I tried the demo for Queen's Domain last year and liked it a lot⁠—though it definitely had some friction I wasn't sure about. The full game launched on October 30, and I eagerly rushed through the parts I'd already played in the demo.

Turns out, that demo cut out right when things were about to go nuts.

Five hours in out of an estimated 30+, and Queen's Domain is easily one of my top games of the year. I am only begrudgingly writing this, because I'd rather be playing right now.

Queen's Domain starts out resembling other entries in a growing subgenre of indie King's Field-likes, paying homage to the first-person dark fantasy RPG series FromSoftware put out before its soulsward turn. In its first half hour or so, Queen's Domain distinguishes itself similarly to fellow genre standout Lunacid: Fantastic art, maybe even better music, and a mastery of nostalgic intangibles (menu, UI, sound cues, etc.) After beating the first boss, Queen's Domain rewards you with a magic airdash sword, and it's at that point that the game truly begins.

Queen of the skies

Queen's Domain is a very deliberately paced game and, like a lot of first-person RPGs, it starts out feeling like your boots will always be on the ground. Think the difference between Doom and Quake: You can mostly tell when a game will let you get some air or not.

But once I was rocking the Holy Sword, Endu? Holy shit. Queen's Domain's first area opens up like some wonderful clockwork contraption. A lot of the verticality reminds me of Destiny raids, the way hidden paths blend into the environment, and reaching them feels like you're sequence breaking.

Endu can be upgraded with special gems throughout the game, with each giving you an extra dash while airborne. I'm up to three at the time of writing, and each upgrade has felt like it radically opened up my traversal options: There are parts of the first few maps I'm pretty sure I'll only be able to reach once I'm up to four or five dashes, zooming from one end of the map to the other without touching the ground.

Endu's a standout, but it's not the only tool available: Queen's Domain seems to have an expansive arsenal, and weapons can transform as they're upgraded. You upgrade weapons just by using them, and the game has no stat allocation on level up, encouraging experimentation with the arsenal⁠—PC Gamer hardware writer James Bentley managed to max upgrade 20 weapons across his full playthrough. You can effectively create a "build" via your choice of which weapons to hotkey (limit of three) and upgrade, a system that more resembles BioShock or the System Shock Remake rather than something like Dark Souls or Lunacid.

My favorite alongside Endu so far has been the Caestus, a type of medieval knuckle duster that's been a standby of the Souls games. Here, it's a fast-attacking blunt weapon useful against slashing-resistant skeletons. Instead of a horizontal dash like Endu, its special attack is an uppercut that launches my character into the air. Plenty of fun to use on enemies, but I've loved deploying it as an effective double jump to reach otherwise-inaccessible areas⁠—and there's always been a surprise or meaningful reward waiting for me when I do.

Don't give up, skeleton

My coworker, PCG staff writer Morgan Park, initially bounced off the pre-Endu, demo-equivalent portion of Queen's Domain. I'm here to say stay strong, prayer warriors. It is worth getting through that first half hour. While there's something to be said about it potentially putting new players off, I think the contrast between pre-and post-Endu gameplay is so strong, it makes the air dash feel all the more powerful. You know what it's like to be stuck on the ground, and you won't take it for granted.

It's the sort of contrast metroidvanias thrive on⁠—I always think of how dinky you feel before you get the wall jump in Hollow Knight⁠—and Queen's Domain's brilliant level design might leave it the best first-person metroidvania anyone's made since the first Metroid Prime.

And I think Prime's a strong comparison point overall here: The cryptic atmosphere, breathtaking vistas, and genuinely unique approach to first-person movement and level design speak to that. I'm already seeing hints toward game-spanning backtracking in my future, but I've got reason to suspect Queen's Domain's backtracking will be less frustrating and obtuse than Metroid Prime's.

I already love this game, and I am about to mainline it over the next 30 hours or so of my free time⁠—stay tuned for our full Queen's Domain review to come. Meanwhile, Queen's Domain is available on Steam for a launch price of $17, down from an MSRP of $20.

High up on a mountain in the Albaneve Summits, just on the southern border of Enshrouded's new zone, I spot the perfect place for my next medieval building project. It seems safe with no nearby enemy spawns on the flat stretch of land, and there's even a cute frozen pond that gives it real Christmas-card appeal. I love it, and I'll love it even more once I've built a cliffside castle.

The only problem is I can't find a way up by climbing or gliding, so I'll have to make my own. I could build something, but that takes time, and I'm impatient. Instead, I behave like an absolute heathen—I bomb and pickaxe the hell out of the mountainside, carving a tunnel from the base to the top. It doesn't look great, but that's a problem for tomorrow's Flameborn.

That's always been one of my favorite parts of Enshrouded: you can destroy or build practically anything, anywhere in Embervale's voxel-based world. It's a survival crafting sandbox filled to the brim with handcrafted details, and every location still hidden by the fog of war could hold a new material, powerful weapon, or scenic vista. There's nothing quite like it, and just like the updates before, Enshrouded's 1.0 build keeps finding new, inventive ways to impress me long after I thought its well of surprises had run dry.

Built different

Enshrouded is a weird one. Not quite a traditional survival crafting game, but not a typical action RPG either. Its combat system and base building options are far more robust than most of its survival crafting cousins, but it's not nearly as brutal. I'm driven less by desperation and more by a desire to explore Embervale—a land devastated by a mysterious, malignant miasma known as (you guessed it) the Shroud. There's hardly a soul left in the world, so you learn more about its history from journals. Some are hastily scribbled by would-be heroes like you, while others are tragic retellings of someone's final days.

So, for what must be the millionth time in my career, I stumble out of a mystical, sleepy haze confused and poorly dressed for the world I've awakened to. I am the Flameborn—a sort of ordained-by-god chosen one and the last hope for restoring the ruins of Embervale—but for now, I certainly don't feel that way. I just feel like some guy. It's a title I'll have to grow into, but will have to wait until I've upgraded from the aptly named 'ragged armor set'. Yeesh.

Enshrouded follows most of those rags-to-riches genre basics, so of course I'll graduate from an era of fighting with sticks and eating fistfuls of berries to magic-infused swords and Michelin-star meals. I've played so many of these games that the flow comes naturally now, but what I like most about Enshrouded's take on classic survival systems is that it drops the more punitive elements like fatigue, crafting chance, and even structural integrity.

Enshrouded knows that I, much like the family Golden Retriever, am treat-motivated. As long as there's shelter, fire, and decor, I'll get a stamina-boosting buff just by hanging out at home, but I'll never die from lack of sleep. In that regard, it's more like Valheim. Unique furnishings have their own comfort stats too, so there's incentive to explore Embervale for a new rug, fireplace, or even a toilet if you want a longer, more powerful boost. It's an especially exciting system for players like me, someone who loves building and decorating bases, but rarely sees a reward for the extra effort.

All this meticulous decorating makes me wonder whether I really want Enshrouded to add enemy raids on player bases and risk destroying them, but I'm leaning toward yes. It's the one major survival mechanic I miss in its formula, and I can't help but wistfully remember how fun it is to scramble into action when Valheim warns, "The forest is moving..." Imagine that, but with Enshrouded's poisonous fog instead.

Fog of war

Repetitive tasks—another hunt for a rare material, another trek across the map—can become exasperating even in the best survival crafting games. There's a thin line between tedium and satisfaction, and Enshrouded walks it better than most. Much of that is thanks to the game's philosophy around punishment and reward, but its RPG elements add a layer of complexity that more than makes up for anything missing from Enshrouded's "survival-lite" approach.

Take my group, for example. I play with seven other friends, while that feels like a lot for most survival crafting games, Enshrouded's combat roles give us distinctly useful jobs. Rather than dumping points into three or four barebones stats, your Flameborn can specialize across 12 different skill trees. I mostly opt for tank, athlete, and assassin perks, but my allies fill other needs with mix-and-match builds for glass-cannon wizards, battlemage healers, or stealthy assassins. We also have our preferred responsibilities, like mining, woodcutting, gardening, cooking, and all those other usual genre chores.

Multiplayer is also where some of my biggest gripes with Enshrouded remain, and despite heavy reworks to its questing systems, my group still struggled to make sense of the journal when our objectives fell out of sync. Our confusion mostly stemmed from completing world progression quests without the full party, so when absent friends logged back in, their to-do list didn't look the same and they had a list of missed quests. There are separate, personal quests to do at your own leisure, but we constantly compared our journals to make sure no one had gone off course.

I'm still not sure if any of that even mattered. No one was ever locked out of crafting recipes or new biomes because of the discrepancies, so the punishment boiled down to a smidge of missed XP and simply missing out on the moment. It didn't end up being a big deal, and I'm starting to think the journal's 'missed quest' label made the whole thing feel more consequential than it actually was. I clenched my jaw in frustration a few times, but if that's my biggest nitpick, then Enshrouded is survival crafting gold.

As much as I love the genre, I can't pretend it isn't filled with seemingly eternal early access pits. I've played in plenty of messy sandboxes, a handful of good ones, and just a few great ones. Then there's Enshrouded, operating in a league of its own. But even then, Enshrouded isn't just a good survival crafting game: it's a damn good game by any measure. Its building tools reward even my most impractical ambitions, and I'll never grow tired of exploring Embervale's hidden nooks and crannies.

Few games in the genre match its distinct identity or degree of polish, and after 500+ hours of adventuring, there's little left to wish for. My biggest dilemma post-Enshrouded will be moving on from a survival crafting RPG so lovingly handcrafted. I fear Keen Games has cooked up something that has forever changed my palate.

Longtime Microsoft executive Helen Chiang was made Xbox's first-ever chief operating officer as part of the 'reset' in July, a role that gave her "end-to-end P&L responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services." Then, just three months later and with virtually no fanfare, she was gone, amidst an anonymous claim that she was "terminated for policy violations."

Saying it was important "to set the record straight," Chiang has now formally denied that claim in a lengthy LinkedIn post, saying she did not:

• "Leak confidential company information to the press"
• "Leave Xbox to join a competitor"
• "Engage in discrimination, bullying, harassment, insider trading, embezzlement, or other fraudulent activity"
• "Leave because I was passed over for a bigger role"

The record-straightening did not get into why Chiang did leave Xbox, although she seemed to imply that it was not an amicable departure: "I believe in fairness, accountability, and holding ourselves to the standards we expect of others. Those standards only mean something when they're applied consistently. I have serious concerns about how they were applied in my case, and I believe those concerns deserve to be taken seriously."

The sudden split seemed doubly strange because prior to taking the COO job at Xbox, Chiang spent more than 20 years at Microsoft, nearly all of it with the Xbox division—rising from Xbox platform business manager in 2007 to corporate vice president of the Minecraft franchise in 2020, a position she held for more than six years. The memo announcing Chiang's departure was also notably restrained: "Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote. "I'm grateful for her years of service and wish her well."

"I share this because I don't want my departure reduced to an inaccurate story about incompetence, ambition for the next big job, or a Nelson-level scandal. My story is about staying true to your core values, especially when it is hard. That's the legacy I hope to leave behind," Chiang wrote in her message.

"This is not how I ever imagined my story here would end. And it is not the whole story."

I've reached out to Microsoft for comment on Chiang's message and will update if I receive a reply.

The start of Arc Raiders was a very mixed bag. On one hand it managed to attract an unbelievable amount of players as Embark Studios struck gold with its gentler take on extraction shooters. But all of this hype was somewhat overshadowed by the controversy surrounding its use of AI to mimic voice actors and supplement the dialogue.

While the actors involved did sign contracts allowing Embark to do this, there was still a great deal of backlash from players who were frustrated to see AI injected into the game. Many players pointed out, rightfully so, just how lifeless, lacklustre, and odd some of the AI voicelines sounded, a fact that was made all the more apparent by how fantastic Marathon's NPCs were.

Embark's devs have pointed out, however, that it only used AI in order to get updates out the door faster; that this was due to efficiency rather than an affinity for the technology. "[The actors] have been here all along," Embark's audio director Bence Pajor says. "But we haven't always used them to record the actual thing you're going [to hear] because that's only been solidified super late. We made a lot of training data from their voices so we could prototype as well with their voice.

"Every new item that appears in the game, every new feature, everything needs to have a lot of dialogue because you can ping it. There's so much going into everything. To record the training data for the ping system becomes too impractical to record every possible version of something. I mean the actors would just go crazy if they had to read all of that. That's not feasible because the game has been changing so fast and we can't call them in every time we just change a feature."

Since the controversy first erupted, Embark has stressed multiple times that it wants to support voice actors. "We are not in the industry of replacing actors, actually quite the opposite we should celebrate the performance and give them more space," chief creative officer Stefan Strandberg says. "And that is something that I'm hoping to bring to players over the coming years for Arc Raiders: really seeing what the characters are like and who they are, and what motivates them, making it real."

Arguably, though, the damage has already been done. Using AI to bulk up voice lines may be easier, and replacing it with real voice actors when you can is certainly better than the alternative, but it has still set a bad precedent for voice actors in an industry which is relentless in its attempt to cut creative corners to optimise costs.

Nightdive has unveiled the first trailer for Thief: The Tarnished Mirror, a new official expansion to Thief coming with its imminent remaster. Most exciting of all: The Tarnished Mirror is being made by the team behind The Black Parade, a 2023 mod that was one of the most exciting things to happen to the series in 20 years.

The Tarnished Mirror consists of four new missions, and is meant "as a bridge between Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age," according to an accompanying press release. Similar to The Black Parade, these new levels will leverage improvements in technology to offer more sprawling, ambitious maps than '90s PCs could handle.

The scenes from the trailer are all very Thief, but similar to The Black Parade, there's immediately more verticality than in the 1997 original game. There are also glimpses at interiors that leverage familiar Thief assets to create weirder, more surprising spaces than I'm used to from the mainline games.

The press release also indicates that The Tarnished Mirror will embrace Thief's contested legacy of horror in a similar way to The Black Parade, and that's music to my ears. I've always been a Thief undead mission defender, and The Black Parade upped the ante⁠—it's one of the scariest games I've ever played.

All told, this news about the expansion has more than made up for my disappointment at there being no PC version of the remaster's big box special edition. I may not get my tchotchke fix here, but the Thief Remaster is shaping up to be something very special.

November cozy game forecast: 🐴Horse game surge

Wait, there's only one horse game on the list this month. How is that a surge? Real horse gamers know that the Barbie Rewind collection includes a couple classic personal computer games that are fondly remembered by horse enjoyers: Barbie: Race & Ride and Barbie Horse Adventures. Add in the very anticipated Horses of Hoofprint Bay and you've got triple the horse game launches of an average month.

My cozy game picks for November

November cozy games calendar

Six months after the disappearance of Nagoshi Studio's website, a Google-translated notice in the Japan government's Kanpo website (via Gematsu) says the company has now officially closed its doors.

Founded by Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi in 2021 after a run of more than 30 years at Sega, Nagoshi Studio's first game was revealed at the 2025 Game Awards as Gang of Dragon—although the reveal was really just a brief CGI clip of Ma Dong-Seok that could have been lifted straight from Korean action film The Outlaws.

