Another week, another fun tidbit learned about our new favorite gamer turned movie star, Inde Navarrette, who creeped us all the hell out in the smash-hit horror film Obsession earlier this year.

We already marveled at Navarrette cooly streaming her Call of Duty killstreaks on Twitch while wearing a Toad hat, and we were charmed to hear she (in part) learned to build PCs by watching Henry Cavill do it on YouTube.

This latest revelation is encouraging, too: Navarrette is a big fan of Resident Evil. Hey, so are we! Celebrities: they're just like us.

In a video interview with Variety's Tiana DeNicola, Navarrette talked about the first videogames she ever played—her mom bought her Shrek: Super Party for PlayStation 2 and her dad was a big Call of Duty fan—as well as what games she's playing now, like God of War Ragnarök.

Navarrette is also playing horror games these days, which feels appropriate considering how spooky Obsession was, and says she's currently "on a Resident Evil kick."

DeNicola asked if Navarrette had been contacted by anyone to do any acting in a videogame.

"Yes, and I'm starting my journey with that soon," Navarrette said, and though she wouldn't reveal which game she would be acting in, it sounds like it could be an indie game rather than a triple-A blockbuster.

"I want to try something smaller to kind of test the waters," she said, "because videogames are obviously an interest of mine."

As for playing a part in a Resident Evil project: "I love that world specifically, the Resident Evil world," Navarrette said.

"That would be perfect for you," DeNicola said. "I think that would be amazing."

"I… would die inside," Navarrette said.

Oddly enough, Navarrette hadn't heard about Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film coming out next month, but seemed delighted at the idea.

"I will buy a ticket," Navarrette said. "That's exciting."

I have to agree with DeNicola, Navarrette would be a perfect fit for Resident Evil, either in a film or a game. Her performance in Obsession required both the type of heightened emotion and the extreme physicality that would be right at home in Raccoon City. Hopefully Capcom will make it happen someday. You can see Variety's entire interview on YouTube.

Last month, as it continued to navigate the PR craters left by its thousands of layoffs and IDF patronage, Microsoft announced that it was bringing four original Xbox games to PC through a new Backward Compatibility for PC program. Now, it seems Microsoft has bigger PC port plans in store, expanding its backwards-facing content strategy.

According to reporting from The Verge, a leaked document sent to developers indicates that Microsoft is planning to enable developers to allow their previously-released Xbox 360 games to be purchased and played on PC. The Xbox 360 backwards compatibility will reportedly be available on "Xbox PCs," Microsoft's upcoming Project Helix, and handheld devices.

Expected to launch via a "gradual" rollout between 2027 and 2028, the service will reportedly let developers opt into allowing PC backwards compatibility for their games in their Xbox 360 release catalogue.

An eventual emergence of Xbox 360 backwards compatibility seemed likely, as users realized last month that the four OG Xbox games newly released for PC were running in an Xbox emulator that was, itself, running inside an Xbox 360 emulator. With "minimal" reverse-engineering, emulator developers were able to get Microsoft's nested emulation solution to run dumped Xbox 360 games.

The leaked document also provided details for the disc-to-digital program that previous Verge reporting said was in testing at Microsoft, which will allow owners of Xbox One and Xbox Series X game discs to obtain a digital license for the game across Xbox devices. Unfortunately, that service doesn't seem to extend to Xbox 360 discs; if I had to speculate, I'd guess it's because 360 discs likely lack the disc-level licensing tech that Xbox had originally planned to utilize with the Xbox One launch.

But users who already own a digital copy of Lost Odyssey might soon be able to play it on PC—something PC Gamer has been hoping for since at least 2017.

Remember those 'I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC' ad spots from years ago? Such platform rivalry feels like old, mouldering hat these days (especially to a console-gaming interloper like me). That said, we live in a world where both the MacBook Neo and the Dell XPS 13, two notebooks alike in dignity, are vying for the crown of 'most affordable entry-level notebook' at $699 a piece.

The rivalry is old news, though a fresh twist in the tale is that apparently large Microsoft Word files actually open faster on the MacBook Neo. Independent testing carried out by PhoneBuff found that the Neo opened a 500-page Word document in a hair over 7 seconds, whereas a similarly specced Dell XPS 13 took 12 seconds (via Windows Latest).

It's quite the upset—you'd think that after all these years, Microsoft would offer the optimum Word Doc experience within Windows. To add insult to injury, the MacBook Neo doesn't even have Apple's speedy M-series silicon, but instead features what is essentially a repurposed phone chip in the A18 Pro. Though, to be fair, this 'mere' phone chip is still comparable to older M-series chips.

Notebooks like this can handle more than just note-taking. The Dell XPS 13 features an Intel Core 5 320 (a stripped-down version of the Panther Lake chips we like a lot), which should offer plenty of other opportunities to shine throughout PhoneBuff's testing. For instance, on startup the Dell XPS 13 races to the desktop in 24 seconds. The MacBook Neo takes very nearly twice as long, clocking in at 40 seconds. Mind you, that may not really be an, ahem, apples to apples comparsion as the notebooks are running two different operating systems.

But as both of the laptops tested were configured with only 8 GB of RAM, you'd perhaps expect this to be a closer run thing. PhoneBuff's battery efficiency and creative workload tests are a lot more variable, but there's only one thing that I'm interested in here: gaming performance.

Cyberpunk 2077 on a notebook? It's more likely than you think—though with some caveats, obviously. The MacBook Neo loaded up CD Projekt Red's techno dystopia in a hair under 41 seconds, whereas the Dell XPS 13 managed it in 55. When it comes to the game benchmark, though, you can't even attempt to run it at ultra settings on the Dell XPS 13.

Otherwise, when running fullscreen, the XPS 13 averages 16 fps in the benchmark, whereas the MacBook Neo averages almost 20 fps. Now, the MacBook Neo outperforming the Dell was not something I was expecting. Though I also wouldn't necessarily call 20 fps 'playable,' let alone 'enjoyable'.

Our Ian managed to get the MacBook Neo to run Cyberpunk 2077 at 30 FPS in his own testing earlier this year. He writes in his review, "The downside is that to get this, you need to dip below Steam Deck settings, using the Low graphics profile, with the resolution at 720p, and with MetalFX upscaling in performance mode. That's not great, and looks a little soft thanks to all the upscaling going on, but at least it is technically playable."

Personally, I think I'll be sticking with my rig for Cyberpunk 2077—though either notebook might still get a look in for less hardware-intensive indie releases and visual novels.

If you manage your gaming expectations accordingly, then the XPS 13's 13-inch OLED touch display is nothing to sneeze at. The XPS 13's OLED also enjoys P3 colour gamut, meaning it supports a slightly wider range of colours than the MacBook Neo. Furthermore, its 120 Hz refresh rate is twice that of the MacBook Neo's screen—at the very least, scrolling through a webpage will feel a smidge smoother on the Dell, even if its Intel Core 5 320 chip will struggle to keep up with your competitive favourites.

My, how the world can change in a year. The previous version of the Razer Blade 16 shot to the top of our best gaming laptop guide upon its release in 2025, thanks to its fantastic chassis design, great performance, and battery-powered gaming abilities, among other virtues. Yes, it was hugely expensive. But thanks to a stunning all round package, it was worth the money if you had the cash to splash.

Now I sit with the Razer Blade 16 (2026) in front of me—and on the surface, not a whole lot has changed. I've been provided with an RTX 5090-equipped config with 32 GB of DDR5, a 2 TB SSD, and a 240 Hz 16-inch OLED display, all wrapped up in the same chassis as the old model. So far, so brilliant. The major change to this refresh, though, is the addition of one of Intel's Panther Lake-based laptop processors, the Core Ultra 9 386H.

It's a very speedy gaming CPU, and a worthy addition to the Blade 16's armoury. But the thing I'm struggling with, as I'm sure you might have already guessed, is the price. Prepare yourself, folks. This particular Blade 16 costs, and there's no getting round it, $4,900/£4,800.

That's $400 more than the previous RTX 5090-equipped Blade, and, as usual, you can largely blame the memory crisis. But for this sort of price, I'm not quite as convinced by the Blade 16 as I used to be. It's still a sumptuous, fabulous machine, and I'd have one in a heartbeat if I had all the money in the world. But I'd also have a gold-plated Lamborghini and a spare room made of chocolate, while I'm at it.

Which is to say, it's become more difficult to justify the Blade 16's value for this sort of moolah. It's super-portable for a 16-inch machine, and that's worth a lot. It's a wonderfully-premium object, too, with a fantastic screen. And it gets good battery life, all the while running relatively quietly if you drop it down into Balanced mode. It's very… civilised. And I love that.

But spending nearly five grand on an RTX 5090 gaming laptop that can be soundly beaten in the performance stakes by the often-cheaper, RTX 5080-toting Lenovo Legion Pro 7i? The idea of it stops me in my tracks. Is the Razer better in many other ways? Undoubtedly. But the price to performance delta is now skewed, and that gives me the odd doubt.

There are cheaper, lesser-GPUed models of the Blade 16 available, and if I was buying one with my own money, that's where I'd be looking. The Razer Blade 16 is an astonishing piece of engineering, and rarely have I wanted a gaming laptop more. But crucially, I think its MSRP across the range is now substantial enough to keep me awake at night—and as a result, I've got to knock it down by a peg or two.

Razer Blade (2026) features

The 2026 version of the Blade 16 is still a lush device, and my review sample has a specs sheet to be proud of. The major internal change over our previously tested model comes in the form of the Panther Lake-based Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor, which replaces the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 found in last year's top-spec config.

It's a 16-core CPU, which breaks down into four Performance cores, eight Efficient, and four Low Power Efficient types. That core distribution might sound a little weak on paper, but in practice it adds up to create a powerful gaming chip, with a 4.9 GHz max boost frequency and a maximum boosted power draw of 80 W.

Unfortunately, the iGPU here isn't the Arc B390 found in Intel's top-of-the-line Panther Lake chips, which feels like a bit of an omission. Instead you get a four Xe3-cored "Intel Graphics" tile, which means that for battery-based gaming you're probably going to want to lean on the dGPU. Which in this case is a beastly RTX 5090 mobile chip capable of maxing out at a 175 W TGP.

It'll sip much less power than that in practice, of course, and you'll need a Razer cooling pad to enable its potential top wattage figure. Still, the lack of a feisty iGPU is a missed opportunity for genuinely mobile gaming, if you ask me.

Lower-specced variants of the Blade 16 are available, going all the way down to an RTX 5060/Ryzen AI 9 365 config with 16 GB of DDR5 and a 1 TB SSD. Even this "bottom-spec" model, though, has an eye-watering price given the hardware inside. It's $2,400, to be precise. Oof.

Still, my top-end sample is well-equipped no matter which way you look at it. It's got 32 GB of LPDDR5X-9600, a 2 TB Gen4 SSD, and a truly stunning 240 Hz OLED display, complete with DisplayHDR TrueBlack1000 certification.

It's still one of the best panels I've had the pleasure of setting my eyes upon—although it's got some serious competition in the form of the new ROG Nebula OLED displays found in the latest Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 models.

All this high-end hardware comes wrapped in a chassis that still stands head and shoulders above the rest. The Blade 16 is astonishingly slim given the components inside, and its crisp-edged, all-business frame feels like the pinnacle of gaming laptop design.

I say all business, but it's still got a big, neon green Razer logo on the back and an RGB-lit keyboard. You can always turn the lighting off, but I quite like the contrast it creates. Gamer executive chic? Something like that, anyway.

The keyboard has more travel than you might expect from a low-profile unit, and my typing accuracy has noticeably improved when clicking away at its keys on the go. As for the trackpad? It's glorious, with a large, smooth-yet-tactile surface and ultra-responsive clicks.

Every other laptop manufacturer should take a look at Razer's efforts here and make notes. Simply put, every part of the Blade 16 looks and feels top notch. It's amazing what huge gobs of cash will buy, isn't it?

Razer Blade (2026) performance

Jumping straight into the 1080p benchmarks, it's clear that the new Intel chip has done the Blade 16 some good when it comes to gaming performance. In Baldur's Gate 3, the newly-sharpened Blade manages to pull an impressive 21 fps lead in the averages over its older AMD-chipped sibling, with substantially higher 1% lows to boot.

1080p gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1080p resolution

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra)Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong (1080p High)F1 24 (1080p Ultra High)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

66

44

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

52

39

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

63

34

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

68

38

020406080

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	66 Avg FPS, 44 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	52 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	63 Avg FPS, 34 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	68 Avg FPS, 38 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

83

41

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

78

43

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

62

28

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

96

55

0255075100

Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	83 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	78 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	62 Avg FPS, 28 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	96 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

110

84

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

102

83

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

114

76

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

99

84

037.575112.5150

Black Myth: Wukong (1080p High) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	110 Avg FPS, 84 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	102 Avg FPS, 83 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	114 Avg FPS, 76 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	99 Avg FPS, 84 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

120

92

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

101

76

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

117

57

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

126

51

037.575112.5150

F1 24 (1080p Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	120 Avg FPS, 92 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	101 Avg FPS, 76 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	117 Avg FPS, 57 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	126 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

126

64

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

102

53

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

117

64

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

140

72

037.575112.5150

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	126 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	102 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	117 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	140 Avg FPS, 72 1% Low FPS

The Blade 16 (2026) is comfortably faster than the previous version in most of my 1080p gaming benchmarks, although the Legion 7i Pro remains supreme.

In Cyberpunk 2077, though, that lead shrinks to a mere 3 fps average, albeit with 10 frames gained in the 1% lows. The Blade 16 also beats the new Asus G16 quite handily, although runs into some trouble when faced with the mighty Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10.

The Lenovo machine also scorches ahead in Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, leaving every other lappy on this chart firmly in its wake. It's a good example of how some high-wattage components in a chonkier laptop chassis can gulp down power, spin up the fans, and pull beyond their weight under duress.

1600p gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1600p resolution

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra)Baldur's Gate 3 (Native res. Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong (Native res. High)F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native res. Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

39

30

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

31

24

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

39

29

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

40

28

010203040

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	39 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	31 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	39 Avg FPS, 29 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	40 Avg FPS, 28 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

81

45

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

80

46

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

61

33

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

96

42

0255075100

Baldur's Gate 3 (Native res. Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	81 Avg FPS, 45 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	80 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	61 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	96 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

76

48

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

75

66

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

68

45

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

111

80

037.575112.5150

Black Myth: Wukong (Native res. High) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	76 Avg FPS, 48 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	75 Avg FPS, 66 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	68 Avg FPS, 45 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	111 Avg FPS, 80 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

78

67

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

63

53

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

77

46

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

77

55

020406080

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	78 Avg FPS, 67 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	63 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	77 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	77 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

95

56

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

68

46

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

90

58

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

96

65

0255075100

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native res. Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	95 Avg FPS, 56 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	68 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	90 Avg FPS, 58 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	96 Avg FPS, 65 1% Low FPS

The 2026 Blade 16 beats its older sibling at 1600p, and gains a decent overall lead on the RTX 5080-equipped G16—but the Legion Pro 7i still rules the roost.

At 1600p, the 2026 Blade 16 is virtually tied with both the older model and the Legion Pro 7i in Cyberpunk 2077. However, the Lenovo lappy knocks all our other machines for six in Baldur's Gate 3 and Black Myth Wukong.

Despite the Legion being an RTX 5080-equipped machine, it's got a tendency to power ahead of many other gaming laptops (including some of the RTX 5090-equipped ones) thanks to a brace of very powerful cooling fans, a monstrous 24-core Intel CPU, and a larger chassis. Thermal throttling will hold back performance with any machine, and the Lenovo is better at letting its hardware run wild and free.

It's a much heftier beast, though. While you could certainly shove its substantial, 6 lbs, rear-lipped chassis into a backpack, it's a laptop that focuses on raw performance over portability. By contrast, what the Blade 16 and Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 are aiming for is a balance between gaming chops and day-to-day usability.

Real-world gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1600p resolution with Quality upscaling enabled, and frame gen. where applicable

Cyberpunk 2077 (1600p, RT Ultra + upscaling, 2x FG)Black Myth: Wukong (1600p, High + Quality upscaling)F1 24 (1600p, Ultra High + Quality upscaling, 2x FG)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

112

75

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

95

79

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

104

73

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

124

83

037.575112.5150

Cyberpunk 2077 (1600p, RT Ultra + upscaling, 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	112 Avg FPS, 75 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	95 Avg FPS, 79 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	104 Avg FPS, 73 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	124 Avg FPS, 83 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

98

59

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

84

72

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

97

82

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

111

80

037.575112.5150

Black Myth: Wukong (1600p, High + Quality upscaling) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	98 Avg FPS, 59 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	84 Avg FPS, 72 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	97 Avg FPS, 82 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	111 Avg FPS, 80 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

185

103

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

144

125

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

169

100

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

184

91

050100150200

F1 24 (1600p, Ultra High + Quality upscaling, 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	185 Avg FPS, 103 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	144 Avg FPS, 125 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	169 Avg FPS, 100 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	184 Avg FPS, 91 1% Low FPS

It's a pretty convincing win for the Blade 16 over two of our tested machines on average, but here comes the Legion to spoil the party once more.

Add some upscaling and frame generation into the equation, and the Blade 16 pulls ahead of both the Asus and the previous model by substantial amounts in two of my benches. The Legion Pro 7i, though, gives it a pasting in Cyberpunk and Black Myth once more, although drops a single frame behind it on average in F1 24, with worse 1% lows.

What we're seeing here is the difference between a full fat, slightly old-school gaming laptop design with modern components, versus three slim and light machines designed to be taken on the road. While the Blade 16's gaming performance has definitely been improved by the addition of a new Intel chip, it's worth noting that better raw performance (for cheaper) can still be found elsewhere.

Gaming GPU usage

Average GPU frequency and power usage recorded during multiple Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition benchmark runs

GPU stats

Avg GPU freq. (MHz)

Avg GPU power (W)

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

1853

143

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

1868.53

112

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

1874

106

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

2375

127

07501,5002,2503,000

GPU stats Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	1853 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 143 Avg GPU power (W)
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	1868.53 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 112 Avg GPU power (W)
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	1874 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 106 Avg GPU power (W)
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	2375 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 127 Avg GPU power (W)

The Blade 16 (2026) seems happier to send more juice to its GPU than the older model, but the average frequency is still significantly lower than the RTX 5080 in the Legion Pro 7i.

Looking at the GPU frequency figures, we can start to see where the Legion Pro 7i finds its extra grunt. While it's got toastier temps overall, the Lenovo machine's RTX 5080 is allowed to clock much higher than the other mobile GPUs on this chart.

