As reported by Automaton, the 2026 CESA Videogame Industry Report, a survey-based assessment of the Japanese games business, shows a sharp uptick in AI adoption by Japanese developers: 85.8% in 2026, up from 51% just last year. In July, a separate survey covering just online game devs showed a 100% rate of AI adoption.

Breaking things down further, 63% of total respondents claim to use generative AI tools on a daily basis, while 22.8% turn to them more irregularly. The survey did not distinguish between disciplines or different forms of generative AI output like code, concept art, in-game assets, or text.

Developers cited benefits including improved efficiency and reduced cost and development time, while "human verification" and avoiding the use of generated material in player-facing circumstances are commonly-deployed safety measures.

The Japanese industry has been far quicker to adopt AI tools than its North American counterpart: Just 36% of respondents to a similar GDC 2026 survey reported using AI tools as part of their job, while 52% of survey respondents believe generative AI is negatively impacting the industry.

One thing I'm curious about is whether Japanese gamers are as vocally hostile to generative AI use as their anglosphere counterparts. Even if there isn't the same social stigma amongst developers, it just looks tacky and cheap when AI-generated assets sneak into a retail game.

The Japanese industry certainly appears to be in a healthier place overall compared to North American triple-A, but I'm skeptical whether generative AI adoption has significantly contributed to that health, and it could very well precipitate quality, player trust, or employment stability issues down the line.

The Last of Us game director Bruce Straley has apologized for singling out God of War Laufey in a comment about lack of innovation in triple-A games.

"God Of War Laufey, I look at that game, and every pixel is mindblowing," Straley said in a recent Edge magazine feature. "The amount of work and skill that's gone into every single frame… I've made those kinds of games, and I'm still blown away. But when I actually look at what you're doing in the game? I'm not excited. And that's nothing against the God Of War team. Just, across the board in triple-A, it feels like there's no opportunity to inject fresh, innovative ideas."

In his apology, posted on X, Laufey said that his comment is being used for "clickbait."

"I want to apologize to the Laufey team for dragging you all into this uninvited & unnecessary negative attention," the director wrote. "I was trying to illustrate an industry concern & my mistake of naming your game is being used out of context & for clickbait. You don't need this. I'm sorry."

Straley didn't take back the central thrust of his remark, however, expanding on his position in a series of posts which place blame on industry leaders for the lack of "clear direction and conviction" he perceives in today's big budget development scene.

"The quest for GaaS & wanting to recreate the next Overwatch, Fortnite, Roblox, etc is not a viable strategy & frankly shows these 'industry leaders' don't know their own brand," said Straley.

"Hot take: There's a lack of good leadership, clear direction & conviction from the ppl at the top, in charge of the money. (Money = stability) I believe if they understand their brand, they could have honest, inspiring conversations w creators to steer our medium to innovate."

Straley left triple-A development in 2017, and founded a new studio, Wildflower Interactive, in 2021. The indie studio is working on singleplayer adventure Coven of the Chicken Foot.

It's impossible to gauge a wider community's feelings towards something, thanks to the simple problem of 'the angriest usually shout the loudest', and even if they're the minority, it usually doesn't sound like it. I've had this problem with a lot of things, but Zach Cregger's upcoming Resident Evil film is the latest victim.

Despite some promising trailers, some fans just can't get behind this film. People have complained about it existing outside of the games—running parallel to the events of Resident Evil 2 instead of a shot for shot imitation. The fact that it will include some liberal interpretations of what the T-virus is capable of has also ruffled some feathers. To which I say, Tolstoy got it right—If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.

I'm going to get crucified for saying this, but here it goes: some fans get too caught up in 'lore accuracy'. Yes I'd be pissed if Zach Cregger started trying to drastically change iconic elements of Resident Evil, like erasing Umbrella from the records or renaming Raccoon City to Badger Town (even though that kind of slaps). But I think we need to have more faith in Cregger, given his clear love of the games and outstanding filmography, which includes bangers like Barbarian and Weapons—bro knows how to make an outstanding horror film.

Lore-abiding citizens

I'm not convinced by the argument that this film will just be a good horror movie, rather than a good Resident Evil adaptation for lore-specific reasons, either. Especially given how liberal Capcom itself has been with the 'established truth' in Resident Evil.

While the main story remains the same across the originals and remakes, some smaller details have been changed for the sake of creating a better story, or just for funsies. One example that comes to mind is Krauser's allegiance in Resident Evil 4. In the original, he's working for Wesker and is sent to grab a sample of the ambfer, but in the remake he's on Saddler's side, working as one of his henchmen. Why change this? Well, it connects to another change the remake made: making Saddler more menacing and mysterious.

Instead of having him wander around the village and speaking to Leon directly, Saddler works in the shadows during the remake and only shows himself more towards the end of the game. But this means he's not out and about for vital moments, and someone had to grab the amber for him. If Krauser had just taken it back to Wesker then the game would have ended there and then, a real anti-climax. So the decision was made to turn Krauser into Saddler's henchman, so he could chill out in his evil lair while also progressing the story.

Likewise, Capcom changed Brad Vickers' death in the Resident Evil 3 remake, having him bitten by some joe-schmo zombie while saving Jill instead of getting turned into a shish kebab by Nemesis.

When did the outbreak kick off in Raccoon City? Well if you're going off the original games, there'd been several outbreak scenarios by September 25th and the city is already feeling it, Resident Evil 3 which was made in conjunction with Resident Evil 2 at the time even added a military blockade which wasn't there when Leon and Claire entered the city. But the Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes make it clear that September 25th is the main start, with just one example of a 'cannibal' case being cited a few weeks prior.

Capcom's most recent entry into the series, Resident Evil Requiem, actually takes some lore from the Outbreak spin-off series, which contradicts Resident Evil 2 and 3 in parts. It also uses Leon's original story of being late for his first day at the RPD instead of the remake retelling which says he was told to stay away, and decides that Raccoon City wasn't completely destroyed after the thermobaric missile.

Let's also not forget that Requiem does a 180 on Spencer's character. Turning one of the most inhumane villains in the series into a remorseful old man whose last act in this world is to undo his life's work in an attempt to make the world a better place. That was wild.

But one of the funniest decisions Requiem made was Zeno. It was so clear that the devs wanted to drag Wesker up from the bottom of that volcano, but just couldn't justify it, so they just went 'fuck it, there's a clone of Wesker who is genetically predisposed to wearing trenchcoats and sunglasses'—but I thought Zeno was great, so no complaints here.

I don't mean to nitpick any of this—that's not the point. In fact, I really appreciate how Capcom treats Resident Evil as an ever-evolving story. Not having to be unwaveringly loyal to the lore means the team can make the best games possible, which sometimes means changing old choices so it works better now. The latest games in the series and remakes are better for it.

The T-virus has also been shown as an ever evolving threat, with Requiem adding a twist which makes the infected remember and reenact their most prominent memories whether that be cleaning, cooking, or eating loads and getting angry. So I think Cregger is well within his rights to play on how the T-virus will affect the infected in his film.

For me, the key to a good Resident Evil adaptation is all in the vibes—understanding what makes these games so scary and how to best honour its survival horror roots, which it seems Cregger gets. But as with everything, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. Even if I am super excited to see a Resident Evil movie that understands vibes over a strict adherence to lore, I'll wait until I see the film to judge it fairly.

So give Cregger some grace for pete's sake. I, for one, am just happy the whole film industry hasn't been forever scared off from trying to adapt the games by Paul W. S. Anderson.

In a new VGC interview, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi revealed that the upcoming JRPG is looking at a 200GB install size, bigger than almost any game out there, and certainly an outlier among singleplayer RPGs.

Hamaguchi was responding to a question about Revelation's retail, physical version. It was previously disclosed that Revelation would require additional downloads alongside the two blu-ray discs that come in the box. We're not even part of that particular conversation on PC⁠—we're lucky to get a download code in a plastic box these days.

"Things are still getting worked out, but it’s probably going to be around 200GB of game," Hamaguchi said. "I understand there are a lot of opinions about this topic, but at the end of the day, the fact is we need to overcome the hardware to a certain extent."

That's one big boy. For context, FF7 Remake requires 100GB of available hard drive space on Steam, while Rebirth demands 155⁠—Revelation's full system specs are not yet up on its own page. All told, the FF7 Remake trilogy will weigh in at 455 GB of space. While the original PS1 game was quite the contender in its time, shipping on three CDs, at the end of the day it consisted of about a gig and a half of data⁠—1.3 according to TheGamer, and 1.7 according to GamingBolt.

I think the biggest install I've ever tolerated was 150GB of Destiny 2, but I'm a different person now. Call of Duty has grown infamous as a hard drive hog, but it's also relatively modular. At a time of brutal storage markups amid the RAMpocalypse, 200GB is a tough ask for one game, but Revelation might be one of the rare few with the star power to pull it off.

It's generally agreed that this is a very bad time for the videogame industry. There's some disagreement on just how bad it is—Tim Cain says it's not as bad as the infamous crash of the early 1980s, Brenda Romero says it's worse—but the bottom line is that if you're comparing your current situation to that very specific moment in time, the situation is definitely not good.

In a new Knowledge newsletter, originally published in Edge magazine, numerous veterans of the game biz shared their thoughts on the industry's troubles, and what might be done to address them. It's a very interesting discussion, but also a bit disheartening to some extent, because several make the point that the real problem goes way beyond just videogames.

"It's impossible for me to look at this as a game industry problem, when really it’s the result of this much bigger, complex system that we’ve allowed to be captured by greedy, rapacious forces," former Arkane Studios creative director Harvey Smith said.

Pointing to Redfall, the game that preceded the closure of Arkane Austin in 2024, Smith continued, "Instead of just being crushed and thrown to the wind, maybe those people would have figured it out and then, another cycle along, they would have had another Dishonored.

"And, even if they just made the occasional hit—one out of every three or whatever—wouldn’t you want to hold onto that? I guess the answer is no. You wouldn’t want to do that, if there’s an opportunity cost where instead you could put that money into AI, and even if it’s a bubble, your share price goes up massively."

Other developers shared similar thoughts. "I don’t think our current financial models are set up for art or entertainment," Kitfox Games co-founder Tanya X. Short said. "I just don’t think art is what capitalism is designed to nurture. But humans are."

Ultima Online and Star Wars: Galaxies vet Raph Koster, whose Playable Words studio recently launched a new MMO called Stars Reach, said "systemic dynamics are what really make this happen," and that "absent regulation, it develops into market concentration, followed by cartels, followed by monopolies. That’s intrinsic in how it works."

Sam Barlow, known for games including Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immorality, put the situation in even starker terms: "Ultimately, to fix what’s broken in the videogame industry, we might have to fix reality."

It's a depressing thought alright, particularly given humanity's seeming drive to do the opposite of 'fixing things,' but it's hard to dispute the point when the mainstream videogame industry is busy swallowing itself via multi-billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions that seem to inevitably lead to massive layoffs and increasingly constricted creative decisions. Earlier this year, Devolver Digital, which went public in 2021, announced its intent to get off the stock market because the videogame business is simply not compatible with the market's demands for "predictable, sequential growth"—a stark admission that the system as it stands just isn't working.

Despite the gloominess of the situation, Smith said he's "an optimist," and he believes that "people will keep coming together and keep making cool things."

"The model might be different, the structure of it all might be different, but I’m hopeful there’ll always be a market for that, as long as people are brilliant and creative, and they want to do good work," he said. "That’s what gives me hope. As long as I see that, I’m like, we’re going to come out okay in the end. It may suck for a while, we may have to depose some kings, but it’ll be okay."

The full report covers a lot of ground, and features commentary from other industry veterans including Shawn Layden, Tim Sweeney, Craig Duncan, and Amir Satvat, who was honored at The Game Awards in 2024 for his work assisting laid-off game developers. It's worth a few minutes to read in full—check it out at edge-online.com.

While Monster Hunter Wilds' performance issues dominated the conversation about its reception on PC, one of the other ongoing sources of player frustration was the entry's approach to difficulty. Initially, a number of players thought the game was too much of a sleepwalk—but once later updates started amping up the threat level, many of those same players thought Capcom's solutions were inelegant, relying on arbitrary increases to monster damage.

In an interview with PC Gamer at this year's Tokyo Game Show, Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance director Takuro Hiraoka said Capcom's goal for the base game was to avoid driving away newer players—but he's working to ensure the expansion's endgame will satisfy players who thought its approach to difficulty missed the mark.

Speaking via translator, Hiraoka said balancing difficulty is "one of the most challenging things to get right in a game," and his objective—first and foremost—is to prevent a situation where players don't feel like they can finish the game they've purchased, because it's not likely that those players will ever come back.

"In my mind, that's where the difficulty curve should be for Wilds, and I think we achieved that—but the player base was so good and so skilled. We had a bit of a gap in expectations. Maybe players got better than we expected in the intervening years," Hiraoka said. "We've grown the audience greatly since Monster Hunter: World, and that was a game where a lot of players dropped off before finishing the story because it got too hard too quickly. We're trying to tackle that issue, which I see as a problem."

