From the archives: This article originally ran in PC Gamer #326 (UK, January 2019).

Something I miss when I play digital games is the tactile side of play. It’s why videogames and board games coexist in my life so beautifully. One allows for complexity beyond what a pen-and-paper can track, and the other offers tokens to hold, boards to construct, people to physically turn to as you play. Somewhere in the middle are a wonderful selection of videogames where you feel compelled to take notes.

I’m not talking about games which demand you fetch a sheet of paper as part of the experience. These are games where my experience just happens to spill over into the real world as drawings and words. The ones where I decide to keep my thoughts straight by idly jotting down words, phrases, the location of a treasure to come back to or an area to investigate more thoroughly.

After a while the odd word or two becomes a page, perhaps even a map. Arrows allow paragraphs to put out little runners, setting down roots in blank spaces and fruiting whole new clusters of notes.

Playing detective

Her Story is one such game. The interface allows you to store a certain amount of information—you can add tags for each video clip, and keep a handful saved for reference. What it doesn’t offer is a way to note all the different potential search terms a new clip throws up and which you want to work through when you’re constantly being sidetracked.

To stop myself forgetting, I reached for my notebook. A record of the victim started to accumulate on one page while the local pub formed another hub. The left side filled up with keywords. One cluster of notes tried to follow outfit changes but it got hemmed in by a lost baby, a widowed midwife, mushrooms, mirrors and a forensic entomologist.

I had enough for a basic solution to the crime after a couple of hours so that’s tangled in there, too. But so many words remained uninvestigated and I wanted to check my working, so I kept going. The result is a section of notebook brimming with curiosity. I like it not so much because it’s a useful record of information—my notes are as baffling to me as to a stranger once the game has faded from memory—but because the volume of writing, and the energetic connections make visible parts of the process of playing a game.

My Return of the Obra Dinn notes take on a different form, but the affection I feel is the same. Having spent the majority of the game keeping all the information in my head or using the map and crew documents as reference points, I reached for my notepad. I needed to cross reference a lot of objects and a lot of names to make progress.

Instead of evidence swelling into lumps of story on the page like it did in Her Story, that part happened in my head and my notebook was about ruling out possibilities. Numbers and names have circles round them, grouping them in ways which are already fading from my mind. These pages feel more like a code because of the shorthand and abstractions.

Different again are my esports notes. For Dota, League and Smite I’m in the habit of recording each match at an event in my book. Every match starts with the list of players and which characters they’ve picked as well as who got banned. It’s a ritual that helps me settle in for a game as much as a journalistic reference. After all, I could just check VODs or a wiki for that data if I forget.

Match report

Writing character names over and over helps me absorb trends in the game—it gives them an analogue feel as well as their digital flavour. Sometimes I write out skillsets for characters I haven’t played in a while. And then it’s just whatever feels noteworthy from the match. Key kills, maybe, and big fights, weird decisions, unusual item choices.

But I also add scrappy sketches and during a tense game the breathlessness and excitement on the screen leaves a mark in my book. The writing gets faster, harder to read apart from upper case explosions of record- keeping, and it’s smothered in ellipses and exclamation marks.

The notes I make around games—scrawled maps to remind me of a route, gold marker pen spiders nudging up against swearwords, lists of murder suspects that span double page spreads—are some of my fondest possessions. They allow a digital pursuit to spill over into the physical world and express so much time, excitement and mental energy.

Just don’t ask me what they mean!

One of the special pleasures in any medieval game is getting to field a trebuchet. In an era where warfare was largely a contest of who can keep people swinging their unfriendliest sticks around the longest before they get hungry enough to leave, there's a sort of giddiness that comes with being the guy who's weaponized the higher art of applied physics to fling half-ton boulders better than any run-of-the-mill onager could ever hope to.

Sadly, there have in fact been real human beings who were unfortunate enough to be in the way of those boulders over the years, and as reported earlier this week by Science, researchers have identified a skeleton they believe could very well be the first confirmed trebuchet casualty in the archaeological record.

The skeleton in question is Skeleton 150, one of a number of skeletons dating back to the 1300s that were unearthed during excavations beneath the chapel of Stirling Castle in Scotland in 1997. Skeleton 150 was one of five whose bones bore the evidence—cut marks, puncture wounds, blunt force trauma—of having died violently.

The injuries that Skeleton 150 had sustained were particularly interesting to University of Bradford bioarchaeologist Jo Buckberry, who later examined the remains in cooperation with Historic Environment Scotland and presented her findings at the 25th European Paleopathology Association meeting.

Because the five battle-damaged skeletons had been buried beneath the castle chapel rather than outside its walls as would have been typical, Buckberry concluded they might have died during the sieges Stirling Castle endured—and ultimately fell to—at the close of the 13th century. A strategic keystone for Scottish forces, the castle was a coveted prize, eventually succumbing to the armies of Edward I at the end of a prolonged siege in 1304.

Skeleton 150, however, was extremely battle-damaged. The warrior's bones had suffered over 160 fractures, including a ruined leg, a massive, jagged break through the shoulder, roughly five dozen unusual breaks throughout the ribs, and 61 distinct fractures across the skull. This was not a man who tumbled off a horse, or even a parapet.

This was a soldier who was all but exploded.

"It looks like he was hit from behind by something traveling at a great velocity. The most similar cases I was finding were car crashes and people hit by trains," Buckberry told Science. "But how do you get from there to a guy in medieval Scotland? What is large and moving very, very quickly in 1304?"

There aren't many candidates for what could cause this kind of damage during the time period, so I'll give you a hint: It was probably something flung by a trebuchet, the counter-weighted siege engine that first appeared in Europe about a century prior. And the English who laid siege to Stirling Castle in 1304 fielded a particularly nasty one: Called the Loup-de-Guerre, or "The War Wolf," the massive weapon was considered the largest trebuchet ever built. One account of the siege, compiled in the Flores Historiarum, says its missiles "pierced the two outer walls … like an arrow through cloth."

That sort of impact is unfortunate for anyone just on the other side of those walls, as Skeleton 150's breaks "indicate a very large area of impact and devastation," Buckberry said. "It’s likely the individual was killed by a siege engine."

A gruesome end, and a tragic way to be remembered by history. Ah, well—at least nobody captured the moment in a Bannerlord clip.

Nightdive's System Shock remake is great. PC Gamer immsim guy Joshua Wolens gave it an 80% review score, and we later chose it as the Best Remake of 2023 in our annual Game of the Year awards. Three years down the road, Nightdive is following it up with System Shock VR, a VR game being developed by Flat2VR Studios.

This is, going by the Steam description, a straight VR translation of the original game rather than a Half-Life: Alyx-style spinoff: You were caught hacking into TriOp, Edward Diego offered you a deal, you took it, and six months later that whole Citadel Station thing has kicked off.

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go play System Shock. It's on sale for $15 on GOG and the Humble Store, if you insist on a Steam key.)

That's fine, there's no need to mess with success, and the Shodan origin story is a classic. But I'm a bit baffled about who this is actually for. VR adoption remains relatively minuscule: The percentage of Steam users with VR headsets, as reported by the Steam Hardware and Software Survey (which doesn't reflect the whole of the Steam user base, but nonetheless "is incredibly helpful to us as we make decisions about what kinds of technology investments to make and products to offer") remains well below 2%, and while the Meta Quest and PSVR2 headsets will also be supported, even with them in the mix it represents a tiny slice of the overall gaming audience.

Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is an apt example: It looked pretty good (for a VR game, anyway), it's based on a classic, beloved property, it was well received by players and critics alike—and it peaked at 233 concurrent players on Steam. Publisher Vertigo Games closed one of its studios in June, just six months after Legacy of Shadow launched, saying "the VR market remains a challenging space."

It's possible that converting System Shock from a conventional FPS to a VR game isn't a big deal, and that the resources required are relatively minimal, but I'm not inclined to think so. I do think System Shock could be quite good (for a VR game, anyway), but whether that's enough to make it a success is a different question entirely.

System Shock VR is up for wishlisting now on Steam. A release date hasn't been announced.

Are you someone who spends almost as much time creating your characters as you do playing them in an RPG? Love obsessing over the details of your avatar's facial features, browsing the menu of noses, eyes, ears, and facial hair for ages? Think you're good enough that you could make your character look so much like someone else that you could fool people?

Good, because Legion Was Here is a game that spends more time in the character creator than it does anywhere else, and if you can't create a convincing character, you die.

In Legion Was Here you're a spy. Scratch that: you're the spy. This game is the opposite of James Bond walking into every undercover situation and saying "Hi, I'm James Bond." You're gifted at stealing someone's identity and impersonating them down to the very finest detail, mimicking them so expertly that their friends, family, and associates will have no idea they're talking to an imposter. At least, that's the idea.

Your mission begins on the operating table, where you page through a dossier of information about the person you're going to be replacing. What color and shape are their eyes? What hairstyle do they have? Is their nose big or small, wide or narrow? Try to match their looks precisely enough that you'll be able to fool the people that know them well.

But it's not as simple as just looking at a photo and picking the parts that match. In the demo I played—the full game is due later this year—I've only got a partial photo of someone I'm trying to duplicate, which shows their mouth, ear, chin, and nothing else. For the rest, I've only got a drawing to go off, and it's not super helpful because it looks like it was drawn by a child. I'm pretty sure my target doesn't really look like this:

Did I mention Legion Was Here can be a bit silly? It can. At least I can gather that my target has curly hair, green eyes, and a narrow nose, so I add those features to my own face, and hope like hell the blue crayon that was used means his hair is actually blue.

But it's no use being someone's doppelganger if your disguise can't stand up to scrutiny, so the dossier is also filled with details about that person: where they're from, what they do for a living, their favorite foods, their hobbies, and more. Before the mission you don't know what questions you might be asked, so you have to learn as much as possible.

That's a lot of information to absorb: after the tutorial, the first real mission of the demo is filled with pictures, newspaper clippings, and lots of other notes and files, and that takes ages to pore over. On the plus side, you don't need to memorize everything: you can create a crib sheet by writing notes on your hand like you're in middle school trying to pass a geography test.

Once you're ready, or think you're ready, you set off on your mission. If you didn't get the looks precisely right, the people you're talking to will be suspicious, and as they ask you question after question, even a few small slip-ups can blow your cover. There's nothing worse than looking at your hand covered in notes and discovering you didn't write down the one piece of information that could help you during interrogation.

Did I say it was a bit silly? It's extremely silly: the demo mission has me impersonate a guy who is actually an alien from Neptune in a human disguise, who also likes dressing like a clown. The aliens' dastardly plot is to blow up Mount Rushmore, and you have to endure lots of questions and suspicions from the Neptunians before you get the chance to thwart their evil plan.

The Legion Was Here demo is a lot of fun and surprisingly tricky: the dossier is really packed with information and it's hard to tell what'll be useful on your mission and what won't. On my first try, my disguise as an alien disguised as a human disguised as a clown was convincing enough, but I fell apart under questioning and the Neptunians killed me.

On my second try I succeeded, however, even after a human sheriff showed up and I had to convince him I was a human and not an alien disguised as one. Funny stuff! I'm looking forward to playing more when Legion Was Here releases later this year. You can play the demo on Steam.

In a few months, Nintendo will release a shiny remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Switch 2. Given its reputation as one of Nintendo's crown jewels, I imagine it will be remarkably faithful to the original, but with new graphics, some tweaks to the controls, and a few other modern touches—like the kinds we've been able to play Ocarina of Time with on PC since 2022.

Ocarina of Time's unofficial PC port Ship of Harkinian, developed by a group dedicated to reverse-engineering the Nintendo 64 game and painstakingly rewriting its code, has a built-in randomizer, accessibility options like text-to-speech, and literally hundreds of enhancements, from autosaving to tunable difficulty to ultrawide to high framerate support. There are options as granular as letting Link unsheathe his sword without attacking and disabling certain graphical effects so that they can be replaced with mods.

Speaking of mods: There are hundreds of those, too, letting you use the character models from the 2011 3DS port, make the UI HD, or play as Wario if you're freaky like that. OOT's unofficial port was a rarity back in 2022, but today it's part of a bustling corner of the hobby game development scene, where hundreds of fans are reverse-engineering old games to make them playable on modern hardware (primarily PC and Android).

There are both PC ports based on fully rewritten games like OOT, but there are also new frameworks for bypassing a lot of that time-consuming work, including N64 Recompiled, ReXGlue for the Xbox 360 and RecompOne for the original PlayStation. Developing a recompilation is still a major undertaking, done for free by skilled developers on their personal time, but it's far more approachable now than it's ever been.

This scene has its challenges—namely an influx of low-effort, AI vibe coded slop that frustrates the developers who've put years of time and sweat into the tools that make these projects possible. And there are, of course, hype-at-all-costs YouTube channels that rush to make videos on each new announcement without investigating whether or not they're AI rush jobs that will never be fully faithful to the original games.

But even with those problems, I'm still going to plant a flag in the ground right here and declare that static recompilation, the go-to technique for porting retro console games to modern systems, is the most exciting thing going on in videogames here in 2026.

As my colleague Morgan Park recently pointed out in his editorial Embrace the great Tech Pause, the timing couldn't be better. Because the games are old and the process of converting the code to a modern language your PC understands is much more efficient than emulating the entire console, recompiled games can run extremely well on really modest hardware.

Morgan called out the "magical experience" of playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess port Dusklight, which runs at 90 fps on the Steam Deck:

"It's an amazing package—both a remaster and a community update bundle—that outclasses Nintendo's own preservation work with modern resolution support, high framerates, and quality-of-life toggles. Within minutes I had Dusklight recognizing the gyro of my Steam controller, enabling bow motion aiming that's better than a Wiimote… Not only are these hand-crafted ports a huge win for preservation, but they inject new life into out-of-print classics while also making them more accessible."

Just this year we've seen notable recompilations for more games than I can keep track of (though filtering out the questionably coded ones narrows the list a bit).

Here are a handful of notable ones—many of which have only ever been playable on one console:

• Jak 3
• Twilight Princess
• Banjo Kazooie and Nuts & Bolts
• Harvest Moon 64
• Pokémon Crystal
• Bomberman 64 and Bomberman Hero
• Snowboard Kids 2

Those are in addition to fan ports released in the last couple years, some of which really go above and beyond in their treatment of the original game. Like sm64coopdx, which adds four-player co-op to Super Mario 64. Or Dinosaur Planet: Recompiled, which is painstakingly restoring the unfinished, never-released N64 version of the Rare game that eventually became Star Fox Adventures on the GameCube.

There are tons more porting projects in the early stages, and hundreds of games being decompiled, though that doesn't mean they'll all end up playable on PC. But there are some other exciting recomp ports I expect in the coming months that are already public:

And there are some

• Donkey Kong 64
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
• Blue Dragon
• Animal Crossing
• The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
• Fatal Frame

And that's just what's on my radar right now—without mentioning a few for beloved games that are heavily using AI. We'll keep writing about the most exciting recompilations on PC Gamer, but if you want to follow along more closely, check out this thread on Resetera, where members are doing the hard work of weeding out the vibe coded projects from the real deals.

Marcus Lehto is known to some as the "father of Master Chief," and for good reason: He was the art director on Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, and its two direct sequels. The look of Halo is kind of his thing, in other words, and he has some issues with how the new Halo: Campaign Evolved looks—specifically, its halos.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is a remake of Combat Evolved, all done up pretty in Unreal Engine 5. It looks pretty faithful, to the extent that I watch the trailer and I say to myself, "Yup, that's Halo."

Lehto, however, sees something else—something less. "While Forerunner tech was metal (not stone) it was also ancient, vast, alive, and a tomb to the horrors that lurked within," he wrote on X, alongside images comparing Halo rings then and now. "It had seen hundreds of millennia of conflict. Yet the [new] game shows it as shiny metal that looks like it was built a few years ago.

"The main menu ring is the most offensive thing we see every time we boot up the game. It should feel massive, dark, mysterious, sinister, but also full of wonder. This new ring looks like a shiny new toy—out of scale, no mystery, damn ugly."

In response to a now-deleted post, Lehto also brought up the toll that "war, Flood outbreaks, repairs, [and] collisions" would take on the structure. "Also, the biggest issue is just with [the] pure scale of the design. It lacks all the micro detail that should give it the epic scale it deserves. Lastly, it needs to feel like an ancient tomb."