CPU performance

CPU performance figures taken from the Cinebench R24 single-core and multi-core benchmarks

Cinebench 2024

Multi-core index score

Single-core index score

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

1200

124

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

1215

124

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

1246

118

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

2039

138

07501,5002,2503,000

Cinebench 2024 Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	1200 Multi-core index score, 124 Single-core index score
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	1215 Multi-core index score, 124 Single-core index score
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	1246 Multi-core index score, 118 Single-core index score
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	2039 Multi-core index score, 138 Single-core index score

The Core Ultra 9 386H found in both the new Blade 16 and the G16 is plenty quick—although the 24-core chip in the Legion Pro 7i is a genuine monster.

As for productivity, the Cinebench R24 benchmark shows the Core Ultra 9 386H tracking near-identically in both the Blade 16 and the new Asus G16. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is ahead by a nose in the multi-core stakes, but a little off the pace of both in terms of single-core performance.

But here comes the Legion Pro 7i once more, with its 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX streaking ahead in both benches. It's no great surprise given the big Intel chip's fearsome specs sheet, but it's still impressive to see how far one of Intel's higher-core-count Arrow Lake CPUs can pull ahead when given room to breathe.

Razer Blade 2026 thermals

When it comes to fan noise, the Blade 16 is a bit of a hairdryer in Turbo mode, which is where you'll get the performance figures above. It keeps its component temperatures decently in check while gaming, but the fan noise is very intrusive.

You can say the same about just about any gaming laptop running at full tilt, though, and I've certainly heard worse. Much, much worse, now I come to think of it.

Real-world gaming temperatures

Gaming temperature results recorded during multiple Metro Exodus EE runs

Gaming temperatures

Avg CPU (°C)

Max CPU (°C)

Avg GPU (°C)

Max GPU (°C)

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

82

98

62

77

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

72

98

69

77

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

86

95

82

86

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

94

105

74

79

037.575112.5150

Gaming temperatures Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	82 Avg CPU (°C), 98 Max CPU (°C), 62 Avg GPU (°C), 77 Max GPU (°C)
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	72 Avg CPU (°C), 98 Max CPU (°C), 69 Avg GPU (°C), 77 Max GPU (°C)
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	86 Avg CPU (°C), 95 Max CPU (°C), 82 Avg GPU (°C), 86 Max GPU (°C)
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	94 Avg CPU (°C), 105 Max CPU (°C), 74 Avg GPU (°C), 79 Max GPU (°C)

The new Razer Blade 16 is better at keeping its GPU chilled than our 2025 test sample, although the CPU runs a little hotter.

Drop the Blade 16 down into its Balanced power mode, and the fan noise, temps, and component speeds drop with it. It's remarkably quiet at these settings, although as you would expect, this does affect the gaming performance.

I recorded a 12 fps lower result in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1600p with Quality upscaling and frame gen enabled, resulting in a 100 fps average with 68 fps 1% lows. That's still plenty fast enough for me, and likely where I'd keep the Blade 16 at all times if I owned one myself.

And therein lies the Blade 16's party trick. When you combine its portability, good frame rates at Balanced power settings, and the still-decent battery life you'll see below, the whole package starts to make a lot more sense. It's capable of being civilised in a way most high-powered laptops are not, and that goes a significant way towards justifying the expense.

Razer Blade 2026 battery life

The new Blade 16 claims to have better overall battery life than the older model, but when it comes to my gaming test figures, that doesn't prove out. To keep things even, all of our laptops are tested by setting screen brightness to 50%, disabling the Wi-Fi, and unplugging them from the wall—which, in the Blade 16's case, causes the software to switch into a Balanced power mode.

A 102 minute score is pretty good going, but it's still significantly lower than the previous model.

Gaming battery life

Results recorded in the PCMark 10 gaming battery life test, with screen brightness set to 50% and Wi-Fi disabled

PCMark 10 gaming battery life test

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

102

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

117

Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

135

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX

73

037.575112.5150

PCMark 10 gaming battery life test Data

Product	Value
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	102
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	117
Razer Blade 16 (2025) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370	135
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275 HX	73

The new Blade 16 drops significantly behind the previous model in this particular test, although it's still a long way ahead of the Legion Pro 7i.

Synapse has an extra Battery Saver setting that lowers the power draw even further, though, so for extra points I enabled it and ran the test again. This resulted in an extra six minutes or so of battery life, which isn't exactly mindblowing. Given the limited gains, I'd prefer to keep the performance of Balanced mode while I was gaming on the go.

Regardless, although the 2026 version of the Blade can't match the older model for gaming battery life in my regular testing, it's still an impressive result when compared to the Legion Pro 7i—which puts the difference between these machines in stark contrast.

You might get more performance elsewhere for your cash, but if you want usable battery life and gaming chops, you'll be paying for it. The Blade 16 might not be the fastest gaming laptop on the planet, but when it comes to travel convenience, it's still a fearsome contender.

Razer Blade 2026 aesthetics

The Blade 16 is a truly gorgeous machine. The crisp chassis design, stealthed-out colour palette and trim corners create a moody, purposeful aesthetic that I can't get enough of. This Razer lappy is here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and guess what? It's all out of Hubba Bubba.

In all seriousness, this is a gaming laptop with the gamer aesthetic tastefully reigned in, which means it wouldn't look out of place in your next business meeting, or on the train to work. It's still got a big neon green Razer logo on the back and an RGB keyboard, but both can be turned off for the true stealth experience. It's lean, mean, and beautifully well-made.

And while we're on aesthetics, I have to rave about the Blade 16's 240 Hz OLED display. You can spot this panel from across a crowded room, as I have done at many tech conferences and events. It's stunningly vibrant without appearing over-saturated, and has caused me to stare gormlessly at benchmark demos running in the background that I'd ordinarily glance at with indifference. And the contrast levels? Sumptuous.

I've spent a lot of time gaming on many different OLED displays, and they're usually very impressive. This one, though? It still stands out from the crowd.

Razer Blade (2026) software

No laptop software is perfect, and Razer Synapse is no exception. Still, it's pretty straightforward to configure, with clearly laid-out presets for Silent, Balanced, and Performance modes to help reign in some of the fan noise (and the performance, naturally) when attached to the wall.

CPU and GPU power settings can be custom configured for the plugged in modes, but the battery options limit you to Balanced and Battery Saver power presets—although you can still switch the fans between an automatic mode and a fixed speed option within the menus.

I'd like to see some more manual power configuration options while on battery, but alas, the software suddenly changes from "do what you like" to "not on my watch, buddy." Otherwise, there are plenty of settings to play with. The display, speakers, keyboard, trackpad, and lighting can be tuned to your preferences, and there's a floating bar along the top showing you real time data for your CPU and GPU temps, fan speeds, and more.

There's also a Battery Health Optimizer, which can be manually set to prevent the battery from topping itself up to the maximum, extending its overall lifespan. It's nothing revolutionary, but the Synapse integration feels reasonably comprehensive and easy enough to mess with, even if it's not quite as granular as something like Lenovo's LegionSpace solution.

Razer Blade (2026) value

The Razer Blade (2026) is now substantially more expensive than the previous model, and the new CPU isn't really to blame. The memory crisis has torn its way through the gaming laptop market, and the Blade 16 is far from immune. Which means that many of the Blade 16's competitors have also jumped in price. But now it's sitting perilously close to the five grand mark, a gaming laptop I genuinely adore is suddenly a tougher sell.

Our Dave gave the previous version's performance a solid thumbs up, even though it was off the pace when compared to some heftier, far-less-portable machines. It was quieter, more refined, more pleasant to live with. And that offset some of the benchmark quibbles, an opinion I very much agree with for the newer model.

However, while the much-faster (and much chonkier) Lenovo Legion Pro 7i can often be found for significantly less, I can't help but wonder how much the Blade's ultra-premium, ultra-portable design is actually worth. More, certainly. But substantially more? It's a very difficult thing to square.

There is a silver lining, though. The RTX 5080 Blade 16, with the same speedy Intel chip (albeit with a 1 TB SSD), can be found for $4,000. The RTX 5070 Ti version is cheaper still, at $3,500. And while these are still eye-watering sums for a gaming laptop, you can buy a lot of the best things the Blade has to offer for a substantially lower price.

The Razer Blade 16 is a fabulous machine, there's absolutely no doubt. If I had a huge amount of disposable cash to spend, I'd spec one out with relatively little thought. It screams desirability from every angle, and I've loved spending time with my review sample. Plus, it's still one of the easiest 16-inch machines to stuff in your bag and take on your next flight.

But at these prices, I think some of the Blade 16's drawbacks start to weigh more heavily upon its svelte frame. It's still one of the best gaming laptops money can buy—but for this sort of cash, I think it's lost just a touch of its shine.

MSI has just announced the Pro Max OLED 271UPJW12, and if you aren't a monitor wizard who can make sense of all those numbers, that's a new 27-inch 4K inkjet-printed OLED monitor.

If you are unfamiliar with what that means, inkjet printing is a cheaper process than the traditional deposition process used by LG and Samsung. LG and Samsung produce almost every OLED screen for PC monitors right now, but TCL, the producers of this MSI panel, have been looking to burst into the market for some time.

The new MSI panel offers a 120 Hz refresh rate, up to 1,000 nits peak brightness, and an optimised RGB stripe subpixel layout that MSI claims "closely resembles the uniform RGB structure of traditional LCDs." This should eliminate colour fringing and enhance image clarity, and is something we've seen arrive on LG and Samsung-made OLED panels only recently.

As you might be able to guess from the 120 Hz refresh rate and 'Pro' moniker, this MSI panel is not traditionally intended for gaming. We don't yet have the response rate, but it's an OLED, so it's likely to be good. Yet the focus on colour precision over speed implies a use case for professionals. The monitor offers "99% of the DCI-P3 wide color gamut with an exceptional Delta E ≤ 2 accuracy."

In a way, this new monitor for MSI will be a good testing ground for what more OLEDs could look like in the future. If inkjet-printed screens get a foothold in the market, it could make for some more budget options, and a third option away from the duopoly of Samsung and LG.

Unfortunately, though, we are missing the two most pertinent bits of information about this monitor. We don't know when it's supposed to release or what pricing will look like. The MSI Pro Max 271UPXW12G, which appears to be the QD-OLED counterpart to the inkjet monitor, seems to sit around the $700 mark. If it can cut away substantially at that price, then the swap to inkjet will be well worth it.

Still, as it's an early model for inkjet tech, I'm not expecting too big of a price cut. And non-inkjet OLED monitors are becoming more and more budget-friendly. I check over our roundup of the best cheap gaming monitors every week, and regularly spot OLED panels around the $300-$400 price point.

Even Alienware put out a $350 OLED gaming monitor as recently as this year, so here's hoping OLED only gets more competitive in the pricing arena.

We're working on what's next for PC Gamer, on pcgamer.com, our magazine, on social platforms, and in video. Gaming is a dynamic, sprawling landscape and we've got some great ideas about how PC Gamer best fits into it as this vibrant medium continues to evolve.

What's essential, of course, is that we better understand you and your media habits and fold that helpful insight into the next generation of PC Gamer. To help gather that, we've put together a survey oriented toward gamers—you don't have to be a PC Gamer reader to participate, but if you're here, I imagine you are one!

📝 Complete the PC Gamer Audience Survey here 🔗

Two survey respondents will be selected at random to receive a $200 / £200 Amazon gift card. Unfortunately due to legal restrictions only US and UK residents are eligible to win, but anyone in the world is welcome to complete the survey.

Topics in the survey include:

• How you feel about PC Gamer and our coverage
• Where you like to get information about games from, and whether you trust AI as a source of gaming information
• Where you like to exchange opinions about games
• What impacts your trust of gaming content creators and media
• What kinds of coverage you most value on gaming websites
• Your habits and preferences when it comes to gaming channels on YouTube

The survey should take most participants 10 or 15 minutes to complete. The survey closes on August 31, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valve's wireless VR headset, the Steam Frame, doesn't yet have a nailed down release date beyond the vague window of 'later this year'. I've got a hunch it'll drop soon though—and not because I put any stock in the Steam Frame subreddit's wild release date rituals. No, I'm instead feeling optimistic because both Lepton and FEX are now publicly available via Steam.

Both of these pieces of software are key for the Steam Frame and required for its operation. Lepton can be thought of as a 'container' for gaming on Linux that lets it run Android games inside of it. FEX is a similarly important tool for the Snapdragon-powered device, but a smidge more complicated.

At the risk of oversimplifying, FEX takes 32-bit and 64-bit x86 games and translates them so they can be understood by Arm-based systems. The Steam Frame uses an Arm-based Snapdragon SoC, hence why FEX is required. Without it, it wouldn't be able to play most of the VR games available on Steam.

To be clear, neither Lepton nor FEX have an easily accessible Steam store page. This 'public release' is mostly good news for developers. For instance, Android devs can easily create an Android depot containing an apk for their game on Steam (the first Android game to be purchasable on Steam popped up back in November, in the form of an apk file for Walkabout Mini Golf).

From there, devs can set the apk as the launch executable for players using the Steam client. Steam Cloud will even support save data stored in the external Android data directory—that's some thought out integration.

FEX could be handy for any Arm system. Besides Valve saying it's 'definitely' already investigating an Arm-based gaming future, Nvidia's recently unveiled RTX Spark 'superchip' pairs an Nvidia GPU core with a MediaTek Arm chiplet.

Though I personally doubt an RTX Spark laptop or notebook will be the most affordable option, the SoC seems set to be a disruptive presence in the space no matter what. Our Dave has already played a native Arm build of Alan Wake 2 on an RTX Spark laptop, but that still leaves plenty of games that will benefit from Valve's work on the FEX translation layer in the future.

I played first-person co-op puzzle game Big Walk with strangers back in March and had an absolute gas. Naturally, it's even better with friends: in two long sessions with my PC Gamer pals Tyler and Morgan, we've solved over a dozen puzzles, had twice as many laughs, and as you might expect, done a heck of a lot of walking.

This isn't a review: after about 6 hours we've conquered a whole mess of puzzles but there's still most of the island left to tackle, and I can't wait to get back in there for more.

After a tutorial consisting of just a few signs on the wall telling us how to use our arms and legs, we set off onto a sprawling island covered in trees, rivers, rocks, and brightly colored puzzle-structures scattered around the landscape. Each puzzle awards a prize I internally call a nubbin (because it doesn't, as far as I know, have a name) and those nubbins have a use I won't specify, but the more of them you collect the deeper into the island you'll begin to explore.

The puzzles, honestly, aren't terrifically hard to figure out so far: the real challenge comes from communication and logistics because no puzzle can be solved alone. At minimum, you need two players, and the puzzles scale up to four: for example, if a puzzle in a two-player session needs both players to hold down buttons at the same time, a four-player session will feature four buttons.

Stray more than a few yards from a pal and you'll have to strain to hear their voice over proximity chat. Another few steps and you won't be able to hear them at all. You can communicate visually by pointing and waving your noodly arms, and there are items you can find and put to use: walkie-talkies, laser pointers, flashlights, even signs you can type messages on.

But those objects all have to be carried in your hands, and you can only carry one thing at a time—at least until you start finding useful accessories like backpacks and holsters. If you take a tumble you'll drop your item, which may bounce away into the woods or down the side of a mountain. Even if you don't drop your item, you'll have to ditch it if you find something else you want to carry.

That's been the real challenge so far: not so much the puzzle solutions but navigating, communicating, and juggling the items we need to bring with us or leave behind. Even when everyone agrees on a course of action, that plan can fall apart by someone tumbling down a hill, getting lost, slipping out of earshot, or to use one specific example, the time Tyler accidentally kicked the binoculars we just found off the top of a tall tower and into the woods below.

Thing is, Big Walk is so chill that little disasters like that are just kinda funny. It's a beautiful, peaceful world, there are no scares or monsters, and no death or fail state. The worst that can happen is someone falls off a ledge or drops an item or gets lost. No problem. We'll take a detour. We'll make do without a walkie-talkie. We'll eventually find each other. There's no need to stress.

My favorite intersection of Big Walk's systems was when we were working on a puzzle (don't worry, I won't spoil the solution) where we were separated by soundproof glass. We didn't have walkie-talkies with us, so I communicated non-verbally to signal Tyler and Morgan to perform certain actions on the other side of the glass. First, I tried pointing at things, but that wasn't clear enough, so we tried a system where I raised and lowered my arms in a sequence. That worked a lot better and we got halfway through the puzzle.

But there's a day-night cycle in Big Walk, and as the sun set, the world grew dark—like not "videogame dark," but realistically dark. Since the wall behind me was green, and I had coincidentally chosen to paint my body green earlier in the game, I started blending into the wall behind me in the dim light. That meant Morgan and Tyler could no longer clearly see my arm motions—and they couldn't tell me they couldn't see my arm motions because I was behind soundproof glass.

When I saw them doing the wrong action, I ran to the glass and pounded my little fists on it, hoping to alert them: but their backs were turned and they couldn't hear the "tink tink tink" of my hands beating on glass because, again, soundproofing.

We had to start the puzzle over again, but it was such a silly situation none of us minded, and on our final try we also found a solution to the darkness problem. Third time's the charm.

Progress in Big Walk is tantalizing: reaching a new area means gaining a new view of the island, getting glimpses of more puzzles and structures and features in the distance, giving your efforts a new direction. It's like stepping into a more relaxed version of Myst or The Witness: there are lots of mysteries on the island to unravel but no frustration to go along with them—and you've got your friends there to help.

Before you visit the island for yourself, I'm issuing a final warning: Don't play this Big Walk while chatting with your pals over Discord. Only use in-game proximity chat. The game will warn you as such on first launch, and while many prox chat games are still just as fun over Discord, this one isn't.

Being able to hear your friends no matter where they are will make things far too easy and will rob you of some of the creative solutions and little disasters that makes the world so satisfying to explore. To accommodate, Big Walk comes with high quality voice chat that includes noise cancelling and a dedicated mute button.

Plus, the faster you solve the puzzles, the quicker you'll finish Big Walk—and this is one game where you definitely don't want to rush to the end. It's out August 4.

Noctua is one of the very best fan makers on the market, but introducing its fan into the Feinmann F01 Noctua Edition gaming mouse seemed to involve a truly horrible sequence of fan tests.

Noctua has "custom-built torture-test rigs", all designed to put fans through their paces to see if they can withstand how the average gamer treats their mice. One video of six fans getting rapidly from left to right says, "This is what 30 sideways movements per second look like."