The reception to Wilds' difficulty, he said, has been a learning experience for Capcom, informing how the studio is working to appeal to "not just the hardest of the hardcore" with the Ascendance expansion while making sure challenge-oriented players don't feel alienated by the effort.

"We expect that if you purchase the DLC, you're going to want to see as much of the story that we've presented as possible—but for players who want to go far beyond and have the really toughest challenges, we expect that the endgame loop is what really satisfies their needs," Hiraoka said. "We're working on that balance at the minute."

Along similar lines, Hiraoka said that the aggression showcased in Capcom's recent Ascendance weapon breakdown videos shouldn't lead players to believe that they'll be able to completely outclass monsters with their new Boost Bracer attacks. While the videos are edited to highlight the impact of those new mechanics, he said it's "not quite so constant and aggressive" over the course of an actual hunt.

"There is a cadence to it, where the player is building a gauge, keeping an eye on how many charges they have, and deciding when they want to bust out those actions. And you only have a certain amount of time in boost mode whenever you do activate it," Hiraoka said. "Overall, the player hasn't become this hyperaggressive, constant demon mode type of presence. It's a new tool in your box. How to strategize on when to use it, and the way it changes each weapon's gameplay, is for the players to discover."

Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance launches in 2027. You can wishlist the expansion on Steam now.

The Hollywood Reporter says noted huge guy Alan Ritchson, best known as the star of the popular Prime series Reacher, is in talks to take the lead on Sony's upcoming Helldivers movie. If negotiations are successful, Ritchson will step into the role left behind by fellow huge guy Jason Momoa, who dropped out of the project in June.

The Helldivers film was first announced in February, with Momoa starring and Justin Lin, known for his work on the Fast and Furious films, set to direct. Reasons for Momoa's withdrawal just a few months later weren't provided, but given his star power, it was a blow.

But his departure also represents a big opportunity for Ritchson, whose own star has risen rapidly following the debut of Reacher in 2022. Ritchson has appeared in numerous movies in the past—more than I realized, frankly, I'd never heard of the guy before he started wandering into small towns and breaking bad guys in half like they were dry twigs— but according to THR this would be his first time actually headlining a major feature film.

I'm kind of torn on the casting, frankly. I'm sure he'll be fine in the role—along with being huge, he's also got easy on-screen charisma—and action is definitely his thing. But I can't help wondering if maybe he's a little off for the role, too. To me, Helldivers is about unremarkable, anonymous guys being fed into the meatgrinder of fascist imperialism, and Ritchson comes off as a little too heroic (and beefy) for that.

I may be assuming too much about the film, but to me, there's really only one true John Helldiver, and it's this guy:

Or at the very least, someone who looks like him: A soft, compliant man of unremarkable talent who's suddenly realized that he's made a very big mistake. Can you see Alan Ritchson pulling off this face? I sure can't.

The Helldivers film is currently slated for release on November 10, 2027, although given that it doesn't have its lead actor fully nailed down yet, I wouldn't be too shocked if that gets pushed back.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming! Not to us on Team PC, mind: It will eventually, but right now it's a strict console exclusive. Why? Hard to say: Publisher Take-Two Interactive has taken pains to reassure PC gamers that they're very important and loved, but also, y'know, not now.

The latest reassurance to gamers on personal computers came during Take-Two's annual shareholders meeting, held yesterday, during which Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked about the potential impact of PlayStation 5 Pro shortages—ironically, driven at least in part by the looming launch of GTA 6—on the company's plans for releasing the game on PC.

After clarifying that the question is really about "the cadence of PC launches," Zelnick continued, "The strategy of the company is over time, generally speaking, to launch for any platforms for which there's a meaningful audience. But that isn't always the case, and certainly if platforms were no longer viable, we would change that strategy. And I would note that the PC platform is becoming more and more important to our company over time."

So, what does that mean? Essentially, that Zelnick doesn't want to talk about it: GTA 6, for better or worse, is a console exclusive, and that's clearly where the studio's focus is.

Which isn't to say Zelnick's response isn't confusing, but that's something of an ongoing pattern: In May he said PC can account for up to half the total sales of major game releases, but that GTA 6 is debuting on consoles because Take-Two is focused on "serving the core consumer," which apparently does not include PC gamers—those gamers who, you may recall, can account for up to half the total sales of major game releases.

Those struck me as inherently contradictory statements, and saying the PC is "becoming more and more important" when it's clearly already very important doesn't really clear that air. I can understand why Zelnick wouldn't want to just come out and state the obvious reason for holding back GTA 6 on PC—double-dipping—but if he did, we'd at least be able to relax and say, 'Well, yeah, that makes sense.'

Speaking of not wanting to talk about things, Zelnick was also asked about GTA Online during the meeting, to which he reminded attendees that GTA 6 is "a singleplayer experience," and that GTA 5 Online "continues to be a robust business for us" that Take-Two will continue to support. The CEO of Twitch thinks GTA 6 multiplayer will come out next year, but it's not entirely clear whether he's speculating or relaying inside info.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19. We'll get it someday.

In a previous life, long before I began making millions writing about videogames professionally, I wrote marketing copy for a finance firm I still don't really understand. Do you know the fine art of embedding payment iframes in customer payment gateways? I did. Once. Do you know the riotous history of the SWIFT international banking system? What about SEPA? No? What a sheltered life you must lead.

My point is this: absolutely nothing is more interesting, cooler, or sexier than finance and banking. We all know it. There was a whole song that was pretty much about just that. And now, I have integrated this glamour into Grand Theft Auto 5. I have installed Realistic Bank System – San Andreas ONE.

Exciting times: I can get into debt now. The thrill of thrills is that San Andreas ONE lets you apply for lines of credit in ways that are fascinatingly reminiscent of real life. GTA 5's protagonists even get actual, meaningful credit scores (based on… something) that impact their eligibility to open new lines of the stuff. Franklin's was 680 (Good), in case you're wondering. That gave him a positive soft eligibility for getting a loan. Yes, this thing has soft and hard credit checks.

Anyway, I got a $30,000 line of credit and set it as my default payment method. Anything I purchased in GTA 5 would go onto the credit card, not my actual money, at least until I maxed the thing out. This was largely immaterial, as in my position as megacelebrity and CEO of Facebook, I am incontinentally rich. But still, nice to have.

The only thing that didn't quite take was the mod's implementation of physical bank branches. I could go in, sure, and mix with the hoi polloi who also wander in to do their banking, but I couldn't actually interact with the teller. In fairness, this might be because of the constant, chaotic churn of my modded Los Santos, which is ever disgorging flaming corpses in and around their desks. I guess it would be sort of hard to work in those conditions.

If you're like me, you've probably become increasingly disheartened almost by the day at just how hard it's becoming to distinguish real photos from fake, AI-generated ones. It does not bode well for the future. There are plenty of suggested solutions, but I like one I just learnt about in particular, in the form of the upcoming CAIM1 camera.

The company, Caim, says it "is the world's first camera that attests human origin of your moments the second you press record and gives physical and open verifiable proof."

Even more surprising than this, though, is where I heard about the camera: Noctua's X page. Yes, the maker of the absolute best fans for your gaming PC apparently also makes the little fan that goes inside this camera. I suppose that explains the colour scheme.

The photo on Noctua's X post shows the little fan inside—the sensor that sits in front of it has been removed. It seems the camera itself doesn't come with a lens, either. The company says it's a "BYOL: bring your own lens" kind of deal.

Noctua has a separate page explaining how it keeps the camera cool and why it went with the specifc fan it did. The fan in question is the NF-A4x10 5V PWM, which Noctua says "provides a combination of compact dimensions, strong airflow and pressure performance, low-noise operation and precise PWM speed control."

"Using a conventional 12 V fan," the company says, "would have required an additional step-up converter." But this would of course take up more room and chew through more of the battery life, plus create more "electrical switching noise and ripple."

Noctua also explains that the fan's bearing system and motor drive helps prevent vibrations and "tonal noises" which do, indeed, seem very important to keep quiet in something like a camera, given the sensitive nature of the sensor and optics.

Given Noctua has consistently impressed us here at PC Gamer by how quiet its fans are despite pushing through plenty of air, it makes sense that its fans are being sought by other kinds of manufacturer than PC ones. Heck, we've seen a Noctua fan in a gaming mouse, so I suppose a camera shouldn't really be that surprising.

The specific camera here seems like a particularly useful one to lend a hand towards, though. Combatting AI fakery will surely be an ongoing battle over the coming years; it'll be interesting to see which methods for doing so will stick around.

The camera company says, "We've partnered with leading security hardware innovators Tropic Square to integrate TROPIC01. From the moment you hit record, your sessions are locked behind an auditable hardware-encrypted pipeline, ensuring that what you capture belongs exclusively to you."

Apparently the verification—the crypto proof—is stored on an "immutable decentralised infrastructure." The proof is open and accessible for anyone to verify, too.

I'll admit it, I'm normally a bit of a graphics settings snob. 25+ years of PC gaming has conditioned me to think that "Low" is an option to be avoided on everything but the most budget of rigs, or the most demanding of games.

But I've just finished my early performance and image quality testing of Control Resonant, and it's remarkable how good the open world looks in motion with everything turned down to the minimum. The clip below was recorded at 1080p, Low graphics preset, with ray tracing turned off:

I appreciate you're likely viewing this on a phone screen, so it's difficult to get a bead on the details. And the video compression does the clip no favours once you fullscreen it. But those Manhattan streets still look pretty good with all the options cranked down.

I think what we're looking at here, more than anything else, is a very strong art style. The details of the buildings remain distinct, the contrast between light and shade as I wind my way around the corners is prominent, and the non-ray traced shimmering puddles still look good.

There's a real sense of scale here, too. While the buildings in the background are shrouded in haze to obscure any uglies, they work with the lighting to create a very evocative, atmospheric effect. Here's an image taken at 1440p Low (again, with ray tracing off), to show how the graphics scale with the resolution at these settings.

And my eye is continually drawn towards the reactivity of the environment. Control Resonant likes to play with its semi-destructible world elements, pulling broken fragments of them into Dylan's wake when he sprints, and throwing them all over the shop mid-combat. There's a lot going on here, but most of it still looks more than acceptable with the options turned down.

Which is good news for those of you with less-than-top-tier rigs, as there's some performance to be found when you drop the settings. Yes, you'll notice some plastic-looking faces in the cutscenes with everything set this low, and the odd shopfront sign suffers from low-res textures. But overall, the effect in motion (while you're actually playing the game) is still remarkably good.

In fact, I struggle to think of a better-looking big-budget game with all the options dropped. Halo: Campaign Evolved, perhaps? It's a close run thing, but I'd still pick Control Resonant out of the two. Perhaps we're entering an era of reasonable low settings becoming the norm, rather than the exception?

Given the price of graphics cards right now, one can only hope.

Over the last two weeks, Capcom dropped a parade of weapon breakdown videos showcasing the new Boost Bracer mechanics coming in the Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance expansion. Serving as a sort of on-demand sicko mode, the Boost Bracer lets hunters juice their combat actions with additional speed and impact, and adds some deliciously over-the-top attacks to the existing weapon movesets.

PC Gamer spoke to some of the lead Monster Hunter developers at TGS to pick their brains about how the Boost Bracer evolves the flow of Monster Hunter combat—and which weapon they expected to gain the most fans with its new moves. Asked what weapon they'd stake 10,000 yen on climbing the popularity rankings in Ascendance, one of the developers had an immediate answer.

"Hammer," series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto said without hesitation. "I think the hammer should definitely go up a place or two."

As a hammer main myself, my natural inclination is to cosign Tsujimoto's objective appraisal of the weapon's self-evident efficacy, utility, and inherent nobility. But I'm obligated as a journalist to acknowledge that there might be some slight favoritism in play.

Tsujimoto, who's worked as Monster Hunter series producer since the release of Monster Hunter Freedom 2 in 2007, has a decades-long record as an avowed hammer diehard. At the 2023 Justdan Game Festival in Taiwan, he revealed his Monster Hunter Rise guild card, which confirmed that he'd used the hammer in each and every one of his 895 completed hunts.

He literally doubled down on his hammer devotion in prerelease interviews for Monster Hunter Wilds: Asked by PlayStation Asia how he'd utilize mid-hunt weapon swapping—a new feature in Wilds—he said "both of my weapons will be hammers."

To Tsujimoto's credit, and at the risk of revealing even more of my personal biases, I'll note that the hammer's Boost Bracer toolkit does look pretty sick. In its Ascendance hammer breakdown video, Capcom showed off the return of Rise's Impact Crater switch skill as the new attack that'll let hammer hunters enter boost mode. And once they've engaged sicko status, they'll have access to a mid-charge boost dash for repositioning and closing distance, as well as a brutal new one-armed slam that can follow up the hammer's heaviest charged attacks.

If you suspect this coverage has a compromising pro-hammer slant—and at this point I suppose I can't blame you—Ascendance director Takuro Hiraoka offered a second opinion: While the long sword has always enjoyed its place at the top of the MonHun weapon popularity rankings, he said gunlance will likely win over some converts.

