. The New California Republic (NCR), Caesar's Legion, and the Securitrons of Mr House are omnipresent in the Mojave, and there's barely an NPC in the game that doesn't shine light on some new aspect of each one.

So many of New Vegas' interactions add texture to its factions because, well, that was the whole point. In a recent appearance on The Examined Game podcast, New Vegas director Josh Sawyer said that one of his and his team's key goals for the game was "to make sure that the people in the factions felt like they were humans that were their own people.

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"When a faction feels monolithic," Sawyer continued, "Where every member of the faction is just like, 'I'm this guy, I believe in this thing, and this is the thing that everyone believes in.' One, nobody's like that, and two, it paints too simple of a picture for the player and their decision making."

Sawyer summons the NCR as a particular example of this design philosophy in action. "I think one of the things that people really wrestled with, with something like NCR, is that NCR is composed of a lot of different people, and some of those people are extremely virtuous and well-meaning, and some are well-meaning but bad-doing, and some are actually malicious and petty and they suck. That's a democracy, right? That's being in a republic."

I have to agree that this kind of texturing with the game's characters made New Vegas one of my favourite games of all time. My own personal favourite example? Canyon Runner, a Caesar's Legion slavedriver who is not, all told, anything more than a minor character. He encompasses a lot, though: for all his bragging about the Legion and his fidelity to it, he constantly, subconsciously slips up in ways that reveal he has not completely shed his previous tribal identity. Caesar's entire pitch—that he will remake the world from scratch by remoulding its inhabitants' identities into something singular and homogenous—is revealed as a total lie, all through some dialogue with a side-character.

"You have to wrestle with the fact that it contains multitudes," said Sawyer. "And then, Caesar's Legion, it's like, 'Well, there is an ideology here. And there is Caesar himself, who has a certain intellect that makes a certain amount of sense from a certain perspective, sort of. But then you have his rank and file, who are, for the most part, really repulsive and abhorrent in their beliefs and their outlook.

"I like it when factions and people are complicated and the player, over time, they have to keep thinking about—not just the people they're talking to, but also their place in it, because they're a participant, right? I think when role playing games are at their best, you feel like you are really at the center of these decisions and you can't control everything, but you can control a lot."

Vampire: The Masquerade is getting a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook—titled Bound by Blood, this tome'll contain a Kindred class (with six subclasses), a 4th-level adventure, some extra systems to make being a vampire in D&D make any sort of sense, and a bunch of new feats.

I will start off with something kind before I unleash the ravening beast inside my TTRPG-loving heart: It's probably neat for D&D players to have a supplementary book that lets players fully commit to being a vampire, especially given Baldur's Gate 3 put spawn in vogue (and with good reason, Astarion's a great character). I also like new feats because I'm a character-building little munchkin. Also, the art is very pretty.

Now I'm breaking the lock on the cage and setting my inner feral beast of the night free: Are you goddamn serious? What are we doing here?

God damn these vampires

My irritation, to be clear, isn't with White Wolf for this move—it's rough out there if you aren't big old Hasbro, and I hardly blame the TTRPG publisher for cobbling together some homebrew so it can cross-pollinate with the bigger boys. It's a profitable move, one can hardly blame the business practice. They've got an eye-roll out of me, but not much more.

Instead, I'm exacerbated with the entire industry as a whole because, look—I think D&D is a fine game. I've played a ton of 5e and I'm currently in a D&D 2024 ruleset campaign with my cousins. I'm playing a Stars druid and having a lovely time. I'm an avid watcher of Critical Role.

But the overarching prison of one system that is halfway decent at doing dungeon-crawling turn-based combat and not much else isn't great. The main advantage of D&D is that it's just crunchy enough to satisfy numbers dorks like me and just rules-lite enough to please less optimisation-hungry players.

But if you want the best version of what it's offering, Pathfinder 2e exists. If you want satisfying turn-based combat, there's LANCER. If you want to tell a story, there are PBtA systems like Masks. If you want to do horror, there's Mothership. And if you want to do vampires—guess what! There's already Vampire: The Masquerade 5th edition! It's right there!

D&D is the "let's just have pizza" of systems, but there are so many different, wonderful, and interesting rulesets out there and I don't think we should be propping up Hasbro's efforts to get its grubby little fingers into everything. Not just because of how the company operates, but for the sake of the hobby itself.