Effectively, the new Noctua mouse has a fan inside, which then blows air on your palm as you play. I've had the chance to try it out in the PC Gamer office, and so far, it's surprisingly pleasant. But ultimately, if you are gaming, you will do a lot of sideways movement and will often pick the mouse up and tap the top of the table. Noctua wouldn't want its fan to break down in a game, and it has taken to its blog to go over its testing methodology.

One test, conveniently named the 'drop test', has a series of fans on a motor that is picked up by a wheel and then dropped rapidly. You can see a video of that particular test in action below.

The results, according to Noctua, are positive for both tests. It says, "The answer to the question of how long NF-A4x10 fans can survive this type of torture is simple: surprisingly long!"

The horizontal test, pushing 12 fans back and forth rapidly, stopped after 280,000 cycles as one of the fans had failed. However, that turned out to be a bearing issue with the tape that fixed the fan coming loose.

In the vertical drop test, all eight fans were still functional after 20,000 drops. "After another 5000 drops, all the fans had their impellers pop out due to failures of the bearing lock-ring, but by this time, the foam padding at the base of the test setup that we used to soften the impact was completely shattered, so the impact force had become much higher than our accelerometer could measure."

So it seems like the gaming mouse is ready for the big league (ie gamers throwing their mice around because a monster has popped up on-screen). We'll just have to see how it fares for gaming in its other aspects. I have my hands on one, so you can expect my thoughts soon, though I don't anticipate dropping it 20,000 times.

If you've ever felt like your bike trainer has a disturbing lack of Rocket League or Forza Horizon, you are in luck. One app called Deck de France can let you use your bike as a controller for games, though it's pretty limited so far.

Shared on GitHub (via Hackaday), Deck de France is technically compatible with any smart trainer that broadcasts Cycling Power Service over Bluetooth Low Energy. That means it can work with the following devices:

• Tacx — NEO, NEO 2T, Flux, Bushido, Vortex, Satori, Booster
• Elite — Suito-T, Justo, Direto, Drivo, Rampa, Sterzo Smart (steering plate)
• Wahoo — KICKR, KICKR Core (broadcasts CPS — untested but should work)
• Zwift Hub / Zwift Hub One (broadcasts CPS — untested but should work)
• CycleOps — Magnus, H3 (broadcasts CPS — untested but should work)
• Garmin — Vector 3 power meter pedals
• Magene — S3+ Speed/Cadence sensor
• Power meters — Any BLE power meter pedals or crank-based meters (4iiii, Stages, Favero, etc.)

Effectively, the app can translate your pedalling power into actions. Sukolupo, the creator of the app, says the original use case is the Tour de France games. The harder you pedal, the faster you go.

That makes sense as it's the closest video game to actually cycling without actually cycling, which has always been a bit of an oddity to me—especially when cycling apps such as Zwift and Rouvy exist.

It also has some rudimentary functionality in other games. In Rocket League, pedalling activates boost. In the Forza games, pedal power is equivalent to acceleration. You can even control the throttle of cars in Grand Theft Auto.

The catch here is that you need a Bluetooth controller to do everything else. That means in the likes of Rocket League, you'd play as normal on a controller and pedal when you want to boost.

As of right now, it is shown working with the Steam Deck, but Deck de France technically works with any Linux PC. It actually seems strikingly simple to set up, with Sukolupo saying you can get it working in just five minutes. The instructions are all on the Deck de France GitHub repository and easy to follow.

So, if you're an avid cycler, or just want the weirdest way to hog all the boost in Rocket League, this seems like a fun way to add a little bit of exercise into a gaming session.

If Microsoft gutting its Xbox division, laying off staff, and struggling to give its console a real unique selling point hasn't quite put you off the brand, you will now have to pay hundreds more for its devices if you live in Europe.

As originally spotted over in a Resetera thread, the prices of Xbox Series S and Series X have just gone up (the change is reflected on the Microsoft Germany website too). The new changes are as follows:

This means the 1 TB model of the Xbox Series S now costs more than the 1 TB Xbox Series X console. As well as this, in June, Microsoft started sunsetting the 2 TB model, citing component costs. And Xbox hardware is seemingly already struggling to sell. As revealed on the latest earnings call, Xbox hardware revenue decreased by a whopping 29% "driven by lower volume of consoles sold."

As pointed out by VGC, Microsoft did previously confirm price hikes, but only in the US. With increases of $100-$150 across the board, Europe actually appears to have been hit worse by the changes. The 512 GB Xbox Series S got a $100 rise in the US, but a £130 (around $175) increase in the UK

Even though higher-priced hardware is bad for pretty much everyone in the gaming industry, there is some schadenfreude to be felt here. That's because console pricing is only so bad because of the memory crisis, and AI growth has led to that memory crisis. In turn, Microsoft has put a lot of money into AI, so as our Tyler puts it, "Microsoft doesn't know what to do about the memory pricing crisis Microsoft is causing."

Unfortunately, all signs suggest the memory crisis isn't ending soon. Samsung, one of the big three memory manufacturers, has warned of a 'severe' memory supply crisis next year, and it will likely take some time for supply to catch up with demand.

With the next generation of consoles still expected to launch at the end of 2027, or perhaps into 2028, it seems likely that whatever Sony and Microsoft do next will be hit by the same memory pricing and supply issues.

Both companies will likely take some losses on consoles to make it back in software, but even a small loss is unlikely to make a big dent in the astronomical prices of memory for the foreseeable future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last month I reported that replacement batteries for the original LCD version of the Steam Deck would return to the iFixIt store after a brief absence. Well, Valve sent more batteries, and you can purchase these replacements from iFixIt right now. Unfortunately, the replacement battery alone now costs $130.

Purchasing a new L-shaped battery without the kit bundle used to only set you back about $80. These new replacement parts for the Steam Deck LCD are still rated for 5200 mAh, and have the same 40 Wh capacity like the old ones, though they cost $50 more. That's a nearly 63% increase (via VideoCardz).

If you don't mind picking up a non-OEM part instead, iFixIt also offers an aftermarket version of the LCD battery for only 80 bucks. This was introduced as a stop-gap while Valve's batteries were out of stock, but they feature the same Watt and Milliamp Hour capacity.

It's also worth noting that you can purchase replacement batteries for the Steam Deck OLED from iFixIt too, though these still only cost $80. As it's for a newer model, the OLED batteries instead enjoy 50.08 Wh, and 6470 mAh. That's about 20% more capacity than the LCD Steam Deck, though its OEM batteries still cost $50 more.

As disappointing as it is, this price jump is perhaps unsurprising. For one thing, Valve quietly discontinued the LCD Steam Deck late last year. For another, in the midst of a memory supply crisis which is driving up the price of new gaming PC components by the day, more and more folks may be moving to fix up older hardware instead.

Last week PC Gamer's Andy Edser highlighted an article tracing a seeming massive drop in Steam Deck sales. I'm not entirely convinced by the maths involved—which was conducted by Boiling Steam—but whether the numbers are accurate or not, it does capture some of the anxiety around Valve's hardware and what kind of future it might have.

When Gabe Newell donated a smidge over $20 million to OpenAI back in 2018, he probably didn't anticipate that the industry arising from its tech would put a huge dampener on his company's future hardware plans. The Steam Deck OLED copped a dramatic price increase in May, with the 1TB model rising from $649 to $949 and the 512GB going from $549 to $789.

"These new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole," Valve wrote at the time, alluding to the way AI datacentres are gobbling up the bulk of components needed for most of the hardware used to play videogames. In one fell swoop, the Steam Deck OLED—which turns three in November—morphed from a great entry level solution for budding PC gamers, into something only wealthy people can afford.

When Valve released that statement in May we didn't yet know how much the Steam Machine would cost, but anyone who hoped they might somehow hack the components crisis to ship an actually-affordable living room PC were, unfortunately, dreaming. As we now know, the Steam Machine is expensive and anyway, in extremely short supply.

As Andy Edser wrote in June just after publishing his 62 / 100 review of the box, the Steam Machine is "the biggest victim of the RAMpocalypse to date". What was predicted to cost around $600 in November 2025 comes bearing a minimum $1,049 price tag. I was with utmost certainty going to buy one if the price was closer to the former. But at the current going rate, there's just no way, and I'm sure there are droves who are in my position.

So I guess it's not surprising that the Steam Machine's "launch"—which was more of a waitlist launch—has been a bit muted. Even Valve's own compatibility module hasn't been updated to reflect the Steam Machine's existence: to see if something is compatible with the device you have to click on the Steam Deck Compatibility box, which then shows a nested result for the Steam Machine. That's the case in both desktop and Big Picture modes.

Browsing Steam, most of the time you wouldn't know the Steam Machine exists. Devs aren't talking about their games being compatible with Steam Machine either, like they increasingly do the Steam Deck. External forces seem to have demolished the viability of these things. It's sad, but true.

And yet! The Steam Deck consistently appears in Valve's list of Steam's top products by revenue: last week it hit 14, and the week before that, 9. That result is influenced by the fact that Steam Deck is much more expensive than your average game, but it still proves that people are buying them.

But I had hoped the Steam Deck and Steam Machine might mark a rapid shift in how PC gaming is perceived. Gaming on a PC is immeasurably easier in 2026 than it was even in 2016, but consoles are still considered the easier route by millions of people. With the Steam Machine and Steam Deck, Valve had a chance to prove everyone wrong.

From the vantage point of November 2025 the timing seemed immaculate, given the existential crises facing both Xbox and PlayStation. It's amazing how much difference three months makes. Steam Machine having any longterm effect on the industry seems hugely unlikely right now.

Top Steam games by revenue (July 21 - July 28)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the chart below doesn't account for the sudden popularity of Mistfall Hunter, which released on Thursday. The "dark fantasy extraction ARPG" is currently third on the live concurrents list.

Counter-Strike 2 holds tight to number one despite the release of a new (albeit actually old) Halo game and the 1.0 launch of Palworld.

DragonSword: Awakening is basically a non-gacha take on Genshin Impact, so its popularity is to be expected. Shift at Midnight is yet another one of those indies that blends retail sim trappings with horror, though this time with online cooperative play.

And while Meccha Chameleon is far from "a dead game" (it appears at 13 this week) last week was the first time it didn't appear in the top ten since launch.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"I now understand why people push people in front of trains. It's super funny."

Alien Kink VR, taking the wrong learnings from Machine Party.

Remember the story about AI companies destroying millions of copies of books while scanning them to use as training data? In terms of bad optics, "destroying books" is right up there with kicking puppies, which is why the AI companies relied on third-party rebuyers to obfuscate what they were actually doing.

It didn't work, and now as 404 Media reports (having broken the original story), third-party book database company ISBNdb has deleted the part of their website advertising that they could be "your streamlined partner for sourcing printed books in bulk, tailored to your LLM training needs, delivered at the scale AI demands."

That page is still available on the Internet Archive, of course, as is their blog post about "Reframing the Destruction Narrative" in which they make wild claims like: "The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one."

The idea that asking a chatbot to hallucinate a summary of a book has exactly the same value as actually reading it seems bugloving nuts to me, but what do I know? I'm not getting my knowledge from the intellectual cycle. Anyway, ISBNdb is now claiming it never actually offered the service it dedicated multiple parts of its website to, telling 404 Media, "The page was a test of market interest; no such service was ever brought to life."

Somebody out there sure is buying up a lot of old and obscure books, however. As reported by Guardian Australia, multiple secondhand booksellers have seen an uptick in online sales from third-party rebuyers, describing them as "waves of orders that did not fit with usual customer patterns."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm not sure whether to feel sheepish or smug that I exclusively come to Owlcat games late. On the one hand, I feel like a fairweather fan of this underrated RPG powerhouse, one whose output and ambition is honestly kind of scary.

But on the other hand: Owlcat has yet to have a single smooth launch. PCG weekend editor Jody Macgregor gave Rogue Trader a 59% in his review at launch in December, 2023, and I don't blame him one bit.

I hated this game when I tried the beta that fall. The fun unfamiliarity of being a 40K newcomer was outmatched by the frustrating unfamiliarity of a complicated new RPG system⁠—Rogue Trader is at least as intricate as Pathfinder, but without any built-in, D&D-derived muscle memory. The fact that "hit points" are called "wounds" made me feel indignant in a way I struggle to describe. You're not special, stop calling them that!

But perhaps Rogue Trader has earned its silly little proper nouns by now. With the release of its Infinite Museion DLC, I decided to finally dive back in and give it the second chance I'd always planned to, just like Jody did last year.

Similar to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Kingmaker before it, Rogue Trader has grown into an all-timer RPG. It's also hit one of my main quality indicators for the genre: I'm so obsessed with its character building that, dissatisfied with the first guy I made after 20 hours, I rolled a new one and beat its first act again in half the time.

In the Navy

When I played Rogue Trader in beta, there were no guides I could rely on, and its level-up screen made for a quagmire of effects, stats, and nouns with little indication of what was actually good. I'd recommend a guide, either from cRPG Bro or Revan619 on YouTube⁠.

For my playthrough on the notch above normal "Daring" difficulty, I'm following builds for my main guy and every single companion, but after 30 hours of gameplay, I do finally feel like I have enough knowledge to make tweaks at my discretion.

On my first guy, I made what's widely agreed to be the most powerful single build with the⁠—let me take a deep breath here⁠—"Death World Pyromancer Psyker Blade Dancer Executioner."

It's built around a few abilities that make you more powerful the more injury debuffs you have on you, as well as a set of powers that let you spend hit points and kill enemies to get a ton of extra actions per turn. It's certainly powerful, and it's always cool to be an edgelord with two swords, but it just felt janky and stale after a while.

I found I was having way more fun controlling the companion Abellard, whose build was basically identical to one buildsmith Revan dubbed "the most fun for new players." That's right gamers, the Navy Officer Warrior Arch Militant. Basically: You dual wield a sword and a gun. When you score a critical or parry an enemy with your sword, you automatically make a free attack with the gun.

Eventually, gun attacks make your sword more powerful, and vice versa. It feels badass, ultimate lightning tank mode in the middle of all the enemies, instagibbing beefy dudes with your signature one-two punch and parrying chumps left and right.

Tally-ho

I just beat the final boss of Rogue Trader's first act with my dark future seaman, and I keep playing it out in my head. Spoilers, but you get ambushed by a Chaos Space Marine with twice as much health wounds as the next-strongest guy in Act One. The world you're on just had its sun go out, and in-between shredding your party with his bolter machine gun, this bad hombre will blow up the last remaining shuttles offworld one-by-one.

That obviously can't stand, so I had my whole party turn and focus on beef boy, only sending my main man Abellard to tank the annoying support mooks. I knocked off the Space Marine's first 200 hit points wounds with three bolter salvos from my freaky gun nun companion, Argenta⁠—two on her own, and the third with an extra turn courtesy of fish princess Cassia.

That teed the boss up for a finisher from my Rogue Trader, wiping out his last hundo or so of health wounds with a critical charge and revolver shotgun to the face.

I felt incandescent. That was one of the best-feeling things I've done in a game in a month of Sundays, and I got a nice little achievement (only shared by 12.4% of players!) for taking him down without losing any of those shuttles.

There's also a whole RPG here, by the way⁠—companions, romance, skills, planetary management, Rogueing, Trading⁠—but that turn-based combat and buildcrafting is the perfectly-charred neapolitan crust of this pizza. Rogue Trader is redeemed, here's hoping Owlcat's upcoming Dark Heresy just bangs like this outta the gate⁠—it sounds like it will.

North Dakota may not be the most dazzling US state, but it is one of them, and so it's set to be absorbed into American Truck Simulator's expansive recreation of life on the road. The game's next DLC will take players through the state's "sweeping prairies, fertile farmland, winding rivers, and endless skies."

I don't know that its skies are any more endless than, say, South Dakota's, but it's still a looker in the trailer (the advertising kind, not the big rig kind) that went up today. Predictably, it shows a bunch of semi trucks hauling supplies past herds of buffalo, small towns, and giant statues of fish. It brings the game up to a whopping 61 DLCs on Steam—though notably, a number of those are free and others are minor additions that come cheaper than the addition of a full-on state.

North Dakota will join the likes of Texas, New Mexico, Idaho, and so on when it launches, though no release date has been named yet. Folks on social media are getting their yuks in: "Easiest update ever," said Reddit user Fun_Assignment_269. "Do you even need to design any assets to replicate North Dakota?" A reply from logicalguest chimed in, "Lol! Empty field, CTRL-C, CTRL-V. DONE!"

Okay, maybe the new locale isn't that exciting. But this isn't some key-jangling, action-packed, high-octane thrill ride we're talking about, this is a game where you drive the speed limit and deliver goods while saying "10-4, good buddy" and blasting Jerry Reed so loud you get a noise citation. Perhaps the placid sights of one of America's most boring states is merely a blank canvas for the determined trucking roleplayer, the kind of player who sees a giant fiberglass catfish statue and says, 'Yes, this is what America is all about.'

Or maybe it's just boring anyway. I mean, this is North Dakota we're talking about.

Modder Elevna on the Nier Replicant Nexus has made my day with the full release of Nier Gestalt ver.1.22474487139…, a project that replaces the young protagonist of the cult classic's 2022 remaster with his grizzled, older counterpart from the 2010 original.

Let's back up: In Yoko Taro's vision for Nier, the titular protagonist (whose name you're allowed to change for some reason) was a waifish anime twink who kinda looks like Raiden from Metal Gear. This was during peak Xbox 360, the piss filter era, so Square Enix executives wanted a hero with a little more Unreal Engine 3 beefy masculinity to appeal to the west.

The compromise: Japan got two versions of Nier. Replicant on the PS3 boasted Yoko Taro's preferred "Brother" Nier, so named because he's siblings with fellow main character Yonah. The Xbox 360's Nier Gestalt featured "Father" Nier, who was aged up to his 40s, put on a powerlifting program, and made to be Yonah's dad. In the west, we basically only got Nier Gestalt no matter the console version.

Fast forward to 2022, and Nier gets a remaster because everybody took another look after the explosive success of Nier Automata and realized the original was always good⁠—I liked Nier before it was cool, and I'm not bitter about all those 6/10s it got. The cheekily named Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139… brought Brother Nier to the west for the first time, giving us oldheads something to get excited about (aside from finally having a PC version).

Here's the thing, though: Yoko Taro, I love you and your eccentric auteur purity, but just this once, the shadowy cabal of risk-averse, art-hating, shareholder-worshipping executives was right. Father Nier is the man. Grizzled dads protecting their kids in the post apocalypse is played out, sure, but Father Nier is one of the high water marks of the form⁠—not the least because he's kind of an asshole who sucks and makes everything worse.

