ChatTJB, according to its Crunchbase profile, is a service that "provides a personal conversational response where an individual directly receives, processes, and writes answers to user inquiries". That's technically true, but not in the way you think… because it's just sorta some guy.

Futurism got to sit down with Tucker Bryant, the man behind ChatTJB, and as you might be able to expect, he admits, "I tend to overcommit to bits."

If you're wondering how far he's willing to commit to the bit, Bryant rented out a billboard for $6,000, which says ChatTJB is the "leading chat interface powered by AI". AI in this case stands for 'Average individual".

He has reportedly been personally writing responses to users over 1000 times a day since starting the project, answering questions on what to eat for dinner, what colour to paint their homes, and he has even given relationship advice.

As Futurism notes, "Like a chatbot, he can also generate images upon request— in the form of graphics that he hastily sketches, of course."

Bryant is a Stanford graduate and a former Google employee who claims the idea came off the back of his partner telling him about "cognitive surrender". Effectively, it's argued that those who use AI chatbots are likely to blindly trust the information given to them, even when the information is incorrect.

Bryant says, "We often, or increasingly, trust LLM outputs so easily that we stop bringing our own creativity or critical thinking into the responses we receive, and over time that weakens our ability to be fully-functioning, sovereign human beings in the world."

Though Bryant was expecting some trolls and acknowledges ChatTJB is a bit of a troll itself, he says it has been "really sweet" to chat with real people and even noticed some users asking more serious questions. One user reportedly said, "I’m on the first night of my honeymoon and I don’t feel relaxed, is that okay?" and Bryant "switched out of super-casual-mode into supportive-friend-mode.”

Though that does raise some concerns. If users are talking to ChatTJB and are under the impression they are talking to an AI anonymously, they could reveal personal information in the process to another human being. That could become more of a concern as ChatTJB has seen interest from users online who want to become the bot on ChatTJB.

However, Bryant is taking it slowly and figuring out how to get volunteers involved. "This was just intended to be an art project. I think it’s beautiful that people want to do something less ridiculous with it than what I had planned."

He continues, "I also don’t want people to get hurt, so I’d rather people wait a long time for their prompts than open the floodgates to anyone and everyone. So, a long preamble to saying: I’m starting to let some approved volunteers try answering questions while testing out some moderation tools."

Bryant argues that ChatTJB is a satire of AI and the culture surrounding AI advertising. “That’s the highbrow answer. But the lowbrow answer is just as authentic, which is that I also thought it would be funny."

Bryant is not explicitly anti-AI, though. He says on his Instagram, "AI can do some really cool things, but sometimes all you really need is to talk with an average individual."

World bosses have been a part of the World of Warcraft player's diet since classic—in case you haven't played the game, what separates a world boss from any other raid encounter is the fact that it's (self-explanatorily) out in the world, something you need to party up to defeat without going into a cave somewhere.

That's changing with WoW's next patch, Curse of Ula'tek, as world bosses are shifting to a "lair" format. Essentially, they'll function like one-boss delves with larger groups—that also gives them the benefit of having scaling difficulties, all the way up to 15-25 man Mythic. You can queue up for them like you would any other dungeon.

I got to speak with lead encounter designer Taylor Sanders about plans for patch 12.1 about why Blizzard's chosen to experiment with world bosses in particular: "So historically, world bosses go all the way back, right, to like the green dragons and the Lord Kazzaks and stuff that many players know and love from Classic and beyond.

"Lately, we found in recent updates and recent expansions that these experiences have really been a little bit lackluster… A lot of players just cluster into a boss. It drops in a few moments. In the worst case, you might have to hop between servers to find a group where maybe the boss is up or the boss is attackable."

I can't say I disagree with Sanders, here—while there's a simple joy in joining an ongoing zerg rush, it's not as though I'm engaging with the games' systems beyond just pushing my buttons when I'm whacking one of these things. There might, on occasion, be an AoE I need to dodge or something, but I couldn't tell you one modern world bosses' mechanics from another.

That's mostly because of changing assumptions about difficulty. Some of those classic world bosses are iconic because they were allowed to be tough, or have punishing mechanics that required coordination to avoid—but because world content in WoW has now become part of casual play, those mechanics just wouldn't work for folks trying to get their dailies.

Imagine if, for instance, a world boss in retail had Lord Kazzak's "Capture Soul" ability, wherein if he kills anybody he heals for 70,000 HP—around 10% of his health. You'd never kill the dang thing.

"Going into the Curse of Ula'tek update," Sanders adds, "We really wanted to reimagine what a world boss could really be and try to make sure that if you are engaging with a world boss, you're having—not only an accessible experience, but you're also having a reasonable combat experience and you have a fun time fighting a boss."

The experience of finding a group itself has changed, too—again, back in the day, you'd meticulously recruit folks from either your guild or general chat. Your average non-Classic MMO player doesn't have the appetite for that sort of thing anymore, so modern WoW uses a streamlined looking for group interface where you can register for groups.

Only, the depersonalisation of that means, as Sanders points out, you can join just as a world boss is dying, or when it's at 5% HP, or something—it does, admittedly, feel janky: "We're hoping that this can get players out of the interface of trying to find a different group … To help players through that process, so they can just get in and get fighting the creature and get their loot faster."

Not that it doesn't have trade-offs. Again, there's something pleasingly chaotic and distinctly MMO about joining a mess of particle effects, or stumbling across a group already doing a raid boss—and that'll be lost if lairs become the way of doing things: "It's very rare that when you're designing something new, or trying to create a new experience for players, that you don't have trade-offs. One of the trade-offs is that sense of coming upon something where you're in the midst of the action, right? Or you're coming upon an event that is in progress.

"But we really felt like that was a good trade-off for us to make, to lose that aspect of it, if players are going to have a better combat experience against the encounter."

It's always a fascinating bit of tension, to me—MMOs are in their nature an evolving genre, mostly in how their playerbases evolve with them. The rigid hardcore/casual divide is a thing of the past, and it seems to me that the state of WoW's world bosses were a symptom of that—an attempt to make something that was for ambitious raiders part of casual content. Now it's all on a sliding scale.

If one thing is true about AI, it's that there's a lot of money in it. Nvidia became the first $5 trillion company because of its role in the explosion of AI data centers, and OpenAI has been rounding up tens of billions in investments. So you'd think AI companies could buy pretty much whatever they want—but one farming family in Northern Kentucky showed that's not the case by turning down a $26 million bid.

As reported by WKRC-TV Local 12, Ida Huddleston was offered the sum for half of her 1,200-acre farmland this year, which an unnamed company would turn into an AI data center. Huddleston's daughter, Delsia Bare, reportedly said she would "stay and hold and feed a nation" and that "$26 million doesn't mean anything."

AI data centers have become an ethical and ideological battleground, with Elon Musk's SpaceXAI only this week agreeing to take down 69 temporary methane turbines in Memphis over the next year in reaction to resident concerns over local disruption.

In this case, Bare claims there's history to the site that the data center company would be ignoring. She told Local 12, “My grandfather and great-grandfather and a whole bunch of family have all lived here for years, paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it." She continues, “[They] even raised wheat through the Depression and kept bread lines up in the United States of America when people didn’t have anything else.”

Bare claims to be among "dozens of landowners" approached by the anonymous buyer, who reportedly represents a major AI company. Notably, Local 12 claims that the land where Bare lives is worth around $6,000 per acre, which makes the offer around ten times the actual value.

Huddleston tells Local 12, “They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we’re not. We know whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don’t have any water—and that poison. Well, we know we’ve had it.”

Huddleston is also sceptical of claims of economic growth as a result of the AI data center. “I say they’re a liar, and the truth isn’t in them. That’s what I say. It’s a scam.”

Data center pushback has been a common theme of the growth of AI, with concerns of both an environmental and ethical nature being front and centre. And AI companies have a lot of money to throw around.

Even if you own a lot of land, $26 million must be a life-changing amount of money to anyone but the richest of the rich; it would even be enough to buy some of the RAM that AI data centers have been gleefully sucking up over the last few years. Just a thought.

Keeping on top of chipset driver updates is a boring, but necessary part of maintaining a modern PC. Unfortunately, both myself and fellow hardware nerd Jacob Fox have run into an issue with the AMD Install Manager, which attempts to install the latest chipset driver and fails miserably on both our machines.

Very unhelpfully, the failed installer points to a general error page, which blitheringly suggests a whole host of vague, unrelated PC update conflicts might be to blame. I even reinstalled the entire AMD Adrenaline driver package in the hopes of an easy fix, to no avail.

However, you'll be pleased to know that a manual chipset update package exists, as spotted by Reddit user Life_Recognition_963. Simply download the individual installer at the bottom of the 8.07.16.1035 release notes page, run and reboot, and voila, the tyranny of trying to keep your machine up to date is kept at bay once again.

It seems like the AMD Install Manager might be pointing at the wrong link, or providing a package that fails to install on a large number of machines. The accompanying Reddit thread is full of users complaining about the same issue, so the problem seems fairly widespread.

For what its worth, I'm running an AMD Ryzen 7 7700X on an ageing Gigabyte X670 mobo, while our Dr Fox is using a Ryzen 7 7800X3D with an Asus B650EM Max Gaming board. Looking at the reports, though, the issue seems to be chip and motherboard agnostic.

All's well that ends well I guess, but keeping your chipset drivers (and all the other drivers on your machine) in tip-top condition is a good way of getting ahead of future issues. Unless the drivers themselves have problems, in which case stuff might break.

It can be a minefield, maintaining a gaming PC in 2026. Still, if only all fixes were as easy as downloading a separate installer package, ey?

A new report suggests New Zealand born actor Sam Neill, who passed away in July, will appear in the forthcoming The Legend of Zelda film adaptation. According to Deadline's sources, filming for the Nintendo and Sony collaboration wrapped in April, just months before the star's death.

While Neill's appearance hasn't been confirmed by Sony, the late star will appear alongside three newly confirmed actors. Uli Latukefu, best known for his role in Young Rock, will play Ganondorf. Dichen Lachman and Yvonne Strahovski, who have appeared in Severance and The Handmaid's Tale respectively, will play yet-to-be-specified roles. These join a cast including Bo Bragason (Renegade Nell) as Zelda and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth (Son of a Critch) as Link.

It's not the only posthumous appearance for Neill: he'll also appear in Godzilla x Kong: Supernova and The Last Resort in 2027. As for The Legend of Zelda, that's scheduled for an April 30 release. It was filmed in Neill's native New Zealand.

Neill died suddenly on July 13 in Sydney, Australia. "The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free," an official statement read, alluding to the actor's struggle with blood cancer.

The Legend of Zelda is directed by Wes Ball, whose recent work includes Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Maze Runner. Shigeru Miyamoto is onboard as a producer.

As soon as Fields of Mistria 1.0 landed I rushed to shove gifts into my lovers' faces and drag them on dates to hustle my way to the coveted 10 heart threshold for marriage, only to find out that, woof, crafting an engagement ring is a real investment! The material cost isn't actually that steep if you've already played a lot, but it does require you to get to the final level of the mines. I'd sort of neglected unlocking those final seals while totally engrossed in friendship grinding, which was apparently the wrong thing to do.

How to craft an engagement ring

To craft an engagement ring, you have to reach level 100 in the mines to unlock additional recipes for The Dragon Forge on level 90. After you make a Dragon-Forged Core, you can craft an engagement ring at a normal blacksmithing station.

Engagement ring recipe:

• 2 Diamonds
• 4 Mistril ingots
• 4 Gold ingots
• 1 Dragon-Forged Core (craft at The Dragon Forge on mines level 90)
  • 5 Monster core
  • 1 Mistril ingot
  • 1 Pink diamond
  • 1 Ancient firefly
  • 1 Medium essence stone

Engagement ring materials shortcuts

You can't just throw down the cash for an engagement ring outright, but you can pay your way to avoid some of the material grinding if you're ore poor but have tons of tesserae.

What you can buy or craft:

• Buy 40 gold ore from the blacksmith for 8,000 tesserae
  • Craft 4x gold ingots at the blacksmithing station
• Buy 50 mistril ore from the blacksmith for 20,000 tesserae
  • Craft 5 mistril ingots at the blacksmithing station (1 extra ingot is for the Dragon-Forged core you need to craft)
• Buy a Large Bundle of Stone to get 100 stone (you need 90) at the carpenter shop for 2,000 tesserae
  • Craft 2 diamonds at the stone refinery (in the mines entrance) with 70 stone
  • Craft 1 medium essence stone at the stone refinery with 20 stone

What you need to find or grind:

• 5 monster cores
  • Dropped by lantern enemies (mines levels 1-39) or by flame spirits (mines levels 61-99)
• 1 pink diamond
  • Mine pink diamond nodes (mines levels 81+)
  • OR take your partner on a gem cutting date on Saturday or Sunday for a chance to get one as a reward
• 1 ancient firefly
  • Catch with a net in the Ancient Ruins (mines level 81+)

There are now three Magic: The Gathering cards for Sting, the magic sword Bilbo claims from the troll hoard. To be fair, they're all mechanically distinct. In The Lord of the Rings set there was an artifact card called Sting, the Glinting Dagger, and an instant called Hobbit's Sting that did more damage the more food you had. Several the hobbit-themed cards are empowered the more food tokens you have piled up, which is a flavorsome idea.

The upcoming Hobbit set adds a card called Sting, Bilbo's Sword, which uses the new mechanic hone, which lets you add +1/+0 to a creature with equipment—a mechanic that mostly shows up on dwarf cards. As you may remember, there are a lot of dwarves in The Hobbit.

There are also now three cards for the One Ring. The Hobbit set adds My Precious, representing the Ring as Gollum's, whereas The Lord of the Rings set had it as both Bilbo's Ring and in its final form as The One Ring. (There was also an instant called Slip on the Ring to represent the act of using it.) Again, the cards are all mechanically distinct and depict a different aspect of Tolkien's story. But at the same time, it's tough to see the slight differences between the 2023 Middle-earth set and the 2026 one as demanding a whole separate release.

There are a couple of other brand new mechanics alongside hone. The dwarves get storied, a condition that activates when they have "three or more artifacts, legendaries, and/or Sagas" and has different consequences based on the dwarf. Dáin, Lord of the Iron Hills, for instance, makes your opponent pay a point of mana for each creature they want to attack you with if you're storied enough to deserve it.

The humans of Laketown get recruit, which lets them draw a card and discard one, giving them a 1/1 human soldier if that discard was a nonland card. Meanwhile, amass, which was used to build armies of orcs in The Lord of the Rings, can here be used for armies of goblins—only fair since The Hobbit doesn't use the word orc for its equivalent monsters.

Each of these additions is fine, and I'm pleased to see several new adventure cards in this set, and the return of saga cards based on Tolkien's songs, because The Hobbit includes such bangers as Roll-Roll-Roll-Roll and the goblin singalong classic Burn, Burn, Tree and Fern. There's definitely a more whimsical edge to this set, with dancing bears and trolls turning to stone, making it feel more like the charming talking-animal set Bloomburrow, which is no bad thing.

But I'm glad it's a smaller release than the deluxe-sized Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth was. Nobody in their right mind would try to stretch something based on The Hobbit to be the same size as The Lord of the Rings, would they? Surely not.