"There's definitely an appeal—a special kind of romance—to gunlance this time that'll maybe see it go up the rankings as well," Hiraoka said.

If you haven't seen the Ascendance gunlance breakdown, I should clarify that the appeal in question involves using the gunlance's explosive shells to perform airborne plunging attacks and overheated stake thrusts. If that isn't a special kind of romance, I don't know what is.

Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance launches in 2027. You can wishlist it on Steam now.

Slay the Spire 2 isn't just one of the most popular new games of 2026, it's the most popular deckbuilder ever. 574,638 people were playing the game simultaneously at launch, which vaporizes the genre's record on Steam. It's the first mainstream-ish deckbuilder, and still the most-played card game on Steam by far (Magic: The Gathering Arena has about 1/7th as many people playing it on average).

With several months of time with its substantial early access release, we've brought together a panel of editors to share their sharpest thoughts on Slay the Spire 2's design, cards, best bits, and annoyances.

• Evan Lahti - Strategic Director, PC Gamer: 426 hours, 441 runs as Silent, Monster Train 2 evangelist, 30-minute wins with every character, plays fast and loose
• Harvey Randall - Staff Writer, PC Gamer: 212 hours, won at least once at A10 on every character
• Austin Wood - Senior Writer, GamesRadar+: 256 hours, won an A10 streak of every character, one by one

Act 1 is too punishing and too boring

The easiest way to clear Act 1 reliably is just to rest at every opportunity. This is the main reason that the Miniature Tent relic is the absolute turbo nuts in Act 1 but just good later on. The entire act is a health check, throwing tons of unavoidable damage at you immediately and forcing you to either high-roll a monstrous build within 10 cards or top up for the HP tax of the final boss. Act 1 almost feels balanced around Ironclad, leaving the other characters to just take their lumps.

The current structure, especially in the godforsaken Overgrowth, sucks the life out of some of the most enjoyable early decisions in Slay and reinforces the snowballing nature of the game. Aggressive pathing and drafting are not even worth thinking about a lot of the time. If you don't spike within the first five floors—something like Cursed Pearl into a fat shop or Silken Tress handing you an "I win" card—you're usually in for a tame Act of conservative plays. If you do roll high out of the gate, the Act just becomes a stomp.

All of this skews Neow relics toward explosive options like Silver Crucible, and it results in a lot of dull or short runs. There's just too much mandatory damage. I'd like to see some difficulty cut out of Act 1 and injected into Act 3. More runs would actually get off the ground, more meaningful decisions would be on the table in Act 1, and there'd be a bigger challenge to measure decks against. —Austin Wood, senior writer at GamesRadar+

Shiv spam & Sly is the most fun basic build

Shiv and sly showcase the simple delight of Slay the Spire 2: playing lots of cards and getting stuff for free. It's meaningful that this Toyota Camry of a build can produce wins on Ascension 10, mostly thanks to the long list of relic synergies it has. Shiv, by itself, combos with Shuriken, Helical Dart, Ornamental Fan, Kusarigama, Letter Opener, Nunchaku, Pen Nib, Cloak Clasp, and Kunai. Grab a couple of these, and playing three or four Shivs amps your strength or dexterity, and doles out bonus damage or block. It's the joy of low input, high output: the same feeling of a single click in Peggle that translates to a cascade of points and particle effects.

Sly is a likewise straightforward "something for nothing" mechanic. In a game where energy management is generally a resource-pinching puzzle, sly lets you cheat, playing a dozen cards in a single turn. The Act 3 boss Aeonglass punishes you for being too all-in on shiv, but sly is a solution to the curses it litters your deck with. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director

I don't care if it's bad, I'm taking Silken Tress every time

There's an argument to be made that Silken Tress is kind of dogwater—for the price of all your gold, every card in your first reward gets replay 1 the first time it's played during combat. Compared to some of Neow's other Relics, the Silken Tress doesn't have a high chance of returning on your investment. If you get three cards that suck, that's curtains for your run.

But I will take it every time, for a few reasons: Firstly, Glam is fun. Ordinarily weaksauce cards, like Setup Strike, suddenly become powerful for the first round of combat with a free replay. Secondly, A10's first few floors are usually about solving your damage problem, and even a mid-tier damage card with Glam on it does that.

The third reason is a secret shame: I am not afraid to just drop a run if my Silken Tress reward sucks. Ascension 10 is so hardcore that I'm not all that interested in playing through Act 1 with a dead card, and while it's a gamble to pick, it's a gamble you know has or hasn't paid off after the first combat. —Harvey Randall, Staff Writer

Slay the Spire 2 needs multiplayer-specific fights & relics

My opinion on multiplayer shifted dramatically in the game's first couple of weeks. At first it felt underwhelming: fighting the same enemies with more HP, felt less satisfying because the rhythm of those enemies was totally different: you were no longer making rhythmic decisions about defending, attacking, and scaling, you were making contributions to a group project. As someone who plays a lot of 30-minute runs, I disliked how runs take significantly longer, depending on your teammates.

But as I played more, the experience of being carried by someone else's absurd build is surprisingly fun. The synergies you get from one player grabbing a relic like Miniature Tent, for example, hit several times harder.

I usually resent "More content plz" feedback when I see it from fans, but in this case multiplayer needs to become more distinct as development continues. My guess is that multiplayer sessions only make up maybe 10% of playthroughs, but the mode is still one of the game's distinctive pieces. Slay the Spire 2’s co-op is a good foundation, but it won’t fully shine until it gets mechanics, enemies, and relics designed exclusively for teamwork, rather than just scaling up health bars. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director

Regent is my least-liked character cards-wise, but my most-liked vibes-wise

The Regent's "buffoonery," as Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano described it to me earlier this year, is endearing. He’s a stupid guy from space, a regal fool whose over-the-top personality brings a delightful comic energy to the roster. I love his rotund little kamikaze servants, holding aloft his impractical throne.

But the actual mechanical wind-up of his kit is slow and frustrating. I don't like being blocked from casting cards in my deck because I haven't built up enough stars. For a player who prefers direct, punchy action, having to do cosmic accounting over multiple turns just to authorize your cards feels tedious. It gets in the way of the fast-paced flow that makes other characters so enjoyable.

Regent's playstyle demands a degree of foresight and patience that clashes with his breezy, goofy aesthetic. Clearing A10 with him was the least pleasant of the four characters, turning Slay the Spire 2's snappy play into an exercise in star-charting that leaves my caveman brain unsatisfied. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director

Underhated enemy: Mytes

Drab brown carapaces, these generic bug bodies belie pure pain.

I don't enjoy having three problems to solve each round: unload these stupid Toxic cards, block for another 10-20, and oh right, hit these guys. Most characters don't have a free discard or exhaust card to manage Toxic, and the fact that these negative cards can cycle through your deck again really punishes you for playing slowly. I struggle with this fight because my goals are split in directions that I usually cannot simultaneously achieve. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director

Doom is boring

Storing block on Osty is a neat mechanic, defensive scaling that makes Necrobinder a particularly new-player-friendly character. But her other main mechanic, Doom, puts me to sleep. It doesn't feel distinct enough from killing an enemy the old-fashioned way.

What's needed to make Doom more layered are more risk-reward cards (and a relic) that apply doom to yourself in exchange for some benefit. Right now Neurosurge is one of the few cards that plays with this tension, but the rest of the Doom toolkit lacks that push and pull, making it feel more like cooking an elite at a very low temperature than an exciting strat. Doom functions like a delayed fuse, ticking down in the background without giving the player many tactical decisions, turning what should be a signature necromantic power into a ticker. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director

Miniature Tent is bad for the game because I specifically never get it

I don't like Miniature Tent. Not because it's a bad relic, or anything, but because it generates so much straightforward value at higher ascensions that, regardless of your build, it's an instant buy. The room for error on HP at Ascension 10 is so thin that the ability to rest AND upgrade a card (let alone combos with other "when you rest, X" relics) feels like a batter getting two extra strikes in baseball.

The problem? I don't get it basically ever, and that makes me sad. Every time I see this tent in a shop, I never have enough gold for it, and it almost never organically drops into my roster of relics. I could count the amount of times it does on one hand, and if I do get it, it's never with the Shovel or the Girya. And while I think relics should occasionally carry you to victory—I think they should do so under specific circumstances, like a Kunai in a Shiv deck.

Basically, STS2 should remove the tent because it upsets me in particular. —Harvey Randall, Staff Writer

Slay the Spire 2 is too conservative

For being such a whimsical grimsical game, Slay the Spire 2 shaves off a lot of the genre's edges. You can make a powerful deck, but most combos are just different flavors of basic multiplication: applying a lot of poison, jacking up your strength, accumulating 100+ block, evoking many orbs, playing a ton of cards for free.

The total number of verbs available to you is pretty low. The spikiest things in Spire 2 are probably:

• Lord's Parasol - Auto-buy everything from the shop
• Clone - Doubles cards, allowing for exponential deck-filling
• Whispering Earring - Lose control of your first turn, which is auto-played for you (but not in an interesting way, just by playing cards from left to right)
• The deck-mixing relics, Prismatic Gem and Kaleidoscope
• Fighting the Merchant - More of an Easter egg than run-altering

It's the design equivalent of painting with a palette of three oil paints. Slay the Spire 2 mixes those colors in satisfying ways. But other games in the genre let you color, sculpt, and draw outside the lines more often.

Deckbuilders have high ceilings for weird stuff, and I want more of that in Spire 2. One example: decades before digital deckbuilders emerged, an old Magic: The Gathering set had a card called Shaharazad that would initiate a "subgame," a new game within the game. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director

Monster Train 2 is a better game

Hi, millions of Slay the Spire 2 players, especially those of you who are willing to watch 1.5-hour applied epistemology and machine learning lectures on YouTube to get better at this simple game—you should be playing Monster Train 2. It's just as replayable, more intricate, more creative, and more more.

As I said just above, I think StS2 contains an elegant but flat set of mechanics. StS2 is cozy checkers. MT2 is 3D chess, laying out a menagerie of units to arrange across three floors, arraying a wider set of variables for your brain to chew on. Fights are spatial puzzles of unit positioning, figuring out who should stand in front to tank damage, how to move key attackers, and when to sacrifice room capacity or even your overall health bar, Pyre health, for advantages.

The Clans are a rich source of depth—you combine two at the start of a run like Magic: The Gathering colors to produce blends of offense, defense, and utility. Pair the Victorian candle people with Lazarus League to create a build that draws its power from dying in creative ways. Team Luna Coven with Stygian Guard to create glass cannon spell bombs. My favorite, the Railforged, melt down cards into a resource spent to boost equipment.

Compared to Spire's basic actions of attack, block, draw/discard, potion, the list of levers I can pull in Monster Train 2 is pleasantly irregular:

• The deployment phase: where and when to play a unit matters
• Sacrificing your own units
• Repositioning units or enemies for offensive or defensive purposes, or to trigger effects
• Using room cards to buff, debuff, or just microwave your problems away
• Sacrificing Pyre (train) HP for gold or other benefits
• Dazing enemies, or even your own units in some edge cases
• Farming kills on permascaling weapons to prepare for later fights (it's kind of wild that Slay the Spire 2 features no permascaling, other than HP, I guess?)
• As Pyreborne, making cost-benefit decisions about generating eggs, a clan-specific currency

I haven't even mentioned Soul Savior, the mode introduced earlier this year that puts every system in the game on steroids. Overall it's a toolbox of weird, game-breaking verbs that Slay the Spire 2 restrains itself from offering. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director

Aeonglass still sucks

Not once have I reached Act 3 and thought, "Boy, I hope the Queen isn't here." I only ever feel this way about the Aeonglass, a boss so far out of band that it could pass for the first taste of Act 4. Don't get me wrong, I do want bosses that feel more like a puzzle to solve and less like a block check to clear, but the compounding gimmicks with Aeonglass are just less interesting than the likes of Act 2's Knowledge Demon.

The brutal irony is that Mega Crit's replacement for the Doormaker, an earlier boss so unpopular and awkward that it was nuked from orbit after the devs gave up fixing it, has almost the exact same problems. Aeonglass is markedly harder than the other two Act 3 bosses, frustrating and un-fun to fight because it fills your deck with status garbage (that deals ramping damage to you for reasons known only to satan), and inordinately punishes multiple characters and strategies in a way that makes those options feel inferior and warps deckbuilding. Far too many things in Slay 2 feel like they're punishing you for playing cards in a card game, and Aeonglass is King Punish II. The less of that, the better. —Austin Wood, senior writer at GamesRadar+

Osty is my best friend because he is overpowered

Necrobrinder is my favorite and most-played character by a pretty wide margin, so I've developed a deep appreciation for Osty, your handy summon. As it turns out, the class that starts with its own version of Barricade and Body Slam is pretty good. Unleash is the strongest starter card in Slay 2 in the same sense that Arnold Schwarzenegger was the strongest member of his class in Kindergarten Cop. Unupgraded, there's no contest. All you have to do is feed Osty your finest chocolates and he'll eventually deal a billion damage for one energy.