Nier shows a world well past its sell-by date, and while both Brother and Father Nier are men possessed by ungovernable rage, Papa Nier cuts it with this sense of mournful weariness that just ties a nice bow on the tragedy of it all. It's mostly sold by a career-best performance from prolific voice actor Jamieson Price, who I only just realized was also part of one of my favorite dialogue exchanges in any RPG.

There were rumblings Square Enix might do an official Father Nier DLC, but it never panned out. Cue Elevna's Gestalt mod, which offers a full, luxury Papa Nier experience in 2026. The original model is back and touched up, great, but Elevna also dug all of the audio files for Price's voiceover out of the original and ported them here, making the mod essential.

That would have been enough for me, but Elevna's attention to detail is truly impressive. Nier's alternate skins have also gotten Papa versions, and ver.1.22…'s bonus chapter now has repurposed voice lines from Price to smooth things over⁠—rewatching the chapter's cutscenes, Nier mostly makes small comments and combat barks that can easily be fudged. Elevna even ported back in relevant dialogue from other characters referencing Nier's age.

My favorite small detail: Nier's OG DLC (now just part of the game) features a dream arena where you fight as the other version of Nier⁠—Brother back in 2010, Papa in Replicant. Elevna's Gestalt mod swaps Brother Nier back in for the dream fights.

Nier Gestalt ver.1.22474487139… is a perfect mod by my reckoning, acting on a supremely niche demand (my supremely niche demand) at an almost absurd level of craft and care. It makes me happy. It's how I'll do my next replay.

ShiftUP CEO Kim Hyung Tae hasn't exactly been lowkey with his pro-AI stance over the years, but he and his company have now made it clearer than ever with one of the most god-awful videos I've ever had the displeasure of witnessing from a company with enough money to do better.

Stellar Blade: Blood Rain—the sequel to 2024's Stellar Blade, which I thought was just fine—is due to come out later this year. And what better way to market it than with a terrible AI-generated music video where Evie's skin-tight suit has a belly button and fingernails, and parts of her outfit phase in and out of existence all while she smiles at the camera in a deeply unsettling manner.

As if that wasn't bad enough, it's all to accompany a song that is also AI-generated. Shrill computerised bleeps masquerade as Evie "singing" high notes during the chorus—which eventually melt into an ear-splitting cacophony of robotic words—and a musical composition that barely understands the fundamentals of what makes music good in the first place.

It is a song so utterly devoid of soul, and also of anything that feels even remotely related to Stellar Blade: Blood Rain and its universe. It actively undermines the game, its theme, and any visual identity it's attempting to present in favour of something that looks shit, sounds shit, and completely discredits any goodwill ShiftUp may have had.

And it makes me worry about the way a hobby I have spent so many years loving is going. For all of the videogame soundtracks that have made me cry, or pumped up, or irrevocably happy. Because they were crafted by a human who understood exactly what they had to do to make me feel those things. Humans who also feel the things they were trying to make me feel through their music.

Videogames are a form of art, and art needs a human touch. Parading around a song that feels so utterly lifeless, that doesn't tell me what Stellar Blade: Blood Rain is actually about? It's frustrating, but especially coming from ShiftUp—a company that is certainly not short of money thanks to the revenue it makes from gacha game Nikke: Goddess of Victory. One which consistently finds itself estimated in the top 10 to 20 gacha earners alongside giants like Hoyoverse.

It can do better. It does do better! Nikke is home to some of my all-time favourite videogame bangers. It literally has a long-time rhythm game composer on its team who is responsible for a good chunk of Nikke's discography. I cannot understand why anyone would think that some of the worst AI-generated music I've heard in a hot sec is the better option.

I'm not entirely sure what effect ShiftUp was hoping to have with this video, but it has completely turned me off trying Blood Rain entirely. I was actually rather looking forward to seeing how the team could expand upon the Stellar Blade universe—I thought the first game's narrative was surprisingly underbaked considering the company's chops for storytelling in Nikke, and I was hoping to see more good stuff in Blood Rain.

And big companies normalising this behaviour only paves the way for more to follow suit. It threatens to open the floodgates, to no longer relegate this kind of garbage to those AI YouTube playlists made with some terrible 80s-themed thumbnail while everything looks and sounds diabolically crusty and deep-fried. It has the very real possibility to continue showing up in our games in a big way, while still demanding the same kind of money we were paying to have a human involved in its creation.

That sort of domino effect is how we have the very real possibility of ending up with reams of samey, soulless games that feel like the very antithesis of why this hobby exists in the first place. And that's why it's so important to call this garbage out for what it is the moment we lay eyes on it, to let companies like ShiftUp know that this ain't it, and we don't want it.

I don't need to explain what Baldur's Gate 3 is since it's one of those games you hear about endlessly, whether you want to or not, because it remains a universally acclaimed phenomenon. PC Gamer's Fraser Brown gave it our highest score ever in his review, a positively covetable 97, and everyone I know who's played it did not stop once the credits rolled. But if you've yet to take the plunge, now might be a good time: it's the cheapest it's ever been on Steam.

Granted, that's just 30% off, but it's still a historic low which takes the game down from $60 to $42. That's 28 Costco hot dogs, and I can personally say I've gotten slightly more enjoyment out of Baldur's Gate 3 than I would get out of 28 Costco hot dogs. In the following paragraphs, I will try to advocate for why that is.

For one, BG3 takes Dungeon & Dragon's fifth edition and turns into a buildcrafter's playground—its turn-based combat is a meticulous recreation of the real thing that combines 5e's RAW with Larian's trademark elemental field combos and prop destruction, lending the improvisational feel which characterizes tabletop play. The purchase of 28 Costco hot dogs prescribes a very specific sort of evening that invariably ends in physical agony.

BG3 is also a compelling bit of fantasy fiction in its own right, with an action-blockbuster story that'll have you battling otherworldly horrors, adjudicating the fates of entire towns, and falling in love with your troubled companions. Its sense of choice and consequence is shocking given the 100+ hour scale of its campaign, offering you the agency to become a paragon of virtue or an angel-murdering psychopath. 28 Costco hot dogs, on the other hand, only offer you one choice: sitting on the commode until your legs go numb.

On top of all that, BG3 is eminently moddable: you can turn the game into a roguelike, supercharge your player character for a solo playthrough, or try out that fancy new third-person camera to pretend you're playing a wayward Dragon Age spinoff. Admittedly, the hot dogs are pretty competitive in this category, as hot dogs famously allow for a variety of toppings. I'll call this one a tie.

Anyway, BG3 is quite a good RPG that feels like a bold step forward for a very old style of game. If you like 5e, there's not a better way to experience it in a videogame, and if you don't like 5e or are unfamiliar with it, it's such a solid fantasy game in its own right that it might just make you a believer.

Felipe Falanghe got into PC gaming by playing Flight Simulator 4 on his dad's laptop. "I remember having no idea what I was doing," Falanghe says. "Me and my brother, we were just figuring it out and playing it on the keyboard and trying to make it go."

It was through games like Flight Simulator, as well as The Sims, that Falanghe got into modding, which started him on his journey to game developer. That happened in 2010, while Falanghe was working at the marketing firm Squad, a job he disliked and decided to leave during an intense array of projects: "They said 'If you help us these next couple of months, we'll let you make your game here,'" he recalls. "I was like 'That's not true. That doesn't happen to people … but what do I have to lose?'"

The result of this fateful decision was Kerbal Space Program, a unique rocket science simulator that is one of PC Gamer's highest-rated games. "I was always working with this idea that for all I know next week this is over, so let's do anything I can under that assumption," he says. "It would be unthinkable to pitch the entire thing that KSP became to a normal game studio."

Falanghe now runs his own development company—Floating Origin Interactive—where he's working on several projects. But he took a break from those to show me around the digital launchpad of his Steam library. We discussed new remakes, old MMOs, and the triumphant return of a PC gaming legend.

What game are you currently playing?

That would be Oblivion, the remastered version. It's actually been really good. I don't remember playing the original back in the day. I didn't get very far into it. Something else probably grabbed my attention and pulled me away. But I remember feeling really stuck. I just wanted to steal everything I could see, and then I became a vampire by accident.

That was problematic. But on the new one, I don't know. Maybe I'm more mature and can understand the story better. Or having played Skyrim and a bunch of Fallouts and Starfield and a bunch of other Bethesda games, going back to Oblivion now, I'm like "Oh yeah, this makes so much more sense now." You can understand the patterns a little better.

I'm a stealth archer, of course. Objectively the only correct way to play. The way I play it is maybe less conventional. I have it installed on my main computer here, but I stream it to the Steam Deck and play it on the couch because it's just so much more comfortable …. On the remastered version, I feel like I've finally got a good control setup that uses gamepad controls, so it's like smooth movement and all.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

There's multiple games I could choose. I'm playing Oblivion, but then I revert to playing a first-person shooter like BattleBit. I've played an untold amount of hours already. It's so fun. I don't know what it is about the blockiness of it. It's not like a PUBG or a Battlefield or something more gritty like that. It's more light-hearted and it runs super well on Steam Deck. It's fun, and the sound you get when you get a one-shot kill with a sniper rifle, it's so deeply satisfying.

I was also playing Old School RuneScape. I did another nostalgia trip back to that. That was something I was playing back in 2005. I first discovered it on the browser, and I was like "Wow, this is surprisingly deep for a browser game." It was actually what I was playing just before I discovered a career in game design was a possibility for me. The graphics are simple enough, I [felt] like this seems possible, like I could maybe produce something like this, not knowing anything about game design yet. These days I know the monumental amount of work that goes into RuneScape.

[When] I started working on KSP, it was super unambitious at first. My first pitch [to Squad] was that it was going to be a Flash game. In 2010, Flash was still a reasonable thing to suggest …. I pitched it because I thought this was the least insane idea. I was like "I feel like this one is safe enough. It sounds simple enough to do the rocket science simulator." Little did everybody involved know what was coming.

But it was supposed to have been simple. I remember there was an old Flash game that was like an advert game for Top Gear. The Reliant Shuttle launch game, and you launched the Reliant Robin shuttle, and through the stages you had to manage different things. So when it was on the boosters, you had to manage the throttle so that they didn't explode … that was the most similar game to KSP that I could find back then, and that was the scope initially.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

It's either going to be Full Throttle or Fragile Allegiance. I'm not sure which is the older one, but both of them are installed. Fragile Allegiance is this old strategy game where you run mining franchise colonies on asteroids. I don't know what it is about it, it's just so good. It's a DOS game, and you play it now and it's still just as good. You can lose hours in it, so I've always got it installed.

As for Full Throttle, I've got the remastered version installed now, so I don't know if that counts as 'oldest' anymore. It can revert to the classic graphics and all. But I remember very well, my Full Throttle disc back in the day had scratches on it, so there were a few cutscenes that never actually played. So as I was playing the remastered version, I ran into a bit of cutscene that I had never watched, and I was like "Wow, that explains it so well!"

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

I just looked it up to be sure, but between Flight Sim 2020 and 2024, I've got going on 2,000 hours. The rest of my life playing Flight Sim not included. Those are unaccounted for.

I was so bummed when Microsoft ended the series after FSX. There was a period of 14 years where there was no Microsoft Flight Simulator. You had X-Plane, and you had Flight Gear and Prepar3D and all those, and X-Plane is a worthy competitor, but it never sparked joy in me the same way.

I've had every single one since FS4. I have the whole list. Every two years, a new one would come out, and pretty much that was when you needed to upgrade. Back then, that was how it worked. New Flight Sim comes out? OK, we need a new computer.

I think the most powerful moments were with the new Flight Sim in 2020 because it has satellite imagery of everything. So you can find your own home, find your childhood home and fly around it. It was a pretty powerful experience, especially flying around the areas in Brazil where I grew up, because I don't live there anymore. So it was actually a powerful experience to do that and see it so well realised. It goes beyond seeing it in Google Earth or Street View.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

Well, [there's] Flight Sim. Fragile Allegiance is one I make a point of never uninstalling. I even managed to install it on my phone once. You have to set up a pretty convoluted stack of emulators to deal with that. But I had it running on my phone at one point, which was pretty cool.

Those two are definite ones that need to be installed. I'm not losing them.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

There's a bunch that I couldn't live without. OBS is one. I'm using it right now. This is how I do stuff. I've worked remotely since the beginning of KSP and sharing the screen is just a fundamental part of it. I use OBS for everything. I have a Stream Deck with the controls for it. I can move stuff around, I can share the screen. I even have a plugin where I can use my phone as an external camera.

The other one is OneCommander, which is a file explorer. It's just a really good file explorer. The one thing I always thought OSX does better than Windows is the multi-column view for browsing folders. You can see your entire folder tree, and you can go back four levels if you need to instead of going back one by one.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I've definitely seen worse than mine. But I don't use icons for applications. I like the old Windows 10 style of Start menu with the little icons right on the tray there. So I actually installed Start 11 to bring back the Windows 10-style menu. So most of my apps I access from those icons on the Start menu.

The other thing you can't see is the screen of shame, where I have all these icons and stuff that I need to remember to do. And some of them have been here since, well, the Middle Ages, I guess. Some of them are embarrassingly old by now.

It's been a big week for Project Zomboid, the wildly successful zombie survival sim that, like a doomsday prepper holed up in a fortified basement, simply refuses to leave Steam early access. Its first major build update since 2021 coincided with a slight price increase for The Indie Stone's undead phenomenon, but this didn't stop the game from setting a new record for concurrent players on Steam.

As detailed on the Project Zomboid blog, build 42.20 brings an extensive overhaul to the game's setting of Knox County. For starters, seven of its towns have been completely reworked with new art that gives each settlement its own distinct architectural style, completely unique buildings and houses, and improved landscaping between the buildings.

In addition, the surface area of the map has been doubled, bringing the total number of tiles to 35,000. This map expansion brings with it multiple new and overhauled locations to explore, including a boy scout camp, an "entirely new" prison, and everybody's favourite spooky locale, an abandoned orphanage.

My favourite stat of all is that the build adds "400 procedural basements". There's no specific reason for that—I just like the idea of needing to procedurally generate a basement. Not all of Project Zomboid's basements are subject to algorithmic whims, however. There are also 75 unique basements that you may stumble upon during your adventures.

Alongside the changes to the map, build 42 expands Project Zomboid at a mechanical level. It introduces new animals like cows and chickens, while also making changes to the hunting and trapping system, opening up new opportunities for farming and wilderness survival. The update also brings an improved stealth system, fishing refinements, and the ability to drag corpses.

It's a significant update, and The Indie Stone has increased the price of Project Zomboid to reflect that. Prior to Build 42, Project Zomboid cost $20 (£16.75), but that's now been raised to $25 (£22.50), which is a substantial hike. But that didn't stop the game from reaching a new all-time player concurrent on Steam, with nearly 79,552 players flocking to Steam to check out the update in the early hours of Friday.

With build 42 now out, The Indie Stone's attention will presumably turn to the next planned update, which will herald the long-anticipated return of NPC survivors to Knox County. Given the average length of time between more recent Project Zomboid builds, I wouldn't expect to see this surface for a few years yet.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 just closed out its second year of post-release support with a one-two punch of updates. Patch 14, aka The Confrontation Update, adds a new enemy and significantly expands the game's PvP options. Since Confrontation's release, a separate update has added Steam Workshop support to Saber Interactive's hugely successful shooter.

Let's start with the Confrontation update, which, as the name, suggests is heavily focussed on Space Marine 2's PvP mode, Eternal War. Patch 14 adds two new PvP arenas, a medium-sized map called Sanctum, and Facility, which Saber describes as "one of the most compact PvP maps" available in the game. Alongside these maps, the patch adds weekly PvP rewards, meaning you can earn cosmetics and other in-game rewards by playing matches and completing challenges.

If you're more interested in the cooperative side of Space Marine 2, then the update introduces a new enemy for players to fight—the Scarab Occult Terminator Sorcerer. The Sorcerer is a tough miniboss opponent that will appear throughout the game's Operations mode, and furnished with a wide array of abilities. He's able to create copies of himself, teleport around the battlefield, and attack the player with a powerful laser beam. This video gives a good overview of the Sorcerer's moveset. It seems like he'll provide a stern test for even the most grizzled Ultramarine.

As for the Steam Workshop support, obviously it's early days for Space Marine 2 mods. But there are a few player-made extras that are worth checking out. The main one is the Astartes Overhaul, which has been available on NexusMods for a while. The mod rebalances Operations while adding new weapons and customisation options. It introduces three new classes to play as—Terminator, Chaplain, and Apothecary, as well as four new weapons including an Assault Bolter and an Artifex Bolt Rifle that comes with optional incendiary bolts.

Most of the other currently available mods are addons for the Astartes Overhaul. These range from adding some extra execution animations to letting you play with six or even nine-man squads. There are a few non-Astartes mods however Health on Executions makes Space Marine 2's grisly finishers even more like Doom's glory-kill system, while Rogue Trader Tyranids reworks the game's insectoid menace to more closely resemble their 1985 models.

While this wraps up Space Marine's second year of updates, Saber Interactive has confirmed that it will continue supporting the game for at least another year. The developer hasn't specified what new stuff will be coming to the sequel in the next twelve months, but a detailed roadmap will be revealed on the game's second anniversary in September.

Oblivion Remastered releases on Nintendo Switch 2 in August, which normally would be wholly irrelevant to PC Gamer. We've been merrily exploring revamped Cyrodiil for well over a year at this point. But you might want to hide your stealth archer in the corner of whatever dungeon you're exploring and check out Bethesda's latest promotional video for the Switch 2 launch. It's a little different from the usual fare of game footage and dramatic voiceovers.

To herald the Switch 2 version's imminent release, Bethesda brought back veteran Elder Scrolls voice actor Wes Johnson—who plays many characters across the series including Oblivion's default Imperial males—to reprise his most colourful role in the series, the mad, cheese-loving god Sheogorath.

In the video, Johnson—dressed as and in the role of Sheogorath—records lines in a sound booth and causes general mischief with the aid of an exasperated audio technician. As the video progresses, the Prince of Madness becomes increasingly baffled as to why he has to record lines he's already done before.

It's a shameless bit of marketing fluff, but it's nonetheless entertaining to see Johnson in full swing as Sheogorath. It's also a relief that he has apparently made a full recovery from the life-threatening medical emergency he suffered 18 months ago, during which he was hospitalised and put into an induced coma.

The responses to the video are similarly pleased to see Johnson in action. But there is an undercurrent of discontent to many of the comments. These mainly centre around the remaster's widely reported technical issues on PC. Not only do many Steam reviews report performance hitches while exploring Cyrodiil, but the game also suffers from a wide array of bugs. Some of these have been around since the original Oblivion released in 2006, while others are entirely new.