If you wanna buy this thing to tack on some character options for, say, a Curse of Strahd campaign—or even just your own homebrew D&D thing with vampires? Go ahead, you'll probably get a lot of use out of it. But if you want to play a game with a bunch of vampires, I implore you to play some Vampire: The Masquerade. You're not gonna burn up like a vampire exposed to the sun by learning some new rules once in a while.

The long-awaited fifth chapter of Deltarune hit Steam like an asteroid yesterday, sending its concurrent player count skyrocketing to nearly 300,000—more than double its previous peak player count—and putting the game amidst the platform's top 10 best-selling games. Despite its age and somewhat irregular release schedule, interest in the game clearly remains high. And for those many of you who are interested in it, the good news is that more is on the way.

"The story is still continuing, and more chapters will be added for free over time," a brief FAQ on the Deltarune Steam page says. "We are aiming for a 2027 release! Meanwhile, we will be periodically releasing information on the development progress of the game."

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Deltarune has had kind of an odd, shifting structure over the years. The first chapter was released for free in 2018, and then in 2021 the second chapter arrived, and despite expectations it was also free.

Creator Toby Fox, whose previous game Undertale was also a massive hit, warned that subsequent chapters would not be free. The plan at that point was to finish chapters 3, 4, and 5, and then release all five chapters as a paid game—but then that changed in 2025 when Fox put out Deltarune chapters 3 and 4, marking the game's "official" release, while work continued on chapter 5. Chapters 1 and 2 remain free, and anyone who purchases chapters 3 and 4 will get any and all subsequent chapters free.

Deltarune Chapter 5 came out IDK if you saw

— @tobyfox.undertale.com (@tobyfox.undertale.com.bsky.social) 2026-06-25T21:45:42.888Z

Chapter 6 won't be the end of the Deltarune tale either: As noted by IGN, Fox said in a recent newsletter that work on chapter 6 is going so well, "it’s not unrealistic that some staff members may start working on Chapter 7 before the end of the year."

If you've been on the fence about Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 for one reason or another, this is the best moment yet to play PC Gamer's 2025 Game of the Year. As part of the Steam Summer Sale, Warhorse is offering the deepest discount yet on its open-world medieval sandbox—you can pick up Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 for $24 or snag the Royal Edition, which includes three DLC story packs, for $32.

We called KCD2 "a new RPG classic" in our 90% review—an expansive Bohemian adventure that carries the torch for weird and varied clockwork worlds. It's not a fantasy game, yet it's the most Oblivion-like RPG you'll find these days. It also has some of my favorite aspects of The Witcher 3, like deep conversations, romance, and varied side quests that often outshine the main story.

As for those DLC packs, I can't yet speak to them. Joshua enjoyed the first one that added shield painting, but thought it felt a bit slight. I've heard better things about the forge expansion and the monastery questline, but I'm saving those for an in-progress hardcore mode replay.

To coincide with the sale, Warhorse also released a patch today that, along with bugfixes, adds a free new quest called "A Jester's Visit."

"A peculiar Jester has started to appear in front of the Hangman's Halter Tavern shouting about a strange new game. A new quest awaits." Considering the accompanying art, I'd say Henry is about to get foolish.

It's also worth noting that the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance from 2018 has an even deeper sale going on—just $6 for the main game and $8 to add on all the DLC. You might be wondering if you need to play it before considering the sequel, and I'm here to tell you: no, not really.

I've started and stopped on the original KCD on at least four occasions over the years, and what kills my momentum every time is its clumsy combat and bland towns. Many swear by it and I wouldn't dare stop them, but KCD2 is the much better game. You won't miss out by diving straight in—the story has almost nothing to do with the original and its opening hours assume you're new to the series.

There's a lot more on offer in Steam's biggest sale of the year—check out Andy's roundup of the highlights.

There's a lot going on this week, folks. Monday saw a thick glut of Steam Machine news, and today Rockstar switched on the Grand Theft Auto 6 info-hose. I am here to tell you not to care about any of it. Here's the real story: Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 have got new patches.

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition, and Icewind Dale—Edition? You better believe it's Enhanced—all just got a new 2.7 patch courtesy of Beamdog. This is the patch that entered beta last February, now available for all and sundry. Well, I suppose the beta was also available to all and sundry, but now all and sundry are getting it whether they click a button or not.

It's a doozy of a patch, too. Beamdog says that it's focused on quality-of-life updates for the Infinity Engine games this far out (14 years) from their Enhanced Edition releases, and the two big ones in 2.7 are: Steam cloud saves that work how they ought to (GOG cloud saves work "properly", too) and Apple Silicon support on Mac.