Archetypes are often a lie in Slay 2 altogether, and Osty is probably the loudest proof. Even without offensive support from cards like Rattle, Squeeze, or Calcify, Osty is always strong. Dirge is fantastic in any deck with energy to spare, Unleash will kill a god given vulnerability and a Lethality or two, Reanimate is a big chunk of permanent block, and Fetch is basically free damage. Even when you just let Osty die to use him as ammo for Bone Shards or Melancholy, he's always putting in major work. Of course, I would never do that. Not to my boy. —Austin Wood, senior writer at GamesRadar+

Gears of War: E-Day is set to launch on October 6, though there's early access available before then. In the lead up to launch, The Coalition has posted expanded system requirements for the upcoming bug blast. These include what the game asks of your rig for top performance on the top settings—it's not easygoing, to say the least—but providing your GPU is at least capable of ray tracing, most should get by fine on medium settings.

An RTX 5070 Ti or RX 7900 XT will be required in order to run the game at 4K with the Ultra preset enabled. This is targeting a steady 60 fps, and I would assume, from the 12 GB of VRAM noted in the table below, that one should be able to swing it on a lower-end card with some assistance from upscaling.

Gears of War: E-Day supports DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4, and Intel XeSS 3.0 at launch, so we're not short of options there.

Otherwise, GPU demands are similar to those we saw back in June: an RTX 2060 or RX 6600 at a minimum, or an RTX 3060 Ti/6700 XT as recommended. It's only at 4K Ultra that demands seem to really ramp up. Though there is a blanket requirement for a ray tracing-capable graphics card to play Gears of War: E-Day. The devs explicitly say so on the new system requirements table:

"A hardware ray tracing capable graphics card is required. Graphics cards without dedicated hardware ray tracing support are not support."

You can't ask for it to be clearer than that. The game comes with ray-traced reflections, shadows, and global illumination.

CPU demands are pretty wide-ranging: from a mere Ryzen 5 2600X at a minimum, to a Ryzen 5 5600 as recommended. For 4K Ultra, it looks like eight cores or more are best; furthermore, a 3D V-Cache chip is recommend: the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. The studio also suggests an Intel Core i7 14700K. I'd assume newer Arrow Lake chips would suffice, too, despite their slightly weaker performance at times.

RAM requirements are modest enough, even at 4K, at a mere 16 GB. Though only 12 GB are required to play the game. You'll have to make way for the game on an SSD, however, as 115 GB of storage space is required. That does actually need to be a solid state drive, so sayeth the devs.

I've spent the past couple of days tinkering with Remedy's latest supernatural action-a-thon, Control Resonant. I've been testing it on my home PC, a fairly powerful (but not outrageous) rig, and I've got some good news: when it comes to balancing image quality with performance, I reckon there's very little reason to stress your own machine out with the top whack settings.

My PC is an RTX 5070 Ti-equipped, AMD Ryzen 7 7700X-toting rig with 32 GB of DDR5. It's no slouch, that's for sure—but neither is it a $3,000+ firebreather. And at 1440p, Control Resonant runs smoothly on this machine at nearly every setting, with zero stutters and decent frame rates even with frame generation turned off.

You should still prepare your graphics card for a workout if you use the Ultra presets, as Control Resonant features full path tracing at the very tippy top. I've got some image comparisons below, but for now I'll say this: I'm really not going to bother with maximum settings for the rest of my playthrough.

This game still looks grand with the graphics options pared back, and when it comes to the ray tracing, you can gain a decent amount of performance by dropping things down.

In terms of those graphics options, my goodness do you get a lot of them. The ray tracing can be adjusted independently of the regular graphics presets, which in turn have a full-featured whack of settings to tweak to your hearts content. There's also a choice between DLSS 4.5 and an older, CNN-based model for upscaling duties, or FSR (including FSR 4) for AMD users.

Despite all these potential setting tweaks, it'll be no surprise to learn that ray tracing provides the biggest performance hit, so I grabbed some figures with Ultra graphics settings enabled at the various different RT presets.

Control Resonant - RTX 5070 Ti - 1440p Ray Tracing Performance

Results recorded during gameplay at 1440p resolution, Ultra settings, DLSS set to Quality, Frame Generation off.

Control Resonant - 1440p, Ultra settings, DLSS Quality, FG off

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RT Ultra

62

44

RT High

71

50

RT Medium

76

54

RT Low

84

60

RT off

105

73

037.575112.5150

Control Resonant - 1440p, Ultra settings, DLSS Quality, FG off Data

Product	Value
RT Ultra	62 Avg FPS, 44 1% Low FPS
RT High	71 Avg FPS, 50 1% Low FPS
RT Medium	76 Avg FPS, 54 1% Low FPS
RT Low	84 Avg FPS, 60 1% Low FPS
RT off	105 Avg FPS, 73 1% Low FPS

The impact of ray tracing on the frame rate is clear to see, although it's the RT Ultra path tracing setting that does the most damage. The difference between RT Medium and RT High is a mere five frames on average, though.

As you can see, the difference between ray tracing at Low and off entirely is fairly significant, amounting to an extra 21 frames in the averages. However, Control Resonant is full of stark shadows, reflective puddles in streets, and shiny office block windows.

Personally, I like to enable some ray tracing goodness if my graphics card can handle it, and there's a mere five fps average difference between the Medium and High presets on my machine. The RT Ultra preset, however, provides a significant plummet in average frames—and looking at my image comparisons, I really don't think it's worth it.

Sure, you can spot some differences between Ultra RT and High if you really hunt for them. The lighting on the parking lot ceiling above the central lamp, for example, looks a lot more realistic with the ray tracing maxed out. But switching back between this and the High setting during actual gameplay, you'll really struggle to tell.

In fact, the Medium RT preset looks pretty darn good as well, although the ceiling darkens up considerably. If you switch to Low, shadows lose their definition fairly quickly, as evidenced by the truck in the background and Dylan's legs.

Given that Control Resonant likes to play with light and shade in its environments, I think that RT High is probably the best compromise between image quality and performance. Still, all these screenshots look grand to my eyes.

Control Resonant - Ray Tracing Image Quality

A comparison between RT High settings, and RT Low. Notice the sharper shadow Dylan casts on the left, and the more realistic reflections on the wet road.

RT High

RT Low

There are some appreciable differences with High ray tracing enabled. In the brightly lit Manhattan street above, the Low ray tracing reflections in the road become a little blocky, while High gives them a hazy quality that feels more appropriate for the scene.

And again, check out Dylan's shadow. It's crisp and well-defined with ray tracing set to High, and quite fuzzy at Low. As is the lighting on Dylan himself, now I come to notice it. Still, I think both of these presets make the game look great, especially once you stop pixel hunting and start stalking the streets.

Keeping ray tracing set to High for consistencies sake, I thought I'd see if I could gain some extra performance by adjusting the regular graphics presets. It's a similar story, though: Ultra settings provide the most significant performance drop, while High and Medium are so close as to be within margins of error.

Control Resonant - RTX 5070 Ti - 1440p performance

Results recorded during gameplay at 1440p, RT High, DLSS set to Quality, Frame Generation off.

Control Resonant - 1440p, RT High, DLSS Quality, FG off

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Ultra

71

50

High

80

57

Medium

81

60

Low

86

62

0255075100

Control Resonant - 1440p, RT High, DLSS Quality, FG off Data

Product	Value
Ultra	71 Avg FPS, 50 1% Low FPS
High	80 Avg FPS, 57 1% Low FPS
Medium	81 Avg FPS, 60 1% Low FPS
Low	86 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS

Once the ray tracing has been set, there's not a huge amount of performance to be gained by adjusting the regular graphics settings. High and Medium frame rates are near identical, and there's only a 15 fps difference between Low and Ultra in terms of average fps.

There's a sweet spot here if you're trying to min/max image quality with performance, and it's setting both the regular graphics preset and the ray tracing settings to High, with the upscaler of your choice set to Quality. The game looks downright excellent at these settings, and on this machine results in some very smooth, great-looking gameplay.

Observe, as I button mash my way through some combat in clip below with both set to High. Also notice how the environment is extremely reactive to my ham-fisted attempts to hit something, anything, with my supernaturally enhanced weapons, all without a hint of hitching or stuttering.

This game is very impressive in motion, and given that I haven't even touched the frame generation to get a smooth frame rate with ray tracing turned up, it seems reasonably well optimised as well.

However, I appreciate that not everyone can afford a PC with this sort of grunt, even if it's not the latest and greatest. The good news, though, is that Control Resonant actually looks pretty good with everything set to its lowest. The screenshot below was taken at the Low preset, with ray tracing disabled entirely.

Not exactly ugly, is it? The restaurant signage is a little blurry, but check out how much detail is still kept within the scene even with everything turned down to the very, very bottom.

Remedy says the minimum required GPU is a GTX 1070 (for 1080p/30 fps at Low), and while I don't have one of those on hand to test with, I'd still happily play Control Resonant at the lowest settings if I needed to. It preserves a remarkable amount of detail with everything turned down, with a decent boost in performance.

The clip above was recorded at 1080p Low with DLSS set to Quality, and with ray tracing and frame generation turned off. It's Control Resonant's art style that really makes the difference here.

The world itself is clearly defined and beautifully put together, and while I'd still enable ray tracing in some fashion if you can afford the frame rate hit, it's simply a good-looking game no matter the settings.

The reactivity of the environment (and a fair few spooky-dooky, yet lightweight effects) are really what you're paying the price of entry for, so don't feel too obliged to turn up the pretties for the sake of it. There's performance to be found in them thar hills, and I certainly wouldn't spoil a good time by cranking things up to the max.

In the first minutes of Control Resonant, Dylan Faden—prototypical sadboy, perpetually kicked puppy, and regretful mass murderer (he got better)—is thrust into a metaphysical war when Jesse, his psychokinetic former protagonist sister, wakes him from a seven year coma by stabbing a magical shape into his chest. She promptly disappears, leaving the Federal Bureau of Control directorless, outgunned, and forced to rely on the man who once killed hundreds of its staff to confront the cataclysm of interdimensional forces violently reshaping Manhattan into a labyrinth of otherworldly logics.

Dylan and the FBC might be going through it, but Remedy is flexing all its finest talents: sculpting uncanny hellscapes, placing tactical redactions in bureaucratic lore collectibles, and capturing endearingly human performances in circumstances beyond human comprehension. Unfortunately, melee combat isn't on that list of strong suits—and Resonant's open world expects you to do a lot of it.

New weird

Remedy's environmental artists and lighting tech specialists are at the height of their powers in Resonant: The stark, brutalist surrealism that saturated the Oldest House in the first game has boiled out of its breached walls and onto New York's streets, reconstructing blocks of brownstones and downtown shopping districts into a sprawling, dreamlike mazework of impossible architecture and alternative physics.

Roadways have abruptly become cliff faces, with pavement—and the buses parked on it—bent skyward at perpendicular angles. Rows of pixel-stretched structures bleed into chasms where chunks of cityscape have simply fallen away.

Whole neighborhoods spiral upwards, outwards, inwards. Some are swallowed in the telltale oilslick haze of Hiss corruption. Others have been reconfigured according to the alien logic of the Patterning—a newer, stranger force whose spreading influence sorts apartments, taxis, streetsigns, pigeons, and unevacuated denizens into inscrutable designs of sprawling radial symmetry.

It's arresting, at turns breathtakingly incomprehensible and queasily familiar. Nestled into the mutated Manhattan's warped streets are pockets of untouched city life: abandoned cafes and laundromats and bespoke art galleries, which only heighten the sense of eeriness through their proximity to reality's active unspooling.

It's gorgeous, a sequel that's begging for an inevitable photo mode update. And it's a pleasure to move through, with Dylan's accumulating collection of mobility superpowers—floating, air-dashing, double-jumping, and eventually, freely reorienting gravity—allowing for truly impressive feats of traversal design.

I just wish I could say the same for all the hours of fighting I had to do.

Break in the pattern

I wanted to enjoy the concept of Resonant's combat. While Jesse wielded a manifold pseudogun in the OG Control, Dylan employs a different sort of shape-shifting weapon technique courtesy of the object his sister impaled in his sternum. It's called the Aberrant, and in his hands, it can assume and discard the shapes of different melee weapons on demand: Depending on your preference, it can be a hatchet; a scythe, a pair of short swords, a hammer, a drill, an orbiting, levitating sawblade, and more.

Playing a guy who can throw rocks with his brain and has a stick that can be infinite swords should be cool. In practice, it's… aggressively fine.

While eventual unlocks add necessary depth and variety, Resonant's opening hours suffer from the cardinal sin of its combat design: It's an action game where basic attacks don't have the juice. On its own, pushing the attack button won't achieve much except lightly grazing the heavy enemies that need to be killed to finish each fight. Instead, Dylan has to pile on temporary damage bonuses—granted most easily by staggering and executing lesser enemies—to make swinging his magical mystery club worthwhile.