What doesn't help is that Bethesda and Virtuos appear to have abandoned the PC version. While Oblivion Remastered received a couple of patches after launch, the last one—update 1.2—arrived over a year ago. Consequently, recent Steam reviews have dropped down to Mixed, though the game still has a Mostly Positive rating overall. Let's hope the Switch 2 launch brings a bit of PC TLC too.

Sometimes I understand why modders flame out, burn their bridges, and give up entirely. Every time I look at a posts page on Nexus Mods, for instance. A perfect example of this has been the reaction to Relysia's True Third-Person Camera mod for Baldur's Gate 3, a labor of love that gives the traditionally birdseye CRPG an over-the-shoulder viewpoint.

Baldur's Gate 3 already has a third-person mode, you might say. All you have to do is plug in a controller and the camera will drop for a more console-RPG experience. And if that's not good enough for you, there's the Native Camera Tweaks mod. Hundreds of people on the internet have been tiresomely pointing this out over the last couple of weeks, every single one of them convinced they are the first person to make this vital observation the rest of us need to read.

Relysia has seen these comments and then, with admirable patience, made an eight-minute video documenting all the ways their mod is different. For starters, with the True Third-Person Camera mod, you can look up. The viewpoint when you play with a controller is locked into a downward angle and can't be changed. Native Camera Tweaks does let you look up, but when you need to bounce back to a more distant view you have to manually adjust the camera, where True Third-Person Camera switches with a simple press of the asterisk key.

There's also the fact True Third-Person Camera defaults to a slightly off-center over-the-shoulder view, where the other solutions default to centred third-person. It's the difference between Tomb Raider 2013 and Tomb Raider 1996. The Native Camera Tweaks viewpoint is adjustable, but you have to edit a file to do so, while True Third-Person Camera is compatible with Mod Configuration Menu for in-game adjustments to the POV position on the fly.

There's more to it than that, but basically, yes, it is a different experience. I've played with the mod for several hours and found it meaningfully distinct and the perfect excuse to start yet another playthrough.

Baldur's Gate 3 works better from this angle than a lot of other CRPGs because so much effort was put into making it look good in those up-close dialogue scenes. Not all of it, of course. Looking up when you're underground or on the bottom floor of a building sometimes reveals places where nobody expected you to do that, and you'll want to switch to the regular camera when you're sneaking or when a companion points out something they've spotted nearby but which you can't see. If Larian put this in as an option they'd have made a lot of extra work for themselves tidying up the kind of stuff that's forgivable when exposed by a mod.

The mod also changes back to the regular camera when combat starts, although Relysia is planning to address that in an update, adding "immersive combat mode, where the camera stays very close to the action throughout". I might stick to the top-down camera for combat myself, but it's always nice to have options.

A big part of the appeal of PC gaming is being able to personalize things to your persnickety preferences, and having multiple ways of doing that—even if it means having two mods with similar but different effects—is the perfect example.

You can download True Third-Person Camera from Nexus Mods, along with WASD Character Movement for the full "what if Dragon Age was turn-based" experience, and get Party Limit Begone while you're at it, because that's still the most essential mod for Baldur's Gate 3.

First reported by Automaton, Spanking Exorcist developer Actor made a free "apology game" available to download after missing a planned July 24 release date due to overzealous Steam content moderation. In the simple apology game, you press a button to simulate spanking the developer as punishment.

Spanking Exorcist's trailer shows a game combining first person exploration, unsettling, sex doll-looking lady characters, and slightly less scary, Sadako-looking forsaken waif lady characters. It strikes me as a perfectly adequate, replacement-level gag horror game for streamers to react to, if a bit more risque than your usual fare.

"I consent," you say. "I consent," announces the anonymous Japanese developer, Actor. "Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?" asserts Valve. The uneven content moderation on Steam became a big story following controversial intervention by payment processors and the persecution of horror game Horses, but it's always been odd.

I'm fond of the theory that there's just one particularly zealous prude at Valve who really has it out for horny stuff from Japan. Anyway, you can still buy Furry Hitler (one and two), as well as Alex Jones' shitty videogame on Steam.

I was pleased to discover that Plantation Simulator was taken down (by its developer's request, not Valve's intercession) following negative reporting by Kotaku. Spanking Exorcist is fine by comparison. Harmless. Let my boy spank.

"We sincerely apologize for the delay in the release of Spanking Exorcist on this occasion," Actor wrote on X, "The Everything App" (auto-translated from Japanese). "As a token of our remorse, we've created a game where you can spank the butt of the developer, Actor … We would be delighted if you enjoy it."

In the interest of journalistic integrity, I followed the Google Drive download link and procured Apology.exe to try it out for myself, ignoring the protests of Google Drive and Windows. Computer, disable safeties, activate indie Japanese gag spanking game. Yes, I know the risks (I'm currently running a system scan as I write this).

There is not much to Apology.exe, just a cartoonish representation of a derriere viewed from overhead and surrounded by Japanese text. There's a link to Spanking Exorcist's Steam page, a button to quit out, and a button to make the butt jiggle in tune with a slapping sound effect. It is the slightest of droll diversions you could sample in this beautiful life, but I appreciate the bit.

And the story gets a happy(?) ending too. I'm thrilled to report that Spanking Exorcist proper is available for download on Steam, having released just six days after its initial target date. It's six bucks usually, $5.39 on a launch sale, and I'm probably not gonna get it.

Expansions should be improvements on the base game, you say. The whole point of them is that they're adding cool new stuff, and the same game with a bunch of cool new stuff added should always be better. Except often that isn't the case.

The list of add-ons that feel like they misunderstood what made the original good, or dragged it out unnecessarily, or were just sort of fine in a "second helping of the same meal" kind of way, is a long one.

The lists of expansions that were genuinely better than the game they were expanding in the first place is much less long. It's like 10 things tops, and these are those 10 things.

Dishonored

The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches

You can understand why Arkane thought Dishonored needed a silent protagonist. You've got a whole arsenal of tools and powers to approach problems with, and players should feel free to use the whole box instead of being constrained by questions like, "What would Corvo do?" But even without a voice players projected a persona onto Corvo, one that was at odds with the ability to possess a guard, walk him up to an electric Wall of Light, then exit just before that guard stumbled vomiting over the threshold and was cooked to death by it.

Dishonored's two-part story DLC wisely chose a voiced protagonist, and what a voice it was. Michael Madsen's Daud, the regretful assassin who was Corvo's most characterful antagonist, introduces each mission with a cynical film noir drawl. Now that's a man who wouldn't hesitate to kill someone while they were vomiting.

The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches were full of learnings from Dishonored. The Blink power gained a timestop element that felt so good it became the default way Blink worked in subsequent games, and every level felt built for climbing around without seeming gimmicky. Dishonored's DLC levels aren't just better than Dishonored, they're better than a lot of Dishonored 2.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

Dark Crusade

Dawn of War's campaign was enjoyably bombastic, but you had to play it as the boring old space marines. The first expansion, Winter Assault, let you choose from a couple of sides but funneled you through linear levels that had to be played in specific ways rather than letting you come up with your own tactics.

With the Dark Crusade campaign they finally got the balance right. You can pick from a bunch of 40K's factions, including two added with this expansion (necrons and tau), and the campaign is a proper paint-the-map struggle as you fight over the world of Kronus. Famously, Dark Crusade even remembers where you built structures, so if the computer attacks a territory you previously conquered your buildings will still be there to help you defend it—an element the final expansion, Soulstorm, lacked.

The Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion

The Shivering Isles

Remember how weird Morrowind was? Giant mushrooms, bizarre architecture, a culture that felt properly alien? Compared to that, Oblivion was a much more vanilla flavor of fantasy. Until a year after its release when The Shivering Isles expansion came out, adding a whole new landmass with giant mushrooms, bizarre architecture, and a culture that felt properly alien.

The Shivering Isles are divided in half, with the colorful realm of Mania and the spooky Dementia as symbolic halves of their ruler's personality. That ruler being Sheogorath, Daedric Prince of Madness, a quirky questgiver who makes Oblivion's parade of potato-faced blandees seem twice as boring by comparison.

Mass Effect 3

Citadel

The real ending of Mass Effect 3 is in Citadel, the beloved final DLC that gave Shepard and the crew of the Normandy the send-off they deserved. It combined an action-packed story full of one-liners and shootouts with a generous downtime zone where you could just hang out with your surviving companions, which is all any player of the Mass Effect trilogy really wanted.

The centrepiece is an indulgent sequence where you throw a party for your pals, getting to see them interact with each other in a less formal and life-threatening situation, cutting loose on shore leave and being themselves one last time. It's an oasis of cozyness in a desert of strife and consequence.

Fallout: New Vegas

Old World Blues

Some of the games on this list were saved by expansions that fixed their problems. I don't want to imply that New Vegas is one of those—it would still be an all-time great without Old World Blues—but Old World Blues is the one add-on I rate even higher than New Vegas itself.

It sends you to the Big MT, a wasteland where mad science holds sway and a bunch of Futurama-style brains in jars are at war with a rival called Dr. Mobius who has built an army of robotic scorpions. It brings back the wacky 1950s sci-fi B-movie side of Fallout, all the stuff that keeps it from being an endlessly grim Mad Max apocalypse and lightens it with a touch of humor. Morbid humor for sure—this is a DLC that begins with your brain being stolen and replaced with a computer, and ends with you having to convince said brain to return to its original home—but humor nonetheless.

Borderlands 2

Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep

Playing Borderlands 2 with friends was knockabout fun, but then I went away and started a new character solo so I could play through it while actually having a chance to understand the story and pay attention to the villainous Handsome Jack's hilarious ribbing of the heroes. About 50 hours later I was so involved in that story its more emotional scenes caught me by surprise.

Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep seems like it's going to be a delightful palate-cleanser after that, a DLC where the heroes basically sit around playing Dungeons & Dragons while making jokes about bad dice rolls and what the difference really is between a wizard and a warlock. And then, several hours later, I found out its story was also a surprisingly affecting meditation on grief and the role of games as coping mechanisms. Goddamn it, Borderlands 2, you got me twice.

Borderlands 3

Psycho Krieg and the Fantastic Fustercluck

Compared to Borderlands 2, well, Borderlands 3 doesn't really compare at all. If the games are just bishy-bashy multiplayer fun for you I guess it's fine, but if you were hoping for a continuation of Borderlands 2's excellent storytelling then you're going to be disappointed.

Until you hit Borderlands 3's DLC, and suddenly it all comes flooding back. I'm choosing to highlight the add-on where you go inside your psychotic friend's subconscious to perform a kind of FPS therapy on his damaged brain, but basically all of Borderlands 3's expansions were better than the original game.

Shadowrun Returns

Dragonfall

The digital version of cyberpunk fantasy TTRPG Shadowrun was supposed to be more of a DIY adventure creator kit than anything, with its base campaign, Dead Man's Switch, intended as an example of the kind of stuff you could do with it. Only after release did the developers realize how many players would rather have a videogame RPG to play rather than a toolkit for making their own.

The response was Dragonfall, a DLC that far outclassed Dead Man's Switch. For starters it let you recruit an entire party of companions with BioWare-level backstories and secrets, and its futuristic Berlin setting felt like a real community you could embed yourself in and change with your actions. Dragonfall was so good it was eventually spun off into a standalone director's cut, which plenty of people have experienced without knowing it was originally "just" a DLC.

Fallout 3

Broken Steel

Fallout 3's original ending was legendarily bad and it's just luck that the internet of 2008 wasn't quite as toxically organized as the internet of 2012 when Mass Effect 3 came out, or Bethesda would have had a consumer revolt on their hands.

Which is not to say that people didn't complain. They did, but instead of releasing the DLC that fixed Fallout 3's ending for free as part of a grand social media apology tour, we had to pay for Broken Steel. Still, it did what we wanted, and rewrote the nonsensical ending of the original game as well as letting us carry on after it. The subsequent hillbilly mutant island expansion, Point Lookout, was also better than the base game, but if it weren't for Broken Steel nobody would have bothered with it.

XCOM

Enemy Within

XCOM 2's expansion War of the Chosen added loads of neat stuff—perhaps too much, given how packed the base game already was. By comparison, XCOM: Enemy Unknown's expansion Enemy Within added things I wouldn't want to be without on a replay. It fixed some of Enemy Unknown's weak spots, adding more maps and a whole new enemy faction in the EXALT, as well as sprinkling the Meld upgrade currency across the battlefield to encourage you to advance and grab it before it expired.

As well as back-of-the-box additions like those, and the genetics and cybernetics lab including two more ways to develop your soldiers, Enemy Within included smaller quality-of-life features nobody should miss. Like foreign squaddies speaking their native languages, a button to free up gear from soldiers who were back in the barracks when you were outfitting your squad on the tarmac, and way more hats and helmet options. It's the little things, you know?

In a July 29 IGN interview, prolific director Guillermo del Toro shared his love of the hardcore action-roguelike, Dead Cells, but lamented its difficulty, wishing there was a mode that eased up on the roguelike restarts. Dead Cells studio Motion Twin has since responded to IGN, and recommends del Toro try the easy mode it's already got in there.

"We'd like to officially add this moment into our own personal Cabinet of Curiosities," the studio told IGN. "We are surprised and truly honored to see that Mr. del Toro is a Dead Cells player, and we can even help him right now: there is an Assist mode in the game!

"This mode lets you resurrect at the start of the current biome or closest checkpoint, rather than restarting the entire run. Thank you very much Guillermo for your kind words and your time on the game. We hope this little message will help you!"

Assist mode kinda sounds like exactly what del Toro was asking for: "You get 35 levels in and then you start again, you get faster, but please do a version without respawning for the elderly players." We could be mistaken, but I and PCG news writer Elie Gould interpreted his complaint to be directed at the roguelike genre's consequences on death: Losing all your stuff and the map getting randomized. Hopefully the director will find what he's looking for in Assist mode.

And lest you judge del Toro too harshly for not catching Assist mode before going on the record about it, a frequent, recurring Google query we've noticed in our eternal quest for SEO succor is "How do I save in [X new videogame]," a question usually answered with "pause the game, then hit the 'save' button." None of us are free from sin. There are (almost) no dumb questions.

First reported in English by Automaton, veteran Japanese voice actor Megumi Ogata (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Danganronpa, Persona) recently spoke to the website TBS News Dig about AI voice generation and its effect on actors. This comes as the Japanese government is considering a legal framework similar to likeness rights to head off such infringement.

Ogata specifically addressed the prevalence of AI imitators on video platforms like TikTok, calling it an issue she “cannot turn a blind eye to.”

"My voice is a part of my identity," said Ogata. "I really don’t understand why somebody would want to make me say things that I don’t want to say as they please and then sell it as my own voice. It’s heartbreaking.

"Why can’t Japan, which calls itself a content superpower, establish rules for content use or tell the world, ‘this is our policy,’ or ‘this is a problem for us?’"

Ogata has a similar stance on the issue to other voice actors, including frequent Bethesda collaborator Wes Johnson, who once tweeted that "anyone trying to create a mod using an actor's voice via AI *without consent* knows they are wrong." Veteran videogame actor Jennifer Hale has been vocal about studios taking responsibility for their use of AI, while at the 2024 BAFTAs, multiple members of Baldur's Gate 3's cast tore into AI voice cloning.

One interesting wrinkle is the professional/amateur divide here: Much hay has been made about companies seeking to automate creative roles, but Ogata, Johnson, and BG3 narrator Amelia Tyler have all singled out modders and content creators as well. Any question of money aside, it's undeniably creepy to steal someone's voice and make them say whatever you want, even if it's for a seemingly innocent shitpost.

First reported by GamesRadar, former Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida is apparently just like us: He loves Bloodborne, and he doesn't get why Sony and FromSoftware haven't done anything with it since its November, 2015 expansion, The Old Hunters.

Yoshida's remarks were part of his keynote address at Japan's CEDEC Industry event. Yoshida structured the talk around impactful, memorable games he encountered over the course of his almost 40-year career with Sony⁠—this included his first hands-on experience with Demon's Souls, and Sony missing out on the chance to publish Dark Souls.

"This game has a lot of fans all over the world, and it still doesn't have a PS5 version," Yoshida said regarding Bloodborne. "PlayStation's first-party team is releasing a ton of remasters, so why don't they release this one? There's no PC release.

"I am often asked why these haven't been released, but it's a complete mystery. Maybe they'll come out in the future. Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll make a special edition. Maybe they won't. As a huge fan, I hope it will come out."

There's certainly a degree of "buddy, wasn't that your job?" energy to a former Sony executive lamenting Sony's lack of action, but it makes more sense considering the timeline and Yoshida's portfolio before his 2025 retirement. He switched to being head of PlayStation Indies in 2019, just four years after Bloodborne's release and before the start of the PS5 generation.

I'm a simple man, and all I've ever wanted is Bloodborne as it was, but playable at arbitrary resolutions and framerates on PC. The notion of a remaster never appealed to me, but that doesn't even appear to be on the table anymore after Sony had its go-to remaster studio, Bluepoint, devote its resources to a God of War Multiplayer game before shutting it down. Even more mystifying has been the lack of a 60fps or 4K patch for, at this point, PS4 Pro, PS5, or PS5 Pro.

And at this point, I don't think the discless, PC-scorning, maximum customer value-chasing Sony of 2026 could produce a version of Bloodborne superior to PS4 emulation. You need a hearty rig⁠—Steam Deck is unfortunately out⁠—but Bloodborne emulation looks like it's in a shockingly strong place. I just need to set aside the time and startup energy to dump my old Blu-ray copy one of these days.

Even though it's been ubiquitous for a number of years at this point, it still feels like generative AI is working on its sales pitch. OpenAI CEO and Elon Musk slapfighter Sam Altman took to X yesterday to offer a new "cool use case" for ChatGPT he recently overheard: "Connect your family calendars and explain your kids' interests."

"Every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid's soccer game that afternoon, one kid's upcoming birthday, some news, etc." In other words, delegate the task of connecting with your blood relatives to a productivity tool. Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch has racked up over 120,000 likes for his reply: "What if you just talked to your children?"

When my dad drove me to elementary school, he would put on country music radio and I would try to explain to him why Spore was so great. We learned about each other that way. The thought of having those memories replaced by some LLM telling him "it's not just a little league game—it's an experience," well, it makes me think of that experiment from the '50s where monkeys had their mothers replaced by surrogates built from wire.

The response on X has been largely negative. Comedian Gianmarco Soresi quote-reposted Altman, saying "Cool use case of a vibrator I heard last night: you can go in separate rooms and not have sex." A quote-repost from Kathryn Jezer-Morton reads, "Surreal how stupid this idea is." Another comment from AM_Pines said, "Children are supposed to be educated with Creedence Clearwater Revival during the morning drive dammit, not some fuckass generated AI slopsicle."