Magic: The Gathering The Hobbit will be in prerelease from August 7–13, with a digital release in Arena on August 11, and its full tabletop release on August 14.

A very Quake-themed QuakeCon kicked off today, with John Romero and current id studio co-director Marty Stratton speaking on a panel celebrating the shooter's 30th anniversary. A new 19-level Quake episode was announced and released during the panel, which also featured a brief livestreamed appearance from Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor.

Reznor famously composed the music for Quake, which was a very big deal at the time. If ever there was a more 1996 cultural artefact than Quake I don't know what it could be (maybe Space Jam?). Reznor's industrial tumult definitely fit the grimier, darker, browner mood of Quake, compared to the MIDI thrash metal of Doom. I remember sometimes having to mute the music because it made me feel too tense.

"When I first encountered Wolfenstein it felt impossible," Reznor said. "Nothing was like that. It was a radical departure from what I'd known as videogames. I went out and bought a PC just to play it."

But it was Doom that sealed the deal. "Jump ahead a few years, Doom comes out, and it was like a bomb went off," he went on. "It was not only technologically advanced, but there wasn't anything like that. It felt like no adults were involved, nobody said no, it was free, and it was fantastic. In some ways I felt a parallel with what I was trying to do with music, by misshaping things and trying to express myself. I really felt a connection to it."

"[I] crossed paths with the id guys and hit it off, became friends, and I'm grateful to be invited to be part of the Quake team working on music and sound effects. And you know of all the things I've done in my career I'm extremely proud of that, and I think the game holds up today."

Reznor was hardly going to make an appearance at QuakeCon in order to distance himself from Quake and its soundtrack, but it's interesting to hear him draw parallels between Doom and his own music at the time. It's a reminder that the nowadays quaint-looking shooter seemed utterly terrifying in 1993. I remember the music in E1M3 sending shivers down my spine. The first pinkie demon encounter in that level prompted a quick shutting down of the game. Similarly terrifying: hearing the radio edit of Closer on the top 40 countdown.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Quake, a bunch of Nine Inch Nails Quake-themed gear has been released. You can get an ammo box (it really is just a $30 empty box), a t-shirt, a keychain, a hoodie, and the soundtrack has been reissued on vinyl. It's all extraordinarily expensive but you may find yourself buying it anyway.

Just a smidge over 30 years after its original release date, Quake just got a big update. MachineGames has added a new chapter to id Software's landmark 1996 successor to the Doom games, dubbed Dawn of the Machine.

The 19 new levels, which join two previous MachineGames expansions, see Quake's protagonist trapped in "a dimension of endless illusion." I'm most curious about some promised new weapon variants: "the Super Axe—unleashing lightning on successive strikes—and the Laser Cannon, firing ricocheting projectiles that tear through enemies from every angle."

The update also adds a gallery of archival material from Quake's development, including a handful of playable levels that were created early in development and never finished.

The creative process on display is decidedly relatable, with level names like "Tim" "Tim10A," and "Tim14," and notes like, "Lots of tight hallways make navigation tough, and similarly there are many dead ends that were not completed, so it is not entirely clear what the idea was."

The update was revealed at QuakeCon today in a panel which included id Software co-founder John Romero, who noted with laughter that the announcement was occurring not on the 30th anniversary of Quake, which released in June of 1996, but on the 30th anniversary of the day he left id Software.

Quake famously marked the end of an era for id: Romero, American McGee, Michael Abrash, Sandy Petersen and others left the company after its development. Petersen said recently that "Quake ruined id Software."

But ruined or not, the studio carried on and released two of my favorite games, Quake 2 and 3, and everything else that came after, including the much lauded run of modern Doom games.

Id now faces a new kind of adversity following substantial layoffs imposed by Microsoft as part of its plan to "reset" the Xbox business.

"This is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month," id Software co-founder John Carmack said in reaction to the news.

Romero, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall are all scheduled to appear at a founders reunion panel on Saturday for "a rare conversation about the company's earliest days, and the friendships, challenges, and innovations that have forever changed gaming."

Five years after going public on the London Stock Exchange, indie publisher Devolver Digital wants to go back to being a private company. In a message posted on the company's website, Devolver's board of directors delivered a frank assessment of the company's current state, saying they believe it is undervalued—in large part because of inherent incompatibilities between the videogame industry and the stock market.

There's plenty of procedural guffola to dig through in the announcement if that's your thing, but what's especially interesting to me are Devolver's reasons for wanting to withdraw from the exchange. It's possibly the most succinct 'creating value for shareholders is going to kill us all' filings I've ever read.

Devolver went public in November 2021, a move CEO Douglas Morin said at the time would "ensure our continued growth and support even more wonderful games. Most importantly, it will allow us to retain our culture." But it seems that the opposite has happened: Devolver said in this new filing that in the years since then, the videogame industry has faced "significant disruption and volatility, characterised by widespread layoffs for studios and publishers, platform rationalisation and substantial impairments across the industry."

As a result of that industry-wide instability, "Devolver has faced the ongoing challenge of delivering growth in line with market expectations despite those difficult sector conditions." That in turn has seen the company's valuation plummet, because "the lifetime and long-tail revenue delivery inherent in the videogames business" are essentially non-factors.

In case that's not sufficiently clear, the filing goes on to state that Devolver's value is linked to "the timing and scale" of new game releases, which are not always the most predictable things. That's also incompatible with the market's emphasis on "predictable, sequential growth," the filing states, and Devolver "has at times faced increased pressure to deliver short-term market expectations that do not necessarily reflect the underlying long-term value creation potential of its portfolio and development pipeline."

Going private isn't just for the good of the games and those who love them: Devolver's board also believes it can save roughly $1.6 million annually as a private company, for one thing, and its shares aren't really seeing much trading action, so being on the market isn't doing much good anyway.

But the emphasis is clearly on avoiding the pitfalls that responsibility to shareholders bring: the layoffs, cancellations, and studio closures that have characterized the last few years of the game industry. Actions are louder than words and all that, but after years of watching the videogame industry be relentlessly decimated because growth isn't happening fast enough, I'll take this as a start.

"Being private will allow the Devolver Digital team, especially the finance, legal, and executive team, to singularly focus on the long-term health of the company and less on satisfying the requirements of the public market, which have nothing to do with being a successful game publisher," a Devolver rep said in a statement to GamesIndustry.

A vote on the proposal to take Devolver private again will happen in September.

Nobody is particularly surprised anymore when the newest hero or class added to a game ends up being its strongest by far. You can't really be the new flavor of the month without some extra sauce. But sometimes developers don't get the balance right and the new toy gets left on the shelf for other, more exciting options.

This is basically what happened when warlocks debuted in Diablo 4 alongside the release of its Lord of Hatred expansion earlier this year. Despite being a marquee feature of the expansion, warlocks were criminally underpowered compared to the rest of the roster. Other classes–with their newly juiced up skill trees—could smash their way through the game while warlocks were left to limp along in their wake.

Normally, I wouldn't care that much if one class couldn't compete with another in a largely singleplayer game, but warlocks also suffered from having a number of skills that forced them to stand still to cast, disrupting the flow of combat. They were not only weaker than everyone else but clunkier, too—the last thing you want in a fast-paced action RPG like Diablo. Even paladins, the other new Lord of Hatred class, weren't as flimsy as warlocks when they arrived.

Blizzard will be giving warlocks another chance next season. According to people like creator MacroBioBoi, the fussy skills are fixed and the buffs are huge. On the PTR, warlocks are capable of clearing out the hardest dungeon tier in the game even using severely unoptimized gear. In the current season, this was only really possible by exploiting bugs.

Blizzard dumped a ton of buffs into warlock skills and opened up ways to scale their damage that weren't available before. Builds that were mediocre are now cruising through the game without fear. MacroBioBoi showcased a build where you surround yourself with burning skull minions and had no trouble melting through high-level monsters.

A chunk of the warlock's power comes from a new seasonal gem that gradually makes you stronger the more enemies you kill, but MacroBioBoi suspects that even if you were to nerf that gem, warlocks would still be one of the strongest—if not the strongest—classes in the game. And the best part is that their newfound power has been distributed pretty evenly across their skills, so a variety of builds should excel when the season comes out for real.

A Season of the Warlock will no doubt help some players cope with Blizzard's controversial decision to rework the strongest items in the game. Mythic Uniques will continue to function as the new highest tier of items, but will be easier to craft and find than they are in the current season.

We still have no clues on what is missing from the PTR though. Blizzard said the mysterious lack of a new seasonal system (other than the jewels) will be cleared up at BlizzCon. My money's on a seasonal story that will finally tie directly into the main story as we get closer to a third expansion.

Despite a record-breaking launch in February 2025, the sales of Monster Hunter Wilds haven't been stellar since. In its second sales quarter, the newest MonHun—which was widely dinged by fans for optimization issues and creative missteps—stalled severely, and by the time 2025 ended it was getting outsold by earlier entries in the series.

In its latest investor Q&A, however, Capcom said it still has high hopes for Wilds: The company wants to not only improve its sales, but to eventually have Wilds surpass Monster Hunter: World as Capcom's best-selling game of all time.

Capcom told its investors that it's already seen an improvement in Wilds sales following long-awaited performance fixes in early 2026. Additionally, the company claims that it has "seen a response to" the reveal of the upcoming Ascendance expansion and the recent Wilds price drop.

"We plan to continue improving the game’s technical performance as we aim to drive its total unit sales beyond those of Monster Hunter: World over the medium to long term," Capcom said.

It's an ambitious goal, because Wilds will need to cover a wide—and still widening—sales gap to get there. According to its latest quarterly report, Monster Hunter: World has sold over 30 million units since launch, and still managed to sell over 780,000 copies in the last quarter despite being over eight years old.

While Wilds' impressive launch has given it a nice headstart on its total sales figures—as of March 31, 2026, it's sold 11.4 million units—its rate of sales has plummeted so dramatically that, unlike World, it's not even represented on Capcom's best-seller ranking for the last quarter. Even with Wilds in a sound(er) technical state, the eight-year-old World is still seen as the best entry point into the series—it remains the only Monster Hunter on our Top 100 list.

That said, there are factors that could work in Wilds' favor. Its upcoming Switch 2 port could be a big deal for folks who only game with Nintendo, and if Ascendance is anywhere near as good as World's Iceborne and Rise's Sunbreak, it could secure Wilds' long-term reputation like those earlier expansions did for their respective Monster Hunter entries.

Still, a disparity of 19 million sales makes for a pretty big if.

Amidst the constant flood of negative and depressing stories about the gaming industry, it's nice to get a glimmer of good news now and then. Today that news comes via the court of Judge John Hodgman, who has ruled that it is perfectly legal to play Slay the Spire 2 in bed—even if the person in bed with you doesn't agree.

Some background, if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about: actor, author, and all-around funny person John Hodgman has a podcast called Judge John Hodgman where he rules on the disputes brought into his virtual courtroom.

These gentle disputes are typically between friends, family members, or partners, and consist of good-natured beefs or unusual disagreements: for example, one memorable case I listened to recently involved one person who thought it was perfectly normal to flush leftover soup down the toilet instead of dumping it in the sink, and another who (rightfully, imho) thought that was a pretty goddamn weird thing to do.

Hodgman hears both sides of cases like this and then makes a thoughtful ruling on who is in the right, with the plaintiff and defendant agreeing to abide by his decision. (I won't spoil the soup case: it is fascinating.)

This most recent dispute brought before Judge Hodgman involves whether or not it's OK to play games, particularly Slay the Spire 2, when in bed with a partner, and really, who better to adjudicate such a case than John Hodgman? He not only plays PC games (until recently he was regularly streaming himself playing SimCity 2013) but he also portrayed the PC in the old Mac vs PC ads that foolishly tried to convince us that a hoodied, goateed Justin Long was more appealing than a nerdy yet dapper John Hodgman. What the hell were you thinking, Apple?

In the case, Dan complains that his fiancée, Elissa plays her favorite game, Slay the Spire 2, in their bed on a laptop. Dan believes screens don't have a place in the bedroom and Elissa's nighttime gaming habits are ruining her chances for healthy sleep. Elissa says playing games before bedtime actually helps her sleep and she has trouble drifting off if she doesn't do some gaming before bed. Who's right and who's wrong?

Well, as you already know from subtle context clues like me saying earlier that Dan is wrong, Dan is wrong—but for a few reasons. First, Dan admits Elissa's gaming habits aren't actually keeping him awake at night: the light from her laptop screen and whatever tapping or clicking she's doing don't interfere with his rest at all.

"Pick an arbitrary battle and stick with it," Hodgman says when Dan admits to stubbornly storming off to sleep on a couch when he sees Elissa bringing her laptop into their bedroom.

"One of the major arguments for marriage is to have someone in the room with you while you're playing a video game," Hodgman says. "When Dan leaves the premarital bed out of spite to prove a point to you, Elissa, how does that make you feel? Really eager to marry him?"

I know there's a school of thought that says you should cut down on screentime right before bed, and some folks feel similarly to Dan that bedrooms should only be for sleeping and, well, let's call it "WooHoo" to keep it videogame related.

But Judge Hodgman ultimately rules in favor of Elissa because, honestly, Dan really doesn't have a case: he wasn't himself losing sleep due to Elissa's gaming habits, he just believed she should share an identical sleeping philosophy. And since he's her fiancee and not, y'know, her dad, Hodgman ruled Elissa can decide for herself what she wants to do before going to sleep.

I think it's a sound ruling, though I do have one sticking point: as a legal expert myself (I took a single business law class in community college 15 years ago and got a B) I think Hodgman should have recused himself from this case, and any case dealing with sleep, as he frequently advertises a mattress company on his podcast. Classic case of conflict of interest and grounds for appeal.

You can watch the entire case on YouTube or download the Judge John Hodgman podcast here.

Doom, one of the most influential videogames of all time, was famously distributed via the shareware model: The game's first chapter was completely free, and if you liked it, you sent id Software some money and they mailed you the remaining two episodes.

What would sometimes happen in those pre-online days, though, is that less-than-scrupulous resellers would offer the shareware version for sale, even though it was meant to be free. For $5 (or whatever, it's been a while), you could take home the hot new shooter from the guys who made Wolfenstein—and sure, you weren't getting the whole thing, but whatever. It's still Doom. Do you want to play it or not?

You might think that id Software would take issue with people making money on their work while they received nothing, but speaking at QuakeCon today, studio co-founder John Romero said the opposite was true: They were happy to see it happen.

"Please do it. Don't give us any money. Just get it out there," Romero said about people who made and sold the shareware version of Doom on floppies. "You would go to the store and you would see 10 different boxes that all had the same shareware Doom in it. I don't care. Give it to everybody, get it out there.

"We were totally happy with that. We were doing so much work just getting the game out. We knew in Taiwan that they were copying it: 100%, that was the market back then. So we contacted the biggest pirates there and went, 'Can you buy boxes from us? Really cheap. Really really cheap.' So they bought tons of boxes off of us, so it would be legitimate.

"Get it out there, make them feel good. We made money when people would actually order the rest of the game. We didn't try to make money off the shareware [version]."

Romero said id viewed it as simply a form of distribution—because again, this was years before the ubiquity of the internet, and most gamers didn't have easy access to this stuff, as we explored in our feature on how shareware transformed PC gaming forever.