That might seem to fly in the face of comments Lehto made in 2025, when he said "the game looks and feels genuine," and described it as "gorgeous in a way I wish we could have built it originally back in 2001." For the most part, though, Lehto seems to be having a good time, and he likes how it looks.

"Overall, I really love the upgrades—movement, cinematics, visuals—damn the lighting is brilliant," he wrote on August 4. "Do I have gripes? A few, but they are taking a back seat to the fun."

Those halos, though? Not great.

Less than two months after the release of its latest game, Unhinged, Netflix is closing developer Night School Studios, as well as its Moonloot studio in Helsinki.

Netflix confirmed the closures, first reported by Game File, in a statement provided to PC Gamer.

"Games continue to be an opportunity for us to expand the variety of entertainment we offer Netflix members, and we’ve built solid foundations in our key focus areas: Kids (Netflix Playground), Party (Netflix Minigolf), Narrative (Unhinged) and Mainstream (FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition)," a Netflix spokesperson said. "We’re especially excited about the momentum we’re seeing with cloud games and kids games."

Unhinged, as I mentioned, was developed by Night School and released just six weeks ago, on June 30. It was seemingly a hit: Less than a month ago, during Netflix's second-quarter earnings report, the company was trumpeting its success. "We really see it working," Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said in response to a question about the company's cloud gaming strategy. "FIFA and Unhinged became our two most successful cloud game debuts, really solid numbers that put it in the top tier of game performance for us."

It sounds very upbeat—yet here we are, 28 days later, with Netflix "making organizational changes to the business" because it sees "an opportunity to be more focused in our execution." Night School, which Netflix acquired in 2021, is being closed, and Netflix is "planning to close" the Moonloot studio it founded in 2022.

"We're grateful for Night School’s work in pushing the boundaries of storytelling through games with Unhinged," the spokesperson said.

But Night School was a lot more than Unhinged. The studio is best known for the award-winning indie hit Oxenfree, released in 2016, and the 2023 follow-up Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals—in between which it put out the lesser-known but also well-received Afterparty, a game about dying, going to Hell, and outdrinking Satan.

Those games played a big role in Netflix's decision to buy out Night School—its first game studio acquisition. "We’re inspired by their bold mission to set a new bar for storytelling in games," Netflix said at the time. "Their commitment to artistic excellence and proven track record make them invaluable partners as we build out the creative capabilities and library of Netflix games together."

After charging hard into the mainstream gaming space, Netflix's ambitions seemed to shift. Two years after launching Team Blue, a studio intended to be "the next big thing in gaming," Netflix shut it down before it could release (or even announce) a single game. Just a couple weeks later, the company's vice president of games became its vice president of generative AI for games; just a few months after that, he left the company entirely.

Rather like Amazon, it looks like Netflix has decided that its future in gaming lies with AI: In October 2025, it put out the call for a new Director of Generative AI for Games, with a starting salary of up to $840,000 plus benefits.

Netflix is also making cuts beyond the two studio closures: "We believe we can operate more strategically and efficiently within our Games business, and as a result are eliminating some additional Games roles." Specifics on those cuts were not provided.

As the prophesied hour approaches, we now know when the End Times descend on Total War: Warhammer 3. Today, in a reveal that arrived alongside a new cinematic trailer, Creative Assembly announced that its anticipated Lords of the End Times DLC will launch for TWW3 on September 24.

And in case you weren't familiar with how the End Times turns out for the Warhammer world, that's only good news if you're some sort of undead, or demon-thing, or rat-guy. However, given how prominently the new trailer features Grey Seer Thanquol, a skaven whose schemes are infamous for causing as much carnage—or more—for his fellow rat men than their intended targets, maybe everything will go fine in your personal campaign.

Provided he doesn't, you know, successfully blow up the moon with a big warpstone gun. Fingers crossed, I suppose.

To go along with the release date drop and cinematic, Creative Assembly also published a Lords of the End Times DLC overview, providing a summary look at the new gameplay that'll accompany its four new Legendary Lords.

For example, campaign playthroughs as Nagash, Supreme Lord of the Undead will involve gathering his Mortarch lieutenants and his legendary lost Books to finally ascend to godhood and reshape the world into a sort of global skeleton zone. As one-eyed coolguy Boris Todbringer, players will channel Middenland's battle fervor into empowering its Great Temple of Ulric, earning army bonuses in the process.

If you instead choose the Glottkin, the Rot-father's favorite special boys, you'll sow Gardens of Nurgle as you lay waste to the world, providing beneficial plagues and demonic Nurgle units from its festering depths. And as Thanquol, you will—as previously mentioned—scheme.

While Creative Assembly says those won't "always go according to plan," Thanquol will "see his grand and destructive plans realized" if you're able to manage the collateral damage caused by your plotting. How hard can it be?

The studio also promises substantial free game updates coinciding with the Lords of the End Times launch, including gameplay overhauls for Vampire Counts and Archaon, new end game scenarios, and reworked victory conditions for every legendary lord.

And, "in a series first," Creative Assembly says purchasing any Lords of the End Times DLC—either as a bundle or individually—will provide access to the massive Immortal Empires campaign mode, even if you don't actually own any of the Total War: Warhammer games. It's the most generous the end of days has ever been.

It's been a bit since I've fired up a new Total War: Warhammer campaign, but the End Times sound like the perfect time to ease back into some grand strategy. Lords of the End Times launches on Steam on September 24.

Game Freak's Beast of Reincarnation arrived earlier this month, and the reaction has been a little iffy. It holds a respectable 73/100 aggregate score on Metacritic—lining up quite nicely with our own 73% review—but the response on Steam is "mixed," with many user reviews expressing some variation of "close, but not quite." And for that, game director Kota Furushima is sorry.

"I honestly feel that there are still areas in the game that require our sincere attention," Furushima said in an interview with 4Gamer (via Automaton). "I’m truly sorry that parts of the game haven't provided a sufficiently enjoyable experience."

Furushima acknowledged that some elements of the game "need polishing," and said that more updates, following the first on August 9, are on the way to address issues with story pacing, add frame generation, and give players the option to skip cutscenes. It doesn't sound like changes to the game's difficulty are too high on the priority list, though: Furushima said his intent wasn't to make Beast of Reincarnation a particularly difficult game, but simply to ensure players needed to work effectively with Koo, the Blight-infected canine companion, in order to succeed.

And while the game needs work, it's not a train wreck: Furushima said the co-op combat "has been well-received, and we've also received positive reactions regarding the overall atmosphere of the game. I think the unique post-apocalyptic vibe of the world is resonating with many players."

That last part in particular fits with PC Gamer Australian editor Shaun Prescott's take on the game. "There's a maturity and patience to the presentation that feels more filmic than even the Hollywood-aping fare that Sony doles out (or used to)," Shaun wrote in his review. "Game Freak loves its long, slow, lingering shots. It loves a strangely resonant silence.

"No one quips. There are no quirky asides or overbearing teaching moments. Characters speak elliptically, or else with an unguarded sincerity just a touch removed from JRPG mawkishness. It is severely committed to its bereft, enveloping ambience, and feels like it was made by a team blissfully unaware of Star Wars or the MCU."

That sounds to me like a pretty strong starting point for Furushima's ambitions.

While I have my issues with the Steam Machine (mostly surrounding its price tag), I really do love the way it looks. It's a classy device, particularly as you can swap out the magnetic faceplates to your taste. I've seen some fairly tasteful designs so far, but none more OTT than this marble version from redditor GinoWT.

The marble used is supposedly from the Carrara quarry basin, which is the one Michelangelo worked from. I know absolutely nothing about marble, but some searching suggests that the old master did indeed use marble from this region.

As for this stuff specifically? Yeah, I'll take a hard pinch of salt with that one. It all looks the same to me—but I am, of course, a classless heathen of the lowest regard. Anyway, GinoWT says they usually cut marble for superyacht materials, so they've got the workshop setup to make square plates of the stuff .

It seems to be more involved than you might think, though, as each needs to be individually finished by hand. "Nobody is scaling this," says GinoWT. I'll take your word for it.

The stone itself is five to six millimetres thick, and bonded onto a 3D-printed structure with magnets to hold it to the front of the Steam Machine. This is apparently the same principle used on superyachts, to keep the weight "sensible" and to prevent the stone from cracking. We really are learning things today, aren't we?

It's not just marble that GinoWT specialises in, either. They've also made a "Sahara Noir" version in black with a gold vein going across it, and another out of Roman travertine. Yes, I had to look that one up as well.

If you're of a classier (and presumably wealthier) disposition than I, GinoWT has a website where you can sign up for one of the first small batches. No mention is made of actual prices beyond the "wait and see" form, so I'm willing to bet they'll be fairly expensive. Still, at what price Michelangelo's supposed leftovers, ey?

The new Summer Season has launched in Forza Horizon 6, meaning there are new challenges, including a weekly photo at Hokuryu Sunflower Farm, a Treasure Hunt, plus there are two new seasonal cars to earn. In the Horizon Mascot Party, you can get the Exomotive Exocet Sport and the Datsun 2000 Roadster, though you'll have to complete challenges to build up progress. So, here's where to find the photo spot.

Forza Horizon 6 Hokuryu Sunflower Farm location

This photo challenge is a nice easy one, since all you're really doing is taking a picture of your car in a giant field of sunflowers, which leaves you a lot of options. You can find Hokuryu Sunflower Farm on the east side of the Hokubo region—simply look for the giant yellow field on the map, west of the Irabuohashi Bridge.

Another way to track it down is to look for the striped multicoloured field (Shikisai-no-oka) on the map in north Hokubo, then move your cursor directly southeast to find the yellow field

As mentioned, you can take your picture anywhere in the field with your chosen car. Doing so will earn you the Yellow Sports Sunglasses clothing reward, but also three Season Reward points so you can progress towards those two Summer Season cars. If you haven't yet, make sure to also complete the Shimanoyama region Treasure Hunt for some more easy points.

Causality Chain is a series at PC Gamer exploring the unlikely links between history, culture, and videogames.

Humanity has witnessed countless tragedies—but occasionally, through the alchemy of passing time, moments of singular woe can serve as a foundation for future wonders. Depending, in this case, on how broad your definition of wonder is.

Today, we once again chart the curious contours of cause and effect, tracing how a haunting moment in an American horrormeister's early years can ultimately lead to an internationally renowned actor participating in an unconventional form of simulated equine combat.

Join us, as we tip the dominoes once again:

Stephen King witnessing a childhood tragedy 🔗 Kiefer Sutherland's combat horseshit command

A tragic early chapter

1951: At "barely four" years old, Stephen King experiences a harrowing episode he'd later share in his 1981 non-fiction book on the horror genre, Danse Macabre¹—an episode he himself doesn't remember, but which was later related to him by his mother. One day, he suddenly returned home from playing with a neighbor who lived near the railroad line. He was "white as a ghost," his mother said, and refused to speak until the next day.

"It turned out that the kid I had been playing with had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing the tracks," King writes.

He goes on to insist in the book that, however horrifying it might have been, the incident had no bearing on his interests or habits as an author, as becoming a writer is "a direct result of conscious will" and not something "born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma."

However…

Phantom pains

1982: Viking Press publishes Different Seasons², a Stephen King collection consisting of four novellas. In the third story, The Body, narrator Gordon Lachance—a fiction author—recalls the conflict he and his childhood friends once entered with a gang of greasers over the discovery of the dead body of a neighborhood boy who'd been hit by a train.

Any resemblance to real events is purely coincidental, I'm sure.

Adaptation

August 22, 1986: Stand by Me³, a coming-of-age drama based on The Body, releases in American theaters. A critical and commercial success, the film cast Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell as its four lead boys.

It will also contribute to the rising fame of a young Kiefer Sutherland, who plays antagonist gang leader Ace Merrill.

Proliferation

April 18, 1987: Stand by Me is released in theaters in Japan, where it goes on to become a beloved classic. It's referenced in Mother (renamed Earthbound Beginnings in the US) and the Gen 1 Pokémon games⁴. Stand By Me receives VHS editions intended to help viewers learn English⁵. It will still be rebroadcast on Japanese TV to sate viewer demand⁶ almost 40 years after release.

Every year it draws Japanese tourists⁷ on a pilgrimage to the Oregon town where it was filmed.

Tactical espionage action, of a sort

November 6, 2001: 25 years after the release of Stand by Me, the first episode of Fox's action thriller 24 airs on American television, starring Kiefer Sutherland in the lead role as counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer. The show is a massive success—and, as the quintessential post-9/11 program, often a controversial one—drawing more than 17 million viewers⁸ for the premiere of its fifth season.

During its nine-season run, 24 also achieves international popularity, thanks in part to the successful distribution of its seasonal DVD box sets.

Militaires sans frontières

2005: Kiefer Sutherland appears as Jack Bauer in a series of 24-themed Japanese commercials for CalorieMate energy products⁹. Aided by a massive marketing campaign for the 2003 Japanese release VHS and DVD releases of the show's first season, 24 quickly became a huge phenomenon in Japan¹⁰—particularly among binge-watching rental store patrons, who contribute to an initial word-of-mouth reputation for being in such high demand it's impossible to find.

24 even sees a Japanese remake in 2020¹¹, though it only achieves a middling reception. Sutherland, meanwhile, gains lasting recognition in Japan: At a 2012 press conference¹² in Tokyo, Sutherland says "I am where I am today thanks to everyone in Japan."

Snake eater

June 2013: Infamous action thriller enthusiast Hideo Kojima announces that, in place of the expected performance from David Hayter, Kiefer Sutherland has been cast¹³ to provide facial capture and English voice acting for Snake in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Kojima says he was seeking a "more subdued performance" to match the "much darker tone" of MGS5, and his Hollywood producer friend Avi Arad suggested Sutherland. "I was like, 'Why didn't I think of that?'" Kojima recalls saying.

While Kojima hasn't mentioned 24 as an inspiration in interviews, a surviving fan transcription¹⁴ of a director commentary track included in the Japan-exclusive Metal Gear Solid 3: Extreme DVD Box Set has Kojima directly citing 24 as the model for some of the game's presentational flourishes. The game was released in 24's prime.

Do it

September 1, 2015: Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain releases worldwide on PC and both PlayStation and Xbox. MGS5 features systems allowing the player to research and unlock combat equipment and additional skills for Snake and his companion characters.

One skill, unlocked by reaching a 50% bond rating with D-Horse, lets Snake—as performed by the peerless vocal talent of Kiefer Sutherland—order his combat steed to "do it," causing D-Horse to defecate at the player's current location¹⁵.

If an enemy light vehicle drives over the horseshit, it loses control and incapacitates its driver and passengers.

Videogames.

Sources and further reading

1. Danse Macabre, StephenKing.com
2. Different Seasons, StephenKing.com
3. Stand by Me, IMDB
4. The famous Stand by Me reference in Pokémon, Legends of Localization
5. Entry for Stand by Me (CINEX : Cinema English exercise), CiNii database
6. What are the highlights of "Stand by Me" according to comedian Kogaken, a huge movie fan?, Kin'yō Road Show (machine translated)
7. Japanese superfans flock to this small city in Oregon because of ‘Stand by Me’, Thrillist
8. Television program viewership ranking from 01/09/06 through 01/15/06, ABC (archived July 7, 2011)
9. Kiefer Sutherland's first Calorie Mate commercial, YouTube
10. Re-emerging with a remake: The legendary '24' that captivated the entire nation, leaving them unable to sleep, Oricon News (machine translated)
11. 24 Japan, Wikipedia
12. Kiefer Sutherland visits Japan for the third time: "I am where I am today thanks to everyone in Japan", Oricon News (machine translated)
13. Kiefer Sutherland confirmed as Snake in Metal Gear Solid 5, GameSpot
14. Hideo Kojima Metal Gear Solid 3 commentary transcription (Ocelot Battle ～ The Fear Battle), Muni Shinobu's Metal Gear Solid fansite
15. MGSV - DO IT D-HORSE, YouTube

Read more on PC Gamer

• After 10 years, there's a functioning Metal Gear Solid 5 co-op mod so you and a friend can be played like a damn fiddle together
• He once said playing Metal Gear Solid 5 would be '60 hours of humiliation,' but Snake actor David Hayter finally played the game: 'All is forgiven'
• Crapshoot: The Stephen King 'game' that will take you to a dark place

The new summer Horizon Mascot Party Festival Series has arrived in Forza Horizon 6, and that means a new weekly Shimanoyama Treasure Hunt, plus more challenges and rewards. There are also two seasonal cars you can progress towards, the Exomotive Exocet Sport and the Datsun 2000 Roadster, and completing this challenge will give you a little bit of progress towards earning them. All that said, here's where to find the chest.