Cloud saves on Steam are now controlled, uh, by Steam. That is to say, if you toggle them off in your Steam client settings for BG:EE, they will be off. Turn them on? They'll be on. You might think, "Surely it always worked like this?" but you'd be wrong. Previously, cloud saves were configured in the gameplay menu for the games themselves—the Steam client settings were a kind of vestigial organ. Which is very counterintuitive and not how pretty much every other game on Steam works, so this is a welcome change.

Apple Silicon support, meanwhile, means the games will now run natively on Apple's ARM-based Mac hardware. This was almost certainly done because Apple is set to phase out its Rosetta 2 translation software that lets x86-based applications run on the company's M-series chips (though it does promise to keep it for some older and unmaintained bits of software). Anyway, it's good news—I can't pretend these games didn't already run like a dream on my M1-series MacBook Air, but now they'll be even dreamier, and potentially a little lighter on the ol' battery.

Anyway, I am as ever very pleased to see these classics continue to get care and attention. Here are the full patch notes for 2.7:

Beamdog Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale 2.7 patch notes

• Steam Cloud saves can now be controlled via the Steam client — Previously, the only way to enable or disable Steam Cloud Saves for BG1:EE, BG2:EE, and IWD:EE was within the Gameplay Options of the games. Now, Steam Cloud Saves are controlled by the Steam client and the individual game properties settings
• GOG Galaxy Cloud saves — now functioning properly
• Added Apple Silicon support — With native support for Apple Silicon, on Mac devices you can expect faster app launch times, overall improved performance, and faster rendering. In addition, laptops will benefit from lower power consumption while playing, leading to longer battery life
• New localizations — We added the following community-translated languages: BG:SoD - Chinese (Simplified), Korean, Russian; BGII - Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Ukrainian; IWD - Hungarian, Japanese
• SoD language switch — Switching to the SoD campaign will now only display languages where SOD was translated. Previously, the game always displayed the full list of languages that BG1’s base game supported. If you are playing BG1 or The Black Pits in a language that SoD doesn’t support when you switch to the SoD campaign, the game will change the language to English automatically
• Dynamic language support — We made changes to allow easier language updates and additions in the future
• Chinese font change — At the request of the Chinese localization volunteers, we have changed the font for Chinese
• Font Size saved per font language — The Font Size zoom setting is now saved per font language
• Indexing Fix — Resolved an off‑by‑one error in rebuilt BIF files that affected some community tools
• iOS Restore Purchases — The “Restore Purchases” button has returned, allowing the game to sync with Apple’s purchase history
• Mobile Keyboard Improvements — The UI now shifts so the text cursor remains visible above the virtual keyboard, preventing cursor loss and mis‑registered taps on iOS & Android
• Android Foldable Support — Fixed UI scaling and touch‑input issues on foldable and tall‑aspect devices. The game now properly resizes when the device’s screen configuration changes
• Android Character Export — Exporting a character now also places the file into the user‑accessible directory
• iOS Modding now supported — The game now stores and reads data from a location visible to standard file browsers. You can manage saves and other files directly on your device or by connecting it to a computer.
• Android Override Folder Optimization — Fixed long boot delays caused by large /override/ folders. Importing is manual via an in‑game UI
• Android DLC Display Fix — The Fists of the Fallen DLC for BG2 now correctly shows as installed
• Android Modding now supported — This update resolves a bug that caused incorrect permissions, preventing access via PC or file browsers. Existing installations with incorrect permissions cannot be repaired. You must uninstall and reinstall the game. Because uninstalling removes saves, export them first and copy anything important to a PC:

From the archives: This story originally ran in PC Gamer (UK) #287.

What stands out most about Knights of the Old Republic II is that it’s less a sequel than a deconstruction. At times, an assassination. Most licensed games, at least those that don’t just put familiar characters into a platform or kart racing game, are incredibly careful. They give us the accepted face of their licence, and maybe sprinkle on a few jokes and meta-references for the hardcore fans. They’re respectful. They don’t tread on any toes.

KotOR 2 goes for the throat. It’s a game about questions and about darkness, and designer Chris Avellone is particularly keen to peel back the more uncomfortable niceties of its universe, such as the convenient split between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and the damage that leads to those labels.

Much of it is designed to invert the original game, as BioShock 2 did with its predecessor. KotOR was, by and large, set in the light side of the universe: a heroic quest, noble warriors fighting evil from a position of moral authority and righteousness.