Doom and other shareware games were available on BBSes, but that meant two things: You had to make a potentially lengthy (and expensive) long distance phone call if you didn't happen to live close enough to a distribution board, and worse, you had to be one of those computer nerd weirdos who actually owned a modem. Believe me, there were not many of us back then. So, dodgy as they might have been, those not-entirely-legit disk-in-a-box distributions were good for id Software and gamers alike.

That attitude also informed the studio's approach to copy protection, which is something it just didn't bother with.

"There's always been a war that's never been won with copy protection, and we didn't want to waste our time with that," Romero said. "If people are going to copy it, they're going to copy it. They might buy it some time later, but—we didn't have money for everything we were playing, so we're like, let's not copy protect it. If people want to play it, they can still figure out how to play it."

When I was a writer for The Wirecutter more than a decade ago, we were obsessed with finding and recommending the singular best version of any specific product, because it felt like there was so much crap to wade through online. Today I wistfully long for the Amazon of 2013, before it came to be overrun by endless samey garbage from alphabet soup "brands" called things like HORUSDY and EHEYCIGA.

If you're really looking for the cheapest thing you can get, you'll find those same products without the dropshipping markup on Aliexpress; and if you want the "best" thing, even seemingly personal recommendations on sites like Reddit are fraught as companies astroturf the site hoping to game AI search. So when I find a bit of kit that I really like that falls somewhere in the middle and is simply good, I feel like it's my duty to evangelize it a little bit.

That's the case with the Ceptics Travel Adapter, which has accompanied me to China, Korea, the UK, and Brazil in the last few years. There are a gazillion power adapter options out there that'll get the job done, but this is the only one I've owned that I can say I really like for international travel, and that's because it's simple and flexible.

If you own a travel adapter, chances are it's enormous. Almost every model out there is some variation of an oversized chunker that crams three or four different plugs into a single body, with one, maybe two sockets for you to plug your stuff into. And then they're usually chock full of USB ports that put out a measly few watts if you plug in more than one device.

The main reason I don't like these things is how bulky they are. They can be hard to fit onto a cramped socket, and there's also a chance the all-in-one approach won't actually work for the country you're traveling to. Annoying!

The Ceptics model is svelte by comparison and its sockets can be swapped out with a hearty click, so you can buy and pack just the specific plugs you need for your trip. I love that it takes up less space both in my luggage and at the wall socket, and its sole USB-C port delivers 30 watts—enough to quickly top up my phone without even bothering to plug in a proper charger. (Ceptics sells another model that also has a USB-A port on the side, but both ports are unfortunately limited to lower wattage).

The Ceptics travel adapter and its bafflingly named "SWadAPt" interchangeable plugs feels like a nice screwdriver kit with interchangeable bits instead of a freaky Leatherman with every tool combined into one. It just feels good to know I have the exact right tool for the job with none of the cruft, you know?

Depending on what I'm shopping for these days, I tend to either go for the high-end option that's more expensive than I really want to pay because I know the quality is worth it, or I go the really cheap, Aliexpress import route. For the former, I recently bought Peak Design's Slide Lite cross-body camera strap and a Cuff wrist strap, which were pretty expensive. But they come with a great warranty, are based in San Francisco where I live, and have some really clever design touches, like a magnet that holds the Cuff in place like a bracelet when it's not attached to my camera.

There are knock-off versions of Peak Design's gear on Amazon that cost like a third the price, but the quality difference for the real deal felt like it was worth the money.

What didn't feel worth the money, when I was looking for a fun little keychain camera to take on vacation, was the Kodak Charmera, which costs $35 on Amazon. I bought the same thing on Aliexpress for 10 bucks.

Ceptics' stuff lives in that rare middle ground that seems hard to find now. It's Chinese (despite claiming itself as a "USA-based" company), and it's not some super fancy but ultimately overkill GaN adapter with 100 watt über charging or whatever. It's just a good price, it's simple, and it saved me from ever having to use one of those clunky megabricks with annoying sliders for each plug type ever again.

Ghost Recon WildlandsNovember 13 will mark the 25^th anniversary of Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, but Ubisoft is getting the celebration ball rolling a little early with a major update to Ghost Recon Wildlands featuring major visual and gameplay enhancements, and an all-new mission "set in a darker, more oppressive Bolivia."

Bolivia, you may recall, is where Ghost Recon Wildlands takes place, in a fictional future where the country has been taken over by a powerful drug cartel. That leads the US to send in the Ghosts, and then it's peace through superior firepower time, baby! This didn't go over very well with the actual Bolivian government, which filed a format complaint about the whole thing with the French government.

The game itself is pretty good though, if also pretty ridiculous. I put probably a couple hundred hours into it with a pair of gamer pals, and even though we never liberated Bolivia we did have a good time, mainly because Wildlands is above all else a five-alarm chaos simulator. Yes, we're an elite squad of deadly operators, but we're also launching ourselves off of dirt bikes and over cliffs at roughly 300 MPH because we forgot which button the brake is.

Speaking of forgetting, never forget the incomparable skills of PC Gamer's own tier one strike squad:

Anyway, with the 25^th anniversary more or less upon us, Wildlands is being updated on both PC and current-gen consoles for "smoother combat, improved distance rendering, enhanced lighting and shadows, and a sharper image targeting 4K resolution."

The new standalone missions, dubbed Last Rites, see the gang hunt down La Llorona, the leader of a fanatical, violent cult called Los Pentitentes, who's hiding in a region filled with "dangerous swamps and dense forests where visibility is low and danger is lurking."

Notably, the followup to Wildlands, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, is not getting a similar facelift. It's a bit newer, although probably not enough newer to make that much of a difference, but it also came out in pretty rough shape and was quite poorly received. It's been improved dramatically since then, but maybe Ubisoft had to pick one and decided to go with the winner. Breakpoint players will get a new 25th anniversary bundle for free in September, though.

In any event, this isn't the only Ghost Recon freebie in the pipe. Wildlands and Breakpoint are both free to play for the weekend on Ubisoft Connect, and on sale for 95% off on Steam—that's $2.49 for Wildlands and $3 for Breakpoint, which are both really good deals. You can also snag the classic Ghost Recon: Future Soldier for free until August 13.

And finally, Ubisoft also rolled out the new Ghost Recon Insiders Program today, giving fans "a chance to help build the next Ghost Recon." You can sign up for that at ghostrecon.com/insider.

Last month, we covered Warhorse Studios' European trademark filings for Kingdom Come Salvation, which provided an early indication of what title we can expect for the third "Kingdom Come adventure" that Warhorse announced was in the works in May. Beyond the name, the filing featured tantalizing language about "services for matching users with computer games," leading to speculation that the next Kingdom Come could include online functionality.

This week, additional Kingdom Come Salvation trademark filings have emerged in the US (via Phrasemaker), containing expanded language about online services. But while it's tempting to read the trademark classification as a promise that there's jolly medieval Bohemian camaraderie in our future, we checked with a videogame IP expert who said we shouldn't get our hopes up.

In both the European and American trademark filings, the sections stirring up speculation are the goods and services classifications specified for the trademark. In addition to the IC 009 classification typically used for videogame trademarks, the filings also classify Kingdom Come Salvation under IC 041—a classification that the World Intellectual Property Organization says covers "services having the basic aim of the entertainment, amusement, or recreation of people," including online gaming services.

In the European filing, the language for the IC 041 classification is fairly general, referring to "online interactive entertainment" and "electronic games services provided by means of a global communication network." While the US filing uses similarly broad terms, it also includes these two eyebrow-raising service descriptions:

• Providing online computer games featuring virtual environments in which users can interact for entertainment purposes
• Providing online computer games featuring virtual worlds in which users can interact for entertainment purposes

While neither of Warhorse's previous Kingdom Come trademark filings included IC 041 classifications, the Salvation filings are "far from a promise that the next Kingdom Come videogame will feature multiplayer," according to videogame IP lawyer Kirk Sigmon.

"As part of our usual cautiousness, IP attorneys generally try to make sure that we file trademarks in enough classes to cover a broad spectrum of how the mark might be used by the company, as well as in view of the fact that certain terms can be read broadly," Sigmon said. "In turn, you can find plenty of examples of non-multiplayer games registered in IC 041."

As an example, Sigmon—who previously walked us through the basics of videogame patent law in the early days of Nintendo's Palworld lawsuit—pointed out the trademark registration for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Despite being a purely singleplayer game, its filing similarly featured an IC 041 classification, with language referring to "providing online computer games featuring virtual worlds in which users can interact for entertainment purposes." It's beneficial for both a trademark's owner and their IP attorneys, he said, to give themselves as much rhetorical space to work with as possible.

"One of the biggest reasons IP attorneys might register a singleplayer game that way (e.g., referencing a game being 'online') is that the term 'online video game' could be interpreted pretty broadly – for example, I might need to argue sometime in the future that distribution of a game via Steam and/or a game with downloadable DLC is, in some sense, 'online,'" Sigmon said. "Also, you never know if a game might go fully multiplayer in the future, so it helps to have that breadth. Along those lines, I’ve personally helped register trademarks in IC 041 for games that didn’t have traditional multiplayer components."

As for Kingdom Come Salvation, he said the filing could hint that the game "might be somehow online" in the broadest sense, but we shouldn't be holding our breath for any multiplayer features unless an official announcement materializes in the future.

Take it from me, a gamer rocking the last-gen Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super and still loving life: your rig doesn't need the most bleeding edge graphics card. That's especially true when the 50-series cards can easily set you back many more smackers than Nvidia's MSRP. The RTX 5090 is especially bad for this right now, with the cheapest deal I can find anywhere online still being $4,500/£3,499.

The company appears all too aware of the runaway pricing of these GPUs. Case in point, Nvidia set up 'Verified Priority Access IRL' at its QuakeCon booth this year, offering attendees the chance to buy either the GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080, or RTX 5070 Founders Edition for MSRP "while supplies last".

Sadly, to get a decent deal on an RTX 5090 these days, flying out to Quakecon may actually not be the most outrageous idea. As I'm based in the UK, the cheapest round trip flight to Dallas, Texas I can find would cost me about $1,428. Add to that the RTX 5090's $1,999 MSRP, and the $16.50 price of admission to Quakecon, plus some no doubt hellish jet lag, and I will have only had to spend a little over $3,443 (or roughly £2,556) total on Nvidia's most powerful graphics card. That's ridiculous.

But let's say I actually carried out this still very expensive, hare-brained scheme. After a nearly 19-hour flight—with a self-transfer—I could rock up to Nvidia's booth only to find it sold out of RTX 5090s. The booth only has a limited amount of GPUs available for sale each day, after all.

That said, the booth is also offering a limited supply of "cool freebies," such as a pack of GeForce Trading Cards "showcasing 14 of GeForce’s greatest gaming moments." If I went to the Nvidia booth after a 19-hour flight, only to find these trading cards were left, I dread to think of the jet lag-induced rage monster I would become—rumours suggesting that Nvidia graphics card prices will increase by as much as 30% already have me howling.

Anyway, this late capitalist hell pit only gets better, because there's still another way to save on that MSRP. For one thing, Nvidia will be awarding a GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition GPU to the player that comes out top in its Quake III Arena RTX Remix and DOOM: The Dark Ages — Revelations challenges. Winners of the QuakeCon Mod Contest will also receive an RTX 50-Series GPU.

Uh, so yes, the tip here is either 'get good' or make a really cool rig if you'd rather not spend silly money on a 50-series graphics card. Or happen to live close by QuakeCon and chance a detour. If it's all the same to you, though, I won't be taking any of my own advice on how to get a more sensibly priced GPU.

Baldur's Gate 3 is known for being, well, smutty—so much so that when the game first came out, we were in fierce, rigorous, masterful debates over it (stop giggling). The game has a lot of sensual scenes, but it also comes with a streamer-friendly mode to cover up all the jiblets and tatas.

A streamer-friendly mode that failed, briefly, on one of Larian's own streams. Senior communications director Aofie Wilson has been streaming a Dark Urge run on various platforms, and has arrived at Act 3's House of Hope (spoilers for that, if you still haven't managed to finish a playthrough).

In this late-game dungeon, you can meet with Harleep, an incubi that Raphael keeps around—mostly to top himself in BDSM gear, a feat of self-love so vicious it'd make Narcissus blush and say 'bit much for me, mate'.

Anyway, that streamer-friendly mode failed during Wilson's playthrough when, for some strange reason, Harleep's nipnaps went completely uncensored as her character took to the sheets with Raphael's psychoanalysable, personified fetish.

The stream's still up on X, and you can see the clothes malfunction happen at around 1:26:00—as Larian's doubtless panicking staff try desperately to cover her up with a golden d20. Which, that being the reward for an honour mode playthrough, does seem a little denigrating of the badge of honour. My bard earned that title fair and square, and now 'tis being relegated to a censor bar. The degeneracy!

Both Larian and publishing director Michael Douse had a good laugh about it on X, with the latter writing: "Baldur's Gate 3 is now cancelled", and the former tweeting an image striking through both YouTube and TikTok as platforms on which you could find Wilson (dubbed "undiluted and raw" by her own stream overlay as the debauchery played out) continuing on, unabashed.

Anyway, Larian's not been given the boot permanently—both channels are back up, it's just this stream in particular that was shut down. And to quote Wilson's own words: "At least we had a nice time."

After years of speculation, after reams of fan theories and screenshot analysis, we'll be finally getting a full look at Grand Theft Auto 6 on… hold on, Netflix? Really? Right, okay, sure.

This news comes courtesy of the site itself, which has a preview page that reads: "Coming August 27: See an extended look at Grand Theft Auto 6, the next evolution in the groundbreaking Grand Theft Auto series." It's given the tags of "crime films" and "action adventure films". Which is technically true for a documentary about Grand Theft Auto 6, I guess—but very much not true of the game itself. Because it's a videogame, and not a film.

The first look will nonetheless be debuting, as mentioned above, on August 27 at 9 pm EST / August 28 at 2 am BST. It'll also be coming to YouTube, but six hours later, meaning Netflix has swung a six-hour exclusivity deal with Rockstar for the purposes of, I assume, getting people to pay for Netflix subscriptions.

And hey, from a business perspective? Bully for Netflix, good for them! This is sure to get at least a little pocket change in the coffers of a subscription service that's grown a little less popular thanks to all the advertisements and, er, AI advertisements.

These kinds of deals will almost certainly work slightly better than Netflix's other attempts to get a slice of the videogame pie, given it took one of its games down after just half a year and closed its AAA development studio in 2024 in order to make AI games with a new head of operations, who, er, exited around four months later.

Basically, offering exclusive streaming options to key-jangle people into paying for a month of Netflix subscription seems like an altogether more sensible proposition than an Amazon-esque hubris, believing you can do videogames just because you do movies and TV good and have a lot of money to throw around.

And, hey—if you're excited about GTA 6, you'll finally get to see it! Yipee! You just might have to take a six-hour nap unless you've got a few bucks in your pocket, or if you happen to already have an active subscription going.

The Steam Machine may be hard to get a hold of and prohibitively expensive, but as is ever the case with Valve, its community is very creative. It's not even been two months since its launch, yet someone has already made a faceplate that doubles up as a charging stand for the Steam Controller.