The wheels came off just a few months later, though, when NetEase pulled funding for the studio, amidst a broader pullback from external studio support over the previous year. Nagoshi Studio reportedly had no success finding another benefactor to fill the gap, and two months later, in May, the studio's website disappeared.

No official proclamations about the fate of the studio were forthcoming, though, and the Steam page remained online, so faint hope of a last-minute rescue persisted. Now, I'm afraid even that's gone, although the Steam listing is still up if you want to poke around at what might have been.

Better idea: Just watch The Outlaws.

I must admit, I was mighty intrigued by the idea of a modern mouse (and all their high DPI machinations) with a screen slapped on the side, but I must also admit I thought we would be over the growing pains by now, what with screens being slammed into everything from cases to coolers to controllers.

Yet one look at the Turtle Beach Command Series MC7 suggests those growing pains are still being suffered. And using the mouse only confirms it.

But I get the idea in concept. I'm a big fan of my Stream Deck, and find myself regularly using its many controls. Being able to shove those into the side of the mouse with clarity to read what they're doing is intriguing. It's also particularly effective when it comes to swapping DPI, polling rate, and even checking the battery. Those are things that do benefit from a visual component. And yet a few weeks with the MC7 have convinced me I won't be making the swap full time.

Features

Internally, the MC7 has impressive stats. Its Owl-Eye Optical sensor goes all the way up to a max DPI of 30,000, and the polling rate of 8,000 Hz is competitive-level. That's so high, in fact, that the average person won't even see the benefit of it.

And the elephant in the room here: the 2.25-inch colour display is touch-sensitive too, which means you can flick through a couple of different screens depending on your use case. We have seen screens on gaming mice before, like the Cooler Master MM830 and SteelSeries Rival 710 (neither of which are touch screens), but as far as I can tell, the MC7 is the largest on a modern gaming mouse from a reputable brand. That makes it an oddity at the least.

But that's not all the MC7 has going for it. The 4D scroll wheel means you can go up, down, left and right on a page with just the wheel, and you have extra buttons here, too. You have one at the bottom of the thumb rest, another next to the mouse wheel, plus two on the left-hand side, as well as your standard clicks.

It's a wireless mouse, so it comes with a 2.4 GHz receiver, and it also has hot-swappable batteries. The battery charger has a spare USB Type-A port, which means your charger can also be the receiver. This is a sweet system, which makes the MC7 feel like it has infinite battery (as long as you are willing to spend twenty seconds swapping the battery every 10 or so hours).

Performance

The Owl-Eye sensor is great. It's consistent and smooth, and never posed any problems in any of the games I threw this mouse at. For everyday gaming, I don't have any complaints about how its internals performed. It's a slightly customised version of the PixArt PAW3950 sensor, and will be familiar to anyone who's used the Razer Deathadder V3 Pro, which previously had the exclusive use of PixArt's 30K sensor.

The mouse clicks are a tad loud for my liking, but they're plenty snappy. This bad boy is fitted with Titan Optical switches, and they are perfect under my fingertips. I have yet to hit a single double-click and find them to be very responsive.

However, the biggest problem with performance is how the MC7's weight is balanced and how it feels under the palms. At 135 g grams, it's a fairly heavy mouse (more so than the recent Naga V3 Pro and its mountain of buttons), but this wouldn't be too big of a problem if it could balance that weight in a comfortable way.

However, it feels clunky, and even has a slight rattle at high speeds. This all contributes to a mouse that feels a little lacking in competitive play, even though it's got the internal chops to handle everything on paper.

In use, the screen is rather peculiar. Via the Turtle Beach Swarm II software, you can flit between a few screens, which you customise with your own controls, and they are fairly snappy and responsive. However, having to arch my fingers to actually click on the screen means it's not intended for quick play. That makes it better as a micro function, or a way of displaying battery (but the device's lighting can already indicate battery life and DPI setting). It can display things like health and ammo in Counter-Strike 2, but its viewing angles are pretty poor, meaning it doesn't offer much of a tactical advantage.

Battery Life

The MC7 comes with two 1000 mAh batteries, both of which are hot-swappable. They connect to a charger (which also has a USB port for your 2.4 GHz connector), and this means you technically only need one USB to do everything for your mouse. It's a great system.

To swap the batteries out, you simply take off a compartment where your palm rests, pull the battery out and put a new one in. The MC7's onboard battery is just big enough that I've never noticed the device dying while I'm changing batteries. It's pretty sweet, and with a little practice, it can be swapped in seconds. It's not quite as quick to swap as the Glorious Model O Eternal, with its open battery system, but it is a bit tidier.

Working on my PC every day, then gaming most nights, I found myself swapping out the battery every few days at 1,000 Hz polling, which is perfectly solid given how convenient swapping the batteries is.

Ergonomics

The MC7 is a very confusing mouse in regard to its ergonomics. The groove on the left-hand side for your thumb is comfortable and intuitive, yet the two buttons on either side of that groove are awkward to get to. My left thumb buttons on a mouse tend to be going forward and backwards on a page, and therefore I like to have instant access to them. I don't have that access here, and have to physically bend my thumb or extend it to get to each button. The groove also has a texture to it, which is clearly designed so the mouse doesn't slip, and that's also quite strange, as it feels like you aren't encouraged to move your thumb, and yet you have to in order to hit those two buttons.

The back of the mouse curves to my palm well, but the two mouse click buttons are quite curved in the centre. That means, if I hold my hand on the bottom of the mouse, there's air underneath the bottom of my fingers as I hold it, and if I put my palm forward, then there's air underneath my knuckles. I feel like, no matter what way I hold the mouse, I'm holding it just a little wrong.

That's before getting to the screen, a panel that is too long to use all of it while on the go, and close enough to my fingers that I constantly change my DPI whenever I take my hand off the mouse and put it back on again. Perhaps the strangest element of this is that I couldn't seem to figure out a way to lock the screen, which would really make it much better for gaming.

For quickly changing a song or pausing a video, I actually found myself taking my left finger off the left click and wrapping it around the display instead. As far as I can tell, there just isn't a quick and comfortable way to get to all parts of the screen with ease, and I have quite large hands too.

As far as build quality is concerned, the MC7 doesn't feel cheap under the palm, though I'm not a fan of the vibration you get when you click the screen. It just has a hollow feel and sound. The texture on the mouse is cool to the fingertips, and it handles fingerprints well. Despite the fact that you have to take the back cover off to pop the batteries in, I could never get it to come off accidentally either, which is always a plus.

There is a slight rattle if you pick up the mouse and shake it, and that rattle appears to be coming from the 4D mouse wheel. Generally, you don't tend to shake mice, but if you pick it up quickly to move it from one side of the mousepad to the other, it does produce the rattling sound.

One thing I do quite like is a button sunken into the left thumbgrip. I can hold that down and move the rather great-feeling scroll wheel to change volume in an instant, and this is handier and quicker than using the touch screen's volume icons.

Aesthetics

The MC7 is clearly intended to fit in alongside the likes of the Turtle Beach Stealth Pro II with its combination of copper and black, but it doesn't have the sleekness of its headset counterpart. Instead, it's more Cronenbergian, a collection of skewed angles and bumps, like the tech parts inside its shell are clamouring to get out and your hand is the thing holding them in. It's almost like two separate gaming mice have accidentally stepped inside the teleporter and what has come out is a wretched combination of both.

The right-hand side is relatively low to the ground and with little detailing, whereas the left side is angular, sharp and tall. This is naturally so tall because there's a screen slapped on the side, but it means the entire mouse has a slant going to the right.

Despite this slant, the front is cut at quite a sharp angle too. The MC7 is kind of curvy, and kind of not. It's kind of angular, and also kind of not. It's a hard shape to make sense of and, to my eyes, pretty darn ugly on top of my desk.

One element I do like about the MC7's aesthetic is its choice of RGB. You get a sleek line of it just underneath the mouse, which is customizable, but it glows red when the battery is low, which is a good reminder when I've needed it. The screen also alerts you when your battery is low.

As far as the display is concerned, it has colour, which is a nice touch, but also has weirdly poor viewing angles. If I look at the screen from the position I'd usually game from, it can look washed out. It never looks so washed out that I can't roughly guess what its icons are (and with time, you learn their position anyway), but it makes it feel less quality than the black and copper might suggest.

Software

For the first few weeks with this mouse, I found Turtle Beach's Swarm II to be a mostly fine bit of software, though it could be a little slow. However, this week, the latest update, Software version 1.0.0.63 (which launched on November 2), has seemingly entirely broken on my PC. I can't get it to open, though it remains open in Task Manager. Given it only just launched, I could see this issue being fixed quickly, but it's a shame that so much software for hardware is not consistent.

It is also a necessary bit of software if you would like to customise the screen. With it downloaded, the screen is customizable much like a Stream Deck. Grab widgets from within the app, the mouse's onboard memory, or third-party apps, slap them on the screen, and now you have a new shortcut. Without it, there's not much you can do.

And, as far as I can tell, you can't set totally custom controls, as you can do with the Stream Deck, which limits your customisation a tad. But it's still pretty broad for the most part, and I've rarely found myself looking for a shortcut and not been able to find it.

Value

$160 is a lot of cash for a gaming mouse. It's so much money, in fact, that you can pick up the best gaming mouse out there, the Razer Viper V4 Pro, with its impeccable sensor, great battery life, and lightweight feel, for the same price.

As such, you can pick an overall better, lighter mouse for the same price, or go for the screen. The battery system is certainly neat, though there are other mice out there with hot-swappable batteries.

The MC7 doesn't detract from day-to-day gaming, but I'd much prefer a lower base polling rate if it meant a cheaper price point, as this isn't exactly a competitive-level mouse in function.

It is clear where the budget for this build goes. A large screen couldn't be cheap; the material feels good on the fingertips, and that's before mentioning the research and development costs associated with getting a touchscreen on a mouse. However, it's so much money that, to my palms, it only really feels like the first step for Turtle Beach. It's like a test run of what a touchscreen could be like, and for this price, I don't quite see the vision.

Preorders are opening up for physical editions of Nightdive's Thief Remaster, and at the high end, the studio is offering an homage to Thief's iconic original PC big box packaging in that shape we all know and love, the trapezoid. The only problem? Nightdive and partner Clear River Games are only offering it for Switch/Switch 2 and PS5.

Why does this matter?

It doesn't really, at least not as much as war and death and politics or whatever. But Thief's original '90s big box edition came in a jaunty little trapezoidal box unlike anything else on the market. It remains a visually striking, highly sought-after collector's item. It's fun, it's memorable, and it's a piece of PC gaming history. I've had to settle for my version of Thief Gold that came in a plain Jane regular box as a reissue.

It's not super surprising that Night Dive and Clear River eschewed a PC version of this physical release⁠—that's fairly common these days, even in boutique indie special editions. I had a similar "we're so back, it's so over" reaction when I saw that indie RPG heater Dread Delusion's limited physical edition had skipped PC.

But the hurt feels new all over again when it's a PC gaming icon like Thief, and a PC gaming phenomenon like the big box. I would have dropped a fat hundo on a physical PC version of Thief Remastered in a heartbeat⁠—it's why I live in an apartment and not a house.

And studios still do come out with physical editions of their PC games: My Baldur's Gate 3 big box has pride of place in my office. All told, it's just a slight bummer and frustration trying to drag down one of my most anticipated games. I'm still going to play the hell out of it when it comes out on December 3, though.

I'm rooting for GOG's proposal to bring back the big box. The company seems to be considering a boutique service where you can purchase physical versions of the games in your library, which sounds pretty rad to me.

Their aesthetic? Chains, whips; spiked. Their mood? Afflicted, condemned, ritualistic. Their angels? Dark. Their maiden? Iron.

Friendship ended with dwarven gearsmiths; my new favorite clan in Monster Train 2 is the tortured edgelords.

The final faction being added to Monster Train 2, The Punished, arrive November 10 as a paid DLC. Their theme is self-damage, with new keywords and spells that, primarily, reward power in exchange for hurting yourself. Your pain? Enemies' bane.

Leaving a mark

Though existing MT2 clans like the Melting Remnant revolve around forms of sacrifice, The Punished are absolutely thirsty for it. They bring new keywords like Chained (enemy units take half the damage that your units take) that make damage an active solution to enemy waves. The self-flagellation angle likewise brings new purpose to some existing spells and equipment, and jives great with partner clans that provide protection from pain (Lazarus League) or more ways to inflict it (Pyreborne).

Damaging my own guys sounds like a risk-reward tactic that requires sophisticated play. In my first run as The Punished, I anticipated having to do brain-wracking calculus about how much damage to absorb. But instead, I've found the new clan to be one of the most powerful and, at least with one of their champions, easy to play.

A lot of that is down to the utility of their new gimmick, a big purple gem called the Monolith. Here's a breakdown of what makes it special:

• Their clan mechanic, the Monolith, sacrifices cards from your hand. Sacrificing a card grants 1 Devotion, a bar that you fill across the run to level up your Monolith level.
• 1 Monolith level = 1 Zeal. Zeal is +1 attack, +1 max HP when you deploy a unit. There's no cap on Monolith level, but in my best runs I was able to achieve 10 or 11.
• Curses can be sacrificed to the Monolith like any other card. So if you have 2 Curses of Entropy in your hand while facing the Titans, but you have 2 energy, you can just click the Monolith twice to vaporize them, avoiding their debuffs completely. Extremely helpful.
• One of the more fun strategies I stumbled on is playing curse roulette with this system, hoping that a Monolith click deletes the undesired card in your hand.
• Also, sacrificing a card to the Monolith triggers Offering (if discarded, play that card)

"Level up the Monolith by sacrificing cards to earn Devotion, which grants Zeal, which buffs attack and HP for all units" kind of sounds like a line from a ProZD deckbuilder parody video (I will take any opportunity to reference the legendary Dairy Cow combo), but it's really not complicated. Click the purple crystal, make cards go away, permascale a little bit.

Though it can change the calculus for a few units, Zeal isn't that game-breaking on its own: usually you're just increasing the ceiling of a unit's HP to set up cards like Zealot's Halo, an equipment that gives +1 attack for every 1 HP you're missing.

More potent is The Punished's starter champion, Archus, an S-tier champ that amps damage based on lost HP, but has the versatility to debuff enemy damage as well. All of his build paths grant him Flight. His best variant deploys a "Darkshard" into the lane he flies into, a 0-attack artifact that does one of the following, on your choice:

• Blinding Darkshard: Give enemy units -3 (scaling to -7 on max level)
• Looming Darkshard: Apply Bloodshed (+1 to all friendly units on the floor when a friendly unit takes damage—scaling all the way to +3)
• Shattering Darkshard: Sacrifice the Darkshard to deal 40 damage (300 damage on max level)

Bloodshed is really, really powerful with the right unit pairings and a cheap spell or two that hurts yourself. What's wild is that Archus can deploy a Darkshard in every lane, with a cooldown of 2 on his flight ability. I might anticipate a nerf on that. Scaling your whole floor from received hits (including self-targeted spells!) is a wonderful way to accelerate sweepers or backline bruisers. Archus good.