There was a Dark Side path and moral choices, but it was clear what you were ‘supposed’ to do. Rise up. Become a Jedi Knight. Beat up the guy in black armour who wants to conquer the galaxy. It was the right story at the right time, the Star Wars experience everyone wanted. KotOR 2 uses the same engine and style for entirely different purposes.

For starters, it takes place primarily in the dark—among the poor and criminal-controlled corners of a galaxy still scarred and bleeding from both the Mandalorian Wars and a brutal Sith assault that has largely wiped out the Jedi Order.

The player character is no hero, but an outcast, the Exile, banished for making a difficult decision at the right time, who draws allies not by need or force of charisma but a subconscious Force Bond that binds them (much as the Mark of Torment drew suffering souls to The Nameless One in Planescape: Torment).

Fallen knights. Assassins. Gangsters. Bounty hunters. All of them primarily defined not by their potential, but by their pain. In KotOR we met spunky young Twi’lek Mission Vao and her bodyguard Zaalbar—a Wookiee who owes her a life-debt. KotOR 2 brings us a similar case with bounty hunter Mira and Hanhaar, the difference being that Hanhaar sees this, not unreasonably, as slavery. He’s also a sociopath, restrained only by that one scrap of culture.

Far from a cuddly teddy-bear looking to protect his human, he longs to free himself by killing her, ideally horribly, on the grounds that her death will free him. Yet at the same time, he’s too caught up in the concept to listen when she tries to tell him that he doesn’t owe her a damn thing and can just leave.

Easily the most successful of the team is the Exile’s mentor, Kreia, whose presence can best be described as like going on an adventure with your mother-in-law. Kreia can be mistaken for an assault on Star Wars’ simplistic morality, there for parables such as helping a beggar and then seeing him beaten up as a demonstration that even good acts can have deadly consequences.

That’s overly reductive. Firstly, her belief system is every bit as dogmatic as the Jedi/Sith code, only revolving around balance and self-reliance. Second... spoiler alert… she’s the villain. Like everyone else, her philosophy ultimately comes from pain – betrayal, exile. She’s not a character you’re necessarily meant to agree with, just one there to make you think.

For the most part, doing good deeds in KotOR 2 does result in good things happening. It’s just that the game also wants to explore how the road to Hell can be paved with good intentions, and how good people can fall without realising it. Jedi historian Atris, for instance, is too busy seeing the Dark Side in you to notice how quickly she herself fell.

By this point, you’ve probably noticed something – a lot of talk about story, not a whole lot about the game. Unfortunately, there’s a reason for that. KotOR 2 suffered from one of the most premature launches of the last decade. Not only did it have just a 14-16 month development cycle, but LucasArts ended up dragging it back from 2005 to 2004. It showed.

A New Hope

Over the next few years, fans created the Sith Lords Restored Content mod – installed by default on the Steam version. Much of the missing content, including voice files, turned out to be there all the time, just disabled. This mod switches it back on.

As a result, the KotOR 2 we have now is a far superior game to the one that came out in 2004. The catch is that even at the time it was a clumsy RPG. That’s partly due to the graphics and controls, not helped by KotOR having been primarily designed for the Xbox (which, as we all remember, had a potato instead of a graphics card). It’s partly because of the combat, which was still rooted in the D&D style of BioWare’s past games: a massive clash between cinematic action, constant pausing and barely concealed dice-rolling.

Also, the rush to get the game out in a year didn’t leave much time for niceties. So much of the game feels like it’s taking place in a shoebox, albeit one found a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Great chunks of the game were pulled, much of what was left was rough as old boots made of sandpaper, and the final chapters were embarrassingly incomplete. Some levels were little more than linear corridors containing the same handful of enemies to fight. The already spartan design became downright minimalistic.

Most awkwardly of all, most of the Companion plots were simply unfinished. There’d be a scene on the last world where, for instance, two of the droids on the ship were having a showdown, and then… nothing. We never went back to finish that, the Exile instead having an atrocious final boss fight while being chased by flying lightsabers, in a scene that begged for the Benny Hill music, and then the whole planet exploding with an almost apologetic shrug.

It doesn’t help that by far the worst part comes at the start. The Exile wakes up on the abandoned Peragus station, which desperately wants to be a System Shock experience full of looming electronic horror, but is actually the dullest couple of hours this side of Myst.