As shared on the Steam Machine subreddit, user NefariousnessWhole25 has shared their faceplate concept. Though an earlier prototype had a shelf to hold the controller in place, they say that the magnets inside the charging puck are actually powerful enough to hold the controller up. The puck is a small, well, puck that comes with the Steam Controller that functions both as a charger and as a connector to your PC. It's pretty neat.

The plate holds the puck in place with friction, and there's a small space to fit the end of the USB Type-C cable into. Importantly, it doesn't have the wire for the puck sticking out of the top of the plate either, giving it a pretty clean aesthetic. You can even use the faceplate by itself as a rudimentary stand, though I think it might look a tad funny given its size.

The creator says they are still finishing the final touches and also says they're open to DMs from Valve, Jsaux or Dbrand, if any of the companies want to chat about the design.

One commenter calls it "slightly ugly, and insanely functional", and that seems like a pretty fair description. With the controller in the stand, I personally quite like the look, but it does look a little hollow when the controller is taken off.

It solves one small issue I'd personally have using the Steam Controller day-to-day: the lack of a charging stand. I think the puck is great, and I wish more controllers came with a charger/connector combo, but the puck alone means I'd leave the Steam Controller just lying on a desk, often not charging. I use the GameSir G7 Pro 8K almost every day, and I've never had to charge it, because it just doesn't look right when it's not on its included stand.

I suspect the Steam Machine's front panel will be a source of creativity for those who actually buy the device over the coming years, because Valve has released the CAD design files for both the Steam Machine and Steam Controller, enabling modders to customise it to their heart's content. The only problem here is that it's shared under a "Creative Commons 'Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike 4.0 International" which means one can't sell their work.

Still, one doesn't always need a financial incentive to make something great, as is proved by this very mod.

The Steam Controller has a pretty niche feature called Grip Sense, which is a pair of capacitive touch sensors inside the handles that can sense when you are touching them. Though you may not use it, Valve thinks you should, "because it's, like, cool," and even recommends a couple of sweet shortcuts to use with it.

Valve notes that you could turn gyro controls off and on, depending on how your fingers sit on the controller, and it points out that the activation threshold is adjustable. That means you could activate a shortcut with only a slight lift of the fingers, or by taking the whole hand off the controller.

Activating and deactivating gyro controls to recenter your hand is apparently called "ratcheting". Valve likens it to picking up your mouse when it hits the end of your mousepad. Effectively, if your body or hands are at an uncomfortable angle, you can take your hand off the controller to turn off gyro controls, recenter your body and turn them back on again. It's a neat function, and one I wish I had while playing Splatoon Raiders on the Nintendo Switch 2 recently (that has a recenter, but it's less natural with a dedicated button).

Valve says, "While the original intent was for ratcheting (and it does work for that!) we have found a few other cool use cases, like using it to bring up a weapon wheel, map, or menu."

In the weapon wheel example, lifting your fingers from the rear of the controller brings up the wheel, allowing you to select your weapon or whatever, and then place your fingers back down to lock in your choice.

If you have your hands on a Steam Controller, and you're wondering how to assign your Grip Sense to Gyro:

• Go to the layout editor in Steam
• Turn on the "Gyro To Mouse" option
• Click the button selector
• Select Grip Sense

The same process works for assigning other functions. You just need to set your keybind to "Press and Hold", so that, when you take your fingers off the controller, it holds the menu button or whatever else.

You could set Grip Sense without a hold, for jumping or shooting, for example, but that seems quite inefficient to me. You can even adjust Grip Sense sensitivity if you find the controls a little hard to hit. Personally, if I were lucky enough to have got my hands on the Steam Controller, I'd be using this feature straightaway. And with a little practice, it could make gyro adjusting feel more natural.

During my world-exclusive hands-on preview of Onimusha: Way of the Sword in Capcom's headquarters in Osaka, Japan, I interviewed the animation director, Hiroshi Yugen, about creating the incredible sword-fighting animations for the game. When the star of the game is the legendary sword master, Miyamoto Musashi, a warrior who won over 60 duels during his lifetime, you're going to want to get these animations right.

"When we get to making action in our games, the first step is always kind of self-study and learning about how to do these things and how to use these things," explains Yugen. "And then we proceed to the stages of design and motion capture. [So I] sat down and spoke with the director, and we [decided we] really wanted to focus on creating this very realistic, grounded sword action for the game, and so from the very beginning, the main goal was first to research the depths of swordplay and how to do that.

"We figured it was best to speak to experts in the field, and so we were introduced to motion capture artists and action stunt coordinators at a studio called Katsugekiza Motion Capture Studio. So we were paired together with an expert who knows about sword fight choreography and has provided that kind of service for a lot of different famous movies and dramas."

But what was the process of shooting the animations for Way of the Sword? I'm shown footage from Capcom's state-of-the-art motion capture studio in Osaka that has over 150 high-tech cameras for tracking and recording motion. A full team of stunt actors is suited and armed with faux weapons, and they're all taking advice/direction from Yugen in between action takes for a scene where Musashi is attacked by a group of ninjas.

"So the first step is taking the action and the game design specifications, what we want to achieve with the action in the game, and explaining that to the actors and sword fight choreographers in the studio, so that they have an idea of what we're looking for," says Yugen. "So what I'm explaining in this video is the rules of the game and how things work on a mechanical level. So I was explaining to them that they need to approach from the right-hand side for the particular animation that we're going for."

I then watch as the team of stunt choreographers and sword technique experts act out the fight, which can be seen in part in the above Way of the Sword preview video. I'm no expert with the sword, or a martial arts expert, but it is obvious these guys know what they're doing.

"So essentially, what you just saw there," says Yugen, "was them basically rehearsing the action that we explained to them. So we take this temp recording, and then we can see that instantly within the engine itself, and then we can review and revise bits."

This last bit really blew my socks off. Mere moments after the fight had been motion captured, the fight just wasn't ready to watch back on film, but it was actually injected into Way of the Sword's game engine, Capcom's upgraded RE Engine, so the actual recorded animations could be appraised looking like how they would do in the game.

"With the rehearsal takes," continues Yugen, "we can take those and iterate until we get to a form of it where we're quite happy with the creation of the action that we've captured. And as with what we saw before with the rehearsal take, once we've recorded that, we can see it instantly within the engine. We can review the motion there."

I ask if it is Yugen who is responsible for making the final decision on what take is good to go.

"So ultimately the decisions all come down to the game's director. He's the one that gets the final sign-off. But even from the actors, there are cases where we've been happy with the performance, but the actors themselves are not satisfied. They're like, 'No, no, no, that wasn't right. I've got to do this again.' And so there are many cases where they will keep doing more and more takes until everyone is satisfied."

It's evident that a dump truck-load of expertise, care, and attention has gone into Way of the Sword's animations, and judging from how awesome many of my fights were during my hands-on preview of the game, I think it fair to say that it has been time well spent.

For more insight into Onimusha: Way of the Sword, be sure to check out the video preview above as well as pick up the next issue of PC Gamer magazine, which has a world-exclusive deep dive feature on the game and also includes a huge A1 Onimusha poster.

Earlier this year, Microsoft posted a support document titled "How to optimize your gaming PC setup" where it said that 16 GB of memory is "plenty for most gamers" but "32 GB is ideal for serious players who run the most demanding titles or use heavy mods". That document has since been deleted.

That's as reported by Windows Latest, who noticed the change this week. Now, clicking on the link address to the support document redirects you to the Windows Learning Center instead.

Interestingly, Microsoft, in a separate support document, declared 32 GB to be the "no-worries" upgrade back in May, and that support document has since been deleted too. Two separate documents that recommend 32 GB of memory being taken down is certainly strange behaviour, and implies it wasn't just an accident.

And it would make sense for Microsoft not to pitch 32 GB of memory, given that it just recently announced it would be bringing back 8 GB Surface laptops in May. Microsoft seemed to remove the 8 GB memory option in the 7th-generation Microsoft Surface and Microsoft Surface Pro 12th edition, which are the previous versions of both laptops.

These new laptops don't even meet the memory requirements to be labelled a Copilot+ PC, and they're mighty expensive, with the Intel Core Ultra 5 standard Surface with 8 GB of memory and 256 GB of storage being an eye-watering $1,299.

This is a shame as its initial assessment seems about right, in my estimation. 16 GB of memory is fine for most games, but 32 GB is ideal, especially for less casual gamers. I went for 32 GB of DDR5 memory in my own rig, and wouldn't want less, but I also reckon I play more than most.

The memory crisis may be a problem for Microsoft, as suggested by a dip in console sales (though this 29% decline could be somewhat attributed to the life cycle of the console and tariffs raising prices), but the company's AI usage is also one of the larger contributors to the mess in the first place. The end consumer is paying for the expansion of AI in many ways, but the most pressing to a PC gamer is the fact that they're paying more and more for less storage and memory.

As such, it would probably be a bad look for Microsoft to recommend 32 GB when its latest Surface Pro device will fetch a minimum of $2,750 to get so much memory. And Microsoft seems unlikely to backtrack on this pricing for some time. Samsung, one of the big three memory manufacturers, reckons we will see a "severe" memory supply crisis next year and "Beyond 2029, it is hard to say because of more limited visibility."

AMD did a similar thing recently. After arguing gamers should look to "Game beyond 4 GB [of VRAM]" back in 2020, it has just recently launched a 4 GB graphics card, the RX 9050.

While these big companies continue to put more and more funding into AI, we'll just have to sit with our meagre supplies of memory until it all blows over. Here's hoping 2029 is the year things get better. Or is it 2030?

Moonlighter is a hybrid of management sim and roguelite dungeon crawl in the vein of Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale. I was more intrigued by its shopkeeping side—where you put your loot on display and hope the locals in your hamlet are in the mood for a magic sword or some banged-up armor—than I was by its dungeon runs and boss battles, but your mileage may vary.

That mileage is currently good value, because right now you can add Moonlighter to your Steam account for free. Digital Sun and 11 Bit Studios have set it to zero dollars until August 9 to celebrate the upcoming release of Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, which is currently in early access but will be hitting 1.0 on September 2.

Moonlighter 2 adds more Hades to the formula, as Sam Desatoff noted in our preview, writing, "It’s impossible not to see the touch of Hades in Moonlighter 2's combat (it's isometric now!), or in the way Will gets to know the characters loitering around town. The hub area of Tresna could be a respectable stand-in for the House of Hades or The Crossroads, and I enjoyed familiarizing myself with the town and its residents."

Moonlighter 2 also shifts away from the first game's Binding of Isaac-esque dungeon exploration for more of the FTL/Slay the Spire-influenced node-choosing that's all the rage. But it's still embedded in a town full of locals to befriend, to throw some Stardew Valley into the blend. If it's the sequel you're more interested in, you can download a demo from Moonlighter 2's Steam page.

Big Walk is a new co-op-only adventure from the creators of Untitled Goose Game. Chris Livingston has been playing it and he's having an absolute gas. It's a loosely structured open world affair starring quaint pointy-nosed folk that you simply have to play with friends.

And I mean that literally: it's impossible to get very far in Big Walk alone. You can load into the open world on your own, but since all puzzles require a modicum of collaboration, it's pointless to do so. Unless you just want to take in the scenery.

But does Big Walk have matchmaking that will pair you up with a gaggle of strangers? The answer is no. Big Walk doesn't have matchmaking. To play Big Walk, you'll need to make sure in advance that you have friends who want to play it.

To play Big Walk you'll need to either host a game or join someone else's game. The latter can be done via a session code shared with you by the host. This is the only way to join up with friends on PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2.

Alternatively, you can join a session via your in-game friends list, which draws from your Steam friends. This will let you jump right in without a code, providing there's space in the session.

If you've been looking forward to Big Walk but none of your friends are interested, that puts you in a rough position. But remember: the internet exists, and for the most part it's still populated by real breathing people. It could be worth hitting up the Big Walk subreddit where there's already a dedicated thread for matching up, or the PC Gamer forums.

During his time at Bethesda Nate Purkeypile was an artist on Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield, as well as lead artist on Fallout 76. Now independent, he's responsible for stealth-archer bowhunting FPS The Axis Unseen, but when he spent some time talking to YouTube channel The Examined Game recently, his tenure at Bethesda was the main subject.

With Bethesda finally making the long-rumored news of a Fallout 3 remaster official, naturally that came up. Purkeypile is excited about the idea of seeing one of his children be taken over by someone else. "I'm personally looking forward to that," he said, "because we were like super tech-constrained making Fallout 3. And you could only place so many lights."

The Fallout 3 Bethesda released wasn't really what they'd hoped it would be at the time, he went on to say. "It's not like it's exactly how we intended," he said. "I get why people are more upset over like movie remakes and stuff, but in the case of games and particularly the art side of it, it's 100% not what we intended, and it was very, very constrained."

Fallout 3's concept art has always been a tantalizing glimpse at what we could have had, but even a simple change like extending the draw distance to give a better sense of the Commonwealth Wasteland's scale would be an improvement. Purkeypile is in favour of the kind of modern remaster that goes a bit further into remake territory, though.

"I think a lot of these remakes have been done frankly better lately too," he said. "Like the Resident Evil ones and stuff, those were fantastic. Whereas for a while I think a lot of those updates were just like, 'Oh, we made the textures a little bit bigger, and like threw a sharpen filter in Photoshop,' and it doesn't really look that much better, or actually as good as other games that are coming out."

It feels like western blockbuster games development is dying. Amid endless rounds of ruthless layoffs and studio closures, a component shortage crisis driving up hardware prices for both PC and console users, and the industry's often-disastrous pivot to live service, it's hard to imagine a healthy future for the kinds of lavish, seasonal tentpole releases that used to be the bread and butter of the medium.

I know western studios still release these things. In 2025 we had Assassin's Creed Shadows, Doom: The Dark Ages and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 to name a few. This year: Forza Horizon 6, a forthcoming Wolverine game, and 007 First Light.

But none of those 2025 games had the cultural impact of a Silksong, Arc Raiders or Clair Obscur, nor were they as sticky as Nintendo, Capcom or Konami's blockbuster output. It's roughly the same narrative this year so far: Forza Horizon 6 was fine, but Korea-made Crimson Desert was a viral sensation. Many, many more people read about Subnautica 2 on PC Gamer than they did 007: First Light.

When they actually get made and not unceremoniously canceled, blockbusters with luxurious seven figure budgets and inescapable marketing just don't have the clout they used to. But there's one massive exception looming on the horizon.

For Real

GTA 6 really feels like the last of the dinosaurs. For one, a big part of the conversation will focus on its envelope-pushing graphics, which feels like an increasingly irrelevant point of discussion in 2026.

The drive towards ever-increasing graphical fidelity has been inseparable from this medium since its birth. It's why we have Doom, Tomb Raider, Crysis, Oblivion and Cyberpunk 2077. It's why we have console generations and dedicated GPUs. It's probably why there hasn't been a new The Elder Scrolls game since 2011.

"Immersion" is near universally valued as the goal in blockbuster development. The word's ubiquity goes hand-in-hand with the medium's obsession with graphical fidelity, which overwhelmingly manifests as realism. After all, what could be more immersive than a videogame that looks like the actual world?

The more realistic a game's shimmering isle or wartorn city, the better. In western blockbuster development, realism has disproportionately ruled the roost compared to, say, the cel-shaded Borderlands look, or that one weird anime Need for Speed game (remember what EA and Insomniac did to Fuse?). Even fifth and sixth gen mascot platformers were marketed for the realism of their newly impressive 3D spaces.

