I didn't like Dying Light 2 much when it launched back in 2022. But I can't deny that Techland has really committed to supporting and turning around its controversial sequel. Over the last four years, Techland has reworked the game's parkour system, added Volatiles to Villedor's nights, injected its combat with greater oomph, and added various features like New Game+ and replayable bounties.

While its lofty narrative ambitions were never quite realised, the foundations of Dying Light 2 are now far more robust. Now, the game's latest update aims to let players expand upon those foundations, bringing significant improvements to the game's modding and UGC functionality.

"Patch 1.28 is something we wanted to do for a long time—opening Dying Light 2: Stay Human much more to player creativity and giving you not only new ways to play the game, but also inviting you to create it with us," writes Techland's UGC program manager Rafal Polito in an article on Dying Light's website. "The Breach is our way of opening up Dying Light 2: Stay Human even more to UGC content and adding new gameplay ideas and different kinds of experiences."

What all this amounts to, essentially, is a combination of official mods and better mod support for Dying Light 2. Once players have completed the game's Prologue, they can talk to two reintroduced characters from Dying Lights' universe—Tolga and Fatin—who act as the gateway to a broader portal of UGC experiences.

As for what these experiences are, they include official mods like a third-person mode and a low-gravity mode, to featured mods created by the community. Polito highlights a couple of examples like The Atomborne, a map that attempts to transform Dying Light 2 into a gothic-as-heck soulslike, and the upcoming Dead Circuit, which converts Dying Light 2 into a snazzy-looking Dead Space knockoff.

As for why Dying Light 2 is going down the UGC route, Polito states in his article that "a lot of you have asked us for this". But it is worth pointing out that UGC is the engine that powers the biggest games in existence today. Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite: If you want to make a truly obscene amount of money in the games industry, convincing your community to make new stuff for your game is the way to go—assuming that you have the resources and the community to make your game a platform.

I think it's fair to say that Techland has the resources—the Dying Light games have been enormously successful for the studio. Whether it has the community is another matter. According to SteamDB, Dying Light 2's daily steam concurrents are in the low thousands. That's decent for a four-year old, primarily single-player game, but those aren't the kind of numbers that power a Minecraft-style behemoth.

Still, a UGC world filled with decaying zombies is probably more appropriate for your child than Roblox is, what with its endless child safety concerns and exploitative approach to monetisation. So, all the more power to Techland, I say.

The Death Stranding movie was announced way back in 2022—a length of time that may well have worked out for it given how videogame movie adaptations are suddenly on a hot streak. The project is still in its early stages and the specifics are being hashed out. But one detail has recently been confirmed by director Michael Sarnoski, which is that the cinema version of Death Stranding won't be a straight retread of Kojima's scenic delivery simulator.

During a chat with IGN live (via Eurogamer) about his latest movie The Death of Robin Hood—which arrives in cinemas later this month—Sarnoski shared some additional details on progress with the Death Stranding film: "I'm writing the script right now, and [am] hopefully almost done with that and really excited to dive into it," said Sarnoski, who previously directed the well-received prequel A Quiet Place: Day One.

Rather than retell the story of Sam Porter Bridges' journey across Kojima's 'I can't believe it's not Iceland' depiction of North America, Sarnoski instead says the movie is "a story with my own characters and my own corner of the world." He does hint that viewers "might see some characters from the game pop up"—so there's still hope for a Dollman cameo. But all-told, Sarnoski wants to "explore something that's meaningful to me."

Whatever Sarnoski's vision for Death Stranding, production company A24 seems pleased with progress so far. "They've read a draft. We're working on some revisions together, and they all seem super excited and happy with it," Sarnoski says. Perhaps more importantly, Kojima himself seems pleased with the story Sarnoski is writing. Certainly, Sarnoski is impressed by Kojima, as he keenly explained during the interview:

"I was impressed that when he read this script, without me needing to talk to him about it, he knew every single [film] reference," Sarnoski says. "He was like 'Oh, you're doing a Come and See reference there. I see that. I like that'. He just knows movies incredibly well."

A Death Stranding flick isn't the only game adaptation A24 has in the works. Alex Garland's Elden Ring movie is filming right now, and is expected to release in 2028. Numerous videos from the set have leaked online, including footage of guards strolling around what might be Conwy Castle in North Wales—likely to be serving as a stand in for Elden Ring's sprawling Stormveil Castle.

If you had told me just a few years ago that there was about to be a Silent Hill renaissance, I would've called you a liar. But it's happened; and after back-to-back horror bangers in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill F, Konami has another developer new to the series working on its next game, Silent Hill: Townfall. Screen Burn Interactive's vision for the foggy town takes place in Scotland, and its lead tortured soul, Simon Ordell, seems to have quite a bit in common with James Sunderland.

When is the Silent Hill: Townfall release date?

The Silent Hill: Townfall release date is Thursday, September 24, 2026. Konami and its co-publisher Annapurna Interactive announced the date at the Sony State of Play during this year's Summer Game Fest.

You can also pre-order the deluxe edition for two days of advanced access, which begins on September 22. Silent Hill: Townfall will be available on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Silent Hill: Townfall trailers

Konami revealed Townfall as part of its Silent Hill Transmission series, where it's been dishing out new horrors like candy. Townfall's special broadcast introduces fans to Screen Burn—an indie developer I wasn't familiar with until their partnership with Annapurna and Konami—but after hearing about their vision, I think they get the vibe.

Townfall's release date trailer expands on the medical horrors hinted at in its reveal footage, but on a larger scale than previous games. Whatever happened in St. Amelia isn't contained to the declining health of just a few citizens, and the people must've put up quite the fight before succumbing to the fog.

Silent Hill: Townfall gameplay

Silent Hill: Townfall setting and characters

What do we know about the characters in Silent Hill: Townfall?

Simon Ordell

Simon is Townfall's protagonist, and like so many of the Silent Hill leads, he has no idea how he wound up in the game's hellish setting. With all of the medical imagery, chronic illness or self-harm seem like the most obvious guesses, but those things could be related to other people in the town.

A close-up in the reveal trailer shows he's wearing a grungy hospital bracelet with his name, date of birth (15/10/59), and blood type (A+) printed on it. Another clip shows a vault door with his last name, Ordell, in the middle before cutting to a regular door labeled 204. My money is that 204 leads to a hospital room, and there's probably a reason the vault only says Ordell, with no first name included.

Zoe

From her familiarity, I'm assuming the mysterious woman speaking over Simon's CRTV is his wife—or at least someone with a romantic connection. We also see Simon pick up mail labeled "Zoe Ellis," but I'm not confident declaring that's the same Zoe until Konami says so. We all know how these games can be.

The resuscitation of Xbox has begun in earnest, but there's still much to be done, and still great uncertainty: Console exclusives are back but to what extent remains unclear, and of course the "reset" for a better future will almost certainly mean putting hundreds of people out of work. And it's possible that even bigger things could happen: A new report from The Information (via Reuters) says Microsoft is looking to shift its focus and resources to its biggest games, while simultaneously mulling the possibility of cutting the division loose entirely.

Three sources told The Information that Microsoft hasn't ruled out the possibility of spinning the Xbox division off as a standalone company, or making it a wholly-owned subsidiary. It's also apparently considering a joint venture with other partners—none named—which could make Xbox easier to sell after its overhaul. Nothing is imminent, according to the sources, but nothing is off limits, either.

The report also states that Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's plan to increase spending on Xbox's biggest game series, including Halo, Fallout, and The Elder Scrolls, has been approved by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood, although the actual budgeting hasn't been locked down.

The primary goal of the increased spending is to speed up development of games in those series, and fair enough as far as it goes: It's been 11 years since Fallout 4, 15 years since Skyrim, and eight years since The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced, and we still have nothing to see but this empty teaser, and not even an official title:

Halo has also stagnated. As PC Gamer's Rory Norris wrote after the Xbox Games Showcase last weekend, Halo "has been treading water essentially since Microsoft set up 343 Industries to shepherd it into the future after Bungie's departure. That was almost 15 years ago, by the way." Halo Infinite, envisioned as the live service future of the franchise, halted new content updates in 2025, just four years after it launched. I don't think anyone expects, or wants, annualized Bethesda RPGs, but you can understand why Microsoft would want to hurry things along a bit.

At the same time, if there's one thing we've learned over the years it's that throwing money at this particular problem won't necessarily solve it. Microsoft has a big advantage over other mega-corps in that it already owns some of the biggest names in gaming, but whether it's able to make anything out of that—and whether it wants to make the effort in the first place—remains to be seen.

I've reached out to Microsoft for comment on the possibility of an Xbox spinoff and will update if I receive a reply.

Life sim player tradition (or stubborness?) dictates I often attempt to build a real house—my childhood home or one I drove past last week—and yet in The Sims, I always wind up frustrated that the series' grid-based building has never been able to quite replicate actual floor plans. I've become totally enamored with building in Paralives because its gridless, real world measurements make so many designs possible, even going so far as just slapping a real life blueprint into the game and tracing it.

In the week after Paralives launched, lots of players were sharing the possibilities of importing custom images. One trick, which just requires a small mod, is uploading an image of a real blueprint and putting it onto a rug which you can use like a guide to draw all your walls in Build Mode. Incredibly it just… works?

How to use a custom rug floor plan in Paralives

1. Download Bunny's Customizable Rug in the Steam Workshop
2. Save an image on your PC of a floor plan you want to replicate (one that shows measurements, ideally)
3. Use the search function (magnifying glass) in the Build Mode menu to find Bunny's Custom Rug
4. Click the "change image" picture icon and scroll down to find the custom image "+" button
5. Import your blueprint image and resize the rug to the correct scale
6. Make sure to toggle the grid off when building walls and verify you're using the matching measurement type (metric or imperial) in your game settings
7. Trace your walls!

To get the scale of your image correct, check the measurements of a room in your blueprint and build two perpendicular walls in the lengths specified. Use the resizing arrows on the rug to line those walls up on your blueprint. With your measurements aligned, you're free to trace away.

In The Sims games, which I've always loved building in, you've got to treat the dimensions of real houses more as inspiration. Tiny rooms like hall closets or half baths are a bit too big even when you make them a single wall tile wide, and bedrooms always have to be a bit bigger than seems realistic just to fit a tiny twin bed.

It was so fun to see a blueprint just translate nearly perfectly into Paralives. The moment of truth was when I finished its small but realistic 8'x11' bedrooms and went to see if a standard size bed would fit and, miracle of miracles, it does. Even my linen closets in the hall just work.

The one bit of scale that I've struggled with in Paralives are the showers. Even those miniscule rounded corner showers measure 4sqft in game. I've been in one of those things in real life and can assure you they are not four feet wide. Since showers are one of the few structural bits in Paralives that can't be resized, because of the animations for showering I assume, it means a few of the realistically cramped bathrooms I've attempted haven't worked out. Alas, I haven't spotted a workshop mod with smaller showers yet.

Otherwise, building true to real life scale has been such a treat after spending 20+ years finagling uncanny replications of the homes in my neighborhood. I wish I could tell my ten-year-old self about this.

The news that Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire, which seems like something the world definitely doesn't need, got me thinking: have I ever even played a videogame that let me be a trillionaire? I've definitely racked up millions of dollars or coins or other make-believe currency in a few games… but trillions?

I honestly couldn't think of any game I've played that let me accumulate that sort of unfathomable wealth. Heck, the only game I can think of off the top of my head that even dealt in billions is Balatro, where my high score is a mere 48 billion—but that's chips, not dollars.

While I was pondering this, I booted up Skyrim to see if it was even possible to give myself one trillion dollars. And wouldn't you know it? The fantasy world of Skyrim, which includes ancient dragons, evil necromancers, steam-powered robots, lizard-people, elves, and werewolves—doesn't allow trillionaires.

Inspired by many of the real world's richest men, I wasn't about to earn my trillions in Skyrim: I was just going to use a cheat and add it to my account as if it were an inheritance or a loan from daddy. I used a classic Skyrim console command many of us know by heart: player.additem.

I typed player.additem 0000000f (that's the item code for gold, also memorized), then added a 1, then carefully counted out the correct number of zeroes. It took a while!

1,000: thousand
1,000,000: million
1,000,000,000: billion
1,000,000,000,000: trillion!

That's a lot of zeroes, innit? Probably more than any one person should have, huh?

But I did it. I typed player.additem 0000000f 1000000000000.

I didn't become a trillionaire. Instead I lost 2,147,483,647 gold. Da hell?

That didn't sound right. Maybe a trillion gold simply couldn't be displayed in my wallet? Skyrim came out back in 2011, a blissful time when probably no one even considered that a trillionaire might someday exist. So I ran into the nearest shop (The Bee and Barb in Riften) and tried to buy a single bottle of Alto Wine for 19 gold from Keerava.

Nope. No mistake. Giving myself a trillion dollars had put me over 2 billion dollars in debt. I loaded up another character and tried it again. Same result.

I googled a bit, confused as to why some people are allowed to have a trillion dollars and some are not. Smarter people than me already know: in Skyrim, gold is a 32-bit signed integer, which means its max value is 2,147,483,647 (1 bit is used for positive/negative, the other 31 for the value). Apparently, if you go over that value by a few hundred billion, or maybe even just one, the number flops from positive to negative.

So there you have it! Even in a fantasy world where you can become a vampire and cat-people exist and you can change the weather by yelling at it, you can't be a trillionaire. I wish our own world made that much sense.

The official RPG Maker forums are closing, and there's some good news and some bad news associated with that. The good news: Gotcha Gotcha Games is launching a new forum called RPG Maker Guild, which aims to "provide a welcoming space where RPG Maker creators can connect, share projects, exchange ideas, and continue growing the community together." But the bad news, revealed in a closure FAQ, is that the existing RPG Maker forums are not going to be archived, meaning that a massive amount of history—and useful data and information—is at risk of being lost.

I'm opposed to forum shutdowns as a matter of principle, and I'm still a little sore about EA closing the BioWare forums. But in this case the cultural loss is accompanied, and even outweighed, by the practical hit: As noted by Eurogamer, there are 1.4 million posts on the forum: The Legacy Engine Support forum has more than 280,000 posts spread across 45,600 threads, for instance, while the Javascript Plugins forum has 34,700 threads filled with 276,000 messages.

That is a massive amount of data, and if you've ever found yourself quietly thanking some anonymous hero who posted the fix for your extremely niche but insurmountable technical problem that they also encountered back in 2013, you know why people are reacting so strongly to its loss.

"Closing the forums is already bad enough, but no proper archive? Seriously?" one user wrote in response to the announcement. "Years and years of community knowledge, plugins, tutorials, bug fixes, troubleshooting threads, scripts, resources, devlogs, conversations, and historical context are just supposed to disappear because people didn’t manually download everything in time?"

"Wouldn't have completed my game, One Fenix Down, without these forums and the community," another said. "This is simply a terrible decision."

They're going to wipe out the rpg maker forums to promote their new one? The rpg maker forums are like 20 years of history and help for people using their software. Every time I struggled making something for Look Outside, I found an old thread on those forums to help. Extremely hostile of them.

— @frankiepixel.bsky.social (@frankiepixel.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T20:49:56.618Z

It's impossible to overestimate how important the RPG Maker community is to video games, so many classic games in the past 35 years were either made by the community or inspired by them.To see one of their main knowledge banks nonchalantly wiped away like this is disgusting.

— @felipepepe.bsky.social (@felipepepe.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T20:49:56.866Z

I love RPGMaker but one of the things that keeps me from using it is that there’s not a lot of tutorials on how to do stuff written for someone with no idea on how the engine works — shutting this down seems REAL dumb

— @beanjbunny.bsky.social (@beanjbunny.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T20:49:56.714Z

GotchaGotchaGames dropped today that they're shutting down the official rpgmaker forums next week, and taking down access entirely come December...Final Profit wouldn't exist without these forums, there's so much knowledge about to be lost. I'm mortified.forums.rpgmakerweb.com/forums/impor...

— @finalprofit.bsky.social (@finalprofit.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T20:49:56.790Z

No one understands the RPG Maker community less than the ppl that make RPG Maker

— @whatsmocca.bsky.social (@whatsmocca.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T20:49:56.532Z

The game industry's difficulty with maintaining institutional knowledge is something we've touched on in recent years, but even by the standards of big-money corporations, this is egregious: A massive, user-built treasure trove of information, valuable specifically to RPG Maker's users, being put to the torch because... well, I don't know why, really.

And if there is reason, Gotcha Gotcha Games isn't saying, which you'd think it would be eager to do if it could. Its only statement on the matter is, "There are currently no plans to provide a public archive or backup of the current forum once it has been closed."

There are two bright spots amidst this encroaching darkness. First, the axe isn't falling for another half-year: New account registrations for the forum have already been disabled and on June 18 the old forum will be switched to read-only mode, meaning no new posts will be allowed. But the forum will stay online until December 11—Gotcha Gotcha Games is encouraging users "to save any posts, guides, resources, or other content they wish to keep before the forum closure."

That's a decent window of time, but even so it's a monumental task. Which leads to the second bit of brightness: Jason Scott, perhaps the online world's foremost archivist, said (or at least unmistakably implied) that help is on the way from Internet Archive:

The sky has blackened over rpgmakerweb with Archive Team crawlers

— @textfiles.com (@textfiles.com.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T20:49:56.920Z

That's great news, but I still very much hope that once Gotcha Gotcha Games sees the backlash, it reverses course and provides some kind of official archive for the old forums, or just leaves them up in read-only. The Internet Archive is an invaluable tool (and by the way, if you find it useful you can kick 'em a little money to help keep the lights on), but nothing beats the real thing.

Playing Final Fantasy 11 after all these years is a lot like returning to your hometown only to find it desolate and different. All the old buildings are still there, but the faces aren’t the same. And that feeling I had—that indescribable sense of belonging—is gone too. It’s a bit alienating and tragic, to be honest, but really what else should I expect from an MMO that’s almost 20 years old and clearly nearing the end of its days?

Though I was never as obsessed with Final Fantasy 11 as I was other MMOs like World of Warcraft, I can still vividly remember the summer months I spent playing it. My love for Final Fantasy 11 is the definition of a summer romance. All I wanted to do was spend my time adventuring across the lush fields of Vana’diel, but my parents decided that wasting my break playing videogames was a bad idea, so they regulated my playtime to a few precious hours each day. But I wasn’t going to give up that easily.

I found an old 11-inch TV-VCR combo set buried in our storage closet and hid it in my room. After everyone had gone to bed, I’d quietly grab my PlayStation 2 and bring it to my bed, plug it in, and play Final Fantasy 12 until the sun came up—until the day my mom’s mischief detector finally got her attention and she busted me and refused to keep paying the monthly subscription fee.

Maybe that’s what’s missing now, I think as I walk the streets of Windhurst trying to reacquaint myself. But I know that’s not entirely true. Final Fantasy 11 wasn’t great because playing it was against the rules, it was great because it was an MMO built from the ground up to encourage cooperation and friendship. A relic of an era before World of Warcraft ruined the entire genre by being too popular.

Old relics

Unearthing what makes Final Fantasy 11 great doesn’t just require a shovel, you need a damn excavator. Before I could even log in, I had to wrestle with the infamously complicated PlayOnline service, an esoteric artefact in itself. Back when Final Fantasy 11 launched on the PlayStation 2 online services were beyond rudimentary, especially on a console that wasn’t really designed with internet multiplayer in mind. That’s why Final Fantasy 11 came bundled with a 40GB hard drive and a network adapter.

PlayOnline was an ambitious push to normalise online console gaming. Square Enix designed it to be a kind of platform for all of their multiplayer games and it included ambitious social features for the time, like personal email accounts. It was Steam for the PlayStation 2.

Today, though, PlayOnline is an enormous burden. Even the simple act of registering an account feels like an arcane ritual. PlayOnline ID, PlayOnline member name, PlayOnline password, Square Enix ID, Square Enix password—you probably need them all at one point or another just to get access to Final Fantasy 11. Menus and prompts are so confusingly arranged that more than once I found myself in some weird dead-end corner of PlayOnline with absolutely no real clue how to get where I was going.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Like many older MMOs, Final Fantasy 11 is virtually unplayable in its original state. Its graphics engine can’t count pixels higher than 800 and the client will crash if you so much as even glance at another program.

Fortunately, modders have come to the rescue with a tool called Windower that allows for modern resolutions and graphics options as well as a host of addons and mods to make in-game tasks easier. It’s an incredible godsend.

Takin' it slow

I spent more than two hours that first night just getting everything set up, reading guides, and installing addons before I actually started playing. But even when I was ready for some adventuring, Final Fantasy 11 likes to start slow. A beginner’s guide I found first had me tour around the major districts of Windhurst clicking on teleportation points and joining various crafting guilds for an initial boost of experience points and currency that I could use to buy some decent armour.

Everything in Final Fantasy 11 takes an enormous amount of time, but that’s actually something I like about it. Modern MMOs are too eager to please, too afraid you might play something else so they try to make everything as frictionless as possible. But Final Fantasy 11 doesn’t give a damn. It’ll make you spend two minutes walking back and forth between a pair of quest givers half a dozen times. It’ll make every interaction, like simply trading items with another player, require twice as many button presses than is reasonable. It’s almost cruel.

But I also know that this was an enormously complicated game that Square Enix admirably tried to make playable with just a controller, so I’m willing to forgive it. And it’s not like Final Fantasy 11 doesn’t have its charms either. Beneath that thick crust of absolute bullshit is a genuinely innovative MMO. And when I finally got out into the field and started killing monsters, I began feeling that familiar pull. That feeling of being sucked into the world and excited by its mysteries.

The job system, for example, remains one of Final Fantasy 11’s greatest triumphs. Instead of needing to make a new character for each job (the equivalent of a class), I can just switch on the fly and level a different job instead. Final Fantasy 14 iterated on the idea, but Final Fantasy 11’s execution of it is still unrivalled. There’s 22 jobs to unlock and level, each one offering a distinct playstyle. And after reaching a certain level you can take on a secondary job, giving you access to even more abilities to augment your primary ones. It’s MMO theory-crafting at its finest.

At a crossroads

In the few hours I spent exploring Vana’diel, I started to feel myself acclimate to the slower pace. The lack of modern conveniences, like fast travel, and the awful control scheme are jarring at first. But there is a distinct appeal to playing a game that forces me to adapt to it instead of the other way around.

It’s like selling all your belongings and living out in the woods, off the grid. At first the change seems hellish, but then you start to settle in and appreciate the little things—the catchy music, the subtle rhythm of combat, the rush of levelling up.

The only thing that’s missing is other people. Though much of Final Fantasy 11 remains unchanged, one major new feature is that players can now summon their own party of NPCs to help them in combat. Unlike other MMOs, Final Fantasy 11 was designed so combat almost always required a party of players.

It’s one of the reasons Final Fantasy 11 was such a social experience. But as its popularity has waned and almost everyone has moved on, Square Enix has had to make concessions to give newcomers like me a chance.

Each level used to be a hard-fought achievement, but now I can just summon my party of NPCs and quickly grind through a dozen levels in a few hours. Alone.

Though I understand why it had to happen, it’s a reality that makes me uncomfortable. So much of what I loved about Final Fantasy 11 was the social dynamics, but now the only evidence I have that I’m not alone is the constant barrage of messages from people trying to sell items.

I’m not sure whether I’ll continue playing. A part of me is already invested in the journey to reach max level for the first time and do things that childhood me only dreamed of. But if those achievements are earned alone—if I’m the only one fighting and celebrating—is it worth it?

I was never able to get a feel for Funselektor's top-down driving game Art of Rally, or its predecessor Absolute Drift: I like rally in real life, but sliding cars around corners at screaming speeds from a weird perspective and with no tactile feedback just didn't work for me. I had higher hopes for the slower pace of the studio's upcoming Over the Hill, and after trying the demo that dropped today with the start of the Steam Next Fest, I am very happy to say that yeah, this is the one.

Over the Hill is a very stylized take on off-roading: You're not going to find high-fidelity mud here, or detailed first-person views from behind the wheel. It's really more about the broader experience of being 'out there,' going slow, taking your time, and thinking about how you're going to get where you want rather than just hammering on it. You can hammer on it if you want, and it'll carry you for a while, and also likely put you over onto your roof when you're not expecting it.

The game world itself is very much like that too: Not realistic, but evocative in a way that I think makes it more powerful—a bit like Firewatch in that regard, and in visual style too, at least for this demo. This playable portion is set in a beefy chunk of Canadian wilderness, and while Funselektor emphasized that it's still "a work in progress," there's a lot to see and do.

Trails of different types lead to points of interest where you'll find customization items and in-game currency, there are cabins that serve as save points, "challenge trails" wait to test your patience and precision, and scenic lookouts provide an opportunity to just kick back and enjoy the view, and play with the game's photo mode if that's your thing.

