At the Game Developers Conference earlier this year, Aggro Crab developer Nick Kaman told me that he thinks there's a lot of meat left on the bone when it comes to co-op "friendslop" games, and that he wants to keep working in the space. Aggro Crab is still down to zig and not zag, though, and will be publishing and supporting a very different sort of game, the upcoming platformer Rebounder.

It's tough enough to stand out in the games market these days, let alone as a 2D platformer, so I'm always excited when one really breaks through and catches my eye. Rebounder is killing it on the art front, presenting everything in this color-limited, comic book, cel-shadey view that I really dig. It dovetails with the story and designs, a sort of blue collar, working class sci-fi reminiscent of Scavenger's Reign, Alien, or Mouthwashing.

"On a remote lunar worksite, valuable resources from an ancient age flow underfoot, and shareholders demand extraction," reads Rebounders' synopsis on Steam. "Contract workers fly-in and fly-out; blue collar labourers from around the galaxy all trekking to the edges of civilization for the next gig.

"A Rebounder runs lines. They pull up their boots each day and speed through hazardous terrain to deliver precious cargo from point A to point B by any means necessary. It’s the gnarliest trade in the universe."

Rebounder looks to be no slouch on the gameplay front either: Its Steam page references kaizo games, hardcore, challenge run fangames/romhacks built out of classic 2D platformers (mostly Super Mario World). It's a style of game I've always loved to watch, but it feels relatively unapproachable for the average Joe. Taking kaizo games' lead as inspiration for a full game strikes me as a brilliant move.

"I think someone got really interested in mario shell jumps," observed top commenter ChampionBob on Rebounder's announcement trailer. Tricky jumps requiring deft manipulation and timing around defeated Koopa shells are a kaizo staple, and Rebounder seems to replicate that style of platforming with its grody little sci-fi bits and bobs.

So it looks rad, the story sounds neat, and it's cribbing notes from a style of fangame that hasn't seen a ton of imitation yet⁠—I'm on board, let's rock. Rebounder is targeting a general 2027 release window, and you can wishlist it on Steam.

In a recent interview with PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens at this year's Gamescom, Saber Interactive CCO Tim Willits admitted the studio's leadership had a reputation for saying precisely what it means—"sometimes we 'say what we mean' too much," he laughed. But when asked if recent controversies would change the studio's comms approach, he said "no."

"I've been in the industry for so long, and there's always some dust up," Willits explained. "People got mad at Saber because we put World War Z on Epic, and people were like, 'oh, Saber's destroying the industry.' Now 30 million people have played World War Z. And the games will speak for themselves, even in our experiment with Rideshare [Stimulator]."

If you haven't been keeping up with the latest drama Saber Interactive has courted, here's the skinny: former Saber Interactive writer Stella Sacco claimed she was fired and replaced with AI during the development of Rideshare Stimulator.

Saber's comms department initially put out a fairly benign statement disputing the details of the claim, but CEO Matt Karch subsequently issued a statement to This Week In Videogames that was both aggressively pro-AI, and personally insulting to Sacco.

Karch apologized privately to Sacco before releasing a statement reflecting on the incident which itself contained a targeted barb for a different games industry writer that has since been edited.

All that might sound like an avalanche of unforced errors on Saber's part, but Willits said Rideshare Stimulator will speak for itself regardless of any concerns about AI and Sacco's treatment. "I encourage people to check it out when it comes out, play it themselves," Willits said. "They may be like 'oh, this is cool! I like this,' you know. And if they don't like it, fine.

"We are going to stick to making the best games we can. Try to show them, give people an opportunity to play them, and have players make their own decisions because players are smart, you know. You make a good game, they'll find it and play it."

Dwarf Fortress is a bit like caviar—not everyone's into it, but the people who are describe their experiences with it like a religious awakening. But the game's legendary co-creator, Tarn Adams, didn't even know it had a big following for many years, as he told PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens in a recent interview at Gamescom 2026.

"It was something like 2013, 14 going to PAX in Seattle, and there was an indie mega booth at the time," he recalled. "Of the 50 or 60 games showing—I'm just ballparking the numbers—I'd say 90% of them heard of Dwarf Fortress and also had a very amazed fan-ish response when we were introduced." It was the first time Adams had a sense of the reach his game had.

"That was crazy. I had no idea that that was even a thing," he said. "I didn't know that anyone knew what we were doing … I enjoyed it. I try to have good moral qualities, but I am apparently subject to all forms of flattery and vanity and such."

If he could go back in time, he wouldn't so as to not "disrupt the timeline." But if he could go back in time without the risk of doing that, Adams said might encourage himself to evangelize the game more in its early days.

"I'd probably be more confident about getting it in front of more people sooner. I didn't know the people to do that, though, so I'd probably be like 'go meet some more people,'" he said. "From the release of the game in 2006 up until around 2013, I didn't meet another game developer really, except maybe one or two at a Dwarf Fortress-specific meet."

He acknowledges things would have felt different then—he was "not a very social person" at the time and DF was "outsider art" for a number of years—but he'd still give his old self "a little pep talk, maybe."

As reported by The Korea Economic Daily, top-ranked Go grandmaster Shin Jin-seo became the first human to defeat the AI platform KataGo on July 21. It's a surprising, encouraging sign of human capabilities almost 30 years after supercomputer Deep Blue's historic defeat of Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

Go is believed to be the oldest board game that is still widely played, originating in China and beating out Chess by at least 1400 years, give or take. The strategy game sees players in control of different-colored stones, working to encircle their opponent's pieces, capturing territory and stones to achieve victory. Like Chess, its complexity, ubiquity, and the large amount of study and data surrounding the game made Go a fruitful tool for machine learning research.

Shin, 26, is the first human to win an official, three-game series against KataGo, which the Korea Economic Daily described as "the world's premier artificial intelligence Go engine." Shin's odds were long, especially considering that, 10 years ago, Go grandmaster Lee Sedol was decisively defeated by Google's AlphaGo engine⁠—the technology has only advanced in the intervening years.