Chain pain

Zariel, the other champ, is more advanced. The first angel cast out of heaven, "Zariel has been imprisoned for so long that her original crime has been forgotten to time." Sick. Although, you'd think that that would enable some kind of clemency?

Since her arms and wings are bound in chains, Zariel has no base attack. What she does have are three diverse paths that all play off sponging up as much damage as possible:

• Matriarch of Chains: Apply Chained 1 to enemies on turn start
• Pain Maiden: Ability - Paintouch: Deal 3 damage to an enemy unit per stack of Pain (starts with 10 Pain, gains Pain for every point of damage taken by friendly units)
• Devout: Siphon - Gain 1 Devotion. Incant - Deal 6 damage to the front enemy unit, increased by 6 per Monolith level

I asked Shiny Shoe CEO Mark Cooke what combos the studio has found useful with Zariel. "A lot of Hellhorned cards like Branding Rite, Dark Deal, and Inferno work really well with Zariel's Pain and Chain paths. Pox is a great spell for consistent friendly damage, because it applies Decay 10 to all units," says Cooke. "Zariel's Pain Maiden path especially synergizes well with The Condemned, because the unit has Tenacious, it won't die to any friendly damage and it even amplifies the damage it takes and redirects it to an enemy, so it's great for pinging and stacking Pain while still killing enemies."

On my second run with Zariel, in the final rounds of a battle, I was dealing 1000 damage from her Paintouch ability, and I was doing it each turn because the ability has a cooldown of 1. On a couple other attempts, I couldn't create damage outputting units to pair with her quickly enough, and my run collapsed.

This is one of the few weaknesses of The Punished—although several units have good base attack, instantaneous damage can be hard to acquire. Reaper of Suffering, The Punished's only sweeper, starts with a generous 60 attack (as much as Demon Fiend, a 4-cost Hellhorned unit), but it also starts Suppressed (meaning she cannot attack), needing a cooldown of 4 to expire before she emerges from that state. Taking damage decreases that cooldown, and incredibly, she heals to full HP when she emerges from Supressed and gains flight when you cross that threshold.

This isn't the only star unit on The Punished. Forsaken Berserker gains one multistrike for every two Monolith levels. Scarred Justicar, an uncommon, ended up being my damage solution on several runs. He simply gains +15 attack when hit by a friendly spell or ability, and considering one of the starter cards deals a gentle 2 damage, you can gain perhaps +30 or +45 attack in a round between spells and other effects. Slap a stack of multistrike and the new 3-cost equipment Sineater on him (Deal 8 damage to self, attack immediately, cooldown 2), and you have a high damage solution that just takes a little time to set up.

The superstar of the roster, though, might be Penitent Sentinel, an uncommon tank that becomes MT2's most durable frontliner if you're able to draft it early. This stoic statue unit cannot be healed, but it gains +1 HP on revenge, astoundingly rare health permascaling that is set-and-forget simple. I found myself taking the "enemies gain multistrike" trial just to welcome more attacks against Penitent Sentinel. In some runs I was ending with nearly 300 HP, linked to a Titanite upgrade that effectively doubled that. Wild.

Riding the pain train

After 12 wins with The Punished, I love that they have several viable units to pick from, and how much they synergize with a variety of clans. I kept finding new ways of winning with Zariel, and my strangest victory was with this configuration:

• The Punished (Zariel) + Underlegion secondary clan, facing Savagery
• No real tank unit, no sweep! 😬
• But I have Remnant Pact to grant Endless to Chainbearer, with a reasonable-ish 80 HP (Largestone/Smidgestone)
• Zariel does 96 damage to the front enemy on Incant
• Zariel applies Chained 1 to enemies on turn start + Dungeon Mooring artifact stacks an additional 1 Chained, so enemies on the first floor take 1X the damage that my units take. But I didn't have any massive self-damage spells. In some cases though this was enough incoming damage on my units to kill the backline enemy sweeper units based on the damage I took from the enemy frontline units.
• In other words: You hurt me so much that you hurt your own guys enough to kill them, who otherwise would have killed me. Congrats, you played yourself?
• Manifold Mirror + Mushy Room to sap every floor, which somehow didn't anti-synergy with Chained
• Use spells to damage my own Scarred Justicar, who I gave multistrike, to attain something like 150-260x2 damage
• Punished Spike with remove consume enchantment, played on Scarred Justicar (often granting 56 Zeal, which is +56 attack and +56 max HP)
• In a couple of situations I played the equipment Shackles of Spite (this unit does 2X damage if their HP is ≤50%) on Scarred Justicar to boost their attack to ~425x2, but I didn't pull this off consistently
• Two 1-cost Rots for some extra damage on bosses
• 11 Monolith level, mostly from Zariel

I had no plan and was mostly freestyling through this, my upgrade selections weren't particularly strong. I was surprised to beat Savagery, let alone the Titans.

After 500 hours in Monster Train 2, it's refreshing to beat the game in an unexpected way. I truly thought this run was doomed because I had little traditional damage, no sweep, no tank, and no decapitating spells.

The Punished's masochistic theme works. And Shiny Shoe's treatment of these tortured angels is nice (their Carolina Panthers-blue skin helps them stand out, even among the pale blue Melting Remnant), though their stoic reverence doesn't leave a lot of room for quirk.

I would've loved to have seen a silly torture sicko among the roster, but I'll settle for Lasher, the first backline unit that hits any friendly units positioned in front of him for 1 damage (I don't recommend relying on Damage Shield when he's on the floor). Just think of it as giving your guys a helpful, spiked-chain pat on the back.

It's appropriate for the final update to a game I like a lot to hurt a little. But Shiny Shoe CEO Mark Cooke did indicate that the studio may not be done with the franchise. "At this time The Punished is the last DLC planned for MT2," Cooke told me. "However, we love the world of Monster Train, and hope to work on more Monster Train games in the future!"

While I go 'oo' at every perfectly lit videogame vista, ray tracing can sometimes make my gaming rig go 'HNNNG'. I love a traced ray as much as the next person, but realistic reflections and lighting can be a bit of a memory hog. Thankfully, Microsoft is previewing something new for DirectX that could significantly take the load off many ageing rigs.

It's a pair of features called 'Clustered Geometry' and 'Partitioned TLAS'. At the risk of oversimplifying, you can think of this DirectX update as bringing tech very similar to Nvidia RTX Mega Geometry to every other GPU vendor.

Obviously there's more to it than that, though, with Microsoft describing this as the "most significant update [to DXR] since its debut in 2018." Top line: Microsoft's own testing of this update suggests it could reduce ray tracing memory load by as much as 90% without the need for a team green GPU (via Techspot).

So, how does it work? Well, without this update, ray tracing is already beaming between less detailed versions of the geometry you see in-game. Traditional ray tracing tech does this because bouncing around detailed models afresh for every frame would simply take too long.

Clustered geometry slices up the detailed models into neat little packages of 256 triangles or fewer. Partitioned TLAS then does a similar thing for the entire videogame vista, splitting a scene into smaller regions. Why? Well, rather than searching the entire map every time, looking for what's changed and updating the frame accordingly, the ol' dread pirate Ray Tracing needs only to run their finger over the quadrants they know are different, marking the spot with 'X'—or something like that, the metaphor got away from me a bit in the middle there.

Basically, this fresh DirectX tech massively simplifies the ray tracing data your rig has to check and update frame to frame. That could free up a whole lotta memory, with Microsoft demonstrating a reduction of 7.5 GB to 774 MB on an AMD Radeon RX 9070. Obviously, frame rates also benefitted, jumping from a wince-worthy 1.2 fps to a very impressive 79 fps in Microsoft's testing.

Now, this isn't really a case of simply installing an update and, 'whee, you're flying!' Microsoft issues a fair few caveats—for one thing, not all games are going to replicate the wins its specialised test environment saw.

For another, working with clustered geometry and all of those packages of up to 256 triangles uses a lot more temporary scratch memory compared to traditional tech—that presents its own logistical concerns for game developers.

It's also worth reiterating that this update is not yet widely available, and there's no word yet on when PC gamers like you and me will be able to get our mitts on it either. If you feel like going sicko mode, though, Microsoft writes you can gain access to experimental features like this by using "matching Agility SDK preview headers and runtime, a supporting driver, and Windows Developer Mode."

Still, the potential to cut down memory usage without needing to buy any new hardware is very promising during these times of runaway pricing for both memory and GPUs. If I can put off a pricey upgrade for a few years more, I'll be happy.

Arc Raiders has a terrific soundscape, although it can sometimes be hard to hear it when you're getting hunted down by your fellow players or bloodthirsty arcs. The game is quite quiet, aside from the occasional sound of distant gunfire, the clicks and cracks from small roaming arcs, and the noise of shuffling scrap as raiders sort through abandoned buildings for valuable items. But perhaps the best noise in all of Arc Raiders comes from the few instruments raiders can find amid the rubble.

"One of the gameplay designers, really early on, made a trumpet," Pajor says. "And it was so out of place, and we were like 'why are we making it?'" The musical items in Arc Raiders serve multiple purposes. There's the social incentive to play an instrument, to bond with strangers and just show them that you're a harmless, relatively chill dude. But there's also the strategic purpose of using noises to lure arcs. Perhaps you're herding them into a trap or ambush or maybe you're trying to distract the aggro of one arc away from another vulnerable player.

Avid players of Arc Raiders will notice, however, that there's no trumpet available in game. Well that's because the trumpet eventually became what we now know as the lure grenade. Apparently a playable trumpet was just too silly to the devs at first, so they settled on something a bit more useful. But now, over a year later from launch players can enjoy multiple instruments like the piano, guitar, harmonica, flute, banjo, recorder, and the trusty shaker.

"It's been almost seven years of exploring this world. [Composers Patrik Andrén and Johan Söderqvist] used to be performing musicians before they became composers so they have a lot of friends who are Sweden's best jazz musicians," Pajor adds. "So a lot of the sounds in the game are quite unique because they are making the sound libraries.

"It's their commitment to building a world; they're phenomenal world builders. So eager to understand what the game is and what the world is. They are also very demanding to work with, because they have so many ideas."

Aside from the Chernobyl piano, which is certainly one of the stranger sources of music I've heard of, composers Andrén and Söderqvist are also known for their abstract use of everyday items to make music and noises.

A lot of raw synthesisers are used to create arc-adjacent noises, but they've also hooked up different kinds of fruits to a synthesiser to grab some slightly weirder sounds. All in all, out of a three hour recording session there's usually only three minutes of usable sounds, "because it's sheer weirdness" but those three minutes "are really really really cool", Söderqvist adds, and stresses that you simply can't obtain these fantastically strange sounds another way.

Valve's second mighty expensive, yet mighty impressive VR headset, the Steam Frame, launched in the latter half of September, meaning October was the first full month where players could actually use it. The latest Steam Hardware Survey suggests a rather big bump in usage for Valve's VR headset this past month.

In September, the Steam Frame accounted for just 0.41% of VR headset usage. In October, that number jumped to 4.13%. That means it surpassed the Oculus Rift S, Sony PS VR2, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality (which is a platform, as opposed to a single headset), the first Oculus Rift and Bigscreen Beyond. It is now the sixth most popular VR headset, sitting just .37% behind the Pico 4, and a hefty 24.14% behind the Meta Quest 3.

The 3.72% increase for the Steam Frame is the biggest jump upwards in October, and the biggest tumble was taken by the Oculus Quest 2, which lost 3.57%.

The Steam Frame officially released on September 18, with preorders going live on September 14, but that doesn't mean buyers got their hands on the headset on the day it went live. So the bump can not only be partially attributed to continued sales over October, but also to shipping times.

It's also worth noting that both the 256 GB and 1 TB models are backordered, meaning even if you sign up for one now, you will simply be put on a waiting list. That means Frame usage is unlikely to entirely stagnate from here.

Given the Steam Frame has enjoyed such a large bump even with customers struggling to get their hands on the headset, this suggests the VR market on Steam isn't huge. Though it is worth taking these stats with a pinch of salt.

The Steam Hardware Survey is an opt-in survey Valve takes every month. This means it only looks at a fraction of Steam users to get general statistics. This is why stats tend to change a tad each month. For instance, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is currently the most popular graphics card in the survey, but it saw a 0.08% increase last month. The RTX 4060 saw a downward shift of 0.40%, pushing it below the RTX 3060.

As such, the Hardware Survey can only ever give a rough reading of usage each month, but it still seems like a good sign for Valve's latest bit of hardware.

Avalon Hill's deluxe rerelease of the classic dungeon crawl board game HeroQuest is getting a digital edition courtesy of Nomad Games, who previously adapted board games like Talisman, Love Letter, and Fury of Dracula. Expect goblin-bashing, trap-disarming, treasure-hunting, and spell-casting. I'll use my broadsword.

As well as solo play, with the computer taking on the role of the Evil Wizard and his minions, it'll support online multiplayer with up to four players as the heroes, and a fifth optionally taking over as the villainous Zargon. (It's based on the American version, so no Morcar here.)

The most promising detail revealed so far is the inclusion of a quest editor so players can create their own maps and missions, as well as downloading quests made by others through mod.io integration.

Hopefully it includes the rules additions from HeroQuest First Light, especially the option to just move eight squares per turn instead of rolling to move if there aren't any monsters on the board. Slogging across the dungeon to get back to the exit 2d6 squares at a time is a real chore otherwise.

HeroQuest: Digital Edition is scheduled for release on Steam in 2027, with a closed beta playtest coming soon.

Persona tragics have been begging for remakes of the first two games in the series for ages (at least, the ones who aren't begging for remakes of the PS2-era Shin Megami Tensei games instead). After thoroughly milking Persona 4 and 5, series producer Kazuhisa Wada said in August, "personally, I think it's something we should definitely do."

Now, almost two minutes of footage from what sure looks like a Persona 1 remake has leaked via the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit. It shows some dungeon exploration, typically flashy combat, and a dialogue scene all in the modern Persona style.

Oddly, Tatsuya from Persona 2 is one of the party members, though it's possible this is a cross-promotional skin you can equip. Or maybe the remakes will incorporate some kind of Persona Q-style crossover?

While it's fair to be suspicious this could be AI-generated footage, it seems both a bit too long and too internally consistent for that to be the case. And it's not like Atlus hasn't got form, given that we found out the Persona 3 remake was real via a leak as well.

In a new Q&A vlog on his YouTube channel, Obsidian studio design director Josh Sawyer took a question about why there are so few RPGs in contemporary urban settings. Part of the problem, according to Sawyer: They're more difficult and costly to make than other RPG environments.

Elsewhere in this section, Sawyer cited Baldur's Gate 2's Athkatla, Disco Elysium, and the recent Zero Parades as RPGs that land the plane on believable, dense urban environments⁠—though Sawyer notes that the latter two have the advantage of not needing to work in as many believable combat encounters as other RPGs.