You can (and surely will) also leave the trailers completely and just go bombing around wherever you want, within the limits of your vehicle's capabilities, which—as an entry-level machine—are pretty limited indeed. But that's also how you find the interesting stuff: The map will guide you to nearby POIs, but it can be a lot more fun to just get out there and see what comes up.

It's probably wise to play it a little safe until you've got some of those cabins unlocked, though. The first time I fired up Over the Hill I found and immediately embarked on a challenge trail that led me across some rocks to a gorgeous waterfall, and I was this close to completing it when I misread the trail, ended up in the water, and drowned my engine. The only checkpoint I had at that stage was the one at the very beginning, so—right back to the start I went.

See that very narrow rock trail in front of the falls? Good luck.

But even those long slogs can be almost hypnotic. During another session I came across a vehicle stranded in a bog, and spent more than 30 minutes trying to pull it out. I came so close, so many times, and I kept telling myself one more shot from this angle and I'm done, and then I kept trying—until, well, I got a little rammy, ended up in the nearby lake, drowned my engine, and whoops. Now we're both stuck.

(I later found a trail that led me to the stuck vehicle from the other side of the bog, and pulled it out with relative ease. Live and learn.)

It wasn't all misfortune and failure. A drive up to a distant fire tower left me hung up on a boulder: After a few minutes of gunning the engine and reefing the wheel I was ready to reset, but decided it was time to finally take a dig through Over the Hill's toolbox. Turned out there was a portable winching point in there, similar to a piton but big enough to yoink a car around. I was able to pull off the boulder, and after a few more stressful moments but no full-on catastrophes, I made it to the top. (And then forgot to take a picture. Isn't that always the way?)

This one, well, I did not get out of. But I also have to admit that trying to drive out to the end of a very narrow, rickety dock was probably not my best idea.

Over the Hill has a day-night cycle that works really well. The game world becomes a very different kind of beautiful over long distances, but this isn't one of those pretend-nights in videogames where the skybox is dark but you can still see: You're gonna need your headlights if you want to keep driving.

One thing I realized after playing Over the Hill for a good while is that I'd put my truck into low gear range—slow, but better for climbing rocks and powering through muck—and then just left it there. Yes, it was taking me longer than necessary to traverse the game's safer areas, but I hadn't noticed because slow and meditative is what Over the Hill is all about. Even after I clocked that I was basically crawling when I could've been cruising, I left it alone—apart from being a more relaxing way to travel, running in low gear had the added practical benefit of keeping me from high-speed bouncing my dumb self into roadside trees and rocks.

Along with singleplayer exploration, Over the Hill supports multiplayer for up to four drivers at once. I took it for a very brief spin, mostly just so I could say that I did, and it's very easy to set up and connect with other players. As for the actual exploration, I didn't do extensive testing but it looks more or less identical to singleplayer, except you've got other people around—handy if you need to be hauled out of some self-inflicted trouble.

How the full game holds up is an open question, but the demo sets a great tone. (Speaking of which, Over the Hill's music is excellent too: Not as deep a soundtrack as that other great fantasy driving sim, Pacific Drive, but a soothing, gentle backdrop to the demo's quiet isolation.) A lot of driving games, like the upcoming Clutch, like to churn excitement about "the connection between car and driver, and the raw thrill of speed," but for my money Over the Hill lands closer to real love of the wheel: Funselektor understands it in a way that an awful lot of studios miss.

The Over the Hill demo is live now and will remain up until the end of the Steam Next Fest on June 22. A release date hasn't been announced but it's expected to be out later this year.

If you're looking for an ergonomic PC mouse, you're probably already considering the Logitech MX Master 3S, or the Logitech MX Master 4. I've used both as my main productivity meeces for extended periods of time, and can tell you that either make for excellent picks. But, if they're a little pricey for your liking, ProtoArc has made an ergo mouse with many similar design features for much, much less.

The result is the ProtoArc EM25, a wireless ergonomic mouse that knows what it's about. Right from the off, it screams "budget MX Master" from the nearest rooftop. It's got a similar chassis shape, an extended thumb rest, two scroll wheels (one with a clutch, no less), quiet main switches—the whole kit and kaboodle. The problem is, at every turn, this mouse reminds you of why the Logi mice are brilliant, and why this one doesn't meet the mark.

It's got all the right features on paper, but most of them prove to be a disappointment in practice. It's also got some odd material choices, some strange-feeling mechanisms, and an overall lack of refinement. Dancing around this mouse's various controls over the past few weeks has caused me to pull a vast array of facial expressions, and none of them have been a smile. Almost every control here feels slightly wrong, in a plethora of different ways.

There's a certain solidity to the chassis design that makes the EM25 verge towards consideration—especially given its very reasonable $50/£29 price tag. However, unless you're absolutely desperate for an MX Master-a-like for less, I can think of lots of less-ergo, but much better standard mice for your money.

Features

3.5

Ergonomics

1

Performance

2.5

Aesthetics

4

Software

2

Value

2

Group 1 Data

Product	Features ()	Ergonomics ()	Performance ()	Aesthetics ()	Software ()	Value ()
ProtoArc EM25 gaming mouse	3.5	1	2.5	4	2	2

We scored the ProtoArc EM25 out of five in six distinct categories.

ProtoArc EM25 features

The ProtoArc EM25 is an ergonomically-shaped mouse with a clutch-controlled main scroll wheel, a horizontal side scroll wheel, and an enlarged thumbrest on the left hand side, à la the Logitech MX Master 3S/4. It's also got twin forward and back buttons, and a small button mounted on the front left corner for switching between its Bluetooth and regular 2.4 GHz connections, the latter of which makes use of a small (some would say, nano-sized) dongle.

Said dongle can be retrieved from the bottom of the mouse via a magnetically-sealed hatch compartment, which is a nice touch. The polling rate is switchable, topping out at 1,000 Hz.

The sensor is an 8000 DPI max optical unit, while the battery is a 500 mAh internal rechargeable model. ProtoArc doesn't list the battery life in among the specs, but I've only had to charge my review sample once (straight from the box) over several weeks of on and off testing.

Software comes in the form of a web app rather than an installed application, which I'll be going into a bit later. And, again like the MX Master 3S and 4S, it's got quiet click switches underneath the main left and right buttons, for your serene, productivity-clicking needs.

The weight isn't listed on the product page, but some searching around suggests it's about 90 grams. What I will say is that the EM25 is light enough to give my scales trouble measuring it, and it feels significantly less porky than the 150g MX Master 4.

Still, it's definitely built for productivity purposes—those looking for something fast and genuinely light would be better off elsewhere.

Plenty of control options

Features

3.5

Plenty of control options Data

Product	Value
Features	3.5

ProtoArc EM25 ergonomics

Testing out all of the buttons, wheels, and ergonomic features of the ProtoArc EM25 is something of an adventure, and that's because almost all of them, in some form or fashion, feel a bit… wrong. I'm going to need to go through them individually here, because each is worthy of note.

Let's start off with the good. The two main switches underneath the left and right buttons feel very positive. They're quiet, too, while still providing plenty of clicky feedback. You can tell most of the money went into these two switch units, and that's a sensible place to put it. They're the ones you'll be interacting with most, after all.

Then there are the traditional forward and back thumb buttons on the left hand side. These are hollow-feeling, bendy, and springy in all the wrong ways. Still, there's a positive click underneath them, and I'm sure you'd stop noticing their drawbacks over time.

My true ire, however, begins with the big orange clutch button behind the main scrollwheel. It's got an astonishingly long travel, a surprising amount of springy resistance, and seems to engage and disengage the scrollwheel clutch at differing points, somewhere along the way.

There's a physical mechanism working behind the scenes to switch the scroll wheel from free scroll into a more clicky affair, unlike Logitech's magnetic solution, and the difference is pretty stark. Which brings me on to the main wheel itself.

In free scroll mode, it feels disconcertingly light. So much so that it can be quite difficult to control, and the wheel moves from side-to-side in its housing more than I'd like. In ratcheted mode, it feels slightly graunchy and overly-loud, although fairly positive. The middle click, though, takes far too much force to activate, and results in the wheel inadvertently moving as you press down on it.

Despite all this, my biggest critique has to be left for the skates on the underside. They look acceptable in person, and feel fine when you run a finger over them. But, no matter the mouse pad, it feels like there's a raised edge somewhere that should have been sanded down.

I can actually hear (and feel) this mouse scraping against my smooth Corsair pad as I move. I'll be honest, that's a new one on me. And I've tested lots and lots of budget mice over the years. Unmute the video below and turn your sound up for an example:

Shape-wise? It's actually quite nice to palm, and perfectly fine for fingertip usage, too. I'm not convinced by the satin-style finish, though, which is a bit tacky. And by that, I mean literally. Tacky, as in it tacks against your skin. Eesh.

Oh, and there's a side scroll wheel as well, which is somehow totally different-feeling and yet similar to the main scroll wheel itself. It's… fine. A little loose, a little hollow-feeling, a little tinny. But fine. Mercy me.

The main switches are fine, but as for the rest? Nope.

Ergonomics

1

The main switches are fine, but as for the rest? Nope. Data

Product	Value
Ergonomics	1

ProtoArc EM25 performance

At no point does ProtoArc advertise the EM25 as a gaming mouse, and given its specs, I don't think many will be buying it for such a purpose.

However, I game with the Logitech MX Master 4 all the time, as it's perfectly reasonable to use for several thousand turns of Civ 7, or a slower-paced, singleplayer shooter. So, I thought I'd try out the EM25 for the same purpose. And you know what? It's also fine.

However, the MouseTester charts above show some odd inconsistencies in the polling rate, although I can't say I noticed the mouse feeling particularly laggy or inconsistent in practice. It's not super-accurate or particularly fast to respond, but it's decent enough to get by. Can you do some light gaming with an EM25? Yes. Should you? Probably not.

For day to day usage, the sensor feels smooth and reasonably accurate, and I've had no dropout issues with either the 2.4 GHz or the Bluetooth connection. In terms of the internal, movement-tracking components, this mouse delivers acceptable performance for a pure productivity squeaker. In terms of the experience of actually using it, see all the ergonomic issues above.

Acceptable, for an ergo mouse

Performance

2.5

Acceptable, for an ergo mouse Data

Product	Value
Performance	2.5

ProtoArc EM25 aesthetics

Despite the drawbacks of the satin finish in terms of hand-feel, the coating actually looks pretty great in photos, and in person, too. I also like how the EM25 is highly reminiscent of Logitech's offerings, while having a neater, tidier design of its own.

The orange button sticking out of the top also adds a nice splash of colour to the black-and-chrome aesthetic. It's a mouse that looks good on your desk, that's for sure. I just wish it felt anywhere near as good when I put my hands on it.

Quite the looker, it must be said

Aesthetics

4

Quite the looker, it must be said Data

Product	Value
Aesthetics	4

ProtoArc EM25 software

Your software options here are webpage-based, which, on my Chrome browser, renders all the text in a Times New Roman font. I know that's a small thing to point out, but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the design. However, there are plenty of options to reassign button functions, create macros, and tweak the general settings of the mouse. By default, the EM25 sets itself to a 250 Hz polling rate, but it can be upped to the full 1,000 Hz here.

Despite the functionality, the interface really does feel basic, with some confusingly-labelled features. An "Advanced Controls" tab allows you to switch on "maximum sensor performance" for limited amounts of time, from 10 seconds to half an hour.

It "runs the sensor at peak performance with high LED brightness" says the menu page, although with a warning of increased power consumption. Fair enough. I've left it off for my testing, as you can only enable it for a 30 minute maximum, and in my opinion, you're bound to forget the option exists. You can also adjust the click debounce time, or activate an Extended Range Mode which supposedly boosts the range from 8-10 meters to 10-12, again, diminishing battery life.

I tested it, and I couldn't tell the difference in terms of using the mouse from different ranges. Still, it manages to transmit successfully over the whole distance of my large front room with the setting turned off, so hooray for a bit of extra juice.

Barebones, and full of head-scratching moments

Software

2

Barebones, and full of head-scratching moments Data

Product	Value
Software	2

ProtoArc EM25 value

I really want to like the ProtoArc EM25, honestly I do. I've used lots of 'Amazon special' gaming mice and ergo mice over the years, particularly as I enjoy a quiet mouse for sociable gaming, and there aren't too many big brand options.

You know all those $20-$30 "silent mouse" options in the listings from manufacturers you've never heard of? I've tried a lot of them. My drawers are absolutely full of the not-so-squeaky squeakers, alongside the many high-end, mid-range, and budget gaming mice I've tested at PC Gamer.

Honestly? I'd take almost any of them over the EM25. It might be cheap, but it really hasn't made me cheerful. And while I appreciate the effort that's been taken to make an MX Master competitor for a more reasonable price point, the end result is something I've found very disappointing.

It's got the MX Master's rough shape and feature set—but in terms of value, I really think you'd be better off looking elsewhere. The sensor is fine, the main button switches are decent, and it looks good on your desk. But I could say the same of many other ultra-budget mice that are even cheaper than this one.

The question I'd be asking myself, if I was considering one of these, is whether I really need those trick scroll wheels in combination with the quiet switches and an ergo shape. If yes, then it's the Logitech MX Master offerings for you.

If you just need a cheap, comfortable-yet-not-ergo mouse, though, how about the Mchose G3 V2? Or this Inphic cheapo-beepo unit I've been messing around with recently. It's $20, it's got a thumb rest, quiet switches, and a single scroll wheel that's perfectly acceptable. Or, if you've decided to save some more pennies and want an ergo mouse that's a bit different (yet still cheaper than the Masters), what about the weird and wonderful Keychron M5?

Overall, it's very difficult to recommend the ProtoArc EM25, unless you must have an MX Master-alike for around $50. Even then, I'd say saving your cash for the real thing is a much better bet.

Cheap, but that only counts for so much

Value

2

Cheap, but that only counts for so much Data

Product	Value
Value	2

Even though many components inside our gaming PCs are exceptionally expensive, enthusiasts are still happy to buy them, partly because they know every item is backed by a warranty. However, that assumes a company is willing to honour that warranty in the first place, and in one such case concerning a Samsung SSD, the responses to the claim have been so negative that it's resulting in a lawsuit.

The SSD in question is a 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro, a somewhat pricey but otherwise pretty decent Gen4 solid state drive. But as explained by Louis Rosmann, the famous tech YouTuber, repair shop owner, and consumer rights advocate, they can fail, just as any mass-manufactured PC component can.

In his YouTube video on the matter, he describes how he bought the 990 Pro drive roughly a year ago from Best Buy, but that it stopped responding to commands in his RAID-1 array. But since it was still within warranty, he contacted Samsung to RMA it, though his internal alarm bell was already clanging over the fact that this model has practically quadrupled in price since he bought it.

Although his initial inquiry started well, the first hiccup was that Rosmann was unaware that he had contacted Samsung Canada B2B support desk, rather than the USA one (he's based in Austin, Texas, for context). He duly compiled, providing all the necessary information again, apart from one seemingly innocuous piece of data: a photo of the 990 Pro. As he was at work at the time, and the Samsung SSD was still in his computer back home, he couldn't immediately give them what they wanted.

The very next day, Rossmann received an email from Samsung saying that it had closed the support ticket because he hadn't sent over a photo within 24 hours (even though it wasn't actually 24 hours later). Do note that Rossmann openly displays all this correspondence in the video.

Eventually, this all gets sorted, and Samsung contacts Rossmann with details on how to return the drive and so on. That all goes smoothly until a repair statement is sent back to him, stating that "based on the test results, the returned drive was verified as good." The consumer rights activist then queried this, but heard nothing back. Instead, Samsung just returned the drive to him.

In the video, Rossmann then demonstrates the drive in action, showing inconsistent write speeds of 20 to 160 MB/s. That would be slow for an old SATA HDD, let alone a 6,900 MB/s PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. To even the untrained eye, that drive is goosed, and Rossmann's eyes are highly trained, as he runs a data recovery service in his repair shop.

Naturally, he fires off… how shall I put it?...a somewhat stern but clearly worded email about everything that has transpired, the issue at hand, and consumer rights that protect his warranty claim. Samsung's response to this ("we apologize for the inconvenience or any confusion you may have experienced") only riles him further.

But then the real kicker drops at the end of the response: "As you may already be aware, there is a very big shortage of memory products across the market. Due to this issue, the warranty service does not currently have your model of SSD in stock for replacement or a comparable model for upgrade."

Rossmann then points out that Samsung's store on Amazon has plenty of 4 TB 990 Pros in stock for $949, and argues that stock levels aren't a problem at all. Anyway, he eventually decides that this whole thing is so ridiculous that the only solution for him is to file a small claims lawsuit. "I look forward to costing you more money in legal fees than what you would have paid to simply replace my drive," he says to the camera.

I suspect that when it comes to DRAM and SSDs, this kind of situation isn't especially rare, and Rossmann describes the "wrong thing to do" that many PC users would actually carry out, to get a working replacement: Buy a new $949 Samsung 990 Pro, stick his broken SSD in the box, and then file a chargeback based on receiving 'faulty goods'.

As someone with a whole host of large and currently hugely expensive SSDs in my primary PC, I'm dreading the day when one or more of them decide to fail, whether it's in or out of the warranty period. Because either way, it looks like I'm going to be faced with a large bill to get the solution I want.

But if the likes of Rossmann are willing to keep fighting for our consumer rights this way, then perhaps I'll get lucky and only have to sell one of my kidneys on the black market, instead of both of them (plus my one decently working lung).

It's a bittersweet time for any Destiny fan, as Destiny 2 is now in stasis after its final update. Hell, even This Week In Destiny, my weekly ritual for over a decade now, is coming to an end. All good things must finish, I guess.

Many have placed blame on Sony for pulling the plug on Bungie's genre-defining looter shooter following its $3.6 billion acquisition of the studio in 2022. Also controversial is its decision to back Marathon in its place. One former employee has pushed back on the notion that Sony is the only culprit, however.

"This fight was pre-Sony," said ex-community manager Liana Ruppert on social media. "Bungie was below the red line before the Sony acquisition. If it wasn’t acquired right then, the studio was very close to shutting its doors at the very least on Destiny. It was an emergency acquisition."

Even from the outside, it was clear that Bungie was in a pickle long before it was acquired by Sony. The acclaimed studio had split from Activision in 2019 to self-publish the MMO-lite. With shakeups to content delivery, microtransactions, and pricing over the years, and a declining playerbase, alongside layoffs at the studio, it wasn't too surprising to see the company hunting for a new partner to keep the ship afloat.

And that's apparently how we ended up with Sony ponying up $3.6 billion to make Bungie its own, a deal that hasn't necessarily worked out for the best. Just last month, Sony recorded a $766 million impairment loss against Bungie for the 2025 financial year, a painful one-two punch of Destiny 2 and Marathon failing to meet its expectations. Despite the acquisition, the numbers still aren't adding up.

On the bright side, Destiny 2's final update has bolstered its player count for the time being, and a fan petition asking Sony to greenlight Destiny 3 is taking off—even though it's screaming into the void. Maybe it's not too late for the 'Destiny Infinity' idea that was pitched to save the series.

If you were to make a list of every concept you associate with Steam—even if you had hours, days, weeks to come up with it—chances are 'high prices' wouldn't make a showing. Quite the opposite: if you're anything like me, you associate Steam with swingeing sales that let you pick up vast troves of games (that you never play) for pennies.

But high prices are nevertheless at the centre of a new campaign by the Netherlands' Consumer Competition Claims Foundation, a Dutch non-profit organisation that says its aim is to "protect consumers against unfair commercial practices, including breaches of competition law, breaches of consumer law and other unlawful conduct."

The CCCF is inviting Dutch signups to "Game Claim", its campaign against Valve that aims first to "sit down with Valve" and then, when that inevitably yields nothing (my editorialising, not theirs), to take the whole damn company to court. Valve, claims the non-profit, is artificially inflating game prices across all PC storefronts with its 30% commission on Steam sales (for the sake of accuracy, it's actually a little more granular: Valve's cut drops to 25% after a game's first $10 million in revenue and 20% after $50 million, which is still a lot!)

"Valve prohibits publishers and developers from offering their games more cheaply on other PC gaming platforms," writes the CCCF, "such as the Epic Games Store, the Microsoft Store and Ubisoft Connect. It does this through a mix of contractual terms and by pressuring publishers and developers."

The org says that publishers jack up prices to make up for Valve's 30% cut on Steam, then have to use those inflated prices everywhere—even places like the Epic Games Store, which only takes a 12% cut—in order to remain on the platform, which they more-or-less have to do because of Steam's massive market share in the PC gaming space.

For its part, Valve—and Valve president Gabe Newell—denies that Steam sellers are subject to an unwritten rule about not selling their games cheaper on other storefronts, though there are various devs and publishers who have claimed otherwise. Newell himself was shown evidence of Valve employees enforcing such a rule in court in 2023, as part of an ongoing antitrust case, but continued to deny it: "Valve does not have a policy or practice of dictating prices to third-party software developers on other platforms."

The CCCF thinks that's bunkem, and it has other grievances with Steam's manner of conducting business, too. "Valve agreed with various publishers that Steam Keys bought in Eastern Europe couldn't be activated in Western Europe," says the org, in order "to keep lower-priced Eastern European games off the Western European market. This is called 'geo-blocking', and it's illegal." Indeed, as the CCCF also notes, the European Commission fined Valve for doing just that a few years ago.

Even microtransactions don't get away: "once you've bought a game on Steam, in-game microtransactions such as skins, loot boxes, in-game currency and season passes can only be bought on Steam through the Steam Wallet. Valve again charges a commission of typically 30%, for processing those payments. If Valve allowed competition from other payment processors, that fee would be far lower."

The CCCF has already invited Valve for an out-of-court tete-a-tete, but going into court feels all-but inevitable. If it wins the case, a point which is years out right now, Dutch gamers who signed up to the claim will get some form of financial reward. "The Consumer Competition Claims Foundation has brought in the economic consultants at Copenhagen Economics to work out the damage. Their early estimate is that Dutch gamers have overpaid by more than 220 million euros. With interest, that comes down to more than 130 euros per gamer, and a good deal more for avid gamers."

There are quite a few legal knives out for Valve and Steam. There's this case, the aforementioned antitrust suit filed by Wolfire Games, and a class-action lawsuit over lootboxes, and—this is probably the biggest deal for the company—a lawsuit from the state of New York suing Valve for 'letting children and adults illegally gamble' with loot boxes.

We are still gluttons for punishment, it seems. A mere week after the launch of Gothic Remake, the RPG has already hit the 500k sales milestone, and Steam user reviews make it clear that we still love some eurojank.

Gothic is currently sitting at a Very Positive rating from 3,369 user reviews. Which is surprising! Not because Gothic isn't good—I'm quite a bit more fond of it than Jody, who gave it 60% in our Gothic Remake review—but I did expect it to be a little more divisive.

Despite its modern makeover, this is still classic Gothic. Wolves will murder you in two seconds, you'll be knocked out and mugged for being sarcastic, you don't get a map unless you purchase one—and it ain't cheap or very good—and there are a lot of quests that make hardly any sense without a guide.

But that's also part of the appeal. It's tough and uncompromising and, yes, pretty janky. While trying to rob people blind, I discovered that loading a save wakes sleeping NPCs up. They were not happy to see me snooping around. Then there are the NPCs who vanish, as well as the terrible DLSS and frame generation implementation.

It looks like most people knew what they were in for, though, and don't mind the incredibly rough edges. And I'm right there with them. Gothic has annoyed me a lot, but I would much rather have a slightly messy RPG that still takes massive swings than something with absolutely no friction.

In 2001, Gothic really epitomised what made PC gaming special. Console gamers expected more polish, but we wanted the weird shit, even if it meant bugs and crashes galore. I don't think much has changed. Sure, beloved eurojank games like Gothic and Stalker can now be enjoyed on consoles, but these are still PC games through and through.

Mind you, I wouldn't say no to some fixes and improvements. So it's a good thing that developer Alkimia Interactive isn't done mucking around with it. Patches are coming, it says, and it might even tweak the terrible lockpicking system.

Destiny 2's Monuments of Triumph is here, the final update for the game and potentially the last Destiny anything. Even This Week In Destiny, my weekly ritual for over a decade now, is coming to an end. To that end, Bungie has crammed in as much of a conclusion as possible, given we're actually at the start of a brand-new saga.

After the conclusion of the decade-long Light and Darkness saga in The Final Shape, Bungie kicked off the Fate saga, beginning with The Edge of Fate. It's all about the mysterious god-like entities affiliated with the planets of the Sol system who have been pulling the strings this entire time. They control time, setting up key events like dominoes.

Say what you will about The Edge of Fate, but its story was the most fascinating aspect. New character Lodi (one of the best in the series, no less), a pre-Golden Age guy working at Destiny's version of the Federal Bureau of Control, was ripped out of the space age and brought to space in the far future. Turns out he was a co-worker of Ikora's, though Guardians don't tend to remember their past.