Shin played with an advantageous, two-stone handicap⁠—seemingly standard for matches between humans and top AIs⁠—but indicated that he would like to face AI opponents "under more disadvantageous conditions" in the future. Shin came back from an initial defeat to take the series 2-1 against KataGo. Shin's final, three-hour match was actually fairly tame as far as the duration of professional Go games, uh, go⁠—games as long as six hours don't seem particularly rare.

"I believe this series holds immense significance because it clearly demonstrated that humans can still hold their own against AI," Shin said after the final match. "Early on, I simply copied AI moves, which led to heavy fighting and frequent, easy losses. This series taught me that rather than trying to imitate AI, it is far more important to build the board according to my own style."

First reported by Dexerto, former Jagex employee Andrew "Mod Jed" Lakeman has been sentenced to three years in prison (suspended for two years) for using dev tools to remove items from player accounts, then selling them online. An investigation found that Lakeman had earned more than $400,000 through this activity.

Former OSRS developer Mat K elaborated on some of the saga in a 2021 episode of OSRS Podcasts. Lakeman was a content developer for OSRS hired in 2015, and he used other Jagex employee's credentials to manipulate the game's appeals system for moderation and account recovery to swipe items and gold from players' inventories.

It's unclear when Lakeman began stealing from players, but according to Dexerto, Jagex realized this was foul play and not a glitch in 2018, and set a trap for the digital bandit: The company bolstered OSRS' security measures without informing most of the dev team. Lakeman was caught out, fired from Jagex, and reported to the police, who arrested him in 2019.

"Just because it’s virtual, doesn’t mean he shouldn’t face the full force of the law," said Detective Constable Andrew McKeane in a statement for the Cambridge Constabulary. "Given the rapid growth of online and virtual worlds, the justice system is going to have to keep pace and adapt to these new and emerging crimes."

Back in 2022, Lakeman actually scored a minor procedural victory through an unfair dismissal counter-complaint, but his financial reward was significantly reduced, and he was unable to secure a requested reinstatement at Jagex. Earlier this year, we reported on presiding judge Lord Justice Popplewell's ruling that Lakeman could be sued for theft over digital assets like RuneScape gold, precipitating this sentencing.

This grim saga aside, things have been going pretty great for Jagex and Old School Runescape. The company held its biggest live event to date with the Deadman All Stars esports tournament in Chicago this June, and OSRS is bigger now than OG RuneScape ever was.

With mega-games like GTA 6 on the way, it's hard not to feel like games are always getting bigger—both the software itself, and the teams that make it (GTA 6 has an entire dedicated NPC team "art-directing" its every background character). But in an interview with PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens, Saber Interactive CCO Tim Willits said a reliance on games with huge scopes and highly specialized teams may be responsible for some of the industry's many, many woes.

"The industry always has some cycles, some ups and downs, and one of the things that we have done well to avoid some of the issues that other studios have had is we spread out our resources," Willits said. "We develop games that are across the scope spectrum, for lack of a better description." While games like Space Marine 2 and the upcoming Jurassic Park: Survival take a lot of manpower, the studio relies on remasters and smaller games to fund those "big bets."

"We have a culture where people can work on any game, and we can move resources around. So we avoid the 'silo problem' that you find with big studios," he continued. "Studios that have a couple hundred employees that work on one game are going to struggle. They're going to really struggle to survive. Because before a game hits a vertical slice, you do not need hundreds of people on that."

He noted that if there's a studio culture where nimble developers can realize smaller passion projects, those can then turn out to be big hits unexpectedly—an example he gave was SnowRunner, a "mega franchise" for Saber with over 46,000 user reviews on Steam. That started as "an experiment by one guy."

"So take some of these totally talented developers that maybe have lost their job or you don't know what to do with them, and put them on a project. You know, sell it for $5. Take a risk … we look at every project, no matter how big it is. If we have the resources and we can reliably make money from that project, why not do it?"

Willits said it's also a creative boon and morale-booster on top of the financial benefits. When asked if he'd turn the studio into a Rockstar-sized hitmaker if he could, he said no. "I have the best job in the world now," he explained. "I do feel that other people at Saber love [the variety of game we develop] as well. You know, you're not stuck working on one game for five six years. We just make so much, and everyone's involved in so many different things that it's fun."

All this being said, Willits also theorized the games industry's current woes right now aren't as bad as you might think in the first place: In the same interview, he said it's "actually, honestly, a good time" for the medium right now despite it all. As for AI's impact on all this, well, Willits said that's not so bad either—in fact, he argued that "of course" id Software would have used it back in the day—Willits himself was studio director at id from 1995 to 2019.

DLSS 5 is a controversial technology for all sorts of reasons—you might have heard about this little thing called AI slop—but perhaps the most infamous is its uncanny look. Real concerns have been raised about the potential for something so aesthetically transformative to preserve a game developer's artistic intent, with Nvidia trying to run interference on this very point.

Director of both Kingdom Come: Deliverance games, Daniel Vávra, has re-entered this battle on the side of DLSS 5. Last Sunday, he took to X to say that some critics of the tech have "literally gone crazy," providing a before-and-after comparison with KCD 2 to say that it indeed helped realize the team's vision.

"On the left is a head messed up by the game engine’s very limited lighting system, which can’t properly render shadows, skin texture, and the detail of normal maps," he wrote, saying the DLSS 5'd version had improved details. "Having no shadows from helmets on faces and fucked up normal map rendering WAS NOT OUR ORIGINAL ARTISTIC VISION."

It's worth noting concerns about AI revising art aren't necessarily about whether it can technically touch up blemishes for a cleaner end product—I'm sure AI would cut Paul McCartney hitting a wrong chord and mumbling "fucking hell" out of Hey Jude if it could, but surely we can agree that little mistake makes the song better. The occasional flub signals the art's humanity. Still, some folks on X were quick to argue against Vávra's point that it was an improvement at all.