Thankfully there’s a mod to skip it on subsequent playthroughs, but too much story is drip-fed here to do that the first time around. Later worlds improve on this, highlights including a two-part civil war on Onderon and a battle between rival bounty hunters on Nar Shaddaa. Still, few scenes have the raw zip of infiltrating Korriban’s Sith Academy back in the first game. You may return to the planet in this one, but like much of the galaxy, it’s in a bad state.

In short, as a raw game, KotOR 2 doesn’t hold up that well. It’s not awful, it sometimes shines, but even post-fixes, it wears both its era and its tortured development on its sleeve. If you’re going to try it now, especially for the first time, it really does have to be for two things: the writing and the characters. Kreia especially is one of the best game characters ever written, never mind in the Star Wars universe, and while the issues that Chris Avellone raises may have been covered in the Expanded Universe, they’re a breath of fresh air in a mainstream game. Even if it’s not quite an RPG classic, it’s very much a game to respect – and a great example of how flipping the perspective on a licence can be endlessly more interesting than playing things straight.

While Vampire: The Masquerade is the obvious option when you want to play a TTRPG where you get to be a vampire, the problem is you need a full table of pretend bloodsuckers to make it work. If you're the only wannabe vampire in your group and everyone else would rather be a more typical RPG hero, your options are limited. Rules for playing a dhampir were included in the D&D supplement Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft back in 2021, but being half a vampire isn't enough for everyone.

Which is where Bound By Blood comes in. The upcoming supplement by Ghostfire Gaming in co-operation with White Wolf will include rules for a vampire class in D&D 5th edition that has blood points to spend, bloodline powers called disciplines to spend them on, and an inner beast to contend with just like they do in Vampire: The Masquerade. It'll also include an adventure set in Vampire's "Dark Ages" timeline, which winds the clock back to medieval Europe.

White Wolf was careful to say Bound By Blood isn't the only thing they've got going on, as the publisher recently revealed it had something big to announce at the upcoming Gen Con event and a few doomers online decided this was it. "We're very excited about sharing the love for Vampires with even more people," White Wolf said, "but want to clarify something since we've seen some wires getting crossed: Bound by Blood is not the primary project we're announcing at Gen Con. They're two different projects."

Now that we've washed the taste of Bloodlines 2 out of our mouths, things are looking up for Vampire: The Masquerade. The upcoming CRPG Eternal Whispers promises to be narrative-driven with big Disco Elysium vibes, and Dimension 20's current actual-play series City Council of Darkness has been a fun take on what Vampire would look like if you removed it from the city and crossed it with Parks and Recreation.

Bound By Blood will be released in July, and will be available on D&D Beyond. After that, the D&D release schedule includes some Greyhawk adventures and a supplement for the Eberron setting called Frontiers of Eberron: Quickstone.

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Diablo 4's upcoming season was shaping up to be a big disappointment after the excitement around its latest expansion. Blizzard threatened to completely flatten the identity of the most powerful loot with a change that—while healthy in the long run—spoiled the fun of having ultra-rare items to chase in an action RPG.

But after holding a week-long playtest, Blizzard has taken the overwhelmingly negative feedback and found a promising compromise.

Season 14, the Season of Death Awakening, will bring a permanent change to Diablo 4 that redefines how its rarest items work. Blizzard's goal is to take Uniques, an item tier that was previously pretty niche, and expand their usefulness for a variety of character builds. To do that, it will make Uniques less powerful and their bonuses more random—two things no Diablo player who is looking to perfect their build wants to hear.

Previously, the plan was to ditch the guaranteed bonuses Uniques currently have for completely random stats. Nobody, including me, liked the sound of erasing the identity of the cool Uniques in the game to basically make them Legendaries with a different color. This would've made the game unnecessarily grindy and broken the whole point of Uniques having curated stats that synergize with their unique powers. Why would you want a sword that empowers your critical strikes to not even have any critical strike chance on it?

Thankfully, that's not how it's going to work anymore. Blizzard has given Uniques back two guaranteed stats to fit their themes. The other stats will still be random, but you'll be able to swap one of them out to fit your build.

The solution, as is laid out in the updated patch notes for season 14, is to preserve each Unique's identity while allowing some flexibility with the random stats they can have. This solves the problem Blizzard was originally targeting by moving away from Uniques only working for hyper-specific build archetypes. It was always a bummer to find an item that, for example, boosted your damage only if you invested in fire skills on a sorceress. Now, that item will retain its general damage bonus but could roll stats on it that synergize with cold skills instead.