Resonant's handful of boss fights are more engaging threats to navigate (though the sheer heft of their health bars still feels like a slog). But the endless rounds of generic creep culling that make up the bulk of playtime don't provide particularly interesting problems to solve. Instead, they're the same predicament with a binary outcome: Either you've stacked enough damage buffs that hitting a heavy enemy will accomplish something, or you can spend your time whittling away at its health bar until you get a chance to set yourself up properly.

To be fair, sometimes a guy will have a forcefield on him. This provides the benefit of occasionally making things more annoying.

Still, if all the pieces of Dylan's combat kit are moving with the right rhythm, it can deliver sparks of satisfaction. When there's nothing to trip up my flow of staggering fodder, buffing myself with their execution, and tearing into heavy enemies with damage-boosted obsidian daggers and stone-clad fists, Dylan's capacity for carnage makes an enjoyable spectacle as he launches from one short-lived target to the next.

Something inevitably will trip up our boy, however: My last ounce of power—the resource that fuels my combat abilities like rock telekinesis or toggleable fire damage—will be wasted when inconsistent auto-targeting flings my boulder at the wrong enemy. I'll earn an expendable damage buff from a perfect dodge just for Dylan to lunge past the Hiss horror I intended to merc and spend it whiffing at empty air.

I'll be staggered enough times by the sheer volume of Mold monster projectiles that I'll miss my peak damage Goldilocks window. An enemy will teleport away just as I'm winding up a triple-buffed finishing combo. Or, after watching the same enemy's execution animation a few dozen too many times, it'll just feel like another few seconds separating me from the parts of Control I'm actually interested in seeing.

That said, I'm still willing to award points for the fact that the Board—the FBC's unknowable astral plane patrons—celebrate every one of Dylan's executions with an exultant, interdimensional honk.

Altered items

Even without those irritations, the spectacle of Dylan's repetitive executions can't sustain Resonant's 30+ hour playtime. Its combat isn't compelling enough to seek out—but it expects that I'm eager to do so. As I beelined towards the story leads and sidequests that most caught my interest, I'd enter areas where the enemies had scaled past my current level—a nebulous figure calculated from my current number of weapon upgrades, spent talent points, and collectible health and power increases.

An underleveled Dylan makes Resonant's damage-sponginess even more pronounced, forcing me to circle back to combat encounters and world activities I'd intentionally noped out of just to get the Faden family's sweet, soft killing machine back up to par. But even that progression scheme feels confused. Keeping pace with enemy scaling provided an excess of weapon upgrade materials and talent points—resources I needed to spend to level up, but had regularly run out of interesting options on which to spend them.

I quickly settled on a comfortable and capable set of weapon forms; once those were maxed out, any additional resources I gathered were spent on weapon shapes I never needed. Meanwhile, the glut of talent points I earned meant I was regularly choosing talents for abilities I didn't even have access to. By the time I unlocked the game's final combat ability, I'd already been upgrading it for hours because I had few other options left on the tree.

As progression lost its luster, the late game's inflating enemy health pools and damage resistances stifled whatever welcome Resonant's combat hadn't already worn out. Mercifully, its granular difficulty adjustment settings helped soothe the chafing: Once I'd seen all the moving pieces in Dylan's combat arsenal, I simply juiced his outgoing damage and stagger buildup to speed combat along in the story's last few quests. I recommend anyone else do the same—ideally, earlier than I did.

While carving up Hiss by the hundreds didn't hold my interest, Resonant's world did. Not all of its open world attractions are winners; I'm still not sure I understand one particular side activity I kept completing by aimlessly hurling boulders at rampant bits of junk. But I kept returning to Resonant for the privilege of existing within it.

It's not just because the world looks good—never before has the texture of concrete been so celebrated—but it's dense with intention that makes poking at its corners feel rewarding.

From the placement of blacked-out bureau reports to the deliberate layering of gravity-bending traversal routes, the pockets of Resonant's Manhattan that stage its puzzles, side quests, and collectibles feel hand-crafted and considered where so many open world spaces feel perfunctory. That exploration might cash out in another chest of materials or another wave of Hiss guys to delete, but as long as I got to soak in another FBC memo, bespoke apartment interior, or ominous arrangement of questionably mundane objects, I got the prize I wanted.

Human resources

Story-wise, the sequel can't fascinate in quite the same way Control could before it was a known quantity. But the embattled, functionalist footholds the FBC are fighting and failing to maintain throughout the city have an altogether different effect. Seeing the organization forced to abandon the redaction-heavy deniability of its paranatural purview to operate in the open and on the backfoot makes its mission of managing interdimensionally cursed radios and hellgate slide projectors feel impressively real.

That's thanks in large part to the talent and direction of Resonant's voice cast. From its prime players to its nameless, proximity-barking NPCs, its performances feel so thoroughly, believably exhausted: Since the first game, half of the FBC has been isolated in lockdown within the Oldest House for seven years, only reconnecting with their bewildered and directionless fellows in the outside world when this new, unknowable apocalypse breaches containment.

And I can feel it. There's a natural, organic cadence to the cast's line deliveries, making Resonant's writing read as genuine—whether its characters are overwhelmed to the point of breakdown by the scale of the crisis, entering a reverie over the metaphysical implications of a murderous stereo, or seething at the presence of the man who killed scores of their comrades.

Speaking of: Let's talk about my sweet, slaughter-stained son, Dylan. Having endured repeated tragedy, isolation, unethical experimentation, and hostile interplanar possession for most of his life, he's effectively a good-hearted 10 year old in the body of a 30-something year old man who can manipulate profound paranatural forces. I might have preferred another outing in Jesse's shoes, but I warmed up to the younger Faden sibling more than I expected—aided by his growing, stumbling rapport with his impromptu FBC handler, Special Agent Zoe De Vera.

Thanks to his compound of sheltered naivety and his regret over being an implement of attempted omnicide, Dylan's the best open world protagonist the FBC could hope to have fall into its lap: Even if he was worldly enough to know when not to offer his help, he's too guilt-ridden to withhold it. And as the game delves deeper into his past as the subject of the FBC's experimentation under all-timer bastard Dr. Casper Darling, he's an excellent lens for exploring the fallout of an organization that knows just enough to be dangerous to all of reality.

If only that fallout was more fun to fight.

If you signed up for a Steam Frame, it's time to check your inbox for an email from Valve. The company has run its 'one-time randomisation' to decide who gets a unit from the first batch and who is left on the waitlist. Once you know where you land, head over to this community reporting website; we're already getting a good idea of the odds of buying a Steam Frame from the results so far.

The odds were stacked against us. That's the picture I get from this tremendous website by coah80 that asks the community, 'Did you get a reservation?' Users can respond with: waitlisted, reserved, or no email yet.

With 35,000 (and counting) results so far, it looks like around 44.7% of respondents were lucky enough to get a reservation, and 51.6% are on the waitlist. 3.8% say they haven't received an email yet.

A quick reminder of how this works: those of us who signed up for a Steam Frame via the Store page were entered into a one-time raffle that took place on September 17. This determines who has a unit reserved for them and who was added to the waitlist. The reserved units are offered up first, and if someone doesn't buy theirs, the unit moves to the next person on the list. Once those reservations are sorted, Valve will start working through the waitlist.

If you sign up for a Steam Frame today, you'll join the back of the waitlist. That's at least 18,254 customers long, at time of writing, though you have to assume that many of the people who signed up for a Steam Frame have no idea this website even exists. There's a good chance it's a lot higher than this site suggests.

The Steam Frame comes in two capacities: 256 GB and 1 TB. As I wrote in my Steam Frame review, I'd rather the 256 GB model. It's considerably cheaper and while you can't upgrade the internal storage, you can slot in a microSD card to expand your library further. If you're mostly going to use the Frame for game streaming, you don't need a huge amount of space on the device anyways.

Good news, looks like a majority of users also agree on storage sizes. The community site also asks which model a user signed up for and offers the option to share their location, which many have, giving us even more data to go on. The 256 GB model is the more popular option country-by-country. It only takes $240 to change hearts and minds, as I think with a smaller premium in pre-memory crisis times, we may have seen those stats reverse. The 512 GB Steam Deck was a popular choice when it first launched.

I've been getting stuck into World of Warcraft: Forever's beta—though I'm a little less levelled up than I'd like to be. Initially, I just chalked this up to launch-day queue problems, but as it turns out, there's a little more to it than that.

See, I live in the UK, and Blizzard rarely does beta testing with EU-region players in mind. Forever's no different, the servers appear to be located solely in the US. Which isn't too much trouble, mind, I can deal with playing on 100+ ping for a beta test. What I can't deal with is logging in, having 300 ping, suddenly spiking to 2000 world MS, and then disconnecting.

The solution? A VPN. The moment I set my VPN to a US region, I received a cosy 100 ping and zero disconnection issues. As I quested through Durotar during EU times, I was able to corroborate the fix with plenty of other EU players who were experiencing the exact same thing with the exact same solution.

The EU WoW Forever beta forums are on fire with (understandable, though perhaps overexpressed) outrage: "We shouldn’t need a VPN service just to get a playable connection to a game we already paid €60 for," writes one player. "Can confirm VPN fixes it, I have <100ms ping on VPN and basically don’t feel lag. But obviously, [I] shouldn’t have to do that," adds another.

If this were, say, simply a closed-invite beta, I wouldn't even blink at this issue. But the fact of the matter is that Blizzard has used the beta to sell the Skyborne Epic Pack, it's pretty rough. Here's the store page for the EU: While the pack is keen to mention beta access, I can't find any mention of the beta's server locations on the page—just a notification of the dates it's taking place.

On the other hand, this is clearly some sort of network issue that Blizzard will doubtless fix. VPNs aren't magic, they can't make the internet go faster. What they can do is reroute your internet connection in a way that can skip routing issues—as is the case with me, and other EU-based players.

From what I can see, these connection problems aren't a known issue on the forums. As such, I've reached out to Blizzard for comment, and will update this article if I receive a response.

PAX Australia returns to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in October, and this year's Expo Floor promises to be packed with playable games.

For starters Sega will have four games to try including Total War: Warhammer 40,000 with three playable scenarios, as well as Alien: Isolation 2, Persona 4 Revival, and Yakuza's noir prequel Stranger Than Heaven. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's multiplayer will also be playable ahead of its October 23 launch.

Square Enix's booth will have a hands-on opportunity for players to try Final Fantasy 14 on Switch 2, then create a bracelet and take a themed photo. FF14's localization director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox and global community producer Toshio 'Foxclon' Murouchi will be taking part in a behind-the-scenes panel where they endure a hot sauce challenge while sharing war stories. Attendees will get an early peak at Final Fantasy 7 Revelation at a special showcase too.

The Ubisoft Community Esports stages will host Rainbow Six Siege competitions, an Assassin's Creed sea shanty singalong, the Ubisoft Cosplay Runway, and a Just Dance-Along, among other events.

PAX Australia runs from October 9–11, and badges are on sale at the official website. I'll be spending most of the weekend at the PAX Rising indie showcase trying to play as many of the more than 90 indie games on show as I can. There's plenty more worth checking out on the full schedule.

Judging by the November release schedule, few publishers will dare release within spitting distance of GTA 6. Which is understandable, but it's caused a massive bottleneck in October: Ace Combat 8, Gears of War: E-Day, Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Modern Warfare 4 will all release next month.

And that's not including all the other anticipated games not under the wings of a major publisher. I'm talking about a new Hellraiser game, Silver Pines, Jonathan Blow's next one, Planet Zoo 2, a remaster of Tales of Eternia, and the 1.0 launch of Enshrouded. There's even a new Final Fantasy 2D-HD remake.

Joining this fray will be Valor Mortis, a new first-person soulsike (their words) by the creators of the Ghostrunner series. It looks better than the concept sounds: a recent demo was well-received, mostly because it seems to nail first-person melee combat, which is famously hard to get right.

I wouldn't dare predict how well or otherwise Valor Mortis will sell when it releases on October 13, but it certainly has its work cut out for it. Its publisher Lyrical Games is well aware of this, as CEO Blake Rochkind told The Game Business in a recent interview.

"By virtue of the development schedule, the cards we’ve been dealt is that we are one of the only new IPs launching this fall," Rochkind said. "We are pretty confident in Valor Mortis. But ultimately, the worst thing we could do is not push our chips in and say, ‘We want this to be a game that you can pick up alongside these other great games.’"

That's basically the approach Lyrical Games is taking: they've priced Valor Mortis at $40 so that people can play it and the pricier blockbuster fare releasing alongside. “A developer I spoke to recently had a lot of success with a game priced at $30, which would probably be $40 today. One thing they said that really stuck with me is: ‘We never regretted being an ‘and’ game. We never regretted pricing our game as something that you can pick up alongside other games.’ Going with this price point will help us be an ‘and’ game.”

This is probably common sense among publishers but it's interesting to hear it presented so bluntly. Just as it was interesting to hear the creators of Peak rationalise its low price: "4 bucks is also kind of 5 bucks, 3 bucks is 2 bucks. And 2 bucks is basically free".