"It doesn't look that terrible here, and I can understand where Dan is coming from," said Goosewasinuse in a quote-repost. "My point is that it oils up characters to the nth degree for muh realism, just looks so bizarre." Another from Knight(Fate)1029384756 reads, "It's not my fault you couldn't put the effort into making it better. Instead you use the machine that can't think to make an artistic choice."

Warhorse Studios's relationship with AI continues to prove contentious. Earlier this year, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 English language editor Max Hejtmánek said publicly the studio fired him so he could be "replaced with AI."

If you're sick of parrying in videogames, then Onimusha: Way of the Sword might hit you, dear reader, the wrong way—especially since its roll is extremely slow. The game's introduction to its combat is a competent, though incredibly careful one. It establishes its full suite of defensive abilities with a glacial pace. Like you're a deer and it's afraid you'll bolt into the underbrush.

The problem with this is that it gives the wrong impression. Onimusha's combat is utter action game bliss when it really gets going—but it takes a minute to get there. Not only does it drip-feed you with mechanics, but it starts off with the most ubiquitous one: The parry, or timed block, or deflect—whatever you want to call it.

And listen, parry fatigue is widespread. In fact, one in four action game players has experienced it in the past five years alone. I get it. But if you find yourself afflicted, you should persevere.

The secret that Onimusha keeps, like a hidden oni gauntlet under its cloak, is that this parry with its forgiving timing (and admittedly sick-as-hell sound design) is just one of the many tools that protagonist Musashi has tucked away. A basic percussion drumbeat that's later joined by the other instruments of this rhythm game in disguise.

Though Musashi only starts with the aforementioned timed block, his kit unfolded like a beautiful lotus flower throughout my 30-something hour playthrough. You've got your deflect, a more involved parry that requires you to be holding down the block button first, and you've also got a timed dodge that's better against unarmed attacks. Then there's the Issen.

The Issen is by far my favourite tool of his defensive kit—a reversal that demands you hit an attack button at the last moment, leaving you completely open, with perfect timing. The risk matches the reward, as an Issen can one-shot most regular mooks and deal a hefty amount of stagger and damage both. It'll also give you souls that charge up a super state where you can do it even more.

All of this pairs nicely with the attacks enemies throw at you. There's the interplay between weapon and unarmed attacks—letting you swat aside sword-swipes or dance around fisticuffs. There are grabs, which force you to break rhythm and dodge at the right time to counter them. There's blade barrages, which ask you to remember what button you were just mashing, and blade locks, both of which can trigger randomly.

They might enter a countering stance, requiring you to smash them with your fists to knock them off-balance—or they might throw an un-avoidable attack, forcing you to parry or deflect. Onimusha at its peak never lets you rest for long, and enemies are always throwing out some new combo of threats for you to deal with in the world's deadliest game of rock paper scissors.

As someone very familiar with this genre, a Sekiro sicko with plenty of hours plugged in its imitators, like Lies of P and Nine Sols, I'm happy to say that Onimusha has one of the most textured, compelling combat systems of its ilk. It's really well-designed, which is why it's just a shame it takes so long to get there.

But get there it does. By around the midpoint of the game, Onimusha has shrugged off its unfortunate, hand-holdy AAA introduction and fully started baring its teeth. And it turns a weakness—a propensity for repeat boss and miniboss encounters—into opportunities to flex on old foes.

Once the combat starts clicking, these mandatory rematches start becoming a stage on which to demonstrate your mastery. Enemies that once gave you trouble can be dispatched deftly because you know their dance now, and you've acquired more than enough tools to deal with them. Meeting with these foes again felt like catching up with an old rival and showing off what I'd learned since.

If Onimusha feels unwieldy or over-familiar in the first few hours, I encourage you to stick with it—and if you're skeptical about the raft of parry-based games, I still think you should give this one a go. Slow start aside, it's a best-in-class action game that rewards your investment tenfold.

Ah, the MMO inventory. The delightful abstraction that means we don't need to actually think all that hard about where to store the hundreds of thousands of pelts, steaks, teeth, claws, trinkets, coins, crystals, and so-on that we accrue. Our bags are full of crap, it is tradition.

On the one hand, I'm grateful for it. I'm out here to grind and run dungeons, not try to Jenga-stack a briefcase Resident Evil-style. On the other hand, good lord does my head spin every time I open up my inventory and gaze upon the horrors of my own chronic lack of organisation. I despair. Please don't tell people how I live.

I could argue that it's the game's fault. Giving me an auto-sorting feature means I can endure a descent into of disorganisation without much trouble. At the very least, if I click a button, all of my junk will be organised by type. Often, these systems aren't how I'd do it. For instance, I'd love it if all the gear I'm de-synthing in FF14 could stop being in the initial inventory slots. But they're still useful.

And yet I don't represent the majority of all MMORPG players (despite my best efforts, I'm still working on the hive mind thing). And neither do you, statistically speaking—these are games frequented by millions of players, and I'm not that smug to assume this column is that popular.

However, I would like to get an idea of how tidy Terminally Online readers are. After all, we know you're fashionable, like your keybinds, and mostly healers. So please, satisfy my curiosity: Are your bags full of junk, or have you sorted your demicrystalised megalized torment orbs or whatever by both colour and patch release date?

Or, are you utterly lost in heaps of garbage like I am. And hey, maybe that's part of the charm—after all, there was a time where an MMO's inconvenience was part of the experience.

Vholume is not big on waypoints or barriers, and I love it for that. In the first level, there's a naturalistic, reasonably signposted "correct" path to walk you through the tutorial. I immediately went the opposite direction for shiggles to indulge my well-honed sense of childlike wonder and curiosity. I lost myself in a field of brutalist rooftops, wallrunning and mantling about with no sign of the beaten path in sight. I accidentally stumbled across the level secret this way, unlocking a B-side bonus mission.

My wanderlust eventually intersected with the critical path, and after wrapping the tutorial, I unlocked time trial mode for this level. After my super-chill freeform exploration, white knuckling it to a gold level time almost felt like a completely different game.