But I don't think the majority of people playing games care about graphical fidelity and its attendant "realism" anymore. Games like Palworld, Peak, Phasmophobia and Valheim make bigger cultural splashes than IO's new Bond game did. Crucially, they all look different. The way they look translates as a sensibility or a purposeful style. But when the rotely realistic-looking Bond game did go moronically viral, it was because the graphics, which strove for realism, weren't realistic enough.

If you were born the year Crysis released, you're 19 now. If you were born the year Skyrim released, you're 15. Graphics have definitely "improved" since then, but nowhere near to the extent they did between, say, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. It's not even close. And yet, it's these iterative nudgings towards greater immersion that defined big splashy games and the marketing of them for decades.

Remember when Spider-Man 2 went viral because the puddles got nerfed? That's the parodic end result of the industry's focus on realism as a measure of its progress. Meanwhile, my tween daughter rotates between Minecraft, Stardew Valley and Hades 2. Some of her contemporaries subsist entirely on Roblox brainrot.

The big exception to this generational shrugging off of fidelity is GTA 6. It'll likely be the best looking "realistic" videogame ever made, but it won't be because of its underlying computer technology. Its unprecedented realism will be mostly attributable to Rockstar's budget. Rockstar—which has reportedly spent well into the billions on GTA 6—can afford to employ a team of people dedicated to making dog fur look uncannily lifelike, or body sweat drip and roll in a very true-to-life way. It's not mere technology that gets us here: it's the result of Rockstar being wealthy enough to pay people to do it.

Advances in realism can no longer come from John Carmack sitting alone in a room making true colored lighting from scratch. It comes from massive teams of specifically-qualified people working on all those finer details most players won't notice. Most studios, even big ones, can't afford to make every building in an open world city look different. The people in these massive teams all command a wage, and there's a limit to what most studios can pay. Rockstar has as close to "no limit" as the industry gets.

That's ultimately what the graphical arms race is in 2026 and beyond: whoever has the most money and the strongest will to spend it wins. And no other studio is even close to rivalling Rockstar in these stakes.

Graphics Accelerator

What happens to the big western blockbuster after GTA 6? I don't think GTA 6 will kill it, but it'll maybe have a Baldur's Gate 3 effect. Developer Xalavier Nelson Jr. presciently warned about this phenomenon in the lead up to the RPG's 1.0 release. To expect that "every RPG should be like [Baldur's Gate 3] going forward" would be to create "the expectations and conditions to ensure your favorite creators may never be able to give you the thing you love ever again."

Which is true, but it's also been an unfortunate reality in game development for as long as I remember. Many are the hairy tales of studios pivoting to newer, less-familiar engines in their attempts to keep up with the graphical joneses. If a game looks bleeding edge it (partially) markets itself.

There is an important difference: Baldur's Gate 3 is famous for its systemic complexity and mind-melting player agency. It lets you do things you've always dreamed of doing in RPGs, which even fractionally smaller RPG studios may struggle to emulate. Singleplayer GTA games, on the other hand, are best known for their edginess, their immersive, simulated cities, and their immersive, realistic graphics.

GTA 5 wasn't dramatically more sophisticated than GTA 4. It didn't change the way people make or play open world city action games. Having three protagonists was neat, but it didn't enforce any new norm on the medium. But one thing's undeniable: it looked amazing. It was more realistic and detailed than any game that came before it. That's what counts in Rockstar's world.

So it's possible that competing western triple-A studios will never be able to make a good looking videogame ever again. Maybe GTA 6 will emphatically murder the arms race that has been petering out for years.

But it's also possible that GTA 6's graphics—and take a deep breath, because I'm about to say something pessimistic about GTA 6 —won't hit with the impact that has historically buoyed the series because, ultimately, who cares about realistic graphics in 2026? How much better can they realistically be on six year old hardware? And won't it still ultimately be an open world shooting and driving game with some lavish narrative accoutrements? (Perhaps it'll be much more than that, but it'd be bucking against tradition.)

Nearly everyone with a console will buy GTA 6 when it releases in November. Many PC gamers will buy a console to play it. It's going to be absolutely huge and it'll dominate the conversation for months. But here's what I think happens afterwards: western studios, the ones still operating healthily, will go on developing their games within their comparatively limited scopes. Outlier philistines will gripe online that they don't look as good as GTA 6, but most people won't care.

Then, two or three months later, until the next GTA Online comes out, GTA 6 will be forgotten, its existence taken for granted.

It'll still be a watershed moment for the medium. I think it'll be the last videogame that can market itself on the strength of its exorbitant graphical detail. It'll be the full stop in that fun but ultimately kinda destructive continuum. As a former Sony Santa Monica exec told me last year, the timeworn blockbuster model is not sustainable.

For those who insist on following that route, they'll need to do so keeping in mind that fewer people will have access to high end hardware because everything is now stupidly expensive and getting worse. As a result, what constitutes the "mass market" in games will shift dramatically. In a worse case scenario our descendants will binge on low-rent UGC. More optimistically, the medium will continue to grow and flourish without the pixel counters breathing down its neck: if that happens, games will be allowed to become more complex in more interesting ways.

Luke Dale, best known to gamers as Hans Capon in the Kingdom Come: Deliverance games, is trying his hand at something new: Serving food and drinks at a medieval tavern in Prague, the capital city of the Czech Republic.

This is not a role in an upcoming videogame. As he reveals in a new video on YouTube, Dale went out and bought himself an actual tavern in Prague, which he is now renovating into Nobleman, "inspired by the places where noblemen would gather and conspire and socialize. Not a themed bar, not a tourist attraction, but a local space where local people can have a really good beer, amazing food, and a bloody great time."

Dale said he doesn't actually have any experience with running a pub and calls it all "a very terrifying thing," but added that it's something he's always wanted to do, particularly since much of what he's done in his career doesn't always "feel real." He was inspired to finally take the leap with Nobleman by his love of Prague, and the Czech Republic in general.

"Ever since I moved to Prague and ever since I've worked in Prague, I've just been so humbled and so appreciative of this country. And so for me, this project and creating this tavern is like a love letter to Prague," he said. "It's a love letter to the Czech Republic and how much I love this city and this country and everything that it's given me.

"You know, my girlfriend is Czech, my dog is Czech, and so much of my identity has been influenced by this culture. The beer, the food, everything about it is stuff that I just adore and I want to be a part of it and contribute to it."

Running a pub is a tough gig, but it does seem like it might be a good fit for his circumstances. Dale said in July that the success of the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series hasn't led to new roles in games, so instead he's shifted focus to streaming. He's built up a pretty sizable audience already—180,000 subscribers on YouTube, 73,000 followers on Twitch—and if nothing else, this venture should give him plenty of content.

Nobleman's grand opening is set for October 1. If you want to follow along with what's happening, you can sign up for updates at nobleman.cz.

With Electronic Arts now officially owned by Saudi Arabia, CEO Andrew Wilson has made some changes at the top, appointing former EA Sports president Cam Weber as president and chief studios officer, and former "chief experiences officer" David Tinson—basically the top marketing and communications role—as president and chief operating officer.

The announcement of the promotions came in a message initially shared with employees that was presumably meant to be reassuring, but lands mostly as just empty pap. After waxing poetic about the company's long and eventful history, Wilson said EA is "entering one of the most exciting and transformative moments our industry has ever seen."

"Every era of innovation expands what's possible," Wilson wrote. "New technologies open new doors, but it is the creativity, ingenuity and courage of our teams that transform possibilities into unforgettable experiences. At EA, we've always believed our greatest opportunity is to create what others haven't yet imagined. This is the spirit that has guided us for more than four decades, and it will continue to shape our future."

It's the kind of wordy, meaningless positivity usually reserved for shareholder calls (when EA had those), but vaguely familiar to my reading, too: A slightly reworded take on the increasingly common promise that yes, we're using AI for game development, but it's all driven by human creativity.

AI does seem likely to feature largely in EA's future: Silver Lake CEO and managing partner Egon Durban said the new owners will "invest heavily in EA’s growth, including what AI can do to enhance game development and player experience," and less cheerfully, there's also an expectation of massive layoffs to follow as EA looks to manage the billions in debt it's taken on to finance this deal.

The promotion of Weber and Tinson was similarly exuberant: Wilson said EA will need "bold creativity and exceptional execution" as it moves into its next phase, but fortunately it has "a deeply experienced leadership team across the company."

I think it's notable that Weber was previously the head of EA Sports. Some observers, including former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes, have speculated that EA's takeover will leave it tightly focused on its dominant franchises—EA Sports FC and Battlefield, basically—to the exclusion of smaller-scale fare. Without wanting to read too much into it, putting the top EA Sports guy in charge of all EA studios can pretty easily be seen as movement in that direction.

I'm not that into the original Path of Exile, but playing so much of the sequel has exposed me to plenty of people who do. A huge topic of discussion around the current league is about loot and the lack of it.

Many players are unhappy with the majority of the loot coming from chests rather than monsters, and the inability to scale the difficulty up for more rewards. Basically, loot isn't very exciting, especially when you roughly know what you're going to get before you even finish an activity.

Developer Grinding Gear Games is already addressing some of the immediate issues in upcoming patches, but it's also planning on a much bigger rework in its next major update. Speaking to PoE streamer Zizaran in a recent interview, Christopher "Octavian" Laferriere said to expect "an extreme shakeup of the endgame" in patch 3.30.

"3.30 will have a huge emphasis on endgame shakeup," Laferriere continued. "We plan to get to as many existing league mechanics as possible and give them all something new, something interesting, something different from before, because one of the problems that we see is that the endgame has just gotten stale."

PoE has been around for over a decade and has accumulated a lot of unique league mechanics over the years. This is why people will tell you they're still a beginner with only 1,000 hours clocked. Balance tweaks aren't enough to spark new creative ways to engage with it all, so one of the focuses of 3.30 will be allowing different league mechanics to interact with each other more often. It will also include a reevaluation of what items should even be tied to a specific mechanic rather than something you can find anywhere. The idea is to make random loot drops more spontaneous and less deterministic—something Path of Exile 2 does really well.

Laferriere told Zizaran later in the interview that the scope for 3.30 will be so big that smaller additions—in this case, new transfigured skill gems—might be limited. The update won't be out for another four months, but it already sounds like it's going to be a significant moment, as POE borrows ideas that have gone over well in the sequel and sees how they fare.

In June 2020, Bungie made what would come to be remembered as one of the most reviled PR incidents in modern videogames: It announced the content vault. To make Destiny 2's long-term development more manageable, the studio said, the launch of its Beyond Light expansion coincided with a culling of in-game content, paring away story campaigns, world regions, and activities of all stripes.

The content vault may have been defensible on technical grounds, but the sunsetting of swaths of game content, many of which players had previously paid to access, left Destiny 2 with a reputational stain that never fully washed out. But now, six years after Destiny 2's downsizing and two months after its end of live service development, its players are learning how to pull some of those lost worlds back out of the vault—not for play, but for preservation.

Over the last few days, videos have started bubbling up on X and YouTube seeming to show Destiny 2 players wandering around now-inaccessible game areas, as well as regions that were never fully implemented in the game. Those videos are the products of work being done by developer stanuwu, who's building what he calls Destiny 2 Shadowkeep Singleplayer Exploration Mode—an upcoming tool allowing users to load into and explore the environments present in the last Destiny 2 build released before the Beyond Light content vaulting.

Before you get your hopes up too high, the tool won't make old builds of Destiny 2 playable. You won't be replaying any Red War missions or old raids. Instead, it's purely for exploration and preservation, as stanuwu writes in the Github repo's readme: "No mechanics are implemented and none will be implemented." Once players load up the requisite Season of Arrivals build—something you'll have to provide for yourself—its maps will be empty of enemies, NPCs, and activities.

But it will let users freely navigate the Destiny 2 destinations that have been absent from the game for half a decade, offering additional exploration features like flight and noclip. Personally, I'm eager for a chance to return to the Echo Basin on Io, one Destiny's more alien-feeling regions that was never revisited after its vaulting in 2020. (Rest in peace, Asher Mir. At least you didn't have to see all the Star Wars stuff.)

While I'll welcome the chance to reinhabit some of my old Destiny 2 stomping grounds, stanuwu's work is more promising as a preservation tool—particularly when Bungie doesn't seem to have its own method for easily accessing all of its vaulted material. By making those spaces explorable again, it will help ensure that the full breadth of Destiny 2's environmental art and design will remain accessible, even after someone eventually pulls the live game's plug.

Stanuwu says he plans to release the tool some time in the next two weeks, and that the tool will be both free and open source once it launches.

Have you heard the good word?

Sorry, good words. Two of them, to be precise: Ace Combat.

I know I'm not the only recent convert to this long-running series; after the announcement of Ace Combat 8 last December, I saw a wave of chatter across social media reiterating that what the uninformed might expect to be rather disposable, After Burner-esque arcadey dogfighting games are actually sick as hell. I played my first Ace Combat this year—2019's AC7: Skies Unknown—before heading to a preview event for Ace Combat 8, and I can confirm that these games are, in fact, cooking with jet fuel.

AC8 is out in October, but I encourage you not to wait for it, because Ace Combat 7 is on sale on Steam right now for 80% off, and is absolutely worth playing if you have even a shred of interest in aerial warfare.

While the planes are all intricately modeled and the game's interface has a sort of militaristic seriousness to it, the tone of Ace Combat is gloriously melodramatic. "What begins as 15 minutes of shooting at radar towers and the odd enemy fighter quickly descends into boss fights against impossible constructions, battles with drone swarms, and navigational setpieces straight from a Universal Studios ride," PC Gamer reviewer Phil Iwaniuk wrote back in 2019. While Phil wasn't completely taken with Ace Combat's anime instincts, I was—I loved the over-the-top cutscenes in this game, which usually involve narrators talking about reaching for that big blue sky or mourning the political strife of their wartorn country.

They're also really pretty.

It's frequently silly and over-the-top, but there's also some pretty deft narrative work being done considering the game's primary focus is locking onto enemy planes and pressing the missile button. The story jumps between three different threads that eventually converge, characters meeting hours and hours into the campaign. It doesn't hurt that those intersecting moments tend to be monumental, playable moments—launching an assault on an enormous space elevator, or dogfighting with the best pilot who's ever lived, or facing off against a next-gen drone that movies unlike any of the aircraft you've encountered up to that point.

Ace Combat 7's missions consistently do a great job of throwing unexpected twists at you, or objectives that amp up the intensity and urgency of what's ultimately a pretty limited set of actions: do a barrel roll, get a missile lock, fire, repeat. You also get to tinker with the planes a bit between missions, but aside from picking a jet that's better for dogfighting or one that's better for bombing runs depending on the mission, there's not a ton of nuance there. There is a lot of gawping at the cool planes in the hangar, though, which I also recommend.

Thanks to how varied the missions are, I don't think there's much risk of being Ace Combat'd out by playing this game just a few weeks before AC8. If anything, I think AC7's melodrama will get you in the mood for more. It's a perfect breezy summer game to fit in this month, before September's wall-to-wall schedule of upcoming games.