Unfortunately, this promising new saga was cut short, ending just as it was ramping up. And the new secret cutscenes in Monuments of Triumph are a bittersweet teaser of what was to come, and an obituary for a universe we might never get to explore again.

There's a bunch of great dialogue and story developments between its new quests, but I want to focus on its two vital hidden cutscenes. Obviously, spoilers ahead for 'the end of Destiny', so to speak.

Me and you, Big Blue

The first cutscene sees our commander-in-chief for a decade reflecting on the journey and the weight he's had to carry. It tugs at the heartstrings of any long-time Destiny fan, not least because of the passing of his previous voice actor, Lance Reddick. Rightfully, Zavala's ready to hang up the hat, with no Ghost and only one life left. Zavala's story fittingly ends with him retiring and passing the baton to Ikora, the last vanguard of the old Vanguard.

And then your Ghost drops one of the most on-the-nose, poignant lines: "Nothing ever stays the same, does it? What do you think is in our future?" You know what, Ghost? I don't know, but I hope it's a continuation of this world.

What's most impressive about this cutscene is the directing, which is a shocking step up from just about anything we've seen in the series. I adore the transition between scenes using Zavala's shoulder pad.

Cinematic director John Ebenger explained that the team "pulled out some new tricks for the transitions between in-engine and pre-rendered and tried to put in the work to make this one special in a short time frame."

A meeting in the Dark Forest

This cutscene is the most important one for the future of the saga, and the one that hurts the most. Lodi's in the Dark Forest, possessed and contorted by an unknown being and speaking cryptic gibberish. He speaks of "A showdown at the end of time, between champions of Dark and Light," and that's why the egotistical Nine have been courting us this whole time.

This entity is presumably the Winnower, an extradimensional god, lover of the 'flower game', and the Darkness equivalent of the Traveler so to speak, directly interacting with us for the first time. And it's told you to take a breather and enjoy some slaughter for the time being. In other words, the story ends here, but with just enough of a thread to pick back up on should Bungie ever get the opportunity.

That's one hell of a cliffhanger, and only makes the realisation that a showdown with the Winnower is unlikely feel like a punch to the face.

I suppose that was the plan with this update, really? Pull out all the stops, set up a new story in the most intriguing way possible, but also try to tie as neat a bow as possible just in case. You win, Bungie. I'm sad, I'm angry, and now I want Destiny 3 even more.

Two months ago, Asus announced the ROG Equalizer, a power cable for certain Nvidia RTX graphics cards designed to banish the fear of melting connectors once and for all. Well, perhaps not completely so, because it seems we now have the first case of a melted ROG Equalizer cable.

As posted on ChipHell and reported by Uniko's Hardware on X (via Videocardz), there's admittedly very little information to go on, other than a crystal-clear picture of a seriously fried connector at the end of an Asus ROG Equalizer cable. Three of the six power pins look properly scorched, with one showing a considerable degree of melting in the plastic housing.

However, there's no indication as to what PSU and graphics card this cable was plugged into, nor the circumstances as to how the melty-melty all came about, so the one thing we can't do right now is point our fingers at Asus and go 'Ha! Your cable is rubbish!' Well, we can, but we just can't use this solitary picture as evidence for such a judgment.

If you're unaware of what all the hoohar is about Nvidia's 12VHPWR (and the subsequent 12V-2x6 design update) connector, let me give you a quick explainer. In order to have its graphics card use gopping great globs of power but also not require lots of big connectors on the card's PCB, Nvidia designed a compact system to be used instead of the traditional 8-pin PCIe system.

A precursor to 12VHPWR first appeared on certain RTX 30-series cards, such as the RTX 3090 Ti and 3060 Ti Founders Editions. This design just comprised twelve power pins (six +12V, six ground), but the iteration of the design that was approved by PCI-SIG and adopted into the PCIe specifications also housed four more pins for sensing.

That format first showed up on Nvidia's RTX 40-series, and almost immediately, reports of melting connectors appeared from owners of GeForce RTX 4090 cards. So much so that it resulted in a class action lawsuit against Nvidia being filed in 2022.

The problem is quite simple. A full load, an RTX 4090 can use up to 450 W of power, but distributed across six pins, each one only has to deal with 6.25 A of current. However, should one pin fail in some way, or the graphics card draw more current in one or two pins than the others, the resulting load imbalance can push the current over the 12VHPWR's design rating of 8.33 A per pin.

Fast forward to today, and we now have a power supply market replete with all kinds of 'solutions' to the connector melting problem. Even the minor redesign, called 12V-2x6, did little to prevent the problem from occurring. Der8auer's detailed analysis of the Asus ROG Equalizer cable shows that while it's a decent enough product, it doesn't really offer much in the way of protection against the problem.

With RTX 5090 graphics cards now costing more than $4,000 in the US, you'd think there would be a far more concerted effort to banish meltygate once and for all. Part of the reason as to why we haven't seen a permanent solution yet is that the fact not every 4090 or 5090 owner has suffered from a melting connector.

The exact number of casualties is probably impossible to determine, but since graphics card vendors, as well as Nvidia, put money aside each year to cover warranty claims, the only way that they would really sit up and pay attention is if the total cost of all the replacements for damaged cards consistently exceeded the pot of money for claims.

We probably can't rely on hardware vendors coming up with a permanent solution, either. It's unlikely that Nvidia will abandon 12V-2x6 in favour of a completely new design, and having active load balancing on graphics cards will eat into a vendor's profit margins (though they're hardly small sums of money when it comes to the RTX 5090).

This particular instance of a melted ROG Equalizer cable could be entirely user error or even a clickbait thing, just to get a bit of attention, but since Asus' design has no means to actively prevent one pin from supplying too much current, this will almost certainly not be the only case we'll see, genuine or otherwise.

If you do have a very high-power RTX card with a 12VHPWR/12V-2x6 connector, here's my advice for keeping it as melt-free as possible:

1. Try to use a PSU that has a native 12VHPWR socket and cable: this won't guarantee perfect safety, but it removes the multiple points of failure you can get with adapter cables.
2. Don't keep removing the cable to check that it's okay: Power cables aren't designed to be repeatedly unplugged and jammed back in, and doing so can weaken the connections, leading to smaller contact patches and thus higher temperatures.
3. Explore undervolting your graphics card: You can just drop the maximum power limit for your RTX GPU in the Nvidia app, but you're better off following a detailed guide on how to lower your GPU's voltage across its range of clock speeds. If it all works as intended, you should get a graphics card that not only uses less power but is also cooler and, in some cases, able to clock higher.

Until we have graphics cards and/or power supply units that actively monitor the current draw on each pin, and dynamically prevent it from exceeding a set limit as standard, the melting connectors are still going to be a thing that will hit the headlines from time to time. Just like this one.

ChatGPT developer OpenAI has published a new security report alleging that, in essence, its own tools are being deployed against it. The company's June 2026 threat report is titled "PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the US," and claims that China-based actors are using ChatGPT to whip up anti-data-centre, anti-tariff, and anti-US sentiment online.

OpenAI says it has "banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that likely originated in China and used ChatGPT to generate social media content for a covert influence operation." What were they up to? Well, generating a lot of bad AI political cartoons, for one thing.

These users would—writing in simplified Chinese, the standard form of the written language in mainland China—ask ChatGPT to generate political cartoons that took aim at, for instance, spiking electricity costs caused by AI data centres and Donald Trump's vindictive behaviour toward notional American allies.

The tech was also used to generate antisemitic memes about "Jewish capital" dictating American policy, and to besmirch Chinese dissidents. The relevant prompts "repeatedly used terminology consistent with individuals associated with China’s public security system," says OpenAI.

Cartoons, short phrases and rumours of an OpenAI data leak that never happened were then shared on social media like X and Facebook by networks of fake accounts.

"It is ironic," says OpenAI, that the scheme "used American AI, rather than Chinese models, to generate their content about American AI. We are not in a position to determine what drove this choice".

Now, before we get too ahead of ourselves, OpenAI is not actually claiming that the reason people don't like data centres is because they've fallen prey to Chinese influence operations. Indeed, the report states and restates that the efforts it claims to have uncovered achieved, well, basically nothing.

"Using the Breakout Scale, we assess this activity as Category One: activity spanning one platform, with no evidence of breakout," writes OpenAI in its impact summary. OpenAI also admits that, well, a great deal of the material these efforts drew on was entirely legitimate reporting about the impact of data centres and the blowback from US tariffs.

Which does raise the question: does any of this really matter? OpenAI certainly thinks it does. These attacks "attempted to connect US technology policies and industries to everyday economic anxieties and geopolitical instability," says the company, and show the potential for "influence operations originating from China" to be "inserted into legitimate public debates while nudging audiences toward distrust of US institutions, technology companies and democratic policy choices to help Beijing gain a strategic advantage in AI development".

One might question whether American citizens protesting against data centre construction in their neighbourhoods feel that they were adequately democratically consulted on the whole thing, but that's OpenAI's line and it's sticking to it.

It's also the case that, while OpenAI's report might say the impact of these campaigns was negligible, that's not what everyone says. Pro-data-centre politicians in the US are already seizing on a narrative that anti-AI sentiment is being driven by shadowy foreign interference, and reports like this one—regardless of their actual conclusions—will fuel that story.

In a comment to Reuters, the Chinese Embassy in Washington said that it had not read OpenAI's report, but that "we firmly ​oppose any groundless attacks or smears against China." China, said the diplomats, wants to "ensure AI is a force for good and for all".

Havn didn't do much wrong with the HS 420. It's easy to build into and looks great once the build's done. But it is absolutely huge and heavy. So, at Computex 2026, Havn had an answer for that.

It's called the HS 360 and it is very similar to the HS 420, only smaller. Specifically, it's 19.4% smaller and 29.5% lighter, the company says.

I'm told the panoramic glass, which wraps around the front to the side of the case, required a slight reduction in thickness and a tighter bend radius to match the newly shrunken chassis and cut down on weight.

"I think we could probably claim that it's the tightest bend on any glass panel," Havn's Steven Levitt tells me.

One new feature on the HS 360 is the inclusion of a magnetic glass divider, which sits above a graphics card using the vertical GPU mount. The idea is that cold air coming through the bottom of the case—the case uses a chimney layout with cool air coming up through the bottom—a lot of it was escaping right out the top along the front third of the case. By adding in something to block the air, counter-intuitively, I'm told temperatures are reduced by three degrees.

There are a couple of minor improvements to how fans are mounted in the case, too. People who have used the HS 420 will know what I'm on about, but the fans need to be installed from inside the case, which is a pain once components are installed. The HS 360 has brackets that let them be installed in the rear, and the lower three fans can also be lifted out from both sides for easier access.

The HS 360 also has a really smart solution for back-connect motherboards—those with all the connectors on the rear for a smarter appearance. The tray to the side of the motherboard tray, with the cutouts that a 24-pin motherboard cable would usually run through, flips around, which means a back-connect motherboard can fit here, and there aren't any unnecessary cutouts for a cleaner look. Smart.

All of these upgrades would be great on the larger HS 420, too. So I asked Levitt about that, and he told me they're working on it, but it's something for the future. Perhaps a V2, then.

I'm told the VGPU version of the HS 360 will be around $230. The non-VGPU one will be around $160. These are only tentative prices, but that would put this case a little above the larger HS 420 and BF 360.

HDDs may be a little box of aluminium, copper, and sometimes ceramics, but their most human trait is apparently that they slow down when you scream at them. One engineer discovered that 17 years ago, and I'm not too sure how.

Taking to X, Ben Dicken recently shared this discovery from Brendan Gregg, who is now presumably shouting at HDDs over at OpenAI, where he works. But before getting snapped up by Sam Altman, way back in December 2008 Bryan Cantrill uploaded a video to YouTube eloquently titled "Shouting in the Datacenter".

Gregg showed that simply shouting loud enough could increase latency on a server rack, and he could even point out which area took the brunt of the shout, as their PC flags any disk that takes longer than normal to operate.

If you're wondering why this is the case, shouting loud enough and close enough to the drive causes it to vibrate, and the drive vibrating can cause latency problems. You do need to be quite close to the drive for this to happen, though. Gregg, in the video, cups his hand around it and shouts right next to it. The video itself is in a data centre, and there's a rather loud hum the entire time, which doesn't appear to be causing any latency problems.

There are many physical components in hard drives which would explain why vibration can be such a menace. SSDs, on the other hand, don't have the same weakness. They are not only faster, but also more sturdy as they rely on electrical currents rather than mechanical movements to read and write data.

Hard drives are finicky things. So finicky, in fact, that Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation was once a form of a cyberattack, because the song contained the same natural resonant frequency of many 5400 rpm laptop hard drives. One could play the song from their machine and crash nearby laptops if they were fitted with the wrong drive. This was such a problem in fact that it plagued laptops between 2005 and 2009.

So don't play Janet Jackson to your '06 laptop and don't scream at your hard drive. Luckily, I do neither of these, so I think I'm in the clear. Just imagine the destructive carnage you could cause on an '08 data centre by screaming Janet Jackson.

Gregg says, "High latency caused by vibration is a real issue. You've seen it. It does exist", to which Cantrill responds, "Just don't let Brendan shout at your discs."

Yeah, that's probably good advice.

To showcase the introduction of neural rendering technologies in its next-gen mobile GPU architecture, Arm has teamed up with game studio Sumo Digital and recently dropped a short video of it in action. With ray-traced graphics, AI-denoising, and frame generation, the demo suggests that there's a better home for the tech than a humble phone: handheld gaming PCs.

Using Unreal Engine 5.6, along with its Megalights feature, Neural Dawn will eventually be released as a complete, albeit very short, game later this year. But 120 minutes of gameplay is fine when you consider that it's really just an interactive tech demo, showing what Arm's neural rendering is capable of more than anything else.

Specifically, it's highlighting two things: Neural Super Sampling and Denoising (NSSD), and Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU). The former is Arm's equivalent to Nvidia's DLSS Ray Reconstruction, and the latter is akin to DLSS Frame Generation.

Of course, we've had this tech on gaming PCs for a few years now, with frame gen first appearing with DLSS 3 in 2022, and ray reconstruction following it in 2023's DLSS 3.5 update. Getting all this onto a phone is certainly impressive and should help such devices run even more complex graphics in the future.

But I wonder if this isn't the best platform for it all, given the increased attention that Windows on Arm has been receiving of late. It could be argued that handheld gaming PCs would actually be better served by switching to mobile phone hardware, rather than using laptop-based APUs.

After all, high-end phones sport displays that make those in the best handheld PC's look basic in comparison, so it's not like mobile GPUs aren't capable of handling the resolutions that the ROG Xbox Ally X or Legion Go S use. In a larger form factor, phone processors can run at higher frequencies for longer, as demonstrated by the Apple MacBook Neo, which is essentially an iPhone 16 Pro in a laptop shell.

Nvidia might not be interested in stepping into the handheld market just yet, but Intel certainly is, so perhaps there is scope for an enterprising portable PC vendor to try something different and go 100% Arm, rather than sticking to one of AMD's much-favoured APUs or Intel's new chip.

However, I suspect hardware isn't the barrier to this transition ever happening, but rather having game developers fully onboard with coding for yet another set of rendering technologies. After all, AMD's FSR 4 isn't supported anywhere near as much as Nvidia's DLSS 4 is, and when it comes to Intel's XeSS, it's almost like developers have never even heard of it.

It would be great to have a handheld gaming PC that's not just super-powerful, but also highly power-efficient, using hardware that's truly designed to be mobile. Unfortunately, for as long as the RAMpocalypse continues to rage, the economy of such a venture wouldn't make sense, and until it's all over and things go back to normal (assuming they ever will), it'll be a long time before we see a 100% Arm handheld PC throwing ray-traced graphics all over the place.

Geoff Keighley is back together with Hideo Kojima, and that can only mean one thing—Summer Game Fest has come and gone. With it, nearly 20 showcases and spotlights—including our very own PC Gaming Show and the Future Game Show by our pals over at GamesRadar—and hundreds of games to gorge upon. Ones that will inevitably flood our Steam wishlists.

Now that all of the chaos and trailer soup is finally abating, it's a good time to think about which games have really got us all giddy with excitement. We're an eclectic bunch here at PC Gamer, from FPS fanatics to JRPG junkies, and Summer Game Fest really felt like it had a little something for all of us.

So here's the stuff we're feeling particularly stoked about. And if you reckon we've made a glaring omission—or simply want to share in our enthusiasm—feel free to drop a comment letting us know which Summer Game Fest showings have you all amped up.

Persona 6

Mollie Taylor, Features Producer: As much as I love Persona, I've been feeling a bit of Phantom Thief fatigue in the last… half-decade or so. Which makes it all the more exciting that we finally have confirmation a new Persona game is on the way.

It's looking a whole lot darker than the last couple entries based on the very brief teaser—almost SMT-adjacent, which I am totally here for. It's all graveyards and dark vibes with flashes of green, and I can't help but think maybe we're veering into the occult with this one. Whatever it might be, I'm already eager to learn more—and, y'know, finally let Joker have some much-needed rest for how much Atlus has milked the poor bloke.

Tenebris Somnia

Joshua Wolens, News Writer: Tenebris Somnia is a 2D survival horror game hot out of Argentina, and it asks players a question no one else dares to: "Hey, remember Resident Evil 1 for the PlayStation?"

I do! I do remember Resident Evil 1 for the PlayStation, and TS' mix of puzzle-solving, zombie blasting, and some incredibly high-commitment FMV cutscenes bring back a lot of very warm memories of the Spencer Mansion in its original incarnation. The studio looks like it's gone hard on practical effects for those FMV sequences—there's some truly messed up stuff in the Steam screenshots that I am very eager to get more context for when the game hits this October.

Alien: Isolation 2

Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer: One of the reasons Alien: Isolation feels like such an authentic Alien game is that it's made by diehard fans of the films. I remember speaking to Al Hope, Creative Director on the first (and now the second), years back, and it immediately became clear just how much of an alien nerd he and the rest of their team at Creative Assembly were. It's no wonder that the game's 1970s sci-fi vibes are so utterly impeccable, even to the point that Alien Romulus easter-egged one of its save stations.

It's sad that it took over a decade for it to happen, but I'm excited a sequel finally has. Though the trailer didn't give much away, our very own Wes Fenlon managed to interview Al Hope and James Green at SGF. It's early doors, but it sounds like the main difference is that we'll be evading the alien in outdoor spaces now too, though I'm sure there'll still be plenty of claustrophobic areas we'll have to fearfully inch our way around.

Thief: The Dark Project Remastered

Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: Thief: The Dark Project is one of my very favorite videogames, so a remaster from the wiz kids at Nightdive? You better believe I'm excited for it. The remaster has a planned launch window of this winter, so we don't even have that long to wait. If you want an idea of what to expect, you can read my review of Nightdive's System Shock 2 remaster, a game that was originally built on Thief's Dark Engine.

Andy Chalk, NA News Lead: Ted started early today so he got to Thief before I did but you know what? I'm so excited for this we're doing it twice. Thief (specifically Thief Gold, in my case) was a truly foundational game for me, up there with Doom and Baldur's Gate, and I basically haven't touched it for a quarter century. So the remaster maestros at Nightdive doing their thing with it—and Stephen Russell is back, and Terri Brosius is back, and baby we are back!—makes this the one must-play game to come out of SGF for me.

Mythologous

Joshua Wolens, News Writer: It is the year 2026 and someone is making a MUD. This is not a drill. This is not a jape. The text RPG is back and it's being made by a guy called Grant Medlyn, whose fantasy game Mythologous is getting a little bit Bethesda with its NPCs that have "jobs, needs, personal lives, and problems," and whose world continues to shift and change whether you're online or not.

A systems-driven MUD is basically all I've ever wanted out of, well, life, so consider me very interested. The only thing that gives me pause is this disclaimer on the game's Steam page: "The game uses some AI-generated text to enhance immersion through short form responsive NPC dialogue and procedurally described events… Generative AI is NOT used for world narrative writing, lore, game logic, audio, images, or calculating outcomes of any kind." That feature is described as "experimental" and not part of the core game. I'm willing to cut a one-man dev team working on a goddamn MUD of all things some slack, but let's be real: it's the non-AI emergent possibilities that really excite me here.

genAtlas

Jess Kinghorn, Hardware Writer:

Even after having spent a sizeable chunk of my career writing about all things PlayStation, I never thought I'd see gunplay in a game directed by Fumito Ueda. I've loved his games ever since first taking the hand of a ghostly girl I found in a cage on PS2 (to say nothing of all the poor creatures that have fallen by my blade throughout Ueda's dark fairytale oeuvre). The shift to scifi is a notable one—and I can't wait to see what the team at genDesign does with it.

So far, GenAtlas has its fair share of desolate landscapes, filling them with architecture as arcane as it is ancient—that already gets a big tick from me. The twist is that the 'architecture' in question is the discarded husks of giant robots that you can bring back to life with your ship, a disembodied robo-noggin. It's definitely a fresh twist on the theme of collaboration that runs through all of Ueda's games. The most obvious, pithiest comparison is probably something like, "Think Shadow of the Colossus, but scifi and also with giant robots that you can pilot." Now, that I can't wait to play.

Spyro: A Realm Beyond

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer: Little-known fact about Harvey—Spyro was one of my first ever videogames. My family had a PS1, and one of my earliest memories was being absolutely terrible at the OG Spyro the Dragon games, spending altogether too much time doing the skateboarding minigame in Spyro 3. So to see Toys for Bob—whose Reignited Trilogy I very much enjoyed—unleashed to make a fully-fledged proper Spyro game? It's hitting me right in my nostalgia bone, and I cannot wait.

Guild Wars 3

Phil Savage, Global Editor-in-Chief: What a treat to have a new MMO to look forward to. I've played Guild Wars 2 for over 4,500 hours, so of course I'm looking forward to the sequel. But more than just my familiarity with the series, what ArenaNet is teasing for this one sounds fascinating. A more action focus, the seeming return of GW1's skill collection, and, most importantly, a focus on traversal. "Run, slide, leap, and bound across Orr with a one-of-a-kind movement system that transfers your momentum between modes of travel," touts the Steam page, "providing a free-form joy of movement through a world alive with adventure."

This is my kind of shit, and it makes sense as the direction of travel for the series. Over the years, thanks to the addition of gliding, mounts, and masteries that enhance all three, Guild Wars 2 has built up a solid collection of movement options—joyous little combinations that make traversing a map feel fun. A game built with that at its fore? It could be something special. More than anything, though, I appreciate ArenaNet's continued commitment to Guild Wars 2. If the sequel came at the expense of a game I'd spent so many hours playing, I might be feeling quite different. That both will coexist? Well now I'm just along for the ride.

The Wolf Among Us 2

James Bentley, Hardware Writer: The Wolf Among Us has long remained my favourite Telltale Games work, and if I thought about it for another 10 minutes, I think there's a good chance I'd say it's one of the best episodic games ever. The original game blends folklore with a dark, gritty city and manages to not feel so edgy that it throws out the stakes of the story. It feels both fantastical and grounded, with narrative threads just daring you to tug on. So, on the face of it, more The Wolf Among Us is an exciting prospect. But what makes The Wolf Among Us 2 just so special is the story around the game itself.

Telltale and the second game have had a 'Will they, won't they' relationship for a while, in the wake of the studio, well, briefly not existing, then promptly re-existing again. And as such, it's a game that has been in the works for over a decade, sort of. Its on-and-off relationship is one that may serve to enunciate some strife at the core of the title, and AdHoc Studio stepping away from development certainly suggests the project was a tough task, but it's finally almost here, and that feels like a light miracle. A game destined to be video game folklore was actually seen again, and I can't wait to wolf the whole thing down in a single night, as Sheriff Bigby Wolf would want.

Now, you might be wondering why this isn't titled "the best builds for Ascension 10", and that's because while builds are still important at higher difficulties in Slay the Spire 2, they're also actually a lie—Ascension 10 isn't about getting the perfect synergy, it's about plugging leaks. Your starter deck is a problem, and you need to fix those problems as quickly and as soon as possible.

I'll get into what Silent's builds are at the end of this article, but really, you'll be better served at Ascension 10 by understanding which cards cover up which weaknesses. Or, as the title might suggest, the best Ascension 10 cards for Silent. Not the best cards overall, but rather, the ones that'll get your hiney out of the fire the fastest. Let's go.

Best Silent cards in Slay the Spire 2

By far, the most powerful mechanic the Silent has at her disposal is the Sly modifier—wherein if you discard a card with Sly, it'll play anyway. However, this comes with a huge asterisk: You generally don't want to pick most Sly cards before you have a reliable set of discard options, since they usually aren't worth their energy cost alone.

If you get too many Sly cards too early on without ways to get rid of them, you'll have essentially created curses for yourself—and you'll lose in Act 1 to terrible hands that see you eating huge damage.