Alongside co-developers Nathan Grange and Niels Tiercelin, Vholume was created by Léonard Lemaitre, one half of the brotherly duo behind our 2024 FPS of the year, Straftat. This previous work was an atomically pure arena shooter, like Quake 3 by way of the Source engine. It was all about lightning-quick rounds and movement mastery, with a dry, slapstick sense of humor.

Vholume borrows Straftat's surreal, dreamlike sensibility, and builds on its movement toolbox, adding an insanely good wall run to the wall jumps and crouch slide. Even with the similar DNA, it's a very different kind of game. There's a multiplayer mode, but the focus is singleplayer time trial and exploration amid desolate concrete cityscapes.

The vibes and music are mournful, but the platforming is pure goddamn speed force momentum, all but blasting you back in your chair. Trying to think of other games that feel this propulsive, what came to mind for me were F-Zero GX and Neon White. Counter-Strike surf maps and the defrag mod for Quake are also handy points of comparison (and possible inspiration.)

Slide city

The more time I've put into Vholume, the more defrag feels like the most relevant comparison. You can do sexy cinematic parkour if you want, but the real shit is crouch slide bunny hopping to get crazy momentum for PB level times. There are already speedrunners like Fobxx on YouTube showing off blistering world record level clears.

I love that Vholume doesn't put a mechanical damper on its movement tools: I can crouch slide bunny hop till my heart's content, and this is probably one of the most generous wallrun durations I've seen in a platformer. You know how some games say you can only wall jump so many times before your feet have to touch the ground again? None of that here.

Instead, Vholume limits your abuse of these mechanics through level design. This game was made with an insanely fast, mobile protagonist in mind. One trick I love is how Vholume will space out platforms or drops just so to punish heedless hopping.

There will be irregular distances between a series of platforms so you risk overshooting one or falling just short of another if you're button mashing. Elsewhere, gaps you have to crouch slide through will be deliberately placed to bring a sloppy, mis-timed bunnyhop sequence to a standstill, forcing the humiliating ritual of slowly crouch walking under instead.

Speed and precision are the name of the game. If that sounds too stressful, I think Vholume more than offers full value as a casual, exploration-forward platformer and mood piece. But man, when you really get moving it is positively thrilling. Even though it costs more than Straftat's hard-to-beat "free," at $8, Vholume is firmly a "no duh" purchase recommendation in my book.

I love lockpicking minigames, especially when representatively they're as far away from the act of lockpicking as possible. While I admire the elegance of Bethesda's bobby-pin/screwdriver system seen in Fallout 4, I'm much more interested in the weirder solutions like Splinter Cell's baffling pin-flicking system, or Gothic Remake's absurdly elaborate sliding puzzle system.

I love how developers have tried so many ways to represent the act of lockpicking, and that despite this nobody has 'solved' the problem of virtual lockpicking yet (though Bethesda has arguably come closest). Inevitably, then, I was drawn to the idea of a game that is all about lockpicking. But I never expected that it could be as imaginative and thrilling as Lockpicks-11.

An entry for Ludum Dare 57, Lockpicks-11 places you in the role of an unnamed thief in the middle of a heist. Yet rather than being a fully fledged burglary simulator like Thief, Lockpicks-11 distils the act of larceny to a linear sequence of locked doors.

What makes Lockpicks-11 interesting is that every lock is wildly different. Some are based upon recognisable locking mechanisms, like inputting a four digit code, or aligning symbols via a tumbler system. Others are more out there, like replicating a sequence of musical notes, or navigating a 2D maze to collect objects.

The order of these puzzles is randomised each time you play, and Lockpicks-11 provides minimal context to how each puzzle works, so you have to figure it out for yourself. On top of that, your thief is being chased by the world's slowest security guard, and if he catches you before you unlock a door, it's game over.

This combination of elements—the puzzles, the randomisation, the lack of context, and the timed element—makes Lockpicks-11 shockingly tense. The maze puzzle, for example, randomises the controls for navigating the maze, and in my last run I was seconds from being caught before I snatched the last collectible and my knotted fingers prised open the lock.

For a game built in 72 hours by a team of two, it's a mightily impressive creation. If you fancy giving Lockpicks-11 yourself, you can play it in your browser. If you're a lockpicking aficionado like myself, I'd also recommend you check out The Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, a digital exhibit that explores the history and evolution of these security-busting minigames.

The memory crisis may be in full swing, taking numerous PC components with it, but the value of gaming monitors is one of a few hardware things that has actually improved over the last few years. In fact, their price-to-quality ratio is kind of outrageous right now, with even relatively recent QD-OLED screens going for around $300.

As such, monitors are one of the few things I check over without rolling my eyes, and therefore, they're one of a handful of techie bits that actually excites me. But that doesn't mean even they can't improve; when I chatted to gaming monitor brand AOC a few months ago, even its designers are aware the software isn't up to snuff.

I've been testing out the Koorui G2741L, a dual mode 4K/1080p monitor, over the last few weeks, and all I can think is 'gosh, why aren't more companies doing dual mode,' and 'why aren't more companies doing dual mode better?'

The central argument for dual mode makes so much sense to me. When you want your games to look pretty, you swap to 4K at a lower refresh rate, and when you want something snappy and competitive, you drop it to 1080p with a much higher refresh rate. You can get dual mode monitors like this Acer Nitro 4K/1080p one for as cheap as $160, they're even pretty reasonably priced right now (even if the 4K refresh rate is a pretty tiny 72 Hz).

Sure, you can technically just swap the resolution of your monitor at any time, but dual mode gives you access to a max refresh rate that is above what you would get if you just turned down the resolution of a 4K monitor.

But dual mode monitors have a few problems. For one, the thing I spotted instantly with the Koorui is that the swap between 4K and 1080p is a tad slow. The swap happens with a physical button, and in the case of the Koorui, it's a series of physical buttons. These navigate through the monitor's built-in software to then switch modes. It also just takes a while to swap, and the more seconds it adds, the less convenient it feels.

Another problem with dual mode monitors is the added blur. 1080p on a dual mode monitor tends to look worse than 1080p on a 1080p native screen. The reason 4K dual mode monitors go down to 1080p is that dual mode traditionally reduces the resolution to a quarter while doubling the refresh rate (though some monitors now triple or quadruple the refresh rate).