It's also interesting, albeit understandable, that a AA action game would prefer the company of four other blockbuster competitors rather than GTA 6. The only meaningful November competitor there is Nintendo's Ocarina of Time remake, which is also something most wise publishers will want to give a wide berth to. Neither are releasing on PC.

Much to my embarrassment, while I was mid-complaint about my new wall of Valheim storage chests, a fellow Viking hit me with, "You know you can color code those signs, right?" Duh, of course I know that. Well, I swear I did, but totally forgot about the handy feature that doesn't require a single mod. In case you forgot too, I'm here to remind you—or teach you a quick tip for organizing Valheim storage with colorful text codes for signs.

Codes for sign colors

You can change a sign's text color in Valheim through markup codes. For those even vaguely familiar with traditional HTML, you won't need to close these style commands, but keep in mind you still have limited text space on a sign, so keep them short.

You can use any 6-digit hex value, so check out the color code calculator on W3 Docs to find more, or reference the table I used from Unity. It's a fairly straightforward process, but I'll leave you with a few extra color-changing tips:

• Some of the color names listed above work in place of their hex code
• If using a color name, remove '#' and replace it with 'color='
  • Example: Red becomes Red sign

Codes for sign text size and style

Other markup attributes from the Unity guide also work in Valheim. You can use a few at a time for text styles like bigger italics, colorful bolds, or extra spacing and alignment.

Unicode characters for signs

You can take your Valheim signs even further by adding Unicode characters. I find the W3 Schools chart to be the most helpful, but they don't all work, so I've included a few below for reference.

Example Valheim signs

You don't have to stop at just one code when customizing your text, so I've made a few examples you can use to test things out. Change the variables as needed, and remember to heed the 50-character limit—lest your signs wind up with awkwardly cut-off words or floating text.

Over the last three years, since the Wilds of Eldraine set, Magic: The Gathering's core expansions have been building to a climactic storyline. It's very comic book, a multiverse-threatening crossover that's been set off by the planeswalker Jace Beleren trying to create a new multiverse, one that's free of all the threats Magic's setting has faced in recent years—Phyrexians, Eldrazi, etcetera—but which will overwrite the existing multiverse once it's complete.

This sets up a bunch of mirror matches where famous planeswalkers face off against their doppelgangers: the pyromantic Chandra versus a cryomantic version of herself while none-more-goth necromancer Liliana is up against a version of herself who practices life magic and, horrifyingly, wears white.

Of course, not everyone playing Magic knows who all these characters are. Tomik Vrona, for instance, is a member of the shady Orzhov Syndicate who excels in finding legal loopholes. If you know him as a lawyer for the magic Mafia, seeing him in Reality Fracture as a sparkmage who delights in breaking not only the laws of the legal system but also physics comes as a bit of a shock. If you don't know all that Tomik lore, it's not going to land as hard.

Which is why Reality Fracture's booster packs will give you an echoed pair together. You'll be able to see both versions of Tomik, or Ajani, or whoever at the same time and understand the contrast between them.

For me, Magic is often a social game, living up to the Gathering in its name. It's an excuse to sling cards and chat to people without having to care about poker or whatever. The setting and characters are secondary to the play, and the sweeping drama of Jace's girlfriend breaking up with him so hard he rewrote reality, or whatever is actually going on, is always going to be secondary to the jokes we make around the table.

I'm glad that someone on the production team did the hard work to insure paired cards would land in packs together, because it means I get to see a fire wizard and an ice wizard together and know exactly what's happening without having to know the events of a tie-in novel trilogy or a six-issue limited series.

Reality Fracture will be available digitally in Arena on September 29 and will have its global release on October 2, with pre-release events starting on September 25.

Matthew Rhys is having quite a moment. The actor cleaned up at the Emmys on Monday, making history by becoming the first man to win two Emmys for a leading role on the same night (for comedy series Widow's Bay and limited series The Beast in Me).

And in doing that, he actually set another record by becoming the only person to receive a lead actor Emmy for all three genres—he'd already won one for drama series The Americans back in 2018.

And his moment continues: Rhys actually has yet another new show out this week. Golden Axe is an animated comedy based on the Golden Axe video game series made by Sega way back in 1989. All 10 episodes are streaming now on Paramount+.

Joining Rhys, who plays dwarf warrior Gilius Thunderhead, is Danny Pudi (of Community and Mythic Quest) and Liam McIntyre (he played JD Fenix in Gears of War 4). Improv comedy fans will also be thrilled to hear the voice of Lisa Gilroy, playing sorceress Tyris, and Cart Tart, who voices… let me see if I've got this right… a humanoid panther.

"In an homage to Sega's iconic 1989 video game, Golden Axe follows legendary warriors Ax Battler, Tyris Flare and Gilius Thunderhead as they reunite to save Yuria from the evil giant Death Adder, who just won't seem to stay dead," says Paramount+. "Their quest is complicated by Hampton Squib, an inexperienced and wildly underprepared adventurer whose dream of heroism far exceeds his abilities. Forced to work together despite their flaws, they must find a way to stop Death Adder once and for all."

I'm a fan of just about the entire cast, and while I haven't seen it yet—and in fact only heard about the show for the first time today, and I've never played the games, either—I'm gonna check it out. If, like me, you're not subscribed to Paramount+ because you simply aren't interested in 26 different Taylor Sheridan shows, you can still see the first two episodes of Golden Axe for free on YouTube here and here. I've thoughtfully embedded the trailer below, too.

Hideo Kojima took to his social media channels earlier today to announce Bill Skarsgård as the new lead for his upcoming stealth-action game, Physint. He also reaffirmed some of the game's casting announcements from before it changed hands from PlayStation to Xbox after a seemingly messy split with Sony. Physint's top-billed cast are:

• Bill Skarsgård
• Charlee Fraser
• Don Lee
• Minami Hambe

Alongside the casting announcement, Kojima shared a new poster for Physint featuring Skarsgård, Fraser, and the new tagline "The Next Cold War Begins." Tucked away at the bottom is, perhaps, the most exciting news for me personally: Third-billed on production behind Hideo Kojima and Hideo Kojima is the GOAT, Yoji Shinkawa, on "character and mechanical design."

The longtime Kojima collaborator and Metal Gear character artist also worked at Kojima Productions on Death Stranding, but it's comforting to get confirmation he was unaffected by the recent production dust-up.

Speaking of Physint's continuity, Fraser, Lee, and Hamabe had all been confirmed in a prior Kojima Productions announcement about Physint's cast. Skarsgård as leading man John Physint (working name) is the only new casting info⁠—though, like with Shinkawa, it's probably worth clarifying after everything that's happened.

I was initially disappointed. Based on John Physint's shadowy appearance in the game's first teaser, I was hoping Kojima would spring for Robert Pattinson in the role. He's a known gamer on a bit of an all-time career hot-streak, and feels like a perfect fit for Kojima's oeuvre. Skarsgård was pretty great in Robert Eggers' 2024 Nosferatu, though, and I can only hope he brings a similarly unsettling, sexual energy to Physint.

Kojima seems to be spinning up marketing for the game again now that Microsoft has scooped it from Sony. The PlayStation parent company reportedly cut Kojima off for going over budget and missing deadlines. There's been no definitive word, but it's hard to imagine that Kojima will be allowed to keep using Sony and Guerilla Games' proprietary Decima engine (which also powered Death Stranding) now that he's left the fold, potentially delaying this game that already felt like it was years away.

Kojima's other big upcoming project, O.D.—also published by Xbox⁠—looks much closer to release. Its "Knock" trailer from last year makes it look like a return to some of the ideas explored in Kojima's legendary demo for the canceled Silent Hills, P.T.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is a pretty excellent RPG, but there's one aspect of it that not everyone loves: Time. Simply put, it's a limited resource in the game, which restricts what Coen—that's you—can do. Our reviewer, Australian editor Shaun Prescott, found it injected a sense of urgency into the game, at least in the early going, but said he'd "also like to pick some nirnroot and play some Gwent, thank you very much"—that is, have the time to relax and fiddle with non-essential tasks on his own terms, at his own pace.

Other players clearly felt the same way: One of the first mods to come out for The Blood of Dawnwalker is the "Better Story Timer," which effectively eliminates the impact of the ticking clock entirely—and which has since become, by far, the most popular Dawnwalker mod on Nexus Mods.

How much of an impact that reaction has had over at developer Rebel Wolves is impossible to say, but in an interview with Eurogamer, studio CEO and game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz said it might not be used for the game's sequel.

"We will play with it. If we will have parts of the story, or the whole story, to which it fits, then we will use it," Tomaszkiewicz said. "If we will have stories where it does not fit, we will not force it. We will play with this system and we will try to use it to boost the urgency of some events in the game. But I'm not saying that in every game we will have the same scheme or loop—it's not like this."

Tomaszkiewicz acknowledged complaints about the time mechanic, and the mods available to remove it. He doesn't have a problem with that, but he does encourage players to try Dawnwalker with the clock running first: "We balanced [Dawnwalker] in a way that it's possible to do around 80 percent of the content with the time mechanic so it's not so bad.

"The arguments of, 'I want to see everything in one playthrough,' I understand, but it's false to begin with, because even in games like The Witcher, you cannot see everything in one playthrough because you have choices and consequences, and different things happen when you choose different things," Tomaszkiewicz said.

I have that same feeling myself with most games—I want to see everything the first time—but Tomaszkiewicz is correct: The Witcher 2 forces players to make a choice at a critical juncture that unavoidably excludes a significant amount of gameplay, and that seemed fine; Obsidian's Pentiment, released to acclaim in 2022, has a very strict time mechanic of its own that's essential to the experience. Missing out on things in videogames is not all that new or unusual—if anything, it's the inevitable outcome of choice in videogames that so many players say they want.

Interestingly, Tomaszkiewicz said that complaints about the time mechanic have tailed off considerably now that Dawnwalker has been out for a couple weeks, because people have finished the game and realized they actually had more time than they needed—a pattern he expects to continue as players continue to wrap it up.

"There will always be people who will have a problem with that because they don't like time mechanics at all, but I think that is fine," he said. "They can download the mod and play without it if they want."

And yes, even though The Blood of Dawnwalker has only been out for a couple weeks, Rebel Wolves is already eyeballing a sequel: The studio is now looking for a lead writer to help "craft the next chapter in the Dawnwalker saga."

There exists in classed-based military shooters an understanding: Never count on a random medic to care about you.

You'd think in games where players have to opt into the support role, it'd be as simple as "There's a medic nearby, they'll try to get me," but any Battlefield player will tell you how often trained doctors trample over their corpse, more hungry to end a life than save one. So you learn to assume that you're on your own, and when a real medic does go out of their way to help you, they're the exception that proves the rule.

Wardogs is different. Help is so abundant in this 100-player, three-team milsim that, when I die, I can be confident a second, third, or even a fourth chance is coming. It's the only FPS I've played where multiple medics will actually race to give me first-aid, drag my body to safety, or pop a smoke grenade to cover a revive.

I've also played shooters where support play is taken more seriously than in Battlefield—Squad, Hell Let Loose, Isonzo, Arma, and other games on the "milsim" spectrum come to mind—but Bulkhead has successfully crafted a medic role so accessible and appealing that damn near everyone in Wardogs wants to help. Official stats from Wardogs' first weekend reveal that players earned 123 million kills and 61 million revives for an overall resurrection rate of nearly 50%. As a lifelong medic main, that's astounding.

How does Wardogs do it? I think a lot of factors contribute:

Money, obviously

The big one is Wardogs' unique, cash-infused incentive structure. Unlike an extraction shooter, where money is earned primarily through kills and selling valuable loot, Wardogs will make you rich just for doing useful, nonviolent things for the team: killing, capturing, transporting, spotting, building, and healing.

On top of the fuzzy feelings I get for helping out, Medic is a very profitable playstyle in Wardogs. A single revive pays almost as much as a kill, and that's before you factor in tips from grateful patients and automatic assist payouts when those patients go on to get more kills. If I go the extra mile of buying spare bandages to heal folks back to 100, I get even more cash and tips.

Battlefield 6 also showers dedicated medics with XP, and really good ones end up near the top of the scoreboard, but Wardogs' cash prizes feel more impactful because it's the currency that fuels everything you do. Going on a 50k profit run in a single life can mean I've taken a big step toward unlocking an expensive upgrade, or it can mean that I get to splurge on my next loadout with a bigger backpack or vehicle. It's smart stuff.

Anyone can revive

You don't have to invest in medic gear to lend a hand. Anyone can drag bodies and revive friendlies, and the vendor gives away a single-use quick-revive tool once per life. There's a world where this design choice could've been controversial in Wardogs, because if anyone can revive, what do you need proper medics for? But Bulkhead has threaded the needle perfectly by making manual "hand" revives—where your soldier literally rubs their hands together for ~20 seconds like they're charging defibrillators paddles—extremely slow.

Teammates can and will try to save you this way, but upgrading to proper defibrillators (unlocked at medic level 11) is a dramatic upgrade. A kitted-up medic can have a full squad back on its feet in the same time as a single hand revive. And even though there are no enforced classes in Wardogs, defibs are expensive and take up your one "specialist" tool slot that could hold an RPG or binoculars instead. It's possible to carry more than one specialist tool, but you need a huge backpack to accommodate that playstyle (which is even more expensive). This ensures that anyone can heal, but not everyone can be a proper medic.