Granted, your view of this might change if you believe, as Altman has said, that we're living through the singularity and AI has surpassed human intelligence. But that claim—and these musings that ChatGPT should help you talk to your kids and take care of your baby—accompanies a broader push by Altman, OpenAI, and other tech companies to resist regulation by leveraging the promise that AI will fundamentally change how the world works.

One of the beautiful things about the PC—about open, general-use computing on the whole—is that you might, at any point, stumble across a GitHub repo that contains its own small civilisation. You'll find some hoary app or game that has lived a thousand lives before you ever became aware of it, that one magical lunatic, or team thereof, has been working on in their off-hours since the year still started with a one. They have communities, traditions, in-jokes, histories. They are worlds.

Sometimes, worlds that live within other worlds, as is the case with Sil-Q, a free-and-open-source take on Rogue (as in Rogue, the 'Rogue' in 'Roguelike') that extricates the action from an anonymous dungeon and transplants it into Tolkien's First Age of Arda: the setting of much of The Silmarillion.

Taken by itself, Sil-Q is not actually that old. Its first release only took place in 2017, but its ancestry, fittingly, stretches back a lot further. Sil-Q is a continuation of Sil, which released in 2012 and ceased development in the mid-2010s. Sil is based on Angband, which first came out in 1993 and which is still under active development today. Angband, meanwhile, derives from 1983's Moria—also still going, heroically.

Some or all of which you might already know, given that Moria was an influence on Diablo 1 namechecked by David Breivik himself, but it was new to me when I discovered Sil-Q on my weekly quest for reasons not to play videogames that came out this year.

Angband was sprawling—a hodgepodge of fantasy concepts in the Dungeons and Dragons mould, with a Tolkienian underpinning. Your goal was eventually to kill Morgoth, the legendarium's first and worst dark lord. This was not, strictly speaking, lore-friendly. In the history of Arda, Morgoth was never slain, but rather permanently kicked out of the party—banished from the world until the Battle of All Battles.

It's also just, you know, kind of at-odds with the general vibe of Tolkien's world. Sauron was not defeated because Frodo powerlevelled hard enough to stab him to death.

So Sil and its descendent take Angband's general gameplay, the Rogueness of it all, and tighten the corset around its fidelity to the setting. Its enemies are all ripped from Tolkien's pages. You can no longer play as races like kobold, or as classes like mage and druid. Instead, you choose between the Noldor (cool elves), Sindar (slightly less cool elves), Naugrim (an elvish borderline slur for dwarves, which seems rude), or the Edain (men, who suck).

These aren't races in the D&D sense—you aren't doing anything so mechanical as picking between different packages of advantages and disadvantages. Instead, they reflect Arda as-written: men really are kind of lame. They might be Eru Iluvatar's favourite, but they're neither fast, nor hearty, nor strong of will. They lack all the advantages the elves and even dwarves get. To play one is to deliberately hamstring yourself.

From there, you choose your House—the precise lineage of cool elf or lame guy you descend from, which then impacts your starting proficiencies and stats—and off you go into Morgoth's fortress. But you're no assassin, the goal is to pry one of the stolen Silmaril gems from the dark lord's black crown, then run the hell away before he notices.

This is what grabbed me about Sil-Q, I think. It's not that it doesn't care about balance, it's that balance and the game's mechanics are all subservient to a dedication to the setting. The world is the thing, and if the world demands that being a mortal man confer no advantages whatsoever then that's damn well how it's going to work. This is probably not something they are teaching in game design school, but I like it.

And then you're actually roaming around Morgoth's dread fortress and, dammit, you're in pure Silmarillion town, baby. You're fighting orcs and picking up strange mythical weapons that glow blue when you're near 'em, dying over and over and over again in classic Rogue style. You are a heightened hero of the first age, evading the blows of your enemies like Fingolfin at Dagor Bragollach. Or, possibly, getting devoured by a pack of wolves in the very first area. That is also a possibility.

If you're as Silmarillion-brained as me (or moreso, which has been known to happen), I strongly recommend you check Sil-Q out. It's a game that runs on anything and has 40 years of history and 5,000 years of lore. It doesn't get much more Tolkien than that.

Videogames have always struggled a wee bit—and I'm being generous here—with the subject of romance. Explosions, dragons and alien invasions? It's got that stuff locked down. But the language of love has proved a bit more elusive. Developers, especially RPG devs, have refused to back down in the face of this challenge, however, and we're now at the point where the absence of romance has become more noteworthy than its inclusion.

Arguably, this is BioWare's legacy. It wasn't the first, but BioWare's RPGs really codified videogame romances—specifically romanceable companions—starting with Baldur's Gate 2. This has become so commonplace that even games that aren't really RPGs, like Star Wars: Zero Company, need to answer the question: can we knock boots with our colleagues?

But is this feature really essential in an RPG? Is it even warranted? If we were just talking about the BioWare model, I'd have to say absolutely not. But there are some caveats.

BioWare's actually designed some genuinely great relationships over the last few decades. In Dragon Age, the potential relationship between the Grey Warden and Morrigan is critically important for the series' overarching story, and equally important is how the development of that relationship really lets you get to know one of Origins greatest and most closed off characters.

Mass Effect also does some interesting things with its romanceable companions. The relationship with Liara, for instance, starts off a bit creepy. In the context of her species, the asari, she is effectively a child, despite being over 100 years old, which is clearly emphasised by her innocence and naivety. By Mass Effect 2, however, she's gone through a great deal and comes across as more self-assured and grown up, and while she only appears in the DLC, the relationship feels considerably more nuanced.

Shep's trilogy also benefits from having the same protagonist throughout, giving you the opportunity to develop a relationship across three distinct games and DLC. There's a lot of room to explore romance, then. But the series never quite manages to escape BioWare's formulaic approach to romance.

You have a handful of conversations, say that you're crushing on someone, and then just before the end of the game you sit through a sex scene. Your companions rarely have much agency—it's just another power fantasy.

This is not the only approach, though. In Baldur's Gate 3, for instance, Larian explores lots of different kinds of relationships with much greater depth, from the purely sexual to the exceedingly romantic. It's an incredibly horny game, but at the same time it doesn't treat sex as some kind of reward that you're working towards. Depending on the character, you might end up having a meaningless tumble in the hay within the first act.

Larian also used romance to enhance companion storylines. In my first playthrough, my PC's relationship with Karlach really elevated her arc and made the beats hit a lot harder. Baldur's Gate 3 relationships are also tested, sometimes, and can be sources of friction within the party. And they are woven throughout the game, rather than being relegated to a few chats and an awkward sex scene before the game's climax.

This approach, unfortunately, is the exception rather than the rule. And even when it is handled well, I find it can still too often veer into wish fulfillment. Case in point, the decision some games make—including Baldur's Gate 3—to have every single character effectively be pansexual, to make sure the player can hook up with whoever they want. It's fantastic that this allows for more queer romances, but I'm not sure it really counts if every companion is playersexual.

Romance has become a box that needs to be checked, where its only purpose is to please the players who have understandably come to expect it—but picking important story beats and mechanics just because they've become conventional only serves to homogenise RPGs.

I used to be all for companion romances, and I proudly celebrated Baldur's Gate 3's horniness and sexual free-for-all back in 2023. And like I said earlier, I still think it was broadly handled pretty well. But lately I've been skipping romance in my RPGs unless the RPG in question is genuinely trying to do something interesting with it—which is rarely the case.

And it's great! I played 150 hours of Rogue Trader and never felt the slightest bit of FOMO when I rejected my entire crew. And when I had to embark on a relationship in Dragon Age: The Veilguard to help out the guides team, I spent most of my time cringing—even though I romanced the only likeable character in the entire game, Lace Harding.

I'll give you this, though: Fable's approach to romance is hilarious. Marry every single character! Embrace polygamy! I kinda respect how the series makes it purely mechanical. There's no real relationship here, just the odd bonus. Is it saying something about the ancient institution of marriage. Nope! It's just having fun. And that's actually a great reason to include this kind of system. It serves a clear purpose beyond attempting to meet weird expectations.

PC Gamer is not a monolith, however, and it wasn't difficult to find a colleague to argue that, in fact, RPGs do need romance. So here's Harvey with another perspective:

OK, I've had my say, Harvey's had his say, but what about you lot? Do you crave romance in your RPGs, or have you had enough of them?

What is that quasi-critical darling and pillar of K-content Crimson Desert even about, anyway? The answer becomes less clear by the day, as now it's something of a full-blown trading simulator—given this is the developer behind Black Desert Online, a game where you can breed and sell horses when you get tired of adventuring, I'm surprised it took this long.

Trading was already in Crimson Desert, but a sizable economy overhaul arrived in the latest patch, which you can read about on Pearl Abyss's website. It adds 133 new trading posts, rebalances "types and quantities" for all trading posts, and introduces some new mechanics to simulate supply and demand.

For instance, when too many items are sold at a single location, that will affect local prices. And if you trade at remote locations ("hard to reach by wagon," as the notes describe them) you'll turn a higher profit. That's on top of the fact that trade profits in general have gone up, and there are 24 new types of "high-value" goods to move.

The response on social media is a mix of pleasant surprise and raised eyebrows. "I'm actually baffled," said Reddit user VictorBelmont. "I thought like three people actually did wagon trading." a reply from Hazel0mutt reads, "Probably because it was a shitty system. Now I'm excited!" The update seemingly continues a long trend of Pearl Abyss shrugging off critiques that less is more by insisting 'no, more is more.'

There's a host of minor fixes as well—certain challenges which were bugged before should be completable now, and there are "improved interaction animations" for animals like the platypus and the feathered weasel. That might sound negligible, but you don't get kudos from the Prime Minister of South Korea by cutting corners on your platypus animations.

I'm about to say something controversial—I don't actually think grinds in MMOs are all that bad. There's a bit of a wider resistance to the idea of having to grind for anything in a modern online game, a resistance to the very concept, even. We've all certainly got less time than in the days of attunement questlines.

But that doesn't mean an MMO can be entirely grindless, right? Depending on how you define the term, after all. They're, typically speaking, RPGs—RPGs have levels, slow-burn goals to achieve, and so on. For the sake of ease, let's just define a grind as a repetitive activity you need to do many times in a role to achieve a goal.

Even then, has that sort of thing been entirely stamped out? Not exactly. We aren't quite at EverQuest levels of quests being rare breaks from the eternal mobbing, but those archetypal grinds have morphed into new forms. Battle-pass like reward tracks, seasons, world quests, or, in the case of Final Fantasy 14, relic weapons.

I recently had to sprint to catch up on my relic weapon step, which required me to gather a bunch of crystal paste from dungeons. If you're unfamiliar with FF14—basically, I had to get 600 of a thing to get a cool weapon, if you've played an MMO you recognise the kind of activity I'm describing. You've been there.

Given I wanted to hop into the patches' new content and start working towards my next step right away, I looked up the easiest way to get it, and it turned out to be grinding low-level dungeons. I settled in with some snacks, put on a playlist, and you know what? I had a lovely time.

It was completely mindless, sure. Absolutely none of my technical skills were challenged at any point. But as I bobbed my head to some tunes and pressed my 1-2-3 rotations, I felt a familiar zen wash over me, a kind of mindless fog that left me feeling rejuvenated. More to the point, I wondered if I actually minded grinding at all. Maybe I just had to get into the right grindset—sorry, mindset.

That's not to say I have a newfound tolerance, or anything. I don't think I could go back to the days where the only way to level involved copious amounts of mob-whacking in the same open fields. But I have to wonder if some grinding in an MMO can be good for it. Like getting enough fibre in your diet.

But what do you think? Do you like zoning out and making some (in the greater scheme of things) meaningless numbers go up for a few hours? Or does the very concept of busywork in your MMO fill you with apoplectic gamer rage? You can answer via the poll below, but I'd also be keen to hear your opinions in the comments, as well.

With videogame budgets ballooning and competition ever intensifying there's a huge amount riding on whether a modern videogame succeeds or fails. As such, publishers are increasingly turning to the safest bets possible, like sequels in proven series or shiny remakes of classic games.

It's the exact strategy that Xbox has said it's falling back on to increase its fortune—recommitting to its big names like Halo, Fallout, The Elder Scrolls etc. Admittedly, that strategy also includes laying off thousands of people and cutting ties with numerous game studios, which thus far has yielded Xbox's worst quarter in years.

Indeed, rather than helping sustain the industry, this aversion to risk may be a source of its present struggles. As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, this was the conclusion of a workgroup run by Vlambeer cofounder and Nuclear Throne producer Rami Ismail at this year's DevGAMM Madeira Games Summit.

Titled "We're moving fast and losing what made us good (creativity, craft & the future)", the workgroup brought together people from various corners of the games industry to discuss how to put creativity back at the heart of game dev (and game financing). It concluded that the industry's general fear of failure is, ironically, one of the biggest inhibitors to success.

"Many of the more fearful reflexes of the industry aim to sand down the rough edges of creative work, creating homogenous and bland works that 'check all the boxes' but are nevertheless (or, consequently) insincere, uninspiring and uninterested," Ismail explained. "Courage is a consistent factor of most hit titles; in funding, in publishing, in marketing, and in investment."

The group pointed to several major success stories of recent years as examples of this, including Peak, Balatro, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In each case, the success of the game was driven by the personal beliefs and tastes of the people making it, as opposed to chasing trends or market analysis.

One other interesting point the group arrived at was that avoiding fear-driven game development could also mean making the difficult decision to end a project, but doing this early rather than spending multiple years and millions of dollars chasing a fundamentally bad idea. This is something we saw in Sony's ill-conceived live-service strategy, where the company has spent the best part of a generation chasing a whole raft of live-service titles, most of which have failed to emerge.

In summary, Ismail said that "The industry’s fear of risk is currently the largest risk it faces." And there's certainly some truth to the fact that the biggest hitters tend to be those we least expect. We've seen another example of this recently in Meccha Chameleon, a multiplayer hide-and-seek game which in June earned more money than every other game except Fortnite.

Things haven't looked great for Dragon Age since its latest entry, Dragon Age: The Veilguard was released to a mixed critical and muted commercial response back in 2024. EA subsequently laid off dozens of BioWare's staff, and numerous former developers have recently said they believe the series is probably dead.

Yet, while there's little hope of a new Dragon Age game anytime soon (if ever), might there be a chance EA revisits the old Dragon Age games? The original Mass Effect trilogy got a spruced-up rerelease in its Legendary Edition back in 2021, despite the fact that EA hasn't exactly been desperate to push out new games in that series either (though a new one is apparently in the works, with the devs being too busy making it to talk about it). Hence, could EA test players' appetite for Dragon Age with a similar remaster for Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age: Inquisition?

Sadly, the chances of this happening are slim too, at least according to former Dragon Age producer Mark Darrah. In the same FRVR interview where he declared Dragon Age as probably dead, Darrah also pointed out that, while he had once envisioned a "Champion's Edition" equivalent to the Legendary Edition, EA is now unlikely to exhume the old games for a remaster due to the practical difficulties of doing so.

Basically, it all comes down to technology. Where all three Mass Effect games ran on Unreal Engine, which is a widely used technology, the three Dragon Age games were all built on different engines. Dragon Age used BioWare's Eclipse engine—an upgraded version of the Aurora Engine (which was also used by CD Projekt for The Witcher), Dragon Age 2 used the further enhanced Lycium Engine, while Dragon Age: Inquisition ran on DICE's Frostbite tech.

"There's basically no one at BioWare any more that understands the Aurora Engine," Darrah told FRVR. "There's basically no one outside of BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora engine. So, unlike Mass Effect, which is Unreal, there are basically no companies that could help you."

On top of this, Darrah reckons that such a remaster effort would require a new team, but claims that "EA doesn't like having employees, so, if you're going to do that, you're going to do that within the umbrella of BioWare, which means those people are not working on something else."

That said, Darrah does think that a remaster of the original Dragon Age would sell well, mainly due to how it's a bit crusty around the edges today. "Dragon Age: Origins wasn't the most attractive game. There's a lot you could do there to make it a lot better looking."

I have an experiment for you. Right now, as you stare at this article on a phone, monitor, PS Vita, whatever, spin your head around. Oh, probably don't do that in public or while walking. Or do. I don't know, I'm not your dad.

But you will probably spot that the entire world doesn't go blurry as you spin. Now, a second experiment: wave your hand in front of you and tell me if your hand goes blurry. As you'll likely deduce from that very scientific experiment, motion blur (ie the entire world going blurry around you as you wiggle your head) is not a 'realistic' game setting.

One of the first things I do when I play a game is turn motion blur off. Given you are reading this on PC Gamer dot com, the likelihood is that you do the same. Recently, while playing Halo: Campaign Evolved, I realised it has one of the worst implementations of motion blur I've ever seen, and it even has the audacity to be on by default.

Now, I do acknowledge that motion blur serves a purpose. Calling it a "cure worse than the disease" back in 2023, we noted that motion blur can not only add a sense of speed and realism but can reduce the perception of artifacts. As you might be able to guess, that means motion blur is effective at obscuring faults at lower frame rates too.

And as such, it makes sense that it largely came about in the early 2000s. As 3D games became more popular, and hardware ramped up to attempt to keep pace with that innovation, motion blur helped to obscure low frame rates.

There is another purpose for motion blur. As pointed out back in 1999, Kong looks a bit weird in the 1933 King Kong movie, because the background shots are shot on camera and the titular great ape was animated with still photos. Cameras introduce motion blur, and many games attempt to mimic film, rather than real life. Nowadays, stop motion animators add artificial blur to make their pictures feel more like a movie.

So, in big-budget cinematic games, there are two built-in reasons for motion blur: to feel closer to a movie than real life, and to make up for poor performance.

But it's 2026, and modern hardware, especially with innovations like upscaling and frame generation, can get the average fps up into the hundreds for even modern titles. So my question is, 'why is motion blur the default?' Why is it the native way we are supposed to play games?

Now, motion blur absolutely has its defenders, and I can see the argument for it in sequences that are played at high speeds (like racing games). But, a study from back in 2013 shows that, even in racing games, players could reliably detect motion blur but did not report it having a positive effect on the game. It concludes, "motion blur effects, while useful for reducing artifacts and achieving a realistic 'look', do not significantly enhance the player experience."

While playing Halo: Campaign Evolved, I realised game capture looked significantly worse with motion blur on, regardless of the fps of the game. The blur tends to be at its worst below 60 fps, but it's not exactly pretty at 100 fps either. The game ultimately feels less immersive to me with motion blur on.