Most gaming monitors seem to use some sort of interpolation algorithm. Our Jeremy said in his Asus ROG Strix XG27UCG review, "You wouldn't want to use this monitor's 1080p mode on the desktop. It's a little soft and blurry. However, in-game it actually works pretty well and is certainly preferable to 1080p interpolated in the normal fashion onto a 4K panel."

Gaming monitor companies do have the ability to make better dual mode monitors. The Alienware AW2725QF opts for a form of pixel doubling (doubling up pixels in both vertical and horizontal directions), getting you much closer to a 'native 1080p' resolution. This is called integer scaling.

So, right now, if you buy a dual mode monitor, you are likely making a compromise on the lower of the two resolutions. But even with that downside, I'd take a 4K desktop experience and 4K gaming in singleplayer games, then 1080p for competitive games over 4K for absolutely everything.

There's plenty of room for dual mode monitors to grow. Just look at how far OLEDs have come since their inception: Burn-in has become far less of a problem, and LG's latest RGB Stripe panel has effectively killed font fringing. Not only could interpolation algorithms get better, but integer scaling could become more commonplace with the growth of the dual mode market.

The same could be said for the process of actually swapping modes. The ability to swap between resolutions could benefit from being snappier and easier to access. I'd personally love a single button that makes the swap in just a moment. And I'd also love that the biggest downside of swapping to 1080p is simply the resolution, and no other artifacting or blur.

But even now, with its flaws, I quite like dual mode. 1080p for some gaming on a dual mode monitor, even with plain 'ol interpolation, works well enough, and 4K for a standard desktop experience isn't such a resource hog that I'd want 1080p for it anyway.

I particularly like the fact that the price point has become so good on dual mode monitors that it's almost just an added bonus, and not something you specifically pay more for. As even OLEDs are becoming downright reasonably priced, I'd love for dual mode to get the love it deserves. Now, a value-oriented dual mode OLED monitor with integer scaling and good software? That's the dream.

Every new Rockstar game is more simulation-heavy than the last, and Grand Theft Auto 6 aims to bring players closer to real-life in a variety of ways. One of these is the addition of vehicle refuelling, which will require players to stop off at gas stations (or petrol stations if you're a Brit like me) and watch your disposable income vanish in a stream of fossilised plant matter.

This mechanical tweak has proved somewhat controversial among Grand Theft Auto players, with some believing that refuelling cars will be inconvenient and interrupt the flow of driving and shooting the series is built upon. Yet while Rockstar is sticking to its guns on the matter of refuelling, co-studio head Rob Nelson recently stated that filling up your car won't be a massive drag on your adventure across Vice City.

Nelson's comments come via YouTuber TGG (via GamesRadar+) who recently saw an extended preview of Rockstar's hotly anticipated crime sim, which included refuelling in action. TGG says that gas stations allow players to both repair and refuel cars, and facilitate recharging for electric vehicles alongside refuelling for cars powered by internal combustion engines. Selecting the refuel/recharge option triggers a refuelling cutscene that TGG says lasts around 10 seconds.

The preview was apparently overseen by Nelson, who commented on the refuelling during play. "Hey, that's pretty fast for a fill up," Nelson observed when getting gas. "You can't complain about that." It also appears there is some trepidation within Rockstar about the refuelling, as when discussing the system with TGG, Nelson stated. "We'll see what people say," before asking "Do you think people are going to like it?"

For his part, TGG reckons that "Fuel isn't really going to be an issue unless you're not thinking about what you're doing". And I think this is probably going to be the case for most people unless Rockstar makes the need to refuel too frequent. When Red Dead Redemption 2 arrived in 2018, some players complained about the simulation-heavy elements of that, like how Arthur Morgan moved and having to fiddle around with your saddlebags for inventory management.

It's strange to think about in hindsight, but Left 4 Dead 2 was a controversial game in the run-up to its release in November 2009—just one year after the original Left 4 Dead laid the foundations for today's enormous cooperative gaming scene. Indeed, it was that rapid turnaround, combined with the fact that the first Left 4 Dead was a relatively short game, which led to accusations that Left 4 Dead 2 was nothing more than a cynical ploy by Valve to cash in on the success of the first.

Ultimately, Left 4 Dead 2 would prove a worthy follow-up to Valve's cooperative blaster. But it turns out there was some skulduggery afoot behind the scenes on Left 4 Dead 2, just not the kind that fans suspected. Shortly before the sequel's launch, a cinematic trailer—which would ultimately serve as Left 4 Dead 2's introductory cutscene—leaked onto the Internet. Now, it's been revealed that this 'leak' was orchestrated by Valve to evade the censorious watch of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.

This is according to former Valve writer and Left 4 Dead designer Chet Faliszek, who revealed Valve's deliberate leak in a YouTube video about cut Left 4 Dead voice lines (via Ars Technica). In the video, Faliszek explains why Left 4 Dead 2 had a large number of voice lines cut from the final game. One reason was that, at the time, Valve had run-ins with numerous countries and ratings boards over the series' depictions of violence and use of profane language.

"You have to remember, especially during Left 4 Dead 1 and Left 4 Dead 2 time, Valve was in fights with the ESRB, with Australia, with Germany, with a bunch of countries about the profanity in the game, or the violence," he explains. "One of [Valve's] lawyers stepped in and said that us writers needed to be babysat on this. And so [the] first thing we did was, well, we made sure there was no profanity in there that crosses the line—basically F-bombs."

Faliszek personally believed that, when it comes to censorship of language and depictions of violence, "you push it and have the ESRB push back". But Valve's lawyer felt differently and Faliszek went along with it. However, the ESRB's regulatory oversight didn't just cover games, but extended to the marketing material for those games. And unlike today, the ESRB had different regulatory rules for trailers and games. Language or violence that might land a game a 'Mature' rating could result in a trailer that depicted the same things being banned outright.