It's not that dangerous to be a medic

I have found that going for a revive in Wardogs is not as risky as in similar games. Often (but not always) when I sprint toward a dead body out in the open, I'm able to drag them behind cover without drama.

I suspect this has to do with how spread out the action is in Wardogs: a three-team structure means there's no singular front where all of the death happens, which also means there's not a single pile of dead bodies that enemies are staring at, waiting for medics to make a move. No, most of my Wardogs skirmishes have been smaller in scale—confrontations with two or three clustered enemies or a showdown with a single sniper I can't even see.

It's a stark contrast to Battlefield 6, where some maps are so congested (and the time-to-kill so short) that the three seconds it takes to equip defibs and use them is enough for someone to sprint around a corner and shoot you in the face. Wardogs' pace is far better suited for support play.

Bribing is fun, but not as important as I thought

The bribes help. As Sean highlighted last week the ability to bribe nearby medics up to $500 to pick you up can grease the wheels in desperate scenarios. For the first few days of Wardogs, I'd max out my bribe every time because it was cheaper than losing a whole loadout, but I've noticed lately that many players will attempt a revive regardless because, as we've covered, the base pay for a revive is incentive enough.

Dead players don't give up, because dying costs time and money

Wardogs is unique in its commitment to death costing time. There are no Battlefield-like squad spawns, no rally points, and not even FOBs themselves are respawn beacons. There are only two ways to get back in the action: Use your team's one APC (a mobile respawn vehicle with a long cooldown after use) or hitch a ride for the 3km journey from HQ.

Both options are more expensive, and often significantly slower, than just waiting for a revive. I can't overemphasize how important that is, because it means that dead players choose to be patient and give medics a chance. There's nothing I hate more as a support player than folks giving up on me as I'm trying to stick my neck out for them, but so far in Wardogs, this has happened exactly once.

It's still really early days for Wardogs, and the game itself keeps changing as players unlock increasingly elaborate tools, but I'm impressed with how well its rules, scale, gadgets, and incentives coalesce around cooperation. The medic role might be the best example of that synergy in action.

WoW: Forever, Blizzard's modernized twist on WoW Classic, launched a beta today, but most people have only experienced a login screen so far.

Following a live Q&A, Blizzard turned the WoW: Forever beta servers on. The queue times weren't too bad to start: I had about a nine-minute wait when I first logged in. But once it finished, I was disconnected and kicked to the back of the line for another, even longer queue.

It appears I'm not the only one who has made it past the queue only to be disconnected and prompted to start the whole process over again. Players and streamers are all reporting similar issues, although some people have successfully made it in.

Blizzard acknowledged the issues on X: "We're working through some final issues, and we expect the doors to open soon."

There doesn't seem to be any trick to the queue. You just need to wait it out and pray that it lets you past the initial login screen.

WoW: Forever is the first version of WoW that doesn't use realms, or servers, in the same way as the others. Instead of picking a realm, you pick a ruleset (normal, PvP, or Roleplay) and join the same server as everyone else. Blizzard did it this way to help preserve the social aspect of the original MMO. This might also be why the queue times are so rough.

Wowhead and others have been busy datamining the game's files for new details. You can already go through all the new class talent trees and peek at some of the reworked armor sets. It might be worth taking a look while you wait to get in, or, if you're like me and don't want to spoil everything, cross your fingers and hope you can play a little before the risk of long queues gets even worse on the weekend.

There will be plenty of time to play the WoW: Forever beta, however. It'll stick around until October 21 before Blizzard fixes it up for its November 4 launch.

As reported by TorrentFreak, the ubiquitous DRM producer, Denuvo, is attempting to take one of its biggest foes to court over their work circumventing the antipiracy measures on games like Hogwarts Legacy and Black Myth: Wukong. The case is unique in that it comes from Denuvo and not one of the individual copyright-holders of an affected game.

The target of the lawsuit, who goes by "voices38" on various channels, is particularly prolific when it comes to putting out DRM-circumventing patches or "cracks" for games that license Denuvo's copy protection software. Denuvo is suing voices38 under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which prohibits tampering with digital protections.

While voices38 is an anonymous actor, Denuvo lists a number of social and gaming services accounts associated with them in its filing, an indication that the company will likely subpoena Valve, Reddit, and/or Discord for identifying information. We saw a similar move from Rockstar recently as it attempted to uncover the identity of GTA6 leaker Cyberleek.

"On information and belief, Defendant is an individual who has circumvented Denuvo’s technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works," Denuvo wrote in its filing with the Northern District of California. "Defendant has further announced, posted, or disclosed online, including through Reddit, how to circumvent Denuvo's technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works, facilitating or allowing others to similarly circumvent those controls and access video games without authorization."

Denuvo's software is largely unpopular with gamers, pirates or paying customers, as it is seen as invasive and a drain on system resources (Denuvo claims that its software does not affect game performance), but major publishers still turn to it as an antipiracy measure. Denuvo's legal strategy echoes the successful actions taken by Bungie and Activision against cheat developers for their competitive multiplayer games⁠. In addition to keeping up in the anticheat arms race, some companies have taken to suing cheat makers out of existence.

But part of what let them pursue that strategy is the fact that developing hacks for multiplayer games had evolved into a grey market business with identifiable, profit-making entities to sue, while piracy is more diffuse and inherently not a moneymaker. Successfully unmasking voices38 is the cornerstone of any successful legal action by Denuvo.

Voices38 does not seem particularly bothered by the threat, or they're just playing it very, very cool. "All is fine, everything will continue as normal," they wrote in a comment on the piracy-focused CrackWatch subreddit.

Just four months after the release of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, and two months after laying off a significant number of employees, Studio ZA/UM has announced Zero Parades: Director's Cut, a major update that will add roughly 40,000 words of new content, a new encounter, and other improvements and fixes.

From the announcement on Steam: "Zero Parades: Director's Cut is the definitive edition of our espionage RPG, bringing more story, scenery and mind-fuckery to discover during your bid to reunite The Whole Sick Crew. And yes, we heard you: that includes more Melita."

All due respect to Melita, but the real centerpiece of the Director's Cut appears to be Quisach Roundabout, a new "dramatic encounter" about escaping the titular roundabout. As someone who lives in a country where roundabouts are still relatively new and rare, I'd say that sounds relatable, but apparently this adventure runs a little deeper than just having to figure out which lane you're supposed to be in.

"Hershel and her old friend Ramses find themselves stoned out of their minds, behind the wheel of a hijacked tuk-tuk and seemingly unable to escape the Quisach Roundabout late at night. The objective seems simple enough: take the right exit and head home. Fail to do so, and well... things might get existential. And possibly fatal."

The Director's Cut also offers a new "backstage mode," providing a look at technical insights into the game's development, cut content, and stories from art director Kaspar Tamsalu, new clothing, interactions, death screens, and "atmospheric additions," various quality of life improvements, "and loads more."

Zero Parades: Director's Cut sounds a lot like Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, which brought full voice acting, new characters, a new location, and more to the acclaimed 2019 RPG. But there's one notable difference: Where The Final Cut arrived a year and a half after Disco Elysium's release, Zero Parades: Director's Cut is dropping just four months after the original release. The relatively muted response to Zero Parades compared to Disco Elysium may be a factor in that seeming rush, particularly given that the studio previously cited that shortcoming as the reason for layoff of up to 32 people that was announced in July.

In any event, the response to the Director's Cut from Zero Parades fans is very positive, and it does represent a second chance of sorts for the game: It's coming as a free update for current owners on October 1, and will also mark the game's launch on PlayStation 5, which is set to happen on November 3.

Diablo 4's current Season of Hell's Legacy is focused on celebrating the 30th anniversary of the series, which debuted all the way back in 1997. As part of that effort, Blizzard has been reaching back into the past to bring back iconic characters and enemies like Deckard Cain, Baal, Mephisto, and of course the Big D himself.

The recent discovery of Rune word recipes from Diablo 2 had players wondering if maybe Blizzard has any other blasts from the past stashed away in the new season, and as discovered by redditor JT99-FirstBallot, the answer is a very big yes.

Tristram, of course, is the village that serves as the home base of the original Diablo, where players go to buy and sell items, and interact with a range of sadly doomed NPCs like Griswold, Ogden, Pepin, and Wirt. But it's more than just that: As the hub of what is arguably gaming's most influential action RPG, Tristram is a seminal piece of digital landscape, burned into the memories of old-time Diablo fans—and its destruction sometime prior to the events of Diablo 2 (sorry, mild spoiler there) was a genuine bummer.

What's particularly impressive here is how faithful this recreation of Tristram is. The visuals are obviously dramatically improved (although it looks just as I remember it—isn't the human mind a wonderful thing?) but the layout is spot on, and all the characters are there, doing what they do. What really lands for me, though, is the audio: I'm not a Diablo fan by any stretch these days (I haven't touched the series since Diablo 2) but that Tristram guitar riff hits like a truck, and Griswold's voice, well—that's Griswold's voice!

But the attention to detail runs even deeper. As YouTuber MacroBioBoi explains, this Tristram can be turned into Uber Tristram, a special zone previously only accessible during the Pandemonium Event from the Diablo 2 expansion Lord of Destruction. Uber Tristram is basically a copy of the destroyed village seen in the first act of Diablo 2, with one big expansion: You have to fight Baal, Mephisto, and Diablo at the same time. The payoff for kicking all that Prime Evil ass is the Hellfire Torch, an extremely powerful charm—and yes, the Hellfire Torch reward is waiting for you in Diablo 4 now, too.

Blizzard is clearly going hard to recapture the magic of Diablo's glory days for the 30th anniversary, and going deep too. Which naturally leads to the question: What else is in there? It certainly seems like there's more up the sleeve: The Uber Tristram bosses also drop a new item that players are still trying to figure out what to do with.

Now that Diablo 5 is coming—though not until 2029—there are no more expansions planned for Diablo 4, and seasons will be the focus. Blizzard says we can expect more storytelling though. Namely, it needs to bring about the apocalyptic return of Diablo to set up the events of the sequel, which will take place after Sanctuary has fallen to the forces of evil.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said that Grand Theft Auto 6 multiplayer will launch next year, in 2027.

Rockstar hasn't made any official announcement about GTA 6 multiplayer, what's going to happen with GTA Online, or when we can expect the PC version. It's a safe bet that Clancy is not authorized to make such an announcement, but his comment doesn't sound speculative.

"We spent a lot of time talking with Rockstar about their plans, and also helping them think about how they can engage our creators," Clancy told the publication. "You are going to see this big bump with GTA 6, but then an even bigger one next year when they launch multiplayer."

I've reached out to Rockstar and Twitch for comment.

I heard you like games, so I put a game-within-a-game so you can… game? I don't know, but I couldn't pretend like there wasn't an early 2000s joke in there.

This week's quiz is all about fun little derailments. Think minigames, but games within games and not Mario Party-style collections. I'm talking things like Triple Triad—Final Fantasy 8's stellar card game that also made it into the MMO—it's the type of sidequest you access from within your main campaign and suddenly the weekend is gone.

Sometimes they're straightforward implementations of real-life time sinks like Poker or Blackjack. I can play an hour or two of those and wash my hands of it. Then there's something like Gwent, which I cite as the reason why I still haven't beaten The Witcher 3. You can't just stick a card game like that into an RPG and expect me to not obsessively play for weeks on end.

So, if I show you a screenshot of a game-within-a-game, can you name the game it's from? You've got 10 minutes to complete the quiz, and I'd love to hear how you did once you've finished.

When battling tree-swinging trolls, ice-spitting dragons, and fire-breathing skeletal demigods, it's hard to think of a skill more important than dodging. A shield or a weapon held up defensively can help, sure, but escaping deadly attacks in Valheim is often down to how quickly you can tuck and roll.

Which makes it a bit curious that over the past five years of early access, you couldn't redbind the dodge skill to a single key or button press. If you want to dodge on keyboard, you have to hold the block button (mouse 2) and press jump (space bar) and pick a direction (WASD). On controller, it's a stick + button combo. No single tap for a deeply important maneuver has been available for the past five years.

Until today! Those busy Valhiem devs finally took a peek at player feedback and noticed the request people have been making constantly for the past five years, seven months, 15 days, 17 hours, and 22 minutes: You have now been granted the ability to remap your dodge key to an alternate—no doubt single-tap—configuration.

Better late than never?

That's not the only key rebinding option that's been added. You can rebind items on the radial wheel and hotbar, too. A much newer request, to disable the intro cinematic (which only appeared with Valheim 1.0 last week), has also been granted. There are also some bug fixes, notably more tinkering with the Valheim cheat-flagging feature that was mislabeling some players and resources as cheats.

Have a look at the full patch notes below, and good luck trying to unlearn the muscle memory you've developed for dodging with three different keys over the past five years or so. One note: the patch, devs say, "will require a few days to get uploaded to all platforms." I've checked and it's live on PC now, however.

