As reported by MMORPG.com, developer Jagex has announced a new MMO follow-up to RuneScape with the working title "RuneScape 4." The announcement came as part of Jagex's yearly RuneFest convention being held this weekend.

The announcement was accompanied by a brief teaser trailer showcasing the game's art style, which builds on the recently-released Dragonwilds survival game: It's like a hybrid of the latest Jagex MMO, Runescape 3, and the ascendant Old School RuneScape based on the series' 2000s heyday.

In the trailer, we see a real Dragon Quest-looking medieval town in a verdant valley under floating islands. An adventurer riding a dragon comes under attack by a three-headed dragon while a wizard watches from below. The trailer ends with the wizard welcoming a new adventurer to the city.

MMORPG.com has more details: RuneScape 4 apparently emerged out of a planned expansion for Dragonwilds. A Jagex developer said that playtesters kept asking for a more traditional, MMO take on the survival game's setting and aesthetic. Other than that, we know RuneScape 4 is being built on Unreal Engine (unclear if we're talking version 5 or the upcoming 6), and that the MMO's original, Dragonwilds expansion version was targeting release in 2027. Scaling up to being a full, new game has almost assuredly pushed that back.

If you're wondering where the "4" comes from, here's how Jagex maps RuneScape's numbered releases:

• Runescape, 2001: The Reason for the Season.
• Runescape 2, 2004: Introduced full 3D rendering. Old School is based on RS2 circa 2007.
• Runescape 3, 2013: Overhauled the art and systems, the current main fork of the game.

While Old School simply will continue⁠—the retro version of the MMO is by far Jagex's most successful game⁠—I wonder if the studio will preserve RuneScape 3 in any way with the version shift, or if RuneScape 4 will seamlessly continue character progression (like 3 did for 2). Stay tuned for more coverage from this year's RuneFest from PCG features producer Mollie Taylor, who is on the ground at the event.

It's hard to believe it's been over a decade since The Witcher 3 first released, and even harder to believe they found a way to make Geralt's tub transformation even shinier. The seminal open world RPG's hotly anticipated remaster has finally arrived, and it's pulling people back into the Continent all these years later (now more than ever on Steam, according to SteamDB).

The new screaming high is a whopping 123,359, which it just reached an hour ago as I write this. It's settling down now, but still pretty impressive given that its peak in August was just over 30,000. The game might be getting on in years, but it's still one of the best in its genre.

When PC Gamer's Shaun Prescott first reviewed it in 2015, he scored the game a mighty 92% and called it "a big, beautiful, sprawling action RPG full of rich stories, and suffused with an oppressive darkness."

It may not have been a huge stride forward for the style, instead feeling like innumerable tiny steps: a bar-setting journey through Andrzej Sapkowski's setting with all the graceful execution of an Olympic gold medalist's platform dive. "The Witcher 3 doesn’t bring much that’s bracingly new to the modern RPG. It’s a series of refinements," he wrote.

It probably helps that the remaster is free if you already own the base game, which has been a Steam sale mainstay since it released to all that universal acclaim. Even with all the new bells and whistles, it's half-off as we speak for Steam's autumn sale. If you want to dive in for the first time or start a new playthrough you'll definitely finish, check out all the mods which have gotten compatibility upgrades or read our guide on how to improve Geralt's fashion sense.

The past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. At least, this is how I explain PC Gamer of yore's selection of Metal Gear Solid 5 for Game of the Year 2015. Meaning no offence to MGS5—a game I spent several hundred hours obtaining every achievement in, just to have an excuse to play more—speaking personally? Nothing's knocking The Witcher 3 off the pedestal of 2015's greatest triumph.

And now CDPR has gone over the whole thing with a fine brush, tweaking and enhancing it to second-quarter-of-the-21st-century fidelity. You might say, 'Didn't that happen several years ago?' Poor reader, that was merely a "next-gen update." Now is the time of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered.

There is already discourse, to no one's great surprise. Are the graphical enhancements good? Are they bad? Do they wrench The Witcher 3's beating aesthetic heart from its chest and stomp it into the dirt? I'm not exaggerating; people really are talking like this. Ignore them. It looks excellent. In the course of play I've found myself stopping regularly just to survey a sunset skybox, or the way tender motes of light slip through Geralt's beard. Actually, I've not been doing that second one. Don't put in the article that I'm doing the second one.

There is a way in which certain game worlds become home. They become actual spaces, fixed in your mind like places from your past. That's The Witcher 3 to me: its battlefields; its main city; and clean, icy Skellige, which arrives towards the game's end like a therapy session after it has spent tens of hours oppressing you with the first two regions. Going back feels like, well, going back—walking streets that were yours as someone younger, looking at nondescript corners and patches of pavement and remembering the specific, personal myths and legends that played out there in now-dead ages.

And it looks excellent, of course. Better than it did before, which means just as good as you remember it. So not only is The Witcher 3 Remastered like going home, it's like going home and finding someone has, in your absence, been in and aired the place out, run a duster around, and reupholstered the furniture. There are some lovely little additions too—minor new features and mechanics to smooth your way through the world.

You can, for instance, now see all your myriad quest objectives on the world map, and you can flip between focused quests (and objectives) right there with a squeeze of a gamepad trigger. The HUD is less cluttered, and a new loot feed tells you what stuff you've picked up or been given, which is rather nice for the myriad quests that end with someone telling you 'Here, take this,' without ever telling you what 'this' is.

There have been changes to the game's combat, too. Some fiddling to sand down some of the old jank. This may be very noticeable to some people, but I confess it's not to me. If, 11 years ago, you fired up The Witcher 3 and bounced off in revulsion at how its swordplay and sign-slinging felt, I don't think you're going to experience a sudden conversion here. That's no bad thing. I'd be upset if The Witcher 3 no longer felt like The Witcher 3, but I do wonder if CDPR was perhaps overegging the pudding with its stated goal of making the game feel, mechanically, like it released in 2026.

The Witcher 3 Remastered is a lovely little present and, with a brand-new expansion called Songs of the Past currently pencilled in to arrive some time in 2027, an excellent excuse, especially now both of the other expansions are free.

Obviously, I need to generate a new, 100%-complete save to take into the new DLC. And hey, I obviously need to see every inch of the game's newly remastered world.

What an autumn treat: a series of warm, placid nights await me, curled up on a sofa and making my way through Geralt's Big Adventure again. It's like 2015 never really went away.

The Cursed Apple, wherein Valve’s latest MOBA Deadlock takes place, is ‘an urban fantasy setting’ in the same way that Limp Bizkit is ‘an American rock band.’ Sure, the label is accurate, but Deadlock is unmistakably, crucially, and specifically New York the same way Fred Durst is sort of like the living avatar of Jacksonville, Florida.

The latest batch of new heroes just unveiled as part of the City Never Sleeps embraces this aspect of the game and takes it to new heights. Almost all the new characters are the sights and sounds of New York City: old man playing chess in the park? That’s Solomon, a chessboard-wielding wizard. A grandma on a park bench, feeding pigeons? That’s Baba, a cheeky twist on Slavic folklore. What about those giant, slimy rats always gnawing on floor pizza? Enter the literal Rat King, who makes all of da rules.

Just look at this fan concept for a Chinese immigrant and construction worker reimagined as Sun Wukong (who natural law mandates must appear as a playable character in every MOBA). Deadlock’s online community is always abuzz with ruminations about what comes next the same way you can find with games like Heroes of the Storm or Smash Bros., but their enthusiasm isn’t for games they’ve already played or stories that have already been told. It’s for the winding alleyways and wild card denizens of the real-life NYC, pulled through a prism of macabre magic.

Maybe that sounds like a gimmick, but the game is never content to leave these characters without dimension. Vyper isn’t just a slithering sewer lizard with a firearm, she’s a chronic flirt and a dismal career criminal. Seven may be a cackling pulp serial villain, but mark his tender memories of friendly wight Kelvin and his affinity for the naive, almost childlike goo monster Viscous.

It's refreshing because a lot of MOBA heroes are basically action figures: emphatic, unsubtle, function-first designs where narrative is a secondary priority at best. It’s obvious why this is if you know the genre’s history—MOBA progenitor DotA's designs all came from Warcraft, and its successors haven't been able to fully get away from that. Sure, Dota 2’s Disruptor has a unique backstory, and he’s an oglodi rather than an orc, but no amount of reverse-engineering will erase the truth from my memory: he is Thrall, but red.

League isn't too far off from that, taking generic character concepts with rough DotA counterparts and retooling them for a standalone game—one with a narrative that wouldn’t be figured out for years. Heroes of the Storm's Smash Bros. grab bag of Blizzard favorites has its own charm, but it certainly isn't cohesive. Smite draws from a different well, but real-world mythology is even more archetypal and constrained by prior assumptions than Blizzard's fantasy cast.

That’s not to say you can’t tell a good story with ‘Thrall, but red.' Dota 2 actually has a lot of fun storytelling if you look for it. But Deadlock breaks new ground for MOBA-pilled lore fiends simply because it's not so beholden to its forebears.

Deadlock is the rare MOBA with both an original story to tell and the blank canvas necessary to tell it best. Valve has seized this opportunity with apparent relish, and you can see the results of that in the oodles of fan art pouring out for each of the newest six characters, only one of whom is even out at this point. Every time the community gets its hands on unique names for over 100 of the Rat King's unique rat citizens or Valve patches in "over 10,000 non-ping voice lines" in a single pre-release update, playtest enthusiasm renews all over again (it just hit a new all-time concurrent player count peak yesterday, according to SteamDB).

Deadlock's specific emphasis on New Yorkian archetypes also begs the question, what’s next? I need a ghostly muckraker journalist. A witch with a hot dog cart. A greedy, monstrous landlord who charges his enemies soul rent! I’m giddy for what’s to come the same way I am with a crossover fighting game, but there’s not that latent stench of knowing it all doubles as advertising for other products. For every bit it’s a pulpy fantasy world, Deadlock is a celebration of the real one outside. And where other MOBAs are sketching in familiar margins, it still feels fresh two years into its "private" playtest.

After putting together a list of some of the big, well-known games currently on sale in the Steam Autumn Sale, I asked the PC Gamer team for some deeper cuts—games they're real sickos for, but that haven't gotten enough love. Here's what they brought to the table.

The ones where you have to read

Underappreciated shooters

Chillout corner

For the tacticians

WoW: Forever's had me nostalgic for a bygone era of MMOs that seems to be enjoying a touch of a resurgence—the idea of a lived-in immersive world, versus the daily task theme park of modern MMO design. Not that I have anything against the latter, mind. Theme parks are neat and roller coasters are fun.

But I have, true to the point, been grouping up with strangers more often in a slower-burn world, partially for convenience, but also partially because the slower pace has me less hungry for rampant progress and time saving. I've gotta hike for six minutes to get to this quest anyway, why wouldn't I stop and help someone in trouble?

When I get all sappy and soft-hearted like this, I also think of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a documentary about a WoW player Mats Steen, who sadly died in 2014 of Duchenne muscular dystrophy—a man whose closest online friends travelled from across the world to attend his funeral.

Steen had a massive impact that I wouldn't presume to match, but in my 16 years playing MMOs (and roleplaying in them, like some kind of nerd), I've also met a lot of people who have changed my life. My first girlfriend, for instance—but I've also made a lot of friends who've become part of my social makeup, as much as any of my "real" pals.

I won't name them for privacy's sake, but one of these people—though I've only heard their voice for the better half of a decade we've known each other, for reasons I cannot share—has been a constant force of good in my life, and I hers. We've pulled each other out of some real mental swamps in the time we've known each other, and I've even met her sister in the real world through sheer accident.

Hopping from City of Heroes: Homecoming to Final Fantasy 14, we've told countless stories together in both MMOs. We know plenty about each other—she knows I write for this very website—but it's all been in the tiny, cosy window of Discord. It would not be going too far to call this person one of my best friends, and while I have a more regular balance of "real world" mates and digital friendships, the latter ones have never stopped being vital.

Ultimately, the friendships are what make these games—beyond any trick of design, art asset, raid, or loot system—special. As such, I'm carving out this week's Terminally Online to ask you all about the folks you've met in MMOs who've changed your life for the better: Please share in the comments below!

There is a place, deep beneath the earth, where the narrative wranglers behind our favourite games come together. Writers who helped deliver the perfect ending for Destiny in The Final Shape, or make sense of Stellaris' irresistible mix of strategy and story. Who spun up the Tim Curry sass of Baldur's Gate 3 companion Astarion, and scribbled the funny ambient dialogue that shows up in Borderlands 4 compilation videos.

They all tangle in Fallen London, the marvellous and sprawling text-based RPG from the makers of Sunless Sea. And there, they do their bravest, smartest, most depraved and moving work.

You play Fallen London in your browser, but it helps to abandon your expectations about how slight, forgettable or exploitative browser games can be. Failbetter's RPG is a near-bottomless brunch of comic and cosmic horror—an interlaced network of choice-driven, literary stories that have been woven together over a decade and a half. It is a regularly updated and living world, riddled with intriguing mysteries and set against the backdrop of a sunken Victorian capital city.

Most Fallen London players are in pursuit of some overarching main quest that swallows up their resources as a gadabout-slash-magnate. These adventures, put together in episodic installments by Failbetter, take you far across the unterzee and eventually up to the cavern roof where the false-stars shift and glitter. They take months and years to see through; Fallen London is a game you might prod at in spare moments on your phone, but gradually becomes a slow-burn and deeply rewarding parallel existence.

In between these major plotlines, however, come Exceptional Stories. Reserved for subscribers, these are bite-sized, entry-level quests that show up every month, as regular as a ratwork watch. They're not typically written in-house, but rather handed off to freelance contributors, and this fact is crucial. It's the reason that Exceptional Stories feel like unpredictable entries in an anthology series. They're self-contained, often introducing new characters whose fates are decided by the story's end. And they reflect the tastes and personalities of their writers in unique ways.

Take Baudelaire Welch, for instance: the architect of Baldur's Gate 3's Dark Urge path, which makes your protagonist responsible for a string of murders they don't remember. Their contribution to Fallen London has been The Goblin Poet—a potently sinister story in which you follow a cult of BDSM bohemians through the mirror to the Reddest Keep, where they toil to capture the beauty of the Red-Handed Queen, using their own lifeblood as paint.