It's this exact scenario Valve faced with Left 4 Dead 2. The cinematic trailer is no more violent or foul-mouthed than the game itself, but according to Faliszek, the ESRB drew a hard line on it. Hence, Valve decided the trailer should find its way online by 'accident'. "We leaked our trailer ahead of time, because they wouldn't let us release the trailer," Faliszek says. "I'll just admit that. I think we can't get in trouble for that now. It's like 20 years ago."

After a quiet few months, September finally hits the gas, and our list of monthly PC game happenings is filled with brand new adventures, series continuations, 1.0 updates, and events galore. I'm still playing catch-up after Gamescom, and now we've got Tokyo Game Show queued up soon. It's the same schedule every year, but somehow I'm always caught off guard.

The Blood of Dawnwalker kicked off the month with a delightfully dismal vampire RPG from the Witcher veterans at Rebel Wolves. Then you've got all month to suck blood as Coen (or be a good two-shoes and abstain, I guess) before Silent Hill: Townfall and Control Resonant launch on the same damn day. It seems everything I've been waiting all year to play has crammed into this 4-week window, and that's not even counting all the big updates.

The Witcher 3 Remastered is easily among the most notable updates, and everyone who owns the original gets the RPG's makeover for free (along with its DLC). It'll be my first time playing, so between that and Valheim 1.0, I'll be plenty busy until 2027.

September 2026 PC Gamer highlights

September 2026 gaming events and sales

• PAX West begins its four-day weekend of panels, concerts, and tournaments on September 4
• Blizzcon returns—with a suspicious gap in its schedule where something StarCraft-shaped might go—on September 12
• Tokyo Game Show hosts its longest show yet with a new five-day schedule starting September 17
• Our very own PC Gaming Show returns for another Tokyo special on September 20
• Game Devs of Color Expo kicks off both online and in-person panels and showcases on September 22
• And themed Steam sales keep the month going:
  • Aug. 3 – Sept. 7: Survival Crafting Fest
  • Sept. 17 – 20: Programming Fest
  • Sept. 14 – 21: Party-Based RPG Fest

September 2026 game updates and DLC

The September 2026 games calendar

September game releases, events, and updates all in one big calendar

I've hit the highlights, but there's still other new games, updates, and industry events planned for September. Here's what all of that looks like in a handy, consolidated reference:

The way our hobby talks about player counts is all sorts of messed up. Steam concurrents are a useful metric for gauging a game's general popularity, but they paint an incomplete picture. They're a single data point, yet have become the flimsy scaffolding on which the internet builds elaborate headcanon about a game's quality, viability, or deadness. Sometimes dogpiling is so successful, and the resulting perception so difficult to fight, that simply saying a game is dead is enough to help kill it.

It's a trend that annoys me to no end, so it's refreshing to see a developer speaking openly about concurrents—both about how many it considers "healthy," and why it's normal for the number to rise and fall. It's been a recurring topic for Wardogs developer Bulkhead, whose closed beta surpassed 200,000 concurrents today on Steam. Responding to a TimTheTatman clip on X, CEO Joe Brammer spoke on the milsim's unexpected popularity, and its inevitable (but healthy) decline.

"Wardogs will continue to lose players for months as the hype dies down," Brammer wrote. "Doesn't make it a bad game or even a problem, we planned for 5k players concurrent! It'll maintain a healthy playerbase and we'll continue to build the 1.0 version of the game then... it'll boom again :) And so the cycle continues :)"

It's a cycle many of us are familiar with, but rarely acknowledge. I tend to build a rotation of multiplayer favorites that I regularly return to, either to check out an update or scratch an itch. It is, I think, a pretty healthy way to enjoy videogames, but the rise of live service "forever" games, as well as high-profile failures, have proliferated the idea that videogames are those species of shark that will die if they ever stop swimming.

Much like the majority of videogames before 2016, Bulkhead does not need Wardogs to be a consistent, top-charting megahit to continue making it. In a video published last month outlining "10 reasons not to buy Wardogs," game director Howard Philpott expanded on Bulkhead's expectations:

"We expect our initial days after launch to have a lot more players than expected, but we can tell you for a fact that this is completely normal. Those players will fall away over the next coming months. Player numbers will drop off, and journalists and influencers on the fringe of the community will try to ragebait your enjoyment out of the game for social media clicks. This doesn't mean the game is dying. We're thinking longer term than a flash in the plan. Our goal is to settle into a sustainable, close-knit community. If we're pulling in 3,000 to 5,000 daily concurrent players who genuinely love the game, it'll allow new players to buy in anytime and join an active community."

If we put our hands together on this one, we can all be normal about a multiplayer shooter. Wardogs is out September 10, but pre-ordering grants access to the closed beta ending Sunday.

The Labor Day weekend is upon us (in Canada and the US, anyway, and we'll be sure to spare a thought for our UK colleagues who will be working on Monday) and holy cow, it is about time. If you find yourself in need of something to do, here's a thought: Play Civilization 7, because it's free to play on Steam until September 10.

Civ 7's had kind of a rough go of things since it launched in early 2025. It made some big changes to the formula that didn't go over well with a significant portion of the fan base, the UI was almost universally unpopular, and performance was dodgy.

Firaxis has been banging away on it ever since, to mixed results: A major update released in May brought a big bump in player numbers on Steam, but the reactions expressed via Steam reviews were almost literally split down the middle. Civ 7's Steam rating remains "mixed," with only 48% positive user reviews, while concurrent player numbers on the platform are still running neck-and-neck with the 16-year-old Civilization 5.

Civ 5 is much beloved but I imagine Firaxis and Take-Two would like to see people move on.

Ah, but here's the counterpoint: It's free. Just go around to Steam and click the "Play Game" button, and after some requisite amount of downloading, you're playing Civ 7 without spending a penny. It's hard to go wrong, really.

If the past year-and-a-half of updates have got Civilization 7 to a point where you think to yourself, 'Yes, I would like to play this game all the time,' you can also pick up the standard and deluxe editions for half price until September 17: That's $35/£30/€35 for the former, and $50/£45/€50 for the latter.