Other than that, the general priority for Ascension 10 stays true: Get early damage and 1-2 AoE cards, get good defensive/block options, then go for card draw and discard so you can both improve your hands on a turn-by-turn basis and set yourself up for Sly synergies.

Early Picks

These cards aren't necessarily run-winners in their own right—some of them might stay put in your deck for the whole run, while others might be less useful as time goes on. But again, this is A10—you need to cover for your weaknesses as soon as possible, regardless of whether or not these cards fit into your imagined build.

It's all about early value. In the first few floors of any run, your job is to grab cards that are just better than a strike—because strikes don't give you nearly enough damage to get past A10's scarier, tankier fights.

• AoE - Echoing Slash/Flick-Flack/Dagger Spray: You'll want at least one of these early on. STS2 has a lot of nasty multi-target fights.

• Poisoned Stab/Bubble Bubble: Poisoned Stab is decent damage, and Bubble Bubble is a natural combo to it—nine whole poison for just one energy is a good deal, as long as you can set it up properly, which is what Poisoned Stab will always do for you.
• Backstab/Assassinate: These cards get stronger with good turn-one draw, but they're never a bad idea in Act 1 where you're starving for energy and quick, easy damage. Just don't take too many, since they don't scale well on their own.

• Strangle: This card doesn't scale too well, but if you're able to pick up a couple of shiv cards to supplement it, the early damage value it offers can be massive.
• Ricochet: Ricochet stays useful until the endgame thanks to its Sly property, and it's not a disastrous card to play early on even without discard, given it's the equivalent of two non-upgrade strikes.
• Flechettes: This thing's better than it seems, especially if you're able to get fat hands with card draw. It'll usually be doing 10 damage for 1 energy even on a sub-par hand—but if you can draw a few skills, Flechettes is excellent.

• Snakebite (No, really): This card gets memed on a lot, but Snakebite is actually fine—it has Retain, which means once you draw it, it's basically out of your deck until you have a chance to use it. It combos nicely with Flechettes, and some enemies or bosses will have turns where throwing 7 poison at them is valuable. You probably don't want more than one, but Snakebite is just fine.
• Dagger Throw: Better damage than a strike, card draw, and potential synergies with Sly—if you see this in Act 1's early fights, just get it.
• Dash: Dash is kinda garbage late game, but good early game just because of its value—you're blocking and attacking for two energy, meaning you can play a defensive turn without falling too far behind on tempo.

Defense

Once you've got some early value under your belt, you'll want to figure out your defensive game, too. Damage in A10 is severe, and chances are high you'll be taking chip damage at least every fight—and resting at campfires more than you can upgrade your cards. Snagging an early defensive plan doesn't just help you dodge damage, it also makes you stronger in the long run.

• Footwork: Dexterity is so good, and Footwork is a cost-effective power that, on its own, can prevent dozens of points of chip damage over the course of several fights. One Dexterity is solid, two is amazing. Three is probably too much, but if you've got relics or energy gain to support it, you can grab more of those, too.
• Abrasive: A touch situational, and only worth playing if you've got good discard options, Abrasive is still great for the reasons Footwork is great. Dexterity's super valuable, and the thorns are a nice bonus.
• Blur: Blur's extremely useful not necessarily because of its value (though that is good), but because it can help bail you out of nothing turns where you draw a bunch of defence but the enemy isn't attacking. A blur can transform a wasted turn into a lovely bit of setup for the next one.

• Leg Sweep: This almost made the "Early Picks" list, because Weak in A10 is an incredibly useful status effect, and the Silent only has a few ways to apply it. Almost always worth having one of these in your hand.
• Blade of Ink: Similar to Leg Sweep, Blade of Ink is a nice, fuss-free way to cause Weak in your deck—it also synergises with the Mystic Lighter relic, so it's a must-pick if you've got that knocking about.
• Untouchable: If you have good discard, you should always grab an Untouchable or two. It's a free block.

• Afterimage: Again, chip damage in Ascension 10 is the enemy—no matter your deck, having one Afterimage in it is useful. Having two, albeit harder in A10, is excellent. This plays especially nice with Shiv cards, so make sure to grab a few if you get it.
• Escape Plan: Save for a few specific enemies, Escape Plan is basically free. If you play it and don't draw a skill, you haven't wasted any energy. If you play it and do draw a skill, you just got 3 block for nothing. See it, click it.

Draw, Discard, and Retain

Once you're all set up, the Silent wants to figure out its draw/discard game—Sly is your friend, which means that discard is your friend, and card draw is just good insurance on any character playing any deck, as having good draw reduces your chances of having wasted turns—which, in A10, can be fatal.

• Prepared: Prepared is solid, baseline, but if you can upgrade this bad boy it can be responsible for winning your run—it might even be worth forgoing a rest at a campfire if you've got the Sly cards to support it. No Sly cards in your hand? Prepare might draw them for you. Sly cards in your hand? Prepared will let you play them. You cannot lose.
• Tools of the Trade: This is basically a Prepared that auto-plays at the start of your turn, and it's good for all the same reasons.
• Well-Laid Plans: Never underestimate Retain—a Well-Laid Plans means you can keep a hold of useful cards for synergies, or remove crappy cards from your draw pool, allowing you to have more effective turns.

• Reflex: Reflex plays nicely with all of the other cards on this list, boosting their draw to give you even bigger hands—which usually means better turns.
• Acrobatics: Never a bad card to grab. Fish for Sly cards in your deck, or draw some cards and play a Sly card already in your hand.
• Backflip: Card draw with a little block. What's not to love?

• Calculated Gamble: You want one of these in your deck, especially if it's upgraded—bad turns kill A10 runs, and being able to simply go "no, I'd like to do something else" is always useful. Bonus points if you're getting rid of (and auto-playing) a bunch of Sly cards, too.
• Hidden Daggers: The Discard plays nicely with Sly, and the two extra shivs are just a sexy bonus.

Ramp/Scaling

Last in your priorities is ramp and scaling—for the non-card game folks among you, that basically means "things that let you play more cards earlier in the fight" and "things that multiply your existing damage, or let you get more powerful over time".

• Adrenaline: This is a "see it, pick it" card. Card draw and extra energy to play with? Get it. Get it yesterday.
• Accelerant: If you've got a poison deck and you're offered this, get it. A measly one energy to effectively double your poison damage is a great way to make you scale into the later acts.
• Tactician: If you've got a good amount of discard going, Tactician helps your discard turns go further, helping to solve your energy problems.

• Noxious Fumes: If you're building any sort of poison deck, Noxious Fumes is worth getting—it might be worth getting even if you aren't. This also counts as an AoE damage card, so it's super valuable.
• Shadow Step: Plays nicely with Sly cards, and increases the damage of your next turn.
• Tracking: If you've got good ways to cause Weak in your deck, tracking is monstrously powerful. It also plays nicely with shiv archetypes, as well as cards like Flechettes and Ricochet.

• Accuracy/Phantom Blades: If you're building a Shiv deck, you'll want to start grabbing these cards—but not before you've got a few Shiv creators in your pocket.
• Corrosive Wave: If you've got a bunch of card draw, Corrosive Wave is a no-brainer. It's a cheap, effective way to potentially throw a whole bunch of poison on your enemies—and it makes poison decks play much faster under the right circumstances.

Situationals

I'd hesitate to call any of these cards bad; most cards are useful in Slay the Spire 2. But they're so situational that you want to make sure you pick them only when you've already got the other cards or relics that make them work.

• Envenom: On its own, Envenom just isn't worth playing—but if you've got a decent shiv deck going or ways to get free powers like a mummified hand, it's a nice supplement to certain decks that improves your scaling.
• Bullet Time: Combos well with high-draw decks. Get a big, nasty hand and then drop a bullet time to play everything in it. Otherwise, skip it.
• Speedster: Similar to Envenom, the energy cost of Speedster is just too high to make it worth playing—unless you've got a deck with an obscene amount of draw and the energy to back it up, in which case, Speedster can win you runs. It's a feast or famine card.

• Serpent Form: More often than not, Serpent Form just doesn't work. Three-energy powers are way too costly at Ascension 10—but again, if you've got the relics and/or energy generation for it? It might be worth taking.
• Fan of Knives: A very good card. However, because of how little you can find Rare cards in Ascension 10, you're unlikely to get this before you've got a couple AoE cards in your deck; Snag it if you're still somehow lacking in AoE, if it's offered to you early, or if you're building Shiv.

Best builds for Silent in Slay the Spire 2

Again, I must emphasise—if you wanna win Ascension 10 runs in Slay the Spire 2, you should be building for solutions, not builds. Stubbornly trying to stick to a certain archetype is a great way to get killed. However, it's good to keep them in mind, given you'll more or less be trying to steer into one of these versions of Silent whenever you play.

Shiv

• (+) Good to build for if you find a Kunai, Shuriken, or Ornamental Fan.
• (+) Mystic Lighter + Blade of Ink combo is very strong, as Blade of Ink counts as an enchanted attack.
• (-) Most reliant on synergy cards.

Worth building into if you get an early Kunai or Shuriken relic, as both give you in-built Strength and Dexterity, scaling that the Silent's particularly good at taking advantage of. Shiv decks primarily rely on cards like Fan of Knives, Accuracy, Phantom Blades, Blade of Ink, and Afterimage. And, naturally, cards that generate shivs themselves, such as Hidden Daggers.

Still, given the amount of supplementary cards you need, it's only really worth building for Shiv if you've been given the aforementioned relics or if you're given no real other synergistic option.

Poison

• (+) Poison scales well.
• (+) Good to build if you get lots of defensive relics and good block cards.
• (-) Very slow tempo.

The second-strongest archetype, poison is just pretty good. It deals its damage right before the enemy's turn, and by its nature has in-built scaling. Poison decks only really struggle with AoE damage, and they can be a little slow to start off with.

You'll want to build for Poison if you get certain key cards like Corrosive Wave, Accelerant, Bouncing Flask, or an early Bubble Bubble—or if you find yourself with a lot of relics that provide you block, allowing you to survive long enough to start ramping up those poison stacks.

Sly (Draw/Discard)

• (+) The strongest Silent archetype.
• (+) Builds out of cards you want to be getting in Shiv and Poison builds, anyway.
• (-) Getting Sly cards before you get discard options can brick a run.

By far the strongest out of the Silent's current archetype, Sly is just busted—and this archetype's already empowered by things you want to be building for any way, namely card draw and discard.

Even if you're building for Shiv or Poison, chances are you'll have some Sly cards in your deck, and a lot of the best cards for Silent—Adrenaline, Calculated Gamble, Tools of the Trade, Hidden Daggers, and so on—are naturally Sly enablers, as well.

With the Steam Frame set to launch at some point in the summer, according to Valve, we don't have that long until we're expected to see the VR headset on sale. If its recent shipping manifest is anything to go by, we could see it in just a couple of weeks.

As shared by SadlyItsBradley on X, the first Steam Frame imports appear to be arriving in Valve's warehouse in the US. The listing notes five different shipments of VR headsets from Quanta Computing. Given Quanta didn't work on the Valve Index, there's pretty much only one thing this could be referring to: the Steam Frame. It appears to be five different shipments of around 6400 kg each, so 32,000 kg total.

As noted by Bradley, when the Steam Controller was shipped out to the American warehouse, it launched around a month later. Given the huge package size, it seems very likely these are intended to be shipped straight to buyers when the release day arrives, ruling out the possibility of them being testing headsets.

We don't know the weight of the Steam Frame box, but the Frame itself seems to sit just under 450 g. Assuming each Steam Frame box is around 800 g, that would mean this shipment has around 40,000 units.

At the very bottom of the document listing is a note about a "Game Console". This is slightly more ambiguous than the Frame mention, which means it's open to interpretation. The game console here could be the Steam Machine, or it could be a resupply of Steam Decks. The game console package weighs 12,647 kg, which might suggest the Steam Machine, but the Deck did manage to sell out in North America after the price hike.

Either way, it seems like, despite me not quite believing it until now, Valve is sticking to its summer time frame for its new devices. The memory crisis has cast a big shadow over almost all hardware drops, and with both the Steam Machine and Steam Frame needing plenty of memory, their price and release date have remained a bit of a mystery.

The one unfortunate thing here is that even if we get either device in the coming weeks, I'm not expecting the best pricing. The memory crisis has seemingly forced price hikes from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and all manner of custom PC builders, so Valve pretty much has to follow suit to avoid losing a lot of money.

I'm certainly excited to give them a try, but AI sure has taken the wind out of Valve's sails here.

What I've learned since setting up a NAS at home: I should've done this sooner. What started out as a plan to store a copy of my most precious data at home has evolved as I've found out what a NAS is actually capable of. I went in expecting accessible local storage, I've ended up with a personalised server with heaps of possibilities.

I've been wanting to ditch Google for a while. I've done the easy things: switching to Proton and using DuckDuckGo. But I don't want to feed the beast anymore—Google is huge, powerful, rich beyond compare, and, in my opinion, wears it horribly. If I can avoid paying a monthly subscription into its already incomprehensibly large coffers, I should try to, even if it means paying a larger sum than I'd ever pay for cloud storage on NAS drives.

So, that's what I've done. A couple of months ago, I purchased two Seagate IronWolf Pro 8 TB HDDs for a princely sum of £240 each. That's one reason I wish I'd done this project sooner. These were available for £170 just a few years ago. They're £300/$300 as I write this, however, so I guess I did alright. HDDs at 12 TB and above are even more ludicrously expensive. That's really what I'd have preferred, but I couldn't spare the cash.

There are slightly cheaper drives available—I'm just a sucker. I recently spoke to someone at Corsair who designs 3D printable cages for HDDs for the company's cases, and stood next to their ample collection of hard drives, they told me the Ironwolf Pro was serious business and I made a good choice. This compliment alone justifies my frivolous spending in my mind. And, of course, the idea that these drives will last me many years to come without failure.

I just had to be sure to buy a proper NAS drive. One designed for the demands of an always-on box. A CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) drive, to be exact. These work exactly how you might expect a HDD to work—hence the conventional bit. Data is written to tracks laid side-by-side on the platter. It's a big disc of very neatly arranged data.

Though not all drives work like this. Many consumer drives use what's called SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording), which uses overlapping tracks on the platter. That complicates things: Data is written to one track, but in doing so, necessitates rewriting the neighbouring tracks, too. SMR is not as reliable in this context and write speeds suffer. So, more expensive CMR drives it is.

Then I needed something to install these drives into. That's where the Ugreen NASync DXP4800 Pro comes in, currently on sale for $676/£586.

It's a four-bay NAS with a pretty powerful CPU in it (by NAS standards): Intel's Core i5 13 1315U. It won't beat any Cinebench records with only two P-cores, but its four E-cores help make up for that. It's rated to 15 W base power and 55 W turbo power. It's a chip with plenty of grunt for the easygoing software I'm running here. A step up over a Pentium or Arm chip, anyways.

From my power measurements for the entire NAS at the outlet, it draws around 49 W with the HDDs in motion, up to a maximum of 76 W, if only briefly, during boot. It draws around 30 W once idle.

The DX4800 Pro comes with 10 gigabit and 2.5 gigabit ethernet ports in the rear, which I've hooked up to a Ugreen 2.5 Gbps network switch via an extremely long ethernet cable routed around my office. The DXP4800 Pro also offers USB 2.0, 3.2 Gen1, and USB 3.2 Gen2 ports, alongside an HDMI out and even an SD card slot.

It's a handy box. It fits snugly on my shelf at 257 x 178 x 178 mm without imposing. Those IronWolf Pro drives are a bit loud when they're spinning up, but I don't notice the drives or NAS itself whirring (the NAS has two fans) during the day—and I sit just a couple metres away from it.

As someone that regularly builds PCs, I am aware that I'm cheating a little by grabbing a ready-made unit. But it's compact and convenient. It doesn't draw much power and the set-up took no time at all. I'm not as precious about these things since I've had time to tinker and learn about the NAS, but I was when I started this journey.

Though I did make a couple of adjustments to the DXP4800 Pro upon receiving it. I upgraded the memory, for starters. The unit comes with just 8 GB DDR5-5600 on a single stick. A Samsung DIMM. That didn't feel like enough for my soon-to-be-realised home server aspirations, so I ordered another stick on eBay, which someone was selling from their own Ugreen NAS unit after upgrading. We're in the midst of a memory crisis, so I spent more money than I'd care to admit on one single stick of slow DDR5—oh, fine, it was £50—but I felt this was an important upgrade. So I've got 16 GB of the stuff now.

But it really wasn't that important. I'm running more on the NAS than I ever thought I would and I'm yet to see the system use more than 6 GB. Though at least I know I could run a lot more if I ever want to—and I almost certainly will.

Alongside the two 8 TB drives in RAID 1—ensuring I always have a backup of my most important data—I also added two NVMe SSDs, at 1 TB each, to the DXP4800 Pro. They're older drives, nothing special or speedy, but they're a damn sight quicker than a hard drive all the same. I had planned to use these as a read/write cache, but I did some research and few in the know recommend doing so. Instead I put them into their own volume, preferable for running containers and system applications from. This way, the HDDs don't have to spin up as much. And often they're completely idle.

I also swapped out the 140 mm fan that cools the entire NAS, located behind the drive bays, with a Noctua NF-A14x25 G2. It makes little meaningful difference, as I couldn't hear nor had any complaints regarding the pre-existing fan, but I had the Noctua as a spare, so why the heck not?

Data migration is straightforward. Drag the files, drop the files. I mostly use the Ugreen NAS application via Windows, which lets me access the UGOS Pro operating system as its own easy-to-use GUI. Though it's just as easy to set-up access via Windows Explorer or even my Ubuntu system, though I haven't bothered with all that just yet.

I add all my photos, important documents, and high-quality music from my CD collection. This isn't a bit to prevent the FBI, or whoever, knocking at my door over piracy claims. I recently started buying my favourite albums as CDs and making copies, just in case streaming services implode or undersea cables implode or the internet as a whole explodes. I'm certain I'll need a copy of The XX's I See You should anything bad happen.

The built-in photos app operates much like Google Photos, with facial recognition and duplicate photo recognition, but instead uses local AI models. There's also a video player that offers something akin to Netflix. So my fear of missing out on important features for going local are put to rest, and by stuffing all my files onto the NAS, I feel more in control of my data than ever. All these applications are accessible via the home screen, which runs on my phone, iPad, PC—whatever.

With my images, videos, and documents now on the NAS and out from under Google's enormous shadow, I consider most of my work done here. This NAS box is a handy thing, alright, I think to myself. A good investment. Then I hit a snag. How do I get my videos to play on my Samsung TV? To do that, it turns out, I need an application called Jellyfin. And this is when I start to realise the potential that a NAS truly offers.

Jellyfin is volunteer-built media server software that's easy to run on a range of devices, such as my Samsung TV, and keeps track of what's been watched like Netflix. To install Jellyfin, I have to run Docker. And Docker is serious business. An open platform for running containers, said containers can contain all sorts of self-contained software. From media servers like Jellyfin to an RSS feed management service like FreshRSS, or even a version of Firefox.

When I'm setting up Jellyfin, I start to wonder if I could access my NAS while I'm out of my house—ya know, not on the local network. Ugreen has a simple solution for that called Ugreenlink. This simply lets one access their NAS over a remote connection. But the deeper I go in my research, the more I'm tempted by another solution: Tailscale. Tailscale turns out to be an excellent solution with full end-to-end encryption.

So I turn again to Docker to install and run Tailscale on the NAS. That's easily done, as there are a number of tutorials on the web for this exact job.

Tailscale is a networking service that acts like a digital tunnel between devices. It's a VPN, but rather than hiding my locality, it connects my devices over a private network, as if they were local, and even when they're not. For my purposes, it means I can access my NAS securely from anywhere—even streaming video from my home in the UK to Taiwan, as I tested just last week. It's incredibly capable, and when it works pretty much out of the box with very little fiddling, I'm super impressed.

I'm also offered some advice by PC Gamer's own Wes Fenlon, who is a dab hand with this sort of thing, running Unraid on a box himself. That's one thing I've yet to experiment with myself: trying an altogether different OS on the NAS.

Though one useful tool I've taken up on Wes' advice is FreshRSS. As someone that relies on RSS feeds for work and has used various web scraping tools in the past, FreshRSS seems like a dream. It combines the best bits of both, and makes easy work of tracking my interests across the web—and across locales and devices with Tailscale. It even works with cleaner, smarter frontend readers, but I'm yet to land on any one recommendation.

There's a lot more for me to tinker with here, but from a relatively small amount of time with a NAS, I've begun to see the vision. Digital sovereignty—controlling my own data in how it's used and processed— may be a difficult thing to fully achieve, but getting somewhere closer with a NAS feels to me like well worth the price of admission. Though I wouldn't mind if HDDs came back down in cost—I could still do with a bit more storage space.

A big new chunk of the upcoming Halo: CE remake dropped online yesterday, and everyone is being normal about it. I actually mean that for the most part—there's a lot of excitement around the Unreal Engine 5-powered do-over, which will serve as a test run for Microsoft's next phase of Halo.

For some, including myself, Halo: Campaign Evolved (a funny title that says upfront they're only recreating one half of the game) comes across as superfluous. The original holds up tremendously well today and is readily available through the Master Chief Collection, so its remake will have to dramatically improve on that game to make a real mark. I wouldn't want that task.

I'm going into Campaign Evolved with an open mind—expecting different, but not necessarily better. Halo Studios' official playthrough of mission five, Assault on the Control Room, is so far confirming that impression. I watched the 28-minute video in full and then played the original mission through the MCC to refresh my memory. What follows are some notable differences and observations:

Cortana is more helpful, and waypoints are everywhere

"These lights seem to be responding to our proximity and guiding us to the exit," a new Cortana voice line says as Chief enters the first of many hexagonal control rooms. It could be a little confusing to find your way around these rooms in the originals, but l always found the flashing white arrows on the ground pointing forward to be sufficient visual guidance. Now, Cortana barks that tip into your ear so you can't possibly miss it.

Not that you actually need to look for arrows on the ground when Campaign Evolved has added HUD waypoints that are visible at all times. This is one of several ways that Halo Studios' is applying a modern hand-holdy lens to Combat Evolved.

So bright, so very bright

This was already clear from the Silent Cartographer playthrough from last year, but Halo Studios isn't just making higher definition sand and snow—it's fundamentally changing Halo's visual identity in many situations.

That's definitely the case as Master Chief emerges onto the bridge above the snowy valley. As you can see in the comparison above, it's really bright out here! So bright that the weather doesn't appear all that "inclement," as Cortana notes. It looks nice in a vacuum, but I think the OG's dreary palette feels more intentional. When Unreal Engine 5 is involved, the sun always seems to become a main character.

The sprint of it all

As we already knew, this remake makes sprint a default power of Master Chief. My record on this debate is consistent: Halo plays better without sprinting, and it's strange to add such a consequential movement change to levels that were originally designed (and balanced!) around a slower, consistent pace.

Take that first open valley Chief arrives in after riding the elevator down: In the original, you're meant to cross a wide gap while vulnerable to a Wraith lobbing plasma mortars down the valley. If you don't get in the Warthog, or it gets randomly blown up, or you can't snag a Ghost, you're stuck having this tense faceoff with a tank whose mortars travel almost quicker than you can pivot. With sprint, I highly doubt Chief will be in much danger at all.

It's nice that they're including a "no sprint" skull modifier for the folks who want a classic moveset, but I'm here to tell you it's "classic" for a reason. It's not like Bungie forgot to make Chief quicker all those years ago—Halo's methodical pace made it distinct. It placed a premium on ranged combat, forcing you to get creative with grenades and flanks in moments when the magnum was unavailable. I could embrace this change if I heard a convincing argument that moving quicker makes Halo better, but instead, the reasoning always seems to come back to sprint being 'expected' of a 2026 FPS. That's dumb.

Lock-on rockets make banshees a non-issue

Banshees could be real jerks in this mission (especially on Heroic or Legendary) back in the day, but I doubt they'll pose the same threat with the SPNKR having lock-on capabilities in this remake, as it does in subsequent games.

Health is gone

I forgot this was happening. The remake ditches Chief's non-regenerating health bar (and med kits as a result), which seems like an out-of-pocket change, unless the goal is to make Halo 1 less distinguishable from the games that came after it. Is that what remakes are for?

Guns are super accurate now

Theoretically, the inclusion of sprint would make close-to-mid-range guns like the assault rifle more useful, but perhaps that doesn't matter when everything appears to have laser beam accuracy from the hip. The AR, plasma rifle, Needler, and plasma pistols in this video have a tighter spread than the original, which would place them roughly in line with Halo Infinite's rendition of those weapons. Not a great sign, as Infinite's sandbox has always had a problem with so many guns being viable from so many distances that it hardly matters which one you choose.