A few others spring to mind for me: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Cyberpunk 2077, and Baldur's Gate 3's version of the titular city. But all of those really highlight Sawyer's point about expense and challenge. Vampire and Cyberpunk were notoriously difficult development cycles for their respective studios. I'll always be a BG3 Act 3 defender, but it's definitely the part of the game with the most noticeable seams.

But even if they're hard to make, I love urban adventures in RPGs, whether as part or the whole of a game. Novigrad and Oxenfurt are two of my favorite parts of The Witcher 3, for example. For a real niche example of an urban RPG you should have on your radar, I highly recommend the early access Moves of the Diamond Hand.

When Mass Effect 3's beloved multiplayer mode was left out of the Legendary Edition, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Redemption has finally come in the form of the ME3Tweaks modding team, who have spent the last three years quietly working to not only get multiplayer working, but improve it.

"It's not just a ME3MP port but rather an extensive remaster of the experience," says modder Audemus. "This includes new features like bringing forward LE's native features like controller support/HDR, overhauled UI, rebaked level lighting, upscaled/redrawn textures, upgraded shaders, improved networking/server replication, extensive bug fixes, new gameplay modes, and a stable format for future mod support and easy installation/compatibility."

They're even adding new game modes, like one called "Unified" that combines enemies from multiple factions, and letting players either join ME3Tweaks' server, or set up their own private servers.

The ME3Tweaks team are the same modders who previously revived and revised the Pinnacle Station expansion, a lost DLC for the original Mass Effect that was also left out of the Legendary Edition. They're planning to release the multiplayer mod on N7 Day, which is also when composer Sam Hulick plans to release a re-scored version of the leaked Mass Effect Universe trailer.

It's easy to knock old-school RPGs, especially grindfests like RuneScape, for being games where you endlessly and sometimes mindlessly make numbers go up. But Melvor Idle, which self-bills as a RuneScape-inspired idle adventure game that claims to squeeze the genre into its "purest form," leans into that—and Jagex has partnered with developer Games by Malcs to make the RuneScape connection official.

The announcement blog from Jagex reads, "Melvor Idle takes a lot of inspiration from RuneScape and you can just feel it," adding that Jagex's support (and branding) is intended to help make the game "even bigger … while Melvor Idle 2 doesn’t take place in Gielinor, we think a fan-built idle game inspired by our MMOs is more than worthy of the title."

This isn't the first time Jagex has collaborated with Games by Malcs. It became the first Melvor Idle's publisher five years ago, albeit without a branding tweak. While RuneScape has had its fair share of monetization controversies over the years (you can see just how skeptical people were of the partnership when it was first announced on Reddit), it doesn't seem like Melvor has been compromised by trouble along those lines—the announcement blog proudly proclaims the sequel will have "no microtransactions."

Beyond that, it seems like a bigger version of the familiar idle RPG with overhauled visuals and a higher level cap of 120. You might find it a bit odd that it's a "RuneScape Adventure" that doesn't take place in the MMO's setting, but I'm not sure how many people are really invested in Jagex's games for the scintillating lore and worldbuilding. If you end up feeling like a stranger in a strange land, you can always hire someone to spam "buying gf" in a chat window while you get your idle on.

Grand Theft Auto's radio stations have long stood as an integral part of the series' whole vibe—either offering time capsules of the times each game was set in (Vice City), or offering a realistic blend of classic and modernity a la Grand Theft Auto 5's excellent music curation.

I've been just a tad giddy to discover what awaits me in Grand Theft Auto 6's car stereos when the game launches on November 19, which has me surprised that Rockstar teasing six of its upcoming stations earlier this month completely flew under my radar.

Well, now I've had a gander and listened to all 12 minutes of its DJs bantering and a peppering of bangers between. And I gotta say, I'm already jazzed to speed down Leonida's highways with some of these stations at full volume.

Rockstar's licensed music curation rarely misses, and that very much seems to be the continuing trend with Grand Theft Auto 6. While we don't know just how many radio stations there are in total yet—this is the first game where we'll be able to tune in to both terrestrial music stations and podcasts, it being 2026 and all—but the six that were teased were the exact kind of flavours I've come to expect from the series.

There's Latin station Cocoteo FM, classic country Back Country Radio, African channel AfroBANK FM, all-out metal hub The Chamber 106.6, pop banger central Flash FM, and hip-hop destination Dirty South Classics. I'm already 100% here for The Chamber's setlist, being an elder emo and all, with bands like Black Sabbath, Pantera, and Slayer making their way onto Leonida's airwaves. But I'm also jazzed to see newer blood on the scene, like Bad Bunny's appearance on Cocoteo.

My biggest interest was in Flash FM, though. Non-Stop Pop has become such an iconic radio station for me, thanks to some excellent song choices and Cara Delevigne's delightfully deadpan delivery. It doesn't seem like I'm going to be disappointed, though—Alex Consani takes up the mantle as model-turned-radio-host alongside the excellent artist Robyn (of Bulletproof fame), and hearing one of my favourite songs in MGMT's Electric Feel is all the confidence I need in Rockstar's keen ear.

While the previews do show criminally little interactions between the hosts (it seems like Grand Theft Auto 6 is going for duos across all its stations, presumably for some easy back-and-forth banter), I'm sure there'll still be satire in droves to come.

Here's each radio station currently teased, along with each song present in the preview. You can check out a brief description of each station along with the audio previews over on Rockstar's website:

Back Country Radio

• The Conversation - Hank Williams, Jr. & Waylon Jennings
• Need a Little TIme off for Bad Behaviour - David Alle Coe
• Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind) - Loretta Lynn

Cocoteo FM

• EoO - Bad Bunny
• Si Es Trucho Es Trucho (Remix) - Axel Rulay ft. Farruko & El Alfa
• Canalla - Romeo Santos & El Chaval de la Bachata

AfroBANK FM

• Joha - Asake
• Gye Wani - Pat Thomas ft. Ebo Taylor
• Shay'sana - DJ Lag & Robot Boii ft. Kamo Mphela

The Chamber 106.6

• I - Black Sabbath
• I'm Broken - Pantera
• Raining Blood - Slayer

Flash FM

• Good Ones - Charli xcx
• Electric Feel - MGMT
• Midnight Sun (Girls Trip) - Zara Larsson & PinkPantheress

Dirty South Classics

• Like a Pimp - David Banner ft. Lil' Flip
• Who Dat - JT Money ft. Solé
• Born N Raised - DJ Khaled ft Trick Daddy, Rick Ross & Pitbull

I remember when I'd get bored as a kid, I'd marvel at the back covers of my older brother's PC game boxes—stuff like Guild Wars: Factions and the original World of Warcraft box, the inner cover of which showed a dwarf thwacking a yeti with that one epic sword that looked like a lightsaber. Even back then, the long switch to digital was underway, seemingly for good. But what if we could go back to the glory days of big, embossed boxes and girthy manuals?

That's the "dream" of GOG's senior business development and partnerships manager, Marcin Paczynski, as he recently told Gamesradar. Specifically, he wants to see a world where you "would be able to buy physical versions of [games] on GOG … You go to your shelf on GOG, you click on the game that you would like to receive a physical copy of, you order it, and it gets to you. That would be a perfect scenario."

I'm sure most PC gaming diehards would agree that, yes, an option to buy physical games—especially older games in a precarious state with regard to preservation—would be pretty neat. Even if you're the sort to snag DRM-free copies of everything you own, a disc makes a game easier to show off, keep close in the event that your hard drive explodes, or place in the seat across from you at a Michelin star restaurant.

The problem for GOG is that physical distribution is basically an entirely different business to running a digital storefront. "Because we are talking about physical media, we need to think about logistics, we need to think about storage," Paczynski said, adding that it's "a very, very complicated thing." But the idea has been on the company's collective mind "for years now," so he's not ruling it out.

If you don't want to wait, there's always projects like Big Box Collection that let you print your own facsimiles. Or buy used! A few scratches and a giant sticker reading "PROPERTY OF TREVOR" just lends character, right?

As reported by Kotaku, a near-mythical canceled Valve game called F-Stop has been reconstructed from material contained in separate leaks. Direct access to the build seems a little shaky at the moment, but full playthroughs of the game, like this one by Meme Man? on YouTube, are starting to pop up online.

Most of F-Stop's assets came out in this August's Steam "teraleak," but the final pieces⁠—F-Stop's source code and mapsrc data⁠—were only just acquired by the Valve Cut Content Team Discord, which appears to have gone private amid all the newfound attention over F-Stop. With the Discord currently invite-only, you gotta know a guy (or know a guy who knows a guy) to play it yourself.

The Half-Life Wiki has the skinny on F-Stop's origins in the "Directed Design Experiments." Following the megahit launch of the Orange Box in 2007, Gabe Newell effectively shut Valve down for a three-month game jam that produced five prototypes, F-Stop among them.

It applied Team Fortress 2's cel-shaded art style to a vision of Aperture Science in its prime, all mid-century wood-paneled office optimism. F-Stop's central mechanic was a camera that could capture objects in the world, then place them elsewhere to solve puzzles. The excellent 2023 game Viewfinder would apply a similar concept to a full commercial release.

But while loved internally at Valve, F-Stop's playtests were apparently more tepid. The game was shelved, though elements of its worldbuilding would appear in Portal 2 and Aperture Desk Job. It's fun to recognize some of these early ideas in the F-Stop longplays: From the jump, we get a version of Cave Johnson (sadly sans-J.K. Simmons in prototype) talking to the player, as well as the first instance of Aperture Personality Cores as companions in the puzzling.

Given F-Stop's "road not taken" nature, particularly compared to the megathit Left 4 Dead and Portal 2 that would follow, I don't really mourn the fact that we never got to play its final version. It is, however, extremely cool that the prototype game is now preserved for posterity.

Lena Raine's formative gaming experience was playing Myst on a Mac Quadra 610, exploring Cyan Worlds' enigmatic island in parallel with her father: "We each had our own playthrough, so we were sending each other notes in the little journal that it came with," she says. "I still have the little book that we wrote in."

Raine always aspired to be a composer for video games, but she initially joined the industry as a games tester for Nintendo America, working several other testing jobs before being hired by ArenaNet as a game designer. While working on Guild Wars 2, Raine designed a bell-choir minigame for the MMO's Winter's Day Christmas update, including writing the music for it. "It was a bizarre first-step into game music," she says. "But that eventually led to at last some visibility for the other music I was writing."

After leaving ArenaNet, Raine wrote the soundtrack for 2018's Celeste, and spent several years composing music for Minecraft, including several of its most popular 'Disc' tracks like Pigstep, Creator, and Otherside. Raine is currently writing music for the early access volleyball RPG Beastieball, while also returning to game design with her own project ANOTHEREAL, an RPG with schmup-style combat. "I have been working on [it] basically since the pandemic," she says. "I'm trying to aim to have something released within the decade."

Raine took a break from her various projects to show me around the digital concert hall of her steam library. We discussed Deadlock, sorted her schmup collection, and took a trip down MMO memory lane.

What game are you currently playing?

The current game that I'm playing is Deadlock. I've been playing it for a while now, basically since it was pretty early in that beta, alpha, whatever phase. I play with my wife and some other friends that we've got.

I've been having a lot of fun with it. I've never been a MOBA person and I've never been a competitive shooter person either. Usually, I get tremendously frustrated with online competitive shooters because I'm not very good. I'm not great at those sorts of games.

But I love the style and the world that Valve has made for Deadlock. I love spooky occult stuff. I just love that entire vibe. A lot of my personal online characters are like demon girl aesthetics, and so I'm just like "This is a game for me".

I've been really committed to learning at least one character, so I've been focusing on Ivy, which is the gargoyle. She's awesome. She's from the first set of characters. I initially just laser-focussed on her. I was just like "Oh, she's really cool".

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

The Mermaid Mask. I was playing it on the Steam Machine, so technically it's still installed. But it's a single-player, linear story game, so I will probably uninstall it at some point to save space.

It's still installed because I finished it yesterday, or two days ago. But I really loved that game. I played the previous game—Tangle Tower—in the Detective Grimoire series, and they just have such a playful way of designing characters and presenting them. The voice acting is really good. The mysteries are fun and interesting to figure out as you're playing through it. It's a detective point-and-click adventure, gathering clues and talking to all the suspects.

There's just [a] ridiculous amount of items in the game that you can ask everyone about. And it's all just voice dialogue about all of them. I'm just such a completionist about it. I just sit in front of the TV and I've been listening to the characters talk about 30 different items for an hour.

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

The one that I really wanted to talk about is Final Fantasy 11, which is one of the first PC games that I got fully obsessed with when I was younger, at high school into college basically. It's got uninstalled and reinstalled over the years. But I have it installed. I've checked in on my character, who has been there since the initial release date … I played a little Tarutaru character and mostly was a red mage and monk.

The interesting piece of history with me and Final Fantasy 11 is that I initially imported it from Japan. It has since transferred over to English servers primarily. But when I initially started playing the game, it was not out in the US yet, and you had to import the game. You had to make a Japanese account with a Japanese address. But there were forums set up for people that wanted to import the game.

So I joined these forums, and these were people who also played like Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast, so we were all buzzing about this new game Final Fantasy 11. So there were instructions of like "here's translated screenshots of every single setup thing to do."

I had taken one year of Japanese in high school. So I knew enough to navigate a menu. I didn't know how to converse very well in Japanese, but I knew what the characters for like black mage, red mage, warrior, attack, level up, those sorts of things.

[But] the thing about Final Fantasy 11 is it was such a deeply social game, because to level up past a certain point you needed to join a party. You could not solo past a certain point. So people would group in in levelling parties, and unless I was playing with friends, I would be in a group of Japanese players that I was trying to communicate with, and it really depended on the sophistication of the conversation that was going on that I could blend in or out myself as speaking English.

The majority of friendships that I had was with the English-speaking community, and it's funny because a number of those people have gone on to have some pretty illustrious careers. One of the people that I played with was Maximilian Dood, who's a fairly well-to-do YouTuber now. Another friend that I played PSO and Final Fantasy with was Jason Oestreicher who worked for Giant Bomb for a while. So I have these weird industry connections from playing this import Final Fantasy game years ago.

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

The highest number of hours is Elden Ring at 282 hours. However, not on Steam, I looked this up also, Final Fantasy 14, I logged into my character and did the playtime conversion, and it's 1,308 hours.

I feel like I've talked a lot about Final Fantasy, [so] to talk a little bit about Elden Ring. I've played pretty much all of the Dark Souls games and mostly attempted to do co-op with them because my wife and I love to play the games together, and we always have a very rough experience when it comes to FromSoft online stuff, because it's very insistent on opening yourself up to adversity when you're playing together with friends.

But with Elden Ring, when that came out, this was right before we moved to Canada … [when] we were in this transit dead space where all our stuff is half-packed and we just need to find the right place. And so we were just calming our brains down by playing Elden Ring together.