AC7's current Steam deal ends in the next 22 hours of this writing, and is $15 (£12) including a Top Gun Maverick DLC tie-in with a bunch of cool planes—though heads up that using them early in the campaign will trivialize some of the challenge. You can get a Steam key even cheaper elsewhere, though: Fanatical has the base game on sale for just $8.69 (86% off) for the next 11 days.

Farm simmers already know what day it is: It's Fields of Mistria 1.0 day. The magical girl-inspired, '90s anime flashback farm sim has been in early access for two years (to the day) and has just launched its full release version with the conclusion of its main story and, way more importantly, matrimony.

To the dismay of some of my fellow PCG editors and the delight of others, I've been totally incapable of shutting up about Mistria. Farm sims are nominally about planting crops and making cash but what keeps me and all the other life simming freaks coming back is always going to be great artwork and crushable characters. Mistria is drowning in both with its Game Boy Advance-inspired colorful sprites and characters who clawed their way out of my old Shojo Beat mags.

It's an old anime tropes fest on its face (red-headed tsundere boy, arrogant villainess, flirtatious rogue, and blonde protagonist are all here) but Mistria does such an incredible job of layering genuine character insights underneath all of them with a shocking amount of contextual dialogue. Farm sims just don't typically write this much, and I respect the heck out of Mistria for it.

Today's a great day to start your first farm in Mistrira, but for those of us who'd been vibrating in anticipation—you don't have to start from scratch at all. The new main story quests and final romance and marriage scenes all naturally fall after the progress you've made so far. Even the new Steam achievements are awarded retroactively.

I'll be writing a scored review of Fields of Mistria just as soon as I have a chance to complete the story and finally choose my spouse, which is the real final boss in this game where I'm dating 10 of the 12 marriage candidates and have only gotten more indecisive. You can wait on the formality of a percentage, but I've made my opinion known that I think this is one of the best games like Stardew Valley a few different times over the past two years so you can see where my head's at pretty clearly.

You can grab Fields of Mistria on Steam now (no console releases yet, sorry) for $12.59 (£10.61) which, if I can effusively praise it one more time, is a heck of a lot of farm sim for about half the price most other farm sims go for these days.

If you've ever listened to a Black Library audiobook, or played a lot of Warhammer 40k games, you'll know that it's often hard to tell Space Marines apart based on just their voices. It's something I've experienced frequently as an avid listener of 40k audiobooks—I stop paying attention for five seconds, and suddenly there are five Space Marines with almost identical names arguing with each other in similarly gruff voices.

We got to sit down with Black Library audio veteran Toby Longworth to talk about his voicework in Dawn of War 4, where he's also voicing a bunch of Space Marines. Now, Longworth has played all stripes of Adeptus Astartes over the years, including Nathaniel Garro, Garviel Loken, Ezekyle Abbadon, plus a bunch of Primarchs, too, so he seemed like the perfect person to query about the challenges you face when voicing to the Emperor's finest:

"The big problem with Space Marines, because of course, there's a lot of cloning that goes on in the Space Marine world, as I'm sure you know, is getting them to sound different to each other," explains Longworth. "They're all pretty tough and flinty, so you've got to start with a tough flinty one. I think Garro was one of my earliest ones, but Garro I ended up doing slightly higher, because as you go through the book, you'll find someone who goes:

'That is all very well, but you are only a first generation!'

'I am a third generation!'

'I'm BIGGER than you!'

'I AM ENORMOUS AND WILL BE A DREADNOUGHT ONE DAY.'

"So you start getting more and more aggressively huge. Obviously if you've got more than ten Space Marines in a book, only dogs can hear you by the end of the- or that would be too high. Only ground squirrels can hear you."

I suggest watching the clip above so you can enjoy Longworth's delivery of the dreadnought line—I might genuinely make that my ringtone. We'll also have some shorts of Toby Longworth delivering Space Marine lines from Dawn of War 4 in the next couple of days, which are genuinely a treat if you're a fan of the original's iconic unit barks, so keep your eyes peeled for those.

For more of our sit down and paint with Alex Jordan and Toby Longworth about Dawn of War 4 and all things 40k, be sure to check out our other shorts on the PC Gamer YouTube channel.

"Face the unknown," reads the lone message of a new Helldivers 2 trailer published today.

Helldivers 2's next major update is coming August 12. The teaser is light on details, but it's certainly illustrative of what Super Earth will be up against. We see a helldiving teddy bear being consumed by the void—a tear in space that's currently eating up big chunks of the galaxy. The bear is ripped apart limb by limb by some psychic presence before the teddy reappears on a jungle planet. In the reflection of its eye, we see a tall, rounded biped alien reach to pick it up, then cut to release date.

All signs point to a new Illuminate threat. The third Helldivers 2 faction, colloquially known as the squids, have been quiet throughout 2026. Not since last year's invasion of Super Earth have the squids been a legitimate threat to democracy. While we were busy exterminating bugs in caves and taking the fight to Cyberstan, the Illuminate were shoring up their forces. Now, they're back with a new vanguard.

It's been a few months since I clocked in for helldiving duty, so I was surprised to find the lower quadrant of the galactic war map—the area where Illuminate fighting tends to go down—currently looks all kinds of messed up:

Several entire planets have been swallowed up by the void, and next, they're coming for our teddy bears. Some believe the teaser is suggesting Super Earth itself will once again be a battleground, though the bear could symbolize the human colonies of outer rim planets.

If you don't mind the possible spoiler for next week's update, many are convinced the figure in the teaser is one of the Cultists, a new faction of Illuminate with powerful magic abilities.

Anything new for the squids is exciting, because despite how far the faction has come since their surprise introduction in 2024, they've always been the army with the least variety. The addition of Leviathan ships, Stingray jets, and Fleshmobs has helped a lot, but they could really use some enemies that send a chill down a diver's spine.

Not so coincidentally, August 12 also marks the arrival of the Warhammer 40,000 crossover warbond, which includes three weapons and two armor sets from the Warhammer universe. No price announced on that one yet, but expect it to be more expensive than a standard $10 warbond.

Co-op puzzle game Big Walk launched yesterday, and it's off to a great start: it peaked at nearly 50,000 concurrent players on Steam this morning, Steam reviews are "Very Positive," and here at PC Gamer we're all having a great time with it, too.

There's one issue, however, that shows up in pretty much every negative review on Steam. In a game that strongly suggests you don't use Discord but instead rely on the in-game proximity voice chat for communication… people are having trouble hearing each other.

"Needs different audio sliders, in-game sounds are way too loud, player voices way too quiet," one player wrote in a negative Steam review.

"It's a game about walking and talking, but the voice volume was so quiet that my friend's voices were barely whispers at MAX VOLUME," another said.

"Even standing next to me, all of my friend's mics (who all sound fine in any other game / app) sounded like a whisper," said another.

"Seems like a massive oversight to release a game that is just walking and talking and not include 5 or 6 volume sliders," another reviewer wrote.

These issues are something I noticed when I began playing Big Walk with Morgan and Tyler. That single volume slider can make it hard to hear voice chat while contending with competing sounds in the game, like the sound of the ocean if you're near the beach. In fact, the first thing I did was open my settings to see if I could make the ambient sounds a bit quieter so I could hear my co-op partners more clearly. No dice.

You also have to be in extreme proximity, no more than a few yards apart, to be able to hear your co-op pals (unless you're using walkie-talkies). The sound falls off much faster with distance than in most games, but I assumed this was by design: there are puzzles where you need to find other ways to communicate with your friends who are only a short distance away, and everyone's voices simply being louder would remove some of the creative problem solving that makes the puzzles of Big Walk so much fun.

At any rate, while some players are having issues hearing each other, House House has heard them loud and clear.

"We understand that some people are having a problem where their friends' voices are too quiet in the game. Sorry about this!" House House said in a post on Steam.

"While Big Walk is built around players getting quieter when they are farther away, we can see that for some setups, players' voices are much quieter than intended even when very close by," the developer said.

"We're working to put out a fix as soon as we can."

It's not clear if that means adding multiple volume sliders or just boosting player's voice levels, but we'll find out soon. In the meantime, if you just can't wait for an official patch, there's already a mod on github (note: I haven't tested it myself) that adds a separate voice volume slider to the menu and lets you crank it up to 200%.

Take-Two Interactive, publisher of Grand Theft Auto 6, will hold its Q1 FY2027 results call on Friday, August 7, and I don't mean to sound alarmist or over-excited but I think something might be happening. Allow me to explain.

Part of my job involves listening in to quarterly investor calls, in case anything interesting is revealed about current or upcoming projects—you never know when a CEO is going to accidentally leak a release target or confirm The Witcher 4. So naturally, it behooves me to know when these calls are happening.

US-based publishers generally hold their calls late in the afternoon in the Eastern time zone, typically 4 or 4:30 pm, and Take-Two is no exception: Results drop at 4, get on the phone at 4:30, and that's your day done. But this upcoming investors call is scheduled for 8 am ET—that's 8.5 hours earlier this T2's usual call time.

The obvious question is, why? Take-Two head of global corporate communications Alan Lewis tells me it's "just scheduling." It may well be "just scheduling," but with the biggest videogame in years now just a few months away from its scheduled release—Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch, for consoles, on November 19—oddities like this naturally draw extra scrutiny.

Of course, if there is a big secret GTA 6 announcement inbound, Take-Two wouldn't tell me about it, but I persevere nonetheless. So in the event that we are in for GTA news, I see two possibilities.

One, a delay: GTA 6 marketing was meant to kick into gear this summer, but here we are in August—just three months from launch—and we've had nary a peep. Weird, right? This week's investors call is the last with any meaningful space between it and GTA 6 day, so if Take-Two is hitting the brakes and wants to mollify investors with an urgency, this is the time to do it.

Possibility two: Early August is mid-summer, which means we're still well within that promised marketing window. Rolling into an investors call with the biggest game trailer to come along in years would be a baller move, and set the company up to absolutely bulldoze the holiday quarter. Which it's going to do anyway, assuming taht first possibility isn't correct, but sometimes it's fun to let 'em know you're coming.

Neither of those theories explain why Take-Two is holding its investors call at 8 am, but consider this: I dug through T2's quarterly earnings calendar all the way back to the start of 2020, and do you know how often it's held investor calls on a Friday? Never! So there you go, right?

For the record, I think a Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer drop is far more likely than a delay, but a last-minute postponement doesn't strike me as beyond the realm of possibility either. Yes, there's also the chance that this is indeed "just scheduling," I suppose, but that's not very exciting—nor does it answer the underlying question of why?

Whatever the reason, we'll be watching, and we'll let you know what happens when—if—it happens.

Marvel Rivals' season 9.5 launches today, and it will be bringing with it magical supervillain and hooded cloak aficionado, The Hood, who'll be appearing on August 7. Ahead of that, let's dig into the patch notes.

The gist of the season 9.5 adjustments is that most Vanguards have been buffed. Devil Dinosaur, Doctor Strange, Magneto, and Rogue have all got some small adjustments which are as follows:

• Devil Dinosaur: Minor buff to Frenzied Feast and his Team-Up ability with Jeff now lasts longer with more healing for allies.
• Doctor Strange: Daggers of Denak do more single-hit damage and Gamma Maelstrom cooldown (Team-Up with Hulk) has been decreased.
• Magneto: His Metallic Chaos projectile (Team-Up with Scarlet Witch) now adds a minor launch up effect to enemies.
• Rogue: Her damage reduction multiplier has been upped while in Defensive Stance and her Regen Shield capacity has been increased.

Unfortunately, at least if you play them, two Vanguards have been given the opposite treatment. The first being Venom, who has had his bonus health reduced and swing cooldown increased "to ensure he has to swing with a bit more strategy". Basically: NetEase needed to stop Venom players diving the backline with almost no consequences.

The second is Peni Parker: "We are slightly weakening Peni's control and survivability," a dev note reads. "In particular, the Immobilize effect applied by her Cyber-Web Snare was too frequent and oppressive, leading to a poor counter-experience for her enemies. We've decided to increase the cost of applying this control, but in return, we will also increase the freedom of her secondary fire." There are more adjustments including some Duelist buffs and a rare couple of Strategist nerfs which you can check out also.

But the main draw of season 9.5 isn't the balance changes, it's the new villain joining the Vanguard crew, The Hood. His design looks cool, some have even noted similarities between his ultimate form to none other than the Gun Devil from Chainsaw Man. But his kit looks very familiar to other Marvel Rivals heroes like Hela's ultimate, Deadpool's primary fire, and CnD's blind. There's even some similarities with Overwatch's latest addition Shion. Hopefully his kit will be more interesting to play than it is to look at.

It seems nearly every conversation about PC gaming hardware comes back to the memory crisis, and that's because it's such an all-encompassing problem for the industry. Though we don't appear to have a way out for the next year (at least), we've seen memory competition coming out of China, with Chinese company CXMT appearing to be getting a foothold in the market.

As noted by Counterpoint, CXMT seems to currently have a 7% revenue market share, with industry leader Samsung mopping up 39%, SK hynix taking 26%, and Micron getting 25%. If you haven't been taking in those numbers, that means just four companies have a whopping 97% of the memory revenue market share.

There are a few reasons for CXMT's seemingly meteoric rise. Early last month, component makers began validating their products for Chinese memory, in order to work with CXMT memory. Then, just last week, the company made its public offering to the tune of $8.6 billion, with shares surging by 466%. That means its market capitalisation was valued at just under half a trillion dollars, making it one of the most valuable companies in China.

To top this all off, CXMT memory has reportedly been landing in HP, Asus, and Acer notebooks, though not in the US. With the big three not having the memory capacity to meet the huge demand, CXMT seems to be making it big off the memory crisis. There's a significant hole in the market, with AI sucking up all that memory, and Chinese memory is rushing to plug it up.

Naturally, more competition is better for the market, in both pricing and production. Just two months ago, Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron were all accused of anticompetitive behaviour in a class action lawsuit, and more competitors would certainly quell any such allegations.

Still, even though CXMT might help ease the memory crisis eventually, it seems unlikely it is ending soon. Just last week, Samsung said there would be a "severe" memory supply crisis next year, and didn't comment on whether or not it will follow into 2029. And even SK hynix believes "Customer demand will remain higher than our supply capacity even beyond 2030."

For now, CXMT is reportedly making plans on making even more chip plants, with a second in Beijing, as well as one in Shanghai and Hefei. The plan is to double capacity up to 600,000 wafers each month, and if the memory crisis stays as it is, CXMT will likely have no problems selling those orders. There are clear winners and losers in the memory crisis so far, and with the cost of RAM for your rig, we PC gamers are currently losing.

The shakeup at the top of the Assassin's Creed food chain continued today with word that Eric Baptizat, the lead game designer on Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag and director of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, has returned to the company after several years away to become game director of the Assassin's Creed brand.

"Eric needs no introduction in this universe," Assassin's Creed head of content Jean Guesdon wrote on LinkedIn (via Eurogamer). "16 years at Ubisoft, key contributions to Black Flag, Origins, and Valhalla as Game Director, his passion for gameplay craft and his deep connection to this franchise speak for themselves.

"Seeing someone with his expertise, his rigor, and his collaborative spirit step into this role fills me with confidence and honestly, a lot of excitement, for what's ahead for the brand."