Forza Horizon 6 Shimanoyama region Treasure Hunt location

This week, the treasure chest is located at the Shimanoyama Drift Circuit in the far north-east of the Shimanoyama region. All you need to do to find it is:

1. Head towards the circuit
2. Turn off to your left and head under the sign towards the entrance
3. Turn left into the circuit itself
4. You'll spot a bunch of open garages on your left side with advertising banners on top—the chest is in the third garage along

Simply smash into it as usual and you'll get 100,000 credits, 5,000 XP, and 3 Season Progress points towards those two Summer Season cars.

For more progress, make sure to complete the photo challenge at Hokuryu Sunflower Farm, plus the weekly challenge involving the Toyota Japantakushi.

I love my Steam Deck. Although the internals are starting to look a bit long in the tooth these days, it still feels like the archetype of what a handheld gaming PC should be. It's a bit large and in charge though, which is why my ears pricked up when I heard of the Steam Boy.

This custom Steam Deck re-imagining is the work of Reddit user PhyFawkes, and the thinking behind it amounts to this: "The Steam Deck motherboard seems pretty small. I wonder if you could make a Steam Deck the size of a Game Boy?"

Turns out, for the most part, you can (via Tom's Hardware). The chassis amounts to a 3D-printed PETG shell, which manages to squeeze in not just the Steam Deck's relatively miniature mobo (complete with APU heatsink and fans), but also its rather sizable battery.

PhyFawkes has also tucked the Deck's internal speakers within the frame, alongside the separate audio board and some creative placement of ribbon cables. All this hardware hasn't left a whole lot of room for controls, though, which have been reduced to a D-pad, four traditional face buttons (alongside two system buttons), one thumbstick, and one touchpad.

That's some pretty tidy work, though—especially when you see the Steam Boy next to an original Steam Deck. In terms of footprint, it's well under half the size. The hardware is stacked, Tetris-style, within the frame, so it's a fair bit chonkier.

Still, you could reasonably fit one in a large jacket pocket, which is more than you can say for the original Deck.

There is one slight drawback, though. PhyFawkes hasn't yet been able to hook up the screen, which is a suitably sized 1200 x 1080 90 Hz OLED panel in traditional Game Boy config. It's going to require an adapter board between the motherboard output and the display, plus a BIOS mod as well by the looks of things, so that's the next task to be ticked off.

PhyFawkes also says that triggers are on the checklist. At least one of them, anyway, which is apparently in a good spot on the board in terms of being mounted somewhere usable on the outside.

So watch this space, as the Steam Boy is definitely a project to keep an eye on. Alongside all the Steam Machine mods we've been covering recently, like this water cooling project, or this RX 9070 XT eGPU setup. There's something about Valve's hardware that makes y'all want to tear it apart, huh?

Sony's decision to stop selling physical disks for its games makes a certain kind of sense from a mercilessly realist point of view—I'd be a hypocrite if I, a person with the majority of my games on one platform (Steam), shook my fist and wept for the end of physical media.

But aside from the sentimental concerns—which, honestly, I don't hold as any less important, there's more to life than money—there is a capitalist argument against the move, too, for both the consumer and the people who make videogames. If Sony ends physical disk sales, Sony decides how much a game on the PlayStation costs, forever.

Such is the argument of one Dutch consumer group that's currently suing Sony for their proposed changes, stating last month that "no discs means no second-hand market and no alternative to the PlayStation Store, so from 2028, Sony alone decides what a game costs and even how long you are allowed to use it."

At the very least, despite Steam's monolithic popularity, Valve's not capable of forcing anybody to use it. You can still use GOG or Itch.io or… Epic, if you really wanted to. The death of physical media for PC means something very different than the death of media for consoles.

The consumer organisation, by the name of Stichting Massaschade & Consument, has gained support from another key player in the growing videogamer consumer rights movement—Stop Killing Games, which posted a video to its YouTube channel explaining its choice to throw its weight behind SM&C.

"Have you ever noticed that digital PlayStation games are more expensive than physical ones?" asks the video. I decided to fact-check this real quick, and, surely enough—if I wanted to buy Spider-Man 2 from the store, I'd currently have to shell out £69.99. If I wanted that same game from Amazon, I could get it for £37.77. GameUK has a deal for £59.99, currently. Some eBay listings for second-hand copies are going for as little as a tenner at the time of writing.

"You'd expect digital games to be cheaper—so what's going on? Sony has a monopoly on digital game sales on PlayStation … And once Sony stops selling physical games in 2028, you won't have any choice at all."

The video's description reads: "We're backing SM&C's (Stichting Massaschade & Consument) lawsuit against Sony over its total control of PlayStation Store pricing. We're putting our full weight behind SM&C's case, with the Dutch court.

"SM&C has to show the court it actually represents gamers, not just claims to. Our support backs that up globally. Every Dutch gamer who signs on backs it up directly."

Stop Killing Games will also be joined by preservation site DoesItPlay, the owner of which actually spoke with our own James Bentley this week, echoing a similar sentiment: "Less options for people is always a bad thing," Clemens Istel says. "Especially if the only option is a future in which your purchased goods can just be taken away or altered whenever somebody else pleases."

I've only recently upgraded to an OLED monitor, but let me tell ya, I wish I'd done it sooner. This thing is gorgeous. Though it's only recently we've seen prices really plummet for these excellent panels, which might go some way to explaining why sales are through the roof right now.

According to analyst firm TrendForce, shipments for OLED panels have increased 26.1% in the past three months. Comparing to last year's figures, they're up 98%. And the firm chalks that up to gaming, specifically, noting that adoption is strong for 27-inch QHD monitors, which sit at the top of the increasingly large pile of panels for popularity.

TrendForce says these "results underscore the rapid penetration of OLED technology in the gaming and premium display markets."

In the first three months of the year, TrendForce reckoned shipments for OLED panels increased 78% year on year. This suggests OLED monitor shipments are still on the rise through 2026.

The analyst firm lists the biggest companies in the space by market share, as it stands today: Asus at the top, then Samsung, MSI, AOC, LGE, and the rest. Samsung slipped due to a "gradual withdrawal" from the Chinese market, while MSI made some waves. Panel supply is said to be improving, too, with new brands entering the market as a result.

Though it's worth noting that most OLED panels for gaming monitors are made by Samsung and LG, even if rebadged under another company's name. We have seen some new developments in recent weeks regarding OLED panels from Chinese goliath TCL making their way into MSI's professional lineup; however, for gaming, we're mostly all in on those Korean-made panels.

Nevertheless, OLED monitors are becoming way more accessible for PC gamers as the technology develops and new products make it to market. Once upon a time, most OLED gaming monitors would demand upwards of $600–$1000. Yet our best budget OLED, the Alienware AW2726DM, has an MSRP of $350. That's brand new. Sure, it's an older panel tech than the very latest panel as found in our top pick, the MSI MPG 322UR X24, but an OLED looks fantastic either way.

We've said it a whole lot lately, but monitors are one of the few good deals left in PC gaming. You can thank the memory crisis for everything else sucking. That pox hasn't touched the monitor market. Prices are still coming down, the technology is still rapidly developing, and OLED monitor deals are still to be found.

Our James checks for deals every week and he's spotted this Samsung Odyssey G50SF for $350 over at Amazon. There's also this AOC Agon Pro for $350. Both 27-inch, 1440p monitors as was suggested to be the most popular by TrendForce. Though even the 4K-capable MSI MAG 321UP is down to $700 over at Newegg.

It's just nice to see a healthy market that's actually serving to the benefit of us regular consumers right now. Demand is high, supply is sufficient, and there's loads of competition; which all feels like a bit of a rarity right now.

It's been nearly seven years since the release of the Xbox Elite Series 2, which means we're well overdue for a new one. It sure looks like that's set to happen soon, as one Redditor just posted the motherlode of information on the unreleased pad—then their account mysteriously vanished and the thread was partially wiped with it.

The internet tends not to 'lose' things, so you can view all the leaked images on this thread from The Verge's Tom Warren. Warren also notes that the original poster says they bought the controller for $200 on OfferUp, a marketplace for buying things in your local area. The poster says, in a comment still live on the thread, that they live in Seattle. Seattle being the home of, you guessed it, Microsoft. The company's Redmond HQ is located just next door in Redmond, Washington.

Lots of people live in Seattle and they don't all work at Microsoft. So what else do we have to go on as to the veracity of this particular thread?

First off, the Redditor's new pad looks suspiciously similar to one we saw back in May. It has the same shape, trigger locks, rear paddle mounting, and battery bay. All of which look to be pretty neat features for the Series 3 pad, if not miles apart from the Series 2 pad. The face buttons, ABXY, are perhaps a little larger. A couple of us here reckon the new Elite Series 3 resembles the Razer Wolverine V3 Pro in overall shape, which isn't a bad thing. That's our pick for the best high-end controller right now.

A screen sits between the bumpers along the top of the Series 3 pad, likely some sort of mono OLED display. These tend to be pretty useful for this sorta application, as the self-emitting pixels draw very little power. In the leaked photos, this display shows an aka.ms URL, made using Microsoft's own shortening service. They also show a very basic game running on the screen in a later comment.

Some other redditors in the thread have followed various versions of the URL in the pics and claim to have landed on documents pertaining to the controller's use and how to connect it via a dedicated connection for cloud gaming—that's a feature we've seen with the Amazon Luna Controller and Google Stadia Controller (rip). This was also a feature tipped in that original leak from May.

The comments from the original poster have not been removed, and from these we can gather a few more tidbits of information. They show the paddles and d-pad removed from the pad, with the latter having a simpler but similar rocking design to the previous model. They confirm that the triggers become clicky once set to the shortest option via the rear adjusters. We also catch a glimpse of the battery, which clearly states "PROTOTYPE NOT FOR SALE" on it. Oops.

The Elite Series 3 even includes a travel case, as has been included with both previous generations of Elite controller, albeit a slimmer version. I would guess that means this thing is pretty far down the road for development. Providing it is real and not some elaborate 3D-printed project, this may suggest we see the controller arrive before the year's out.

What we don't know about the Series 3 is whether the sticks are using Hall effect or TMR (Tunnel Magnetoresistance) technology. This helps banish stick drift for the most part, and it's something I value more than most other features these days. The Elite Series 2 famously lacks any such tech, instead using older potentiometers on account of its age, but we can only assume the Series 3 will. It would be wild not to.

We also don't know how it will work in action, as the redditor says it doesn't work on either Xbox or PC right now. Some suggest it will be locked to a dev account, which does seem likely if it's the real deal.

The redditor succinctly sums up the controller in one reply, noting it "feels like a Xbox Series X controller but pro and more clicky." If that sounds like your sorta thing, and I have to admit, it is mine, then this might be something to keep an eye out for in the near future. That said, as someone who has owned a couple of Elite controllers over the years, I've started to look elsewhere these days. You don't have to spend Elite money for an elite controller anymore—the GameSir G7 Pro proves that.

There's a problem with new technologies, in that cutting-edge technology develops quickly—in the span of years. Meanwhile, us human beings with our wet flesh bodies and our complicated bureaucracies and legal systems are glacially slow. You can see this playing out with generative AI.

For a few years now, we've heard a lot of overexcitement from the videogame industry that AI is going to let smaller companies make bigger games, that soon you'll be able to generate your own concept art, your own music, your own videogame dialogue—and, of course, the deeply tedious phrase "democratising art".

In actuality, generative AI is more of a plagiarism machine, often spitting out carbon copies and, even when it's not doing that, still requires countless copyrighted works (which sometimes have to literally be burned) to actually function. That legal heat has spooked videogame companies, so says lawyer Haley MacLean in an interview with our friends over at GamesRadar+.

MacLean, both a corporate IP lawyer and a videogame specialist at Voyer Law, tells the site that no-AI clauses are on the rise, particularly in the last year: "It's turned around, especially in the past year. I would say about two to three-ish years ago, you'd see a little bit of it … Even the smaller, more simple publishing studios are like, 'Let's include this just to cover our butts.'

"So now it's just boilerplate, to the point that if I did encounter one that didn't have a gen AI clause, if the publisher was creating assets too, I would say we need to push for that to make sure the publisher is not using gen AI in the marketing, porting, QA of your game."

It's not all too surprising, even from a ruthless capitalist perspective. There's a tension between videogame platforms, who are incentivised to rid themselves of the tides of AI slop lapping at their shores, and developers themselves. The former is encouraged to add large, obvious disclaimers so their users can filter out the garbage, while the latter is utterly screwed when they do.

Back in June, for instance, a data analyst found out that AI disclosures could reduce the number of reviews a game got by 53%, making the reviews more negative overall, which MacLean says causes a pervasive attitude of "I don't want to use gen AI because my community would hate it."

But the legal quagmire is also becoming increasingly insurmountable as legislation catches up—one particular quirk? If you use generative AI to make something, it might be impossible to prove that you copied the thousands of artists who were fed into your algorithm, sure. But it also means that, legally speaking, you can't really argue YOU made it, either.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy when I see these massive corporations … It kind of feels like a lawyer is hovering slightly over them, because they'll say things like, 'Look at this awesome tool. I can just type in 'barrel' and a barrel appears. But I have to make sure to change it a little bit!' They sort of imply that the users should be transforming every generated asset a bit, but they know that their users aren't going to do that."

MacLean uses the example of the Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis remake, which uses generative AI for its assets—the game's not out yet, so it's unclear if it'll meet this bar, but if it doesn't change those assets enough? "[if there was] an outdoor level and all the trees are AI-generated, I legally would argue somebody could go and use every single tree in the Lara Croft game, that they know is AI-generated, and put in their game, and I don't think those devs can turn around and say, 'Those are our trees.'

"No, they're not, because you didn't generate them, and legally speaking, you have no ownership title over them if you didn't put in the sweat equity to have an artist go in and, inspired by that original first pass of the tree, then transform it into an original tree asset … But I think these major companies who are always laying off, trying to cut the bottom line, increase the value of the company, they're going to cut corners when they can, and I think they're going to get sloppy."

It's sort of a 'snake eats its own tail' situation. In order to fulfil the promise of generative AI—that you could lay off a bunch of artists and just have your hallucination machine dream something up—you need to lower your headcount. But your remaining artists then need to meaningfully transform what AI generates, in order to legally lay claim to it.

And if there's not only fewer of them, but they also kinda resent you for laying off all their colleagues, then that increases the chance of legal trouble happening—or lost sales from just pissing your consumer base off. At which point, you might not even be saving the money that a handful of yearly salaries (which are pennies to the absolute billions these companies have) saves you by way of their absence.

"I think," MacLean says, "We're going to see lawsuits of those types in the coming years when they want their protection but they want to do everything faster and cheaper … What case law in the US and Canada has seen, time and time again, is that AI cannot own because it was not human-made.

"We're in that frustrating middle with new tech where it's very fun, it's very flashy, everyone's excited, but I think the legal issues are going to just be popping up more and more."

This month, PC Gamer gets world-exclusive access to Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Capcom's much-anticipated new action sword-fighting game. For our awesome lead feature, PC Gamer travels to Osaka, Japan, to go inside Capcom's headquarters and play plenty of Way of the Sword as well as interview seven of the key developers who have brought the game to life. And, from what we've seen already, this is looking like one of the games of the year, delivering visceral, kinetic, intense swordfights unlike any we've seen to date. Get the inside scoop in this issue of PC Gamer magazine.

This special issue also comes with two great gifts, too. First, we have PC Gamer's Top 100 supplement. This is a 32-page mini mag that details the top 100 games we think PC gamers should play today in 2026. It is the result of weeks of voting, debating and, naturally, PC gaming here at PC Gamer Towers, and the result is our definitive recommendations for our favourite games, both new and old.

And, secondly, to celebrate our world-exclusive Onimusha: Way of the Sword cover feature, we've also included a huge A1 Onimusha: Way of the Sword poster in this issue, too. This is another exclusive for PC Gamer magazine, so if you fancy a kick-ass poster on your wall, then pick up this issue today.