That also includes the DLC up until the final boss, because the final boss of the DLC was too steep of a difficulty curve for the build that we were both running. This was also at the time the person that got famous for soloing Melania, they came back and they were Let Me Solo Them instead. And so my wife actually summoned that person, who beat the final boss for her. I was extremely jealous.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

It's a tricky question for me because, with Steam existing as a service, it's very difficult to not uninstall something if you need to save space. But I was looking at what I did have installed and I saw a pattern, which is I basically leave all my favourite schmups installed.

I love going back to games like ZeroRanger, Adventures of Ten and Till, Deathsmiles, Mushihimesama, a number of classic and newer schmups that I love playing, because it's that kind of arcade experience [where] it never gets old. You can keep going back to it, keep improving on it. It's been good research also, because I'm working on a game that has schmup combat in it. But I'm making it because I have this experience with schmups of not being great at them.

A lot of times it has to do with the music too. A really good schmup soundtrack is basically an album.

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

This one's easy because I'm a composer and I work on the computer, so it's my music software. My DAW of choice right now is Bitwig Studio. It's by ex-developers of Ableton. They split off and made this new DAW called Bitwig that is like if you took a bunch of chains off Ableton in a way where you an rewire everything under the hood.

There's just a really open approach to how it's designed, where you can use basically every version of VST, which is instrument software, that's out there. You can use Clap, which is an open-source plugin format. It can open files from Ableton. It can open files and import the settings and metadata and stuff.

It's the one that has won me over. I've been using Ableton since working on Celeste, because used to use Cakewalk Sonar. The very first piece of music that I wrote for Celeste, I wrote in Cakewalk Sonar, and then I switched to Ableton after that … I literally can't open the first level of Celeste anymore, because it's in software I don't have installed anymore.

The very first [Minecraft update] I worked on was the revitalisation of the Nether, which was the underworld space, and I was pulling from a bunch of survival horror vibes, writing this scary music that was really unsettling, which is funny that that was the first … because the existing tracks that Daniel, C418, did was very calming, soothing.

What most people know my Minecraft music as is the three discs that I wrote, as opposed to the tons of other tracks that I wrote … it's funny because, for [Pigstep] too it was just the developers saying to me, "For discs, you just write whatever you want" because the initial discs were just tunes that C418 wrote that wasn't necessarily related to anything.

One of the throwaway ideas was "What would music the Piglins listen to sound like?" And so I was just like "Dubstep for pigs!" That was the prompt that I made for myself, and I just made a funny little tune and people just love it.

It's created a funny effect. I think at Mojang now, because they've since worked with a couple other composers—I feel like my tenure has expired. I had some fun there, but I want to focus on other projects—but they've worked with other composers since then. But the prompt I keep hearing is 'Oh, Pigstep was such a banger that they want more bangers.' I started something there. It's gonna keep on getting discs that are bangers.

Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?

Immaculate. I don't really believe in putting anything on my desktop. I have my wallpaper, and it's a cute piece of art, and if I have anything minimised, I look at the art, and I have a folder structure for everything else.

If you're a fan of first-person shooters and haven't played Selaco, you should. Built in the Doom engine and inspired by FEAR, Half-Life and System Shock, Selaco is a rollicking, dizzyingly ambitious sci-fi FPS where you battle a mercenary incursion of a vast, city-sized space station that's home to the last of humanity.

Launched into Steam early access in 2024, Selaco's first chapter alone is as long as some entire '90s shooters. Now, developer Altered Orbit Studios is preparing to release an update that will not only double the length of the game, but also introduce a wide array of new features and rework much of its existing design.

Described by Altered Orbit as "an absolute behemoth", Selaco: The Machines of War introduces the second of a planned three chapters to the FPS. Chapter two comprises 19 new campaign maps, which apparently amounts to "6-8 hours of additional content". Alongside further story elements and a voice for the protagonist, the chapter also introduces what sounds like a persistent enemy, in the form of "an unstoppable machine" that is "hunting you down."

Naturally, this second chapter also adds new weapons and enemies, with the former including a minigun and "a heavy machine gun that fires literal explosions". I don't know how that would work, but I'm keen to find out! Alongside your equipped arsenal, players will be able to use new deployable weapons like mini-turrets and sentinel drones, while the update also introduces a "heavy ordnance system" that lets you wield large, disposable weapons scattered across the battlefield, Gears of War-style.

As well as completely new stuff, Altered Orbit says the update will also enhance a lot of existing content. The FEAR inspired enemy AI, for example, has been "rewritten almost entirely from scratch" to facilitate smarter tactics and better decision making. The rewrite also introduces a new "rally" system and NPC area patrolling when not in combat—an addition designed to give players more agency in when and how fighting begins. Oh, and the entire first chapter has been given an overhaul that introduces "improved set pieces" and "new surprises".

And those are just the headline changes. Other improvements mentioned by Altered Orbit include a new lighting system, an overhauled particle system to make combat even more spectacular, improved navigation through Selaco's massive, mazey levels, new voice lines to make enemy communication even more lifelike, better controls, new music, and more. It almost sounds too good to be true, but I've played Chapter 1 and I know Altered Orbit can cook with rocket fuel, so none of this is beyond the studio's capability.

Selaco: The Machines of War arrives on November 13. The scale of the changes means that old saves will no longer be compatible. But if you don't fancy replaying the reworked first episode, you will be able to jump in at the outset of Chapter 2.

Chronicles: Medieval is an impressive looking open-world sandbox where players explore a dynamic Medieval world and fight in massive, authentic battles. It's been in development for more than four years and is due to launch into Steam early access early in 2027.

However, there is a very real chance this will no longer happen, as developer Raw Power Games suddenly faces closure after funding for its game was pulled.

On Friday, Raw Power Games posted a statement to Steam and on social media channels (via IGN), explaining how the studio has suddenly found itself in dire straits. "Due to circumstances outside our control, the necessary funding for Raw Power Games is no longer in place," the studio wrote. "Without it, we can't keep building Chronicles: Medieval, and right now the studio is at real risk of closing."

This appears to be a sudden development. Through October, the studio had been posting regular development updates, including an incredibly detailed deep dive on Medieval coats of arms and how they would appear in the game. None of it suggested a studio that's in trouble, so it seems this has caught Raw Power off guard.

By the sounds of it, Chronicles: Medieval isn't all that far away from being done, either. Or at least ready for its planned alpha launch: "What makes it hurt is how close we are. Early access is within reach," Raw Power Games writes in its statement. "The world we've been building for years is finally starting to feel alive, and we have so much we've been thrilled to show you."

Chronicles: Medieval first appeared on our radar last year, not without some controversy. At the time, Raw Power Games was super excited about using generative AI for its games. Not only was the studio using Midjourney to generate (terrible) concept art, but company COO Jakob Rasmussen told Danish newspaper Ingeniøren that genAI was "at the core of our vision", adding that "When the technology is ready—and perhaps a little sooner—we'll be willing to stick our necks out and put it into the game."

Yet the company quickly changed its tune on this point, with CTO Caspar Strandbygaard telling PC Gamer that Chronicles: Medieval was "100% handcrafted with no use of generative AI." Strandbygaard admitted that Raw Power was still "curious" about the technology, but regarding Chronicles specifically, he stressed that "every asset in the game is built by our extremely talented team of passionate developers. It is not generated by AI."

While the situation seems grim for Raw Power, the studio says that it is "not going down without a fight" and has urged fans of the game to "keep Chronicles: Medieval on your wishlist and keep talking about it." How much road Raw Power has remaining before it's forced to close isn't clear. But since the game is allegedly close to being in a releasable state, it may be able to secure new funding relatively soon.

It seems it isn't just Steam that's being flooded with AI slop. Indie games storefront itch.io has reported that the number of new game pages being created per day on the site has doubled in the past two months, and just like Valve's much bigger distribution service, the finger is being pointed at AI.

Over on Bluesky, itch.io shared an image of a bar chart labelled "game events". The chart shows that, between August 3 and October 30, the number of new game pages being created per day has risen from around 3,000 to regularly surpassing 6,000. It's a ratio that more or less matches the increase in Steam demos showcased at the most recent Next Fest, which rose from around 4,000 to over 8,000.

While Itch doesn't explicitly point the finger at AI as the cause, it heavily infers it. When Bluesky user Tommy's Homemade Games asked "Do you know why?" Itch responded "take a guess" followed by emojis of a crying face and a robot. Another Bluesky account, BardZaku, asked "is it AI dreck?" to which the account replied with an emoji of a face with bags under its eyes.

The rapid uptick in Itch pages also coincides with the launch of Claude Opus 5, which arrived on July 24. The latest iteration of Anthropic's LLM—which is now at version 5.5—has proved particularly adept at reverse engineering code. This has had a bunch of knock-on effects in various areas of game development, ranging from much faster decompilations of old games, to Steam being flooded with AI slop, and developers cancelling public demos out of concerns their games will be cloned.

Anthropic has since updated Claude to reign in its ability to directly copy games, but it's currently hard to tell whether it has stemmed the broader flow of AI generated games. Indeed, it's worth pointing out that AI Generated games now comprise a good portion of the pages listed on Itch. Out of 1,769,316 listed on Itch at the time of writing, 131,929 are tagged as AI Generated, approximately 7.5% of the total. That's a lot, considering how long AI coding tools have been around.

But to play devil's advocate, Itch is a storefront that allows AI games, and if people are downloading and enjoying these games, then adding them to the store is fair enough, right? Well, Itch also points out that, although the number of games appearing on Itch per day has doubled, "the number of downloads and purchases has *not* doubled". This suggests these AI games are clogging up the site for nobody's benefit, not even the people 'making' them.

The question, then, is what's to be done about all this? The replies to Itch's initial post are filled with calls to ban AI generated games from the store. But as pointed out by AI researcher Mike Cook, simply banning these games is unlikely to solve the problem.

"I think that would be a good move. But it won't change this graph, unfortunately," Cook wrote on Bluesky. "You need a team of people to enforce it, or a very dicey public reporting system. Even then, it's a lot harder to detect than people think." Valve has also cast doubt on the efficacy of a ban on AI coding tools for games released on Steam, though its opinion is heavily influenced by the company's laissez-faire approach to operating its storefront.

Another possibility is to simply let this trend play out. There is a viral element to the ongoing surge in AI generated games, as people post their vibe-coded works online for attention and social media clout. But Itch's statement suggests that people aren't properly engaging with most of the games being uploaded.

Hence, it's possible that the people behind these games may eventually lose interest, moving on to whatever attention-grabbing scheme big tech facilitates next. The risk, of course, is that the audience also loses interest in what these storefronts offer before that happens. After all, nobody wants to wade through a tsunami of slop to get to the games they want to play.

Earlier this week, Kris Zierhut, principal game designer on World of Warcraft: Forever, said that the game would have a release schedule that's a "little more laid back". Rather than the blisteringly fast eight to 10 week schedule of Season of Discovery, Forever'll aim to release major updates once every four months or so.

This is honestly music to my ears—I've been impressed by retail WoW's blistering pace and its seasonal structure, even if there have been some rocky, bug-filled patches in the past; and it's certainly something I've praised before, especially in contrast to other certain MMOs that have been coming to a standstill.

But I've been playing WoW… well, for a long time, but I've had a consistent sub since Dragonflight, and I've been able to see the arc of Blizzard whipping up its schedule into a proper roadmap. Which did pull the game back from the brink, true, but three expansions in and I'm just sort of exhausted.

There's always some new bar to fill, some new doohickey to collect, some new reputation track to chew on, and it all moves so fast that if I, say, have an off-week to go play another game, I feel pretty lost. While Midnight does major patches at roughly the same release tempo (12.0.0 came out in January, 12.1.0 came out in August) it also has a ton of interim stuff to flood out your schedule every three months, rather than four.

Launch was already crammed with stuff—a raid tier, delves, the new prey system, housing, and so on. Just under three months passed since launch, and wham, suddenly we've got Void Assaults! Ritual Sites! The Omnium Folio! Whatever Abyss Anglers is, I never checked, which is kinda the problem! Just over a month later, and there's a new raid and a new system plugged into Void Assaults (which I'm literally just now finding out about, I completely missed it). Two months later, and it's 12.1.0, which I hadn't even sat down to properly play before Labyrinths became a thing.

The idea of smaller, chiller patches in an overall slower-paced game (here's fellow PCG writer Lincoln Carpenter's treatise on the virtues of hitting a scorpion with a club for 38 seconds) sounds like a nice, soothing bath after an overstimulating day at the circus.

I do feel that prickling sense of overstimulation fear return when Zierhut talks about the interim stuff, however:

"And then one nuance on that is: We do plan on making content that unlocks in between … you want to stagger out some content across those four months. It's not just patch day comes [around], here's a content fire hose, and now we're silent for four months. A lot of that is, hey, there's a time event calendar that gradually unlocks things and opens them up over those four months to give things a little bit more life instead of that all at once effect."

Still, given Forever's meant to be a horizontally-progressing game that doesn't have expansions (we'll need to see how that pans out), I might find these little tasks a lot more soothing than the looming feeling I have with WoW, where at any point it might suddenly become too late to get stuck into a season.

Ideally, these mid-patch trickles will be optional tasks I can get around to basically whenever, rather than something I feel pressured to get done just so I can stay up-to-date for whatever flashy system's trundling down the pipeline next. Hit me with that lo-fi update cadence, I'm ready for it.

The Verge reports that Dan Greenawalt, studio head of Forza Motorsport developer Turn 10, is planning to retire after nearly 27 years, quoting an internal memo from Trevor Williams of Playground Games. "Dan Greenawalt has decided that this is the right time for him to retire from Microsoft," Williams is reported to have said, clarifying that Greenawalt will stay on temporarily as an adviser during a changeover period.

Microsoft announced in September that it plans to merge Turn 10 and Playground, the two Forza studios, into one entity as part of the same restructure that will merge Obsidian into Bethesda and hand Halo over to Activision. Oh, and that restructure will also see another 268 employees being laid off.

Turn 10 had already been turned into a support studio for Playground's Forza Horizon following the 2023 reboot of Forza Motorsport, with former developer Fred Russell saying last year that the Motorsport series died in a prior round of cuts at Microsoft.

Nine years ago, Matt Filer officially began work on the OpenCAGE mod tools for Alien: Isolation—following two-and-a-half years of work on prototype versions. During that time the tools have been available for anyone to use, which is part of the reason Creative Assembly's legendarily scary horror game has a variety of mods already. (Though the VR mod works differently, since it's actually enabling an unfinished mode that shipped with the game.)

OpenCAGE has finally made it to version 1.0, which can be downloaded on Steam. Filer proudly told us his mod tools have "now reached the point where you're able to implement full custom maps, missions, modes, characters, weapons, animations, sounds, models, textures, and more!"

As a demonstration of what's possible, Filer is making a Halo-themed custom map. "It features custom cinematics, enemies, weapons, all on a brand new map with a custom HUD," he said. "It has reached a point now of being able to make full total conversion mods, which has always been my end goal, so it's cool to finally be here!"

Alien: Isolation just won our scariest videogame poll, and I consider it a well-earned victory. It's one of the few games I've seen frighten even people who aren't normally bothered by horror thanks to how unpredictable and relentless the xenomorph is when pursuing you. And those dead-eyed Worker Joe robots are no slouches either.