The Wraith and Scorpion shoot and move much faster

Another change in line with Infinite and other 343-era Halos. The Scorpion and Wraith, the heaviest vehicles on the battlefield, now steer and aim on a dime. Their cannons also cycle much faster, which stacks the odds in Chief's favor in at least one showdown in this mission. On Heroic in the original version, Hunters are one of the only real dangers for Chief in a Scorpion. They can often take two shots to kill, and time between tank shells is long enough for them to get off one or two Fuel Rod barrages. Not anymore: the tank's new fire rate makes quick work of these apex predators.

What have they done to the sniper rifle…

I really like the new model for the sniper rifle in the remake, but its new sound? "Downgrade" is a loaded word, but it's appropriate here. Sound on.

Halo CE sniper rifle: A godly announcement. A thunderclap. A warning that comes too late.

Halo remake sniper rifle: blam-o

You can't get Sgt. Johnson killed anymore

Here's a change that makes a lot of sense with 25 years of hindsight. Originally, Sgt Johnson is one of the marines fighting for his life in the valley with the Scorpion tank. His sniper rifle makes him an excellent wingman on the tank's shoulder, but uh, he can also die like any other marine. The remake fills in this plot hole by taking him out of the encounter.

You can swap guns with marines

Since I've been complaining about features from latter Halo games that make CE less interesting, I'll mention one I'm glad to see in the remake: swapping weapons with marines. This was a thing from Halo 2 on, and it always felt like a cool way for Master Chief to throw his rank around—"I want your sniper rifle, here take this pistol."

But real heads know that the best use of this feature is actually to give marines all of the power weapons, since they have unlimited ammo and decent accuracy. The person on the sticks of this demo does exactly that when the tank section comes around, and it's super effective.

I love a mech game, but I especially love when a mech game lets you get out of the cockpit and just run around. It makes things feel so much less gamey, and it more fully sells the scale and power of a mech to contrast it with the perspective of a puny little human. Few games ever do it, though.

It's an obviously hard thing to do: People and mechs are vastly different sizes, you need to program more and deeper systems of interaction, and how do you even balance such a wide gulf in durability and firepower?

Titanfall, the early access Psycho Patrol R, and the upcoming Brigador Killers are the only games I've played that boast this feature. Halo arguably comes close with its vehicles, but I'm gonna say Mister Chief gets to sit this one out⁠—"Mech" means legs, baby. Apologies to all the car centaurs people made in Armored Core 6.

When I recently spoke to brothers Hugh and Jack Monahan, Brigador Killers' lead designer and artist respectively, I wanted to ask about this feature so dear to my heart, as well as Brigador Killers' long lead time⁠—it's been a decade since the cult classic original game first launched. Turns out the two topics are closely related.

How hard could it be?

"We joke that the seemingly innocuous question of 'What if you could get out of the mech?' added five years of development time," said Hugh. Superficially, Brigador Killers strongly resembles the first game, with similar pre-rendered environments and an isometric perspective, but functionally it's like comparing an FPS and a first-person immersive sim⁠—the shared perspective belies a huge step up in complexity.

"You can talk to characters in this game, you can do a lot more," said Jack. "It took years to get down to adding the mechanics involved with running around as a human rather than driving only vehicles in Brigador, which is orders simpler. We put all that in⁠—in part⁠—so that the inhabitation of a character on the ground, and being able to talk to people, helps [players] who are more driven by story."

Jack also argued that adding on-foot gameplay is helping overcome genre misconceptions that players have had about Brigador, like assuming it's an RTS due to the art style and perspective. "It's been worth several years of development on Killers," said Jack, "Because you don't have to explain that you're the little guy running around. If there's a little guy and he's in the center of the screen, everyone knows that's your little guy." But changing some of these expectations had knock-on effects elsewhere.

"I shoot a guy in a mech, it's reasonable to not be able to pick up a gun off the ground, [but] completely unacceptable at an infantry level," said Hugh. "Now we need to be able to pick up and drop guns, now we need an inventory⁠—why don't I have a backpack to put the stuff in? Then I want to be able to drive a car. But a car should be able to fit into a flatbed.

"I see this payphone, can I interact with the pay phone? Or there's a guy walking next to me on the street, I want to talk to that guy. You start running into more and more of the expectation of interaction with the world [that's] completely different as a person on foot."

It sounds like the brothers found all that extra work to have been worth it, though. Hugh was particularly happy with how it met some of their fans' desire to spend more time in Brigador's world without blowing it up⁠—or at least before blowing it up.

"We just want to have cool scenes where you can walk around and get more of a picture of what it might be like to be in this place," said Hugh, "Because that fantasy is a big part of the enjoyment of interacting with games."

They've also got a lot more help this time around. "Brigador was built by four people⁠—two coders, and then Hugh and I," said Jack. "I did all the art, he did all the design, and that was going to kill us. We have steadily expanded out a team on the early id Software model, which was almost everyone that works on the game originally came to it as a fan, as a modder.

"They built so many cool maps, or did so many cool edits, now they're punished for it for eternity: By having to build more of it."

You can wishlist Brigador Killers and check out its demo for yourself on Steam⁠—it recently received a substantial update with added story content, quality of life improvements, and weapon descriptions. There's also the original game to catch up on, if you haven't already.

Before I tell you about Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, the second remake of a game that has also been ported and remastered more times than I can count over the last 30 years, I want to tell you about Tomb Raider, as I played it in the late 1990s. I remember it in fractured snapshots:

• Finding that trapezoid box in my dad's sock drawer after he came home from a business trip, and somehow not exploding with excitement
• Pressing the Function key that switched from lo-res to hi-res graphics, awed by the sharper polygons
• The eerie quiet of that first cave, punctured by each intrusive shot from Lara's pistols
• Diving through glittering pools, worried about how quickly she'd run out of air, but exhilarated by the feeling of arriving at a new place no human had set foot for hundreds of years
• Learning the hard way to quick save before jumps, because not pressing a key to grab a ledge at the right moment was as likely to kill me as misjudging my spacing
• Falling off a waterfall and hitting the ground below with a sickly snap, the camera lingering on Lara's limp body
• How real Croft Manor felt as a place to explore Lara's life and practice her acrobatic moves
• The almost casual way you come around a corner into a lost valley and see that T-Rex come lumbering toward you out of the darkness
• Cycling through those "look at our 3D models" menus, the way you begin the game by opening Lara's passport exhibiting style in a place I didn't know games could be stylish

I never saw the end of Tomb Raider. I may have barely even seen the middle, but I do remember the wobbly floor under a tempting lever that collapsed with me on it. With no good save to go back to I just… gave up, instead replaying the first few levels I enjoyed. I was not a very determined kid.

I didn't see Lara's first adventure through to the end until Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which I bought in the 2010 Steam Winter Sale and enjoyed a great deal. But even within the span of a decade games had changed so much that Anniversary was fundamentally different from the game it recreated.

Much of Tomb Raider's grit and obscurity were done away with, puzzles made more intuitive, jumping friendlier with automatic ledge grabbing and a generous grappling hook. The mansion was now a puzzle box tutorial rather than a playground. The T-Rex no longer wandered in from the dark—it was siloed off into a tropey videogame boss arena and defeated by quicktime events rather than panicked pistol fire. Lara had developed reservations about killing in cold blood.

Yet just a decade removed from the original game, Anniversary was still more like a game from 1996 than a 2026 remake will ever be. A manual grab option restored some of the platforming's original rawness. The menus retained that swirly '90s flair. Still three years before the trendsetting Uncharted 2, Lara wasn't yet prone to talking to herself while solving puzzles.

The Legacy of Atlantis developers call their new game a "reimagining" rather than a remake, but in playing it I was mostly struck by how strictly we've come to define the form of a big budget videogame in 2026. The menus look identical to everything else. The arrival of the T-Rex triggers a scripted chase sequence. The Peruvian jungle is now lush with life, realistically bright with beams of light pouring through the trees and shadows darkening the corners. Scraped white edges mark the rocks Lara can easily clamber between. Bright targeting circles appear on the objects she can yank with her grappling hook.

Making a 3D game was a new and uncertain thing in 1996. Tomb Raider's developers at Core Design were figuring it out, and the game they ended up making was by its nature experimental. It controlled like nothing else. Its environments were foreboding by necessity of a short draw distance. They didn't have the programming sophistication to make Lara hesitate near a cliff's edge, so precision was essential unless you wanted to break her neck.

By comparison, Legacy of Atlantis feels like a game of Tetris played with nothing but I blocks. It's all been figured out. This is how you do a puzzle, this is how you do locking-on, this is how you signpost the jumps. There are options to make combat or puzzles easier or harder, so you can say everyone can dial in the exact experience they want. Crafting ingredients dot the area, so there's always something to click a button on just a few steps away.

These are not inherently bad things, and Legacy of Atlantis, despite some clear unfinished wonkiness (Lara's jump currently has her hang in the air in defiance of gravity for a smidge too long) is not a bad game. But it has "reimagined" a game that was once weird in the most conventional way possible, 30 years later. I don't know why the developers needed to use generative AI to make it when it all seems so perfunctory.

I'm glad that you can still buy Tomb Raider, and Tomb Raider Anniversary, and Tomb Raider Remastered—Legacy of Atlantis won't replace any of them. But its modern sheen made me reflect on how much of the 1996 Tomb Raider's identity lies in the space between what its developers could make and what they wanted to evoke.

In 2026 it's easier than ever to get close to the latter, creating a near-photorealistic game that looks and moves like a Hollywood swashbuckler. But that's the glitter of fool's gold. The real magic of Tomb Raider lies in all the unassuming bits that now seem old, clunky, hostile.

Big-budget game development can't produce an artifact that feels like that anymore. But I don't actually think it's impossible. If Amazon really wanted to reimagine Tomb Raider as it was 30 years ago, it would hire the developers of a game like Pseudoregalia or perhaps Dread Delusion. Otherwise we're just dressing Lara in the fashion of the decade, dooming her to chase the latest trends instead of giving her a chance to create some new ones.

Destiny 2 is ending—for all intents and purposes, in fact, it already has, with the launch earlier this week of its final update, Monument of Triumph. More than one Destiny fan at PC Gamer has described the moment as bittersweet—it's not only Destiny 2's last live service update, it's also one of its best—and in a smaller way, this is too: Maybe it's no surprise, but the clockwork-like This Week in Destiny updates will soon be over.

The launch of the Monument of Triumph update went remarkably smoothly, given both its massive scale and Bungie's long history of, well, not always having great luck with big updates. In today's TWID, the Destiny 2 team said it's "keeping a close eye on what needs some extra tweaks," and that an "incremental patch" aimed at tackling those issues is slated to go live next Tuesday.

And then, the sadness. "As a reminder from our Monument of Triumph announcement article, we will be continuing TWIDs for a few weeks following launch to keep you informed of game news," the team wrote. "Once we're through our launch window, our weekly blog entries will be entering a form of hibernation as well.

"This won't be the end of communications from us by any means; we'll still be keeping in touch with you and sharing community highlights through our website, social media channels, Discord, and other outlets."

It's kind of a melancholy moment even for me. I haven't touched Destiny 2 for years and even when I was playing regularly, I didn't care enough to keep up with TWIDs—known at the time as This Week at Bungie updates. I was happy enough to just jump around and shoot things and occasionally annoy my teammates by firing my super at the wrong time.

But my boss, editorial director Tim Clark, is a man who once ignored multiple tornado warnings so he could finish a Destiny 2 raid, and you better believe that every Thursday he'd have a quick scan through the TWAB and then I'd get a message in the PC Gamer Slack chat asking if I was covering TWAB, telling me what to cover in TWAB, and reminding me that if I enjoyed my ongoing employment I'd best keep the sass to a minimum—occasionally, all in a single sentence.

I did not keep the sass to a minimum, for the record, and while I haven't touched a TWAB (or a TWID) in ages, I have fond memories of working with Tim on them. Which isn't to say that I'll miss doing that, strictly speaking—trying to parse some of that stuff could be a genuine headache—but on this point at least, I will join with my colleagues in saying that, yeah, it's a bittersweet moment.

At last, the Fable reboot has shown off a lengthy 30 minute gameplay demo touting the word cloud-style reputation system that'll decide whether its 1000+ NPCs laud or heckle you as you traipse through their peasant hamlets. Every character has their own values and every decision you make has consequences! Unless you have enough gold, Playground Games is quick to reassure us, because then you can just pay for a new reputation.

Fable's gameplay demo starts off with a lot of things that I—an RPG and life sim fan with a fondness for systems and strategy—am really liking the sound of. All sorts of actions have an impact on your adjective-based reputation. Sparing someone's life makes you "merciful" in the eyes of the settlement you're in, and doing so by negotiating makes you "shrewd" while dropping a ton of cash on fancy clothes increases your reputation for being "rich" and firing random arrows in town makes you "reckless."

Fable soaks up all that info and feeds it back to you in some pretty direct conversation menus. Megan the Merchant, "an ambitious commoner" likes you because of your reputation for being "shrewd" and she thinks you're "savvy." Megan is like the translucent colored tech of the early aughts, the way I can see straight into the gears making her tick, but I don't mind the transparency. Systems-driven games are fun because they let me see the system and play with it.

That cloud of reputation epithets can do all sorts of things, like make a merchant who dislikes you jack up their prices or an employee who hates you blow off their shift, generating no profit for you.

Playground Games reinforces multiple times during the demo how this type of reputation is all about subjectivity, complexity, and shades of grey—quite different from the horns and halo 'good vs evil' system that the original series creator Peter Molyneux said it's "a real shame" to see go.

What Playground Games also mentioned multiple times during the demo was how you can just bypass the system they've built if you shell out some gold.

"If I don't like my reputations in Silverbrook, I can pay the town crier to change them," Playground says. "I give them gold—a lot of gold—and they spread a new reputation for me. If you're rich enough you can change what people think of you."

I can think of a few real-life rich people who keep desperately attempting to make that true.

Playground Games didn't give a peek at that town crier menu in the demo, so I can't say exactly how it works. It is a bit of a bummer though, to build this highly reactive morality and reputation system and then give us an opt out. They even reference later the possibility of changing your reputation through your actions.

"Once I'm known as a killer and a criminal it'll stick with me until I put in the work to change what people think or until I've made an expensive visit to the town crier," Playground Games reiterates.

RPGs in general, and Fable in particular, always encourage you to collect and hoard a robber-baron pile of gold by the time the credits roll. So the penalty to change your reputation manually seems like a finger wag more than a consequence. Making choices and then regretting them is what save scumming is for.

It also comes across as lacking in confidence, this sort of "don't annoy the player" design ethos of a big-budget project. That obsession with a frictionless experience as the requirement for broad appeal just doesn't hold up when some of the biggest RPGs in recent years, critically and financially, are things like Disco Elyisum, Baldur's Gate 3, and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, all of which proudly challenge and inconvenience us at times—and insist we live with our choices.

Despite that, I am still quite interested in this morality system Playground Games has built that, as they say, creates more interesting reactions than a single-axis reputation system can. I'll simply not visit the town crier, I suppose.

You gotta hand it to the brave few who willingly risk it all playing an early access game like Path of Exile 2 on hardcore difficulty, where a single death permanently ends your character. If you're not getting squashed by a giant monkey boss, you're taking your chances with whatever unfinished parts of the game could be your end.

Path of Exile streamer Zizaran didn't know that it wasn't actually his fault when his hardcore character inexplicably and suddenly died in a mundane combat encounter several days ago. The real culprit was revealed during a recent interview with the two lead developers on the game who regretfully informed him that his killer was one accidentally deadly crab.

While answering a question about surviving bosses as a hardcore player, co-game director Jonathan Rogers told Zizaran that the team had looked into how he died. Rogers explained that it was one specific crab enemy that can unleash a volley of projectiles if it dies mid-attack, and there was a bug that caused them to all fall immediately, like a shotgun blast.

"If you're standing on that monster when it dies while it's using that skill you just die instantly," co-game director Mark Roberts said.

According to Roberts, out of all the monsters, that specific crab climbed up the ranks to claim the third highest player kill count in the game.

I imagine that's because it's a common monster that appears when you activate a Remnant encounter in the latest league, or season. A large group of enemies spawn around you in a circle and you have to clear them out to get the reward, which means it's very easy to be right on top of them when they die.

Rogers brought up the crab to make a point about how bugs like that can make it seem like certain monsters are deadlier than others. He recalled a spider that was "accidentally doing 100 projectiles over 100 milliseconds for a total of 200K damage." The crab, he said, is just one of many small kinks they need to iron out for deaths to be more fair in PoE 2.

"I did watch the clip and I was like, should I have done something different here?" Zizaran said.

"No, you did get screwed there, for sure," Rogers laughed.

"In the case of some of these, they're literal typos. You can see that someone just typed a number in the wrong column," he said of the many instances of monsters misbehaving during PoE 2's development.

It probably stings a little bit to hear that you lost hours of progress to what could've been someone pressing the wrong number on their keyboard, but that's the risk you take with an early access game. Zizaran, a veteran hardcore player in Path of Exile 1, just smiled while listening to the developers explain how unlucky he was.

Who's stronger, the hardcore player who takes the most unfair death in the game on the chin or a crab who spent the last week blasting unsuspecting players with a shotgun? Sadly, I don't think we'll ever get to see a rematch.

It's not as flashy as sacrificing your character to buff everyone in the game, but Zizaran's untimely loss will at least save the lives of all the exiles who come after.

I had forgotten about Quake Champions, the free-to-play take on Quake 3 Arena that first arrived on Steam in 2017. But it's still around, it's still got, well, a handful of players, and today it got a surprisingly beefy update to mark the 30th anniversary of Quake, including a free battle pass for everyone.

The battle pass is the most obvious hook here: Befitting the big birthday of id Software's OG 3D shooter, the season 30 battle pass includes a number of cosmetic rewards from 1996 and QuakeCons gone by, plus previously exclusive skins and the new Disintegrator rocket launcher and Goroth's Earth Magic podium.

Functionally, though, I think the update is the bigger deal. Despite its age and relatively small player numbers—it typically peaks at a few hundred concurrent players on Steam these days—the patch makes some significant changes, including an overhaul to the network code aimed at reducing packet loss and lag compensation, and improving projectile predictions. The amount of lag compensation will now vary based on your ping, problems with hit validation for high-ping players have been fixed, and the 160 ms ping limit required to connect to games has been removed completely.

A range of other fixes, optimizations, and tweaks have been made across the board, and a new "Random Champion Select" option has been added that lets players play as locked champions—when randomly selected—in practice, quick play, and ranked modes.

Universal weapon shaders have been added, characters and maps have been tweaked up in a range of ways, Quake 30th anniversary banners have been added everywhere—this is a sizable update by any measure, and particularly so for a shooter we included in our list of "eight 'dead games' that are still very much alive" two years ago.

That hasn't gone unnoticed by players on Reddit. "I don't know how [Quake Champions developer] syncerror convinced them to let him keep updating this game for so long but I'm grateful for his efforts," redditor Fob0bqAd34 wrote. "When we got that battlepass some months back (or maybe it was last summer?) with a ton of the old weapon skins in one pass I thought that was going to be it. Hopefully he gets to keep quietly ticking away in the Sharma era as well."

The patch notes for the Quake Champions 30th anniversary update are below.