The Keep itself is viscerally horrible, its very floors made up of taxidermied beasts tied together in a carpet of rodent death. But it's the attitudes of the infatuated artists that lend the story its lasting unease. Their hapless adoration of the queen is conditional; the moment she reveals the slightest imperfection, they turn on her in misogynistic rage.

"The vision I presented to you—that is who I am," argues the queen. "Who is not a different person when they turn to bed for the night? When they are in their own company? It is no different than wearing a fine suit! All of you will age and wither: why must I be confined to one skin alone?" Yet the artists reject this argument; their impossible ideals of womanhood ultimately unravel the queen, and free them from a trap of their own mak

Then there's Tired of London, another missing person case among this year's Exceptional Stories from Paradox designer Giada Zavarise, which takes the player somewhere utterly different. Channelling the opening hours of Failbetter's most famous roguelike, Sunless Sea, it carries you north on a steamer to the Tomb-Colonies—where an ingénue seeks to escape the stifling obligations of nobility among the crumbling near-dead.

It climaxes with the kind of grand spectacle a text-driven game can offer without breaking the budget: a last cruise of the mummified living, designed to end in a split hull and a rush of water. "The captain removes the ship's wheel," Zavarise writes, "and throws it overboard." The ship lists and lurches into the black zee as the band plays.

Where Tired of London ends with a half-drowning, Nessa Cannon's tale begins with one—your own. In Old, New, Drowned & Blue, the Borderlands 4 writer offers a lethal love story, rooted in the deep-zee court of the Fathomking, who appreciates a good yarn as much as any Fallen London subscriber. Dishonored and Destiny scribbler Hazel Monforton, meanwhile, introduces a romanceable rodent with three heads in The Prince of All Rats—the kind of figure you couldn't imagine kicking about The Tower with Ikora Rey and company.

It's cool to see AAA writers let loose in a universe that can accommodate their wildest ideas, and empowered to tell a whole tale from start to finish. In this context, their individual voices come through more clearly—rather than becoming muffled in the mix of a much larger product.

But Fallen London's Exceptional Stories are a home for more esoteric indies, too, and have introduced me to some new favourites. My ears now prick up whenever I hear about the latest story drop from Heather Flowers, a devious designer who likes to muck about with probabilities—both in Fallen London's dice rolls and in her own projects, such as the heads-or-tails mindfuck of Unfair Flips.

You might remember the name Jim Rossignol from the byline of PC Gamer's classic Half-Life 2 review—or from the credits of Sir, You Are Being Hunted, the British riff on Stalker that lampooned the country's fondness for fox hunting and class warfare. His dark whimsy has proved a strong fit for Fallen London; in recent months, he's contributed stories about a painting that refuses to live in its frame, a malevolent building that follows you around the city, and a new aesthetic movement that treats illness as art. "Oh, let me look at you, my poor darling. Yes, it's just as I thought! You have the Lily-Tongue Sweats. Fascinating. Beautiful!"

September's The Poetry of God. A clearly personal work, it concerns a disabled academic who handles dangerous sigils with the same matter-of-fact fearlessness as she does her wheelchair. Yet it's also something of a Cold War thriller, full of delicious turns of phrase. Grief and yearning are briefly revealed in the eyes of a revolutionary, "like darting things in a hidden pool".

At one point, you learn that a book-burning censor has been surveilling the academic, but keeping his distance. Here Anthropy writes as if peering down her glasses at the man with disdain: "Perhaps he fears that the small woman in the chair that he has been watching might turn and look back at him." It's the story of a powerful person, underestimated.

Before the year is out, Fallen London will serve up another handful of distinct short stories from all corners of the gaming medium. And there's a bank of them going back a decade at least, beginning with the nascent tales of Nighthawks writer Richard Cobbett. It only remains for the wider world to discover them. These stories are Exceptional in both senses of the word: deeply unusual, and bloody good. It simply doesn't get bloodier than the Reddest Keep.

Gaming's worst-kept secret Deadlock received a humongous update earlier this week, one that redecorated its entire town and added six new classes for players to sink their teeth into. On the subject of teeth, one of these classes is a tank called Rat King, a giant humanoid rodent who started out as a fan concept before becoming part of Deadlock's official roster.

Rat King loves two things in life: rats, and throwing rats at his enemies. In fact, he enjoys rat tossing so much that he has more than 100 voice lines dedicated to his calling.

According to Deadlock voice line viewer (yes, that is a site that exists) Rat King entered the fray with a grand total of 1534 individual utterances, a similar number to most other Deadlock heroes. Of those lines, 126 of them are dedicated to his power "Rat Swarm", whereby Rat King unleashes a swarm of rodents from beneath his resplendent cape—which leap onto enemies and deal spirit damage over time.

Why so many voice lines for a single power? Well, I suppose the short answer is "because Valve can". But the longer answer is that, although some of the lines are generic power callouts (such as "I got a whole lotta rats, baby!") many of them refer to individual rats by name.

Rat King clearly likes to express support for his subjects, so will yell phrases like "Get 'em Lou!" or "My boy Widget is gonna chew you up!" or "Rabies Ronnie has a gift for ya. Surprise, it's rabies!" Sometimes Rat King will refer to named groups of rats, implying there are whole factions residing beneath his cloak. Rat King's group-based callouts include "The Pantegana boys say hello!" and "Say hello to the McMullen gang!" and my personal favourite—"I brought Gumdrop's whole polycule!"

It's a great example of the huge injection of personality Deadlock received from the City Never Sleeps update (which is not to say the game was short of it before). It's worth noting that Rat King is not the only character to become much more talkative. Alongside the newly introduced heroes, Valve has doubled the number of voice lines for all existing characters in the game.

It's this kind of colour and attention to detail that has made Deadlock so popular despite players having to be invited to the game in order to experience it. How much longer Valve will keep Deadlock (theoretically) under wraps is uncertain, but let's face it, there isn't exactly a pressing financial need for Valve to push the game out of the door.

What comes to mind when I say 'big brand competitive gaming mouse'? If you're anything like me, that particular Rorschach test will make you spit out the word 'expensive.' That response isn't wrong, either: just look at the big releases we've had this year.

There was the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike: $180. The Razer Viper V4 Pro: $160. The SteelSeries Rival Pro and Sensei Pro: each $180. And there's an X3 Superstrike now, too, which is $200. These are some very expensive mice.

In previous years, I would have taken a dimmer view of this. Especially given the impressively competitive rodents you can pick up from niche Chinese brands these days. The $89 Mchose K7 V2 Ultra+, for example, is a Razer Viper V3/V4 Pro clone that performs very well and is plenty comfy.

And to be honest, even if fancy big brand mice are top-tier build quality, it's still a heck of a lot of money to ask for. The Rival Pro, Sensei Pro, and Viper V4 Pro specifically are truly fantastic on the build quality front, with the latter being practically flawless and cheaper than the rest, but they're all still very expensive.

So why isn't my view quite as dim as it could be? Because all of these releases have pushed the competitive gaming mouse scene forward in a way that probably only big brands can—both in terms of being able to absorb risk and also get new tech into as many hands as possible with big marketing campaigns.

In the case of Logitech, we have probably the most radical tech of all three: haptic-inductive (analogue) clicks. Then there's Razer, which has changed the way the sensor reports its data to save battery. And SteelSeries offers a few new things: primarily ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless connectivity and some changes to how it does polling (there are hot-swappable batteries, too, but those aren't completely new).

Logitech's analogue clicks

Logitech's Haptic Inductive Trigger System (HITS) combines, well, haptics and induction, of course. The result is the ability to change how much you need to press down your mouse button before it actuates and registers a click, with the haptics there to ensure you get the feeling of a click wherever you set it to.

Logitech was the first to market with this tech. In fact, the company's head of engineering told me, "We knew we had a golden nugget in our hands... so we took all the shortcuts we could." Which probably goes some way towards explaining why an improved X3 Superstrike was released just seven months later—a fact that must surely sting some early X2 Superstrike buyers.

Since Logitech launched the X2 earlier in the year, we've seen that Keyhcron has been cooking up the "next gen mouse switch" which lets you choose between optical and magnetic within one switch, though its click feeling is static, meaning you won't be adjusting it to perfectly align with the actuation like with the Superstrike. We've also seen niche brand Finalmouse show off its TMR analogue clicks.

Razer's FrameSync

With the Viper V4 Pro, Razer introduced FrameSync—no, not Meta's FrameSync, something else. It essentially does for mice what VRR tech does for monitors, syncing up hardware with your system's polling. FrameSync ensures the mouse sensor's optical capture sync up with the microcontroller unit (MCU), ensuring it only captures the data when the MCU is polled by the PC and asks for it.

One benefit is potentially to latency and jitter, but a good sensor doesn't really struggle with those things anyway. The actual benefit is to battery life, for one simple reason: there are fewer sensor snapshots required. That's how the Viper V4 Pro manages up to 180 hours of battery life at 1 kHz polling, despite the very performant sensor.

As far as I'm aware, Razer is the only company offering this kind of tech (Motion Sync is different). And we've seen from independent testing that FrameSync is indeed doing what it says it does.

SteelSeries' UWB and "true" 8K

SteelSeries was the last to the 2026 'new competitive mouse tech' party, and its new technologies aren't quite as exciting as the ones mentioned previously, but are still great additions to the competitive mouse industry's toolkit. The new SteelSeries mice have hot-swappable batteries, and they're done well, but it's not the first company to have done so. It's the other technologies in there that are the newer ones.

SteelSeries is the first company, as far as I'm aware, to use ultra-wideband (UWB) in a mouse, apart from niche Japanese brand Elecom, which announced a similar mouse just a few weeks prior. The UWB promise is for more stable and reliable wireless connectivity. SteelSeries is also offering "true" 8K, as it claims its polling doesn't bundle up data packets but sends one packet for one receipt. Elecom makes similar claims about its mouse. SteelSeries also lets you have a lower sensor polling rate than click polling rate, but I think sensor polling is more important so I'm not too fussed about that feature.

None of these technologies on their own are quite as exciting as haptic clicks or synced sensors, but if other brands follow suit and add similar features to their mice, I certainly won't be complaining.

Big brands risk it, others follow

After learning about all that niche brands have to offer, such as Chinese ones that make 'clones' of well-known mice, I did wonder for a while whether big brands like Razer, Logitech, and SteelSeries can continue charging so much for theirs. After all, you really can get great-performing, comfy, well-built mice for much cheaper than these big companies charge for their own options.

Perhaps these big brands started wondering the same, and rather than charging less, instead decided to use their big bucks to take the risk of investing in developing new tech. I'm sure much of this was done selfishly—to have something new and shiny to offer that other brands don't—but the positive side-effect for us consumers is that these new technologies are sure to spread out across the industry.

We should remember that with all these gaming mice, the mouse makers themselves don't make all their internal components (though Logitech does design its own sensors). Sensors, switches, and the like, are usually made in collaboration with distinct manufacturers of those parts. Which means that the new mouse tech we've seen this year isn't likely to be wrapped up with just one brand forever, unless the companies have very deep hooks in patents and whatnot.

The fact that it's the big brands that have been taking on the risk of developing and implementing new tech also has the benefit of giving these technologies a stamp of legitimacy plus widespread marketing. Not everyone is a competitive mouse enthusiast, and most probably won't try a niche brand's mouse tech, however good it might be.

But taking the Superstrike as a paradigmatic example, Logitech is a big enough brand and has put enough marketing into its haptic-inductive click tech that people generally now accept that the technology is legitimate, useful, and marketable. Thus why other brands haven't been scared to follow suit. No doubt it helps to have some working models in the wild to see exactly how to make it work technically well, too.

All of this is to say that yes, top-tier competitive mice from big brands are ridiculously expensive these days. And yes, I'd still recommend picking up one of the many cheaper but still-quality options out there instead if you don't have a big budget. But I also have to hand it to the big brands for actually pushing the industry forwards in a way that's likely to stick. Rising tides to raise all boats, y'know?

I thoroughly enjoyed 007: First Light when it launched back in May, but one area where I thought it fell short of delivering a fully-fledged James Bond experience was in its cars. While there are some great vehicle sequences in First Light's campaign—including a fight on a cargo plane and a killer action scene involving a massive dump truck—its handful of car chases and non-dump truck driving sections tend to be short and not especially memorable.

Most disappointing is the late game sequence involving an Aston Martin Valhalla, which also appears briefly in the most recent Bond film, No Time to Die. IO Interactive spends pretty much the entire game teasing the Valhalla, with the car gleaming alluringly on a pedestal every time you enter Q-Lab. But when Bond finally gets to sit in the driver's seat, it's essentially used for a short turret sequence and you don't get to drive anywhere.

Thankfully, this flaw has now been addressed—sort of. Earlier this week, IO Interactive released a free DLC pack for First Light. Titled 'Extended Operations' it adds a bunch of new modes and missions to the game, including one that finally lets you take the Valhalla out onto the road.

The mission is called Valhalla Protocol, and it's part of First Light's TacSim mode—which is a bit like Metal Gear Solid's VR missions if they had a preposterous budget. Valhalla Protocol lets you cut about the mountains of Slovakia in Bond's heavily armed sports car, blowing up drones and other vehicles using its rockets and twin machine guns.

Obviously, I'd have preferred to see a mission like this in the campaign, but it's still nice to see the Valhalla liberated from that tiny garage adjacent to Q-Lab. That isn't all the DLC offers either. Alongside Valhalla Protocol is a new TacSim Operation called Jungle Heist, which reworks First Light's showstopper Vietnamese hotel into a randomised affair where Bond has to pilfer some documents inside the safe of one of the hotels' luxurious villas.

These two new missions come bundled with a Photo Mode, a New Game + that lets you replay the campaign wearing different suits and able to adjust your gadget loadout during missions, and a new "00" difficulty level that unlocks after completing the campaign. Oh, and there's a bulldog you can pet in the game now—IO's way of saying thank you for 7 million wishlists.

First Light was a big hit for IO Interactive, becoming the studio's fastest selling game after selling 1.5 million copies within 24 hours. While it seems likely we'll get a second helping of IO's flavour of Bond, it still isn't wholly clear whether IO itself will get to make it. Back in July, Amazon Gaming's general manager said the company would "probably want IOI developing it", but a sequel from IO has yet to be confirmed.

In that same conversation, Amazon also didn't rule out purchasing IO outright, thus bringing the Danish developer formally under its wing. Much as I enjoyed First Light, given the choice between a sequel and an independent IO Interactive, I think I would take the latter—if only for Hitman's sake.