On top of all of that, Uniques will be able to appear as Mythic Uniques. Diablo 4 already classified a pool of its rarest and most powerful items as Mythic Uniques, but now that title will refer to any Unique that drops with a purple tooltip, like how orange items (Legendaries) are better than yellow items (Rares). These new Mythic Uniques will have maxed out stats when they drop, or when you craft them, giving you a new item type to chase after.

By opening up the possibilities for Uniques, Diablo 4's loot should be more broadly useful and exciting. I was always confident it would be a healthy change for the game, but disliked the way Blizzard had initially decided to handle it. This revised approach is a compromise I'm willing to try when the season starts on June 30.

After an incredibly brief existence, Owlcat has completely removed a controversial new launcher from Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.

Introduced yesterday, the Owlcat Launcher was intended to be a pre-game space for collating news and updates about Owlcat's various games.

"Instead of searching across multiple platforms for updates, news, and announcements, now you can find them all gathered in one convenient place whenever you launch the game," said the studio.

Though Owlcat said it had taken pains to make the launcher as "unobtrusive" as possible—it required "no mandatory registration," said it did not collect player data, and could notionally be entirely turned off—players hated it. The Rogue Trader subreddit and Steam forum were immediately awash with complaints.

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Partially, of course, that's for the simple reason that these sort of pre-game launchers are universally terrible: bloatware that's useless at best and intrusive at worst. But making matters worse was the fact that turning off the launcher did not, in fact, turn it off. It just made the launcher run invisibly.

"Apparently if the launcher closed, the game stopped recording Steam time (because launcher ID is now how the game is recognized by default)," wrote Owlcat community manager Starrok in the Rogue Trader subreddit. In other words, if Steam didn't detect the launcher running, it wouldn't count your hours in the game. "The team decided to use this background process as a bandaid fix for that.

"I know VERY well how that looks, and unfortunately I was not informed about this change," continued Starrok. "I've already communicated with the team about this and tomorrow they will research how this time display issue can be resolved in a different way rather than leaving an unkilled process that eats up memory."

That was yesterday. Today, it seems that the solution Owlcat settled on was to obliterate the launcher entirely. "We are Rolling Back the Launcher," reads the title of a new announcement. "The game will now revert to the previous patch, completely removing any Launcher-related changes. Thank you for your feedback, and genuinely sorry for the frustration caused." Fans seem pleased.

All in all, the Owlcat Launcher lived for about 19 hours, which is slightly less than the life expectancy of an adult mayfly. It's not the studio's first controversy like this, either: back in 2023, fan pushback forced it to strip a data-sucking tool out of Wrath of the Righteous.

Credit where it's due, plenty of studios would simply leave the offending tech in and ride out the wave of complaints. Opposite-of-credit where it's due, I can't imagine someone at Owlcat didn't know how this stuff would be received ahead of launch. Studio decision-makers should probably listen to them.

Loving someone means putting up with all their flaws. In Final Fantasy 14's case, that's shrugging my shoulders and going "classic server tick moment" every time something that is definitely not supposed to happen does, in fact, happen.

That's been happening an awful lot more lately as I've been progressing through Dancing Mad (Ultimate), the game's newest balls-to-the-wall eight-player raid. The final mechanic of the fight's first phase involves carefully placing 16 teleporting arrows in such a way that when four people get smacked with a classic JRPG Confusion status, they can run in (technically towards another player in an attempt to murder them) and get successfully pinged around the arena.

The problem? Sometimes, they simply straight up did not work. I've had static members run right over them, or get pinged off in every direction except the way the arrow is actually facing. That's because, for whatever reason, the arrows teleported you based on where you stepped onto the panel. Players had come up with ways to try and alleviate some of this bizarre behaviour, but having to create strats around janky netcode never feels good.

It's something I had resigned to forever being a little bit scuffed. So imagine my surprise when, upon peeping today's hotfix notice, I saw something I never expected: it's been freakin' fixed.

"Players will now always be teleported a fixed distance from the centre of the panel in the direction indicated by the arrow, regardless of where they step onto it," the brief patch notes read.

"Previously, players were teleported based on where their character stepped onto the panel. However, when discrepancies arose between the server-side and client-side positional data due to network conditions, the destination of the teleportation appeared inconsistent. To address this, this behaviour has been changed so that teleportation is now determined by the arrow panel itself, rather than the character's position."