Quality of Life:

• Added several new keybinding options to the keyboard (Alternate dodge key, hotbar rebinding (on top of 1-8), support for rebinding radial wheel, support for removing keybinds)
• Added accessibility setting to be able to toggle blocking
• Add toggle to Gameplay settings to skip the intro cinematic on startup
• When attacking, the player’s rotation now also snaps towards the intended attack direction when the “attack towards look direction” option is enabled, not just when it’s disabled.
• Swapped Motion Sensor and Sheath keybinds on gamepad, returning Sheath to its original keybind. Motion Sensor can now be activated with the alt-key + Sheath button instead.

Optimizations:

• Improved GPU performance when tessellation is disabled by eliminating unnecessary GPU overhead in this case.
• Heightmap shadows are now calculated more accurately and at a lower performance cost.
• Optimized particle systems in the main menu to reduce overdraw.
• Multiple GPU performance improvements on Switch 2.

Bugs & Issues:

• PlayerBase effect on some build pieces has been increased to block enemies more
• Fixed inaccuracies in stick input pre-processing that made it heavily weighted towards axis-aligned movement and 30% too slow diagonally.
• Jotun puffs and Magecaps no longer respawn.
• Fix for player characters sometimes mistakenly being marked as temporary cheaters, leading to items dropped by monsters they kill being incorrectly marked as having a cheated origin.
• Cheated stackable items no longer stack with regular items, preventing uncheated stacks from being “corrupted” into a cheated state.
• Persistent Events devcommand (“pevents”) is now actually behind the devcommands toggle and not available in the console by default.
• Fixed errors when using the grappling hook’s secondary attack on creatures.
• Fixed various issues with Ashlands water (VFX, water damage not stopping)
• Fixed a bug where characters didn’t save correctly when manually pressing Save while playing on a server hosted by someone else.
• Disabled biomedata caching, fixing a bug where the cache could end up in an invalid state, making it impossible to join remote servers.
• Fixed Deep North battleaxes tool tier, can now cut all the trees.
• Made placeable boulders persist, only placeable on the ground, break if the ground they’re standing on goes away, and give ground-level support.
• Updated Ballista to make it accept all new trophies (All Deep North enemies + Bjorn + Vile)
• Timberwood build pieces no longer incorrectly show up in earlier biome locations
• Fixed various crashes/errors that could happen in rare circumstances
• Fixed a bug where Helmet of the Protector was craftable directly via the Black Forge
• Fixed a bug where terrain modifications by players or monsters could lead to performance and portal issues in multiplayer, such as performance and portaling issues, terrain seams, and terrain modifications becoming undone
• Updated Deep North and Winding Tunnels music for better balance and to remove some clicks when looping.
• Now plays the correct music in Mörkhalla.
• Better mixing of location music in the Deep North.
• Tweaked Seal and Baby Seal colliders to better match their bodies.
• Fixed an issue where the “No time for snoozing” achievement could sometimes not be unlocked in multiplayer
• Fixed an issue where The Homesteader and The Architect achievements could unlock repeatedly.
• Nintendo Switch 2: The TV output no longer switches from 120 Hz to 60 Hz while the virtual keyboard is open or while in the home menu when using the balanced graphics preset and playing online multiplayer, which caused a black screen while entering and leaving these menus.
• PlayStation®5: The TV output no longer switches from 120 Hz to 60 Hz while in the home menu when using the balanced graphics preset, which caused a black screen when entering and leaving this menu.
• PlayStation®5: The “Stronger Together” achievement is now achievable.
• Steam: Fixed a bug where Steam Cloud could get stuck in an invalid state if the game crashed while saving.

I grew up by a dry riverbed. This was, on the whole, positive, because what a big empty riverbed is good for is setting things on fire, firing air rifles, and walloping golf balls into orbit. Some say they never stopped travelling. They're still out there, somewhere, in the space between the stars.

The reason Grand Theft Auto 5 is worse than a riverbed is that you can't do that last thing. Or, well, you can, but only at officially designated golf courses, which are prisons for the soul. I have now fixed this omission. I installed Street Golf, which lets you play golf, but in the street.

Much like the previous two mods I've bolted onto GTA 5's sagging frame (LifeInvader Business Mod and Become A Celebrity), I was immediately impressed by how much of the mod there is. This is no ramshackle creation—the possibility of equipping a golf club and whacking some balls in the street—but comes with a suite of tweakable menus, golf stats, and potent balltypes. Normal balls? Yes. Fire balls? Absolutely. Detonating balls? Very much so. And super balls, which you can set to travel about 200x further than any other ball in your arsenal.

Being as I am now accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard, who is instantly replaced by an almost-identical bodyguard whenever he happens to get pancaked by a flying car or assassinated by a squad of mercenaries, I opted to use him as a kind of ambulatory mini-golf windmill.

My shots were angled towards him, alternately sending him cartwheeling hilariously down the street, sending him cartwheeling even further down the street (super ball, you see), or setting him on fire. The detonating balls never quite worked. The mod procced some sort of achievement when I successfully nailed him in the dome with a maximum-power shot.

It's a pleasant distraction. Whenever the travails of my life in Los Santos get too much I can, at any moment, drop into Golf Mode. Would that real life were the same way.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says the European Union's plan to restrict social media use by children, including a complete ban for anyone under the age of 13, is "terrible for the next generation of humanity" because of the impact it will have on the growth of creativity and expression.

Announced today, the EU KIDS Act—"Keeping Internet Digital Spaces Accountable and Trustworthy," because overwrought acronyms for serious legislation isn't a uniquely American phenomenon—imposes a blanket ban on social media accounts for anyone under the age of 13, although "specially-designed child-friendly video-sharing services" can be established via their parents' or guardian's accounts.

From the ages of 13 to 15, accounts can be set up under the supervision of guardians, although they should have "limited features and screen time." From 15 up, minors can set up their own "autonomous accounts" without parental consent, although "parental guidance remains essential during this stage."

The goal of the new regulations is to effect a "gradual approach" to social media use—the digital equivalent of teaching kids to swim before throwing them into the lake. Notably, the KIDS Act covers not just traditional social media platforms—Instagram, TikTok, and the like—but also "video-sharing platforms, online games, AI chatbots or companions," plus app stores and operating systems. Some services, like online encyclopedias, educational platforms, and digital news outlets, would be exempt.

"Today, our children are engaging with the most sophisticated technologies ever created. Technology that was never created with their wellbeing in mind," EU president Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. "Our KIDS Act is reversing the burden of proof—it is for platforms to show they are safe by design. And we put parents back in the driving seat, giving them the tools to help their children navigate a safer online world."

Sweeney takes a different view of the situation, however. "This would be terrible for the next generation of humanity," the Epic chief said on X, a day prior to the act's official announcement. "The apps and games of today are the paintbrushes and tree forts of yesterday. Fortnite has Creative Mode, Roblox has Roblox studio, and being a digital creator is in everyone's reach, till politicians take it away."

It's fair to say that it would not be great news for Epic if the EU suddenly made it a whole lot harder for kids under 15 to play Fortnite, and without wanting to sound like an 'in my day we drank straight from the hose!' guy, I would point out that paintbrushes and tree forts are still readily available. It's not as if pre-teens will be reduced to cave painting and hitting each other with rocks if they're suddenly no longer able to generate content for billionaires.

Even so, I find myself on board with Sweeney's broader stance—this isn't a great idea—not out of concerns that it will dull the creative instincts of the next generation, but simply because it's a potential security and privacy nightmare that's difficult to enforce and may or may not achieve its stated goals anyway.

And as other PC Gamer writers have previously pointed out, the impact of social media on young minds is only part of the problem, and arguably a relatively minor part: It also bakes the brains of adults with startling efficiency.

The EU KIDS Act is not a done deal. The proposed regulation has been submitted to the European Parliament and Council, and from there will enter the legislative process required for approval. Given the recent enactment of social media bans for kids and online age verification requirements in Australia, the UK, and some US states, though, and "the clear demand for urgent and comprehensive action" expressed by the EU, I expect it will be soon enough.

As reported by IGN and Gabe Follower on X, Backrooms director Kane Parsons shared an Instagram story from Valve's Bellevue, Washington headquarters on September 16. The director has previously said that Portal was extremely influential on his work, inspiring hopes for a Parsons-led adaptation or some other collaboration with the studio.

There's more circumstantial evidence in favor of this being more than just a friendly visit: Parsons previously told The New York Times in May that making a Portal feature film would be his "dream." What's more, this isn't the first time Parsons has been seen at Valve HQ. His Instagram story commemorating a visit in June has been preserved by user eugen3 on the Valve subreddit.

Those are encouraging signs that we could have a Portal movie from a guy who'd do a great job on it to look forward to, but there are some caveats. Parsons also told the NYT in May that he doesn't want to move on from Backrooms until it reaches some kind of conclusion, and he is already engaged to direct a sequel for A24.

There is also the matter of J.J. Abrams' seemingly-abandoned Portal movie project. He last spoke about it on the record in 2021, but there could be some standing contracts or agreements to consider.

I find I'm not particularly excited about a videogame adaptation unless the right director's involved, but there's been a lot of that going around recently. Zach Cregger's Resident Evil is looking like a slam dunk, even if some people are grumpy it's not about Leon Kennedy, and I find myself increasingly excited for Alex "The Guy Who Wrote Dredd" Garland's upcoming Elden Ring movie.

Parsons has already shown himself to be a master of the sort of abandoned corporate surrealism that defined Portal⁠, and his passion for the subject matter would also be cause for excitement. Gaming also runs in Parsons' family: His father, Michael Parsons, was a longtime technical artist at Telltale during its legendary 2010s hot streak.

The industry obsession with high-resolution graphics has haunted it for years, but given the dire state of things in regards to both layoffs and hardware prices? It's now starting to be downright incompatible.

Raph Koster, a veteran developer who worked on Ultima Online and was the creative director for Star Wars Galaxies—and is now making another MMO, Stars Reach—has been banging that particular drum for years.

"I think the first time I spoke about, ‘Hey, cost is going to kill us’ was 2005," he tells our friends at Edge Magazine in a massive interview inside Issue 428. "Myhrvold’s Law says that software is a gas—it expands to fill whatever computer you have … The place that shows up the most in games, for better or worse, is in content costs."

Reiterating similar thoughts spoken to me when I chatted to him back in June, Koster says that "what used to be a single 128x128 texture is now multiple 4K textures with shaders and all this stuff. And, yes, tools have improved along the way. You don’t handpaint that texture pixel by pixel any more—you can use procedural tools like Substance, or just purchase it from a texture library or whatever.

"But there’s still [a] downstream cost, even if it’s just testing how those umpteen textures and shaders interact. It all adds up." Combine that with the fact that game prices haven't gone up in parallel to these ballooning development costs, thanks to constant deals—"who buys something at $60, even, today?"—and you've got a recipe for disaster.

A cyclical one, mind. "Unless we hit the singularity," Koster says, "a platform will come along that changes things." Koster lays out a few key qualities this hypothetical platform would require in order to save the industry (or at least, the developers working within it) from this steadily-approaching iceberg:

"It needs to provide a new affordance, meaning there has to be gameplay you cannot get except on that platform … [it needs to be] worse for making traditional games—because that means the big incumbents cannot just transfer their expertise, come in and dominate.

And to top it all off? "The number-one biggest thing this new platform needs is to have shitty graphics." Referring to a few historical examples, like Flash games, social games on Facebook, the Wii, and mobile. That's not to say these platforms'll be immune to those problems, though.

"They eventually catch up, and then the costs rise in exactly the same way. But we haven’t had a new platform come along to reset that cost curve in a long time. Like, a long time."

If you remember a very cool project we reported on a few months ago that got Ubuntu Linux up and running on PlayStation 5 consoles, I have some bad news: the lead developer of the open-source project, Andy Nguyen, has stepped away:

"I am stepping away from the PS5 scene and stopping all my work on PS5 Linux," Nguyen posted on X. "After pouring my heart and months of my life into it, including plans to finish PS5 Pro support and release in 2027, it's all down the sink."

"The scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don't even understand. Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony."

The project, which was run by Nguyen, used hypervisor bugs to get Ubuntu Linux working on the PS5. Once past Sony's barriers, open-source Mesa drivers were tweaked to get everything working as it should, but you had to stay on older firmware to prevent Sony's patches "fixing" the hypervisor bugs that permitted the project to work.

Nguyen was working on getting Ubuntu working with the PS5 Pro, but that relied on the "only hypervisor bug left", which has now been reported to Sony by the "slop kiddies." Which will presumably mean a patch from Sony and goodbye to the project.

"I asked them [the people who found the hypervisor bug]," Nguyen says, "to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy Linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead."

I'm unsure how much of Nguyen stepping away has to do with this happening to the Pro project, and how much is the prevalence of "noobs." It seems like perhaps a little of column A and a little of column B. I'm not a dev so I can't say whether this kind of negative environment is encouraged by 'easier' development using AI, but it wouldn't surprise me.