This is how I knew Dicevaders got its claws into me: the first thing I did this morning was boot up my Steam Deck (which is next to my bed, of course), just so I could get another run in before logging on for work. This kind of compulsive behaviour hasn't been part of my daily routine since Titanium Court back in May, and before that, Blue Prince in 2025—so Dicevaders is in good company.

You play the captain of an alien invasion force hurtling through the stars in this roguelike deckbuilder, which is about activating units on a grid using three dice. Each column on the grid corresponds to a number on the dice. You draft your units in each column, roll the dice, then the outcome determines which columns of units will score. As you can see below:

Your units don't actually go anywhere or fight anything. They each have a strength stat which forms the base score of each turn. Let's say you roll a pair of threes and a six, as I did in the screenshot above. Your units placed in the third column will have their strength stat multiplied by two, while the unit in the sixth column will only score its basic strength stat because one dice only equals a 1x multiplier.

The goal is to hit a target damage number across four turns, which successfully triggers the invasion. If you don't hit the number, you start losing health on each further turn until it's game over. Of course, you can also buy a suite of artifacts which positively affect the score in many ways, from increasing multipliers to bolstering the permanent strength stats of your different units.

Written down, all of this sounds pretty familiar. And it is! But what's key to Dicevaders' appeal is how much scope it gives you to affect both the outcome of each dice roll and your current run. Sure, chance is a factor in how you play, yet there's an intensive resource management layer here that makes it feel fair.

For example, you have a currency called 'Budge', which is self-explanatory: you can spend one Budge point to move a dice roll either up or down one per turn (so, a four becomes a five or three), and you can do this for all three dice. You can also spend another currency called 'Chrono' to re-roll the dice completely. That gives you quite a bit of scope to avoid the dice roll landing on the columns with all your dud units.

Both of these resources are finite. The game isn't that stingy with them, however, and you have numerous ways to get more, which is what gives Dicevaders its feeling of fairness. In between each turn, you're given cash to spend on units, artifacts and both these vital currencies.

You can also freeze an item to buy it on the next turn if you're short on cash—again, all of this adds to the feeling that the developers want to give you the power to turn your luck around, rather than write off a run early.

The other resources you're managing, of course, are your units. As well as their strength stats, most of them have specific abilities, too: teleporting around the grid between turns, attacking three times per turn but only if they're placed on the bottom row, or randomly activating other units around the grid to add their points to the score total. There are many other variants.

Managing them is about positioning and getting their strength stats as high as possible to increase your base score. In a fun touch, you can sacrifice one unit between turns and give their strength stat to another. You'll fatten up a unit's strength with one of your artifacts, only to feed them to a different unit that has the special ability to attack six times if they're played in the sixth column. Suddenly, that unit is six times more useful, and you've opened up another spot on the grid to drop another unit in.

Or maybe you'll have a network of Swarmers that share one giant strength stat with adjacent units of the same type. Which is exactly what I had going on with these yellow lads below, meaning they'd do the same base damage whether I rolled a 3, 4 or 5 in Prism Tower-like fashion.

"Shit yeah!" I yelled after figuring this out, before realising my artifacts weren't scaling fast enough to keep reaching the score target. It becomes apparent that there is a staggering number of strategies you can employ to hit the high numbers in Dicevaders, and it's excellent at teaching itself as you go.

Just by following a few simple tutorial screens, I'm punting scores into the millions already—but by no means do I feel like I totally understand the shape of the game yet. It's hit that roguelike sweet spot.

Dicevaders seems to repackage some of the art and characters from last year's well-regarded Starvaders, which was also a roguelike deckbuilder with more of a shooter bent. I haven't played that, but this seems rather different—the alien invasion stuff is just a pleasantly cartoonish skin for a game about managing a grid of increasingly outrageous numbers.

I can't honestly say that Dicevaders feels completely new and fresh, or that it'll bust the cobwebs if you're burned out on the hundreds of games trying to be the next Balatro. I can't even say I fully understand why certain numbers are triggering the way they do about 20% of the time.

But it's the real deal in terms of high-level synergies and how much control it offers you over each situation. I don't feel like I'm pissing time into an abyss, either, which is always the risk with these games—it's complex and has a lot of moving parts, and there are too many unit types available for you to become entirely dependent on a single strategy. It keeps you changing things up.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to bed to play some more of it.

Capcom has been on an historic run over the last few years, delivering hit after hit during a period when many other publishers are struggling to keep their heads above water. This year alone, Capcom has released Resident Evil: Requiem, Pragmata, and Onimusha: Way of the Sword, all of which landed to both critical acclaim and commercial success.

So now is obviously the perfect time to wade into the not-at-all controversial topic of AI-powered game development.

Yesterday, Capcom held its own tech conference titled "Capcom Open Conference RE: 2026" during which programmer Satoshi Ishida gave a talk detailing the company's future plans for its proprietary RE: Engine—which powers all the publisher's modern games. During this talk, Ishida revealed Capcom's intentions to gradually transform RE Engine into an "AI-generation game engine."

Now, it's important to stress here that what Capcom appears to mean here is an engine for the AI generation, rather than a generative AI engine. As reported by Gamebiz (via IGN), Capcom's plans are more nuanced and detailed than slapping ChatGPT into its game development workflows.

During the talk, Ishida stated that the project is called "REX", and it involves six different programs that will integrate AI and machine-learning technology into RE Engine. Some of these are designed for enhancing program performance during development. Re:Dox, for example, is a data handling program designed to translate different types of data into a common set of rules for faster processing, while RE:UI is built to provide AI-assisted optimisation the RE: engine's development tools—sort-of like adding DLSS support for Blender.

Alongside these are tools designed to make the process of game development itself faster. There's a program called RE: Runtime, which apparently allows the engine to animate large numbers of objects and characters in groups—rather than running those real-time animations individually. Most intriguing is RE: Flows. This is apparently designed to simplify the implementation of game mechanic ideas, then convert them into a standardised programming language. This sounds vibe coding-adjacent to me, though it's hard to say for certain without seeing it in action.

According to Gamebiz, Capcom says it wants to integrate all these ideas into RE Engine for several reasons. First, modern games are so massive and technically complex that data management is a huge challenge and making changes to that data takes a long time. Second, more than 2,000 people now use RE Engine, including people from many different nationalities, so Capcom wants to create a system that is universally understandable. Third, AI technology is rapidly evolving and is essential for streamlining development—a somewhat arbitrary justification that I'm not convinced by.

Broadly though, these plans fall in line with Capcom's previously declared stance on AI, where the publisher stated it "will not implement assets generated by AI into our game content", but would use it to "enhance efficiency and boost productivity" in its development pipeline. Certainly, none of these tools appear designed to create art or character models and so forth, though it seems like some of them would require AI generated or AI assisted code to function.

It's also worth noting that Capcom's approach to development has worked pretty well for it over the last ten years, earning a reputation as one of the most reliable developers around. While I can understand the desire to make game development faster and more efficient, as the old adage goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

At 8:35 am Central Time on Friday, October 2, PC Gamer audience development manager Cameron Bald shared a Twitter post by fan account GTA 6 Countdown. Miami's NBA basketball team, the Heat, is doing a cross-promotion event with Rockstar, "A Night in Vice City." The team will temporarily rebrand, though from what I can tell it's as "Vice City" and not "The Vice City Heat," which feels weird but what do I know.

None of us were particularly enthused by the branding exercise, but noted negative nelly and Glasgow-based PCG online editor, Fraser Brown, took particular umbrage, wondering "Who the hell doesn't know GTA is coming?" Cameron offered a fairly compelling rebuttal: "The super-casual types who are still on a PS4 and need convincing that GTA 6 is worth getting back into games over." Lead SEO editor Lauren Morton likened it to a chocolate bar at the checkout counter: This isn't an exercise in persuasion, but flooding the zone.

Fraser was not persuaded, doubting the efficacy of the campaign. We got our first indication that something was amiss at 8:54 am. "A basketball stunt is so much more niche than, say, the Netflix trailer," Fraser argued. Niche? The Miami Heat? The multi-billion dollar NBA franchise with three championship victories to its name? The one that signed LeBron for a while in the 2010s and made everybody mad (I don't really know ball either)? That Miami Heat?

Then, the whammy: "I guess it's gonna land differently with Americans. To me, this is insanely niche. I had to google Miami Heat."

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 1

More step forward

I was just logging on to work myself at this time, and was floored at what had transpired. I let Fraser know that this was the most British thing he had ever said. PC Gaming Show editorial director Jake Tucker tried to liken it to the international popularity of British football clubs, which did not help, because Fraser also does not follow footy. Lauren pointed out that Fraser was effectively saying, "I don't see the marketing value of sports because I don't follow sports." Fraser dug in.

"I get using sports teams for marketing, but it feels niche when it's one local sports team in one country. But maybe Miami Heat is an extremely big deal all over the world. I would never know!"

I pointed out how I've seen guys in Russia wearing Chicago Bulls jerseys, to which Fraser responded that he was aware of the Bulls and has even owned merch. If there is one takeaway from this whole debacle, it is not the manifest weakening of America's global cultural hegemony. It is instead the continued dominance and recognition of America's finest city, the Windy City. The City of Big Shoulders. Chi-Town, baby. Did you know we have a pope?

"I have heard of the Miami Dolphins," Fraser remarked, perhaps as some manner of conciliatory gesture to his American colleagues, "but only because they featured in Ace Ventura."

Then, the other shoe dropped: "[To be fair], I also don't know what a Miami Heat is," news writer Joshua Wolens, who lives in England, unhelpfully proffered. "But I generally assume I don't know most of what's happening in the modern world."

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 2

It was around this juncture that Fraser agreed to be subject to a formal write-up on PC Gamer dot com. I am not bullying my coworker. Buffalo-based PCG news writer Lincoln Carpenter helpfully reframed the argument at this time as well: "It's not so much that the Miami Heat specifically is a big deal. It's that NBA teams, as a rule, are big deals." Lincoln also shared Forbes' estimated valuations of the most expensive NBA teams in the world vs. the most expensive football clubs. For what it's worth, the basketball teams are more expensive.

At 9:06 am, UK-based social video editor Paul Broughton introduced the new argument that "basketballs are a myth created by 2K to sell their annual videogame," but I think it would be dishonest of me to add him to the counter. The work chat conversation then moved in different directions, but I was haunted.

Dateline: Lunch

I took my lunch break to play some of the Dark Souls 2 Seamless Co-op mod with PCG senior guides writer Sean Martin and freelance contributor Tyler Colp. I remarked on the Fraser/Miami Heat situation, and how I couldn't get it out of my head.

"What is the Miami Heat?" Sean sheepishly asked. Sean is also English.

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 3

At almost the exact same time, former PC Gamer editor-in-chief Samuel Roberts, who has returned for some freelance work and is also an Englishman, entered the chat. I thought he was a man of the world. I thought surely he would know ball.

"I learned what they are two hours ago!" Sam informed us. "I'm aware of the Miami Dolphins." Unlike Fraser, Sam did not come by this knowledge through the works of Jim Carrey, but rather some kind of hazy osmosis through American podcasts. Sam did know about the Bulls though (Chicago baby da Bulls baby etc.)

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 4

Then things took a turn for the strange. Senior editor Christopher Livingston, who has lived in the United States his entire life (and also Orlando, Florida for five years), revealed that he also probably couldn't have placed the Heat prior to this morning's events. Man, what the fuck.

Americans Who Don't Know Ball Count: 1

I can't stress enough that I'm not a basketball guy. I don't know why this lack of Miami Heat brand recognition is bothering me so much. Is this how my UK colleagues feel when I don't know what a chip sandwich, Mr. Blobby, or a bank holiday is? I feel like I'm being pranked.

We're really rocketing toward the end of 2026, so before we're crushed under the mountain of games releasing in October and that one game launching this November, lets' take a moment to get caught up on what's going on with Steam's 20 most-wishlisted games.

Is there hot news? Have release dates shifted? Have a few devs worryingly not made a single peep in months, or longer? Let's find out together.

Don't worry, there's not whole lot of reading to do: these are just little tidbits to absorb so you can get up to speed. Here's the latest from Steam's 20 most anticipated games.

Top 5 STEAM WISHLISTS

WISHLISTS 6-10

WISHLISTS 11-20

To most, the highlight of this week's big Deadlock patch is the snazzy map makeover, new heroes, and tons of quality-of-life additions. To me, it's all about the patch notes.

I spend a lot of waking hours reading white-text-on-black-background changelogs in this line of work, so when a page comes along that was specifically designed to be pleasant and exciting, it deserves to be rewarded. Valve has a long history of designing beautiful, bespoke webpages to introduce meaningful changes to its games, but the graphics department is really going ballistic with Deadlock.

The City Never Sleeps patch notes are styled like a tourism brochure for Deadlock's refreshed New York City, walking readers through scenic stops across the four major districts (Chinatown, Theater, Haunted Lot, and Plaza). Descriptions weave between in-world storytelling and technical explanation where it makes sense, with Valve's splashes of humor reminding readers not to take any of this too seriously.

Dotted lines draw the reader to new points of interest as they scroll while furthering the map motif, and the page is stuffed with custom artwork for new items and mechanics that might only exist there. Valve did such an annoyingly good job with presenting the next era of Deadlock that I'm almost tempted to play a MOBA (but only almost).

Finally, some good food. Welcome back, Valve patch notes.

Valve's golden age of patch notes

It cannot be understated that Valve pioneered storytelling in multiplayer shooters with Team Fortress 2, arguably kicking off with the 2009 WAR! Update, aka "Soldier vs. Demo." This was before the concept of multiplayer games having seasons, before League of Legends had a TV show, before "live service" was even a thing—Valve had created a cast of nine lovable weirdos and new updates that weren't just dropping items, but telling stories that put the characters in conflict with one another and added context to the multiplayer maps we'd already been fighting in for two years.

It was weird in the first place for an FPS to receive so many free post-launch additions, and it was even weirder for a developer to treat the arrival of new weapons, modes, and hats as worthy of dedicated splash pages with accompanying comic books.

TF2 was the gold standard for post-launch support, and its patch notes drew massive interest, often dropping late on a Thursday or Friday, Pacific time, hinting that Valve may have been polishing until the last minute. Valve's blog posts were never the same month-to-month, often adopting new color schemes, layouts, and original elements for the occasion.