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Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why this wasn't the case from the beginning—it makes far more sense to me, personally—but I'm genuinely jazzed to see it actually rectified. Nothing feels worse than getting through the first three minutes of the fight, only to have to wipe the pull because of a little server side shenanigans.

The hotfix has also made it so that players with speed-buffing abilities like Sprint or Expedience shouldn't straight-up run over the arrows anymore. It's funny the first time, but certainly not the 10th or even 50th time.

The developers of co-op RPG Fellowship had to publish its season 3 patch notes across five separate Steam news posts, which should tell you just how much is changing in its latest update. Along with tons of balance changes, the new season veers away from its MMO-inspired roots to lean harder into being an action RPG with loot and character builds—a decision that didn't immediately go over well.

The team at Chief Rebel are confident that season 3 will be a turning point for Fellowship as a co-op experience that emulates the thrill of running dungeons with your friends without the baggage of MMO busywork. And a lot had to change to make that happen.

For starters, the old loot system had to go. Community director Hamish Bode told PC Gamer during a recent demo of season 3 that too many players would collect the best gear and immediately stop thinking about it. In the new system, "there's always something cool that can happen," Bode said, like finding a pair of gloves that supercharges one of your abilities.

Bode was speaking my language as someone who has spent the last few weeks playing tons of Path of Exile 2. Fellowship won't be quite as deep as loot-heavy games like Diablo, but the revised item system is an attempt to give players interesting choices to make about how they want to build their characters. It also means there's a real chase for gear upgrades that will help you survive the jumps in difficulty for each dungeon tier.

Necklaces, for example, will now carry random defensive bonuses for every hero, giving you a reason to keep checking for an upgrade every time you find new ones. If you get lucky and find an item perfect for your playstyle, you can now boost all the stats on it through the new Tempering system. From what I saw, Chief Rebel was careful not to add unnecessary bloat that would make it feel like you're gambling for power. Loot has variables, but not so much that you'll be waiting days to see something useful.

Bode said the team is "hyper aware" that the last thing players want is for Fellowship to suddenly feel like a grind. "I don't think it's fun when the game just kind of feeds you everything and kind of plays itself for you," he said. "It's a really tricky balance, but we also have crafting systems so you can have more agency over how you want to progress. Even if you, for example, go for a few runs without finding anything, you can salvage those items and pump those resources into the things that are really good for you."

Bringing back the challenge

Season 3's long list of changes also includes things that are a direct response to players who found the last season way too easy. Bode said the team tried to help onboard new players by making the dungeons easier, but failed to account for the sheer power of its new heroes. "People who were running the new tank and the new healer—it's almost worth saying—broke the game a bit," Bode explained. "It's one of the reasons why we leaned so hard into larger scale testing for this season."

Bode said he personally prefers when games give you the elation you get when you finally kill a frustrating Dark Souls boss. "I prefer to have that because it shows people are wanting to progress through something," he said. "If you go too far the other way and people are like this is too easy and they become apathetic and check out, that's a much worse situation for a game to be in, in my opinion."

Season 3 aims to turn things around from the last season with more challenging dungeons, including a new pinnacle dungeon with three brutal bosses. Every week, you'll be able to run a pinnacle dungeon and receive rewards from any other dungeon in the chest at the end. Completing it will also grant you a Bloodstone, which you can use to greatly enhance your gear.

All of this sounds really promising for a game that fills an important niche you can't find anywhere else. I ran two dungeons alongside Bode as the new melee damage hero Gunde and remembered why I still believe in Fellowship. Gunde joins its list of heroes who feel inspired by archetypes I know from WoW but are wrapped around a core mechanic to manage.

Gunde is a berserker who cleaves through packs of enemies with his twin axes, leaving them bleeding: I spent the first dungeon lining up his AoE attacks to keep enemies maimed and the second watching them melt when followed up with a finisher move that does loads of extra damage to bleeding enemies. Gunde isn't the kind of character I'd usually pick in an RPG, but I won't say I didn't enjoy slicing enemies up instead of casting spells for a change.

Fellowship is still less than a year into early access and already feels like a dramatically better game than it did at the start—and I thought it was pretty good back then. Season 3 is the first time I can sense a vision for the game that won't just appeal to people who need something to do at the end of a WoW season, and I'm extremely curious to see where it goes from here.

Season 3 starts today and you can get the game on Steam for $15, or almost half its normal price ($25) until June 29.