Talking about "brands" rather than "games" always makes me a bit itchy, but Baptizat's credits are legit. After working as a designer on numerous lesser-known games, he served as lead game designer on James Cameron's Avatar: The Game. It wasn't great, but he followed that up with Black Flag, which was great, and from there worked on Unity and Origins before becoming game director on Valhalla. He left Ubisoft in 2021 to join EA Motive, where he first directed the Dead Space remake and then served as game design director on Battlefield 6.

That's a pretty good run, and it's good news for Ubisoft that it's getting the band back together, at least a little bit. Baptizat is just one guy, but he's a high-profile guy on some of the best-loved Assassin's Creed games, most notably Black Flag—which, you may have heard, is doing pretty well these days in its Resynced guise. He's not going to singlehandedly save Ubisoft, but bringing that guy you know from that game you like back into the fold is at least a start.

After exactly two years in early access, shoujo-ified farm sim Fields of Mistria 1.0 is launching. Whether you've been playing consistently all this time or coming back after trying it two years ago, here's what you need to know about what's changing in the full release version of Mistria.

Fields of Mistria 1.0 highlights

Should you start a new save for 1.0?

You don't need to start a new save file for the 1.0 launch and personally I didn't. The biggest changes coming in the launch version of the game are mostly ones being added on to extend the story, so it shouldn't feel weird to play through even if you're in year three or four. I've come back to play Mistria a couple times after its early access updates and story content that's been added has always felt like a pretty natural flow from where I left off.

You also won't need a new save file to get any of the new achievements added to the game. They'll all be earned retroactively based on what you've done in your save so far.

What if you haven't played since the early access launch?

There have been several major updates over the past two years. If you stopped playing early on and are just coming back, here are some features you might not immediately realize were added:

• Shooting Star Festival on Summer 28 that you can invite a date to attend
• Harvest Festival in fall and Animal Festival in winter
• Riding mounts after upgrading Hayden's barn
• You can buy an expansion for your farm property from the carpenter's shop (and home size upgrades too)
• Greenhouses are available, but only after reaching renown level 70
• Apiaries for farming honey are now craftable
• After upgrading the general store you can buy a seed maker to turn crops (or forage) into their seed versions
• Hayden sells an auto-feeder for your barns and coops after you reach ranching level 45

Full 1.0 change list

Via the Fields of Mistria official blog.

[Highlights]

• The Town Repair Questline can now be completed!
• The Town Renown Cap has been raised to 100.
• The Mistril Town Rank Event has been added to the game.
• NPC Heart Level Cap has been raised to 10.
• 10 Heart (Proposal) Events have been added to the game.
• Wedding Events & Marriage have been added to the game.
• Children have been added to the game.
• The “Saturday Market Plaza” Quest has been added to the game.
• The “Repair the Bell Tower” Quest has been added to the game.
• Stillwell & Zorel join the Saturday Market.
• The Museum can now be completed.
• Steam Achievements have been added.
  • Note: Achievements will be retroactively received after loading an existing save, and will populate based on that save data. If you would prefer to start fresh without receiving retroactive achievements, all you will need to do is start a new save file.
• Beta localizations for 7 languages have been added to the game:
  • Chinese (Simplified)
  • Chinese (Traditional)
  • French
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Russian
  • Spanish 

🎮 Gameplay

• Unlocking Stillwell will allow you to access Mission Quests from his Mission Board at the Saturday Market.
• Unlocking Zorel will allow you to purchase Crystal Resonators and Song Crystals at the Saturday Market. This feature allows customization of the music that plays on your farm and in the rooms of your home.
• The exterior of your house can now be customized from a selection of styles after it’s been fully upgraded.
  • Note: You will receive a letter from Landen after fully upgrading your house, which will unlock this feature in the Carpenter’s Shop.
• 7 new perks have been added to the game, including:
  • Cooking:
    • Espresso Yourself
  • Ranching:
    • Playtime
    • Eggstra
    • Close Bond II
    • True Trust
  • Woodcrafting:
    • Hammer Timing IV
    • Deliberate Debris II
• The “Engagement Ring” item will now become craftable at a Forge after reaching 10 Hearts with an NPC you’re dating. 
  • Note: Elsie will deliver the recipe to you the morning after reaching Heart Level 10. Use the recipe scroll to unlock it.
• “NPC Special Items” received from NPCs 10-Heart (Proposal) Events have been added. 
  • Note: It is possible to view all events and collect all the special items before deciding to proceed with a proposal (if desired), as 10-Heart events can be retriggered with the Engagement Ring until you choose to propose and become engaged.
• Elements of your wedding (such as flower color, cake flavor, and meal served at the reception) can be customized via wedding planning dialogue with your fiance in the days leading up to your wedding.
• The “Mystical Feather” item will now become available via a cutscene in the weeks following your marriage, allowing you to trigger an optional family planning discussion for players who wish to have a child.
• Via the Combat Perk “Friend-Shaped,” all monsters now drop Pet Skins that make your pet take on the appearance of that monster.
• The Big Chicken mount has been added to the game.
• An additional “Friday Night at the Inn” storyline has been added after finishing the Mines Storyline.
• New Requests have been added to the Request Board.
• 2 new Museum Sets and associated rewards have been added.
  • Honey Set
  • Terrarium Treasures Set
• You can now interact with NPCs you are dating, engaged to, or married to, to kiss them.
• Taking an NPC on a date will now increase their heart level more.
• Town Rank Quests have been added to better guide existing progression.
• Museum Wing rooms can now be entered to view your collection.
• The order of popups when donating items to the museum has been updated such that Museum Set Complete popups now appear directly after seeing their respective donated items popup.
• Previously inaccessible cooking recipes are now available in-game.

✨ QOL

• 🌼 The player character can now be rotated in the customization menu.
• 🌼 Players can optionally disable the break-up letters and associated follow-up lines that acknowledge the change in status from “Dating” to “Best Friends” that occurs by default after getting engaged (when dating multiple NPCs).
  • Note: this setting will not disable the break-up themselves, and will become available in the gameplay settings menu via the engagement tutorial cutscene.
• 🌼 Players can optionally disable the status change from “Dating” to “Best Friends” that occurs by default post-engagement (when dating multiple NPCs).
  • Note: this setting will disable the break-ups entirely, and will become available in the gameplay settings menu via the engagement tutorial cutscene, but must be toggled prior to confirming an engagement in order to take effect.
• 🌼 Drop rates on items received from Mines treasure chests have been improved.
• 🌼Ritual Chamber and Treasure room spawn rates have been adjusted to be more common.
• 🌼 Your animals will be fed and your crops watered automatically during March’s 8-Heart Event.
• 🌼 The speak interaction now takes priority when multiple interactions overlap near NPCs.
• New Graphics settings have been added to the settings menu, including brightness & saturation sliders and options to better customize the game’s performance on your machine.
• The Birthday selection screen now has a header that says “Select Your Birthday”.

🎨 Art

• Cloud shadows now appear outside on sunny days.
• Ryis’ Hawthorn tree now has an intermediate growth stage.
• The Bathhouse water wheel now animates.
• 🌼Additional UI indicators have been added, including a directional arrow when placing furniture, an arrow icon over Mines ladders, and a talk icon over Caldarus’ Statue.
• New furniture items have been added to the game, including:
  • Monster Set
  • Ornate Set
  • Bonsai Set
  • Dragon Set
  • And more!
• New cosmetics have been added to the game, including:
  • Barrel Hat
  • Wedding Outfits
  • Beetle Mandible Horns
  • Dragonfly Wings
  • And more!

💛 NPCs

• NPC Heart Level Cap has been raised to 10.
• 10 Heart (Proposal) Events have been added. 
• Engagement dialogue has been added.
• Wedding Events have been added.
• Events related to having a child have been added.
• Post-Marriage dialogue and NPC routines have been added.
• New dialogue has been added to the game.

🔊 Sound

• A new winter song has been added.
• 4 existing seasonal songs will now swap to special extended versions after progressing through the game.
• 10 new songs have been added via Song Crystals

[Bug Fixes]

• 🌼 Substantial improvements to performance since the last update.
• 🌼 Fixed early errors on startup which prevented the game from launching on certain old PCs.
• 🌼 Reduced the game's VRAM usage by over 50%, which should help with performance on older machines.
• 🌼Players can no longer walk on water by moving diagonally into corners.
• 🌼The game no longer crashes due to the Pet being in the wrong location while their job is active.
• 🌼Players can no longer earn second place in the Harvest Festival despite turning in a winning amount of Queen berries.
• Hayden’s weathervane now correctly reappears on his barn after you return it during the Find the Weathervane quest.
• Stepping stones on the beach now play stone footstep SFX.
• Certain popups (e.g. unlocking new hairstyles) have been widened to better fit on the screen.
• Repeatedly ringing the Bell no longer raises the Ranching Skill level.
• Placeable forge animations have been restored.
• Rock Stacks can no longer get stuck in an idle animation.
• Flame Spirits no longer get stuck idle after attacking.
• 🌼The game no longer encounters a rare crash when scrolling through the museum menu rapidly.
• Shooting Star Festival-related dialogue can no longer fire past midnight on Summer 27.
• Players can no longer obtain cosmetics from the Chicken Statue for animals they haven’t unlocked yet.
• It is no longer possible to equip armor and miss unlocking its associated cosmetic.
• NPCs eat specific meals where intended during certain cutscenes instead of randomized meals.
• The camera no longer zooms rapidly when tabbing back into the game window during the End of Day pan.
• 🌼NPC sub-icons on Date Photos have been restored.
• 🌼You can no longer get stuck in certain doorways.
• The Flying Tome now appears at the appropriate depth relative to its wind attack VFX.

Do you remember the trailer for that gorgeous Chinese action game at this year's Summer Game Fest? No, not Blood Message. And not Phantom Blade Zero, which showed up at Sony's State of Play. I'm talking about Swords of Legends, which featured a boss fight against a flying magician whose body happens to be an ornate rug. I've played it, and it's every bit the lavish, Unreal Engine 5 rendition of Chinese mythology and folklore it appears to be. Five years ago this game would've floored me—but here in 2026, it's instead made me a little apprehensive about the influence Black Myth Wukong is likely having on the upcoming wave of big-budget Chinese games.

You wouldn't know it from the name if you don't speak Chinese, but Swords of Legends is the sequel to Gujian 3, a 2018 RPG in a series beloved in China long before Black Myth Wukong made a seismic impact on the country's game industry. The Gujian games started out as turn-based, Final Fantasy-esque RPGs before leaning more heavily into action with each sequel (as Final Fantasy has done, itself). When PC Gamer contributor Kerry Brunskill covered the first Gujian, they did what most of us do when writing about an RPG: focus on the characters and story.

"All six members of your playable party consistently contradict the obvious pigeonholes lesser tales would leave them stuck within forever," Kerry wrote. "If you’ve got the time for it—and you might not have—Gu Jian’s leisurely pace exudes confidence in its world building, the closest accessible equivalent perhaps being Falcom’s Trails of… series; you feel these extended scenes and the endless spread of ancillary characters are included because they enrich the setting and everyone living within it. To the game’s credit these details really are important and over time numerous plot threads weave into one beautiful tapestry, your own shock as everything falls into place as strong as the reactions found in any of the cast."

By contrast, I couldn't tell you the name of the beautiful-but-generic character I played in the demo for the new Swords of Legends. The first thing I did was fight a giant bull named Ox-Head, who called me "boss;" defeating him in a tutorial battle turned him into a summonable sidekick I could call in when I needed help against a tough enemy. I welcomed the help, but had to wonder how much of a role he'll play in the story. Does he have quests? Can he talk with other characters, or change his opinion of me based on any decisions I make?

Swords of Legends' demo, limited to a few boss fights and one chunk of a linear level, emphasized the "action" half of the action RPG equation so thoroughly that really the only sign of the latter was the column of stats on the inventory screen.

As action games go, Swords of Legends does seem promising! You've got your standard light and heavy combos, but my eyes lit up when I saw that it was eschewing dedicated block and parry for interchangeable weapon skills and artifacts, which each affect the abilities you have in combat. The starter artifact comes equipped with a guard skill, of course, which uses mana unless you pop it with perfect timing. But I started having more fun when I swapped it out for the Thunder Banner, which replaced that block skill with a crackling, damage-dealing dash with generous frames of invincibility. All of a sudden I had to play aggressively, because blocking wasn't an option.

Later I equipped a hard-hitting parry skill on a greatsword and baited one of the bosses into attacking me, consistently punishing him with the riposte. It was a defensive playstyle, but a higher risk one—each parry used up some of my mana, and mistiming it left me wide open for a wallop.

Swords of Legends offers enough choice from the jump that it's at least not living wholly in Sekiro's shadow. That's a relief, considering Nioh 2 and 3 and Ninja Gaiden 4 and Rise of the Ronin and Wo Long and Lies of P and Phantom Blade Zero and The First Berzerker: Khazan and *deep breath* Clair Obscur and Spider-Man 2 and Doom: The Dark Ages and Resident Evil 4 Remake and Onimusha and 70 other games I'm forgetting have all leaned into press-the-right-button-at-the-exact-right-moment reactions. I think Sekiro's a masterpiece, but too often parrying gets in the way of the more expressive, flow state combo mashing of older action games like Devil May Cry.

In the same way I hope the next five years of action games have ambitions beyond the parry, I hope the big budget wuxia games coming in Black Myth Wukong's wake don't mistake its success as a template and narrow themselves to the path it's already walked. From the bit I've seen (too little to judge definitively), Swords of Legends seems more Black Myth than Witcher 3—which is a shame, because a full-on RPG in an already established series seems like the perfect way to truly delve into China's thousands of years of mythology.

Swords of Legends does, at least, have some wonderfully creative designs in just the hour or so of scattered sections I got to play. In my favorite scene, my taciturn protagonist sat down in a roadside inn for tea, only to end up dueling a warrior wearing a teapot on his head like a helmet—who was also wielding a teapot with a comically long spout as his sword. Most of his attacks flung boiling water around the arena.

The flying rug boss likewise felt like a character ripped from a folktale I've never read but now very much want to—he hid himself in one of three spinning teacups once I did him enough damage, then angrily rained fireworks down on my head when I caught him. Classic magician stuff.

I hope there's a lot more where that came from, and that the fun characters we've yet to see aren't all just boss fights at the end of linear, Souls-lite maps. There's still a long wait ahead: Swords of Legends is on Steam, but it doesn't yet have a release date.

Toby Longworth is a titan (no, not that kind) of Warhammer 40k voicework—one of the most prolific narrators of Black Library novels there is. For years, he's narrated Dan Abnett's work, widely agreed to be the best 40k has to offer, including the hugely popular Eisenhorn and Gaunt's Ghosts series.

He's also narrated a variety of Horus Heresy novels, where he gave voice to the famous Death Guard turned Grey Knight, Nathaniel Garro. Now, he's lending his voice to Dawn of War 4, specifically to a bunch of different Space Marines, and so he sat down to paint and talk with us about his career.

As someone who's listened to Toby Longworth's voice for hundreds of hours (is there a way to say that without sounding creepy?) I had to know: Who's his favorite character to play? .

"Garro was always my favorite character, but that was very early on and Garro has a bit of a following," explains Longworth. "His voice has a wonderful rolling quality that allows you to do it really smoothly. Eisenhorn was great fun as well. I did Gaunt's Ghosts, too, and Gaunt has a very long story arc. I don't know how many books it is—I'm sure someone does—but it's a lot."