There's another fantastic feature in this issue of PC Gamer, too. Co-op games are having a moment right now, with more great options to play with your friends available than ever before. As such, here the PC Gamer team gets together to decide upon our favourites, with everything from social hangouts through to competitive madcap romps included.

In terms of previews this issue, PC Gamer goes hands-on with The Blood of Dawnwalker, the incredibly exciting new dark fantasy action-RPG from the director of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. In addition, we preview Star Wars: Galactic Racer, Wardogs, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, Flask, Carcass Clad, and Brigador Killers.

Meanwhile, over in reviews, the PC Gamer team passes judgment on a selection of new games, including Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, Moonlight Peaks, Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations, Meccha Cameleon, Denshattack!, Granblue Fantasy: Relink - Endless Ragnarok, among others.

Cover feature: Onimusha: Way of the Sword

Written by: Robert Jones

Magazine exclusive: Until September 26th, 2026

What's in this month's cover story: PC Gamer travels to Capcom's HQ in Osaka, Japan, to play its ripping new action game, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, as well as interview seven of its key developers. The result is the definitive all-you-need-to-know preview for Way of the Sword, with exclusive behind-the-scenes information about how the game was made and what PC gamers should expect when it releases this September.

Secondary feature

Additional content in this month's issue

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After noticing the announcement of upcoming driving sim Rideshare Stimulator, writer Stella Sacco commented on social media that she'd once been the game's lead writer but had been fired in favor of ChatGPT. The game's publisher, Saber Interactive, denied the claim, stating that while it did use generative AI in the development of Rideshare Stimulator (which has not yet been disclosed on its Steam page), the story was written "entirely by real people."

Sacco acknowledged that the studio may have changed direction since she was removed from the project in 2023, but stood by her recollection. That could have been the end of it, but now a confusing, combative follow-up from Saber CEO Matt Karch is raising eyebrows.

In a statement sent to This Week in Video Games, Karch claimed that Sacco violated a confidentiality agreement by stating that she was fired in favor of AI, but also denied the assertion, crediting Rideshare Stimulator's "entire story script" to an unnamed writer.

Karch also stated that he didn't know who Sacco was until he consulted an AI chatbot, but nevertheless claimed that she was replaced by "someone more talented" and that he would retrospectively be "happy to replace her with AI" because AI is "programmed to be honest."

Here's Karch's full statement:

"Stella who? I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her. We have already said we are using AI for certain parts of the game and will update the Steam page once we have finalized the feature set.

"Let me clarify that the entire story script, were it to win an award, would go to someone who can walk up on stage and receive it. It was always our intention to reveal this until Stella violated her confidentiality clause and revealed this before we were ready.

"We look at our use of AI in this particular game, which will be a lower priced title, as a plus for consumers.

"As far as Stella is concerned, she was replaced by someone more talented and terminated for a variety of reasons a few months later. From what I can gather she enjoys controversy even more than I do. I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI. At least we would be dealing with someone programmed to be honest."

Sacco responded on Bluesky, standing by her original claim.

"I've seen the statement by Matt Karch, the CEO of Saber Entertainment, and all of the truly horrendous things he said about me. I think it should be obvious to anyone who reads that statement that he's lashing out because he did not want people to know there was AI use in the game," said the writer.

"Everything I said was true. Here's more truth: that statement is remarkably pathetic for the CEO of any company to be making, and combined with the AI use it will do far more damage to Saber's reputation than it ever could mine. This screed will be many people's first exposure to the Saber brand."

Big Walk is a co-op only online game about hanging out with friends and solving puzzles. Given we are currently living through peak friendslop thanks to the likes of Peak, RV There Yet?, R.E.P.O. and Content Warning, it was probably inevitable that Big Walk would attract that coinage too.

But does Big Walk deserve it? Does any game deserve it? "I love that there is a word out there to help people categorize games that are good for groups of friends to play together, and that it recognizes that the friends are the important part! It's a useful concept imo," wrote House House's Nico Disseldorp in a new Reddit AMA.

Still. The "slop" part of it isn't super appealing, despite a lot of people using it in a joking and affectionate way. "Personally I'd prefer the second word wasn't 'slop' because it's a term with so much baggage (like AI slop) and I think these games are so thoughtfully made," Disseldorp went on.

"But artists always hate the genre names used to describe their work, so it's nothing new."

The House House team also touched on the real world inspiration for Big Walk's environment. There are heaps of game studios in Australia but they rarely make games explicitly set in their home country. House House's Big Walk isn't strictly set in Australia either, but it definitely looks a lot like the Australian bush. The greens are dry and slightly muted. Gum trees, or trees looking very much like gum trees, are rife. When I watch gameplay footage of Big Walk I can smell the dry eucalyptus.

It turns out that's because Big Walk's world is based on a real world national park in Victoria, in the country's south west. House House's Jake Strasser revealed as much. "The game world is directly based on Wilsons Promontory National Park in south-east Victoria," he wrote.

"All the plants in the game are native to the Prom, as well as the iconic granite. The topography of the island is also based directly on the Prom—we started with a LIDAR heightmap of the real place, and then started sculpting and accentuating landforms from there. We also live just a few hours drive away! So we could literally go to the place to get inspired, take photos for textures, record all the atmos etc etc."

In his Big Walk review, Christopher Livingston avoided using the term friendslop entirely, calling it "a joyous jaunt through a gentle world full of thoughtfully-designed puzzles."

Behind soundproof glass, Tyler is frantically signalling to me by wiggling both his arms over his head. I look over at Morgan, behind a different glass wall, who is holding a puzzle piece over his head—but he can't see Tyler's frenzied arm-swings. I repeat Tyler's gesture, wiggling both of my arms, and Morgan silently gets the message: Wrong piece. He drops it and picks up another.

What's interesting is that in the dozen hours we've been playing first-person co-op puzzle game Big Walk together, wiggling both arms over our heads has meant a number of things and "wrong" is just one of them. It's alternately meant "I've found something" or "come here" or simply "hooray!"

And as well as meaning "wrong," like it does now, it has also meant the complete opposite: "Correct!" That's the genius of Big Walk: it teaches you to communicate with your co-op partners so effectively that you can use the same gesture to mean a half-dozen different things, yet you'll almost always know exactly what your companions are saying. Even when you can't hear them.

Little steps

Here's how chill the vibes are in Big Walk: there's a tutorial zone where you learn how to jump, crouch, and pick up and use objects, but at no point is there any indication you've finished the tutorial. There's no big arrow pointing at where to go next, or even when to go: we just sort of eventually wandered away from the tutorial and discovered a huge mysterious island waiting for us. No rush.

In our initial wandering we found a tall crane-like structure and eventually noticed it had a button on it, well out of reach. When we figured out how to push that button, we were rewarded with a small poof of confetti and a bulbous red object we decided to call a "nubbin" because it doesn't have a real name. We soon located a slot for that nubbin elsewhere, which led to more puzzles containing more nubbins.

Big Walk was communicating with us non-verbally: solve puzzles, collect nubbins, find more puzzles.

As chill as the world is, however, the limitations of Big Walk are more extreme than a lot of games. The nights are dark, much darker than many survival games, making it easy to get momentarily lost in tropical sprawl. You can carry only one object in your hands at a time, and even when you find storage solutions like backpacks, you need a friend to both attach it to your body and retrieve gear from it. Welcome to a world so dedicated to cooperation that you need a friend just to access your own inventory.

If you want to talk over the game's proximity chat you need to be within a dozen yards of each other. Any further and you'll need a walkie-talkie to keep in touch—though if you're all carrying walkie-talkies, how are you going to carry all those nubbins you're finding?

These restrictions are there to teach you what Big Walk is all about: sticking together, communicating, and relying on your friends for everything—which is precisely what makes it so great.

Puzzle me this

There's a nice variety of puzzles on the island: some require pushing buttons in unison or in a sequence, some want you to work together to get an object to a certain spot before a timer expires, some need you to describe symbols or shapes to a player who can't see them. But we weren't that far into Big Walk before puzzle elements we'd already seen started being recycled, which worried me early on: were we just going to be doing the same handful of puzzle types over and over?

Sort of. Big Walk's puzzle elements quickly begin repeating themselves—you'll see the same symbols, buttons, soundproof doors throughout a playthrough—but developer House House has done a great job remixing and complicating its solutions, throwing in new twists on the formulas we'd already learned.

If one puzzle needed us to describe symbols to each other over voice chat, the next iteration might ask us to pass fragments of the solution from one player to the next like a game of telephone, or send signals from a mile away, or develop an impromptu code.

As we solved similar types of puzzles a few times, we were unconsciously developing a shorthand—a way we could understand each other even given new limitations. Non-verbally, through its thoughtful and clever puzzle design, Big Walk was teaching us how to also communicate non-verbally.

Pal world

It wasn't always easy: occasionally we had to quit a puzzle halfway through to discuss a new strategy. But I was surprised and delighted how many times we encountered a new wrinkle in a puzzle but still aced it without a rehearsal. That's when waving our arms over our head meant "hooray!" the most: each puzzle completed was a real cause for celebration.

I won't spoil the game's ending, but after a dozen hours everything we'd learned was put to the test, letting us use the shorthand we'd developed in ways I couldn't have predicted. And we crushed it. Finishing Big Walk was a real feeling of satisfaction, and it was twofold: not only had we learned the game's puzzle-based language, but we'd invented our own, almost without knowing it.

It's not just puzzles that make Big Walk great: the world is a supremely enjoyable place to just hang out with friends. There's no death, no jumpscares, no monsters, and no real pressure to do anything except whatever you want to do at that particular moment, including impromptu dance parties or playing catch.

This is a gentle place where the worst thing that can happen is becoming briefly stunned after falling off a cliff, or accidentally kicking a precious walkie-talkie into the woods because you pressed the wrong button.

Big Walk is a joy: a chill game about curiosity, exploration, and overcoming obstacles using friendship and cooperation. Grab a pal or two (or 12!) and play it: you'll find you can communicate in ways you didn't expect.

Even though we still haven't seen a gameplay trailer, Grand Theft Auto 6's pre-release sales have been "unprecedented," according to publisher Take-Two. So why doesn't the public company just tell us specifically how many GTA 6 preorders it's sold?

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier recently posed that question to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, who said that the volume of GTA 6 preorders is so unprecedented that they "can't tell whether they mean anything."

Specifically, Take-Two is unsure whether the preorder count can be used to accurately estimate GTA 6's total launch sales based on established wisdom, or if it's such an outlier that established wisdom doesn't apply, and people who'd normally wait to buy the game after launch are opting to preorder.

"The massive demand for preorders we've seen to date could reflect a pull forward of sales that otherwise would materialize in the fullness of time," Zelnick said.

Because they "simply don't know the demand curve because it's just never happened before," the CEO says that "the raw numbers could potentially be misleading," and as such Take-Two is keeping them to itself for now. (Though it is clearly happy to indicate that GTA 6 is already an extraordinary success.)

The next big moment for GTA 6 is a proper gameplay reveal, which will debut exclusively on Netflix on August 27, and then on Rockstar's public YouTube channel six hours later.

Regarding that controversial deal (I don't think it shows much respect for GTA fans myself), Zelnick told Bloomberg only that "there's reasoning" behind it and we'll "understand more" once we watch it.

All this talk of GTA 6 preorders is purely academic for the PC-only crowd, as there's still no PC release date for the game. The console-only launch is frustrating for PC gamers however you slice it, but it's made extra irritating by today's inflated console prices: The PlayStation 5 Pro currently goes for $900.

Twitch has revealed that it is now using content in streams "to train generative AI content models across Amazon," and making matters worse, everyone is opted into the training program by default.

Rumors of an AI training program have been kicking around for at least a few weeks now—streamer Zach Bussey posted about it on Bluesky back in July—but it was confirmed today, very indirectly, by a Twitch Support announcement on X of a setting that lets streamers opt out.

That, naturally, means the default setting is opted-in, which has not gone over well: Responses to the message on X are predominantly either explanations of how to turn AI training off, or enthusiastic f-bombing. A Twitch User Voice thread on the topic, originally posted in May, calling for all AI features to be "optional and opt-out by default," has exploded to 228 pages, and nearly 14,000 votes in favor, as I write this.

As for why the new generative AI training system is opt-in by default, Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton gave an unexpectedly honest answer during a livestream today, and by extension confirmed that Twitch is well aware of how people really feel about it: "If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in." So, credit for at least being straight about it, I suppose.

they know we don't want it. they do not care.

— @witchytq.bsky.social (@witchytq.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-08-12T22:17:07.747Z

It's not particularly difficult to opt out of Twitch's generative AI training scheme. Just go to the "security and privacy" tab in your Twitch settings, then scroll down to the bottom where you'll see the "Training for Generative AI" toggle. Click that (and I would strongly encourage you to do so), and you're done.

The problem is that ease of use does no good if people don't know it's there, and Twitch does not seem to be making great efforts to ensure everyone is aware of it. Revealing the new system through a post about a related feature on the Twitch Support channel rather than a conventional announcement on the Twitch Blog is hardly a high-visibility way to get the word out, and a response to a more recent post by Bussey about the feature muddied the waters by saying "Twitch is not training GenAI models on streamer content."

But Twitch's own account settings FAQ indicates that's exactly what it's doing. Under the question "What are 'generative AI content models,' and what does it mean for my content to be used to train them?" Twitch wrote:

"Generative AI content models are AI tools that can help create or synthesize content outputs like text or images when given instructions or prompts because they are also trained on content. When you allow training, that means that your content may be used for future Gen AI model improvements. An example of what happens when you allow your content to be used for training a GenAI content model is that your audio might help refine models that create speech to text, which would help improve captions at Twitch but would also help improve captions across Amazon."

That seems clear enough, so what does that statement on X mean? My best guess is that Twitch is trying to claim that Amazon is using streamer content to train generative AI models, not Twitch itself—a distinction completely without a difference given that Twitch is part of Amazon. I've reached out to Twitch to ask for clarification.

The FAQ also notes that opting out of generative AI training "does not opt you out of all AI or machine learning uses at Twitch." The platform can still use your data, including streams, VODs, and all the rest, for "AI-supported features" like auto-generated captions, although that is not retained to train models that can generate new content.

This is hardly Twitch's first big botch. If anything, the platform has been a hotbed of bad decisions over the years, on topics ranging from sexual content to Donald Trump, Palestine, "politics and sensitive social issues," and when you can and can't say "Zionist"—and that's just within the past three years.

But this move could be more impactful than most: Mike Futter, co-founder and analyst at game consultancy F-Squared, said Twitch's new generative AI training system has potentially far deeper consequences for streamers than might be immediately apparent: "What happens if a creator streams your game and is opted in? Does Twitch think it has the right to feed a developer's game into its AI slop factory?"

What happens if a creator streams your game and is opted in? Does Twitch think it has the right to feed a developer's game into its AI slop factory? This has deeper ramifications than it seems on the surface.

— @futterish.fsquared.biz (@futterish.fsquared.biz.bsky.social) 2026-08-12T22:17:07.463Z

"I think a lot of studios are going to be talking to their lawyers over the next couple of days," Futter told PC Gamer. "For those of us who have avoided AI like the plague, this is a clear and present danger to our businesses and our creative work.

"In a period where our industry needs as much support as possible, especially from the companies that use our content every day to enrich themselves, this reads as extremely hostile."

"We're a staunchly anti-AI studio, and this now creates a real threat to our creative work," added Futter, who's also director of operations and publishing at indie developer Causeway Studios. And while he thinks Twitch and Amazon will face some pushback from game makers over its gen AI training plan, "this is David and Goliath. We're going to need a critical mass of studios and creators to be loud about this."

Given Twitch's history of switchbacks, I wouldn't be surprised to see this new feature dropped because of the backlash—but given Amazon's determined embrace of generative AI, I also would be surprised by it. Either way, the bottom line at this point is that the new generative AI training model is a mess for Twitch on multiple levels, and it seems more likely to get worse than to go away anytime soon.

Today's Helldivers 2 update is bittersweet for the hardcore fans: The teased arrival of new Illuminate enemies did not include the anticipated Cultist unit, but it did add two other monstrosities that just kicked my teeth in for half an hour.