The Civ 7 development team (a small part of it, anyway) will also be discussing what comes next during a livestream from PAX on September 5—you can catch that on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook.

Officials with Miami-Dade County have held talks with Rockstar about using facilities and landmarks in the county to promote the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, according to a recent report by The Miamian, saying it could represent "a unique opportunity to generate revenue for the County while showcasing Miami-Dade to a massive audience." Just one problem: the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office is dead-set against it.

The Miamian report (via RPS) says the county submitted a pitch deck to Rockstar on June 29, after which staff had "some conversations with Rockstar about potential opportunities around the launch of GTA 6," said Carlos Suarez, a spokesperson for Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

"Nothing has been formally agreed to or approved, and any idea would have to go through the appropriate review and approval process," Suarez said. "Given Miami-Dade's clear influence on the game, we think there could be a unique opportunity to generate revenue for the County while showcasing Miami-Dade to a massive audience."

Miami-Dade is the inspiration for Vice City in the GTA series, and by "inspiration" I mean it basically is Vice City, although Miami exists as a separate city in the game's fiction. Vice City will serve as a central location in GTA 6, and will represent the seat of Vice-Dale County, much as the city of Miami is the county seat of Miami-Dade. Given that, the campaign makes obvious sense, and most of the ideas floated don't sound too overly disruptive.

Some examples:

• A display aircraft wrapped in Vice City logos and a GTA 6-inspired baggage claim at Miami International Airport
• Vice City signage and colors at the Metromover and Metrorail transit stations
• Vice City-inspired installations or public art at PortMiami
• A "family appropriate" celebration of "Miami car culture" with cars, bikes, DJs, food, artists, and branded installations at Tropical Park
• A Vice City Radio Lab at the city's main library, providing access to recording, editing, and digital media equipment to support "music production, podcasting, oral histories, neighborhood storytelling, sound engineering, video-game development, and other creative programming, while reflecting the central role that music and radio play in the GTA experience

The pitch also includes ideas for Rockstar funding permanent upgrades to county infrastructure:

That all sounds pretty cool to me, and some of it is quite civically wholesome, too. Yes, it's all part of the monstrous marketing machine for the biggest videogame of all time, but it also seems like the county is coming at it as a way to celebrate the real people and civic culture that led Rockstar to embrace Miami in the first place, and that counts for something.

The big stumbling block, of course, is that the GTA games are the polar opposite of civic-minded and wholesome, and that's led Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz to speak out against the idea.

"Grand Theft Auto is a videogame franchise built around criminal activity," Cordero-Stutz told the Miami Herald. "Its fictional world includes murder, robbery, drug trafficking, carjacking, violence against law enforcement, and other conduct that the men and women of the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office work every single day to prevent."

Miami-Dade Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez also spoke out against the idea: "We should be promoting the Miami-Dade we have worked so hard to build, not a fictional version of our community defined by crime and violence."

The sheriff isn't wrong. GTA games have always been notoriously violent: Former attorney Jack Thompson, at one time the videogame industry's foremost nemesis, spent years campaigning hard against the games and publisher Take-Two Interactive before he was finally disbarred for his relentless antics and misconduct.

But the game industry, and its audience, have matured in the 25 years (that's right, look it up) since Grand Theft Auto 3 changed everything: GTA is still steeped in criminal violence, but the shock factor—and the hand-wringing over it—are long gone. These days it's completely mainstream, as evidenced by the performance of the GTA 6 reveal showcase on Netflix, which was the platform's biggest show of the week.

Would Miami-Dade have to tone down some of the seedier elements of GTA 6 for its "family appropriate" events? Sure. But I also have no doubt that a significant number of sheriff's deputies and police in the county grew up playing GTA themselves, and I bet an awful lot of them will be calling in sick when GTA 6 drops.

In 2021, as studio CEO Pete Parsons cited the company's recent "tremendous growth and opportunity," Bungie announced its plans for a massive expansion to its Bellevue, Washington headquarters. The campus embiggening, which internal sources have reportedly described as costing "hundreds of millions" of dollars, more than doubled the size of Bungie's offices from 84,000 square feet to just under 211,000.

Now, after five and a half years of spending sprees, publisher acquisitions, stumbling product launches, project cancellations, and repeated mass layoffs, Bungie appears to be seeking subletters for the goliath game development headquarters it's no longer capable of filling.

According to a 10-page leasing brochure reviewed by The Game Post, Bungie is seeking interested renters to sublease its expansive headquarters, listing its 210,984 square feet as a "turn-key" production facility. In addition to expected office fixtures, the listing also features a dedicated lobby, gym and exercise facilities (including a rock climbing wall), a motion-capture studio, a cafe, catering space, and a private exterior patio.

While the brochure didn't directly identify the studio, a statement provided to press verified that Bungie was actively pursuing a sublease.

"Bungie is exploring options to sublease its campus in Bellevue, Washington. The studio transitioned to a digital-first model several years ago, and this move reflects the team's evolving workplace needs and the effectiveness of its remote collaboration," Bungie said. "Bungie will continue to maintain a physical office presence in Bellevue."

Bungie formally adopted remote work eligibility for most of its roles in 2022, following the studio's shift to work-from-home development during the COVID-19 lockdown years—effectively defeating the purpose of its office expansion due to circumstances that would have been impossible to predict during its early planning stages.

Bungie wasn't the only games company to make ill-fated investments during the height of the pandemic: Analysts have repeatedly cited overly-ambitious expansions and acquisitions—propelled by the COVID era's low interests rates and explosion of at-home entertainment revenue—as one of the driving forces behind the games industry's brutal cost-cutting in the years that followed.

Bungie's overextension, however, was particularly drastic. After Sony purchased the studio for $3.6 billion in 2022, Bungie leadership embarked on a rampant hiring spree, adding hundreds of developers to the payroll to fill out development teams for a swath of simultaneous incubation projects—projects that would prove unsustainable as the impact of Covid waned and revenues started to tumble across the industry.