"Being able to stick with a person that long, that's the most fun. So I'd say of all of them, I think I'm going to go for Gaunt, just because I think Gaunt's had the most amount of opportunities for me to get it right."

If you're curious about Warhammer 40k and looking for some novels to read, Gaunt's Ghosts is a really good starting point. They're basically the equivalent of the Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell, except set in 40k, about an Imperial Guard Commissar who takes command of the first and only regiment from the planet Tanith. My personal favorite is Necropolis.

There are 15 of them, which as Longworth said is a lot, but as someone who's read them all (and all of the Sharpe books), I definitely recommend giving them a look if you're curious about Black Library. They're so good, in fact, I kind of hope the first Warhammer 40k TV show that Henry Cavill is working on turns out to be that instead of Eisenhorn, but chances are slim.

If you want to see more of our interview with Toby Longworth and Alex Jordan about Dawn of War 4, check out our other shorts on the PC Gamer YouTube channel dropping in the next couple of days.

How do you create a gaming mouse that sits comfortably in the palm of most gamers? With science, that's how. As such, Pulsar Gaming is taking matters into its own hands with a research study—and nine survey participants will get a gaming mouse for their trouble.

In collaboration with the High-Performance Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Yonsei University, Pulsar Gaming is setting out "to establish empirical design standards based on quantitative user data and actual behavioral patterns." In order to collect enough data, Pulsar has invited the "global gamer community" via X to fill out an academic survey.

You can find the survey in question here, and the response period is from August 5 until August 24. The survey is about 19 pages long, with questions available in English, Japanese, and Korean. Pulsar writes that responses will be used to create a "foundational baseline for engineering the next generation of gaming mice."

It's a fairly in-depth survey, with even just the first page asking everything from what sorts of games you play and how many gaming mice you've "meaningfully" used, to how long your phalanges are. Those are your fingers, not your toes, for those wondering.

If you fill out the 19-page survey, you'll be in with a chance of winning a random Pulsar Gaming mouse. Nine survey participants in total will be randomly selected, and these winners will then be contacted on August 26.

A survey is definitely one way to approach designing a fresh gaming mouse. The dedicated Logitech lab our Jacob visited in Switzerland is another. There, designers consider ideas such as 'making a lightweight mouse that is nothing but strands of plastic inside,' and use electrode pads to measure how different hand muscles interact with different mouse shapes.

Speaking of mouse maestro Jacob and Pulsar, it's worth noting he also highly rated the X3 CrazyLight Mini gaming mouse earlier this year—not to mention the many paragraphs he dedicated to his 'gaming mouse heaven', the Pulsar Playstore.

There's just one small problem: Our Jacob is based in the UK, and the Pulsar Playstore can only be found in Tokyo, Japan. Ah, well.

Great news, if you're a fan of cool horror-action protagonists with quippy one liners or Grace Ashcroft, who doesn't want to be in said horror-action games but is trying her very best: We've got both coming to the Future Games Show this month, as the voice actors for both Leon Kennedy and Grace will be presenting a feast of games for you to sink your teeth into.

Nick Apostolides and Angela Sant'Albano are known, most recently, for their roles in Resident Evil Requiem—and they'll be helping our friends at the FGS show off over 40 games from both AAA and indie studios, including Tides of Annihilation and Onimusha: Way of the Sword.

PC Gamer's own Morgan Park was particularly taken with the latter, calling Onimusha: Way of the Sword "the best thing I saw at Summer Game Fest" last year, and its penchant for style even cracked Wes Fenlon's parry-averse heart when he played it back in August of the same year. It's one to keep an eye on.

"I can't wait to share an incredible lineup of games with fans around the world," Apostolides says, "Whether you’re into pulse-pounding horror, samurai adventures or anything in between, we’ve got first looks, exciting reveals and plenty of surprises in store."

Sant'Albano, unlike the understandably-terrified Ashcroft, is also giddy with excitement: "We’re putting the zombie-dodging to one side to bring you world premieres, exclusive gameplay reveals and brand-new trailers for some of the most exciting upcoming games. Nick and I can't wait to share it all with you—see you there!"

You can tune in August 26 at 1 pm EDT/6 pm BST, though there'll be more after the main show with FGS Live at Gamescom, which'll have even more previews and news from the packed, excited floors of the Koelnmesse. There'll also be the Best of Gamescom on August 30 at 1 pm EDT/6 pm BST, for recaps, developer interviews, and more.

You can watch on Twitch and YouTube alongside other platforms—including a sister stream from our friends over at GamesRadar+.

PC gamers (and PC users as a whole) find themselves in an increasingly expensive landscape, in part due to the AI data centre industry's apparently bottomless appetite for memory. And yet, AMD CEO Lisa Su reckons "AI PCs will become more important" for the average consumer.

Lisa Su told investors during AMD's most recent earnings call, "As we go into 2027, I think we have a strong product portfolio that is coming on board to address not just the traditional notebook and desktop markets, but also as you think about a more AI-centric PC experience, like what we have been talking about with the Ryzen AI Halo."

To be fair to Su, at the start of the year we did describe the Ryzen AI Max+ 388 as a chip that looks perfect for the ultimate in handheld PC gaming. For more context, AMD has just reported record-breaking total revenue of $11.5 billion in Q2 alone. A decent chunk of that is down to demand from data centres. Even so, AI PCs feel like an odd play when consumers are staring down increasingly runaway hardware costs.

Su seemed undaunted speaking to investors, saying, "I remain optimistic about the PC market as an important way for us to reach a broader set of users and our ability to grow ahead of the market."

For a little more context, the gaming section of AMD's business has shrunk by 31% in part due to high hardware costs (though the company likely saw that coming). It's perhaps less surprising then that AMD has been selling a lot of lower-end and mobile Ryzen processors this past quarter, rather than the newest gamer-geared GPUs and CPUs.

Su reflected on the current volatility of hardware pricing, saying, "The market itself will depend a bit on some of the components. We’re all watching the component costs and how that will play out over the next couple of quarters."

The client segment of AMD's business, "which primarily includes CPUs, APUs, chipsets for desktops and notebooks," made around $3.1 billion outside of gaming hardware (the client and gaming parts of the business "do not qualify as [...] separate reportable operating" segments, though AMD does still report their financials separately).

As such, Su told investors that the client business's "first half performance has been very strong." Though AMD expects the market to see a decline in the second half of 2026, Su went on to say she expects to see year-on-year growth in this more consumer-focussed sector. Even if it doesn't meet these expectations, data centre demand will likely more than buoy the company.

Su said, "I think our portfolio and our rising content in enterprise are very positive for our client mix."

That's all very well and good, but if big tech continues with its AI infrastructure build-out, that's just going to continue to drive up the price of memory and more besides. If AMD truly believes NPU-equipped AI PCs are the future, who does it think will be able to afford them?

Electronic Arts has officially now passed into the hands of Saudi Arabia—specifically, the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, as well as firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. It is with a grim lack of surprise that I now inform you that this will, reportedly, involve a lot of layoffs.

The news comes courtesy of Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who posted to Bluesky: "EA officially goes private tonight, meaning: EA will no longer trade on the NASDAQ for the first time in 36 years, all stockholders of EA (including many employees) will receive $210/share, [and] EA will take on $18 billion (!) in debt, putting it on the hook to pay ~$1.8 billion/year in interest.

"EA's annual Ebitda is around $1.5 billion, which should be enough to service the interest payments. But the publisher has told debt investors that it will cut $700 million in annual costs including $170 million in 'organizational efficiencies,' per Bloomberg. In other words: mass layoffs."

This is, technically, a called shot—but it's a called shot in the sense of saying that a giant boulder rolling down a hill is probably going to flatten the sand castle it's headed towards. Maybe it hits a pebble and jolts out of the way at the last second—maybe $700 million in annual costs will be cut through, I don't know, pragmatic restructuring or executives reducing their salaries. Perhaps pigs shall fly. Anything's possible.

But given the state of the current industry, I'm inclined to agree with Schreier here. Large-scale acquisitions like this typically result in mass layoffs and studio closures, as was the case with Microsoft's $68.7 billion purchase of Blizzard, which resulted in a bloodbath of 1,900 laid-off employees across the company and Xbox.

That ugly trend has continued unabated: Microsoft's recent 'reset' saw 1,600 layoffs, with 1,600 more to come by 2027, Ubisoft has continued to make deep cuts as it struggles to stay alive, and yes, EA has already made significant layoffs of its own ahead of the acquisition—and that's just the past couple months.

There's a huge flood of talent, both institutional and new, that's now being dropped into a hiring pool already thousands strong—adding what's bound to be a rash of layoffs from EA to that pile is bound to be grim tidings.

All of this comes in spite of the fact that the wider industry is as big and as profitable as it always has been, with global games revenue surpassing $200 billion in 2025. Where's all that money going? Clearly not to the people making the things, that's for sure.

For some time now, Battlefield 6 players on Nvidia cards were running into a peculiar crash when changing attachments on the SOR-300SC carbine, using custom server search, or "playing on maps with large bodies of water". If you have run into such a problem, you will be happy to know that it should now be fixed.

As announced over on X, Battlefield 6 game update 1.4.1.5 is a "smaller quality-of-life update focused on improving reliability, presentation, and moment-to-moment gameplay"

The specific Nvidia crashes were such a problem that the Battlefield Comms X account put out a separate tweet declaring the fix. If you were unlucky enough to have been hit by the crashes, the fix is in the update that launched on Tuesday, August 4.

Unfortunately, this crash came at a terrible time, because the game just launched Tsuru Reef, which is both the biggest map in the game and a return to naval warfare for the series. A Top Gun crossover, there is a lot of water on the map, which you can imagine would be a problem when paired with crashes that are more common on maps with big bodies of water.

Interestingly, reports popped up with these specific crashes just after the previous Nvidia driver update went live, and Battlefield Comms recommended that users roll back to Nvidia driver version 596.49. The Battlefield X account said that RTX 50-series owners were particularly affected by the problem. This means that if you previously rolled back Nvidia drivers, you should now make sure your card is up-to-date.

As well as fixing this Nvidia crash problem, Battlefield Studios has reportedly improved deployment, aiming, water transition and vehicle behaviour, plus several "UI, loadout, and customisation issues" have now been fixed.

The latest update also has a focus on map and Portal polish, addressing visual, collection, interaction, and audio issues across multiple maps plus through Portal, the community creation function.

Here's hoping the next Nvidia driver doesn't pose another problem for the game.

Sovereign Tower has genuinely surprised me. At first glance, it's a cosy-looking management romp with shades of Reigns and Yes, Your Grace. It's colourful, a little silly and chock-full of charming eccentrics. This is not an inaccurate assessment, but it's also so much more—and a lot darker than the soft colour palette and whimsical tone initially suggests.

After opening the door to a magic tower, you become the Sovereign, the leader of a nation and a big player on the international stage. Yesterday, you were an itinerant leper. Now you're the boss. What are your credentials? Who cares? You've got destiny on your side.

Take the reigns

Each day follows the same broad loop, where you'll hold an audience with commoners, diplomats and your fellow rulers, dole out decrees and advice, and then send your knights on quests—typically given to you during the audience phase—all around the world.

The choices you make determine what the rest of the world thinks of you, from your knights to your citizens, who are split into merchants, scholars, nobles and "people", who I guess are just everyone else.

Every quest will challenge a specific set of abilities—strength, agility, charisma, luck, magic and wit—only a few of which will be revealed to you. If a manticore hunt demands a strong sword arm, you send your strongest knights—simple! But not quite. See, each knight has a list of positive and negative attributes, like a love of water or a fear of crowds, which can raise or lower their chance of success at a given quest.

These attributes are initially invisible, requiring you to get to know them, or to send one of your advisors to spy on them. The same goes for their preferences, which don't impact the quests themselves, but will affect their satisfaction level.

If you send someone who's afraid of the dark and hates to hunt into a gloomy forest to kill some wolves, there's a good chance they'll fail the quest and think you're a bit of a dick. But you can still make them try, anyway, and if you buff their abilities with the right gear, they might succeed despite all of the obstacles.

So the management side of things is surprisingly dense due to the way it works in tandem with this pretty full-featured RPG system. This could have easily been Sovereign Tower's big hook, but it's actually one of two, and its companion is what really makes the game properly impressive.

Time crime

Deep inside the bowels of the tower sits an artefact inhabited by a demon. This demon has a pretty neat party trick: it can turn back time. And it's very eager for you to use this power. Convenient? Absolutely. Suspicious? Oh yeah.

Here's the deal: if you're not happy with the outcome of a quest, decision or scripted moment, you can turn back the clock. This is of course handy if you've opted not to allow for manual saving, but this power goes well beyond an in-fiction way to savescum.

See, when you go back in time, your character retains everything they've learned in the now-defunct timeline. This means you can not only take a different path, entirely new options open up for you that reflect your knowledge of the future.

Say one of your knights gets killed off—not dying valiantly during a quest, but cowardly murdered in the tower. And through another knight's investigation, you discover who the culprit is, and why they did it. Well, now you have everything you need to go back in time to stop it from happening.

But should you?

You're not just thwarting a murder, you're killing off a timeline, and all the events that resulted from that crime. Maybe some of them are even positive. You could bring back some characters while losing access to others. And who's to say that the best timeline is the one where this knight lives?

Killing time

Aside from all that, there's the big conundrum at the heart of Sovereign Tower: should you really be making deals with a demon? Especially a demon who is so desperate for you to use this power. Well, I ain't telling.

You can stick to your guns and prove you've learned things from so many other time travel stories, refusing to engage with this system. And should you do that, you'll still have fun. Sovereign Tower is an excellent RPG/management game/visual novel hydra. But the temptation to meddle is so damn tempting.

This tension might be the game's most potent feature. The ethical, existential crisis that results from the discovery of time travel is a big part of the genre, but it's something few games really tackle. Sure, they might pay lip service to it, but as players we never really need to grapple with it.

Sovereign Tower, meanwhile, never stops testing you. Whenever a big decision is made, whenever something goes wrong, whenever you reach a milestone—the demon is always there, whispering in your ear: "Could you have done something differently?" And the answer is always "Yes". But do you act on that knowledge?

I've been roleplaying as a pretty rotten monarch. I've allowed whole towns to drown, I'm rude to peasants and diplomats alike, and I regularly send my most ruthless knight to steal, murder and cheat. My kingdom won an international horse race because we poisoned all the other riders. I suck. But I still agonise over the choice to turn back time.

It's a testament to the writing and the game's memorable cast of weirdos. This is not an abstract choice. The world and its inhabitants feel tangible, and eradicating a timeline is a weighty decision. I know I can gain a lot by making changes, but what will I lose?

I love that I'm wrestling with these questions. And as I'm still playing through Sovereign Tower, I don't yet have any answers. This might be the best part of the experience. I don't want to learn that there's a correct path—though I suspect it won't end up being that black or white.

Sovereign Tower launches tomorrow, on August 6, and while I unfortunately won't have a scored review up in time for its arrival—it's technically a short game, but it's greatly extended by time travel shenanigans—I'm already clearly smitten. If you want to wait for a score, however, come back in a couple of days for my full review. In the meantime, Sovereign Tower's Steam demo is still available, letting you play up to the end of the first main quest.