When Atlus announced its remake of Persona 4 (or more accurately, of Persona 4 Golden), a cry went up around the land. Mostly, I think people were rightly excited about Kanji Tatsumi in 4K, but there are a few peccadilloes in the original game's design that some folk—including here at PC Gamer—were eager to see Atlus iron out. Namely, those dungeons, which in P4 and P4G were quite the slog: a series of procgen corridors that went on for around 10 floors each.

"I think Persona 4 Revival should veer off from Reload's changes," wrote our Mollie Taylor last year. "Each of its dungeons are the perfect vessel to go full Persona 5 style. Palaces that serve as grand setpieces for each character, handcrafted to get real into the weeds of their insecurities and internal conflict."

I'm not sure Atlus has gone quite that far. From the snippets we see in its recent Persona 4 Revival Broadcast, Yukiko's Castle and the Bathhouse both look to be the many-floors-of-corridors affairs of the original games, though I don't doubt Atlus has put in more events and NPC dialogue to spice up the grind, much as it did before in Persona 3 Reload. To be fair, we only get a brief glimpse, so perhaps the studio has something more up its sleeve, but that design looks very familiar to me as someone who has experienced a lot of Persona 4 over the years.

One thing which is quite a bit different, though, is the combat you'll be doing in those dungeons. The Investigation Team/Scooby Gang has a lot of new toys at its disposal for fighting shadows, all lavishly coloured and animated. The three Atlus focused on in its broadcast were: Baton Pass, Send Flying, and Prime Time. Baton Pass is an easy one—it's the mechanic introduced in Persona 5 that lets you give your turn to another party member after downing an enemy.

The other two are more novel. Send Flying is a new mechanic that lets you, more or less, turn individual enemies into vectors for disease. Afflicted a shadow with the fear ailment? You can attack it to send it flying into another foe in the arena, inflicting them with the exact same debuff. Which, hey, great. I've always thought that Persona should let me ravage my foes with communicable viruses.

Prime Time, meanwhile, is a meter that fills as you do battle. Once it tops out, you can, well, activate Prime Time, which drops all your skill costs to 0 and lets you hit foes with a "Prime Time finish," which looks a lot to me like a P3R Theurgy attack.

The only other new combat mechanic that seems notable to me is the addition of a Guard manoeuvre in the overworld. Initiating combat looks much the same as it did in base P4: hit a foe when they're off-guard and get advantage, get hit yourself and get disadvantage. But guarding adds a new wrinkle: if an enemy hits you while you're guarding, they'll bounce off and become dazed, letting you either gain advantage in the full battle or else run away.

Which is all very slick and fun, but I do have to wonder what Atlus is doing to compensate for all these new tricks in your toolbox. Persona 4 was not a difficult game (with the possible exception of Yukiko's bossfight), and the addition of these new combat mechanics feel like they'd make the battle system entirely trivial. Here's hoping the shadows get some new toys to make your life harder, or else I'm going to start feeling bad.

Morrowind, the gloomiest and mushroomiest of all the Elder Scrolls games, is getting on in years—and it was never the most polished game in town, even upon its release a whopping 24 years ago. If you're sick of those rough edges, you need look no further than OpenMW, a fanmade open-source engine which makes the game play nice with modern hardware and operating systems. If that sounds like your thing, you'll be pleased to know it just got a huge update.

The full patch notes are worth a read if you want to sift through the technical details, but the big highlights are up top: for instance, modders can now create custom magic effects using OpenMW's scripting API, which means that certain additions in popular mods like Tamriel Rebuilt—which previously would have only worked on the original engine using a script extender—can now be remade the open-source engine.

That and other changes, like the ability for all characters to cast enchantments, are laid out in a video breakdown of 0.51.0's additions (embedded above). Even if you care about none of this, it's an entertaining watch, and some of the new graphical bells and whistles are an impressive sight.

The update addresses a slew of technical issues, too. The notes state 0.51.0 fixes "many Lua-related crashes" as well as "annoyances with gamepad menu navigation." And if you're already mid-playthrough using OpenMW, there's no need to start over—it's safe to use your existing saves with the patched versions, though you can't take new saves into the old versions due to a file format change.

It's nice to see the elder Elder Scrolls RPGs and their surrounding communities thriving all these years later, with superlative fan projects like OpenMW and Daggerfall Unity keeping the games accessible to whippersnappers like myself who were two years old when Morrowind released. If that's too boring for you, maybe give a look to mods like Muffinwind Rebaked instead.