There was no single template they stuck to. The Engineer update introduced his advanced Gunslinger gauntlet and Wrangler as blueprints with hand-written notes, while Scout's update debuted the Force-A-Nature scattergun in a department store catalog. I especially love announcing the Mac version of TF2 with a white, sanitized home page complete with symmetrical boxes and tiny text in the style of Apple circa 2002.

Poring over the "history" section of the TF2 website in 2026 is like uncovering one of those lost civilizations that invented a ton of sophisticated things before everyone else.

We're in an era marked by formulaic seasons, videogames as advertisement platforms, and teams scrambling to alter plans when they're not immediately popular. And yet 15 years ago, Valve had so much confidence in its direction that it could decide to wage a war between Soldier and Demoman one day (live-tracking the kills between both classes—Soldier narrowly won with 6.40M kills to the collective Demomen's 6.37M), introduce a crafting system the next, and then rebrand as Scream Fortress for October.

It wasn't exclusively good vibes—Valve caught flak for its (now quaint) paid hats, paid loot boxes, and speculative marketplace that became a fixture of updates. In a move that I would be surprised to see a studio make today, Valve made fun of itself at the time with a subsequent "Hatless Update".

Deadlock's blogs are practically retro, it feels weird to say. I wonder what inspired Valve to go this hard again. Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2's changelogs do not share the same sense of theater. Their patch notes are comparatively regular, functional bullet lists—perhaps in line with how often those games are updated. Valve does occasionally produce unique web pages for major CS2 announcements or Dota 2 events, but we're far from the days when an incremental Mann VS Machine update was announced with a lavish movie poster in the style of kaiju cinema.

TF2's exceptional, ever-changing patch notes were a reflection of the game they promoted. Valve leveraged the flexibility of an arena shooter and imagined a world where Red and Blu were real factions locked in stupid conflicts. You never really knew what elaborate scenarios Valve would think up next for its over-the-top action figures, and that filled TF2 fans with a sense of wonder that very few games have pulled off since. Maybe it's no coincidence that the only example of innovative multiplayer storytelling in recent years, Helldivers 2, is another over-the-top war game that finds comedy in the futility of endless violence.

Valve is tapping into that dormant TF2 energy in small ways with Deadlock, and it's great, though I wonder if, being a MOBA, the game's inherent sweat level will eventually lead to a regimented, low-nonsense future that's more focused on the minutiae of balance. Whatever Deadlock is up to years from now, I'll be keeping up with the patch notes.

I don't typically have much love for billion-dollar corporations dropping the 'meet our legal department' hammer on no-budget modders who are just trying to exercise their creative muscles, but in this one instance I'm willing to let it slide: Bethesda has issued a cease-and-desist order to an "AI creator" who made a Fallout game set in New York City that runs in browsers.

That's actually overstating it: As Chris First explained in his X feed (via RPS), he "directed Claude and a studio of AI agents" to make the game for him. Nor was there any new creative thought injected into the process, First continued, saying he asked for a game that was "not inspired by" Fallout, but that was "exactly like Fallout."

This is the result.

I know that being playable in a browser is a limiting factor, but this is really just something I'd rather not play at all. It stands in such sharp contrast to mods like Fallout: London or Skyblivion, efforts that reflect genuine passion, commitment, and creativity—and yes, those mods are massive undertakings that require years of effort from hundreds of volunteers, but they also don't suck and I feel like maybe there's a lesson to be learned there.

Anyway, whether I want to play it or not is now a moot point, because yesterday First said he received a message from ZeniMax Media telling him to knock it off—specifically, that the domain name he registered for the project, fallout.nyc, infringes on the studio's IP rights.

I don't know if First was expecting sympathy for his plight, but he doesn't seem to be getting much of it. Some responses criticize him for calling the project "Fallout," which is just about daring Bethesda to do something, but there's also plenty of heat over the use of AI to make the thing. A few optimists suggest First would be fine if he just changed the name, but he doesn't seem inclined to pursue that course.

That's probably for the best: Maybe I'm being overly harsh here (although I don't think so) but the one clear drawback to that plan is that changing the name doesn't change the fact that it looks like garbola. Playing a low-poly Fallout in a browser isn't an especially impressive technical feat—you can do the same with Morrowind, and it actually looks like Morrowind—and if you just want some really cheap Fallout, Fallout 3 is $2.49 in the Steam Autumn Sale, or you can snag New Vegas for a fiver.

I do sympathize with First's urge for a proper new Fallout game: I'm a little tired of the formula, but it's been 11 years since Fallout 4 and that's too damn long. But this ain't it, as the kids say, and while I'm never going to sign up for the corporate cheerleading squad, I can't say I'm sorry to see this one consigned to the dustbin, where it belongs.

For a while now, AI guys have been arguing with the pope—Bishop of Rome, Primate of Italy, Chicago White Sox fan—over whether or not their chatbots and image generators are consistent with the will of the Lord, and in one recently-revealed exchange, whether making a computer talk constitutes creating life.

According to a New York Times report published this week, Anthropic lobbied the pope's advisers "to take the prospect of AI model consciousness seriously" back in May.

The pope, apparently unmoved, stated in his Magnifica Humanitas that "so-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean."

Former White House technology adviser Dean Ball criticized the pope's letter at the time, saying it "puts the Church into the awkward role of the European technocratic regulatory advocate."

Ball is now head of strategic futures at OpenAI.

The latest in this ongoing beef between the pope and AI boosters is a new anti-slop message from His Holiness posted on X this week.

"In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce," wrote the pope. "There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."

Even on X, ruled as it is by the dunce king of tech and his Grok-riddled followers, there is a lot of support for the pope's stance. But of course there are also AI evangelists intent on schooling the Holy See about the beauty of "super intelligence," as it has been dubbed by people who must lack conviction in their own.

In one response I saw pointed out on Bluesky, the pope is asked "What about the Minions?" Indeed... what about them?

With the battle lines drawn between powerful AI interests and the Catholic church, will the next Great Schism be over whether or not Claude is a real person? Will an AI thoughtleader ascend to pope-like status of their own?

An event like that wouldn't be out of place in '90s cyberpunk-comedy novel Snow Crash. I'd once assumed that those satirical visions of mad techno-cultists and lawless megacorps would manifest in a somehow more buttoned-up way, more 'realistically.' I gravely misjudged reality's capacity for farce.

A tangentially-related case-in-point: Palmer Luckey, the guy who invented the first decent consumer VR headset, is now a weapons mogul with a personal UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. Deus Ex bosses are real, and they wear Hawaiian shirts.

Doctors have confirmed it: It's physically impossible for me to turn my nose up at a mecha action game. But despite this dire prognosis, I've been suspicious of Gundam Rogue Orbit—Bandai Namco's mobile suit action game coming in spring—since it was announced back in June.

The problem is the giant monsters. I'm a Gundam traditionalist. Gundam, to me, isn't about fighting aliens—it's about traumatized child war pilots becoming so psychic that their brains explode. But this week, Bandai found a way to coax me off my high horse: With an extremely sick model kit.

My time at PC Gamer has coincided with my steady descent into Gundam model kit obsession: I'm currently at the stage of manually re-scribing mold lines, so the outlook is grim. As a result, I was particularly prone to react when yesterday, as part of its reveal lineup for the 2026 All Japan Model & Hobby Show, Bandai announced the HG 1/144 Bau Bahlam—a model kit incarnation of a mobile suit we'll see in Rogue Orbit. Look at this thing:

The Bau Bahlam was briefly visible in Rogue Orbit's release date trailer back in September, but these model kit renders are the first time I've properly taken in the design. Here's what jumps out at me:

• It's a mono-eye suit: It's factually proven that Gundam's best guys pilot mono-eye mecha, and the Bau Bahlam feels a lot like a spiritual successor to the Gouf—the classic close-quarters mobile suit first seen piloted by Ramba Ral, also known as the realest moustachioed man in the Universal Century.
• It has a CHAINSAW MACUAHUITL: If you're not familiar, the macuahuitl is a very cool, sword-like Mesoamerican weapon, consisting of a wooden body with obsidian blades embedded along its sides. The Bau Bahlam iterates on that design by swapping out one side of its giant robot-scale macuahuitl with a chainsaw, and the model kit includes a mock pull-cord so it can be posed like its revving the weapon's motor.
• And, for good measure, it's got spiked knuckle plates, because apparently being punched by a giant robot doesn't hurt badly enough on its own.

It's impressively menacing, and—if the mecha customization shown in the release date trailer is any indication—we'll probably be able to use its various bits on our own robot. Hopefully that includes the macuahuitl. It'd be cruel not to.

I still reserve the right to be obnoxious about Rogue Orbit's departure from the traditional Gundam conceptual palette once it actually launches, but rolling out impressive mecha designs like these is an effective way of softening me up in the meantime. Surely, a game willing to give its robots giant Mesoamerican chainswords has to have its heart in the right place.

Gundam Rogue Orbit launches on Steam on March 4, 2027. The HG 1/144 Bau Bahlam kit doesn't have a release date, but it's expected to be available sometime in 2027.

Kazutoki Kono: You're welcome.

Back in June, I asked the Ace Combat brand director, who's been working on the series since 1997's Ace Combat 2, if he'd ever gotten to strap into an F-16 and experience the real thrills of doing barrel rolls at 30,000 feet. "Unfortunately over the last 30 years of my career I've been appealing, saying 'hey, we want to ride in one of these jets!' but we have not yet had the chance," Kono said at the time. "Neither myself, or anyone on the team."

Mere months later, it's a whole new world. In a promotional video released today alongside Ace Combat 8, Bandai Namco revealed that Kono finally got to climb into the cockpit of a jet and live the real life version of the series he's been overseeing for years and years. Well, minus the combat parts.

"I was scared before getting in. But once we were airborne, it turned into one of the most beautiful experiences," he said in the video. "The G-force during turns was noticeable, but what stood out the most was the force pushing me downward into the seat. Being up in the sky inside such a compact cockpit felt incredible. It was a surprisingly comfortable and enjoyable space to be in. Compared to a large aircraft, it really made me appreciate the appeal of fighter jets."

One way to look at this sequence of events is to see the ad as a logical and inevitable marketing step for a series that Bandai Namco has clearly put more money behind than ever before, including a live-action YouTube miniseries. The other way to look at it—as I'm choosing to—is that the public outcry after my groundbreaking interview was published reached a level of fervor that simply could not be ignored. It may have only gotten one comment on pcgamer.com, but the ripples must've been felt all the way over in Tokyo.

Clearly the people demanded Kazutoki Kono be given the chance to soar that big blue sky, and the money men had no choice but to pay for our guy to hitch a ride in a MiG-21. Whatever it cost, it was clearly worth it. Look at Kono in his post-flight interview. He's glowing!

That's the look of a man who's just had his dream fulfilled. And even after having just experienced the wonder of flight at a speed and intimacy few on this earth will ever know themselves, he remained steadfast in his duty as brand director.

"Looking out at the clouds and the sky while flying, I couldn't help but think how Ace Combat is incredibly well-made," he said. No argument here.

Another unexpected twist in the Bungle tale:

That's the latest move from Bungie, which recently un-cancelled Destiny 2 following a massive fan backlash over the decision to put the game in maintenance mode. It seems odd to me—I would think that now, with the seeming rebirth of Destiny 2 at hand, is exactly the time you'd want that storefront up and operational. Regardless of the need for a new storefront, taking the old one offline for months while it's being made feels counterproductive.

Also interesting is that the Marathon storefront, which lives on its own subdomain, is not being taken offline while the "new home" is being built. They look effectively identical, so I have no idea what to make of that.

Here's a little comparison of the two:

At a guess, I'd say the most likely outcome here is that the Bungie Store will be integrated into Sony's own storefront—rather like Bungie's own absorption into Sony after the wheels came off the whole "independent subsidiary" thing.

Some followers hope that will lead to lower shipping costs, which would be a positive outcome of sorts, although Sony taking control of the whole endeavor could mean a more limited selection of stuff going forward. That's entirely speculative, but that's also the whole Bungie/Destiny 2 situation in a nutshell: Something is happening, but exactly what we just cannot pin down at this point.

What we can pin down is that the Bungie Store as we know it will close on October 19, while digital downloads and emblem codes will remain accessible until December 31. Get 'em while you can.

A scenic welcome to The Etchery School of Magic and Melody

Musical magic-assisted gardening

Crystal ball cell phones with Charlie Brown-style "wah wah wah"

A flute rhythm game for mastering magic spells

The fun and hectic potion brewing minigame

My roommate's disastrous magical experiments

One very prickly shrub

By the time he stepped down as head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2025, Mike Tomlin—then the NFL's longest-tenured coach—had led the team through a 19-year run without a losing season, securing 13 playoff appearances, eight division titles, and a victory at Super Bowl XLIII.

Since 2014, however, Tomlin has been answering a higher calling: He's been building. In a YouTube video on Wednesday, he unveiled his true masterwork: A sprawling Minecraft metropolis that he's been meticulously hand-sculpting for the last 12 years. And it's magnificent.

As the video starts, Tomlin—PlayStation controller in hand—explains that he was introduced to Minecraft by his children, who were obsessed with the game during their middle school years. While he didn't have much history with videogames, he was "mesmerized by what could occupy their attention," and as he's "always had an interest in architecture," he naturally gravitated to Minecraft's creative mode.

Eventually, his kids moved on to other interests—but Tomlin remained transfixed by the "therapeutic" act of crafting buildings, communities, and neighborhoods.

"It allowed me to detach from the realities and pressures of life," Tomlin says. "Let's take you through it."

The video then transitions to Tomlin's first-person view as he surveyed his works from on high, revealing the purest product of a grown man's hyperfixation I've ever seen: a waterfront district, with a bay surrounded by skyrises, hotels, and apartment blocks—each with its own color schemes, exterior detailing, balconies, courtyards, balustrades, awnings, and plazas.

"I started small," he says.

The former NFL coach then takes us on a tour of his city's first completed building, a "boutique hotel" built from cut red sandstone with marble and birchwood walkways, featuring—as Tomlin casually explains—a multi-floor executive spa with therapy rooms, a glass-ceilinged multi-purpose conference room, an indoor-outdoor restaurant with balcony seating, and "appropriate amenities" like public restrooms with sinks and stalls recreated from cleverly repurposed Minecraft fixtures.

It also has a basement speakeasy with a glowstone-illuminated window looking out into the hotel pool. With an adjacent employee area. And kitchen.