Everyone say hello to the crusher and the wretch, a pair of melee bruisers rounding out the Illuminate faction with some much-needed variety. They're the headliners of today's Devoid of Liberty update, which charges Super Earth's bravest soldiers with counteracting an imposing void that's opened up in Illuminate space.

It's at this point that I wonder if you're seeing the same resemblance making the rounds online: The wretch are dead ringers for Dead Space necromorphs, and the crushers seem directly inspired by Silent Hill's Pyramid Head (except they carry big clubs, not a big sword). If you're going to borrow, it better be from the greats.

And man, these things do feel at home in Helldivers 2. The wretches serve as a new frontline enemy alongside the basic "voteless" zombies. Similar to the mid-sized Terminid units, wretches are faster than helldivers at a full sprint unless you shoot off some of their creepy-crawly legs. Unlike the Terminids, these jerks are pretty smart: they will pivot on a dime to avoid your line of sight, preferring to attack from the rear after making you waste ammo.

They're simple to kill if you can hone in on their tiny heads or shoot off their limbs, but they overwhelm easily in groups. Unless you're extremely confident in your aim, shotguns might be the play for these guys.

Crushers are kind of the opposite: Giant, meandering brutes wielding long clubs. They have no ranged attack and only a prominent helmet for armor—so far, knocking off the helmet to reveal the head is the quickest way to put one down. These guys seemed a little underwhelming at first, but they're sneakily lethal. Keeping away isn't hard, but their health pool is huge, so they're a problem you have to deal with eventually. Watch out for the club's surprisingly far reach: if it connects, that's the ballgame.

While it's great to see the Illuminate faction get some much-needed love, this is a smaller update than I anticipated. There's no new biome (unless stormy cities with twisters count) or major piece of tech like the tank introduced earlier in the year. I do like how Super Earth has begun summoning SEAF troops of varying classes to reinforce players—could this be a test run to eventually give us direct control over troops?

Looks like this one won't match up to the memorable raid on Cyberstan, and that's fine. New weapons that aren't tied to a warbond are quite rare these days, which is a shame, but 240 hours later I'm still happy to buy the occasional $10 warbond for some new toys. The armor sets in the new Warhammer warbond look cool, but none of the weapons seem interesting enough to justify the $5 crossover upcharge.

Indeed, Helldivers 2 is in an age of refinements. Today's patch made some great quality-of-life changes to short magazines and backpack reloads (you don't need to have the backpack on to assist anymore), and after a months-long break, this was also my first time seeing the campaigns terminal on my ship. The level cap has also increased to 300 for Super Earth's truest sickos.

When I really think about how I spend my time writing here on PC Gamer, there’s actually not all that much of it that goes into straightforward recommendations. Between interviews, editorials about the games industry, features about PC gaming history and a spot of news here and there, it’s not all that often I just get to say: “Hey, here’s something I really like. Check it out!”

Considering how noisy the internet can be, it’s inevitable that when we do share these bits of our lives they’re quickly buried and forgotten. This is a permanent home for my favorites: Games, movies, gadgets, recipes, maybe even life tips? Before we get to what I like, though, a bit more on what I’m like:

Stuff I recommend

Here's a good video from 2026

PC Gamer reads I recommend

2026

• I ran 45 idle game demos from Steam Next Fest all at once for a desktop companion battle royale by Andrea Shearon
• I played the Halo: Campaign Evolved remake and original Halo back-to-back, here's my review by Morgan Park
• 'It nearly killed me': Why studio head James Ohlen left sci-fi RPG Exodus mid-development—and why EA crushing his Star Wars: The Old Republic reboot was the 'beginning of the end' at BioWare by Samuel Horti
• It's time to set the record straight: Doomguy's armor does not have a tummy window, his shirt just got ripped by Ted Litchfield
• From ancient Buddhism, to iconic manga hair, to Keanu Reeves: a PC Gamer Causality Chain™ by me
• How do you put a price tag on a legacy like id Software's? by me

Oldies but goodies

• Promise Mascot Agency review by Maddi Chilton
• 'A good idea, infinite drive, and lots of Diet Pepsi': How YouTube essayist Majuular's life changed course telling the story of Ultima across 2 years and more than 20 hours of documentaries by Justin Wagner
• The rise of the Chinese action RPG by Kerry Brunskill
• Mail trucks and millions of dollars: how shareware transformed PC gaming forever by Jeremy Peel
• How a bunch of art school grads made putrid, brilliant horror adventure Sanitarium by Alexis Ong
• ​Murder Incorporated: ten months of deception for one kill in Eve Online by Tom Francis
• Life in Vana'diel: 19 years in, Final Fantasy 11 is still an MMO unlike any other by James Mielke
• The story of the bizarre Mega Man DOS games by Tyler Wilde
• Breaking the internet: The story of EverQuest, the MMO that changed everything by Steven Messner
• The ethics of smurfing by Nicole Carpenter
• Ubisoft, please put my dad in Far Cry 5 by James Davenport
• I put 'Gamer Goo' on my hands, and god help me I actually liked it by Andy Chalk
• It's time for cyberpunk games to remember how to be punk by Jody Macgregor
• The '80s and '90s PC games unbelievably still being updated today by Chris Livingston and I
• The 50 most important PC games of all time by me (and many contributors)
• The race to save Japan's incredible '80s PC gaming history before it's gone by me

Back in 2024, Immortality creator Sam Barlow teased a new thing codenamed Project C. During today's Kinetic Publishing Showcase, it was finally unveiled as Precognition, a sci-fi thriller being developed in a collaboration between Barlow's Half Mermaid Productions and horror director (and son of David) Brandon Cronenberg.

Precognition will set players off as Diana, a woman who receives an experimental brain implant that gives her visions of the future. But in the fine tradition of Cassandra and quantum mechanics, it's not all upside: By exploring her visions and committing them to present-day memory, Diana changes the future she's seen.

"We’ve really been trying to test the limits of non-linear storytelling, focusing on how the game feels to play, while encouraging player agency and freedom," Barlow said. "We’ve pushed ourselves even harder with Precognition by bringing the feel of investigation and mystery games into a world of cause-and-effect, with a story that spins out as a consequence of your choices."

Barlow opted to partner with Cronenberg on the new game because he wants it to be "a very authentic sci-fi horror experience," and Cronenberg—who's played Barlow's previous games Immortality and Her Story—understood the assignment.

"The films I make tend to be subjective and experiential, with the horror emerging as one person’s perspective of the world warps around them," Cronenberg said. "The games that Sam and the team have made over the years are subjective experiences by their very nature—no two people will have the same experience with them. So it’s the perfect place to explore these themes further."

Precognition "follows in the footsteps of Immortality," the announcement promises, with a blend of FMV cinematics, non-linear storytelling, and an emphasis on player freedom. That sets a very high bar to clear: Immortality earned a nearly unheard-of 95% score in our review as "Sam Barlow's best, most thought-provoking game yet." Score aside, that accolade itself is no small feat given that its predecessors, Telling Lies and Her Story, are genuine bangers themselves.

Whether Precognition will up the ante as Immorality did remains to be seen, and this is the bad news for fans of Barlow's games: It's currently expected to be out in spring 2028. For now, you can throw it on your wishlist pile on Steam.

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

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

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

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

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

We've been hearing for quite some time that Microsoft is planning on making changes to Windows 11 that focus on performance, quality-of-life, and just actually good things. Rather than, y'know, AI gubbins almost nobody was asking for.

And now, according to Windows Latest, the most recent update for Windows 11 includes a feature that's supposed to make apps launch quicker.

The 'low latency profile' launched earlier in the year but it now apparently covers apps in addition to Windows elements such as the Start menu. This feature essentially allows the scheduler to have the CPU boost up to fast speeds and drop down again quicker, which is good for short burst tasks like opening apps.

You should get this feature automatically with the latest Windows 11 KB5121003, build 26200.9168 / 26100.9168 update, and you can check whether it's working by keeping an eye on your CPU clock speed and seeing whether it boosts up near max in software like HWInfo.

This isn't the only useful update we've seen for Windows 11 in recent weeks. Although initially just for Insiders, recent improvements to the Start menu look promising. And while a recent update did seem to mess up my monitor (or, perhaps more likely, my AMD driver and how it interacts with my monitor), that issue has disappeared now, so either Microsoft or AMD presumably fixed it on the down-low. It wasn't a problem for too long, just a few days.

All this being said, there is certainly a slight taste of 'it's about time' regarding these actually useful Windows 11 improvements, especially since Microsoft is reportedly charging OEMs significantly more for Windows licenses now. At least we should be getting a snappier, more performant experience for that extra cash. Keep these updates rollin', Microsoft. I'm here for them.

Amazon's big MMO era has taken its last gasp, as the company is ending its publishing deals for both Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark. The games themselves will continue, however: NC will take over Throne and Liberty for Western markets near the end of 2026, while Smilegate will do the same for Lost Ark in early 2027.

Little should change for players as a result of the handoffs, although a small number of details on the Throne and Liberty changeover are still being hammered out and will be announced closer to the actual transition. On the Lost Ark side, some user data will not make the transfer, including in-game mail, friends list memos and group names, guild member nicknames and memos, and chat messages and history.

The games themselves will continue to operate as they always have and will receive regular content updates leading up to the changeover, although Throne and Liberty developer FirstSpark Games warned that major updates may be held back until the transition is complete.

Swinging the axe on Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty is pretty much the final nail in the coffin containing Amazon's once-lofty gaming ambitions. The company put a pin in its home-grown MMO New World in 2025 as part of a shift away from big-budget gaming (which of course also saw major layoffs), but it continued to serve as publisher of those externally developed MMOs in the West.

Lost Ark fans started to get nervous about that arrangement earlier this year, though, as a new round of layoffs in March impacted Amazon's Lost Ark team. In light of that, this outcome is probably good news.

This is normally where I'd embed the Courtroom Chaos Starring Snoop Dogg trailer to remind everyone what Amazon Games is now focusing its efforts on. But while poking around for more information on these MMO handovers, I came across something new, and possibly worse, and I now inflict it upon you:

Bad news: Dawn of War 4 is no longer a mere month away. King Art Games' first take on the RTS series was due on September 17, but it looks like the war needs a bit more time to cook. It's been pushed back until December 3.

If you shell out for the Commander Edition, you'll be able to sneak in a bit earlier, though, with the three-day early access unlock letting you dive in on November 30.

"As we approached the final stages of development, we saw an opportunity to further enhance Dawn of War 4 and deliver the quality of experience we’ve always envisioned," said creative director Jan Theysen. "The additional time will allow us to continue optimising performance, resolving bugs, and applying further polish to ensure players have the best possible experience from day one."

Dawn of War 4's launch will be followed up by free updates with new maps, the return of Crusade mode, more commanders and a mission editor. Two story expansions are also in the works.

There are a lot of big games coming out between now and the end of the year, but this is one of the new releases I'm most excited about. The first two Dawn of War games are among the best RTSs of the 3D era, and King Art's work on Iron Harvest has left me confident that it can rise to the challenge of bringing the series back to its glory days.

Back in 2025, I got to play a skirmish, controlling the Blood Ravens in a big ol' scrap against the orks. And while King Art has made some tweaks to the formula, its closest relative is undeniably the OG Dawn of War. It was an absolute blast—one which ended in an orbital strike that took out the final ork base, while my beefy Dreadnoughts smashed any greenskins trying to escape their grim fate.

I've been craving more time with the game ever since, but I guess I'll need to wait a few months longer.

The RX 9070 XT is one of our favourite graphics cards of this generation, as it delivers a hefty whack of gaming performance that can sometimes edge it ahead of the RTX 5070 Ti. As for the Steam Machine... well, I reviewed it and I'd like it a lot more if it was cheaper, put it that way. Or if it was more powerful.

One redditor may have solved the Steam Machine's performance drawbacks by putting the two bits of AMD-powered hardware together. Large_Customer_3840 has hooked the big AMD graphics card in to a Steam Machine as an eGPU, via some clever use of adapters.

"I did this by using the NVMe slot with an NVMe to Oculink adapter" say the redditor, "and then had the NVMe drive on a USB-C NVMe adapter to boot SteamOS."

Apparently, this setup works surprisingly well. "When I turned it on, the 9070 XT became the primary monitor and worked straight away," says our intrepid tinkerer. It's always a good feeling, isn't it?

The only issue to date has been a black screen problem, which revealed the Steam Machine needed to be connected to a TV for the eGPU to work. Other than that? It looks to be plain sailing.

Large_Customer_3840 says they've only tested the performance with Crimson Desert so far, but reports that the Steam Machine/AMD GPU hybrid gets over 100 fps on High. The setup looks to require the removal of the Steam Machine backplate, although the redditor says it could become a permanent upgrade with some modification of the case.

Perhaps some water cooling might be in order, just to put the cherry on the cake? It feels like we're gradually putting together the Franken-Steam Machine over here, and I can't wait to see what the modding community does next.

Ever since they were introduced back in Helldivers 2's Heart of Democracy update when the Illuminate invaded Super Earth, the SEAF troopers have held a place in the heart of every Helldiver. These NPC soldiers stand basically no chance against the hordes of bugs, bots, and space aliens who besiege Super Earth's worlds, bristling with ever-more exotic implements of murder, but they do their best and that's what counts.

Well, with the new Devoid of Liberty update, which sees us battling against a tide of void-mutated enemies the Illuminate have unleashed, the SEAF have also been buffed to better face the battle. To quote the official blog post:

"We have commissioned SEAF platoons to aid in completing operations. They’ll arrive on dropships to fight alongside you and your squad, offering medical support via stims, but also give a boost to your morale when you salute, shake hands, and–of course–hug them."

Yes, that's right, you can now hug the little troopers in blue. I hopped into the game to try it out, and, as you'll see below, SEAF troopers will pause mid shot and accept your offer of a little morale-boosting cuddle. It's only fair to show your appreciation, they do have a tough job after all.

Though, as you can also see at the end of the clip, I'd advise against hugging troopers when you're in the thick of combat, unless you want to share a casket because they couldn't untangle your remains. I've played a few missions in the new update and the SEAF actually amount to a somewhat fearsome fighting force now, with support weapons and increased numbers, and they'll periodically drop in on shuttles to help in the fight.

We'll definitely need the help, too. Those new Crusher enemies don't go down easy and they're weirdly hard to hear coming. The Necromorph-esque Wretch enemies, too, add a fast-moving component that the Illuminate didn't have before, and can really close you down quickly if you're not paying attention.

We've got a tough fight ahead of us, but don't forget to take a moment to stop every now and then to show your SEAF contingent their work is appreciated.

PC gamers may have watched physical game discs disappear years ago, but there's a battleground happening over in console land right now. A big one. And it might only be getting more contentious as time ticks on.

With Sony ending support for physical discs in the near future, and the heads of Ubisoft and Take Two seemingly not caring very much, you might think the end of physical game media is not far off. Yet there exists a growing movement to push back against this trend. I had a chance to chat to Clemens Istel, the owner of game preservation site Does It Play, about this movement.

He tells me, "Customer rights are almost non-existent in the gaming space, and companies have proven time and time again that honest communication is not their strong suit."

Does It Play is both a physical games media advocacy group and a database dedicated to documenting which games can be played without a download or offline. Istel is also part of the team behind Stop Killing Games. Just last month, we documented Does It Play's reporting, showing that 34% of physical PS5 games and 50% of tested Xbox Series X games don't fully work without a download first.

There are a handful of central reasons one might wish for physical discs to stay around. With games going through so many updates after release, a disc provides a clean way to preserve version 1.0 for future gamers to play and experience. It also means that storefront holders can't have a monopoly over pricing. If you wish to buy a game on PS5, for example, you can buy it directly from Sony, or through any number of second-hand or new physical marketplaces. This gives companies less control over the direct price long-term.

"Less options for people is always a bad thing. Especially if the only option is a future in which your purchased goods can just be taken away or altered whenever somebody else pleases," says Istel.

"For the most part, [over] all these years, it felt like there was an unwritten agreement between companies and players. They provide cool experiences, we buy cool experiences. But in recent years, this symbiosis [has] more and more turned into a one-sided form of exploitation." He continues, "Lobby groups and lawyers attacked preservation efforts, a growing minority of games are released unfinished, even hardware now has online dependencies."