Hopefully some creative mods will give us reason to go back to Alien: Isolation, and help tide over the wait for the upcoming Alien: Isolation 2, which is likely to be available some time in 2027.

As reported by Eurogamer, FromSoftware has shut down multiplayer (invasions, co-op, messages) in Dark Souls 2 and 3 for an indeterminate amount of time due to an undisclosed "server issue." The company shared the news in an October 30 post on X, "The Everything App."

The closure affects all platforms for each respective game, and the company said that it would provide an updated timeline for server restoration once it had more information. This isn't the first time something like this has happened with FromSoftware's back catalogue. In early 2022, on the eve of Elden Ring's release, a catastrophic remote code execution vulnerability was discovered in all of the Dark Souls games. That resulted in PC servers for the series getting shut down for months.

But there are key differences here: It's only Dark Souls 2 and 3 this time around, while the issue extends to all platforms, not just PC. That gives me some hope that this issue is not only less serious, but it will take less time to resolve as well.

It honestly couldn't have happened at a better time for PC players, though: Legend modder Yui's Seamless co-op series runs on its own servers, separate from the official FromSoft ones, meaning the party's still going if you download the mod and play that way. Dark Souls 2 finally got the Seamless co-op treatment at the end of September (Dark Souls 3 has been covered for awhile).

As its name implies, Seamless Co-op makes it easier to play through the entirety of these games together with a friend or friends, offering shared progress and no disconnects on death or defeat of a boss. I've been loving Dark Souls 2 Seamless Co-op alongside my PC Gamer colleagues Tyler Colp and Sean Martin.

On October 29, bedrock fanfiction website Archive of Our Own (AO3) was taken down for maintenance that was initially predicted to last 12 hours. Later that day, the estimated downtime was upped to two to four weeks. On October 30, the site's volunteer leadership shared a more substantial update about the security intrusion behind the takedown.

At the time of writing, the team is "still in the early stages" of determining the scope of the intrusion. AO3 has assured readers and authors that the archive itself and associated data (bookmarks, kudos, etc.) remain intact. Donor information is stored on a completely separate system, meaning that data is safe.

The AO3 team is "unable to rule out" that its user database was compromised in the hack. AO3 user accounts include emails, usernames, IP addresses, and hashed (encrypted) passwords. In an abundance of caution, the team advises users to update passwords they may have reused from AO3⁠—but that's just good practice in general, gamers.

Over the coming weeks, the team anticipates that AO3 will be brought back in a "degraded" state, meaning incomplete or read-only access, as well as further intermittent downtime. As for why this happened, that remains unclear.

AO3 is a very widely-used service, and the sheer numbers game of weak passwords combined with emails in its user database could make it valuable on the black market. I also don't think you can rule out a more ideological motivation for such an attack, given fanfiction's long association with women and the queer community.

Either way: It's just poor form. Very meanspirited. An invitation to several lifetimes' worth of bad karma. I see AO3 on a continuum with The Internet Archive and Wikipedia as a holdout of a more utopian internet, a website that exists, uncorrupted by money, because people like it and it's good. Why would you mess that up for everybody?

The case as presented by Rebelzize seems fairly open and shut: A volunteer team being sued by a former volunteer over contributions excised from the project? There are potential material benefits to consider: Skyblivion has a level of scope and popularity that could leave participation in it as strong a resume line as shipping a commercial game. Fallout London's developers even pivoted to being their own indie studio.

But that's not a clear-cut monetary incentive, and the clout of participation is contingent on productive contribution to the project. While it is worth noting that we only have Rebelzize's accounting of events, I think there are green flags pointing to his trustworthiness:

• The call to action is for pro bono legal aid in line with the project's overall volunteer nature, not fundraising.
• The former volunteer is not named, and Rebelzize urges against the sort of Reddit gumshoe sleuthing you see so often in these situations.
• Skyblivion as a whole has run for a long time without major scandal.

Unless you, the reader, are or know a lawyer with expertise in IP/GDPR cases⁠—check out Skyblivion's website to contact them, in that case⁠—there's not much for a given fan of the project to do. Rebelzize noted that he has paid legal help lined up should the call for volunteers fail. Even if a lawsuit is filed, it does not sound⁠—at least from this vlog⁠—like it could imperil Skyblivion's release. I have questions, but ideally this whole situation will resolve cleanly enough that we never know exactly what happened:

• What, specifically, did this volunteer work on in the game?
• Did redoing this work have any bearing on Skyblivion's delay from 2025 into '26?
• What happened here interpersonally? Was there an issue of crediting the work done? Are there any missing details that, if they don't justify the volunteer's legal threat, at least make it more understandable?

At last call, Skyblivion was still scheduled to release this year, but time is running short for that goal. We Elder Scrolls-likers at PC Gamer have been excited about it for years. Skyblivion promises a more ground-up remake of TES 4: Oblivion⁠—complete with radically redesigned dungeons and biomes⁠—in Skyrim's engine. This is in contrast to the more graphics-focused Oblivion Remastered we got in 2025.

Earlier this month, Big Walk developer House House explained why their co-op puzzle adventure wouldn't be available for sale on Xbox: Microsoft's gaming division is a priority target of the the Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, which names the tech giant in general as a pressure target alongside Google, Amazon, and a host of other companies. House House isn't alone in taking this action.

Narrative platformer Celeste and party fighter TowerFall have delisted from Xbox recently, and Maddy Thorson of Maddy Makes Games fame took to BlueSky to explain why: "For those who’re asking, yes, we delisted Celeste and TowerFall on Xbox. We did this to support the BDS boycott."

For reference, Microsoft gets a cut whenever it makes a sale through its proprietary digital distribution storefront, similar to Steam. Console producers tend to take a loss on hardware, subsidizing it for accessibility to more consumers, so they can make up the difference by selling other stuff, a crucial slice of that other stuff being games.

So as long as sales trickle in for critically acclaimed games like Celeste and TowerFall, that's a bit of easy money for Microsoft—the choice to delist the game stops that. If you're an Xbox owner who wants to observe the boycott, you can always buy used physical versions of games where that's an option or switch to another platform for the time being.

But this is PC Gamer dot com, so you probably haven't even heard of the Xbox. You've certainly never seen one up close. You're probably playing Chessmaster 9000 on your second monitor as you read this, you beautiful freak. In any case, you can always buy TowerFall on Steam. Same goes for Celeste.

As reported by MMORPG.com, Square Enix has delayed Final Fantasy 14's Evercold expansion to February 2 from its initial January launch window. Preorders for the add-on will open up on Wednesday, November 4⁠—those preorders also come with early access to the expansion on February 19.

The news was delivered by FF14 honcho Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida at the opening day of Final Fantasy 14's 2026 Fan Festival in Tokyo. Yoshi-P explained that the team was committed to its January window, and were even "just barely" on track to meet that schedule. Quality concerns led Yoshi-P to make the call on three extra weeks of development time.

One month isn't enormous in the context of most game development these days, but it is fairly impactful for the audience and overall pace of updates in a live service concern like Final Fantasy 14. Evercold will be the first new expansion for Final Fantasy 14 since the release of Dawntrail in July, 2024.

From the outside, Final Fantasy 14 has struck me as one of the more high-morale MMO communities out there, but I was permanently scarred by peak pandemic, Season of the Worthy Destiny, so my standards might be pretty low. In her 2025 state of the game writeup at the beginning of the Dawntrail era, PCG features producer Mollie Taylor observed that FF14 was in "a pretty weird spot."

But Mollie seems cautiously optimistic for Evercold's promised changes, while a recent roguelike mode added to FF14 has news writer Harvey Randall excited for the upcoming expansion's combat overhaul. Its new class looks pretty dope as well: A viking with two shields, laser cannons, and Wolverine claws.

Back in the '10s, Yacht Club cultivated a reputation as the studio that kept on giving—Shovel Knight Treasure Trove morphed into one of the best deals in the platformer genre, with one free update after another (including full story campaigns) for those who owned the original NES throwback.

But those awaiting the studio's follow-up, Mina the Hollower, spent a long time waiting, and delays left the company in dire need of a hit. "It’s make-or-break for sure," studio co-founder Cris Velasco told Bloomberg last year. "If we sold even 200,000, that would be really, really great. If we sold, like, 100,000, that’s not so good."

Well, we're a few months out from the game's release, when it sold over 500,000 copies in a few weeks, and Yacht Club is to remain afloat "...for now," co-founder Sean Velasco said in a Reddit AMA (via Eurogamer).

The future looks relatively bright for the developer, as other answers in the thread discuss that Mina the Hollower is due for some big updates soon, including randomizer and speedrunning options, and that most of the team is at work on a 3D game. Designer Alec Faulkner didn't provide any details on the unannounced game, other than to say "it’s gonna be soooooooo awesome."

It's good to hear the studio has the wind back in its sails, and it probably helped that Mina was such a hit. It seems set to hold its own the GOTY conversation later this year—and PC Gamer contributing writer Kerry Brunskill gave it a spiffy 90% in their review, calling it "a gloriously gothic combination of ferocious combat and beautiful scenery." If you've had your fill of the game itself, though, there's always Mina's fighting game debut to look forward to.

'Tis the season, spooky season, and I am also one of PCG's RPG guys. Thus, scary RPGs to celebrate the Halloween spirit must be organized and expounded upon. In a genre that often delivers numbers-based power fantasies in no particular rush, it can be difficult to elicit fear from the player. So when that does happen, I am listening, learning, and taking notes.

I've organized the entries in escalating order of scariness, culminating in a game I want to try some day, but freaks me the hell out just by reputation alone.

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

Kotor 2 is one of my favorite games, and it delivers this overall grim, grimy, hopeless atmosphere like nothing else in Star Wars. Many RPGs consolidate their horror into one or two super-freaky parts, and The Sith Lords boasts a few memorable set pieces in this regard.

The academy on Korriban is particularly affecting for me: This ruined, haunted school where untold suffering took place in the relatively recent past. Seeing it in its gruesome prime in Kotor 1 only adds to the effect. You've seen what the beast can do, and now you're poking its corpse.

Shout out as well to the opening bit on Peragus, specifically the part where ghost ship Harbinger docks with the station. The whole sequence is a very fun and loving riff on System Shock, and I'll always remember this gnarly audio log that introduces one of the game's main antagonists.

6. Fallout

Fallout is a series that has reinvented itself over and over again, but no other entry has quite matched the sense of desolation in the 1997 original. Even the most gore-slick, in-your-face edgy portions of Fallout 3 don't quite do it for me in the same way.

More than anything, I just think of the ethering, "nothing is scarier" sight of the Vault Dweller standing alone amid tiles of empty desert, the drone of Mark Morgan's ominous soundtrack your only company⁠—assuming you're not just left in utter silence.

The incongruity of jolly old radio bops used to be a far smaller portion of the Fallout soundscape, with the music more dominated by stuff like "Vat of Goo" and "City of Lost Angels." As far as the visual experience goes, the yawning crater of The Glow remains one of the most quietly disturbing images I've ever seen in a game.

That's to say nothing of The Master. New Vegas' lineup of morally questionable faction leaders are some all-time great videogame antagonists, but they're not as unnerving as The Master. This twisted, gestalt creature gives me pause no matter how many times I two-shot it with a Turbo Plasma Rifle (or talk it into killing itself), and the simultaneous tragedy and inhumanity of its vision creeps me the hell out. And that unique FEV mummy death screen? Fuhgeddaboudit.

3. Lunacid

Lunacid's lonely, forgotten world calls to mind FromSoftware's best, but it's somehow even more cryptic and offputting than the work of that legendarily cryptic, offputting studio. There are plenty of particularly scary levels, for a start: The Accursed Tomb is an early winner, a pitch-dark labyrinth inhabited by faceless zombies, the top halves of their heads removed in a voluntary procedure meant to deliver enlightenment.

But the real freak shit lives in The Mausoleum, a semi-hidden zone patrolled by Death itself. The Grim Reaper will spawn and chase you down whenever you enter this area, lending a frantic urgency to any exploration. Things only get worse if you craft a turbo-hidden sword to kill this otherwise-unkillable foe.

Killing Death messes up your game. In exchange for its powerful scythe, nearly all friendly NPCs disappear, and you'll constantly be chased down by spectre enemies unique to this mode. The Death state can be reversed, but only with a ton of grinding.

This hidden mode, which always reminded me of the evil playthrough of Undertale or Nighttime Anor Londo in Dark Souls, is one of Lunacid's deepest layers of creepy weirdness. But the game is full of stuff like it, a constant process of uncovering new icebergs of lore and mechanics that made me feel like I never fully grasped what was going on.

1. Skald: Against the Black Priory

Skald is one of my favorite RPGs of the decade, maybe all time at this point, and it works on so many levels. As former PCG editor Robin Valentine pointed out in his 2024 preview, there is nothing else like Skald's combo of high fantasy (not quite low fantasy, mid fantasy? That sounds like I'm saying it's "mid") with cosmic horror.

You play as a group of outsiders stumbling onto a Class 5 Cthulhu situation, and while it calls to mind Bloodborne with its portrayal of an outer god-worshipping society, things weren't always like this. Skald provides context, reminders of a world that hasn't gone mad, to elevate the sheer what the hell you're witnessing in the Outer Isles.

It's insane that a game with pixel art graphics can evoke so much dread, and Skald hits you with moments of cosmic revelation that crescendo in one of the most bonkers endings I've ever seen in an RPG, the sheer outer darkness of it all underscored by the lengths Skald goes to make you care about its world and characters. Demon King is more stressful and unpleasant moment-to-moment, but the contrasts of Skald, the rollercoaster ride of its story, owe a lot to how much of a classic-style CRPG it is.

Demon King is a really scary game with RPG elements, while Skald is all the more memorable and horrifying because it is an RPG. And that's why it gets the crown for me.

Too scary to even play: Fear & Hunger

Taking inspiration primarily from Berserk in the first game, Fear & Hunger is an unforgiving voyage to a dark, dark place, one where shocking sexual violence, mutilation, and utter negation of dignity and humanity are explored in lurid detail. There is no compromise with good taste. The fact that these games are allowed on Steam and not the far more tame Horses is just one of those funny things! I'd like both to be there, to be clear.

Fear & Hunger's low-fi JRPG graphics and anime-esque art create the slightest distance from its horrors. The games also, I think, justify their dizzying level of transgressiveness with nuanced storytelling and a uniquely hopeless fantasy world. Fear & Hunger is one of my favorite examples to point to for the value of transgressive art, particularly as it pertains to games.

I'm fascinated by this series. I've read about it, watched let's plays, and spoiled much of the plot. I'd still like to play both games some day⁠—I own them on Steam⁠—but the thought of immersing myself in so much misery and degradation for the duration of a full RPG, let alone two, makes me physically queasy. I'll get around to it eventually.