The tour continues through themed residential high rises-slash-aquariums with detailed bedroom interiors, past recreated CVS pharmacies, baseball fields, and soccer stadiums, and over rooftop penthouses. Throughout, Tomlin reiterates how he tried to consider both function and aesthetics by keeping conscious of interior lighting and what types of views building occupants would enjoy.

It's delightful—but it may not have been entirely delightful for the Steelers. Since he presented his city on Wednesday, many have noted that the years in which he would've been building his Minecraft magnum opus overlapped with the team's declining playoff performance.

From his first season as head coach in 2007 to 2013, the Steelers had a postseason win rate of 62.5%. Between Tomlin breaking ground on his Minecraft city in 2014 and stepping down as head coach in 2025, however, the team's postseason win rate was a mere 25%. During those years, the Steelers won only three playoff games, and suffered nine consecutive years without a playoff win.

It was also apparently a trying time for Tomlin's son Mayce, who had to endure his dad bogarting the PlayStation.

Now, we can only speculate whether Minecraft actually played a role in the Steelers' playoff record—but even if it did, I think we can all agree the price was worth paying. Have you seen how many aquariums this town has? Coach, if you're reading: I'm ready to move in.

The initial showing of Tomlin's Minecraft city was only the first episode: He and his son Dino—who's been handling the video production of his dad's build showcase—evidently have more tour videos planned. It's unclear when we can expect the next, but you'll be able to find it on Tomlin's YouTube channel.

There is no more room in hell—the dead are at the beach. Grand Theft Auto 5, already burdened and bedraggled by the parade of mods I have inflicted on it, must now contend with a new disorder: revenants from beyond the veil.

I have installed ZombieInfection, which adds zombie and, indeed, infection. In any given populated space, you will look about yourself to notice that some of Los Santos' denizens are more bloody and shambling than usual. This is because they have been rejected by the grave.

Whenever these undead pedestrians brush up against other city-dwellers, the latter converts instantly to the horde. Before long, what began as just two or three bloodied weirdos becomes a city-threatening catastrophe, which is both horrifying and a good way of demonstrating the power of exponential growth.

Fortunately, zombies are just as prone to the impact of tornadoes, cars, fire, and so on as anyone else. They're also rather slow. More often than not, they get taken out by one of Los Santos' countless ambient threats before they can do any real damage. A lesson for mayors everywhere.

Shockingly, the curse of the undeath is so strong that it can somehow break my own aura of immortality. Franklin—you may have noticed from previous articles, where he does things like surviving tornadoes and being used as a ramp by cars—is invincible in my GTA 5 install. But let a zombie brush up against him for long enough and he will succumb to the afterworld like any other mortal. It's very scary. Happy Halloween.

Of all the games on the horizon, the one I may be most looking forward to Let's Build a Dungeon. It's a sim from Springloaded, makers of Let's Build a Zoo and the upcoming RollerCoaster Tycoon Wonderworks, and the premise is one we've all mulled at one point or another: what if I could make my own videogame?

And in Let's Build a Dungeon, you can. Dig dungeons, populate them with monsters and traps and loot, design quests, and watch simulated players play your game. You'll even be able to let real players play the game you make.

But there's also the simulation surrounding the game you're building. The development studio you've founded. The devs you hire. You'll have to deal with investors, finances, the public, the press (like me!), crunch, gaming conventions, hackers, and even text messages from your mom.

There's a lot going on in this sim. Like, a lot, a lot. During a recent preview and interview with Springloaded founder and Let's Build a Dungeon lead developer James Barnard, here's what leapt out at me as being the most a lot among the lot.

"We have, like, 700 [fictional] games or something, and the list keeps on getting longer."

Let's Build a Dungeon simulates Steam's backend and sites like SteamSpy where you can see your game alongside the competition. Lots of competition: Springloaded has invented hundreds of fictional (and unplayable, sadly) games to populate your reality.

"We have all these games, which obviously our concept artist, poor guy, he spent his his whole life drawing these things."

And look, there's even an advert for a gaming show. A computer gaming show. That's a great idea for an event! Someone should do that for real.

"You can see sort of how your game is doing with the wishlists and things like that. The objective is to get into events, and if you do, you get massive number of impressions. So we really use the impressions, click through rate, conversions, wishlists, and all of that stuff feeds into the chart."

"When you go from CGA to VGA, you have to upgrade some of your computers, and then the size of everything expands and becomes bigger, so suddenly you need more hard drive space because all your assets are now high resolution."

The fictional game you're making in Let's Build a Dungeon runs on fictional hardware, and as your game gets bigger, it takes up more space. Time is passing, too, meaning there are advances in PC hardware as well as your game's required specs, and that's reflected in the sim.

"We drew every single component of every computer, so there's about 150 components that we drew from, and it goes through the history of computing."

You won't just see a difference, you'll hear one. The soundtrack of the game will change based on the audio card your simulated computer is using.

Buying plane tickets and booking hotels for your devs to attend game showcases is a "ridiculous minigame" that even simulates layovers

"Once [your employees] head off to the [showcase], you get to pick who's going to go to the event, and then they aren't working, so they won't appear in your design board. If I send these two people to an event, they're going to disappear for three days and and, you know, fuck up my schedule.

"The flights kind of curve up in price as you get closer to the day, but then sometimes there'll be a bargain right at the end if they've got too many seats to sell, and the same for the hotel. So if you wait till the last minute, you sort of take this risk of: Am I going to spend too much?

"We calculate where you started your company and where the event is. We actually calculate the distance and how long it takes and we do the stopovers in the right cities, so where your office is, is gonna impact you. So if you get EGX Rezzed, it's just down the road for you, if you pick London."

Remember Cyberleek? That could happen to you

"This is some super nerd who's basically hacked your computer. Oh no, he's been following your investors' flights around the world, and he's decided that you are making an MMO, and he's looked at your financials and the other guy's financials, and then he holds you to ransom.

"He's either going to leak the game, or he's or he's going to convince you to put him in the game. There's lots of different outcomes."

Your mum sends you pie recipes and cat videos

"Your mum calls you. Have you eaten? And then she tries to make you eat different food, and gives you desktop screenshots and things for rewards.

"And this conversation, for example, you can get a song, you can get like different desktop images to cheer you up because she wants you to be encouraged in your daily life.

"One of the other things she gives you is a pie, and then she sends you the recipe for the pie, and then you get inspired, and you add a the ability for your designers to come up with a pie recipe, and then you get a pie that you can put in the game, and the players can eat, and you can adjust all that kind of stuff."

By the way, if all of this game dev studio simulation stuff isn't your thing and you just want to use Let's Build a Dungeon to design your own game, you can do that too! There's a campaign mode, build mode, creative mode, or just play the games created by other players.

Let's Build a Dungeon is coming to early access in February. There's a demo you can try in the meantime.

I am a disastrously untalented individual, but my biggest failure of all? My inability to sew. Holes in clothes? Unpatched. Long trousers? Unhemmed. Thrifts? Unflipped. It is both a pure skill and creativity issue, and I forever look on longingly at those far more talented than myself.

Turns out that extends to one of the hottest new cosy games of 2026, too. Dressmaker has absolutely taken over my life—and the life of many new virtual sewists—with its relaxing yet devilishly moreish garment creation. It's genuinely brilliant, a testament to how good games can be when you zoom in on a niche and go all-in on it.

Sketch dresses with different bodies, skirts, sleeves, collars; doodle in rough colour schemes and lay fabric samples over each other to find the perfect combination. Sift through bolts of silk, lace, linen, cotton, and velvet in an absurd number of colours, before laying out all the parts of your bespoke pattern and sewing them all together. It's brilliant, but I am naff at it. Literally, look at this dress I tried to design with the brief "what if Geralt of Rivia was my client?" in mind.

Where's the pizzazz, the drama? Thankfully, social media has been blessing me with people who actually understand how to make the most out of Dressmaker's gorgeous adornments and fabrics—for both good and evil. Here are some of my absolute favourites for you to feast your eyes upon:

This incredible armour-inspired piece

A stunning Van Gogh ballgown

This recreation of an upcoming Genshin Impact character, Tsaritsa

Of course, I had to include this amazing Emet-Selch dress from Final Fantasy 14

And finally, this deeply cursed but also peak artistic Excel minidress that I would 100% wear in real life

It's a fact: Hidden object games have a less-than-stellar reputation among the gamer cognoscenti. They're commonly viewed as low effort, vacuous, beneath the notice or caring of real gamers⁠—a sort of proto-slop, in many ways, that predates the rise of AI. They're games your mom plays. Ewwww.

Dramatic exaggeration? Not really. Back in 2016, we published a story entitled "My shameful obsession with hidden object games on Steam," whose author chose to remain anonymous to avoid the consequences of their humiliating admission—and yeah, maybe that was a bit of dramatic exaggeration. But it vividly illustrates the point that hidden object games are not taken seriously by serious gamers.

I'm here to change that. I'm here to tell you that hidden object games are good, actually, and that it's a valid genre worthy of respect. Because videogames can be anything. Yes, violence tends to be at the core of most mainstream gaming experiences, your Calls of Duty and your Dotas and your Grand Thefts Auto and whatnot. But there's so much more out there. You can drive a bus, manage a cycling team, collect mushrooms on another planet, or play weird card games. So what's the big deal about just sitting back and looking for things?

I was introduced to the hidden object genre in 2009 by Find Your Own Way Home, an 'advergame' for an REO Speedwagon album of the same name. I was shocked to find that it was actually really good—here's an old review, from my pre-PCG days, if you're curious. Sure, it didn't hurt that I was a Speedwagon fan from way back, but it was just fun, too—relaxed and undemanding. Kind of like listening to nostalgic album-oriented rock, but that's a whole different conversation.

The Speedwagon rocks and I am not ashamed to say so!

I've played an awful lot of hidden object games in the years since, and I'm not going to pretend that they're all good. But in that sense, they're no different than any other genre. Which is the point: You may not like them, but it's time to start showing them some proper goddamn respect.

And you might like them! If you've made it this far, then I have to assume you're open to at least the possibility that maybe there might be something here worth giving a chance. And you better believe I can help get you started:

BEHOLD: MY HIDDEN OBJECT GAMES!

Now look, I'm not naive. I don't expect that I've suddenly convinced 30% of PC Gamer's readership to stroke their chins thoughtfully and say, "Hmm, yes, perhaps I have been missing out." (I'd be thrilled to get 3% of you, quite frankly.) But I do think it's long past time that we put the 'shame' of playing them behind us: Like 'em or not, hidden object games are real games, every bit as valid and legit as anything else out there. (And seriously—try one! You might just like it.)

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi must be one of the least guarded interviewees working for a major publisher. Before I speak to him, I find tons of details about the final game in the Remake trilogy spread across a dozen different sources—everything from granular titbits about why Vincent Valentine has a unique skydiving animation to defending the sheer volume of minigames that make the cut. This is someone whose team has built a hell of a lot of game over the past decade, and he clearly enjoys discussing the sweeping vision of it all.

In Revelation, which launches April 8, series villain Sephiroth has summoned the destructive cosmic spell Meteor towards the planet, intending to destroy it. Cloud, Barret, Tifa and company stand in his way—and the planet itself begins fighting back in the form of Weapons, kajiu-sized creatures that emerge from an enormous crater and then unleash mayhem across the land and sea. The events in Revelation cover the last third or so of the original game.

This is the third in a series of remakes that have been defined, in some ways, by their extraordinary production values. I ask Hamaguchi whether he thinks the FF7 Remake trilogy could offer a more sustainable model for building blockbuster games in future.

"So I can't say whether in the future anyone else will decide that they're going to take a famous old game and remake it as a multi-part series, but regardless, I do think that this has left quite a lot of interesting knowledge as a case study," Hamaguchi says via a translator, explaining that his team has now been working together for 10-12 years.

"I think that this project has contributed hugely to Square Enix, not only in terms of the business as a successful game, but also in building this team that I can trust. But whether this becomes a model case or a template is, I think, a bit of a difficult question, because it becomes a question of whether or not other teams can recreate that."

Keeping the same person at the top, too, is vital to how the end product turns out.

"For example, I have been able to stay on for the whole project as the series director because I'm extremely motivated. I've been more than happy to pour all of my energy into this project, but there might be some people out there who are like, 'Well, I've done the first installment in this, and I'm done, I'd like to do something different.' And so if then the top person were to change, that can really change the trajectory of a project, the style of a project, even some of the themes that it's dealing with might be impacted by that."

It's true that the three FF7 Remake games feel like the result of a steady leadership team that knows what it wants to create. Even if someone else could convince a publisher to greenlight three games at once, that consistency is harder to replicate.

"Requiring a stable development environment for 10+ years is incredibly difficult," Hamaguchi says. "I really do mean this: even though I've obviously been in the leadership position, I've had my own skills to lean on and to lead this, it's because the same team has stuck with me that whole time that we've been able to achieve what we have."

Third time's the charm

It's undeniable that FF7 Revelation achieves the scope it does because it's Square Enix's third go-around: the increased size of the world map with both new and existing locations; the growing roster of characters who each have a rich suite of combat moves; more minigames; the FITS job system which confers additional abilities upon existing characters.

It's gloriously ostentatious as a project—or overstuffed, if you ask the more negative recent reviewers of Rebirth on Steam. I fall somewhere in the middle. I admire how unashamedly massive and generous these games are, even if the flab tested my patience in both Remake and Rebirth.

That may be because they've caught me in my time-starved late 30s. If these games existed at the peak of my Final Fantasy fandom when I was 17, I would've absolutely devoured them. I ask Hamaguchi how he thinks about pacing, and how Rebirth compares to Revelation on that front.

"Obviously, Rebirth has this world map with so much content, so much to explore, but if you just do the story, then what you'll find is that the pacing is extremely similar and the structure is extremely similar to the tight, story-driven experience of Remake," Hamaguchi says. "And we've essentially kept the approach the same for Revelation in terms of pacing."

More of the same, then. One thing that has changed since the events of Rebirth, of course, is that there's a big meteor heading towards the planet—which may change up the urgency of exploring its open world for players.

Hamaguchi and his team, however, have thought ahead of concerned fans on this topic. "So, you've got Meteor up there in the sky, and in the main story, obviously, you're going to have that time pressure, that sense that you really need to be getting on with things because there's this looming, impending threat," he says. "I've seen people concerned that all the side content may detract from that sense of urgency.