Istel points out that the last two Xbox generations can't be set up offline without a Microsoft account, and notes that some games are fully available on disc and still have hard-coded online checks before you can play. "The next step is killing physical media, the last thing you actually had some form of ownership over."

Istel argues that gaming companies have a "stranglehold on players", and that's what Does It Play, and movements like Stop Killing Games have come out of. Istel believes that Sony knew what consumers wanted when it famously made fun of Microsoft's introduction of DRM back in 2013, but it now has "Zero understanding for what their customers want. All that's left is a hyper-arrogant 'take it or leave it' attitude, as far as we can tell."

But Istel says it's not just console players who are affected by this. I'm told the Sony situation is just one step. "It sets another precedent and pushes the distribution further towards the idea of streaming, as recently suggested by Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. Once we reach that point, all hope for customers to ever have control over a product is gone."

Though Istel believes the perspective on game ownership has "only gotten worse" over the years, PC gaming does offer one "glimpse of hope" with the "emergence of more DRM-free stores on PC."

The likes of game marketplace GOG sell many games DRM-free, which means you can download offline backups, play without an internet connection, and can install and play games on multiple computers without any limits. It gives more freedom over bought games, and means losing connection to servers, or servers going down, can't remove your access to the game— assuming it's downloaded already.

PC gaming shifted to digital a long time ago, and even before that, many PC games had physical restrictions in the forms of CD keys, but Istel believes digital DRM is not the same: "Digital DRM that requires you to go online makes you dependent on a third party, while a CD key gives you everything in your own hands to access the game.

"The former will eventually lead to the game becoming inaccessible. At the very least, there needs to be an end of life plan to keep the game working after official support ends."

Still, even if Sony does officially end disc support with the PS6, Istel doesn't think physical media will entirely go with it. He told me, "I firmly believe that physical media will stay, but it will probably never be mainstream again."

Though PC gaming went mostly digital a long time ago, Sony being the creators of the hardware and software on a PS5 gives it ownership over the device to an extent that isn't possible on PC. If you don't like Windows, you can swap to Linux. If you don't like Steam (for whatever reason), you can make do with half a dozen different digital storefronts. And that makes this specific fight so important for console owners. There's no alternative to Sony whilst owning a Sony device.

And, as such, it's a little strange to watch from the comfort of my own rig, given how relatively healthy the digital gaming market is on PC. Steam, its biggest storefront, may not be DRM-free, but the option is there to actually own games for those who want it. As consoles are unlikely to adopt third-party storefronts, that makes physical game discs the final line of defense for actually owning games, and an altogether different ball game compared to our PCs.

This week, Nvidia announced it will be receiving "over $500 billion of third-party capital" from banks and investment companies. And now, in a blog post explaining how 'AI factory' compute is "becoming an investable asset class", Nvidia has answered the question, "Is this circular financing?"

The company says: "This initiative is designed to address that concern. We are bringing independent, long-term institutional capital into the AI infrastructure market.

"The demand is real: it comes from frontier AI labs, AI-native startups, enterprises, cloud providers and countries building AI services. The capital providers independently underwrite each project — including the customer, demand, utilization, cash flow and residual value. NVIDIA provides the platform; the investors make independent financing decisions.

"This is the beginning of an open capital market for AI infrastructure."

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink reportedly said, "We need to raise this money as fast as possible... This is going to be creating a huge amount of jobs."

Let me get the positivity out of the way with first: Yes, it's good that Nvidia is addressing the concern that the AI market finances itself circularly, by having AI companies fund other AI companies and vice versa with the same pot of money going around and around. Alright, that's the positive sorted—on to the negative.

First, of course Nvidia can say so now, after months of circular financing has already occurred. Now that it's opening up to widescale financing beyond the AI industry itself, it must be a lot easier for it to talk about. But where was this recognition six months ago?

Second, in the world of bigwig investment, it's hard to ever fully distance yourself from circularity. BlackRock, for instance, alongside Microsoft and Nvidia, has previously bought almost 80 AI facilities in a $40 billion deal. So I doubt funds already wrapped up in AI investments will balk too much at getting Nvidia a bunch of money for more AI building, as some of that will presumably trickle back in their direction, too.

Third, it's kind of unsurprising that big hedge funds like BlackRock would want to keep the AI hype going given the economy itself is arguably now somewhat dependent on it. Most economic analysis seems to agree that the AI industry is indeed a (giant) bubble, and that when it pops it could spell very bad news for the economy in general.

To wit, New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin says of this $500 billion partnership: "Mark Monday on your calendar. It’s a date we may look back on years from now as either the inflection point in the AI boom—or the moment it got so leveraged that a crisis began to form."

Finally, while it might be good that Nvidia has acknowledged concerns about the AI industry's financial circularity, it's far from clear that a $500 billion investment from Wall Street adds more solidity to the market. We have to remember that these investments are made on the promise of AI actually returning on investment, something we've seen little evidence of so far.

To my eyes, it looks a lot like tech CEOs gritting their teeth and crossing their fingers that the bubble doesn't pop before AI makes some miraculous, superintelligent breakthrough that grants an exponential ROI. And if that's the case, this $500 billion investment might mean more of an "open capital market" for AI, but it could still just be buying time before the inevitable *pop*.

Crimson Desert, while often a chaotic, systems-drowned game—is also rather good, if you're into chaotic and messy things. Its brand of delightfully irreverent overstimulation charmed my pants off when I went to see it pre-release, and it's certainly captured the hearts of a few of us here at PC Gamer.

It's also raked in the big bucks for developer Pearl Abyss, whose recent earnings letter puts in perspective just how much of a win it was for the studio: "Crimson Desert sold approximately 2.11 million copies during 2Q26, with digital sales accounting for 1.72 million copies (82%) and physical sales accounting for 0.39 million copies (18%)."

Those sold copies produced an operating revenue of ₩406.2 billion, or around $284.5 million, in the first and second quarters of 2026—none too shabby for under a year's worth of sales! Interestingly enough, North America and Europe are the two main drivers. This number includes revenue from Black Desert Online, the studio's MMO, but those regions apparently accounted for over 75% of the profit.

Mind, there's a law of large numbers going on here. North America and the EU have an estimated 1+ billion people combined, whereas South Korea has around 51 million people in it—Crimson Desert is still very much popular on Pearl Abyss' home turf, it's just the population of Korea is outnumbered nearly 20:1 when compared to the NA+EU market blob.

Anyway, if you're one of the people who made up that number, you've got some DLC to look forward to, as the letter reads: "Crimson Desert is preparing key initiatives, including DLC, strategic pricing, and platform expansion, to ensure long-term success … The DLC is currently under development scheduled for release this year while we refine its content direction and overall quality. Specific details regarding pricing, content composition, and launch timing will be officially announced in 3Q26."

Looking it up, South Korea's fiscal year starts on the calendar year—with the third quarter having already begun, but lasting until the end of September. That means that, at latest (assuming these plans bare out) we've still got a month and a half to wait for details.

But that's still honestly sooner than I expected, especially given the rapid pace of updates that Pearl Abyss has been pouring into this thing. We're talking birdwatching, we're talking economy overhauls. 20 news types of small animal? Sure. New mounts? Here you go, sweetie. What's that, you're all full? Are you sure you don't have room for a wyvern? Here comes the aeroplane, open up, yum yum!

It's a blistering speed of new additions to an already systems-bloated game, but hey—anyone who's still tucking into Kliff's wild adventure probably doesn't mind having seconds, thirds, and fourth servings.

Marvel Tōkon—the all-out 4v4 tag fighter from 2D fighting game veteran ArcSystem Works—didn't get off on the best foot with PC players. Forced PSN logins and frame drops that were leading to a whopping eight frames of rollback in online modes saw the game launch to "Mixed" reviews, before eventually tanking to "Mostly Negative" over the weekend.

And while there's zero chance of the PSN stuff going away, ArcSys has at least been speedy about trying to tackle those pesky frame drops. A patch earlier this week has done the bulk of the work on optimising performance, leaving the game a helluva lot smoother for it.

It turns out that one of the primary culprits was the game regularly checking for audio inputs, of all things. According to the patch notes: "These unnecessary checks could cause sudden frame drops and performance drops. This has now been addressed."

The patch has also reduced overall CPU usage, including addressing an issue where "the CPU ran high throughout the startup process," and one where "additional load on the system was being created due to periodic audio processing during matches."

It seems to have had a positive effect overall—the game's Steam rating is back up to Mixed since the patch landed, and from my own time playing, I've definitely noticed a smoother experience overall. It doesn't seem to have completely fixed the PC port, however, at least not for some folk.

A handful of Steam reviews are still complaining that the game is struggling to hit 60fps, with those performance dips still leading to rollback frames that would teeter into unplayable. I've also experienced lower framerates here and there—even in parts you wouldn't expect, like the Episode cutscenes—but it is still undeniably in far better shape than it was at launch.

Unfortunately, as it stands, a framerate fix doesn't seem to be stemming the tide of negative reviews criticising Sony's forced PSN login. It's a situation we've already seen back when Helldivers 2 pivoted to a mandatory sign-in, which was received just as poorly as it is now—and one that Sony is incredibly unlikely to back down on.

The new Helldivers 2 Devoid of Liberty update has arrived, alongside the Warhammer 40k warbond, but there are also a bunch of new titles you can unlock as you level up. Since the level cap has gotten a big boost, and you earn a new title every 10 levels, Arrowhead has added a bunch to fill in the gaps.

Any XP you earned above Level 150 was also banked this whole time, so you might have already unlocked a bunch of these with the new update.

All Helldivers 2 new titles

There are 15 new titles in Helldivers 2 coinciding with the level cap bump from 150 to 300. As before, you'll get a new title every 10 levels. The new ones are:

If you've been playing at Level 150 for a while, chances are you will have unlocked quite a few of these titles already thanks to our XP being banked this whole time.

A slight bastion of hope for those affected by the memory crisis (ie, anyone who wants to buy new electronics in the next few years) is the planned arrival of new fabrication facilities, pumping out vast amounts of wafers that will be turned into memory modules. According to Micron, though, we shouldn't hold our breath.

Sumit Sadana, the executive vice president and chief business officer of Micron, spoke at a tech and finance forum earlier this week. According to Sadana:

"All of this growth in [AI server-critical] HBM pressures the supply that is left for everything else, which means that the wafer supply has to increase dramatically, and that is just not easy to do."

"It takes a long time because the whole industry got itself into a state where most of that expansion needed to be done in greenfield expansion," Sadana continued. "Which means you go to an empty space that is nothing but trees, and you have to create an entire massive fab cluster there. That is a very challenging endeavour.

"It is one of the most complex engineering projects in the world from a construction perspective to build such fabs."

Certainly, anyone who envisions a new wafer facility being thrown together in a few months will need to take a hefty dose of reality pills, at least from Micron's perspective. Sadana points out that fabs are not like data centers, which seem to have been sprouting from the ground like weeds in recent months.

"Building a data center—no offense to our customers—is considerably easier than building a sophisticated leading-edge technology front-end fab," Sadana continues.

"It takes a long time for these fabs to come online, and this leading-edge technology... takes a long time to ramp. Because of all these reasons, we do not have line of sight as to when that supply vector will intersect the demand vector."

That's corporate speak for "everyone wants memory modules, and we're not sure when we'll be able to produce enough wafers to make enough of them," if you ask me.

Which, to speak more casually, sucks for the average consumer. It's not just Micron that's investing in new fabs, of course, as SK hynix and Samsung are also busy building extra production facilities for themselves. But estimates vary wildly as to when meaningful amounts of new memory modules might enter the supply chain.

Whatever the situation, the memory crisis is still expected to continue for a long while yet, with predictions for its demise ranging from the end of 2027 to 2030 and beyond.

In the meantime, it looks like we've got what we've got. Of course, new, memory-optimised AI models might enter the market, taking some of the server demand out of the equation. Or, y'know, the AI house of cards could come tumbling down in often-predicted ways.

Failing that, it's difficult to find a silver lining. As you were, folks. We're in it for the long haul, it seems.

Every time a new OLED gaming monitor comes out of late, it seemingly poses pretty much the same question. Is this the one, is this the model that effectively "completes" the task of gaming monitors, that represents 2D panel technology perfected? Give it up, therefore, for the latest candidate, the Asus ROG Swift PG32UCWM, a 32-inch 4K model.

There's a lot to keep up with when it comes to OLED panel technology developments, but big news here is the inclusion of a new LG Tandem WOLED panel with RGB-stripe subpixel structure. We've already seen LG's Tandem WOLED tech in 32-inch 4K trim recently in another Asus monitor, the Asus ROG Strix XG32UQWMS. But that didn't get the RGB-stripe version of the new panel type, instead retaining the additional white subpixel LG has long used to boost brightness in an "RGWB" configuration.

In theory, then, this new panel has it all. You get the very latest LG Tandem WOLED panel generation with all the benefits that brings, but applied to a pure RGB-stripe subpixel structure. That's it then, job done, the perfect OLED gaming monitor?

Not quite. It's not all pros with this RGB-stripe panel. There are some cons, too, at least on paper. The RGB-stripe subpixel structure—or red, green and blue subpixels arranged vertically in that order—should mean more precise rendering, especially for elements like fonts that rely on addressing the panel at subpixel level to achieve maximum crispness. It also promises more accurate colours and a wider overall colour volume, too.

However, LG has been using the white subpixel on all of its previous OLED panel generations for PC monitors for a reason. And the consequence of removing it is that this RGB-stripe 32-inch Tandem WOLED panel has lower full-screen and peak HDR brightness ratings than its RGWB cousin.

So, where the Asus Strix model was rated at 330 nits full screen and 1,500 nits peak HDR in a 2% window, this RGB-stripe Asus Swift clocks in at 250 nits and 1,000 nits respectively. It also makes do with DisplayHDR True Black 400 certification instead of True Black 500.

Just to confuse things, this new RGB-stripe panel tech is also being used in the new Alienware AW3926QW 39-inch 5K2K monitor, a review of which we also have coming. That has exactly the same pixel density, but somehow Alienware has managed to squeeze 300 nits, 1,300 nits and HDR True Black 500 from that panel. Odd.

Anyway, it should also be noted peak brightness specs aren't the whole story, in any case. As I've explained before in reference to monitors using Samsung's competing QD-OLED panels, which have never used white subpixels at all, peak brightness ratings are for pure white.

But panels with lower brightness ratings thanks to using pure-RGB subpixel structure can actually offer superior colour brightness. Put another way, if you want to show pure and accurate red, for instance, the white subpixel isn't much help in boosting brightness.

Speaking of QD-OLED monitors, it's notable that the likes of the MSI MPG 322UR X24 uses a Samsung panel with no white subpixel to achieve 300 nits full screen and True Black 500 certification. What's more, Samsung has also announced an even better 32-inch 4K QD-OLED panel with 360 Hz refresh and True Black 600 certification. Samsung hasn't quoted panel brightness, but the True Black 600 tier requires 350 nits full-screen at minimum. Like I said, it's a lot to keep up with.

One last note on the panel tech. LG's branding for all this stuff is getting really confusing. The "W" in Tandem WOLED doesn't refer to the white subpixel, hence its use here. It refers to the fact that each subpixel emits white light that is then passed through a colour filter. And the "Tandem" equally doesn't actually mean two full OLED panels stacked atop one another, but instead refers to additional emissive layers, again within the subpixels.

My actual final note on the panel is that it's glossy, not matte, which isn't always a given with LG-based OLED monitors. Anywho, aside from the panel specs, this is an Asus "Swift" model, which makes it more premium than the Strix version I reviewed recently and that has implications for the feature set. First up, that includes a 480 Hz 1080p "Dual" mode to complement the 240 Hz native 4K refresh rate.

Connectivity wise, you get full 80 Gbps DisplayPort 2.1, two HDMI 2.1 ports, plus USB-C with 90 W of power delivery. There's also full KVM switch support. Further gaming-friendly features include ELMB motion blur reduction and VRR anti-flicker. Oh, and there's not only HDR10 support, but Dolby Vision, too, albeit Dolby Vision is more relevant to HDR video than HDR gaming.

It's all wrapped up in a premium chassis that includes height, swivel and tilt adjustment, RGB lighting, including a down projector, and some nifty design elements. Most unusual is the partly transparent rear chassis cover.