Honorable Mention: That one part in Fallout 3, and that other part in Fallout 4

The Dunwich Building and Dunwich Borers, respectively. Both twist Bethesda's engine until it screams to make shock flashbacks to before the Great War work, and I just love the deep pool of water with the freaky eye at the bottom in Borers. Stumbling onto these bad boys late at night for the first time, not knowing what to expect? That's Bethesda's capacity to surprise and delight at its best. The rest of these games just aren't that scary⁠, but these moments deserve a shout.

A week ago, I asked PC Gamer readers to nominate the scariest PC games they could think of. I collected the top 16 submissions from that comment section (with some editorial discretion) and randomly seeded a bracket.

After a week of voting, we've finally got a winner. The scariest game on PC is...

🏆 Alien: Isolation 🏆

Some of you called it from the start, and Alien: Isolation plowed through its competition without much resistance, beating SOMA, Darkwood, Silent Hill 2, and finally Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Having a Xenomorph stalker is scary: reconfirmed. "Alien: Isolation completely destroys me, drenching me in sweat and causing me to take leave of my senses," Fraser wrote a couple years ago. It took him 10 years to get up the courage to finish it.

Our runner up is classic first-person horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which entered the final after a close battle with one of its younger siblings, Amnesia: The Bunker.

Solid arguments were made for the scariness of The Bunker, which Ted once said is the scariest game he's ever played, but The Dark Descent was a landmark PC horror game that lodged itself in a lot of our memories 16 years ago as a very scary thing that once happened to us.

Speaking to PC Gamer back in 2010, Frictional Games co-founder Thomas Grip said that their strategy was "to hint at things and then let the players build up an image in their head."

It was a worthy contender, taking out S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and F.E.A.R. before slaying one of its own on its way to the final. But ultimately, it was a harrowing stay on Sevastopol Station that shook PC Gamer readers the most.

If you haven't played any of these games, it's a good time to pick them up. Alien: Isolation is $10 on Steam right now, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent is just $4.

Thank you to everyone who suggested games and voted! We also recently crowned the best RTS unit: a large tank.

There are many scenes from Outlast that are burned into my memory, The Groom's sequence in Outlast's Whistleblower DLC, the finger amputation from the first game, or perhaps it was landing on a bunch of baby bones in Outlast 2. There's quite a lot to pick from over two games, a DLC, and the live service The Outlast Trials. But if Philippe Morin, co-founder of Red Barrels, had to pick the scene that made the team really stop and think about whether this was ok he'd go back to the first game.

For those who don't remember, or perhaps have never played the game, or maybe just wiped the encounter from your memory, as the protagonist Miles Upshur is navigating the abandoned Mount Massive Asylum he stumbles across an inmate engaging in necrophilia. It's a pretty startling moment, and was actually the last thing I thought I'd come across, even in an Outlast game. But that was the whole point of that scene.

"We felt like we needed something that's going to make people think that anything can happen in this game," Morin explains. "Then J.T. Petty, [lead writer for Outlast] came up with this whole dialogue of switching things around, having the [necrophiliac] say to you, 'You like to watch? You're fucked up!' So that was a really nice spin because it turned things around. Because obviously, yes, the player is making the choice to watch. So yeah, I mean that's probably the very first sequence that got a bit [heated]."

The only other time Morin can recall where the team spent so long debating whether or not to include a scene actually happened more recently, in The Outlast Trials. Specifically, the decision to include child mannequins instead of animated children in trials like Grind the Bad Apples or Punish the Miscreants.

Morin explains how the team questioned "what to do with the kids? Do we make them mannequins, or do we have actual characters? At the end of the day it's a bunch of polygons moving. But you know, in the player's mind, it's not the same thing. That was probably where we found our limit. Like, no, let's stick with mannequin kids, and not go too far with that."

This was undoubtedly the right decision. There's plenty of extreme moments in The Outlast Trials with objectives like Pervert the Futterman or Despoil the Auction, the gore and horror already present is more than enough to make players feel uneasy as is—trust me.

But as it is with most games, the best decisions tend to be made by the people who know the series best; its devs. "The team is always the first to react to some of these ideas," Morin says. "So sometimes if people feel like it's alright, let's keep pushing in that direction until like maybe the reaction becomes a little too strong.

"I remember discussing at some point when we went from 20 people to 30-40 people, because most people on the team were not with us for Outlast or Outlast 2, so we had to have a little chat about what kind of conversations are necessary to create this kind of content?

"And sometimes, yes, it might start with a very juvenile, gratuitous idea, but then you have to let it evolve, and be willing to talk around it to come up with an approach that feels scary and satisfying. You gotta be able to have those conversations. We often joke about that at Red Barrels. There are many conversations that would take you to an HR office in other studios, but here it's just part of our daily routine."

If you've played an extraction shooter like Arc Raiders or Marathon, you've probably experienced the agony of trusting another player only for them to shoot you in the head and nick all your stuff. Whenever that happens—and it's happened to me more than I'd like to admit—the same questions run through my head (after the traditional wailing and gnashing of teeth). Was that always going to happen? Did I do something wrong? Should I have said something different? Behaved differently? Or should I have simply foregone any attempt at diplomacy and shot first?

I've often wondered if there's a way to get better at this. Not just to convince other players that I'm not a threat, but to make them not want to shoot me. Conveniently, I recently had the chance to speak to someone who knows a thing or two about resolving such situations, both in videogames and real life.

James 'Pigeon' Fielder is one of only two political scientists in the world who specialise in gaming. Or at least, if there are more than two, Fielder is yet to be made aware of them: "When I talk about my research with fellow political scientists they either look at me like I'm crazy or they go 'Oh, that sounds cool.'"

Political science is the study of governments, which in turns means it's the study of human behaviour at a large-scale, organised level. Areas of interest include policy development, power distribution, and most importantly for us, conflict resolution.

What relevance does this have to games? Fielder answers this himself: "It's almost like taking theories of political science and doing fruit fly experiments, like trying to understand human behaviour, specifically human political behaviour, inside of game worlds," he says. "In a space like EVE Online, we might see political phenomena develop in weeks, months, or years that in real life would take decades or centuries to express themselves."

How does one become a political scientist specialising in games? Well, it's not exactly a job with an established career path, but Fielder arrived at it through his career in the US military, where his lifelong love of TTRPGs resulted in an aptitude for designing wargames. "I was getting groomed to be promoted from specialist to sergeant, and to be promoted, I had to demonstrate that I could teach a class," he says. "So I decided to build a class on a task that integrated roleplaying game elements. Why it seemed like a good idea at the time, I can't recall. All I know is that everybody had a great time."

Fielder's commanding officers took notice: "Once you get that stink on you in the military, like 'Oh Fielder, can you build another exercise for us?' You build another exercise, and they would get bigger and bigger," he says. "To date, the biggest exercise I've ever designed was for 5,000 people that ran 168 hours."

Fielder eventually switched from the US Army to the US Air Force and was hired by the Air Force Academy to teach political science. "My degrees are in history and national security … but it was political science who hired me." During a lesson on social capital or "why do people trust each other" as Fielder puts it, one student asked a question—can people develop trust in online games the same way they do in person?

"Like a good scientist, I went 'Huh, I don't know. Let me look that up," Fielder says. "That's when I started learning why games are so effective at bringing people together."

To very briefly summarise why games are effective in this manner: while the scenarios games present are fictional, the feelings they produce in the people playing them are very real. Anyone who has rage-quit a game will understand this. But games are also capable of producing more complex emotions and imagined states of being.

With roleplaying games in particular, they encourage people to inhabit personalities and mental states other than their own. In the right circumstances, these feelings can help instil empathy or new perspectives in people. "A [prison] inmate, for example, might put on the character of a lawful good hero," Fielder posits. "Now, when I'm supposed to be stealing from people, or using violence or vandalism, I'm going to play a Paladin, and now I'm inculcating what it's like to be a lawful good Paladin. I get debriefed at the end of the game, and I go 'Oh, it actually felt good. It felt good to be playing that different person.'"

Fielder has applied these techniques in a military context, such as forecasting the outcome of elections in Afghanistan as he discussed in a 2023 TeDX talk. But since retiring from the military, he's also applied these techniques in a civilian context, running games and exercises for businesses, prisons, and other institutions.

What's especially interesting, though, is that the lessons learned from playing out scenarios in the real world can then feed back into games and game design. To take the latter first, alongside his political science work, Fielder is also an RPG designer and design consultant: "When I run games at conventions and I run one shots, if it's an invention that I've designed, I work to try to maximise the amount of agency players have," he says.

"Players want to feel like they're powerful and can do something cool, even if it's an unforgiving setting like Call of Cthulhu …. Where the lethality is high, players like to think that the decisions they make matter, and when they do, when the dice work against them and they can see the dice fall, they're more likely to accept it as fair."

Likewise, players can deploy techniques for deescalation and establishing trust used in the real world in games too, which is where we circle back to extraction shooters. Fielder starts by pointing out that the rules of the game must support cooperation to begin with. "If it's a game like the original iteration of PUBG, then that's impossible because you know that 'The only way to win is I have to kill everybody.'"

This might seem obvious. But it's also applicable on a sliding scale—the more explicit and involved the rules are for cooperation, the more likely players will use them. This is why you're more likely to see cooperation in Arc Raiders than Marathon. While Marathon has the capacity for cooperative play, this idea hasn't filtered through to the playerbase in the way it did with Arc Raiders, perhaps because of its faster TTK, or its friendly callout being less clear than Arc Raiders' 'Don't Shoot!'

But assuming that the rules apply and there's at least a base level of comprehension. "The best way—it's not foolproof—is to approach without visible weapons. If there's a way to have an emoticon where you can have your hands outstretched … and this comes from my military background, [it] demonstrates 'Look, my hands are empty, and it's very difficult for me to grab a weapon, even in a videogame.'"

In addition, Fielder says trust is established a lot faster if you have something to offer and offer it freely. "I don't expect anything in return except let's not fight," he says. "The more valuable that item is, the more receptive your audience will be." He concedes that there is a risk here. "If you offer something very valuable they [might] go, 'Oh, maybe he has more stuff.'"

Fielder has spent much of his life studying and using games as a method to resolve conflict. But there is one area of conflict where a solution still eludes him, and that's within the gaming community itself. "It actually hurts me when I see social differences in the gaming space, gatekeepers over racial differences, gender differences, or players [who] are angered with each other," he says.

"In reality, one of the best places to overcome differences with people is a game. You learn, you sit down to play, you work together to overcome an objective," Fielder continues. "Gaming should be the most inclusive space in the world. And why it's not always that case, I don't know."

Thus far, Funcom has focussed mainly on changes to its survival MMO Dune: Awakening, with the Norwegian studio reworking the entire game to function as both a solo experience and a PvE adventure. Now that overhaul is done, however, Funcom is now set on expanding players' adventures on Arrakis, having just announced a free expansion that adds a new and completely different map to explore.

Coming in December, the Blood and Ice DLC will let players depart the searing sands of Arrakis for the planet's frozen north, adding a new survival map called the Polar Sink that flips the game's central survival concept on its head. Rather than avoiding the heat, players will actively have to seek it out, while also developing new technologies to help them adapt to the extreme change in climate.

There's some variance within this environment too. The Polar Sink is composed of two different biomes, the tundra and the icecap. While the icecap is the more extreme of the two, both areas are closely guarded by "water shippers", wealthy traders who supply Arrakis' second most-valuable resource from the polar regions down to the deserts. Players' primary objective in the DLC will be breaking the water shippers' stranglehold on the ice, which they can then use to cool their base equipment back in the desert and speed up resource production.

Funcom says that the expansion adds "around 35 hours of new progression", which sounds pretty beefy for a free DLC. It also apparently "brings the focus back to ground-level survival" for veteran players, "traversal, temperature management and combat all playing important roles in your progression."

Blood and Ice will be released on December 1. Alongside the expansion, Funcom has also introduced a Cosmetics Store to Awakening, and is also working on several other heavily requested features. These include an offline single-player mode that's coming in November (the game can be played solo right now, but only with an Internet connection) and fully supported cross-play in January next year.

Funcom also says that Blood and Ice represents "another step in the ongoing development of Dune: Awakening" and that it will "continue expanding the game" through 2027. This falls in line with the studio's recent announcement that it was pivoting to exclusively support its existing games—which includes Conan Exiles alongside Dune: Awakening—and was laying off an unspecified number of employees as a result of that shift in strategy.

Id Software has tightened its relationship with fellow shooter specialists MachineGames according to studio co-director Marty Stratton, after Xbox laid off roughly half of the Doom developer's employees earlier this year.

Stratton was asked how the studio was doing following Xbox's massive job cuts at a recent press event for Doom: The Dark Ages' Revelations DLC (via IGN) and he was keen to assure everyone that things are hunky dory at the legendary FPS developer.

"We're doing great," Stratton explained. "Not to handwave the [layoffs] away … everybody knows we had about half of our studio exit as part of that. But there was a very deliberate effort to make sure that we were incredibly viable coming out of that across everything we do, across game development and [the] technology department."

As part of its response to those layoffs, id Software has apparently deepened its ties with MachineGames, developers of Wolfenstein: The New Order and, more recently, the excellent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

"We're working more closely with MachineGames than ever," Stratton said. "We've always had a very close partnership with them, but I think we're at the point with technology development that both teams are incredibly talented and have incredibly talented engineers and we're really on an amazing path that had started pre-[layoffs]. We'd kicked this off earlier this year. We're really excited about that. We're both really, really bullish on what we have ahead.

Stratton's comments have led to speculation that the two developers may be cooperating on Wolfenstein 3, which MachineGames is rumoured to be working on. Id Software has just concluded active development of Doom: The Dark Ages following the expansions' release, so this is possible. What's interesting to me, however, is how Stratton repeatedly references technology.

The id Software layoffs heavily impact the developer's Frankfurt arm, including numerous designers of the formidable id-tech engine. This led to fears that id-tech was being shelved. Microsoft contradicted this, though further reports left the question open. But Stratton's comments lead me to believe we might be seeing a tech alignment between the two developers as a result of those Frankfurt layoffs.

While id Software built Doom: The Dark Ages on id-tech 8, MachineGames used a modified version of id-tech 7, called Motor, for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The fact that Stratton references both teams' "incredibly talented engineers" suggests to me that id Software is folding MachineGames' engine programmers directly into id-tech's ongoing development, with both teams working on the engine concurrently going forward. Assuming that id tech hasn't been canned outright, this approach would make sense given the expertise id Software lost from its Frankfurt arm.

Sadly, the layoffs that affected id Software were far from the last at Xbox. After cutting 1600 jobs in the summer, Xbox initiated a second wave of layoffs in September that also saw Obsidian and Bethesda merge and put Activision in charge of Halo. Further Xbox layoffs are planned leading up to January 2027, while Microsoft more broadly has offered a "voluntary exit offer" to over a quarter of its workforce.

Final Fantasy 14 released a new typing minigame recently—you hop on over to the Gold Saucer, you rock up with a party of four, and you compete with each other to see how many waves you can defeat with the literal power of words. It's a fun little laugh, and as someone who types for a living, I spent a couple hours getting all of my rewards from it.