• Game Client Updates
  • Fixed the collision bug that pushed players out of the map, through the map geometry collision layer
  • Fixed being able to damage a respawning player by attacking their death location with a gauntlet
  • Raw Mouse Input fixes & optimizations • NVIDIA Reflex fixes & latency markers added
  • Code optimizations and cleanup for the damage summation markers code
  • Code optimizations and cleanup for the special movement input code
  • Fixed Heavy Machinegun shader not applying when attempting to customize its shader prior to selecting any other weapons in Customization
  • Fixed the wrong champion medals being awarded after meeting the qualifications for a medal and then changing champions
  • Fixed an issue where you could see a static player doll in the map when a spectator enters Freefly cam mode
  • Fixed spectators not being able to exit Freefly cam mode after entering it
  • Fixed a crash in the camera manager when switching to a player that is currently dead
  • Added caching optimizations to improve performance when referencing user setting values
  • Reduced RAM size requirements for Texture Quality levels
  • Quality Settings will no longer be lowered for hardware that is too new to appear in our internal CPU & GPU databases
  • Removed the fullscreen UI popup that would occur after a match when reaching Level 2, announcing that a new mode (Slipgate) has been unlocked
  • Fixed several cases of game crashes
• Threaded Input
• This option is enabled by default as it has tested to improve performance under most conditions – however, this option is not recommended for Linux users and may not be ideal for mice using polling rates of 4Khz or greater.
  • Added Threaded Input setting - Enables moving the input to a dedicated thread that runs at above normal priority. This has some benefit regardless of input mode but greatly reduces Raw Mouse Input latency
• Sound UpdatesBroken Persistent Sounds
  • Fixed sounds that would remain persistent in the world after they should have ended
• Pain Sounds
  • Fixed missing pain sounds
  • Fixed the incorrect pain sound playing when exactly 25 or 50 hp
  • Restored pain sounds between 75 and 100 hp
  • Added Acid & Fire panic sounds when a damage-over-time effect has been applied
• Death Sounds
  • Death Sound radius extended to 35m to match other character sounds
• Weapon Sounds
  • The volume of the RUTHLESS water railgun shot sound was reduced
• Item Updates
  • Power-ups dropped from dead players will now have a minimum duration of 3 seconds remaining • Dropped Power-ups no longer pop up vertically before dropping
  • Dropped items now fall at the normal rate of gravity
  • Fixed in-game Lore drops, in addition to being able to unlock a readable lore item, it grants an in-game bonus to those who discover them
  • Fixed dropped items (weapons, powerups, flags, etc.) from being able to land on a player’s head and remain floating in the air
• Bot AI Updates
  • Fixed Doom Slayer Bots so that they can now use their Berserk ability
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bots so they can no longer run backwards during Bull Rush
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bots so they can no longer accidentally cancel their abilities early
  • Fixed Strogg Bots so that they can now use their Drone Strike ability
• Armor Feedback
• To provide players better feedback regarding how their combat encounter is going, we have integrated the armor hit beep system from Quake 4 and expanded upon it further. This new feedback will provide unique hit beeps when dealing damage to an opponent with armor, as well as provide visual feedback when that armor has depleted.
• Armor Hit Beeps
  • You will now hear a unique hit beep when you hit an opponent who has armor
  • AUDIO Settings: Added ARMOR BEEP STYLE - includes OFF, Q4 and QC options Armor Break FX
  • You will now see special fx when the damage you deal depletes your opponent’s armor
  • HUD Settings: Added ARMOR BREAK FX Armor Break Sound
  • You will now hear a special sound effect when the damage you deal depletes your opponent’s armor
  • AUDIO Settings: Added ARMOR BREAK SOUND - includes OFF, POWER DOWN, ENERGY RELEASE, SHIELD PUNCH, and METAL TINK options
• Additional Hit Beep Options
  • Added HITBEEP styles – includes:
    • Mid-Tone (popularized in Quake 3)
    • High-Tone (from Quake 4)
    • Damage-Based (from Quake Live)
    • Additive Damage (introduced in QC)
• Teamplay FeaturesTeammate Death POIs
• Teammate Death POIs have been added to assist in teamplay. These not just help you know when a teammate has fallen but can act as a sign of danger. Whether you choose to rush into that combat zone for revenge or heed its warning to find a new path is up to you.
  • Show a Point of Interest markers at the position a teammate dies
  • HUD Settings: Added TEAMMATE DEATH POI
• Drop Commands
  • Now available in team modes are the Drop Weapon and Drop Power-Up commands. Each command will drop the item if available and trigger a message in team chat
  • Drop Weapon will drop the weapon with the current ammo count if you own below the weapon’s starting ammo amount
• Say Commands
  • Added 6 Say Commands: Yes, No, Hi, Bye, Thanks, Sorry.
  • Available in all game modes, issuing these commands will print a chat message and generate a local in-world VO message that everyone can hear
• Show Vanity Customizations Toggle
  • Enabled by default, this new setting allows you to toggle off the in-game armor shaders, vanity items, vanity weapons (including their custom fx and sounds), and weapon shaders. This can be toggled on the fly in a match. You will still see all vanity in the Match Lobby and the Pre and Post Match Podium scenes to show off your style, but during gameplay all vanity will be removed
• Weapon Zoom Toggle
  • Activating the toggle will keep the weapon zoomed in until you either untoggle or change weapons
  • CONTROLS Settings: Added ZOOM TOGGLE
• Hidden Weapon Position
  • New Hidden option sets the weapon and hands to be invisible and centered
  • Added a Gauntlet icon to the ammo HUD, so that the gauntlet weapon selection is always visible
• Weapon, Ammo, & Knockback Updates
  • Starting Weapons now upgrade instantly without weapon switch downtime
  • Weapon Pickups will now always add the starting ammo count to your current ammo count
  • Knockback is now applied immediately instead of queuing and applied in delayed batches
  • Knockback cap adjusted from 120 to 132, resolving the rocket jump penalty accrued in the prior update
• Champion Specific Weapon Loadouts
  • Weapons are now equipped per Champion in Customization
  • Added an optional Equip on All Champions button
• Random Champion Select
• The Random Champion, selected in the Champion Roster, will make a random selection from all champions. This option allows players to play locked champions (albeit random) on Practice, Quick Play, and Ranked
  • In Duel, it selects one champion at random that will be used for the entirety of the match
  • In Sac Tourney, CTF Tourney, and TDM Tourney, selects a champion during the pick phase, ensuring that it is a unique selection within the team
  • In Duel Rounds, makes a random selection during the pick phase, ensuring that it is a unique selection within the squad
  • In all other modes, it picks a Mystery Champion that cycles at random with each respawn, with ability cooldown retained
• Universal Weapon Shaders
• All weapons that currently have shader support now support 23 universal shaders, which have been made available for free to all players, instead of needing to own different sets of basic weapon shaders for every individual vanity weapon
• Basic weapon shaders
  • Red, Pink, Orange, Yellow, Lime, Green, Teal, Blue, Purple, White, Grey, Charcoal, and Black Basic Shaders Camo weapon shaders
  • Grasslands, Forest, and Snow Camo Shaders Patterned weapon shaders
  • Blue and Brown Patterned Shaders Mastery weapon shaders
  • Ithagnal, Cthalha, Goroth, Volkerh, and Master Shaders
• UI Player HUD Updates
  • Buff & Debuff player info HUD (such as Quad, Protection) shows a remaining duration number when duration is 5 seconds & below (and shows decimal durations when duration is 3 seconds & below)
• Pre & Post Game
  • Fixed the Drag/Move Player hit detection of the bottom right pillar in the Custom Game 4v4 Lobby
  • Fixed a the Add-Bot [+] UI elements appearing on top of the Settings UI when passing Party-Leadership to a player actively in the Settings menu
  • Added new tips to the map loading screens
  • Fixed the persistent menu blur bug when leaving the Battle Report after a match
• Champion Updates All Champions
  • Changing champion mid-game no longer resets the ability cooldown
• Anarki
  • Disabled weapon switch during ability usage, while still allowing you to queue the switch, which will execute after the Injection completes
  • Fixed the Anarki hoverboard sounds' Teammate Volume support
• Athena
  • Grappling Hook: Fixes & updates to pull speed acceleration
• BJ Blazkowicz
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Increased Walk Speed from 160 to 280 ups (for silent walking)
  • Fixed BJ Blazkowicz’s SUMMERTIME outfit attachments when combined with the GOLDEN CROWN
• Clutch
  • Starting armor reduced from 100 to 75
• Barrier
  • Barrier: Breakable shield, increased duration that degrades as it receives damage, with a maximum of 200 dmg received before breaking
  • Barrier: Both duration and damage soak share the same energy pool. For example, while the shield can withstand a maximum of 200 dmg before breaking, if half of its duration expires before taking damage only 100 dmg is needed to burn through the shield’s remaining energy
  • Barrier: Shield sound now alters pitch as duration depletes
  • Barrier: Fixed incorrect movement settings during ability usage, including move speed 300 instead of 320 and max speed of 750 instead of 600
  • Mining Laser: Duration is now 3 seconds, instead of the remaining time from Shield duration
• Dodge
  • No Dodge Passive while the Shield is active • Spawns with 1 of 3 dashes available
  • Reduced stamina regen from 0.33 to 0.3
  • Improved the responsiveness & accuracy of the Dodge Stamina UI
  • Added a 10ms delay between executing dodges to address small issues when rapidly executing dodges
  • Updated the Air-Dodge passive title & description to Dodge Jump, to fully encompass both Air-Dodge and Ground-Dodge mechanics
• Death Knight
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Fixed the "bayonet" bug that would leave the sword extended outward while holding a weapon
  • Fixed Death Knight’s Humiliation vanity not staying equipped
• Flame Strike
  • Fixed the splash damage from the fireball projectiles, they will now always add the flame dot
• Charring Passive
  • Fire Dot - Increased from 6 dmg x 5 sec (30 dmg max) to 9 dmg x 5 sec (45 dmg max)
• Doom Slayer
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 700 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
• Berserk
  • Improved enemy visibility in Berserk, making them appear solid white (with an enemy outline colored arrow)
  • Duration reduced from 5 to 3 sec (to reduce the distance he can run away when using berserk passively)
  • Duration restored in full when he lands a punch, resetting the remaining berserk time to 3 seconds (to encourage offensive usage)
  • Added a sound effect when a punch lands, to help it feel more visceral and for punches to feel like they are making contact
  • Added magnetism, trails, and new pickup sounds for blood punch bubbles
  • Fixed a bug with the weapon drop and hand raise that resulted in being stuck without fists or a weapon during or after ability usage
  • Blood Punch sound added when earning a kill with Berserk
• Eisen
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 700 ups
  • Max Extra AP reduced from 175 to 150 ap
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Improved Eisen armor decay rate from 1pt every second to every 2 sec
• Sentry Turret
  • Added Damage Summation audio support for hitbeeps from turrets
  • Added Overhead Health Bars for both friendly and enemy turrets; health bars on enemy turrets are visible when the turret is either below full health or when it has obtained any armor upgrades
  • Decreased the turret’s max health from 120 to 100 hp
  • Increased the turret’s starting health from 120 to 125 hp
  • Starting Armor 0 ap, Max Armor 50 ap, Max Extra Armor 75 ap. Armor is granted via the updated Repair passive
  • Improved Turret armor decay rate from 1pt every second to every 2 secs
  • Damaged health now regens back up to 100 hp, healing 5 pts every 1 sec when it does not receive any further damage for 5 seconds
  • Reduced activation delay from 2.0 to 1.5 sec
  • Added an a health and armor info status indicator above the ability info to show when you have an active turret deployed and how healthy it is • Fixed turrets from eternally bouncing on jumppads
  • Throwing a turret into a kill zone will now grant 80% of your cooldown back, as it isn't exactly fair that we destroy the turret and you lose your cooldown just because we decided the turret was placed in an unallowed location. We grant 80% instead of 100% to discourage spam and exploitation
• Repair Passive
  • Removed the armor regen passive, in favor of a new Turret Repair passive
  • Eisen can now deny Light Armor pickups when at max armor by standing near the pickup for 2.5 sec. Any armor Eisen picks up will also be applied towards the deployed turret to "upgrade" the turret's stack
• Salvage Passive
  • Shards will now grant 5%, Light Armors 10%, and Heavy Armors 10% cooldown reduction
• Galena
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Improved the fitting of the QPL SEASON 3 BELT with Galena’s ACOLYTE Outfit
• Unholy Totem
  • Hitbeeps will now play when damaging enemy totems
  • Damage Numbers will now appear when damaging enemy totems
  • Added Overhead Health Bars, Enemy Arrows, and Owner Names for friendly totems
  • Added Overhead Enemy Arrows for enemy totems, when targeted Owner Names, and when damaged Hit Beeps and Health Bars
  • Totems now receive Quad Damage, Protection, and Spawn Protection FX to show when they will deal or can receive more damage
  • Added fire SFX to totems when 3 totems are deployed
  • Totems you own will now appear solid through walls, to differentiate them from totems belonging to a teammate Galena
  • Friendly totems will now appear yellow through walls when 3 overcharged totems are deployed
  • Enemy totems will now have a visible SFX ring around them that is visible in any lighting quality setting
  • Starting Health increased from 60 to 75, Max health increased from 60 to 75
  • Damaged health now regens back up to 75 hp, healing 5 pts every 1 sec when it does not receive any further damage for 5 seconds
  • Throwing a totem into a kill zone will now grant 80% of your cooldown back, as it isn't exactly fair that we destroy the totem and you lose your cooldown just because we decided the totem was placed in an unallowed location. We grant 80% instead of 100% to discourage spam and exploitation
  • Fixed applying the Super Shotgun's close range bonus damage towards totems; damage was capped at 80 dmg with the Super Shotgun but you can now deal 120 dmg
  • Slightly increased the totem's weapon collision mesh, so that close range shotgun pellets don't miss when expected to hit
• Keel
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 600 to 800 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
• Grenade Swarm
  • Fixed grenades sometimes explode 3 times instead of once
• Reinforced Passive
  • Improved self-damage reduction from 60 to 67%
  • Improved splash damage reduction from 20 to 33%
• Stockpile Passive
  • Improved ammo box cooldown reduction from 10 to 20%
• Nyx
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 750 to 1000 ups
• Ranger
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Ranger Gladiator outfit renamed to BRAWLER to avoid having two armor sets with the same name (Strogg's GLADIATOR, which is based off of the Q2/Q4 Strogg Gladiator enemy). BP art for new reward added
• Dire Orb
  • Velocity reduced from 1000 ups to 900 ups
  • Shoot Delay after throwing increased from 0.4 to 0.5 sec
  • Shoot Delay after teleporting increased from 0.4 to 0.5 sec
  • The orb now has 75 pts of health and can be destroyed when shot, triggering the orb to explode. The explosion can be triggered by anyone: Ranger, teammates, or enemies
  • The orb’s damage output is now based on it’s time in flight, gaining damage over time & distance
• Scalebearer
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 600 to 800 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
  • Fixed an IK animation crash in the Scalebearer’s animation set when trying to reach a target position during weapon-aiming that was unreachable
• Bull Rush
  • Fixed the Scalebearer sensitivity bug, where sometimes the default rotation limits are not restored
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bull Rush sometimes passing through the enemy target with a collision (especially at high ping)
• Slash
  • No changes.
• Sorlag
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
• Strogg
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Will no longer drop Stroyent when he commits suicide
  • Fixed Golden Crown power-up shaders • Fixed Golden Crown crash behaviors that would occur when cloaking & decloaking
• Drone Strike
  • Drone: Fixed Peeker’s camera view angles from updating if its Strogg owner's body enters a teleporter domain
  • Fixed Peeker’s drone flight sounds persisting after death
• Visor
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap Piercing Sight
  • Piercing Sight now exposes the enemy’s health and armor information
  • Increased the volume of Visor’s third-person ability VO and reduced how much the occlusion muffles its volume
• Game Mode UpdatesLobbies/Queues
  • In a ranked match, when a player disconnects from the lobby/match, the leaver still gets the existing forfeit loss, but now loses SR. The remaining opponent now also gets a forfeit win persisted to their profile
  • Added Unholy Trinity TDM to the Bot Practice queue
  • Added support for disabling the Score Limit, by setting Score Limit 0 in Custom Game
• Matches
  • Fixed the max warmup time bug, which would allow warmup to go on forever, instead of being capped to 120 sec
  • Fixed the Auto-Abort system, to properly end matches when no enemies remain in game
  • Anti-Griefing system will now exit the current match and send you back to the main menu, instead of closing the game application
• Duel
  • Dead player bodies will now hide at the minimum respawn time (3 seconds) -- so that it doesn't convey when an opponent chooses to respawn. This also allows you to use the Hide Dead Bodies option without being penalized
• 2v2 TDM
  • Dead player bodies will now hide at the minimum respawn time (3 seconds) -- so that it doesn't convey when an opponent chooses to respawn. This also allows you to use the Hide Dead Bodies option without being penalized. Instagib • IG Matches in Quick Play now last for 10 minutes with no score limit
• Sacrifice
  • Active Abilities are now canceled on Soul Pickup, just like we do in CTF during flag pickups • Added an Announcer VO countdown from 10 to 1 as the point reaches 90-99% captured
• Clan Arena
  • Added First-Person Spectating while dead to replace the third-person spectating
• Slipgate
  • Added First-Person Spectating while dead to replace the third-person spectating
• Unholy Trinity
  • UHT Matches in Quick Play now last for 10 minutes with no score limit
• Spectating
  • Fixed spectators having a delay changing the spectator player, when the followed player dies and has entered the death HUD UI
• Map UpdatesAll Maps
  • Quake 30th Anniversary Banners added
• Blood Covenant
  • Removed an unused out-of-bounds jumppad
• Blood Run
  • Added a teleporter from the Tri-bolt mid-level to the Super Nailgun / Power-Up room
  • Fixed a hole in the wall mesh near a statue
  • Fixed the position of an out-of-bounds breakable urn, placing it back into the map
• Church of Azathoth
  • Fixed missing game mode flags for items in the disabled obelisk area
  • Fixed the position of an out-of-bound breakable urn
  • Removed the out of bounds jumppad
• Citadel
  • Removed out of bounds fireplace reference inside the central jumppad Deep Embrace
  • Recreated ocean mesh from scratch for performance optimizations
  • Fixed three small holes in the map mesh
• Insomnia
  • Fixed holes in the window frame mesh near HMG
• Ruins of Sarnath
  • Swapped the SG spawn and SG player-spawn locations (so that you don't have to turn around to pick up the Super Shotgun)
  • Fixed three small holes in the map mesh
• Tower of Koth
  • The smaller version of Tower of Koth will now be used in DM, TDM, IG, i9, and UHT
  • The larger version of Tower of Koth has now added the support beam above the central mid-level teleporter that was introduced in the smaller version of Tower of Koth

Remember Pokémon Go, the game that had millions of people running all over the world to find and capture Pokémon on their mobile devices? It was big—so big that Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group bought the game division of developer Niantic for $3.5 billion in 2025—and even though it's not at the forefront of the public consciousness the way it used to be, it's apparently still very popular. And also, well, it's being used to train war machines.

In 2020, Niantic announced new "AR Mapping tasks" for Pokémon Go, and then in 2021 it rolled out Powered-Up PokeStops, which enabled players to team up "to complete AR Mapping tasks and create exciting new AR experiences for Trainers worldwide, simply by using your smart device to scan real-world PokéStop locations."

Fun and games, right? Except as reported by DroneXL, Niantic Spatial, which was formed when Savvy (through its Scopely division) purchased Niantic's gaming business, launched a partnership with a company called Vantor in December 2025 "to deliver a comprehensive air-to-ground positioning solution that will enable air and ground platforms to navigate and coordinate precisely in GPS-denied environments." As is the way these days, that system will be dependent upon AI—which is trained, in part, by Pokémon Go data.

Conventional GPS systems rely on satellites, and virtually all modern military navigation and targeting technology rely on GPS to function. A quick way to disrupt enemy operations, therefore, is to deny access to GPS functionality. That's where Visual Positioning Systems—VPS—come into play: Simply put, they enable GPS-comparable navigation capabilities when GPS signals fail. That could be handy for anyone, but make no mistake: Vantor's software is used in military drones, and that's clearly the company's priority.

The system being pursued by the Niantic Spatia/Vantor partnership is basically a two-parter: Niantic Spatial enables ground-based users to find their way around accurately even without access to GPS, while Vantor does essentially the same for airborne platforms.

"By combining Niantic Spatial's expertise in ground-based localization with Vantor's proven aerial systems and global 3D foundation, we're building an integrated positioning network that operates anywhere," Niantic Spatial chief technology officer Brian McClendon said when the deal was announced. "Our Large Geospatial Model gives these systems the ability to perceive, align, and operate in a shared frame of reference—even when traditional GPS is unavailable."

Pokémon Go data isn't being used for direct mapping in this system: In a statement to PC Gamer, Niantic Spatial said "ground scans" collected by Pokémon Go are just one part of the inputs used to train its AI models. It also clarified that its deal with Vantor does not include sharing that data, and that following Scopely's acquisition of Niantic's gaming business, it no longer has access to scanning data.

"Now as part of Scopely, Pokémon Go data is not shared with Niantic Spatial," a Niantic Spatial spokesperson said. "AR Scans collected through Pokémon Go were submitted voluntarily by players who opted into the feature and were subject to the applicable Terms of Service and Privacy Policy at the time. The discontinuation of AR scanning and the end of data sharing with Niantic Spatial were part of the transition planning associated with Pokémon Go's move to Scopely

In its own statement, Vantor said it is "exploring adapting Niantic Spatial's ground-based Visual Positioning System" to operate with its own systems, but added that it does not have access to the actual Pokémon Go data. "Vantor's GPS-denied positioning capabilities are underpinned by our own 3D data that we produce from our satellite imagery," a Vantor representative said.

Jeroen van den Hoven, a professor of ethics and technology at Delft University of Technology, told Dutch news site Trouw that it would be very difficult to say exactly how the Pokémon Go data—nearly 30 billion scans, according to the Trouw report —was used in the training of Niantic Spatial's AI systems. But he believes it would have been impactful.

"Without the large amount of scans from all those gamers, the development of this system would never have progressed so quickly," van den Hoven told the site. "The players have indirectly, in a perhaps minimal but still effective way, contributed to military applications."

As noted by the Niantic Spatial rep's statement above, the data collection in question is covered by Pokémon Go's TOS. The sections governing both User Content and AR Content state that users "grant to Niantic a nonexclusive, transferable, sublicenseable (through multiple tiers), worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license" to basically do whatever the hell they want with your scans and data.

Even if the practical impact of this kind of data collection is minimal, as is apparently the case here, it's a moral and ethical minefield. "The people who thought they were playing a game have clearly been fooled," van den Hoven said. "It is gradually starting to sink in that companies are not necessarily using our data to truly advance our lives by, for example, improving education. It is about making money. If they can sell a dataset or AI model for a good price, they will do so."

September 2026 is looking to be one of the most crowded months for games in history, as everyone with eyes on a fall release crowds into the few weeks before Grand Theft Auto 6 dominates everyone's attention. We're no doubt going to start seeing delays soon that push games clear of that blast zone—but during last week's Sony State of Play, one game moved closer to the epicenter.

That was Phantom Blade: Zero, the action RPG I flew to China to play last year. And according to game director Qiwei "Soulframe" Liang, GTA 6 didn't factor into the decision even a tiny bit.

"Many people may think we have some marketing strategy to move it from the overcrowded September, and some are very worried that it's closer to November," Liang said. "We don't think about any of this. We only think of the quality of the product itself. I don't think competition can influence, much, the success of a work. Only the product itself matters. So I would say 99% of the decision [was about] development."

I asked Liang directly if launching in the vicinity of Grand Theft Auto was scary. While PBZ's new date of October 29 is three weeks before Rockstar's new open world game drops, that's likely still too close for comfort for most big budget games that have been in development for half a decade, as Phantom Blade: Zero has. GTA's marketing campaign could easily be dominating minds by the start of November.

"I have no idea, actually," he said. "We don't think about what's happening there. We don't even think of the competition, what's launching ahead or after. What matters is how polished the game is, and if we have one or two extra months, we can fix more bugs, do more optimizations, so that we don't need a huge day one patch."

Liang wasn't thinking about Grand Theft Auto, but he was thinking about something else: the AI-driven PC hardware crisis. His team wants Phantom Blade: Zero to be able to run on the Steam Deck, which with Unreal Engine 5 is "a hard task," but they're going to try. And a key focus for the last polishing sprint will be making sure the game looks as good as it can with ray tracing disabled.

"This year the hardware price is going up, and people who want to replace their hardware may postpone their plan to upgrade their equipment, so we think we need to let the game be played by as many players as possible without reducing the quality."

Only the key creatives behind Forza Horizon currently have the sway to start up a brand new studio and secure the tens of millions of dollars in funding necessary to make a movie with a racing game attached to it. That's Clutch, a "cinematic open world action-driving game where the worlds of professional and underground street racing collide across the French Riviera."

It's appropriate that Clutch is partially set in Monaco, because the whole game looks like money.

Big money is not something I tend to associate with racing games in 2026, outside a very small number of legacy names. Forza Horizon's 6+ million sales in a matter of days makes it the only racing series going right now that pulls in the same kinds of numbers as, say, Sony's prestigious third-person action games. So why not make one of those, which tons of people like, but about cars?

The pitch is sensible: So much of the appeal of heist movies or globetrotting capers like the Bond films is seeing suave people driving incredibly expensive cars around beautiful environs. Sim-focused racing games reproduce those cars in painstaking detail, while lighter racers that evoke the old arcade days often let you speed through those fun environments. Yet it's rare for either style of racing game to ever really make you care much about the person behind the wheel, even in the rare instances they have a story mode.

Clutch is betting those millions of dollars that fully mocapped actors, a wealth of cutscenes, and an open world will make the difference. An hour-long presentation at this past weekend's Summer Game Fest highlighted just how much attention the developers are paying to their licensed cars, their recreations of real European cities, the nuanced facial expressions of brother and sister Theo and Cass Martial, promising young stars of the R1K racing league who get pulled into the sketchier world of street racing.

The setup seems to promise quite a routine story, starting with a deadly crash during an R1K race and an on-the-nose threat from the league's chairman to take away the agency of human drivers by using more automated braking systems and such to prevent crashes. Theo, shaken by his front row seat to a friend dying on the track, agrees. Cass and their adoptive father seem to side with the idea that the freedom to live on the edge for the sake of sport is more important, though hopefully the story plays out with a bit more subtlety than that.

Ten minutes later Theo was stealing a car outfitted with our first example of "Clutch Tech," a harpoon he used to drive right off the deck of a penthouse, grapple to a nearby helicopter, and safely swing the vehicle into the hills outside Monaco—so I'm not sure subtlety will ultimately be a high priority for Clutch.

The reason I ultimately really like Clutch's narrative pitch isn't that I hope to be moved to tears by Theo's story, anyway. I like it because it serves as a way to stitch together and give meaning to different types of racing. You can get chased by the police and have to outrun them, breaking line of sight long enough to hide in a parking lot. But these aren't just missions you select from a menu: when Theo went to steal that car, he had to avoid the security detail patrolling a garage, with a dedicated button for ducking out of sight in his BMW convertible. You'll have to do that whenever you venture into an off-limits zone, and if you get caught, a chase ensues.

Street racing with the Midnight Collective lets you earn money to buy new cars, and here Clutch is particularly Forza Horizony, with in-fiction livestreams of the street races letting you build up your popularity (and cash) by taking viewer requests mid-race, like performing drifts or near-misses with oncoming traffic. Winning the race matters, but you could still be outscored by an opponent who puts on a flashier show, adding a nice bit of variety to your goals. Here Clutch Tech like that harpoon gives racing a bit of arcadey flair, too, letting you take impossibly sharp corners that you'll find in the winding streets of the French Riviera.

When Theo and Cass finally make it back onto the track at the R1K, the racing will lean more serious. This was the only bit of Clutch I actually got to play, with just a few minutes of hands-on time at the end of the demo. I immediately drove too fast into a turn and was penalized for careening off the track.

At that point I realized that how I imagined Clutch would control and how it actually feels in the hand are very different things. I spent much of the demo excited that someone was making a game in the vein of classic Need For Speed or Rockstar's Midnight Club, but with way more going on around the edges of those straightforward races. My quick impression, though, is that it feels far more like Forza Horizon—heavier than an arcade racer, with that now-familiar racing line encouraging you to brake as you go around corners. There's no Burnout-style smashing into other cars to knock them out. You may have an E-brake, but you're not going to be drifting around every corner like an Initial D prodigy.

I shouldn't be too surprised that Clutch plays like a game made by people who really care about simulating real cars. And to be clear, it's more approachable than something like Gran Turismo—by lap two I was already doing much better, tapping the brakes as I went around corners and not outright embarrassing myself behind the wheel. But this sort of 'halfway sim' feel just isn't really my style of driving. I crave nitrous and ridiculous drifts; I want Burnout Paradise, but with Clutch's narrative framing populating the open world with rival racers and missions with snippets of story; I want to remember a narrow one-way as the perfect place to ditch the cops or recognize a tunnel as the one I drove that car Theo stole into the back of a box truck, pulling off a perfect Fast & Furious vanishing act.

I'm mourning, a little bit, that Clutch probably isn't precisely the racing game for me. Even in the street races with Clutch Tech bending the laws of physics, I fear it will feel a bit too heavy, the kind of racer that encourages you to brake for every turn instead of grinding your car along the metal guardrail at max speed. But I'm also seemingly the rare outlier who does not outright love Forza Horizon.

And if, like PC Gamer Editor-in-Chief Phil Savage, you love most everything about Forza Horizon 6 except "how bland the dialogue is… all trite platitudes and empty positivity," Clutch is almost certainly going to be the game for you.

I have a feeling that's exactly why it exists—because a few years ago Horizon studio Playground Games was divided over the idea that people would care about anything happening when they're not in control of the car. Forza is bland by design. The new studio, Maverick Games, is pouring millions of dollars into the hope that you won't reach for your phone every time a character starts talking. I hope they're right, because I want a game that looks like Clutch with the energy of Crank: High Voltage—the second you slow down, you're already dead.