It's a lot like the see-through rear cover on devices like Nothing's smartphones and headphones. It's pretty neat, albeit you're obviously not going to see it day-to-day on a monitor sitting up close to a wall.

Without further ado, then, how good, exactly is this new RGB-stripe Tandem WOLED panel? Pretty darn good, but not quite perfect, is the short answer. There's some subjectivity in this, but I have never personally much liked LG OLED panels with the added white subpixel. They lack colour vibrancy and suffer from slightly green-tinted white tones.

That's all fixed with the RGB-stripe panel. To sum up the experience, it's a lot closer to a Samsung QD-OLED panel in terms of how pleasing and punchy the colours are. But you don't have to worry about the purple tint that even the latest QD-OPLED panels suffer from in bright ambient light.

This RGB-stripe WOLED also has a more accurate and neutral colour balance compared to the slightly warm colour temperature of QD-OLED panels. Add in the precision of the RGB-stripe subpixel structure, especially as applied here to a super-sharp 4K panel, and all the usual OLED upsides, including ridiculously fast 0.03 ms pixel response, perfect lighting control and very wide viewing angles and, well, you have one heck of an experience.

For the record, the banding or "dirty screen effect" that some other lower resolution Tandem WOLEDs suffer from is more or less invisible here. So, that's good. And if you are wondering, yes this monitor does have something akin to MSI's EOTF boost mode that essentially enables maximum available brightness in both brighter and darker HDR scenes.

Asus calls it "Adjustable HDR" on this model, but it does basically the same job and works well enough, albeit with some limitations, which we'll come to in a moment.

Now, I know I go on about this routinely when it comes to OLED monitors. But the night time HDR scenes in CyberPunk 2077 really do look spectacular on this panel. Let me give you an example to get across the experience. You know those neon lights and signs that populate many of Cyberpunk's moody urban scenes? They don't look like images of neon lights and signs. They look like actual light sources.

That's actually the point of HDR done right. To recreate the true dynamic range of reality and that means light sources that look like actual light sources.

The reality is that most supposedly HDR-capable screens can't really do HDR. Well, this one can, and it looks epic at its best. But what about at its worst? Brighter gaming scenes inevitably show up the limited full-screen punch.

Again, we're into subjective territory here. Do you really want the screen to light up at 500 nits and beyond across the whole screen? That wouldn't actually be comfortable for extended use. But it cannot be denied that 250 nits full-screen is not hugely punchy and there are moments when this monitor can look a bit, well, dull.

Overall, I'd definitely take this RGB panel over the RGWB alternative. Where the choice becomes more tricky is versus a QD-OLED. I think the latest QD-OLEDs are still a touch punchier in brighter scenes and on the Windows desktop.

If you disable uniform brightness in order to max out the visual pop in SDR mode, there's more apparent dimming according to how much bright content you are showing with this LG RGB-stripe panel than a Samsung QD-OLED.

That dimming, as more and more of the screen is lit up, is also apparent in HDR mode when the Adjustable HDR setting is maxed out. And that dimming is more significant than you'll see on the latest QD-OLED panels, including that MSI MPG 322UR X24, which is something to think about.

On the other hand, there's no purple tint to contend with and, like I said, the colour temperature is more natural. In the end, it's now a very close run thing between this LG panel and the QD-OLED alternative. That's a major step forward given I'd have taken QD-OLED easily, before.

Really twist my arm and I'd probably pick this panel. There, I've said it. Wait, can I take that back? I've just remembered this LG RGB-stripe dims a tiny bit more than I like. Argh. Ultimately, it's probably too close to call. Both of the current LG and Samsung options have their own slight shortcomings, but both are also great panels.

More to the point, however, 32-inch 4K OLEDs of any stripe—pun fully intended— make fantastic all rounders. They're big enough to be really immersive, in-game, but also have sufficient pixel density to look crisp and sharp for daily computing.

So, really the main problem for the Asus ROG Swift PG32UCWM is how the value proposition stacks up. At $1,299 or £1,099 this is a very expensive display. You can typically get a first-gen 32-inch 4K QD-OLED for somewhere in the $600 to $700 range, currently. Yes, this new RGB-stripe Tandem OLED is better by several metrics. But not that much better.

Then there's the comparison with that Alienware AW3926QW. That isn't quite on sale yet, but it's expected to come in at $1,100. Okay, it doesn't have USB-C connectivity. But it's not only brighter, but larger at 39 inches and offers that ultrawide 5K2K upgrade.

Of course, you're going to need one heck of a GPU to drive this display at its full 240 Hz refresh at 4K and that challenge is only going to be stiffer with a 5K2K panel. But perhaps that's a separate issue to the reality that you're paying more for less with this Asus compared to that upcoming Alienware. The choice is yours, but I'd want a look at that Alienware before pulling the trigger, that's for sure.

It might feel like an eternity that we've been living in this AI era, but really we're only at its advent. As such, many of the risks associated with it have until now been merely hypothetical. However, we're now seeing research filter out from security and software research teams that show some genuinely concerning behaviour, in particular when it comes to AI agents.

On the one hand, we have Island Technology explaining how it's uncovered thousands of malicious GitHub repos disguised as AI agent skills and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that the agents are at risk of downloading of their own discretion. On the other hand, we have the AI Security Institute (AISI) showing how the (unrestricted) AI agents it was using for cybersecurity attempted to dupe real people, using fake identities and pressuring people into accepting malicious code.

I remember when OpenClaw ('Moltbot', back then) first entered public consciousness with promises of actual agential behaviour to help solopreneurs and the likes do, umm, stuff and things. Without said solopreneurs having to do said stuff and things themselves—just hook your bot up to your different apps and services, tell it what to do, and let it cook. That wasn't too long ago, either; I reported on it in January.

How time flies. Now, talking about autonomous, agential AI seems pretty normal. And we're starting to see what this actually means in terms of security risks. We'd seen cases of AI agents running amok before, of course, but these newly identified risks seem a little more concrete.

In the first case, Island Technologies has discovered that fake GitHub repos pose a real threat for AI agents. These kinds of attacks existed previously, of course, but they attempted to dupe real humans who could personally assess them and take responsibility for vetting things thoroughly before downloading. The difference is these repos are now dressing up as AI agent skills and MCP servers to specifically target AI agents, which could download these repositories of their own 'volition'.

The Enterprise Browser creator explains: "The most significant shift is a technique we call AgentBaiting. An AI agent searching for a new capability such as a Skill or an MCP server can discover a campaign repository on its own, treat the attacker's Readme as legitimate documentation, and hand the installation instructions to the user.

In our testing, Claude Code, Gemini, and ChatGPT all surfaced malicious campaign repositories without ever being shown a link. A playbook built to deceive people now deceives the agents acting on their behalf."

In at least one run, while Claude didn't download the relevant malicious repo in the company's testing, it did recommend it as a backup. In other runs it did detect malicious code and refused to recommend it.

As if this wasn't bad enough, there's the potential that AI agents could some day be the ones that create such repos, at least if a recent incident disclosed by AISI is anything to go by.

According to the institute, in some of the cybersecurity challenge runs it tasked AI agents with, "an AI agent took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations."

More specifically, in one case, AISI says, "An agent tried to insert malicious code into an open-source project. In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering — creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project's maintainer to approve the code. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code."

"The agent researched the project's human maintainers, created multiple fake identities, and used the fake identities to socially engineer a real maintainer into approving the code. When the agent’s pull request was challenged in public, it edited its earlier activity to appear harmless and considered adopting a fresh identity to continue. The agent used Tor to bypass some network restrictions on GitHub, which is what first triggered AISI’s security alert."

"As part of the same effort, the agent tried to contact real people directly, sending messages and files through an online file-transfer service to persuade them, or their own AI coding tools, to run malicious code. Some messages carried harmful payloads, and some were attempts at social engineering; targeted at real people—something we’ve never previously observed."

The important caveat to note here is that these AI agents had had their reins taken off and were permitted wide-spanning internet access. The usual preventative measures built into these agents in public models had been disabled.

That being said, it's hard to imagine that really serious malicious actors wouldn't be able to do the same and remove those safeguards. In which case, I can't help but wonder if there's a chance that in the future we'll see AI agent-designed or agent-injected malicious repos being unwittingly accessed by AI agents that don't detect it.

There are, of course, always risks associated with new technologies, so I don't want to stoke fear too dramatically. But it's hard not to worry about such research when it involves a technology that is fundamentally designed to have some level of autonomy. That's the key issue here, and in both cases—whether acting maliciously or unwittingly downloading malicious software—it's this agency that is the primary issue. Let's just hope improvements to safeguards keep up with improvements to AI agent capabilities.

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

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

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

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

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

It's always heartbreaking when fan projects get axed—but one sorrow from last year was Bionicle: Masks of Power, which was shut down by Lego after it had peacefully co-existed with it for eight whole years. The project, a fully-fledged third-person action game by Team Kanohi, had attempted to thread the needle by playing nice with Lego's rules on fan-made media.

Unfortunately, eight years is a long time—and as Kanohi said back then, "the Lego Group's stance on fan-created media has changed." It was some genuinely impressive work, and you can see a full two-hour gameplay walkthrough of what could have been below.

But there's still hope for that original vision. Team Kanohi has rebranded to the appropriately-titled "Unmasked Games", a studio that's working on something called Rustbound.

As the site reads: "Rustbound is an upcoming third person action-adventure game from Unmasked Games set in an entirely original world," in other words, it's likely that Unmasked Games has hit its eight years of prior work with the legally-distinctification beam, a feat that's likely taking a ton of work to pull off—but will at least preserve the skeleton of what was there before.

And you know what? Good for them! While my Bionicle-loving inner child is a little sad I'm not getting a modern version of the third-person action games I spent my younger years wrestling with (I was eight, and thus not yet come into my true gamer power), my inner adult is more excited to see what Unmasked Games can cook up on their own.

I'll even go one step further and say that the current aesthetic from the teaser is more interesting, anyway—the core of Bionicle is still there, in the blending of mysticism with technological aesthetics, and the as-yet-unnamed protagonist's new design is pleasantly reminiscent of the designs from the Bionicle movie. In a legally distinct way, of course.

An undersea power cable linking the UK National Grid to Ireland has been forced to relocate, after Harry Potter fans complained it would go through Dobby's grave. You know, Dobby the house elf. The fictional character created by J.K. Rowling.

Fans became aware of the desecration of Dobby's memorial after a BBC interview with project manager Simon Ludlam, who detailed plans to put the cable underground at Freshwater West beach in Wales (via The Guardian). This just happens to be the location where Dobby's fictional death was shot for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, and the site of a fan-made shrine.

According to Ludlam, speaking on The Energy Revolution podcast: "We did the [BBC] shot, we finished, I went back to London, and they then aired it a couple of weeks later. And we got hundreds of calls, I mean, hundreds of calls."

Ludlam doesn't appear to be a Harry Potter fan, as he expressed confusion over all the fuss created by the location. A colleague told him "Apparently, we're going to go straight through Dobby's grave."

"Dobby, who's Dobby?" Ludlam recounts. "He's a fictitious character in a fictious book.... what are you taking about?" His colleague told him: "Not, it's very, very serious."

The good news is that Ludlam's company, Etchea Energy, then enlisted planners to reroute the £430 million cable project, avoiding the spot where the fictional house elf fell. The bad news is that the cable now runs close to a site of genuine historical importance instead.

"We went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains," Ludlam says. "But we avoided Dobby's grave."

Well done, Harry Potter fans. The bizarre shrine to your fictional character's death remains intact, but now the cable runs quite close to proper archaeological trenches. Which, it should be pointed out, have previously revealed pottery linked to actual human burial.

The history of this collection of islands being what it is, I suppose you can't put anything underground without running into something important—but I'd argue the site of Dobby's fictional demise doesn't really count. The memorial is also a massive nuisance to locals, because people keep leaving socks on it. And messages of genuine grief, apparently.

Still, RIP, you strange little creature. May your final resting place remain bulldozer-free, and may you continue to hamper useful infrastructure projects until the end of time. Because humans are freaking weird, man.

Back at June's PlayStation State of Play stream, my most-anticipated action game of the year popped up with a short teaser trailer starring a mysterious masked man fighting with a sword in one hand and a baby in the other. In a much, much longer trailer today coinciding with pre-orders going live, Phantom Blade Zero revealed who was behind the mask: Donnie "Ip Man" Yen.

Call this Phantom Blade Zero's Keanu moment—except Yen is doing more than lending his face and voice to the supporting role of Mó Yuan, protagonist Soul's father. That'd be stolen valor in a kung fu game, considering Donnie Yen is an action star not just in his native Hong Kong, but internationally, thanks to roles in Rogue One and John Wick 4. He has some all-timer Chinese action classics to his name, including Hero, Iron Monkey, and Once Upon a Time in China 2, and since 2008 he's starred in multiple films as the man who taught Bruce Lee kung fu, grandmaster Ip Man.

Developer S-Game announced with today's trailer that Yen has been involved as a "creative consultant" for PBZ's kung fu choreography since 2023. That means the studio's managed to keep his role under wraps since the game was first announced. I imagine the commenters over on Bilibili are going apeshit right now.

"Huge thanks to Donnie and his stunt team for bringing authentic kung fu to the game," the trailer's description reads."

If you were conspiracy-minded and paid really close attention to detail, you may have been able to see this reveal coming. Back in 2023, S-Game founder Soulframe Liang wrote a post on the PlayStation Blog naming Kenji Tanigaki as the game's "action director." Tanigaki has been a member of Yen's stunt team for some 30 years, collaborating with him on at least a dozen projects. Looks like we can now add one more to the list.

Phantom Blade Zero was scheduled to release just a month from now, but was recently delayed until October 29 for extra polish. Donnie Yen's star power, at least for the Chinese audience, is probably yet another reason Soulframe isn't worried about competition from GTA 6. A PlayStation State of Play stream diving deeper into the game is planned for next week, on August 17.

Pre-orders are live now on Steam, with a few goodies in tow.

If you scroll down to Popular New Releases on Steam right now, you'll find a quintessentially 2026 list of games. There's Shelves & Sorcery, a new entry in the burgeoning sortslop genre. There's Landscaper Simulator, which is a simulator about landscaping. The War in the North reissue is there, and there are at least two incremental games, which is not a lot compared to normal.

Possibly that's because Horse Magnifier: The Full Horse landed on Steam this week, throwing all norms into disarray. As the name implies, it's a game about magnifying horses. The trailer bears this out: horses are shown being magnified or else distorted—not what I came here for!—alongside a '90s evoking drum 'n' bass soundtrack.

Lest you think this game is a mere joke, it has over 250 "very positive" reviews already after releasing on Monday. Because despite looking like a joke it's actually a fairly decent puzzle game, one that has been on Itch.io for a while, but which arrives on Steam in a premium The Full Horse edition.

It plays out like this: there are two horses on the screen. Using a variety of magnifying glasses each with their own distorting effect, you have to make your horse match the other horse with pixel precision. This isn't always easy, but that's OK, because it is always curiously funny. I haven't played this new premium edition, but I have spent a little while mucking around in the Itch version, which is both very annoying and, like I said, pretty funny.

In the words of Steam user Toasterban: "This game is beautiful. This game is confusing. This game is horrifying. This game is horse."

Look: this premium version of Horse Magnifier has more than 50 levels which I can't see myself tackling. Call me a dullard, call me a philistine, call me a prude: I can only bear magnifying horses for about 15 minutes all up. But if Steam demonstrates anything in this year 2026, it's that people sure do like to play a bizarre variety of games.

The new version also has Steam Workshop support, meaning you could possibly magnify horses forever. It's on Steam with a launch discount.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saber Interactive's upcoming Rideshare Stimulator drew some eyeballs today when Saber CEO Matthew Karch confirmed that its trailer includes a hidden jab at Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford. But that same trailer sparked a grimmer reaction from former lead writer Stella Sacco, who said on Bluesky that she was replaced on the project by ChatGPT. Saber, however, denies the claim, saying that no writers were replaced with AI "for Rideshare or any other game."

"I didn’t even see this had been announced," Sacco wrote earlier today. "I was lead writer on this one! And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development. All the passenger voices were AI too. Either they changed direction at some point or they’re not disclosing it on Steam."