"But we have been really careful about how that's approached, and obviously that's something that [Kazuhige] Nojima has really been keeping in mind when writing the scenario. Obviously Cloud and all of the main characters are heading towards this final confrontation and they're very aware of that, but that means that they're also trying to find and discover their own motivations to make sure that they are certain of what [they're] doing, to find a reason to move forward.

"So it's not that you're just rushing into this final battle. They're saying, 'Well, if this is the end, then let's do what we want to do, let's do what feels right for us along the way.'"

So Queen's Blood, dog football and all the other minigames are still on the menu, even when the world seems like it's coming to an end.

Weapons-grade

The biggest surprise for me is how much Square Enix has decided to reveal about the game in its marketing campaign, including some things I considered sacred secrets of the original.

I wasn't surprised to see them spoil the playable Highwind airship and how that moves around the open world—that looks rad as shit—but the Weapon bosses were almost playground myths to me while I played the original. I ask if Hamaguchi had any qualms about spoiling them all during Gamescom, including how dauntingly huge they appear in the open world.

"First of all, I am glad to hear that it was a surprise that we would showcase the Weapons," Hamaguchi says, pointing out that the previous two instalments focused their marketing around the characters, and this time they wanted to dial in on gameplay. "I suppose that was what we were going for."

Hamaguchi is determined to match the spectacle of the Weapons in Revelation with players remember them in the original.

"In terms of how strong and how difficult the Weapons are going to be, as with the original, some of the Weapons are going to be part of the main story, and some of them are side content," he says. "And whether they're ones in the main story or side content, they have a lot of unique mechanics and interactive elements; some of them even have minigames in, and are quite strategic in that same way as well.

"In terms of the difficulty, obviously those that are part of the main story need to be defeatable by most players, so I would say the difficulty there is somewhat lower. For those that are part of side content, I would say those are hard, and you're probably going to need to be a higher level than you would have been to complete the game to take those on."

I use the rest of my time with Hamaguchi to ask about details of the original FF7 that still stick in my memory, decades after I first completed it, and how they'll be interpreted in Revelation.

FF7 Rebirth gave players a little sample of Highwind captain Cid, but in the original game he was quite a complicated and self-loathing character, stuck on the ground because his dream of going into space went kaput. The order of when that story occurs has changed, which fans already knew, but Revelation will be faithful to the specifics.

"Revelation does pay tribute to the original with everything that's going on in Rocket Town, [including] that mission from Shinra to launch the rocket, exploring the relationship between Cid and [Shera], and that experience of going to space and space travel," Hamaguchi says. "We really think that it'll allow players to explore Cid's internal world a little bit more."

As fans may have already seen, too, Rocket Town is a more expansive setting in Revelation, which requires its own form of transportation. "There was a buggy in Rebirth, of course, but this [time you] will be driving around in Cid's car. And you can put some background music on in the car if you like, and who knows, maybe if you do some more side content you might unlock some more tracks for his car and things like that, so there's plenty to explore."

I ask which characters get expanded upon the most versus the original game, since we've now spent tens more hours with some of these heroes than we did in the 1997 version. "In terms of extra depth and exploration, I think particularly with Revelation, the characters that we've really been able to explore in more detail, in more depth, are Yuffie and Vincent. Because in the original, Yuffie and Vincent were both optional characters, they weren't able to be so intricately tied into the main story."

Elsewhere, Hamaguchi has expressed his enthusiasm for folding in elements from the wider net of FF7 side projects. I've always been curious about the remake games' obsession with Zack Fair, a flashback character in FF7 who was spun off into the popular PSP prequel Crisis Core (which has since been remade and released on PC). Hamaguchi says this creative choice is driven by fans' enthusiasm for the character as depicted in the game.

"In Revelation, there are more playable sections with Zack, and they are more extensive than those in Rebirth," Hamaguchi says. "He'll actually be playable in battle with his own combat system that's unique to him, and there will be room for growth in a skill tree kind of way. It's very closely tied into the story experience, so it's on a much larger scale than what you've seen before, which I think will hopefully make Zack fans happy, and his sections, let's just say they are full of surprises."

Speaking of surprises: it took FF7 Remake only a few hours to break the seal on series antagonist Sephiroth, which perhaps robbed the character of his elusive potency in the original game. By the time Revelation comes along, it'll be the third time players have faced him—I'm curious how Hamaguchi and team will top the spectacle of Rebirth's prolonged Sephiroth encounter, which reached double digit phases.

"First let me just say that we haven't said whether there will be a dramatic showdown with Sephiroth in this third of the series," laughs Hamaguchi. "However, if there wasn't a dramatic showdown with Sephiroth, I do think the fans would be angry, so there will be one!"

He's keen not to spoil the surprise, but also can't help but drop a few hints—including a nod to Cloud's final Limit Break attack, a legendary moment of the original game's finale. "What I can say is that it's going to be a very extravagant, all-out battle that will far and above surpass what was in Remake and Rebirth in what I believe will be a very satisfying encounter. I know there are a lot of people out there who are looking forward to seeing the ultimate limit break [Omnislash] at the end of the battle with Sephiroth.

"Obviously we are putting in plenty of homages to the original, including to things like [that limit break]. We have crammed it full of everything that we can," Hamaguchi says, clearly excited to show fans another eye-wateringly high-end boss battle that will no doubt consume an entire evening.

While I think less could've been more with the FF7 Remake trilogy, I do enjoy Hamaguchi's absolute confidence in his vision of what he believes fans want. It's impossible to look at the Highwind cruising over the 1:1 scale world map in Revelation and argue that was a poor way to burn three games' worth of budget.

The Star Wars movies have always had a mashup quality. You take some dogfighting from The Dam Busters, some swordfighting from old samurai movies, the saloon scene from a western, and you mix 'em up real good. That's how you make one (1) Star War. There's nothing wrong with that—when The Phantom Menace threw the chariot-racing from Ben Hur into the mix, it ended up being easily one of the best parts of the movie.

While Episode 1 Racer managed to recreate that specific scene just fine, as soon as you left Tatooine the quality dropped. Star Wars: Galactic Racer sets its aim higher than recreating just one scene, and instead imagines an entire racing culture flourishing in the peacetime gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, where crime syndicates back planet-hopping hotshots who race landspeeders, speeder bikes, and skim speeders across planets that conveniently have one biome each.

That worldbuilding helps populate a cast of rivals—the villainous Kestar Bool is immediately hateable, so well done there—including an ex-TIE Fighter pilot and a bunch of rich kids who could be real-life Formula One drivers if they weren't blue or speaking Huttese.

These characters populate the paddock you walk across every few races on your way to the upgrade monkey and they insult you during the races, though since half of those insults are in subtitled alien language I didn't pay much attention to them. If you've got time to read subtitles when you're hurling through a cavern at 450 km/h, good for you.

It's arcade racing, of course. A bit like Wipeout only instead of losing all your speed the second you touch the sides you either scrape along for a bit or bounce off or explode in a way that'll be familiar from the Burnout games. Galactic Racer studio Fuse Games was founded by a bunch of ex-Criterion developers who worked on the Burnout series as well as helping DICE with the modern Star Wars Battlefront games, so that explains that.

When you slam another racer into a wall the takedown camera pans over to give you a proper slow-motion look at their greebly Star Wars vehicle being reduced to the kind of scrap Jawas would turn their nose up at, though unlike Burnout 3 the computer isn't great at steering for you while that happens. More than once I came out of a takedown to discover the CPU was aiming me directly at a wall at high speed.

Roger Ramjet

Takedowns are a much less significant part of Galactic Racer than I expected. I thought this would, like Burnout 3, be a string of high-speed crashes with some brief bits of racing in between. Instead, it's an actual racing game—albeit one where a crocodile-faced alien will occasionally rocket into a wall and be engulfed in flame.

You've got an afterburner that gives a modest speed boost on a cooldown and a faster "ramjet" boost that can dangerously overheat if pushed to the limit, and balancing these two varieties of turbo are important. You have to pay attention to status effects like Cooled, which triggers at high speed or when cruising over water and lowers your heat, and Burning, delivered by the flame jets one opponent loves to deploy or by racing over lava, which of course raises your heat. Other status effects like Overcharged and Corroded and Shielded might factor into your build as well.

Those builds are developed over the course of a tour linking races together. Five of them in a multiplayer tour or the scenario mode where you get to play as one of the cast of rivals, or three acts worth of them in the campaign mode that borrows elements of its structure from roguelite games. This mode is run-based, so you pick your next event from a map of nodes right out of FTL or Slay the Spire, earning upgrades as you go, but if you wipe out it's back to the start of the act—with some unlocks that should make your next attempt easier.

It's not that far off the kind of knockout grand prix mode you get in other racing games, but like that crack it really is more-ish. One path might favor more traditional races, while another is high on eliminators, where you lose a league token (a life, basically) if you don't finish in the top three. But eliminators have better rewards, so I always choose them. Maybe another path has a random event or a visit to the scrap shop, which could result in some gear that radically changes my build and my odds of winning the championship. There's plenty to consider.

Death Rally

A big part of most builds are abilities. Ion bolt temporarily scrambles steering for a targeted pilot ahead of you, while the vent ability drops your heat to nothing. Concussion mine? Does exactly what it sounds like. Abilities are on cooldowns but also cost energy to use, and you've got a limited amount of that based on your battery, which is another thing that can be upgraded.

After events you get to spend whatever credits you've earned on a random selection of improvements to your racer and its abilities, as well as bolting on parts that might influence the direction your build takes—a part that refills my afterburner on collision encourages me to build for tankiness, while one that wipes all heat on a perfect landing after a jump means I can go all-in on the ramjet.

The other thing splitting up events is the paddock, a hangout for racers with a bar and garage that you walk through in third-person at the start of each planet in a tour. One of your rivals might confront you, a couple of racers may be arguing over drinks, or the league organizer might have something to say about how you're doing.

It's nothing as involved as the Underworld hub from Hades, but it does add a narrative layer and set dressing that feels properly Star Wars. The racer who dresses like an X-Wing pilot has a real 1970s mustache like Biggs (I think humans in Star Wars should always look like they're from the '70s and '80s, bring on the feathered hair and sideburns), and each planet has some native critters hanging out so they can scurry away as you approach.

Another pleasantly Star Wars touch is the pre-race check where you flip a bunch of toggles just like Han Solo sitting in the Millennium Falcon, a string of quick-time events that can give you instant access to your afterburner or power up the first activation of your abilities. Nailing a string of them feels great, though the ones that use the D-pad have reminded me why I hate the 360 controller's D-pad.

Get in the podracer, Shade

The story casts you as a human, customizable though always a helmet-wearing courier named Shade. (An anagram for Hades, now I think of it. Coincidence? Well, probably, yeah.) You get to choose from a handful of outfits and voices, then change the color swatch of those outfits and put different levels of mechanical echo on the voices.

Most humans don't have the fast reaction times needed to fly a podracer, but Galactic Racer finds ways to work them in regardless—including a series of flashback races where you play as Sebulba, Anakin's main opponent from The Phantom Menace. Cantankerous and bearded, he hangs around the paddock in later acts being the legend from the old days everyone's afraid of, giving out "advice" that's actually self-aggrandizement. He rules, and ends up stealing the show from the new characters Galactic Racer introduces.

The speed of podracers is almost too much for the tracks, and I got intimately familiar with the walls of the crystal caverns on Crait (the salt-covered planet from The Last Jedi) after colliding with them a bunch of times. Something Galactic Racer definitely nails is the sense of speed. When you're whipping through tunnels making turns that seem impossible then zip out into the open, redlining the ramjet as you fly down the straight, it really does capture the feeling of riding a shopping cart down a hill after a few beers—which is the closest I've ever come to racecar driving in real life.

Wacky Races

It's frustrating then how often that feeling is interrupted by crashes caused by the tracks being hard to read. If a rival like Biddy Blas takes me out with a well-timed slam that's par for the course, but a lot of my crashes came from struggling to distinguish between an outcrop of white ice and the white snow of the racetrack, or a brown boulder and the brown sand beneath it. Some corners have rows of lights strung up to highlight them, and I wish there was an option to add more of them to certain tracks.

The other thing that caused more crashes than I would have liked was the autopilot ability. Activate it and you get several seconds of near-perfect piloting, with upgrades that can boost your speed and extend your ramjets while on autopilot. More than once though, I hit the autopilot and then watched in horror as it went out of its way to steer directly into the side of heating tunnels on the snow planet, or clipped the top of a tunnel after taking a jump, or drove straight over a concussion mine in the middle of the track. Even when it didn't, sometimes I'd come out of autopilot racing toward a corner at top speed, unable to slow enough to take it safely.

I kept choosing autopilot when I had the option though, because when it works it's one of the most powerful abilities in Galactic Racer. If you're struggling on the final race of act three, fully upgraded autopilot and ramjet can carry you through. It's an odd combination of overpowered and flawed, and feels like it'll probably be patched post-haste.

Revenge of the plot

The amount of story in the gutters around the races might seem odd given how badly that stuff often lands in regular racing games, but being a Star Wars game helps Galactic Racer immensely. Every generic street-racing game thinks players will care about its cast of backwards-hat douchebags and rejects from The Fast & The Furious, and we never do. Yet I enjoyed hating the hateable racers here (honestly, fuck Kestar Bool), and enjoyed slowly earning the respect of a blue lady who dresses like Amelia Earhart. The four-armed monkey mechanic who sounds like she's from Liverpool is an entertaining sidekick, and if you're the kind of fan who will recognize a character from Star Wars Resistance you'll get to point at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio.

Which is why it's a shame the story doesn't amount to much in the end. When I made it to the end of act three and finally triumphed, it felt flat. There's not much payoff compared to all the setup and I feel like a rube for getting invested in the trimmings instead of the meat. Even before the finale, characters started repeating dialogue I'd already heard.

I felt kind of the same about Zero Company when I finished that. The benefit of making a Star Wars game is if you get stuff like the sound effects and the music right—Galactic Racer nails both the gnarly stutter of the engines and the soundtrack only kicking in on the final lap just like in The Phantom Menace—then you get to piggyback on the warm fuzzy feelings the movies installed in me when I was young. Even the movies struggled to pay off on the expectations that set up.

But while I didn't roll credits thinking I'd just played a masterpiece, and the signposting on some tracks wasn't great, I did enjoy zooming past Biddy Blas while he screamed "nobata nobata!" at me. Huh, maybe I did learn some Huttese after all.