But not everyone has had as much fun as I—someone who has spent arguably too much of their life in front of a keyboard—am having. Typing speeds among MMO players vary greatly, despite it being the predominant form of communication. This became incredibly obvious to me when I sat down and tip-tapped my way through this mode.

Some players, I left in the dust—others I was level-pegging with, and some of them seemed blessed with divine powers of fingerwork (stop giggling) that left me agog. Also some people were just using bots, but hey, not everyone who's faster than me did. Which got me thinking—you, my fellow MMO players. How fast do you type?

If you're not familiar with your own speed, I invite you to go on your WPM tester of choice (there are plenty on Google) and pump some numbers.

For reference, most sites put the average keyboard typist at 40-60 WPM. I, a person, who does this for a living, average around 130-140 WPM on a site like Monkeytype, which doesn't require any capitalisation or many unfamiliar words. Putting the effort into proper punctuation and spelling on other tests slows me down to around 110-120 WPM (in both cases I'm pretty accurate, between 95-98%).

But then again, I grew up playing videogames on my PC (you might call me a PC Gamer) and MMOs were my jam, so I got a lot of practice; which is part of why I'm curious as to how you, dear reader, match up. Furthermore, do you reckon that your time in MMOs has made you better at typing and improved your grammar? Feel free to share your own experience with the wonderful English language in the comments down below.

Anthropic has updated Claude Opus 5.5 to "steer it away" from letting users clone other developers' games, after weeks of Steam being overrun with AI slop and outcries from the game development community.

In an update spotted by X user Chasm (via Game Developer) Anthropic added a new rule to Claude Code's "Rules". Listed under "tengu_heron_brook", the rule reads, "Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user's own designs and assets. Do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original."

The addition was later confirmed by Addy Osmani, a member of Anthropic's technical staff. In a response to Chasm's post, Osmani stated, "We added two sentences to Claude Code's prompt on Opus 5.5 to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy."

Osmani added that "original games, genre games, and games built from your own design are meant to keep working. We'll continue to iterate to ensure that we're striking the right balance. In the meantime, if Claude turns down something that's yours, send it my way."

Opus 5.5 has proved adept at reverse engineering code, causing all manner of disruption within the games industry. The effects range from rapid decompiling of old console games to the PS5 being jailbroken.

Anthropic's latest change arrives in the wake of multiple reports from game developers that their games and demos have been flagrantly copied with the aid of AI. This has led several studios to cancel planned public demos of their games for fear that the code in those demos will be reverse engineered and used to create AI clones.

This all occurred within the broader issue of Steam witnessing a massive influx of low-effort, vibe-coded games, many of which are heavy imitations or direct copies of existing titles. While low effort game clones are not a new issue within the games industry, the most recent Steam Next Fest saw the number of showcased demos double over the previous event, with AI assisted games accounting for most of that increase.

Valve itself has admitted that Steam has a problem with AI slop. But the company is reluctant to resolve the issue by simply banning AI coding tools. At Steam's Indie Connect event last week, Valve's Tom Giardino explained that Valve doesn't want "to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use."

As for what Valve does plan to do about the problem, Giardino didn't have a specific answer, only that "making Steam a smarter and more dynamic platform is the starting point of our philosophy." In the meantime, he suggested that developers make their games harder to copy, stating "you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality and creativity that stem from your own perspective."

While it's true that the games being cloned are often small and not especially complex, it's worth pointing out that many of the most important games released in the last few years are relatively simple designs. Games like Vampire Survivors, Balatro and Peak are all built upon elementary concepts. And yes, those games have spawned endless imitators. But it's one thing to riff on their ideas with your own design, quite another to lift their codebase wholesale.

The Outlast series has been providing horror fans with some of the most grotesque and outrageous scenes for 13 years, and to over 50 million players. The most surprising thing about all of that, though, isn't how it's able to keep players terrified, it's that no one else has tried to capitalise on its success.

Sure, there've been games which have had their fair share of gore involved, Resident Evil 7, Harvester, or Agony are just a few that come to mind. But none of them have either managed to top the gore seen in Outlast and also achieve its continued success.

I decided that no one else would be better to ask about this strange phenomenon than Red Barrels' co-founder Philippe Morin, but he seems just as confused as I am that Outlast hasn't had any imitators: "Honestly, I don't know. Sometimes I ask myself the same thing, but I'm glad that we're still different from other games because it can be so hard. There's thousands games coming out on Steam every year. So that's a lot of other games people can decide to spend time with."

But that doesn't mean the Red Barrels team doesn't get a scare every now and then. "Sometimes there's a game coming up, and we're like, 'alright, this one is probably gonna be the next Outlast'," Morin says. "But so far [nothing's come of them]. It's maybe a combination of different things. The fact that there is no combat or the gore [is lacking]."

My working theory as to why no one has attempted to ride the coattails of Outlast is simply because it's so hard to find the edge of what's acceptable in those kinds of games. Red Barrels has always managed to walk the razor thin line of outrageous horror while managing not to tip over into gratuity that's no longer fun to watch or be a part of. It's a hard task, and one that a mainstream game may not want to gamble with, or a newer studio may not get right the first time around.

Red Barrels has managed to find itself in an incredible circumstance of being experienced enough to truly understand how to push gore to its limits while also being a small enough studio that it doesn't need to break into a mainstream market.

"We're happy to be part of a niche and be successful within that niche," Morin adds. "We don't try to, or I should say, it's not part of our internal dialog that we need to make this more mass market or we need to reach a wider audience. Obviously, we want as many people as possible to play the game, but we don't want to let that dilute or become something that takes our focus away from what makes an Outlast game. If we ever decide that we need to be more mass market, then we'll just come up with a different IP or call it something else."

Edge magazine unleashed a whopper of a 16-page feature all about Grand Theft Auto 6 earlier this week. After poring over every paragraph multiple times, one thing really stuck out to me: It feels like Rockstar is pushing for a more realistic, grounded experience.

Those two words might sound like an absolute nightmare to some GTA aficionados. It's not like the series has never known how to be serious or gritty—see Grand Theft Auto 4—but it's always facilitated chaos with relative ease. Outlandish weapons, an easily gamed wanted system, NPCs that feel more like props to be mowed down than anything with a personality. If I wanted to hop in and wreak a little criminal havoc for a while, I wouldn't find much hardship in wriggling out of trouble as soon as I was bored.

But it sounds like creating that sort of pandaemonium in GTA 6 is no longer as free as it once was. Police will remember what you looked like, if you were working alone or alongside an accomplice, and any weapon you were carrying. It'll use that information to fight back against the anarchy you orchestrate. It's not just police presence, either. Edge describes chaos as a third participant—no longer just your own, but the way the world reacts to your behaviour: would-be vigilante NPCs stepping in, carjackings going wrong thanks to modern tracking technology.

And you know what? I'm completely here for it. Sure, we're perhaps losing a little bit of that all-out, sky-high criminal power fantasy. I'm probably not going to be able to pull a rocket launcher out of my invisible butt arsenal anymore—Edge notes that larger weaponry instead gets stored inside your car—and I wonder if the world is going to let me lob a hundred sticky bombs at a plane without consequence anymore. But when it's all in the name of a more detailed, more involved-feeling world? I honestly believe that a little bit of grounding is going to make it feel all the more satisfying.

Puzzling out how to gradually return to the shadows is that little extra bit of flavour I've been craving from the series. Even if it is something as simple as a wardrobe change, the modern-day equivalent of going and getting your car spray-painted mid-chase. But co-head Phil Hooker also describes things like jumping on a bus out of sight of any CCTV or witnesses—if police didn't see you get on the bus, there's no way of figuring out where you ended up once you're safely distanced from the scene (or scenes) of the crime.

And ultimately, I don't feel like a more detailed, realistic reaction to my crime sprees dulls their buzz. I don't think Rockstar is trying to stop people from playing the game the way they always have, but instead inviting more ways to let the chaos ripple out and a greater incentive to work strategically on reeling things back in. And while it might feel a little different initially—at least, I should hope it will with 13 years of technological advancement behind Rockstar since GTA 5—I'm confident that the level of depth these sorts of tweaks afford will have even the most hardcore pedestrian-mowers in our midst converted before long.

Valve recently admitted that it has a problem with AI slop games and clones flooding Steam—it doesn't know what to do about it just yet, but it at least acknowledges that it's an issue. Now we have Roblox, speaking from the other side of that coin in its Q3 2026 shareholder letter, in which it bragged that the July release of Build, its AI-powered "prompt-to-game creation tool," users have published more than 70,000 games.

"During the last three months, we have witnessed an inflection point in AI adoption and content generation in the gaming industry overall, and on Roblox in particular," the letter states. "AI-enabled game creation, automation in code generation and AI supported asset creation are leading to an explosion of content. The time it takes to go from an idea to a playable game is compressing dramatically, and so is the time it takes to adapt a game for new devices."

The "explosion of content" remark is what jumps out at me first and foremost. Is that really a good thing—content, in explosive quantities? That is essentially what Valve is facing on Steam that's widely considered a problem—an ever-growing mountain of content—yet in the world of Roblox, it's a feature, not a bug. And Roblox is not looking to stem the tide.

"We have been embracing AI to accelerate creation since the first release of Roblox Studio Assistant in December 2023," the letter continues. "Over the past month, more than 80% of the top 100 games on Roblox (ranked by hours engaged) used AI tools to accelerate creation, and the number of daily asset uploads to the Roblox cloud tripled month-over-month.

"Since Q2, time spent using AI tools (including Build, Studio Assistant, and external AI via MCP) tripled among our top creators, and those using our MCP server daily grew nearly 5x. In Q3, Break and Steal an Egg and Huss Valley were both created almost entirely with AI and both broke into the Roblox top 20 (ranked by concurrent players). Build is our new prompt-to-game creation tool. Since its alpha launch in New Zealand, Singapore, Serbia and Thailand, more than 500,000 users have used Build—and have published over 70,000 games."

Take a moment to think about that: Build launched in July, five months ago, which means we're looking at a rough average of 14,000 games per month. And that's with Build still not fully launched yet, so only a fairly small portion of the Roblox userbase has access to it. I can't help but wonder, with a certain sense of alarm, what will happen when the doors are opened to more populous parts of the world.

Roblox, however, says it is "uniquely positioned to capture this moment," which is seeing "traditional barriers to software and content creation" giving way to a focus on "distribution, audience aggregation, monetization, discovery, and safety."

To further capitalize on that, Roblox has kicked off two new initiatives: Roblox Everywhere, revealed in September as a way to make Roblox games playable outside of the Roblox platform, and the Universal Player, which is basically the reverse of that: "AI is used to seamlessly import any existing game into the Roblox cloud platform while transforming it to run multiplayer, on any device (at the upper edge of the device's performance capabilities), with instant join, instant UGC updates, local 3D, and access to Roblox services for discovery, safety, communication, and monetization."

That's interesting: Details are scant but the idea seems to be to make Roblox a platform for all game developers, akin to Steam, GOG, or the PlayStation Store, with minimal fuss or muss: Just make your game, then zippity-pow it through the AI machine, and suddenly you've got a full-on Roblox game and access to a massive audience that previously would've been much more of a headache to reach. And Roblox gets basically the same: Its goal "is to capture 10% of the global gaming market and an even greater share in the US."

"As content becomes abundant, attention and connection become scarce," the letter says, extolling the virtues of Roblox's platform. "What sets our distribution apart is that it runs on social connections: people come to Roblox to play with their friends, so every new game can reach players through an existing social graph, through friends inviting friends, and through social influencers, which we believe enables great content to find its ideal audience faster than on any other platform."

Maybe Roblox is right. Hell, maybe EA chief Andrew Wilson was right—maybe the future really is all about billions of people cranking out content while corporations fight over where to put it all. It's hard to argue that Roblox hasn't put up serious shareholder value so far, after all, and while Steam doesn't have shareholders it's still making bank, AI slop problem or no. Still, I can't say that making speed and quantity the key indicators of success really represents the kind of future for videogaming that I'd like.

After three years of invite-only playtests, Soulframe is opening its doors to everyone next week on November 6. If you've been waiting to see what the developers of Warframe are doing with a fantasy action RPG, you'll finally be able to jump in and see for yourself.

The transition to an open alpha will be followed by a massive transformation to the structure of the game later in November. Midrath, Soulframe's big open landmass, won't be the verdant, almost chill, place it used to be: The entire area will be corrupted and it's your job to bring it back to life. "You're going to enter a game that is much more unforgiving and harsh at first glance," creative director Geoff Crookes explained in a recent presentation attended by PC Gamer.

This update, Prelude 17 or Verse of the Veillands, is a huge shift for Soulframe, but an important one that will help new players acclimate to the world. Crookes said the goal is to improve the onboarding experience and to give players "much more ownership" over their decisions early on. It won't be fully finished yet, however, so what's in there today is just "the functional bones" of what will come in the final game.

Feedback from players who struggled to reach the point of the game where they could freely explore the open world convinced the team there needed to be a more direct intro. In Verse of the Veilands, the main quest will teach you how to stop the siphons draining the world of its color. Enemies and resources you encounter will change as each zone is restored and side activities, like fishing, will become available. You'll also be able to raise a wolf pup into a full-on mount.

"The system is also helping the worldbuilding," Crookes said. Pages and pages of new writing for each faction leader will be added and you'll start to hear them radio in and fill you in on the history of the world. The team said it wants them to have a more "integrated" role in your journey as you work to cleanse Midrath of the corruption.

A new Pact, Soulframe's equivalent of a class (or a Warframe), will be added, too. The name of it was still undecided during the presentation, but the developers described it as a "hunter, poacher-type Pact" related to the alien Ode race. Equipping it will let you tie enemies together with a sci-fi bola, pierce them with a cone of spikes, and send them flying away by attaching a giant balloon to them à la Metal Gear Solid 5.

The developers stressed that there's a lot packed into Verse of the Veilands, so much so that they were still tweaking things days before the presentation. Crookes and McGregor nervously expressed that it would "hopefully" be done in time for today, but it seems it won't quite make it in time. That said, the plan is for the update to be out before the end of the next month, so new players might want to wait until then.

"I think this is probably one of the biggest, most violent changes we've made to the structure of the game in a long while," lead designer Scott McGregor said. "Paired with open Preludes is nerve-wracking and we hope players and the feedback stays positive."

The final (final_vfinal_finalfinal.exe) version of everything in Verse of the Veilands will be shown during a stream later today on the Soulframe Twitch channel.

I've made peace with our 2026 list and accepted that a few of my most anticipated releases may wind up on our new PC games 2027 calendar instead. That's good news for me—legend has it I cannot be slain by my enemies until I've played Gen Atlas, Blight, and The Expanse RPG. Oddly specific win conditions, I know.

My picks remain dateless, much like Grand Theft Auto 6 on PC, but other 2027 release dates are starting to trickle in with Fable, Exodus, and Final Fantasy 7 Revelation among the early headliners. Here's hoping your favorites get penciled in soon, too. Until then, here's our new PC games 2027 calendar.

New PC games to watch in 2027

January

February