I didn’t even see this had been announced. I was lead writer on this one! And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development. All the passenger voices were AI too. Either they changed direction at some point or they’re not disclosing it on Steam

— @antlervel.vet (@antlervel.vet.bsky.social) 2026-08-13T01:48:31.362Z

Sacco also shared an image of a December 2023 social media post, in which she had written, "I got replaced on one of my games at work. By ChatGPT." Sacco's LinkedIn account indicates that she was lead writer at Saber Interactive from July 2023 to July 2024, during which she worked on Stuntman Hollywood and other games.

In a subsequent post, Sacco said the decision to replace her with a chatbot was made by "one to two AI dummy higher-ups at Saber," and that she has no issues with Rideshare "Stimulator" developer Unigine. "My boss, to his credit, argued over and over with the c-level who pushed the AI—'we already have Stella and she’s funny and she’s good at this, she’s done live games before so live ops are no problem,' etc—but the suit insisted 'gamers love new tech' so using AI would be 'great marketing'," she wrote.

The allegation resulted in immediate blowback on YouTube and Steam, over both the alleged use of AI and the lack of disclosure on the game's Steam page. In a statement provided to PC Gamer, however, Saber denied Sacco's claim, although it acknowledged the presence of AI within the game.

"Neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI for Rideshare or any other game," the studio said. "In fact, Saber's staff of writers has tripled since 2023. Rideshare's story was written entirely by real people.

"The game will also feature an experimental, free-ride mode that by necessity incorporates AI as the number of passengers in the game is infinite. We are firm believers in using AI tools to improve or enhance gameplay experiences and improve NPC behavior as we have done since Saber was founded in 2001. As the industry has continued to contract, Saber continues to hire. None of our 3000+ employees have to worry about being replaced by AI.”

In response to Saber's statement, Sacco told PC Gamer, "They can say what they want—I was there, I even posted on Facebook about it at the time, and I have mentioned it on Bluesky several times without using the game’s title.

"They took me off the project to use ChatGPT to write the rest of the text, including planned live updates. If they changed plans in the intervening years, that’s great, but again: I was there, and it was my job to write the game, and then it wasn’t once Matt Karch decided using ChatGPT would be great publicity for the game."

The Rideshare "Stimulator" Steam page says "each ride presents players with unique and unpredictable passenger stories, ensuring a diverse and engaging gameplay experience." That's not the most compelling bit of marketing I've ever read (and doesn't that make you wonder?) but it does imply the importance of strong narrative and writing to the overall experience. I had a friend who drove taxi years ago and he wasn't a huge fan of the work but he loved the people, and I think that will hold true in Rideshare "Stimulator" too: The mechanics of driving will provide a skeleton, but it's the people in the game world that will give it life—or not, as the case may be.

At the same time, though, it also jibes with what Saber said about the game's "free-ride mode," which essentially promises the opposite of strong narrative and writing. Specifying that "the story" was written by humans, as opposed to everything, is also effectively meaningless because it could refer to anything from the basic plot to a specific script—and excludes narrative aspects like dialog, which is what ultimately makes a game like this work.

In spite of the admission, the Rideshare "Stimulator" Steam page is also notably lacking an AI disclosure. In a follow-up statement, Saber told PC Gamer "the Steam page will be updated once the feature set is finalized. We are touting this experimental mode as a feature, not shying away from it."

Fields of Mistria romance walkthrough

FAQs

• Can you date multiple people? Yes! You can date all 12 marriage candidates simultaneously until you choose one to propose to.
• Do they get jealous? No, characters will comment on who you're dating but in a sort of parallel universe way where nobody realizes you're in multiple relationships.
• Are there rival marriages? No, marriage candidates don't express interest in each other, regardless of who you are or are not dating or married to.
• I heard there are breakups? There are breakup letters, yes, but NPCs only send these if you have proposed to someone else while dating them. See the breakups section below for info on turning these off in the settings.
• Divorce? There is no divorce in Mistria (so far) so be extra sure before you lock in a spouse with a ring!
• How do I choose who to marry 😭😭😭? I dunno, but tell me when you figure it out because I'm still torn and rocking multiple save files.

See also

Friendship points

Friendship points are essentially experience points for your relationships that you earn by talking to characters or giving them gifts. In the heart tab of your journal you can see your current heart level with every NPC and the pink meter showing friendship points earned towards the next heart. You cannot lose friendship points with NPCs. They do not decay over time (animals are a different story) and giving someone a gift they dislike or hate does not subtract points.

All NPCs have friendship points for you to earn, but only marriage candidates (listed as "single" in the relationship tab) have heart symbols and heart events.

How to earn Friendship Points

*The total friendship points earned by going on dates will likely be uncovered by modders and dataminers soon. For now, 70 points is my approximation based on an embarrassing amount of pixel counting and math in an image editor. It sure sounds like a lot but it's definitely worth more than a loved gift!

If you give a gift to an NPC after midnight on the in-game day prior to their birthday they will react as if it's a birthday present. When I tried it, this didn't appear to give the friendship points bonus for a birthday gift though, so it's only superficial.

Gift giving

Each character can receive one gift per day. Most items are giftable (flowers, produce, ores, food, etc.) and you'll be able to intuit some preferences like how Celine likes many types of flowers, March enjoys ores, and Balor likes expensive gems. Refresh your memory on what they like or love in the relationships panel of your menu.

There's no penalty for repeating gifts, so if you want to grind Friendship Points with a specific character, just keep giving them something they like that's easy for you to stockpile. There is a Steam achievement called "Thoughtful Gifter" for giving any one character all of their different liked and loved gifts. They react differently to gifts they like, dislike, love, or hate, with some pretty cute character details often coming from loved gifts, so that's a little motivation for seeking out all the different things your favorite singles love most.

Gift hints and lists

• If an item is mentioned with pink text during a conversation, that's something that character likes or loves.
• You can also get in-game hints by asking Elsie for "gossip" starting from the request board in your first summer. She'll reveal a liked or loved gift for a character once per day which is added to your gifts list in the game menu.
• Check my Fields of Mistria gift list for a guide to the easiest gifts for each marriage candidate.
• For gifts to give everyone else, I recommend the Fields of Mistria wiki!

Heart events

Heart events are special cutscenes with marriage candidate NPCs (other characters have friendship points but not heart events) that you can attend after reaching heart levels 2, 4, 6, and 8. After reaching the appropriate heart level, a character will send you a letter inviting you to meet them somewhere. You can check the details in the quests portion of your journal.

Heart events are scenes that explore each character's personal story and each new scene with a character will build on the ones before. Heart events don't award any friendship points, so you don't need to worry about choosing specific dialogue choices during these scenes to gain more points. Just roleplay how you like!

Heart event thresholds

*Friendship point totals via the Fields of Mistria wiki. Point totals are not visible in game, so these are just info for doing your own math, if you're curious.

Exceptions:

• Juniper's 2 heart event begins at the request board outside the general store, not from a letter in your mailbox.
• The secret bachelor and secret bachelorette (revealed by story spoilers) begin with 6 hearts unlocked, so you'll only have an 8 heart scene and, if you choose, proposal and wedding scenes with them.

Speedrunner math:

• Mathematically, you can reach 8 hearts by Summer 14, Year 1 by talking to an NPC and giving them a loved gift every single day. If this is possible to achieve at all, it would likely be with Celine by foraging spring flowers.
• (Slowrunner math) You can unlock 4 hearts with a character on exactly Summer 28 (to attend the Shooting Star festival date) just by talking to them every single day without giving any gifts, if for some reason you want to do that.

You must unlock the summit to take a date to the Shooting Star Festival. Unlock it by completing Adeline's town beautification quest which comes after you've repaired the bridge, stocked the food stores, and restored the mill in town. Get that done before Summer 28.

Dating

You can begin dating any (or all of) the marriage candidates by reaching 8 hearts. During their 8 heart event you will choose between becoming best friends or confessing your feelings. You must confess your feelings if you want to date someone. You can't be best friends and start dating later, sorry.

After confessing your feelings, Elsie will come to your house the next morning to give you a tutorial on dating. Basically, you can only go on dates on Saturday and Sunday and you can only take each person on one date per weekend. After each date, you get a commemorative photo that you can hang in your house.

Initially you'll just have the meal at the inn as a date option but you can find or buy other "date inspiration items" (unlock by using the same way as cosmetic items). You can only find date inspiration items after you've begun dating at least one person.

How dates work

On any Saturday or Sunday, walk up to a character you're dating and press the button (same button as giving a gift) to invite them on a date. You'll choose from a list of date activities you've unlocked and they'll have a couple short lines of dialogue to accept. Each date is a tiny little scene without dialogue (unlike a heart event) showing you and your date on your outing.

Afterwards, you'll get a photo of your date showing the day and the setting. You can hang the photo on the wall like other pieces of decor in your home and interact with it to view the picture any time. You'll only get one of these photos per date type for each character, so think twice before taking them on a park date in the winter! Unless that's the aesthetic you're going for. You'll also receive an item from your date like a flower, gem, or a meal, depending on the activity.

Dating around

You can date all 12 of Mistria's marriage candidates simultaneously if you want to. Reach 8 hearts and confess your feelings to absolutely everyone. I'm not judging; that's what I did. Here's what happens:

• Two dates per week: You can only take each character on one date per weekend but Saturday and Sunday are both valid date days. So if you have multiple beaus you can invite two on an outing per week. Gem cutting for March and a picnic with Reina, maybe!
• No jealousy: Characters will all comment on who you're dating but none of them acknowledge you being in multiple relationships. (So Adeline may comment on you dating Eiland without referencing that you're dating her as well, for instance.)
• No player-initiated breakups: There are breakup letters initiated by NPCs (see breakups section below) when you propose to someone else, but you cannot choose to end a relationship with a character you've confessed to otherwise. Sorry, you're dating forever until they say so.

Marriage

You can propose marriage after reaching 10 hearts with someone you are dating and crafting an engagement ring. Elsie will come to your house to give you the engagement ring recipe the morning after you reach 10 hearts. Be warned: You need to have reached level 100 in the mines in order to craft it, so don't neglect those quests!

How to get married TL;DR:

1. Earn 10 hearts with any marriage candidate you are dating
2. Craft an engagement ring
3. Offer the engagement ring to your partner to begin a proposal scene
4. In your proposal scene, choose the heart dialogue option when offered
5. Choose your wedding date when prompted
6. You won't be able to miss your wedding, the day begins with a cutscene

Proposals

You can begin the proposal heart event by offering an engagement ring to a character you are dating and have 10 hearts with. During this scene your partner will give you a gift to show their feelings for you—March forges a shield, Ryis gifts you a potted tree, etc. You can reciprocate by choosing the red heart dialogue option to propose marriage. You can also choose to put the conversation off by saying you want to wait and discuss things later and then come back to initiate the scene again later.

You can cheese wedding proposals by offering the engagement ring and then, during the cutscene, telling your partner you want to discuss things later instead of proposing. You can do this with multiple characters to get all the proposal gift items before committing to just one person. The recipe for an engagement ring disappears from your blacksmith station after you've completed a proposal, so you can't go craft another ring after getting married.

Wedding planning

The first day after you propose, your partner will have a cute little line about being excited to get married. On three other separate days leading up to the big day, they'll ask for your input on details about the wedding. For each decision, all fiancees offer three choices: two that are the same among all spouses and one choice that reflects their personal preferences.

• Flowers: Red, white, [spouse preference]
• Cake: Vanilla, chocolate, [spouse preference]
• Meal: Harvest plate, Mushroom steak dinner, [spouse preference]

Wedding day

On your wedding day, you don't get to do anything other than attend the festivities. Pro: Watering your crops and feeding the animals is handled for you, Elsie and Josephine promise. Con: You lose an entire day, so avoid scheduling your wedding for a Friday or Saturday so you don't miss the market or the night at the inn. You may not want to schedule it on the same day as another NPC's birthday (or your own!) either because you won't get a chance to give them a gift.

Wedding gifts

The morning after your wedding, Elsie sends you a letter with furniture unique to your spouse as "wedding gifts." Juniper has a desk, cauldron, chair, and a bed for Dozy, for instance. March has a desk, chair, and a forge station. You also get a wedding photo of your spouse that you can hang in your home like other date photos.

Breakups vs "Polyamory"

If you date more than one character and do want to marry one of them, one of two things can happen: Your other partners break up with you and become your best friends instead or you go on dating everyone alongside your spouse. Aside from getting engaged, NPCs will not autonomously break up with you since there is no friendship point decay if you ignore your partners for a period of time.

There are two toggles related to breakups in the "gameplay" section of the menu. Here's how the three possible configurations work:

Default settings

The day after you propose to someone, any other characters you are dating will send you a letter in the mail saying that they want to end your relationship but remain friends instead. The next time you talk to them they'll ask if you got the letter and how you felt about it. They're all pretty much bittersweet but leave you on good terms. In the relationships menu you will still have the same number of hearts with that character but their label will change from "dating" to "best friends."

Breakup letters off

If you toggle breakup letters off, any characters you were dating outside your fiance will still revert to "best friends" status the day after your proposal. You just won't receive a breakup letter or see any dialogue related to ending the relationship. So you get to have your cake and eat it without the sting of consequences.

Breakups off entirely

If you turn breakups off entirely, you will continue to have the "dating" label with all other characters you'd been dating. You can continue taking those characters on weekend dates, kissing them whenever you want, and having daily chats with them that refer to your being in a relationship even after you're married. Like with dating multiple people, no one references that you're married while still dating. It's not really polyamory and more like plausible deniability non-manogamy.

You know a developer is confident in the game it's making when it's willing to list all of the reasons you might not want to buy it. That's the thrust of the latest dev log for Wardogs, the tactical milsim FPS coming to early access in September.

Wardogs has built up a lot of buzz this year, joining Steam's top-wishlisted games and rising ever since. Now it's up for pre-order, and it's immediately become Steam's top-selling premium game. I played a handful of hours in a closed playtest this past weekend and it totally won me over—this thing might be special.

But developer Bulkhead also knows Wardogs won't be for everyone—which is, coincidentally, one of the "10 reasons NOT to buy" Wardogs, according to the studio. The whole thing is worth a watch, but here's a few of the more interesting bullet points with a relevant quote from the devs:

• Early access content: "Wardogs has a content problem… After launch into early access, we'll be focusing on bug fixes, feedback, and a new map… Players should not expect regular content drops [throughout early access]... We want to make sure your expectations are set here before your purchase."
• The price: "Right now, you can preorder Wardogs for $39.99 on Steam and get access to the beta… If the price feels too high for an early access game, please don't buy it yet. Wait until the game has more of what you want, and consider it then… If you don't enjoy the beta, just refund it."
• Player count will decline: "We expect our initial days after launch to have a lot more players than expected, but we can tell you for a fact that this is completely normal. Those players will fall away over the next coming months. Player numbers will drop off, and journalists and influencers on the fringe of the community will try to ragebait your enjoyment out of the game for social media clicks. This doesn't mean the game is dying. We're thinking longer term than a flash in the plan. Our goal is to settle into a sustainable, close-knit community. If we're pulling in 3,000 to 5,000 daily concurrent players who genuinely love the game, it'll allow new players to buy in anytime and join an active community."
• Monetization: "We will not monetize the game at any point during early access. We will never monetize in-game gold bars, they must be earned through play. We will never allow you to purchase camos, with the sole exception of an optional supporter's edition… However Bulkhead will have ongoing running costs [after 1.0], and those costs will need to be covered if base game sales no longer cover them."
• We made Battalion 1944: "As much as we wanted [our WW2 FPS Battalion 1944] to succeed, with the low player numbers of only 50 to 200 daily players, our publisher relationships broke down, the console version was held in limbo by lawyers, and we burned through our profits supporting the game. We went dark on communication, way darker than we should've gone… If you still don't trust our studio because of Battalion 1944, don't rush to buy Wardogs. We hope our actions speak louder than words."

The video is essentially a clever framing for a design manifesto, laying out what Wardogs is and isn't so that curious Steam shoppers can decide if it's their speed while also addressing common criticisms. The brevity is refreshing: I don't know I've ever seen devs preemptively confront the hobby's fixation on player counts, and the race to declare a "dead game," in official marketing.

Wardogs isn't out until September 10, but pre-ordering gets you into the beta on August 21.