It has been two years since Dragon's Dogma 2—the unlikely sequel to an unlikely RPG—emerged from its Riftstone, and it just got a fairly mondo new patch. Released on June 10, Dragon's Dogma 2's latest title update brings fast travel tweaks, pawn futzing, bug fixes, and plenty else besides. Oh, and it's part one of two: the second part will come at the end of August, just ahead of DD2's October Dark Arisen expansion.

They're both doozies (though, with its additional weapon skill slots, the upcoming August patch may be doozier), but let's get into June's patch, since it's the one that's, you know, here.

First on Capcom's big tweak list is changes to the game's fast travel system. DD2 kind of delights in making fast travel a bit of a hassle (something I generally very much endorse), but I guess Capcom got tired of people moaning about it, because the game now hands you an Eternal Ferrystone "after talking to Brant during the quest Seat of the Sovran," which is pretty early on.

Instead of hauling your bones into a trundling cart that will inevitably be attacked by every cyclops on the map, you can now use your Ferrystone(s) directly from the map by hovering over fast travel spots. Which even I'll admit is how it should already have worked.

There are also more portcrystals (the crystals you, uh, port to) in Melve, Checkpoint Rest Town and the Volcanic Island Camp. And you get a bonus one as a reward for the quest Monster Culling.

Basically, Dragon's Dogma 2 is now a baby game for babies. You hate to see it.

To me, that's the headline item of June's patch, but spare a thought too for changes like a free camera in photo mode, disabling random pawns approaching you outdoors and asking for a job, which is good, because there's genuinely nothing more immersion breaking than encountering a pawn who looks like Kratos from God of War on the road and having him ask to party up.

The patch also disables high fives from your own pawns (monster), adds a new "Guardian" specialisation for your pawns, and changes the game's map to make it a bit more parseable. Here are the full patch notes:

Dragon's Dogma 2 patch notes from June 2026

Fast Travel/Movement Adjustments

• Added the fast travel item Eternal Ferrystone.
  * The Eternal Ferrystone will be automatically acquired after talking to Brant during the quest Seat of the Sovran.
  * If you have already completed this quest, the item will be placed in your inventory.
• Added Portcrystals to Melve, Checkpoint Rest Town and Volcanic Island Camp.
• Added a Portcrystal as a reward for the quest Monster Culling.
  * If you have already completed this quest, it will be placed in your inventory.
• Added Oxcart Stopovers.
• Reduced the time until the Doze Off command becomes available when riding an Oxcart.
• If an Oxcart happens to be close by, an Oxcart icon will be displayed on the mini map.
• Extended Oxcart Station departure hours. Oxcarts will now depart from morning till evening.
• Decreased the amount of stamina used when dashing outside of combat.

• Selecting Load from Autosave after defeat will no longer result in loss gauge accumulation.
• Improved the stats for some equipment found when exploring dungeons.

Options Additions/Adjustments

• Added the Free Camera option to Photo Mode.
• Added the option to toggle the display of patterns left on equipment strengthened in wyrmfire.
• Added the option to toggle the display of head armor.
• Changed the wording of the Set to "Examine" Only option in the Button Mapping settings to make it clearer that it does not include Dash.
• Added the option to enable/disable unhired pawns to approach you and offer their services.
• Added the option to enable/disable high fives from pawns after battle.

Reward Adjustments

• Changed the content of some treasure chests and some enemy item drops.
• Increased the rewards (mainly gold) for some quests.

UI Adjustments

• Added the option to use a Ferrystone from the map by moving the cursor to a Portcrystal.
• Improved the visibility of the player icon on the map.
• A notification will now display if your camping kit was destroyed in an ambush.
• When shopping, you can no longer purchase more than you can hold of a specific item.
• The stat boosts for Pawns inflicted with dragonsplague will now be reflected on the status screen.
• Multiple item types can now be transferred at once between the Arisen and Pawns.
• The Art of Metamorphosis has now been moved to the top of the Pawn Guild Vendor's product list.
• The order of Lantern and Lantern Oil has been changed at each shop so that Lantern Oil appears first.
• An hourglass icon will now appear on timed quest notifications.
• Quest progress will now be displayed for priority quests after loading saved data.

Pawn Adjustments

• Added Guardian specialization.
  * Enables the pawn to prevent oxcart raids from occurring while they accompany the Arisen. Also enables the pawn to singlehandedly repel smaller foes that attack the camp, and to reduce the Health of larger ones before the Arisen joins the battle.
  * The Guardian's Tome can be acquired in the following ways.
  - Bought from the Nameless Apothecary in the Nameless Village.
  - As a reward for the quests Claw Them Into Shape and Readvent of Calamity.
  * If you have already completed these quests, they will be placed in your inventory.
  * Added a tutorial for the Guardian specialization.
• Adjusted behavior when moving, making it harder to fall from cliffs.
• Increased the stamina recovered when Pawns help you after becoming exhausted.

Shop Adjustments

• Reduced inn fees for staying at the inn in Melve, Excavation Site, Nameless Village, Borderwatch Outpost, Vernworth and Harve Village.
• Reduced fees for all barberie services.
• Lantern (Fueled) price changed from 1000 G to 800 G.
• Ferrystone price in Normal Mode changed from 10000 G to 5000 G.
• Ferrystone sale price changed from 99 G to 900 G.

Text/Tutorial Display Adjustments

• Replaced Monotype Fonts
• The loading screen has been changed to show tips instead of quest progress.
• The tutorial for loading from an autosave has been adjusted to reflect the changes to the loss gauge.
• Added a tutorial explaining the "!" symbol that displays on the minimap.

Other Adjustments

• Adjusted the camera angle when approaching a pre-existing Portcrystal.
• Adjusted the quality of the camera angle when returning from a zoomed view.
• Added the Hollow Cape to the product lineup at Celeste's Smithy in Checkpoint Rest Town.

◆ Bug Fixes

Vocations

【Mage】

• Fixed a bug where the Arisen's position would slightly move if no input was entered after drawing their sword.

【Sorcerer】

• Fixed a bug where Prescient Flare would not affix to enemies in certain areas of the Tomb of Ku'Myage.

【Trickster】

• Fixed a bug where the effect of the ability Enlightenment would activate without it being equipped.

Pawns

• Fixed a bug where the Arisen and allied pawns would be afflicted with debilitations when hit by an unhired pawn's elemental weapon.
• Fixed a bug where a pawn's appearance would become unnatural when moving.
• Fixed a bug where a different pawn would speak when a pawn saves the Arisen from falling.
• Fixed a bug where a pawn would guide the Arisen to the Rocky Lair as if it was undiscovered, even though it had been fully explored.
• Fixed a bug where after the pawn Luksa was summoned in the Riftstone, Luksa would not disappear even when searching for pawns under different conditions and it would become impossible to interact with them.
• Fixed a bug where pawn commands would flash rapidly and pawns would not respond.
• Fixed a bug where pawns would sometimes not dash when far from the Arisen.
• Fixed a bug where a pawn would stop guiding the Arisen towards a quest immediately after they started.
• Fixed a bug where the "!" symbol that appears after a pawn discovers a movable boulder would remain on the map, even if the boulder has moved.
• Fixed a bug where the "!" symbol that appears after a pawn discovers a treasure chest would remain on the map, even after the chest was opened.
• Fixed a bug where pawns would not use Barrage Shot towards small enemies.

NPCs

• Fixed a bug where NPCs would enter your private dwelling in Bakbattahl.
• Fixed a bug where some NPCs would not be registered in the NPC Logbook.
• Fixed a bug where NPC voices would not stop when they die.
• Fixed a bug where NPCs that died during a quest would be revived after waiting 999 days in game.
• Fixed a bug where you could buy the Saurian Tail from Emerich even if you did not have the required amount of gold.

Enemies

• Fixed a bug where an enemy's appearance would become unnatural when held in place by Forbeding Bolt.

【Goblin/Hobgoblin/Chopper/Knacker】

• Fixed a bug where the hit effect would display incorrectly when the Arisen was hit by a burning club or torch.

【Harpy/Venin Harpy/Gore Harpy/Succubus】

• Fixed a bug where the Arisen's behavior would become abnormal when airborne near a wall's surface.

【Ooze】

• Fixed a bug where pawns were unable to avoid explosions.

【Undead/Fat Undead】

• Fixed a bug where enemies would not flinch after a Fighter successfully used the ability Deflect or True Deflect.

【Phantom/Phantasm/Specter】

• Fixed a bug where the simulacrum's behavior would become abnormal after it possesses a foe.

【Cyclops】

• Fixed a bug where unintended behavior would occur when startled while laying down.
• Fixed a bug where damage was not taken when recovering from a downed state.

【Minotaur/Goreminotaur】

• Fixed a bug where damage taken was greatly increased if hit with Counter Slash or Tidal Fury while charging.
• Fixed a bug where the enemy would continue to exist in a transparent state when destroyed while petrified.

【Goreminotaur】

• Fixed a bug where the enemy would repeat the same actions after certain conditions were met.

【Skeleton Lord】

• Fixed a bug where the enemy would attack skeletons and other unintended beings.

【Lich/Wight】

• Fixed a bug where enemies could attack for a period of time after death.

【Dullahan】

• Fixed a bug where damage was not taken for a period of time after a grab attack.
• Fixed a bug where the target being grabbed was not blown away at the end of a grab attack.
• Fixed a bug where the Thief's Easy Kill counter did not work and damage was taken when used.
• Fixed a bug where the Arisen's actions became abnormal when countering an attack with Warrior's Tidal Fury.
• Fixed a bug where the background music did not transition as intended when the battle situation changed.

【Drake】

• Fixed a bug where magic attacks were generated embedded in the ground.
• Fixed a bug that caused an unnatural appearance after dying while only the chest is glowing.
• Fixed a bug where death lines sometimes played when drakes aren't around.
• Fixed a bug where destroyed body parts sometimes reverted back to their pre-destroyed state.

【Drake/Lesser Dragon】

• Fixed a bug where destroyed body parts sometimes reverted back to their pre-destroyed state.

【Medusa】

• Fixed a bug where, at low frame rates, if the enemy was caused to flinch during a specific attack, they would be unable to move afterwards.

Quests

• Fixed a bug in the quest Nesting Troubles where Lennart would sometimes be inflicted with the blighted debilitation.
• Fixed a bug in the quest Monster Culling where the wagon would disappear when approaching the location of the soldiers near the Nameless Village.
• Fixed a bug in the quest The Caged Magistrate where the Arisen would unintentionally move to a different location when using a Sealing Phial.
• Fixed a bug in the quest Saint of the Slums where Elena would be outside her cell after being imprisoned.
• Fixed a bug in the quest Hunt for the Jadeite Orb where Offulve wouldn't disappear when progressing along a certain route.
• Fixed a bug in the quest The Guardian Gigantus, where if the player were to approach the bridge just as the Talos destroyed it, the Talos would still throw a spear towards the bridge during the resulting cutscene.
• Fixed a bug in the quest The Guardian Gigantus where if the Talos was petrified right after destroying the bridge, a cutscene would play as if the Talos was still alive.
• Fixed a bug in the quest The Guardian Gigantus where progressing to the location where the scene changes at the same time the Talos throws the spear resulted in multiple instances of abnormal behavior.
• Fixed a bug in the quest A Scholarly Pursuit where, when getting close to the Battahl Purgener, the Arisen's appearance and hitbox were misaligned.

Gimmicks

• Fixed a bug where fragments would spawn at their original location when destroying rolling rocks.
• Fixed a bug where the game would crash when re-spawning rolling boulders after they were destroyed.

Equipment

• Fixed a bug where the character's neck was sticking out when wearing Creedbound Armor.
• Fixed a bug where, when wearing Monarch's Crown, the part that covers the neck would disappear after using a ferrystone.
• Fixed a bug where body hair was poking through when wearing Robe of the Enlightened.
• Fixed a bug where protrusions appear to stick out of the ring part of the Tribal Brace armor.
• Fixed a bug where shields were not sorted properly when sorting by strength.
• Fixed a bug where only the armor spikes remained when equipping cloak-type equipment while wearing Intrepid Scalecoat.

Display

• Fixed a bug where rain entered certain buildings.
• Fixed a bug where wounds were not displayed when attacking an enemy.
• Fixed a bug where lanterns would flicker constantly despite being filled with oil.
• Fixed a bug where the model for Panacea would differ from that on the field.

UI

• Fixed a bug where some riftstone names differed between the one displayed on the map and the one displayed in the rift.

Sound

• Fixed a bug where, when equipped with a bow, the quiver sound effect would continue to play even after changing weapons.

Other

• Fixed a bug where the game would crash during processing.
• Fixed a bug where falling into water in some places would not result in the activation of The Brine, allowing the player to move along the bottom of the water.
• Fixed a bug where approaching the Riverside Cavern would trigger a map transition and dialogue as if the pawns had entered the cavern, despite not actually being inside.
• Fixed a bug where selecting certain head options in the Character Creator would result in the appearance of holes beneath the eyes.
• Fixed a bug where items could not be obtained by performing the Investigate action after defeating enemies, and subsequently prevented further Investigate attempts.
• Fixed a bug where certain facial animations did not play in some cutscenes.
• Fixed a bug where obtaining multiple items simultaneously from a treasure chest while inventory space was insufficient would result in some items being unobtainable.

If ever I needed the nudge to rethink my rig's cooling set-up, a heatwave in the mostly AC-less UK would do it. Earlier this month, I admit I had the thought, "Is that smell coming from my PC and, if so, why does it smell of bacon?" So when Phanteks rocks up with an unconventional-looking case that rethinks airflow, you can consider me intrigued.

I'm a little late to the party on Phanteks' EX series of modular PC cases; these were first unveiled during Computex earlier this month, though obviously I was too distracted by the Sanrio cases also on the showfloor. Thankfully, a deep-dive by heavyweight hardware creator Der8auer has informed me that there is another way to do modern case design beyond the ubiquitous fish tank look.

The Phanteks EX isn't just notable for its compartmentalised design—cordoning off the GPU into its own little apartment and generally looking like a sci-fi block of flats—but also for how it handles airflow. The most affordable model, the Phanteks EX5, costs $110 and requires you to source your own cooler, but every other model comes with a side-mounted cooling system included.

This design helps the AIO to direct fresh, non-recirculated air squarely (cuboid-ly?) at your hottest components, such as a toasty GPU. This directed airflow makes for greater thermal efficiency and also means you won't need to fill your case up with additional fans.

Phanteks EX6 Max is the most expensive model in the lineup. Costing $330, it takes cooling efficiency even further. Rather than detachable windows of tempered glass, the EX6 Max's compartments enjoy opaque aluminium instead. It also comes with a rubber gasket for your GPU, essentially sealing off the top of your graphics card's chambers from the bottom and minimising the risk of hot air recirculating.

This premium model also comes decked out with high-performance X30 fans, its own special AIO liquid cooler, and even a 10-inch LCD display right there in the case. A further flourish is that its RGB light strips can be configured to keep track of your GPU temps, illuminating more of the strip the hotter your graphics card gets.

Obviously, going from the more affordable Phanteks EX5 to the $330 EX6 Max is quite a jump, so there are a few tiers in between. So, the EX5 Plus includes a custom cooler, plus tubing management for $160, whereas the EX5 Max includes the cooler and the tubing management, while also throwing in a 6-inch LCD display for $230. According to TechPowerUp, you won't have to wait long to get your hands on this sci-fi tower block PC case; the EX5 case is expected to drop in August, while the EX6 cases should show up sometime in September.

The memory crisis has fundamentally changed how we approach memory and storage. It has made consumers adjust expectations about how much capacity they can get, and for what cost, and for companies like Biwin, it has meant having to purchase billions worth of NAND flash memory years in advance just to make sure it has a good supply.

Biwin is in a funny place, being a DRAM kit and SSD manufacturer. Even though the increased demand means it can almost guarantee selling all of its stock, it too will be hit by the supply crisis when it comes to securing precious memory chips. Biwin does not produce its own NAND flash memory, but it does need it for its products.

As reported by Tom's Hardware, it has signed a two-year deal to give $1.86 billion to an unnamed NAND supplier in exchange for an agreed volume of chips.

That supply will start flowing as of June 30, 2026. Both the pricing and quantity are fixed, which means if the price goes up over time, it's not paying a variable spot price. It's potentially a smart move from Biwin, but if the price happens to go down, then it would be overpaying for that stock.

As noted by Tom's Hardware, that $1.86 billion figure is more than half of Biwin's annual revenue. That is both a testament to how big its revenue now is, due to the memory crisis, and a sign of how big that commitment is.

Chances are, this long-term deal will be beneficial for Biwin as there's no sign of the memory crisis stopping soon. AMD's global vice president and general manager of the client channel business, David McAfee, recently told us that he hopes it ends in the next few years. He noted that the big three memory manufacturers— Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix—are all working on increasing production.

We were told, "I think we'll start to see by the end of next year and into 2028 that that ramp really starts to take hold, and then it's just a factor of the forces of supply and demand, and how that affects memory prices."

However, SK hynix and Samsung are both trying to minimise risk by not ramping up production too hard, just in case demand drops suddenly (*cough* AI bubble popping *cough*). Still, the commitment to at least two years of NAND at such a high figure is a sign that Biwin likely thinks the memory crisis isn't ending in at least the next two years, and that seems to be a common thought among manufacturers right now.

Videogame analyst Matthew Ball predicted in his "State of Videogaming in 2026" report released earlier this year that in-game ad placements will become more common in PC and console games and services in the future, as they're a largely untapped source of revenue—income the industry needs and is increasingly struggling to find. Now he's the newly-hired chief strategy officer for Xbox, and in an interview with The Game Business, he says he hasn't changed his mind.

Ball said the issue is a "two-sided problem": The cost of making games keeps going up, particularly on the big-budget side of the street where Microsoft lives, and so is the cost of the hardware on which those games are played. All of that ultimately lands in the lap of consumers, who are eventually forced to reduce or stop spending money on games—and that's bad for the game companies in turn, because without consumer spending, growth stops, and growth is the core pillar of the economic system we've decided is best.

The solution, then, at least for this particular aspect of what is actually a very big and broad problem, is to figure out some way to keep people coming through the door (lower prices) without cutting into the monthly take (the consequence of lower prices). Thus, ads.

"I think the best evidence comes from the [TV] streaming space," Ball said. "In excess of 100% of net adds in the United States for years and years have been on the ad-supported tier. That has not excluded anyone from ad-free experiences. Those products are still there. They’re still popular.

"The question is not can we cram ads in everything. The question is, are there opportunities that allow the people who can't afford, or wouldn't try, to have an onboard to our properties and franchises?"

A recent Comscore report supports Ball's claim. Simply put, Netflix is embracing lower-priced ad-support subscription tiers because that's where the growth is: 45% of the service's "total household viewing hours" came from the ad-supported tier in 2025. And it's not unique to Netflix, as "total hours watched across major free ad supported streaming services grew by 43 percent year-over-year."

Whether or not it will actually happen (although I think the real question at this point is, how soon will it happen?), Ball cannot say: He's the chief strategy officer for Xbox so it seems like the kind of thing that would be right up his alley, but he said he's not privy to Microsoft's monetization plans. He does think it's a good idea, though, and not just for Xbox, but for gamers as a whole.

"[His interest] is coming from that perspective of how do we reach more people? How do we keep our products affordable? How do we make sure that we can continue to fund outstanding work from our development teams?" Ball said. "That’s the goal. It’s not about placing an ad in front of someone so that we can sell, you know, a pizza."

Finding the Astro Toy photo challenge location this week in Forza Horizon 6 is much easier than the Tokyo Tower or Edogawa Baseball Stadium, so long as you've done some exploring. That said, finding the Irokawa Space Centre isn't the biggest hurdle. That would be figuring out what a Track Toy is.

Below, I'll explain exactly where you need to go so that you can get back to racing and other Festival Playlist challenges.

Forza Horizon 6 Astro Toy photo challenge explained

This week, you need to take a photo of a Track Toy at the Irokawa Space Centre in the southeast of the Nangan region, at the southern tip of the map. It's just down the road from the Launch Control wristband event that unlocks the purple wristband, as well as the Irokawa Circuit road race and Nangan Cross-Country Circuit.

Unlike the hint suggests, you don't necessarily need to snap a photo of the rocket at the centre of the space facility. Instead, you need to take a photo of a Track Toy, which is a type of car. This includes vehicles like the BAC Mono, a Chevrolet Camaro or Corvette, or a Nissan GT-R NISMO. I recommend filtering your garage (or the Autoshow, if you need to buy one) by Track Toys.

Like previous photo challenges, you'll receive three Festival Playlist points upon completion, which puts you one step closer to Spring's Festival Playlist rewards—the 1996 Toyota Starlet Glanza V and the 1974 Toyota Corolla SR5. You'll also get the "Beam me up!" Forza Link, which is basically meaningless to most players, I'd imagine.

Any news on the current global memory crisis probably seems like a stuck record right now, but SK hynix reckons it has some good news for us: Its plans for constructing new chip factories have managed to shave ten years off the projected completion date. The only problem is that it's only brought it to 2034.

Talking to Nikkei Asia (via Computerbase), SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won explained that the construction of four new facilities had been originally expected to finish by 2045, but that it has now managed to bring that date closer to home, with the current target now being 2034.

However, Chey shot down any hopes you might have of it being done even sooner, saying, "There is currently no way to move faster than this."

But to counter that disappointment, he also claimed that with everything all up and running, production levels would be even better. "Since we're proceeding with the plan to expand as much as possible, our calculations show that our wafer capacity will double within five years. But honestly, once all these facilities are built, it won't just double, it will triple by around 2034".

There's no denying that this is good news as far as the long-term is concerned, but it means absolutely nothing for the current memory crisis, where the demand for DRAM and NAND flash outweighs supply so much that memory prices have quadrupled since this time last year.

One could also argue that the construction and output update from SK hynix could make the present situation worse, because if the world's second-largest memory chip manufacturer isn't able to ramp up its output any time soon, the demands from AI companies are likely to take up even more of its limited production capacity.

Prices for DDR4/5 kits and SSDs have been relatively stable for the past month or so, but with vendors already warning of further increases, which strongly suggests that this is indeed what's going to happen. All we can do is look after our hardware as best as possible, and hope it lasts long enough for a replacement or upgrade to become affordable again.

Either that or set up a second retirement fund, just for a 1 TB SSD.

EVE Frontier is a weird game. It's had an uphill battle winning goodwill from EVE Online's infamously dedicated community, running into a refrain of, "Why should I play this crypto spinoff thing?" It's gone through traditionally closed, often unsightly stages of early development in full public view, with players offering feedback along the way.

It has justified its blockchain integration, to my eye, by repeatedly demonstrating a freeform, server-side modding system unlike anything I've seen in an MMO⁠—or really any game⁠—and it's stuck with the controversial tech base well after the early 2020s crypto gaming gold rush ended⁠.

At this year's EVE Fanfest, I spoke to members of the dev team and tried Frontier's new gamepad support for myself. Promises that were once cool but abstract are starting to crystalize into a hardcore space sim I can see myself playing. Frontier is a game that promises to combine the emergent economy of EVE, the sense of exploration in No Man's Sky or Elite, and two things I've never seen before: The aforementioned server-side modding at runtime, and a Rust-like survival experience that trades tree punching and bedrolls for asteroid mining and space stations.

Fragging out

My latest hands-on was night and day from my experience almost exactly a year prior: Frontier was built on the same Carbon engine as EVE Online, and until recently had similarly zoomed-out, mouse, menu, and hotkey-centric gameplay. This was a two-pronged problem, as Frontier needed to differentiate itself from what EVE fans already had and also make itself more approachable for new players.

Even as a lover of crusty old CRPGs with way too many stats and classes, the first build of Frontier I tried was tough to get my arms around. Luckily, it's a problem the dev team was aware of. "Let's go back a year ago. Get into the game, so you think [you'll press] Q or W or something, right? And nothing happens," Frontier product manager Scott McCabe told me. "You're like, 'Okay, so how do I move?' There's a disconnect, so it's about making the thing more natural."

Fenris Creations (formerly CCP) had demo stations set up on the Fanfest show floor, and the Frontier team was offering a combat arena slice of the game, with show goers trying to frag each other on a 10-minute timer. On two runs through, I think I scored three kills total⁠—the record on the floor was four in a single run, to give you an idea of the slow time to kill⁠—and it's shocking how good of a space shooter it was given Frontier's origins as an RTS-scale MMO.

It was slow⁠—not in a bad way, but weighty and chunky like a survival horror game. McCabe stressed that they weren't trying to make a zippy starfighter sim, but rather a big boys-only experience, one where the smallest vessels you could use were corvette-scale.

The free-for-all took place among debris and ruins in a moody nebula, and the close-in perspective gave me a new appreciation for Frontier's art direction and sound design. The thrum of your ship and the distant sound of fire being exchanged were substantial but muffled, like being underwater.