The thing is, motion blur's benefits, aesthetically speaking, are subjective. I hate it, and wish I'd never have to see it in a game again, but others like it. And that's part of the problem here. It has become the default, I think, in part because it was the default, and there's no point fixing it if it ain't broke.

But we have tools that are much better at making up for lower frame rates now. I'd opt for a little upscaling pretty much any day over motion blur, but I also don't expect that to be the default. There's also a little part of my brain that doesn't like tools that are used to mask performance issues being the expected way to play games. I want my first taste of a game to be as untreated as possible, where I then season it with as much salt and pepper as I like. And motion blur is simply too spicy for a first bite.

Students of first-person shooter history will likely know that the technology Half-Life runs on—GoldSrc—is a heavily modified version of the Quake engine. It's one of many, many branches of id-tech's ancient technological tree. Indeed, you'll still find tiny fragments of Quake code in Valve's modern successor to GoldSrc—Source 2.

Now, nearly three decades on from Half-Life's release, a modder has decided to put Quake back into Half-Life. Or maybe it's Half-Life back into Quake? Honestly, it's hard to tell.

The mod in question is called Libre-life, and it's a total conversion mod that aims to port Half-Life's key assets, like entities, weapons, monsters and mechanics, into Quake sourceports derived from DarkPlaces and FTEQW, with the primary target being the Zircon Engine. It's the creation of modder KleskBY, who aims to "combine support for Half-Life, Quake 1 [and] Quake 3 brush entities standard" according to Libre-life's ModDB page.

Why is Klesk doing this? Well, contrary to appearances, it has more to do with looking forward than looking back. Old game engines like GoldSrc tend to have hard-coded limitations that can affect its capability in various ways, like the maximum size of a map you can create.

The way around these limitations is to create a sourceport, like GZDoom (or its newer equivalent UZDoom) for Doom 2, or QuakeSpasm or its fork Ironwail for Quake. Such sourceports are what make mods like Brutal Doom or Arcane Dimensions possible.

Half-Life already has such a sourceport in Xash3D. However, Klesk cites several reasons for not just using Xash. The modder points out that Libre-life is intended to be more than just a straight engine port. "It can run on multiple Quake engines and could even run on Xash with enough adaptation work," Klesk writes. "There is no need for the project to be locked to a single Half-Life based engine".

Klesk also claims that Xash's Half-Life reimplementation of Half-Life is "not technically superior" and that the Quake source-ports he's focussed on provide "many capabilities that Xash does not."

Currently, Libre-Life is still in its early stages, but a fair amount of work has already been done, like reimplementing all of Half-Life 1's weapons. You can see the results of Klesk's work so far in the video above. For the most part it looks and sounds like Half-Life, though there are some obvious differences, like the higher-contrast shadows and the softer blood decals.

I was curious about Klesk's work and went to check out the demo. But it was upon doing so that I discovered Klesk has some, uh, interesting ideas about AI. In an FAQ about the demo, Klesk states unabashedly that he uses AI "a lot" and that "If you are anti-AI please just close this tab and move your focus to XashXT/FreeHL."

Which, as someone who is highly sceptical of generative AI, is what I will probably do. But it wasn't Klesk's use of AI that caused me to raise my eyebrows. It's what the modder said next:

"The Anti AI movement is just a hypocrisy and it does not provide any real solution. My opinion is that Anti-AI rhetoric is influenced by Chinese government and domestic terrorists who are competitors aiming to advance in AI development, as they never provide a solution, only complaints."

Alrighty then! It isn't clear what problem generative AI critics are supposed to be proposing a solution to. If the answer is "coding", then you can do that without generative AI and have been able to since computers were invented.

As for the Chinese government/domestic terrorist stuff, I think it's far more likely that people don't like AI because the technology is built upon plagiarised work, is terrible for the environment, is ruining the PC hardware market, and causing people to lose their minds, among other things.

Given the above statements, it seems unlikely that Klesk will change their mind on using AI for Libre-life. But it's not impossible. The recent Half-Life total conversion Diffusion, which funnily enough was built in Xash3D, used generative AI for its voices. But when criticised for this, creator Aynekko had a very different response, and replaced the AI voices with a cast of human actors to the delight of its fans.

As a child of the '90s-era pocket monster craze, I had what I suspect historians will call Monster-Taming Madness. A not-so-terrible, but sort of annoying affliction that meant I always had a Tamagotchi in my pocket, a handful of Pokémon cards, and the entire Spice Girls discography on standby for summoning creatures from discs in Monster Rancher.

To say I was obsessed is putting it mildly, but in all that time I spent collecting little guys and preparing them to duke it out, I never once considered the obvious: What if I gave one of these guys a gun?

When it launched in early access, that's what Palworld was known as: Pokémon with guns. It's not an entirely unfair description of the survival crafting, creature-collecting adventure, and two years ago, I would've agreed with it. It certainly looks like a case of copying someone's homework, though that's not a good distillation of the Palworld 1.0 we have today.

Palworld has come a long way since early access, with the bones of a satisfying, iterative creature collector all here. I just wish I jived with more of the survival bits, and that Palworld embraced the things that make it stand apart from Pokémon outside of hokey ultra-violence satire.

The Pokémon in the room

Let's go ahead and get it out of the way—yes, Palworld's trainers, pal spheres, and even some monster designs are all similar to Pokémon. And yes, that's part of the appeal. It's also one of the least interesting influences when you start digging into the meat of Palworld's systems.

Comparisons to Ark or Conan Exiles feel more apt with its minion-like system for catching pals and deploying them to do base-keeping chores back home. In Ark, dinosaurs toddle about your base completing grindy survival crafting tasks, while thralls in Conan Exiles serve a similar purpose.

Palworld's pals work like the dinosaurs and thralls, but the execution is leagues better. Organizing your workforce is immediately satisfying in a way the others aren't, because you don't have to fight with it. I catch a pal, check its skills, and drop it at a crafting station to get started. There's no overly obtuse taming mechanic, and no need to engage with messy stat calculus. Even when I didn't have a clear grasp of all the nuances, my army of cute critters got their chores done without much fuss.

Not every pal is willing to do every type of job, and I love how Palworld conveys their preferences through 'work suitability' levels—a clearly delineated set of specialty task icons highlighting a pal's capabilities. I was never left wondering why my new favorite early game pal, Pupperai, wasn't best in show for helping out around the base. It could only chop trees, pick berries, and move materials. Pupperai looks unemployable when the wild Tanzee nearby has those same skills, plus expertise in two additional task types.

My problem in Ark was always feeling so exhausted by the taming process that I would eventually just say 'fine, I'll do it myself,' before abandoning the idea. Pals will always try and help, at least a little, and the option for min-maxing is there through work suitability levels, partner skills, and passives.

Aesthetically displeasing

While I dig some of the new pal designs and scenery, Palworld's look and presentation occasionally sour me on the whole thing. There's just no way around how off-putting I find some of the game's tone and direction, which only grows worse as Palworld signals it's not very confident in its own artistic decisions. I get it, you aren't like the other games, you're different—the edgy older brother with a crude sense of humor.

I'm not just talking about Lovander giving me the bedroom eyes, either. Palworld has several little moments with weird tonal dissonance that feel inserted for virality or a need to prove it's different.

The first time I felt that way was right after crafting the Meat Cleaver, an early game tool you can use for butchering adorable critters like Lamball or Cattiva. So, being the monster that I am and unwilling to sacrifice Pupperai, I surveyed the starting area, judged all of its pals by their cuteness, and chose the one I liked the least as my first test subject. Sorry, Chikipi.

Violently butchering my pals didn't have much purpose, or at least not in the early game. In the time it took me to fetch a Chikipi from my Palbox and hack it apart, I could've already clobbered one in the wild without the weird blur effect making it into a goofy spectacle. There's no explicit gore to hide, it's just a bit for making the action cartoonishly violent. It was only in the very late game, when I unlocked the cleaver's automated mass-killing counterpart, that I saw any potential use for butchering pals at all.

Most of Palworld doesn't strain this hard to be shocking, but there's an air of the attitude sprinkled throughout. You'll find pals crying in cages, warnings that some little 'buddies' are working in various states of injury, and a handful of little guys wielding guns. Honestly, I'm glad there aren't more gun-wielding pals. That's more your avatar's thing. Tanzee, along with maybe four or five other pals are the only ones I can recall that stay strapped. You mostly just craft saddles to ride them like horses… or put them on the death machine.

Home groan

Legend has it that if you look into a mirror and whisper "survival crafting" three times, I'll come leaping out to ask what we're playing and when. I love'em, especially if they come with a good set of blocks because my friends always appoint me to the position of base architect, and I'm not stopping there. Our survival crafting house is getting the full service, appropriate holiday decor and all.

If you're also that person, bad news: Palworld makes for a pretty boring set of Legos.

If you're not that person, well, it's nice that the building is so bare-bones simple you can slap some crap on the ground and move on. But if I'm going to spend 100+ hours surviving and crafting, you're damn right I'm getting irritatingly picky about how my space looks.

Palworld's kit isn't all bad, but the underwhelming architecture and a few 1.0 tools are still worth mentioning:

• The building grid is massive and painfully strict. You have to stack three walls to accommodate bigger pals if you don't want to see them clipping through.
• Its building pieces, like walls and foundations, are of course oversized as a result. Palworld's map already suffers from a lot of empty space, and it's tough to let that go when my base looks the same way thanks to so much dead space.
• I love the new paint tool that changes the color of some building pieces. Light shades of wood are almost always a sin in my book, so I used it to customize wooden building pieces and turn them into darker grains.
• Paint works on storage furnishings too, and I love displays of color-coded chests. However, you can't paint some of the more basic furnishings like simple tables or chairs, though those futuristic production facilities need it the most.
• The alignment tool for snapping walls or furnishings neatly beside each other rules. We should make this mandatory in every base builder.

Creature crafter

Micromanaging pal work suitabilities was easily the best part of my Palworld base design experience, and getting into the nitty-gritty of breeding for other stats was a similar treat. It's another thing you don't have to fully engage with—I didn't even touch the system until approaching the final boss—but it's a delight for anyone also into Pokémon's stat-perfecting systems.

Pals have more situational builds, so I can spec them to help out with housekeeping, combat, or buffing duties. Do you want a Sekhmet for combat or crafting? Will Chillet keep your base cool, be your primary mount, or both? Their passives—a random selection of traits affecting everything from work speed to attack damage to their ability to work at night—are randomly assigned to pals caught in the wild, and help you breed for traits suiting their role.

I've got absolutely zero chill when it comes to in-game travel, so I didn't even fuss over breeding a more powerful sidekick for the final fight. I just wanted the fastest ride available, and that's led me down an Eidrolon Ignis breeding frenzy. Don't worry, Palworld doesn't make it weird. There's just a lot that goes into the process, which includes tasks like:

• Mass catching wild pals for the desired gender or passive. Sometimes you'll even stumble upon a Lucky pal, the game's version of shiny Pokémon.
• Adding pals with breeding-specific buffs to the team managing your base.
• Setting up facilities like the Breeding Farm and Egg Incubator; the Ranch for special food ingredients; or the Pal Condenser for merging weaker pals into your best one.
• Breeding for particular stats, passives, an entirely different pal, or even the chance at Mutated Eggs with special features.

I haven't seen many cool Mutated Eggs yet, and my main battle team remains mostly made up of pals caught in the wild, not bred for specialities. For most of my 100+ hours through the main story, I only tinkered with the Surgery Table to give pals special passive implants. It looks a bit grim when set up, but fortunately lacks the theatrical brutality of butchering. I rolled my eyes at the presentation, then tinkered with implant combinations for hours.

That's emblematic of my Palworld experience. Lots of little moments where I grimaced at edgy reminders it's a big kid's game before getting lost in the freedom of its systems. It was nice to skirt by in tough battles without going all-in on designer pals, but when the time came, I could indulge in the side of me that loves involving a spreadsheet.

"Gotta catch'em all," also takes on a whole new meaning when I can actually catch them all in a single game with no fuss. Pokémon's historically miserable system of transferring, trading, buying the same game in a different color, and limited events evolved into one of my biggest peeves with the series. Palworld doesn't have the same massive monster roster, or at least not yet.

Knowing I could complete the Palpedia was a delight that often kept my character and her team overleveled from pal-catching XP. I sped through most story bosses using the default world settings, and felt like I was missing out on seeing what my pals could do while I was busy blowing the place up. It wasn't until the late game that I was humbled by a monstrous boss pal. Several deaths later led me to give aerial combat an honest try, and well, I should've done that from the beginning.

A showdown with Panthalus—Palworld's mythical big whale beastie—forced me to respect the mechanics. It was either that, or risk drowning again. So, I relied on my flying pal, Jetragon, for safety.

My new strategy worked, and shooting missiles from above was more fun than running around with a gun. Both are effective, but from the sky I'm at least using my pal, and I like the control I have over both my character and her pal as a unit. Palworld let me experiment more than I realized, and I like that.

There's a push and pull between some of the things that matter most to me in survival crafting games, though I can't deny how good Palworld's creature collecting foundation is. I love micromanaging pals at my base, fighting alongside them, and perfecting pedigrees through implants and eggs. I'm disappointed by the base building, lackluster open world, and mundane exploration.

It also lacks personality, unless being bludgeoned to death with a bat labeled "violence" counts as one. We can argue it's parody or satire, sure, but it's not very good at that, either.

With all of its success, I hope Palworld uses future updates to establish a more confident identity that relies less on being the most audacious person in the room. It's full of enough thoughtful systems and entertaining loops worth embracing—no need to dress it down in callow internet humor.

Well well well—what a difference, uh, 30 years makes, huh? While the Sony of 2026 is insisting that it should, or must, carry on with the execution of physical media for its forthcoming PlayStation 6, and has backed away from releasing its prestige games on PC, the Sony of 1996 was in a very different mindset.

Shortly after the release of the original PlayStation, Sony was still so eager to court PC gamers that it took out a 16 page ad supplement in this very magazine to hype up its "PlayStation mega-hits" with "CD-quality audio."

"Sony is just as committed to bringing great games to the PC as they are to creating cutting-edge PlayStation titles," the ad reads, as it explains that storied PC publisher Psygnosis had become a subsidiary of Sony Interactive. "In fact, with all the high-end design work coming out of Sony Interactive, PC gaming may never be the same..."

While many of the games featured throughout the 16 page ad insert are not exactly all-timers, it's fun to look back and see a few closely associated with the PlayStation console, namely WipEout and Twisted Metal, listed for PC. It also promotes a game called Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou as "one of Japan's most popular CD-ROM titles." (Hardcore Gaming 101, by contrast, says "the game wasn't much of a success.")

It's not exactly a gotcha to point out that the Sony of today is no longer talking up CD-ROMs or how awesome its PC games are. But stumbling upon this ad while I was looking at old issues of PC Gamer magazine still made me a bit wistful. It was cool when games came on discs and Sony was still eager enough to court PC gamers that it was boasting about games that "displayed in stunning SVGA with up to 32,768 colors" and "full 360 degree freedom of movement through a 3D world."

Enjoy this look back at a better time—or at least a time when "over 40 huge mazes to explore" was all it took to convince someone to buy your game.

Feed the Machine: New PC Games from Sony Interactive (PC Gamer #20 (US, January 1996)

Here at Clanker Watch we're keeping a close eye on the burgeoning age of robotics, staring wide-eyed with equal parts horror and amusement at the hijinks those state-of-the-art automatons are getting up to.

July was a busy month, with robots doing everything from punching through walls (on purpose) and falling to pieces (accidentally), and one even trying to teach high school classes before getting expelled from school. Here's the top five robot sightings of the month.

5. The butler ate it

Robots abruptly shutting down is nothing new: we've recently seen one robot faceplant on the starting line of a race and another moonwalk itself to death, but this has to be my favorite yet. During a presentation at Computex, a 4NE1 robot designed by Neura Robotics walked on stage during a Qualcomm presentation, delivered an IQ10 processor on a tray, and turned to face the audience. Then, the magic happened.

Make sure you have your volume up.

Quick thinking having a tablecloth handy. I didn’t even notice the twitching from that dead robot.

— @rvbdrm.com (@rvbdrm.com.bsky.social) 2026-07-31T23:19:46.257Z

Wow. That bot ate it like it was taken down by a sniper. And after the deafening clatter of its knees connecting with the service tray, it politely raises its hand to signal for help. Classy.

Are robots really labor saving devices? Because it seems like for everyone one robot there's gotta be three dudes standing nearby to immediately cover it with a death shroud when it inevitably collapses. Seems labor intensive to me.

4. Over sea and air

In more terrifying robot news, engineers have solved a major problem: what if a human being is fleeing a flying drone and dives underwater? How can we invade their privacy or fire incapacitating darts into their necks if they're swimming?

No problem: here's a flying robot, supposedly designed to monitor birds, that can dive into the water, swim for a while, then leap back up into the air and resume flying. There is no escape.

3. Mech trek

I always thought mechs didn't do anything without their pilots, but it appears I was wrong. Unitree Robotics unveiled it's own mech recently, and it seems perfectly comfortable walking around without anyone inside it.

Also, you can just go ahead and buy one if you have $650,000 lying around. "Please everyone be sure to use the robot in a Friendly and Safe manner," says Unitree below a video showing the monstrosity punching a concrete wall to rubble.

2. Centaur of attention

"Hey, guys, we're going to design a robot that can use a chainsaw, what do you think it should look like? A terrifying obsidian death-centaur with horns on its head? Perfect, I'll get started."

As far as I can tell, "Threehalves" is just a concept at the moment, but what a concept. It's a "general purpose" robot meant to perform work in dangerous environments, but why they made it look like a literal demon is beyond me. If there's not an indie horror film called Threehalves starring Jack Quaid about a chainsaw-wielding robot in about two years, I'll be shocked.

1. Hot for teacher

Finally, how can we not include the weirdest robot story yet: a pilot program at a high school in Salamanca, New York, has put on hold plans to introduce an AI-powered robot teacher to the curriculum. Why? Well, in part because the robotics company, Realbotix, also has a division that makes sex dolls. Surprise: that makes a lot of people pretty nervous.

"Realbotix LLC and Intima LLC have different product offerings with no crossover," the Realbotix Corp said.

OK, but surely you can understand that it's hard for us to shake the idea you're just sticking a corduroy blazer on a sex doll and shoving into a classroom to teach economics, right? 'Cuz that's what we're all thinking.

Nobody could have foreseen this.

Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, Ubisoft's NFT tactics game, will be shutting down in October, as announced on its website and its official Discord. If you need a refresher—I did, despite having previously written about the game—Ubisoft launched Champions Tactics in 2024, long after most of the tech-adjacent industries had relented on trying to push quarter-baked Web3 feature pitches and shifted their attentions instead to the emerging AI boom.

As hard as it is to believe, Champions Tactics was one of two NFT games that Ubisoft launched in 2024, despite previous fumbled rollouts of "pay-to-earn" features that prompted the VP of its Strategic Innovations Lab to insist in January 2022 that we simply "don't get" the value of NFTs. Surprisingly, that didn't stifle the backlash much, driving Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot to assure us all in September 2022 that the publisher was only "researching" further Web3 integration and would pursue it "when we have something that gives you a real benefit."

Well, we can see now how that turned out.

"Today, we’re sharing an important update regarding the future of Champions Tactics. After careful consideration, we have made the decision to sunset the game," Ubisoft said in its announcement of the upcoming closure. "The Champions Tactics servers will officially shut down on October 30. Until then, the game will remain fully playable, and our goal is to ensure that players can continue to enjoy the experience during these final months."

Champions Tactics had already shed its NFT features earlier this year, announcing in May that it would "progressively transition away from blockchain functionality" due to "upcoming changes to the blockchain infrastructure supporting the game’s Web3 features." In the following days, Ubisoft removed the ability to mint and sell its NFT characters—some of which had been listed on the Champions Tactics marketplace for over $63,000 shortly after launch.

It's unclear how many of those characters had ever been sold, or for how much—and once the Web 3 features were removed, each player's supposedly non-fungible characters were converted into thoroughly fungible ones. You know, like the ones that are in a videogame.

But don't worry, its heavily invested users didn't walk away with nothing. On May 21, Ubisoft announced that "players who reached Divine rank at least once during the last three seasons" will be eligible to receive free stuff in Might & Magic Fates—a digital TCG it launched in February that lets players earn and trade cards "through an external marketplace powered by Immutable's technology that will enable and secure these exchanges" and oh my god they're still doing this?

Before now, Champions Tactics hadn't occupied much of the public consciousness. It had previously only entered the news cycle when a matchmaking bug forced all its ranked players to spend their first weekend with the game continually connecting—and immediately losing—the same baffled, unkillable guy.

Looking at the Discord, it's hard to tell how upset the remaining Champions Tactics players are; mostly they've been arguing about whether or not the game was a scam. I think the results speak for themselves.

There was a point in the most recent Path of Exile 2 league that I thought I would have to quit playing the game. Every 20 minutes or so, the entire game would freeze. I'd wait for a solid 30 seconds before everything came back to life, praying I wouldn't lose my character the second I had control again.

When I looked up why this could be happening, I found dozens of Reddit threads about the same issue. People have been suffering from intermittent freezes and crashes since the game launched in early access and the only solution was to swap a setting that made it look considerably worse until developer Grinding Gear Games figured out a solution.

It turns out the freezes were just the first part of a troubleshooting saga that the developers have been on for the last year and a half. As of this week, the war against Path of Exile 2's constant GPU shader crashes is finally over thanks to a mountain of effort GGG put into diagnosing them.

Despite identifying the exact Nvidia driver code that caused it, game director Jonathan Rogers explained in a recent video that the graphics company won't fix anything unless you provide it with the steps to recreate it. "And those steps unfortunately can't be 'just grind to top tier juiced maps,'" he said.

"Even though ultimately this is a bug in the Nvidia driver and it affected a huge number of high level players, quite frankly, they just didn't really seem to believe that it was as common as we said it was," he explained.

GGG started by having someone just play the game for multiple hours hoping it would eventually crash. But with no real clues on what could be causing it, this was a crapshoot. "You really are just taking shots in the dark at that point," Rogers said.

After making no progress toward a solution, the dev team decided to build a system to at least prevent the game from crashing. The freezes I, and many others, experienced were the result of the GPU crashing and the game reloading the textures, shaders, and entire engine without closing down.

Rogers said the solution was "pretty good" but that they were still determined to figure out what was actually causing it. "So we went down an incredibly deep rabbit hole of trying to reproduce it," he said. GGG added a bunch of ways for the game engine to track useful data and a specialized replay system that could play back long gameplay sessions for hours on PCs around the office.

"Eventually with the replays and an incredible amount of work from our engine team, we managed to get it to happen fairly consistently," he said. "We got a replay that would reproduce it every five to seven minutes on average."

They took that replay, packaged into a file you could use to run it again, and shipped the specific rig it was running on to Nvidia—"PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there."

It took some time, but Nvidia finally got back to them and said it would look into it. It came back a few weeks later with a fix: by increasing the shader heap size, the crashes would go away completely. And earlier this week, the Nvidia Game Ready Driver 610.88 was released with this note: "Path of Exile 2: Fixed intermittent long pauses that could occur after extended gameplay sessions in DX12 mode."

"The saga is over and now our engine programmers can go back to optimizing some more normal performance problems," Rogers said, before popping open a bottle of champagne in celebration.

I would be celebrating too if it took almost two years to solve a problem that wasn't even your own fault really. There's nothing worse than being surrounded by dangerous monsters—or looking at a pile of valuable loot—and having the game go unresponsive for a solid 20 seconds. Fingers crossed that no other bugs will show up so everyone can have a smooth experience when it hits 1.0 later this year.

With layoffs continuing to wrack the games industry—Microsoft's decision to cut 3,200 people and ditch four studios in July was the big attention-getter but hardly the only bad news of the month, or the past few years—the United Videogame Workers union and Necrosoft Games have launched the Game Industry Hardship Fund bundle on Itch.io, with more than 100 games on offer for just $10.

Funds raised by the bundle will go toward a hardship fund run by the union for game developers impacted by layoffs, who can apply to the fund for money to cover food, healthcare, and rent. Details on eligibility are available in this FAQ, but one thing to note is that the fund, like the union, is only available to developers in the US and Canada.

As with most Itch.io bundles, this one is very indie and offbeat, although there are some more mainstream names in the mix too, like A Short Hike, Skatebird, Drywall Eating Simulator, Dungeon Bodega Simulator, and You Can Save Everyone, to name my own personal shortlist.

But the real fun arises from diving into stuff you've never heard of and might not normally be drawn to. Diorama Dungeoncrawl looks like it might be kind of groovy, and how can you not be curious about Dirtbag Majhong?

It's hard to go wrong on 100+ games for a tenner—even if you hit just one winner in the bunch you've got your value out of it, and I would expect far better results than that, but we're making a point here. It's for a good cause too, which is nice, and speaking of that, you can pay more than $10 if you want to do a little extra solid for out-of-work devs.

Special shoutout to the players who have been supporting and spreading the word about the itch bundle to support the Game Workers Hardship Fund! Your solidarity means the world to us, and player-dev solidarity is a critical component for driving positive change in the artform we love. We love you! 💪

— @videogameworkers.bsky.social (@videogameworkers.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-31T20:35:06.095Z

The Game Industry Hardship bundle has, at this moment, raised just shy of $30,000. It'll be available for purchase until August 14.

From the archives: This article originally ran in PC Gamer #330 (UK, May 2019). You should still play Bullestorm, which is frequently 90% off on Steam.

Bulletstorm is the stupidest game ever made.

Everything about this game is stupid. Your character is stupid. Your allies are stupid. Your enemies are very stupid. The weapons are daft. The skillshot system is absurd. The script almost prides itself on how much rank idiocy it can cram into every line. Even the setting is stupid, a holiday resort built using prison labour on an alien planet so hostile that it rains gamma radiation.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Bulletstorm was developed by semi-concussed jocks during a two-year long frat party. It makes Gears of War look sensible, an impression that is probably the main reason why it sold a pitiful number of copies when it originally released in 2011. The game has such a brash and puerile exterior that it put a lot of people off playing.

That’s such a shame, because beneath the fathom-thick veneer of dumbness is one of the cleverest shooters designed this side of the millennium. Every stupid thing that Bulletstorm does has been designed with a huge amount of thought.

Take the aforementioned setting. Yes, building a luxury vacation town with a bunch of dangerous criminals on a highly irradiated planet is a terrible idea, but the result is a planet populated by hundreds of mutated psychopaths just desperate to greet your bullets with their faces.

You play Grayson Hunt, a mercenary who formerly worked as an assassin for prize interstellar scumbag General Sarrano. When Hunt realised Sarrano had been sending him to murder innocent people, he went rogue and set his sights on Sarrano himself. Bulletstorm begins as Hunt encounters Sarrano’s flagship, the Ulysses, in orbit around Planet Butlins. With his four-man crew, Hunt embarks upon a frontal assault that would form the climax of any other shooter, ending with Hunt using his own ship as a missile to punch a hole through the Ulysses, sending both vessels crashing down to the planet’s surface.

Stupid is as stupid does

One thing I’ve always admired about Bulletstorm is its sheer breakneck pace. The prologue alone gets through about four missions’ worth of content, including a flashback sequence where you use gravity boots to walk down the side of a skyscraper. By the time the game commences proper, two of Grayson’s crew are dead, while the third—Ishi—has been turned into a cyborg in an effort to save his life.

What’s even more remarkable is that Bulletstorm barely breaks its stride throughout its entire six to eight hour length. The first chapter alone has about three gargantuan set-pieces, including a level where you’re chased by a giant, motorised wheel, and another where you need to escape the nest of a Godzilla-like dinosaur. There’s a sequence where you control a robot-dinosaur and a battle across a giant dam which, naturally, bursts in the process.

Bulletstorm’s sense of scale and spectacle puts most other shooters to shame, and it’s not even the point of the game. It’s merely seasoning sprinkled into the casserole of shooting angry mutants in the most creative ways possible.

Yes, the skillshot systems was and remains Bulletstorm’s most unique feature. While you’re free to kill enemies however you like, killing them in specific ways awards you with varying numbers of points. This could be by combining a kick to the face with a spray from your assault rifle to perform a “Bullet Kick” or impaling an enemy upon some metal railings to pull off a “Voodoo Doll”.

These points can be used to buy ammo and unlock new weapons, which, alongside the ever-shifting environment, can be used to conjure even more creative kills. Like People Can Fly’s earlier game Painkiller, Bulletstorm’s weapons are delightfully eclectic. Highlights include the Flail Gun, which shoots twin explosives connected by a chain that coils around enemies before exploding, and the Driller, a ludicrous weapon that fires gigantic drill-bits at colossal speeds, impaling enemies onto any surface and spinning them around like a meaty windmill. Combine these bizarre guns with the skillshot system, and you’ve got one of the most gleefully entertaining shooters ever made. Impaling multiple enemies on one drillbit for the “Shishkebab” bonus is almost worryingly satisfying, as is kicking a flail-wrapped enemy into a man- eating plant and blowing both up in a shower of blood and chlorophyll.

Like everything else about Bulletstorm, it’s incredibly crass and incredibly silly, but it’s also a huge amount of fun. The only downside to the skillshot system is that it rewards you for set tricks, which limits the creative potential of the system (there’s no difference between kicking or sliding an enemy into spikes, for example).

Swearing up a storm

What’s interesting about Bulletstorm is that it inverts the typical way modern shooters present themselves. Most shooters try to justify their violence with a grand narrative about war and sacrifice and why all that killing is necessary and important. Bulletstorm, on the other hand, doubles down on its own gratuitousness. The script is unbelievably filthy, a cascade of swearing and toilet humour that almost completes the circle and becomes poetic.

Yet despite its crass front, Bulletstorm demonstrates more self-awareness than the majority of its peers. The game is clear on the fact that you’re not playing as a hero.

Hunt is a bad leader and a worse friend, his own arrogance and desire for revenge having cost him everything except for his life by the end of the game’s prologue. Two of his squadmates are dead, while Ish’s RoboCop-style makeover has left him in constant pain, fighting the AI system keeping him alive and taking over control of his own body.

This isn’t subtext either, its frequently pointed out by other characters in the game. Trishka, the leader of Sarrano’s special forces group, is probably the most scathing of Hunt’s critics but Grayson himself is painfully aware of his own failings. Much of his swaggering smack-talk basically amounts to overcompensation. Beneath that he’s desperate to save his last living friend, and in doing so harvest a grain of redemption from the mountain of shit he’s piled up. This is partly why the addition of Duke Nukem as a playable character in 2017’s Full Clip edition rang so hollow. Bulletstorm is ultimately only pretending to be a dumb shooter, whereas there is no pretending with Duke Nukem.

Indeed, to think of Bulletstorm as an “old-school” FPS is a mistake. It’s a thoroughly modern shooter, from the regenerating health to the aiming-down-the-sights to the fact that its characters actually have some layers. Most of the time this works, but there are a few areas where it just doesn’t come together.

No jumping allowed

Most significantly, you can’t jump. You can only mantle over certain obstacles. It’s an odd omission in a game that is essentially about performing stunts with guns, and proves somewhat limiting in play. Moreover, while the environment design of Bulletstorm is incredible – particularly its crumbling sci-fi cityscapes – the actual level design is comparatively simplistic, lots of large, straight corridors cleverly decorated to make them feel more complex.

Ultimately though, this is the only area where Bulletstorm is simpler than it appears. Beneath all the blood and cursing and toilet humour is a brilliantly imaginative shooter with a unique sci-fi setting and enough action to fill a game twice its length. Bulletstorm may be the stupidest game ever made, but boy is it clever in how it goes about that.

Original Story: First reported by Wired, AI company Anthropic revealed in a July 30 blog post that its AI agents have successfully hacked three unidentified companies since April. The whammy: Anthropic claims it only realized this after OpenAI's recent Hugging Face fiasco⁠—where one of its prototype agents hacked at least one other company⁠—led it to conduct a review of its own operations.

The incidents occurred as part of testing with an external firm, Irregular. The AI agents were supposed to be constrained to a simulation, hacking fictitious companies as part of a "capture-the-flag challenge." Notably, while OpenAI's alleged rogue AI incident occurred after the agent overcame its testing limitations, Anthropic stated that its models were mistakenly granted internet access due to a "misconfiguration" with Irregular.

"Neither we nor our evaluation partner were aware of this misconfiguration until we detected it through our additional evaluation monitoring last week," Anthropic admitted in its blog post about the incident. According to Anthropic, the models used familiar, low-tech methods in their hacks, "such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints."

Anthropic stated that the agent behind one incident seemed to process that it was operating outside its parameters, but continued anyway. Another seemed to achieve similar 'awareness,' then "reasoned its way back to the conclusion that it was still in a simulation." The third⁠—and supposedly most advanced⁠—agent reportedly recognized that it was operating outside its bounds, then stopped the attack.

“We now have evidence confirming that both of the two largest AI labs have not only failed to contain their agents, but also failed to detect their jailbreaks in real time,” said Jake Williams, VP of R&D at IT consulting firm Hunter Strategy, in a statement to Wired. "I don't understand how any of these AI labs are playing this off like this is 'just something that happens.' It's not. It's negligence."

Another discomfiting angle to this story is how this effectively works into the marketing of these AI companies: From my normie perspective, they appear to be admitting to gross negligence that would be sharply punished by any sane society. But they are also effectively saying, "Woooo, our models are so scawy and powerful, we can't even control them!" It rhymes with Sam Altman saying AI will destroy the world unless he gets enough money and datacenters to do it right or something.

I find myself thinking of the UK teenagers behind the 2022 Rockstar hack that first leaked GTA 6's existence and development materials. Their apparent compulsion to stalk, harass, and otherwise commit brazen cyber crimes by whatever means at their disposal (including, in one memorable instance, an Amazon Firestick) has led to hospital orders and restricted access to technology. It does not sit right with me to see them held to a higher behavioral standard than these multi-billion dollar companies, whose lying machines are now proving to be unsupervised crime machines as well.

Sony's decision to end game disc production and go fully digital in 2028 was met with no small amount of backlash. Concerns range from loss of the ability to trade in old games on new ones to the potential inability to play games when services are offline—which happens—or accounts are lost, not to mention the basic principle of the thing: What do you really own if your ownership is dependent upon the whims of a distant digital platform?

Despite that pushback, Sony isn't changing its mind: During the company's latest earnings call, chief financial officer Lin Tao said she knows people have "strong views" on the topic, but so does Sony, and its view is that it's going to happen.

"There are various reasons we made this decision," Tao said in response to an analyst's question about the driving factors behind the change. "The biggest being that the digitalization of contents overall has been progressing. That's the big factor.

"It's not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of contents, digitalization is progressing, and so when we think about the future, we put in a lot of thought and time. We cautiously considered this, we came to this conclusion, and we're going to cautiously move this forward."

The comments are translated and I assume the bit about "moving cautiously" is meant to indicate that Sony put in the appropriate levels of thought and research before reaching its decision—because the actual end of production doesn't strike me as "cautious" so much as mashing the brakes with both feet when 2028 hits.

Tao said Sony has received feedback from people who love games and have "fond memories" of them. "We understand those emotions," Tao said. "We want to consider that, and in the future digital ecosystem, 'how do we engage the gamers' is something that we would like to continue to explore."

For the short term, Tao said the announcement had no impact on the company's business, and she doesn't expect that to change much when physical disc sales actually end because a large portion of Sony's game sales are already digital anyway.

It's not surprising that Sony isn't backing away from its decision to end physical disc production. It clearly wasn't a rushed or unconsidered call, and the world has changed a great deal since Don Mattrick dropped his famous livin' on a submarine comment: The entire PC games market has effectively gone digital, and it's bigger than ever.

The call took a more interesting turn near the end, though, when an analyst asked if ditching physical disc support risks making future PlayStation consoles more like those all-digital PCs—a point PC Gamer editor Wes Fenlon made shortly after the announcement—and how Sony plans to go about differentiating them.

"Our strength is the curated contents, that's one of our strengths. The game environment being stable, that's another strength. Compared to the high-end gaming PC, our product is more affordable," Tao said.

"We don't feel that the disc itself is a strong factor for differentiation. Going forward, we can coexist peacefully with PC games."

As a long-time PC gamer I see Sony's curation and "stability" in a somewhat different light: Certainly there are fewer headaches, but there's also considerably less freedom and flexibility. But that's always been the case, and will remain so with or without an optical drive in the box.

The comment about pricing is also interesting. Certainly a high-end enthusiast PC is going to cost a whole bunch more than a console, but recent estimates pegged the materials cost of the PlayStation 6 at more than $900, leaving very little space between it and the Steam Machine. Sony may choose to subsidize the cost of the PS6 to some extent to make it more manageable, but with the RAMpocalypse expected to get worse before it gets better, I have to wonder if Tao is being a little overly optimistic about the impact of price difference.