The odd thing about computer mice—gaming, ergonomic, or otherwise—is how subjective they are. I guess we've all got different hand shapes, finger lengths, and technical needs. I've been hunting for the perfect mouse for my particular hands for years now, and I've refined my selection down to two.

Unfortunately, they couldn't be more different, so I guess I'm a two-mouse sort of guy now. One is the Logitech MX Master 4, an ergonomic mouse with a poor sensor for gaming, but an excellent shape for all-day work usage. It's also near-silent, which the rest of my household is very grateful for.

And the other is the Razer Cobra HyperSpeed, a tiny rodent with exactly the sort of weight and technical specs I like for gaming, all for a relatively reasonable sum. Looking at the two together, they're completely chalk and cheese. Neither mouse is perfect, but switching between the two is the best solution I've found for all my computing needs.

As I sit here during a workday, typing out this article, it's the MX Master 4 that keeps me company. While I technically prefer the MX Master 3S, I managed to damage the rubber coating of mine when I took it apart for cleaning, so I've switched to the newer model.

It's not quite as comfy as the 3S, but it's still a weighty rodent with a horizontal scroll wheel for spreadsheets and a selection of programmable buttons that come in handy for my daily tasks.

When I want to play something fast-paced, though, I swap over to the Cobra HyperSpeed. It's tiny, which makes it perfect for quick fingertip movements. It's also got a speedy sensor, brilliantly clicky, satisfying switches, and a little dash of near-tasteful RGB lighting underneath.

It's a bit like cars. In an ideal world (in which I could afford to have two automobiles on my driveway), I'd have a big, wallowing cruiser for getting me to the office in comfort, and a little two-seater sports car to bomb around in on the weekends. Which is exactly how I use these two mice.

But the stark difference between the two makes me think that, for my purposes, the perfect mouse doesn't exist. I've tried lots of them over the past few years, but this combo is the one I've stuck with for a while now, and it's probably where I'm going to stay.

Neither is technically the best on the market for all purposes. But once you've found a system that works for you, it's difficult to change—which means I guess I'm a dual-wielder from this point forward. As are, I notice, several other members of the PC Gamer team. What's next, two gaming chairs? This double-hardware lifestyle is going to get expensive, I can tell.

Wireless gaming mice are great and have only gotten better with time. They're so good, in fact, that I would not go for a wired model unless I was really looking for a budget option. And yet it turns out wired mice were the best choice for the Valorant Champions tournament in Shanghai, where custom desks were apparently interfering with the signal.

The Valorant Esports X page recently revealed that "repeated mouse interference issues have caused multiple tech pauses and disrupted our most important tournament of the year" and that it would be asking all players to swap to wired mice until the problem is fixed.

In a match between FUT Esports and 100 Thieves, player xeus had an issue with their mouse where it was unable to fire. Xeus is part of FUT, which lost to 100 Thieves, two to zero.

Riot claims, "Following an official post-game evaluation, we concluded that a round rollback should have been allowed. We take responsibility for that error." Riot also said, "After considering the available options, we have decided that the match result will stand, as other options would result in overturning a victory by a team that competed under the same conditions and was not responsible for the error."

Riot fabricated custom metal desks for the tournament, and believes the material choice could be the cause of the interference problem here. For most players, they will be able to use their wireless mouse simply in wired mode, but some mice without USB Type-C ports, like the recent SteelSeries Rival Pro, would pose a significant problem.

In this use case, a pro would have to swap the mouse altogether, which means getting used to a new shape, weight, and feel. At the highest level, this could be a slight disadvantage.

But even using the same mouse, being tethered to your rig poses a slight problem too, as it adds some resistance in movement. This will likely mean that many players have to ever so slightly change the way they play for the tournament, or at least until things are fixed.

There's a reason why wireless mice are so popular among competitive players. They're easy to move around; you don't have to factor in the tether of the cable as you move your arm, and polling rates are now so high that wireless mice are as quick as wired. Regardless of how fast this issue is fixed, it's still likely quite the setback for pro players, and may make them bring a spare USB cable with them in the future.

2XKO ending its development (which Merrill phrases here as turning it into a "box game" instead, despite the fact Riot also laid off a bunch of people to make that happen), came as a deep frustration, but not much of a surprise given the current nightmare year the industry's been having. However—that number, "high hundreds of thousands, if not millions", is a somewhat desperate number.

Especially given the podcast has an annotation of monthly active users (MAU), which one'd assume would mean they asked Merrill for clarification. An active user is a unique user that logs in and does something at least once during a month, which means that the number would be far higher than concurrent users (how many of those users are logged in at any one time).

However, we can at least make some very loose guesstimates. Street Fighter 6 has a 30,000 concurrent peak on PC at the time of writing. Let's assume the average person has a seven hour window during a day to play, accounting for a nine to five job or chores/social obligations on the weekend—the concurrent count doesn't actually jump that much.

So let's say that in a 24 hour period, you've got around 30-35% of your potential playerbase online at any given moment. The rest are sleeping, working, running errands, etc. That leaves SF6 with roughly 100,000 people who are consistently playing the game on PC every day.

I wanna note: This is by no means an accurate number, it's kitchen napkin math and guesswork that assumes there's an even amount of SF6 players in each time zone and that they each have the same daily schedule but look, I'm working with what I have here (Capcom doesn't have monthly active users info available).

Let's be extremely generous and say only 25% play on PC, something that likely isn't even the case, I'm steelmanning myself here—that still leaves us with 400,000 players total in a 24-hour period. Monthly active users, though, is simply a tallying of: "Did this person log in at any point during the month". Assuming no new players came to SF6, that 400,000 daily total player count wouldn't change its impact on the MAU number.

Which means that you'd have to be getting in a lot of new or returning players every single day to bump up the monthly unique player count to anywhere near one million. SF6 has sold 7 million units total between June 2023 and June 2026. Even if you spread that out over the 36 months between those two dates (unlikely, sales are usually frontloaded) that'd still be just 194,444 potential additions to the pool every month.

In other words, even if you take one of the most popular fighting games in the world, with the most generous read possible on its total daily active user count, with the most disadvantageous PC/Console split to make my point, you'd still barely get over the 500,000 monthly active user mark. Shy of "high hundreds of thousands", and certainly shy of "millions" plural.

The comparison becomes weirder when you compare it to other fighting games that are still receiving support. Guilty Gear: Strive is still getting new characters and updates, and that has a 24-hour concurrent peak of 1,580.

In other words: There was no way in hell that 2XKO was ever going to get enough in the way of players to satisfy its expectations, which leaves a lot of questions here. Did Riot as a company just get overconfident from less niche genres? Did it not do the market research? Were the 2XKO developers just super inefficient?

Or did it simply have enough money to, like many studios before it, simply gamble and see if it could create something even better than Street Fighter 6—rolling the dice on the livelihoods of the developers who were making it? None of the answers to those questions are particularly flattering.

With price gouging and some buyers exporting graphics cards to China, Micro Center is reportedly making customers swear they won't do the same. And with a signed declaration, it's maybe a bit more airtight than a pinky promise.

This is according to Reddit user Krothic, who recently picked up a Powerspec Ai90 prebuilt PC with an RTX 5090 in it and was hit with the form. The Redditor bought the PC from a Micro Center in Tustin, California, and according to the manager, the new anti-export declaration only came into effect a few days ago.

High-end GPUs have been banned from being exported to China as America is looking to win the AI race, and more beefy cards in the country equals more power. But it's also become harder to actually buy an RTX 5090 GPU on its own, with the likes of Newegg and Amazon's only listings being shops with questionable provenance and names such as 'sdflkjahsdgasdggbsd'. Full PCs, then, might be your only recourse for grabbing a card for export if that is your aim.

Apparently, the user had to hand over their driver's license to verify their identity, too, linking their purchase to their name. Should that GPU be found being shipped elsewhere, Micro Center could technically tie the GPU back to the buyer by checking its serial number. But this doesn't account for someone buying a prebuilt, then deciding to one day sell that on or eventually giving it to someone else.

In fairness, the paper does get the buyer to state, "I am purchasing this product for my own legitimate personal or business use in the United States, or I have accurately identified the actual end user above." But that still feels like a lot of paperwork just to buy a new PC, and that's before we get into how enforceable any of this is.

If an exported GPU is tied back to someone who purchased one at Micro Center, there are reasons one could claim for how the GPU ended up there, ie, it being stolen.

It seems likely the biggest deterrent to exporting is not the declaration but, in fact, the ID check. If you are looking to export cards en masse, you likely won't want to give your full legal name to an entity that can tie those purchases back to you.

Still, it's getting harder and harder to buy gaming hardware, and not just because of the price. The barriers to entry are being raised, and many brands are opting to have users prove brand loyalty to get the tech instead. Neither option seems that appealing to me.

There are few things that give me the heebie-jeebies more than overflowing toilets, burst pipes, and water damage. Ditto receiving a hefty, unexpected fee. So I wonder, how would it feel to be on the receiving end of both?

One Redditor can answer this question, though only thanks to the smoke and mirrors economy of digital manipulation. Apparently, they found themselves on the wrong end of an Airbnb host—"one of the biggest Airbnb companies of their state in Australia"—who attempted to get them to cough up $1,700 for an overflowed toilet, the evidence for which was, you guessed it, AI-generated.

So thanks, AI, in addition to making our precious PC memory very expensive, you've also made it very easy for people to attempt to fleece others using the humble commode.

Thankfully, it's AI that can also come to the rescue here, as Gemini is able to spot its own SynthID watermark in the fake image. Not that it wasn't suspected in the first place, given the Reddit post was shared on r/isthisAI.

This story has a happy ending, anyway:

"Good news everyone! I had this case resolved and deemed ineligible for the reimbursement they asked for... Also another detail I forgot to mention is that there is a floor underneath this one so if there are a few inches of water on the ground the entire first floor should be an aquarium!"

Regardless of how things went in this particular case, I'm using this as a reminder for myself: take pictures and record videos of any Airbnbs you stop at just before you leave. Better to be safe than sorry.

Valve has pushed yet another update for SteamOS on the Steam Frame. It includes power efficiency improvements, eye tracking accessibility, and improved streaming reliability. Also something about grabbing handles?

• Improved power efficiency and battery lifetime during both streaming and local gameplay, with gains of up to 12%. Note: Result vary depending on framerate and content.
• Added accessibility option for users who want to limit eye tracking to a single eye. VR Settings -> General -> Track Dominant Eye Only. (requires enabling "show advanced settings")
• Fixed an issue that prevented controller bindings from loading for certain games, including Google Earth VR and Thumper.
• Improved focus behavior when interacting with grab/resize handles
• Further VR streaming reliability improvements, including additional fixes for “Error 17.” Note: On the PC, you must also opt into SteamVR 2.18.2 or later to reduce “Error 17” connection issues. At the time of this release, SteamVR 2.18.2 is available on the SteamVR [beta] branch.
• Fixed steam frame wireless adapter connectivity issues that affected users in some countries.

It's the battery life improvements that most will feel the benefit of. A 12% improvement is pretty impressive for a single software update—the Steam Frame runs for around two hours while streaming, so you're looking at another 15 minutes or so from that bump alone. Though, as Valve notes, that's dependent on what you're playing and the power setting.

Valve also recently improved charging on the Steam Frame, allowing it to fast charge even when the headset is turned off. That dramatically decreases charging times in my testing.

SteamOS for Steam Frame is a whole new project for Valve. A version of its Arch-based Linux distro, used on the Steam Machine and Steam Deck, except built for virtual reality and Arm-based processors. Specifically, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in the Frame, though laying the foundations for any further Arm-powered projects. I'd love to see an Arm-powered Steam Deck, though a recent rumour suggests the Steam Deck 2 will use another AMD chip instead.

Nobody likes scalpers, man—it's already hard enough to get the latest and greatest hardware, let alone with some enterprising bad actor and their bots buying up all the available stock, and then charging an even greater fortune for sought-after bits of kit. That said, I'm not really a big fan of the anti-scalper measures many vendors are now deploying either.

For instance, Sony Japan has rolled out an anti-scalper lottery system for PS5 Pro orders. To be in with even a chance of picking up the pricey console, you'll need a Sony account registered in Japan that has logged at least 60 hours or more of gaming, either on a PS4, a PS5, or both (via Tom's Hardware). In theory, that should be enough of a faff to deter scalpers and an easy enough hurdle for PlayStation fans to overcome. In practice, I'm not loving the weird precedent of locking my potential hardware purchases behind a dystopian brand loyalty test.

Obviously, it's not just Sony that's up to such silliness. Most recently, Valve implemented a reservation system for the launch of the Steam Frame. To sign up, the FAQ says, "You must have a Steam account in good standing," and that "You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026."

To be fair to Valve, I did see reports of the Steam Machine being scalped for over $3,000. But 'In good standing'? What does that even mean? I couldn't find a precise definition from Valve itself; an account 'in good standing' could mean one not subject to a ban or any community restrictions, or it could mean an account that has made a purchase within a recent timeframe, or it could mean whatever suits Valve at any given moment. I'm still a little unclear on this finer point.

I've already written about how it's been genuinely cheaper for me to fly internationally to either QuakeCon or PAX West earlier this year, and pick up an RTX 5090 for MSRP at either of those in-person events. The latter scheme was described as 'Verified Priority Access IRL'. For those who don't recall, VPA was the draw system Nvidia used to offer the chance to pay full price for RTX 5090 or RTX 5080 Founders Edition graphics cards last year (Newegg's Shuffle lottery system also did a similar thing).

Zotac even attempted to beat those dastardly GPU scalpers by selling RTX 50-series graphics cards to actual gamers via Discord last year. And like Nvidia, Zotac likely knew it could sell every card it offered up through such a direct (not to mention exclusive) channel.

I hate this trend, even if it is all meant to deter scalpers. I firmly believe gaming, and PC gaming especially, should be for everyone, though I'll acknowledge it rarely lives up to that ideal. Brand loyalty tests like this, plus the runaway pricing caused by the ongoing memory supply crisis, mean those without deep reserves of both cash and time are still stuck on the outside looking in. Bottom line, though scalpers may be mostly closed out of the loop by reservation systems with set qualifying criteria, I'm not convinced this is the best deal for hardware consumers.