Meanwhile, there's been so much focus on Frontier's tech backend and emergent possibilities that it's easy to overlook the game's striking look. It's the sleek cyberpunk of EVE Online crossed with something ancient and unknowable: Ziggurats in space and disturbing, mega-scale statuary emerging out of nebulae like the dusty ruins of Las Vegas in Blade Runner: 2049. Even the UI is memorable, boasting a minimalist, retro computing vibe that reminds me of Bungie's Marathon.

In a major departure from EVE Online, Frontier now offers both manual aiming and auto-targeting weapon systems, with the choice between the two being a balance and player preference question: Big, meaty skillshots, or reliable slow-burn auto targeting? I had one weapon system of each type in the demo, but I relied more on the skillshots. "This is a pretty huge departure, obviously, from EVE Online," said Fenris community developer Ben Sisson. "EVE Online is much more like a MOBA in that way, where you just sort of select the target, you press the button, and it'll auto-target."

There was this great tension to chasing down opposing players, missing a shot as they banked and flew behind me, then having to slowly bring my ship around for another volley. Sisson described what they were going for as "like World of Warships in space."

At this stage, the main thing I found missing was feedback: The UI was still very much a fit for a mouse, keyboard, and desktop monitor that I found hard to parse on a big TV, and my FPS-loving brain yearned for clearer indications of weapon cooldowns, enemy health, and when I'd successfully scored a hit⁠—even the vulgar pft pft of CoD hit markers would have been welcome. But I very much got the vision of tense, ponderous submarine duels in space, I'd gladly play again, and Frontier's devs say it's just the beginning.

Future perfect

One thing that really intrigues me is where Frontier is going with those megastructures, the ziggurats in space. The team is treating them less like the highly-crafted dungeons in other MMOs, and more like the ones in the Elder Scrolls: They're desolate points of interest that can surprise you while you're scanning a system or on your way from one place to another. In a hands-off demo, I was shown gameplay exploring one such megastructure, turning Frontier into something more resembling a six degrees of freedom shooter like Descent.

"Environments have to be the focus," said Sisson, "And have had to be the focus for a while, especially interior spaces. It's cool just to go through space, and that's awesome, but a lot of games do that." He explained that very few space games do the same sort of seamless interior/exterior transitions as Frontier because the scale is so daunting.

"A lot of the things that are going on, though, are about the camera and not the ship," Frontier development director David Bowman explained regarding refinement of the driving controls. "We can easily get the ship to be physics-accurate and modeled, but the camera is your way of perceiving that. We want to make sure that you stay comfortable, that you stay in control, and that you don't get the 360 blur of which way is up. It's more about the camera than it is about the ship."

Moving forward, Fenris wants to bring more active gameplay like the skill shots to other areas of Frontier, such as mining⁠. McCabe and Sisson described slicing up asteroids with mining lasers rather than the "set it and forget it" process currently in the game, for example.

Frontier has already made the process of scanning systems more active and engaging. In the hands-off demo, I was shown a massive, manual-aimed scanning cone that could tell a player everything in its confines⁠—incredibly powerful in a game that emphasizes exploration, surprise, and asymmetric information⁠—but it would also effectively broadcast your position for a significant distance both in front of, and behind you.

"If you need information quickly, you're going to want to ping the sonar, you're going to want to actively scan for something, but as soon as a submarine pings its sonar, everybody knows it's there," said McCabe. "We talk about the idea of every pulse, essentially, as a beacon, and every sweep being an announcement. Get information, but the tradeoff is you broadcast your presence."

If you'd like to get your hands on EVE Frontier and follow its development firsthand, Fenris Creations continues to offer founder access to the game on its website. But maybe wait a tick: EVE Frontier's next server wipe and major update, Cycle 6: Sanctuary, is set to go live on June 25.

After taking last week off, the Treasure Hunt challenge is back on the menu in Forza Horizon 6's Spring Series 1 update. This week, we've got to find the Tokyo City Treasure Hunt, which is the hardest one yet.

The hint you're given is of the shipping yard in the city, with tons of containers and facilities on the ground below. But it's hard to figure out what direction the photo was taken from, which makes it difficult to pinpoint the location. Don't worry, I'll explain exactly where to go to find the Treasure Chest this week.

Forza Horizon 6 Tokyo City Treasure Hunt location

The Festival Playlist's Treasure Hunt chest this week is in Tokyo City, on a warehouse roof in the docks to the far east of the region. It's not far from the Pier Pressure wristband event—in fact, you can see part of the course in the background of the photo clue. You'll need a fast, powerful car to reach it, though:

1. Head to the west side of the docks, near the large warehouses overlooking the shipping containers—you'll see the red pylons from the photo clue.
2. Drive up the ramp on the northernmost Tomitama warehouse.
3. Jump across the gap to the other warehouse and drive up to the rooftop.
4. Use the ramp on the roof to jump back across to the roof of the Tomitama warehouse.
5. Drop off the ledge on your right, onto a platform where you'll see the festival chest—it's above the first ramp you took.
6. Crash into the Treasure Hunt chest there to smash it, completing the challenge.

Like previous Treasure Hunt challenges, you'll receive three Festival Playlist points and 100,000 credits for your trouble. Can't argue with that for only a short detour.

As for what those Festival Points go towards, this week, you can unlock the 1996 Toyota Starlet Glanza V and the 1974 Toyota Corolla SR5. You'll also be closer towards the 60 and 120 point milestones with the 2008 Mazda Furai and 2010 Nissan 370Z respectively.

This is the last update of Series 1, though there's a good chance that there'll be more Treasure Hunts popping up regularly during Season 2 as well.

I didn't really like Palworld all that much—granted, survival and crafting games are hit-or-miss subjects with me, but I also just couldn't quite get past the whole 'isn't it funny how your little critters get depressed if you put them on the assembly line for too long' thing. Witchspire solves those problems, then, by being altogether charming and lovely with much the same gameplay loop.

Released into early access this week, Witchspire's core loop is as follows: You are a witch who has arrived into a mysterious land, there are familiars there, you have a wand. You are tasked with tracking down your fellow arcane alumni, building a base, and chopping trees—just, a whole lot of trees.

You're also able to capture and tame familiars, too. This happens mostly at random, with slain familiars dropping orbs that'll sometimes let you attune to them—though you can find or make items that increase the odds of this happening.

Familiars serve as either combat pets, or you can assign them static positions around your hearth—your base of operations. For example, I have a little rock guy sat on my workbench that makes all of my crafting faster.

The real advantage Witchspire has going for it, though, is the magic theming of it all. Instead of finding various gats lying around, you find wands, swords, and magic spells—each with their own unique properties and cast spells, bound to your left and right mouse button. Combat with these things feels nice and fluid, thanks to a nippy dodge and just a whole bunch of double-jumps the game outfits you with.

This extends to the tools, too. It's just a reskin, sure, but there's something imminently more satisfying about flicking a wand and firing a bunch of specialised wind blades to cut a tree into chunks, rather than doing the same-old axe whacking I'm used to in every survival crafter ever.

The building elements aren't half-bad, either. You're able to gridlessly clip things to your heart's content for the most part, with a snapping option to make getting the foundations of your witch hut actually feasible.

This is buoyed mostly by the exploration, which rewards you with lots of little chests, mini-puzzles, and experience points to funnel into your Luminaries skill tree—a somewhat linear progression path that nonetheless makes poking your head around the world feel rewarding.

Early access is as early access does, however—there are some quality of life features that are clearly absent. For instance, there's no way to look at recipes once you're out and about in the world, or bookmark things you might want to craft. Hot-swapping to consumables mid-combat also feels a little clunky, though that can be somewhat jury-rigged with keybinds.

But for its first debut? Witchspire's a deeply warming and welcoming bath to sink into if you like to collect little critters, pick up lots of crafting materials, find little chests, so on and so forth. I can very much see the scope of the game widening as developer Envar games layers more systems on top of its comfortable foundation.

If I really sit down and think about it—put my thinking cap on and plumb the depths of my feelings—I can only conclude that 80 Days is one of my favourite games ever made. Top five, for sure. Top three even, maybe. Inkle's adaptation of Phileas Fogg's globetrotting gamble is a dang masterpiece full of adventure, intrigue, 19th-century homosociality, and moustache grooming.

I tell you this because you can pick it up, right now, as part of Humble's Complete Inkle Library bundle. For $12 (£11), you can nab, well, the complete Inkle library. That means you get:

• TR-49
• Expelled
• A Highland Song
• Heaven's Vault
• Sorcery Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4
• 80 Days
• Overboard!
• Pendragon

For $9 (£8), you can get all that minus TR-49, Expelled, and A Highland Song, while $20 (£18) gets you the lot plus four Heaven's Vault books. If you're into, you know, reading.

It's very worth it, if you ask me. Like I said, 80 Days is a personal all-timer, but Overboard—which tasks you with covering up a mariticide while you're on a cruise—is a fantastic time too. Heaven's Vault also has its stalwart fans on the PCG staff (I've not gotten around to it yet), and our Heaven's Vault review scored it 88% and praised it for doing "a beautiful job of letting you unlock a language, and thus a dialogue of sorts, with the past, via a wonderfully engaging protagonist."

TR-49 is Inkle's most recent game, and we loved that too. "Inkle builds a weirdo computer for the ages, then lets you use it to solve a beautifully-written mystery. Outstanding," wrote Abbie Stone in our TR-49 review.

If you love a dense, intricate, and reactive narrative? It feels like a no-brainer to me. The only game in there that doesn't quite hit is Pendragon, and we still called that "An accessible strategy game tied to a powerful, dynamic story generator." Say hi to Phileas for me.

AI is ruining everything, right? The economy, air quality, and computing as a whole have all felt the impact of the exponential growth in data centers for machine learning. However, there's one little hardware AI project that proves bigger isn't always better, and even shows a possible way out of the current memory crisis.

It's called CrankGPT by Squeez Labs (via Hackaday) and the gist of it is simple: Have a little microcomputer run a tiny local model for AI voice assistance, then stick it in a box and power the whole thing with a hand crank. No massive power station, no endless racks of GPUs, no DRAM-destroying demands.

The computer in question is powered by a standard 8 GB Raspberry Pi and pretty much nothing else. It handles the voice recognition node, the local LLM (large language model), and the text-to-speech stuff. CrankGPT's creators built their own edge voice agent to process the complete algorithm (i.e. voice input > LLM stage > text-to-voice output).

There's a brief demo of CrankGPT in action at the bottom of the webpage for the project, and it seems to work pretty well. Of course, there are strict limitations as to what it can do, as the Raspberry Pi 5 isn't exactly designed to be an inference powerhouse. It also takes roughly 30 seconds of cranking for the system to boot and be ready for any input, too.

What interests me most about CrankGPT is the fact that, as a proof of concept, it shows that edge AI has a clear future ahead of it. Being entirely offline and with a local LLM, it's unmatched for privacy, but I reckon there's something more significant here. The hardware required for this is extremely light: just a little processor, 8 GB of LPDDR4X, and a small SD card to host the OS and required data.

Video credit: Squeez Labs

AI training is always going to be done via hulking data centers, but ChatGPT shows that you don't need the same for small-scale inference. If a hand-powered box can do it, then so can a basic laptop, phone, or even a watch. This hardware already exists on a vast scale across the world; all that's needed are the right AI models and agents to make it all work as intended.

Should inference truly head off in that direction, it could significantly lessen the rampant demand for the kind of DRAM and NAND flash used in massive AI machines, and thus help bring an end to the current memory crisis.

With hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI training and inference, though, there's not much impetus for the industry to scale things right back and target the hardware that we already have. But wholesale change rarely happens overnight; all that's needed is for someone to show the way forward, and that's what CrankGPT has done.

The latest market data from research outfit Jon Peddie shows that the volume of PC graphics cards shipped in the first quarter of this year actually held up pretty well, despite the broader chip crisis. But AMD is basically flat lining, stuck at well under 10% of the market, albeit with caveats attached to the quality of JPR's data.

According to JPR, 11.82 million PC graphics cards shipped in the first quarter of 2026. Note, that's shipped, not sold, there's an important difference which we'll come to in a moment. But that's only very slightly down on the 11.9 million units JPR estimates for the last quarter of 2025.

However, it's well up on the 9.2 million units the research outfit has inked in for Q1 2025. Year-on-year, then, things are looking pretty healthy for PC graphics. Or are they?

As 3D Center points out, "it's important to note that these figures represent shipments to graphics card manufacturers, not shipments to retailers or their sales figures. Therefore, this result could be partly due to graphics card manufacturers stockpiling in anticipation of the memory shortage (they wanted to quickly buy up supplies at a lower price)."

In other words, we'll have to see what the data looks like over the next few quarters to be sure. Meanwhile, what of AMD's ongoing struggle to make a dent in Nvidia's market domination?

Here, the news isn't great, though there's a pretty major caveat. JPR puts AMD at a mere 8% market share in these latest figures, or exactly the same as the previous quarter.

However, when JPR originally released its Q4 2025 figures, it had AMD down for just 5% of the market. For this latest release, AMD's Q4 numbers were revised, adding an extra 400,000 GPU shipments to its tally for the quarter and thus taking AMD to 8% and a total of one million units in the updated figures.

That's a pretty huge revision for AMD's numbers and does somewhat undermine the overall credibility of JPR's data. The company has form when it comes to data errors. Like the time when it wrongly included a load of Intel data centre chips as gaming GPUs and thus implausibly decided that Intel was matching AMD for GPU market share.

When JPR originally released its Q4 2025 data, there was some scepticism. Some observers pointed out that AMD earned $843 million in gaming revenue or 22% of Nvidia's reported $3.7 billion in gaming revenue in that quarter. Moreover, AMD graphics card don't extend across the whole market and it's extremely likely that the average selling price of an AMD GPU is much lower than that of an Nvidia GPU.

With all that in mind, the conclusion is that it is very hard to imagine AMD achieving 22% revenue share with just 5% unit sales of the PC graphics market. The confusing factor here is that AMD and Nvidia's "gaming" revenues also including console chip sales. And there, AMD has both Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox, while Nvidia is essentially limited to Nintendo Switch sales.

Anywho, make of it all what you will. As it stands, it looks like the PC graphics card market is probably doing OK despite RAM and SSD prices getting silly. But we'll have to wait and see how things pan out later in the year before we can assume everything is going to keep on being dandy.

In the midst of the AI feeding frenzy, have you ever looked upon the fluctuating stock charts of big tech's major players and thought, "Yo, I bet that would be a sick dirt bike track,"? Really, just me?

Well, I know for a fact this is not a wholly original brain wave as StonkRider exists. Made by someone going by the handle 'Oops I Deployed' (you can support the creator via Ko-Fi), it's a very simple browser-based game. Just search for your company of choice, and ride the track.

Naturally, I had to take a look at the swift peaks of Nvidia's stock chart first. But, let's be real, it's kind of a boring hill climb right now (dining well on the AI industry, to the tune of a $5 trillion market capitalisation will do that, I guess). It's not a dissimilar story for AMD's track—I mean, stock chart. Then, our Dave suggested I'd perhaps have more fun with the highs and lows of another company's stock chart.

Intel's stock chart between 2021 and now is bumpy to say the least, with a recent spike I was not sure how I was going to navigate. Thankfully, Stonkrider's slightly twitchy controls don't go full QWOP, and are easy enough to grasp. You accelerate with the up arrow key, jump with the space bar, and adjust your trajectory by lifting your front or back wheel on the left and right arrow keys.

Did I get a great score while touring Intel's stock chart? Nah. You can easily beat me by making better use of the rudimentary trick system. Lobbing yourself off a peak will get you 'Big Air' and maybe even a 'Superman,' though you can also do mid-air flips too. If your wee stick man rider's head makes contact with the stock line, you'll be set back a few paces so it helps to be ever so slightly careful if you want to score a good track time. Summitting Intel's peak took me way longer than I'd like.

It's a neat little distraction from, well, the state of everything and, judging by the number of rides completed, 5,300+ folks would agree with me. I'm trying to ignore the fact that more than $22 million have been traded since the project went live, though.

So, If you're looking for similar browser-based distractions, may I suggest this very simplistic FPS with photo-real graphics? Failing that, now is as good a time as any to get into Fallen London, I'd say, or indeed any of the other best browser games out there.

I'm not really a Call of Duty player for the most part. Sure, I've played the hits like anyone who enjoys a good shooter, and have fond memories of the first, second, and third, plus the Modern Warfare games and the original Black Ops, but besides those, modern CoD has mostly alienated me. Or at least it did until 2022 when I found myself putting hundreds of hours into a new Warzone mode: DMZ.

To this day, I genuinely think DMZ is one of the most underrated extraction shooters around, plus one of the best things modern Call of Duty has ever produced. It's not necessarily for the hardcore crowd, but for those who prefer more PvE-centric play. Back before DMZ, I felt alienated by the genre. I personally love extraction shooters like Hunt: Showdown—it's a fantastic concept, but for me its world and setting (which I wanted to explore) were hampered by the fact I'd get sniped whenever I attempted to do that.

I love PvP, but more as an interlude, as a tasty little morsel of encounter that occurs between exploration and PvE. And this is one of the reasons DMZ was so good. The giant city-wide map of Al Mazrah, flush with locked buildings to explore, loot rooms to raid, vehicles, events, and even boss-type enemies felt so liberating. Sometimes you'd encounter other players, sometimes you wouldn't, but when you did, its team-based mechanics made these encounters all the better.

Not just proximity chat, but the ability to gamble on betraying your team to join another, or even recruit other teams you'd just wiped, giving you a better chance at clearing harder areas. And to clarify, I'm not talking about an unofficial alliance Marathon-style, you could literally join other teams to tackle harder content. Stuff like the Koschei Complex—an entire indoor mode with loot vaults and bosses you could only matchmake for in Al Mazrah itself.

Building 21 was a fantastic concept, too, channeling many of the same ideas as Marathon's Cryo Archive years before. To enter this hardcore mode, you required a special keycard loot item you could only find in Al Mazrah, which would give you a single run when the mode was periodically active. This was a great way to incentivise players to bring their best gear, especially as the building was filled with puzzles, dangerous enemies, valuable loot, and bosses like the grenade launcher-wielding Velikan.

Defeating him was the only way to get this extremely powerful gun in DMZ and my proudest moment in the mode might be when I managed to kill him and snatch it. All of this is to say, DMZ was filled with really smart ideas, and for me, it was my Arc Raiders before Arc Raiders.

Sure, it wasn't perfect, and sometimes a match would devolve into teams of six riding around ganking everyone in sight. DMZ has also progressively gotten more sweaty since its release (as shooters generally do), but especially after Activision stopped supporting the mode in 2023. That's why I'm excited for a fresh start. As you've probably seen, DMZ 2.0 is set to arrive with Modern Warfare 4, and not as a beta like the previous iteration, but a fully-fledged mode.

You can watch the reveal trailer above, plus a developer deep dive on the COD Podcast where they discuss DMZ 2.0's development, but it sounds pretty great. There's a new stealth system, dynamic weather, the option to bring vehicles into the mode, but the biggest green flag for me is that they're talking about accessibility and accommodating all the different player experiences they observed in the original DMZ.

There are also new deployment options that allow you to matchmake with people who want to do similar stuff, avoiding that classic DMZ experience of one player running off in a completely different direction. The story missions also sound much cooler. No more picking up three bandages and exfiling—one of the missions they describe involves robbing a casino vault.

Perhaps my favorite addition is the "star system", an almost GTA-style escalation as you're discovered and continue to loudly kill enemies. The higher your stars, the more enemies will be drawn to you, including "deathstalkers" and "hunt squads" neither of which sound particularly friendly. In general, though, it sounds like DMZ 2.0 will be much more reactive towards your team's playstyle.

When I first watched the trailer, I was a little nervous that Infinity Ward was pushing the experience purely towards PvP, but from what I've read and what's been said by the developer, it genuinely seems like it's building on what makes the original DMZ such a fantastic extraction shooter. Essentially upgrading every part of the experience as it becomes a fully-fledged mode versus its beta predecessor.

Either way, if you're an Arc Raiders player who loves its PvE-focused elements, but maybe want to try your hand at a little more PvP, I think DMZ 2.0 is set to be pretty special. Especially if it manages to retain DNA of the original when it releases in October.

Neighbour shot my PC through the wall from r/pcmasterrace

It's not every day you hear about a PC incidentally saving someone's life. It's even rarer that you hear about a dog shooting a gun. Somehow, this morning on the PCMR Subreddit, one user shared their own harrowing experience, which is a horrid mix of the two.

User angelbabyzz took to the Subreddit to share a picture of their PC, with a bullet hole shot clean through their motherboard (and to add even more horror, straight through their RAM too). In the middle of the night, they were woken up by a gunshot and pieces of tempered glass hitting their face. The tempered glass side panel of their PC was now scattered all over their room having been shattered by a bullet.

Their teary-eyed neighbour came to check on them, "in a complete mess sobbing and shaking and terrified that she had hurt someone" and claiming their dog had somehow accidentally discharged her gun. That shot had passed through the wall and hit the PC in the redditor's room. "The police said that the PC changed the trajectory of the bullet," writes the OP, "and it would have hit me while I was sleeping if the PC hadn’t been there."

It reportedly took three days to clean up all of the glass, and though they are both hoping the neighbour's insurance will cover the PC, the neighbour has agreed to cover the price of the rig if not.

There's naturally a lot of scepticism in the original thread about whether the dog actually caused the discharge of the gun, with the top comment claiming it's a new version of the "dog ate my homework" excuse. Logistically, the thought of a paw somehow getting into the trigger certainly gives pause (paws?) for thought, and if the firearm is faulty enough to go off without touching the trigger, that rings even louder alarm bells. It certainly suggests the gun's safety mechanism was off or not working, either way.

The redditor says, "While I’m not sure about the dog story, it’s very clear from how she responded at the time that it was an accident. She was more messed up about it than I was and could barely speak from crying so hard and her whole body was shaking, and she just kept apologising over and over."

The redditor also claims that they feel the neighbour has paid "her dues" with a criminal charge, confiscation of her gun, the cost of replacing everything, and the constant apologies.

The redditor hopes to rebuild their PC but the memory in their machine has likely risen in price over time, so here's hoping they're still able to get a similarly powerful rig that doesn't cost the earth. But, a gun going off and through a wall with no death or injury is just short of a miracle, even if the memory crisis will make replacing the PC much harder.

Vtubers are a phenomenon that has intrigued and perplexed me over the years. Cards on the table, I do enjoy the odd Ironmouse song (I've had Cry for Me WA WA WA consistently in my rotation since it dropped), but I'm hardly an expert. The tech often intrigues me more than the personalities—and now that a YouTuber has seemingly created the best Vtuber rig ever, I think I'm about to become the anime cat girl of my dreams.

Before I start shopping for 3D artists and riggers to commission, let me back up a bit. Rather than using AI to track a body in space, DIY hardware creator Made By Dennis went all in on optical motion capture, setting out to build 'Hollywood Motion Capture from Scratch' (via Hackaday). Obviously, this technique is also heavily used in games, as you can see in the behind-the-scenes of God of War Laufey, where they did motion capture on a cube.

Actor Jack Quaid's obvious professionalism aside, Made By Dennis briefly explains how multiple cameras are used in a mocap setup to track retroreflective markers through space via a process called Triangulation. Those multiple mocap cameras are often pretty pricey, but the YouTuber ends up making their own from scratch for less than $200 each.

Made by Dennis deploys a number of DIY touches to cut costs. Each camera uses the relatively inexpensive monochrome variant of the AR0234 sensor. As these cameras are going to be paired with an infrared light ring and only used to track highly reflective white dots wiggling around in space, a monochrome sensor makes sense for capturing clean motion data. Using one of these teeny tiny sensors has the added perk of pairing well with the cheap, mass-produced lenses made for surveillance cameras. The 6.8 mm sensor, plus this lens, costs about $40 total.

The YouTuber struggled to find an appropriate board to pair with the monochrome sensor for a price that wasn't heavily marked up—so they ended up simply designing and making their own PCBs. Okay, I may need to put my Vtuber plans on hold while I go back to Design Tech class…either that or I crib from the PCB design Made by Dennis has shared via their GitHub.

These cameras are only one small part of the entire project, with Made by Dennis also going on to explain how images captured by the 16 budget cameras can then be processed into precise motion data. That's a little over my head, but Made by Dennis has also shared their own custom solution on GitHub, and they say it's 300 times faster than the leading open-source option, OpenCV.

As open source projects go, this is definitely one of the most labour-intensive builds I've seen in a bit. But considering you get an IR camera rig that captures 4 billion pixels per second at 240 fps, capable of capturing motion data with a less than 0.5 mm margin for error, I could maybe be persuaded to pick up the soldering iron (not to mention hassle my buddy with the 3D printer). Alternatively, Made By Dennis is also scoping out demand for prebuilt versions of the IR cameras via this Google Form. With tariffs and so on factored in, each individual camera would cost around $300—that would be one way to support an independent creator.