The first six months of the year were Steam's biggest, thanks to continued growth in back-catalogue sales as well as blockbuster new releases like Forza Horizon 6 and Resident Evil Requiem. As industry analysts Alinea Analytics report, September was another record breaker based on their estimated figures.

"Steam generated $1.7 billion in September 2026," Rhys Elliott, Alinea's head of market analysis, wrote, "the platform's best September to date, up 13% on the previous record, September of last year."

Wardogs was the smash hit new release of September, though Elliott noted the "hype cycles and virality" of comparably leftfield surprises Arc Raiders and Helldivers 2 were more sustained. "By this point, Helldivers 2 had made $130M (26.5% more than Wardogs) on Steam, while Arc Raiders had made about $125M (21.2% more)."

Still, Wardogs generated an estimated $86.9M on Steam in September. Elliott highlights Onimusha: Way of the Sword ($30.4M), The Blood of Dawnwalker ($26.9M), Bodycam ($24.2M), and EA Sports FC27 ($20.7M) as the other big new launches on Steam that month.

"Steam also had its best-ever Q3," Elliott wrote, "generating $5.5B (up 12% on last year). That brings the 2026 total to $16.5B so far, a 13% increase from the $14.5B Steam made in the first nine months of 2025. Given the insane release slate for the rest of the year, it's safe to say Steam's yearly revenue will blow past $20B for the first time."

He's not wrong about the rest of the year. Looking at just October's calendar shows how spoiled for choice we are.

As we're in the latter half of the year, quite a few brand new, 2026 games are on sale in Steam's latest seasonal discount party, the Autumn Sale.

Here are nine standouts we spotted:

There are lots more great games on sale at the moment: SteamDB's sales section is the best way we've found to sort through the on-sale games and look for gems.

It's been a while since I set foot nervously inside the Playtime Co. factory, but last time I was there I was hounded through the halls and air vents by a towering blue plush toy that wanted nothing more than to hug me to death.

I played a bit of the multiplayer prequel to Poppy Playtime this week, and I can now report that there's something even scarier than that giant Huggy Wuggy doll roaming the factory. Her name is Miss Delight. You can meet her yourself because the Escape from Playtime open beta is now live on Steam and you can try out the game all weekend long.

This time you're one of the cute little Playtime toys, like a plush bunny, a cartoony cat, or a fluffy unicorn, and your goal is to escape the accursed factory with your pals by skittering through the dark corridors and shadowy rooms collecting supplies. Fill a cart with enough useful junk and you can advance to the next shift. Complete all the shifts and you're free. But it's not gonna be easy.

In my session we were stalked by progressively more monstrous toys each shift we completed. There are toy robots who speed toward you when detected and explode on contact, though if a teammate bonks them in the back of the head with a thrown object first, they shut down. There's also a Cat Bee (it's a cat dressed like a bee) that latches onto players and poisons them until, again, another player knocks them off with a thrown object. You can already see the purpose of sticking together.

Then there's Miss Delight. You'll know she's around by the clicking of her high heels echoing through the factory. She, like Huggy Wuggy, is tall, towering over you (especially since you're just a little stuffed toy) and insta-murdering you if she catches you. Thing about Miss Delight is that it's simple to stop her in her tracks: just shine a flashlight in what's left of her face.

But somehow Miss Delight standing there staring at you is worse than Huggy Wuggy chasing you down. Turns out there's something worse than an unstoppable monster, and it's a monster that stops. And stands there motionless. Staring at you. With bright, shiny dead eyes a gaping, hungry mouth. Just standing there, completely still, staring… right up your flashlight battery dies.

That's not the only warning about Escape from Playtime. Mob Entertainment has one too:

"We want to emphasize that this is very much a playtest looking for your feedback," the developer says. "This build has many work-in-progress aspects, experimental features, experiments with balance, and locked away features. Your feedback from this Beta Playtest will greatly aid in the development of the launch build and beyond!"

There will be a survey after you play if you'd like to give feedback. The open beta runs until 6 pm PT on Sunday, October 4, and supports up to eight players (with at least groups of four recommended). Find the full beta details here.

We've only got three months left in the year, but our list of upcoming 2026 games has enough October releases and updates to tide me over until this time next year. I just installed Silent Hill: Townfall, but who knows if I'll get to it before we start decking the halls or whatever the song says. I was hoping to deck a few monsters in Scotland. Alas.

It's a very my-steak-is-too-juicy complaint, but I've already overcommitted my October schedule to more survival crafting with Enshrouded's 1.0 update. I'm also trying to make time for MMO nostalgia when MapleStory Classic is out, and Final Fantasy Resonance will have to squeeze in there somewhere.

My own calendar is already buckling under the weight of this month's treats, so in the spirit of spooky season, I haunted a few colleagues with threats of dead pixels and ghosting until they shared their staff picks for the month. I'm pacified, for now. But I'll be back again next month with a turkey and the world's most mumbly protagonist.

October 2026 PC Gamer picks

October 2026 gaming events and sales

• LudoNarraCon begins its digital celebration of narrative indies on October 8
• Brasil Game Show kicks off its four-day convention in São Paulo on October 9
• PAX Australia returns for three days of gaming, cosplay, and panels on October 9
• League of Legends Worlds begins its quarterfinal and semifinal tournaments on October 15
• Paris Games Week celebrates its 15th anniversary with new programming starting on October 22
• Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show returns for its second four-day convention in Bangkok on October 29
• Final Fantasy 14 Fan Fest makes its next (and final) stop in Japan on October 31
• As always, you can grab more Epic Store free games every Thursday, and check out weekly Steam sales for themed deals:
  • Oct. 1 – 8: Steam Autumn Sale
  • Oct. 12 – 19: Cooking Fest
  • Oct. 19 – 26: Next Fest (October Edition)
  • Oct. 26 – Nov. 2: Steam Scream 5 Fest

October 2026 game updates and DLC highlights

The October 2026 games calendar

New game releases, events, and updates you can check out during spooky season.

Masters of Albion's 'New Beginnings' update launches today, and it overhauls and upgrades many of the original early access release's systems. The above video gives an overview of what's new.

I bought Masters of Albion when it launched in April. But after scoping out what's new in this update, I feel the moment that I and, no doubt, many other PC gamers have been waiting for has arrived: it's the moment when Peter Molyneux's final title has properly started to take form and genuinely recapture the god game magic of old.

Here is what's new in Masters of Albion, with commentary from Peter Molyneux on each new feature. This is followed by my personal take on the New Beginnings update.

Engine performance just doubled

Nighttime gameplay is overhauled

There's a brand new, card-based Arcadium

Product orders now are narrative lead

The design table has been reworked

The Orkenstone now warps the landscape

The god hand has been upgraded

Masters of Albion's start has been enhanced

Mysterious new colossal structures now exist

My take on New Beginnings

Speaking candidly, before the New Beginnings update I struggled to recommend Masters of Albion to most PC gamers. And this was because, at launch, I felt the game was lightweight, even for an early access game. It had plenty of god game systems, sure, such as building and settlement construction, product manufacturing, and combat (strategic and action), and yes, there was the famous god hand of old to wield, but much like the game's rudimentary opening, the well of what you could actually do with those systems soon ran dry.

Be that the repetitive nature of product manufacturing, the eventual grind of nighttime, or the limited way in which you could impact the world with your god hand, what you could do made you recall Molyneux's great games of old, such as Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, and Fable, but you were left wanting more, as the systems were not as complex, fleshed out, or varied.

Molyneux has since described the original release of Masters of Albion as an 'initial sketch' of a game, and in many respects that is to be expected from the very first version of an early access game, but when you're trying to combine multiple parts of other genres together for your game, individual genres that in single-genre releases tend to flesh out their core loop at the earliest moment as it is all they deliver, rather than just a facet of what they deliver, it feels a harder sell to convince gamers to get invested when your game's systems start off in a more unfinished state.

To me, this ability to combine multiple genres together has always been where Molyneux has been at his creative, magical best, delivering unique experiences not offered elsewhere. But combining genres also poses its own problems, with the two most pressing being the depth of the systems and how they interact. You need the systems, such as city building and RTS combat, to be good enough to stand on their own and combine into something new, as otherwise the draw for gamers to just go play the single-genre game that does, say, RTS combat better will be too strong. Molyneux hit this problem in Black & White 2.

The good news is that the updates that New Beginnings bring all seem to directly address these two fundamental aspects in both fleshing out the bare-bones original early access release, or overhauling its core systems for the better, while adding extra interactivity and strategic weight. And I genuinely think those changes shift the game up to a whole new level. Suddenly Masters of Albion feels like a proper PC release and, while far from finished, is now in an early access state where I feel I can recommend it to god game fans, as well as PC gamers interested in getting a taste of this old-school PC gaming genre.

The game's engine optimisation is also a huge deal. This was my number one criticism from playing the game at launch. Despite having a powerful gaming PC, I struggled to hit 30 fps at times, despite the game not being a AAA graphical powerhouse. A much higher fps is going to make a big difference.

Finally, what I consider to be the really tantalising addition in this update, though, is the appearance of these mysterious colossal structures that dominate the skyline—especially because they are called out in the New Beginnings press release, which asks if they are "a link to the past or a foreshadowing of the future?" This, along with Molyneux's cryptic commentary above, indicates that Masters of Albion could very well be heading towards introducing Black & White-style giant avatars in a future update. If these are added, and we continue to see this level of acting on community feedback to refine and upgrade in-game systems, maybe Masters of Albion really will evolve into the ultimate god game. And that would be a fitting swansong for the man who created the genre.

If there's an Ace Combat fan in your life, you're likely already aware that it's a very good time for fighter jets dogfighting with arcade intensity. But if you're not already certain that exchanging near-infinite missiles is for you—you should be, but I acknowledge we all find truth at our own pace—Ace Combat 8's $70 price tag might seem a bit too high for a trial run.

Luckily, there's a phenomenal alternative that you can pick up for a fraction of the price: Project Wingman, a celebrated Ace Combat-inspired passion project that's currently available for $12.50 in the Steam Autumn Sale.

Project Wingman began development as a "portfolio piece" for its developers, eventually graduating to a successfully-backed Kickstarter project that nearly tripled its funding goals and ultimately launching on Steam in December 2020. It's an unabashed homage, drawing on the missile-heavy excess of its spiritual predecessors and elevating it to an even greater intensity of near-absurdist air combat.

It's more than an imitation, however: Project Wingman implemented its own roguelike Conquest Mode, where players can battle for territory against enemy squadrons and use the funds they earn in completed missions to build out their own airfleets. And unlike the latest Ace Combat—which had to issue an apology for its lackluster flight stick support—Project Wingman boasts comprehensive HOTAS compatibility for the intensive air combat sickos among us.

It's also got native VR support, if you think your stomach can tolerate the simulation of hammering a high-G turn.

But don't just take my word for it: Project Wingman is currently enjoying an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam, where 93% of its more than 22,000 reviews are favorable. We were marginally less enthusiastic in our own Project Wingman review from 2020 due to an unsated hunger for a more hardcore flight sim experience, but if you're looking for an affordable entry into indulgent jet jousting, you'll be hard pressed to find a better option.

Project Wingman is available now on Steam at a sale price of $12.50.

ABOVE: A brief gameplay clip from Radiosol. You can't spend too long in the sunlight.

"A journey through a desolate world burned by a planetary cataclysm"

I related this experience in PC Gamer's work chat and multiple of us bought Radiosol, called by its developers "a journey through a desolate world burned by a planetary cataclysm," on the spot. It helps that it's only $9 on Steam, and that its jaggy megastructures look exceptionally cool.

As has become habitual when I see anything that looks mildly uncanny these days, I scrolled down to the generative AI disclosure on Steam: It was used for translations, the Moscow-based developer says, but not to generate any audio or art.

On X, developer TripletConcept also states that they used AI for "some coding and utility stuff like handling Git merges." The artist has been making art in this style since before the 2020s, as evidenced by their ArtStation profile.

I'm not far into Radiosol yet, so I'm still working out what I think—this is just my first impression, not a review. But so far, it's pretty sick.

You're a little wall-climbing spider-robot in the deserted ruins of megastructures, on your way to some kind of final battle for the fate of… it's unclear. Multiple subjects are broadcasting information to you as you work your way toward a pyramid for the big fight, leaping between shadows to stay out of direct sunlight.

So far, there's nothing in the way of combat. It's fun just being a spider-dude, executing big hops in the low-G environment—I have gotten the impression that this is not quite earth—to traverse unshaded stretches of desert. Currently, I'm seeking a "Megapol station" in the territory of the "Locus Group of Companies."

If you decided to check out Radiosol, my suggestions are A) prepare to have a lot of proper nouns thrown at you without context and B) commit the important parts of the menu layouts to memory, in the event that you can't help yourself from hitting the red button that turns off thinking.

Indie RPG team Lovely Hellplace is undeniably retro-focused: 2024's Dread Delusion and the early access Entropy are crunchy and polygonal as hell. But that also extends to design. Dread Delusion was like a stripped-down Morrowind, while Entropy is a classico JRPG with some PC gaming DNA spliced in.

When I spoke to lead developer James Wragg earlier this year, he told me that he thinks part of the appeal of older games is their willingness to be succinct.

Elsewhere in our conversation, Wragg revealed that he's never beaten Breath of the Wild, and whenever he plays, he just wants to revisit 2002's Wind Waker instead. I find this issue much more acute on replays, in my own experience: I've never beaten BotW a second time after that initial playthrough where I got all the shrines (I was unemployed). More recently, I've found myself turning away from my beloved Elden Ring to the far more snackable Bloodborne and Sekiro.

Fallout is such a good shout here: I had a fairly completionist replay a few years ago, and I wrapped it in about 12 hours. Even the fact that Wragg's previous game, Dread Delusion, was open world isn't as much of a gotcha as you might think: It's a pretty dense map and boasts a roughly 15-20 hour runtime.

I find myself much more likely to stop playing a game without hitting the credits these days than to finish something and wish there had been more of it⁠—and even then, the latter is a preferable feeling in my book. There will always be a place for long runners and sprawling open worlds in my heart, but not everybody gets to be Cyberpunk 2077 or Fallout: New Vegas, and that's what makes them special.

Entropy, meanwhile, feels like it has a massive world, at least from the slice of map I've seen. But being able to evoke scale without overstaying the game's welcome is something Lovely Hellplace already managed in Dread Delusion. If you're intrigued by Entropy and Wragg's approach to design, you can check out its free demo or $12 early access on Steam.