A mass layoff followed in October 2023, affecting roughly 100 employees. The next round cut 220 developers in July 2024 as fallout from Bungie leadership having reportedly "overstated their studio’s financial prospects to Sony," leading to a dire enough fiscal outlook that even the success of Destiny 2's Final Shape expansion couldn't salvage it. As Sony intensified its oversight amidst the mounting turmoil, Bungie's leadership began to abandon ship, culminating with Pete Parsons departing the studio in 2025—presumably in one of his vintage collector cars.

Bungie staff ultimately suffered another sweeping layoff in June 2026, with most of the Destiny team losing their jobs in the aftermath of Destiny 2's end of live service. At peak employment, Bungie's staff numbered over 1,600; in July 2024, Parsons said the studio numbered around 850. The WARN notice issued for this June's layoff indicated at least 292 jobs were affected.

In other words, if all of Bungie's remaining employees gathered in its office, there would be fewer than 600 people to fill its 211,000 square feet.

If you're interested, the master lease runs through September 30, 2035.

The White House, the epicenter of power in the most powerful nation in human history, has rolled out a new online arcade on its website. And yes, it is every bit as racist, repugnant, and creatively bankrupt as you'd expect.

We'll set aside the question of "why?" for now and get straight to the games, beginning with Flappy Bill, a game in which you fly a bald eagle down the National Mall. It's not clear whether the bird's name is actually Bill because it's also carrying a bill, which my young years of being exposed to Schoolhouse Rock from across the border taught me is part of the US lawmaking process, or at least used to be before they decided that having the president do everything by fiat is more efficient or something. In any event, it's an entirely unremarkable Flappy Bird clone, innocuous but about as much fun as tying a shoelace.

The tone takes a hard turn to the right with the next game, Build the Wall: Zombie Border Siege, a Tetris knock-off where you'll "protect the border from the coming horde." To ensure there's no misunderstanding the nature of this horde, the game's backdrop is a retro-future take on the sun setting over a barren desert—and in case that's too subtle, there's also a sign that says "Southern Border."

One notable thing about this one is that unlike actual Tetris, the lines don't disappear when they're completed. Instead, they just stack up until they reach the top, at which point it's inevitably game over no matter how neatly you've arranged things. A slow-moving line of "zombies" moves across the bottom of the screen, and they are capable of getting past your wall if you haven't built it high enough—but "high enough" is literally two stacked tetrominoes, after which nothing can get past. So I'm not sure what the point is there, except to be really racist and xenophobic, I suppose.

Moving on: The third game in the White House Arcade is called Rio Run, a recreation of a "border patrol along the Rio Grande" based on the ancient classic Snake. As a balding white guy in a suit, you pick up brown-skinned people one at a time, each of whom joins a train behind you wearing shackles and an orange jumpsuit. Once the game ends, when you run into a wall or your train of prisoners, they're all deported and you're encouraged to try again. Lovely.

I don't really know what to make of the fourth game. Supply Line, as it's called, charges you to "sort the school line to make America healthy again" by letting 'good' food ride a conveyor belt to the school lunch box, while chucking 'bad' food—anything with coloring, additives, sealed packages, or seed oils—into the "reject" box.

This one was a little tricky at first because the low-effort graphics make it difficult to tell good food from bad (as the concept is envisioned by Robert F. Kennedy Jr), but what's really bizarre is the muscular Black man in boxing gloves standing in the background. Every time I let a bad bit of food slip past, he punched the back of my monitor. Four punches and it was game over, although oddly enough he's the one who took the actual damage.

Also, reading labels is apparently bad, according to a sign with a red strike through it. Ain't that America? For you and me, baby.

The fifth and final game on the White Hours Arcade tour is Trump Savings Tycoon, a game about filling your kids' Trump Accounts, which are basically retirement savings accounts for children, backed by money from various super-wealthy individuals like Jensen Huang and Michael Dell who may or may not have anything to gain from big-money sycophancy.

This game involves simply clicking on various money-esque objects with a net as they fly across the sky. It's maybe the simplest of the bunch mechanically, but the clicking is extremely imprecise so it doesn't take long before three objects are missed and it's game over.

More interesting to me is the background, which features the Reflecting Pool (a perfectly lovely shade of blue, unlike its real-world counterpart) and a massive construction crane looming over the Washington DC skyline, presumably indicating optimism about the president's planned ballroom/bunker. There's also a small convoy of what appears to be flying police cars that goes soaring across the sky every now and then. I have no theories about what that might be about.

In case it wasn't sufficiently clear, these things are universally bad, both conceptually and in execution: If you're going to rip off the world's most famous stacking game to promote your racist agenda, for instance, you should at least make it play like that game. It's an astonishingly lazy effort, and I can't shake the feeling that all of these games were vibe-coded, maybe by some DOGE hanger-on they found hiding in the bathroom.

The obvious question is, as noted earlier, is why? Who are these games for? I think the answer in one sense is that they're for no one in particular, but are instead just another wave in the flood of sewage pumped out every day by the US president and his administration. Over the last couple years, the US government has posted numerous gaming-related memes, video clips, and AI generated images to promote its leader and his agenda.

But more broadly, this effort is targeted at the young male gamer demographic, at least in part to leverage the political influence it first demonstrated during the Gamergate harassment campaign.

George E. Osborn, author of Power Play: Videogames, Politics, and the Battle for Global Influence, wrote on his Videogames Industry Memo blog (via The Guardian) that "the content works because it does what a lot of good social content does. It riffs on widely known popular culture to get cut through in the way many popular memes do. It has a chaotic, anarchic tone which suits the channel it's in. It is transgressive in a way that delights the administration's supporters and infuriates its rivals. And it feels all the more edgy because the formerly stuffy White House social channels have been turned into a place where this kind of stuff circulates freely.

"A big chunk of the modern political right in America emerged from Gamergate. The hate movement was brought into the political fold by Steve Bannon and Breitbart after it showed how it is possible to wash extreme talking points into the mainstream political environment. Its members became online 'shock troopers' for Trump, as well as becoming foundational figures in the alt-right and nuttier fringes like QAnon. And as they've grown up, the almost entirely young men who made waves back in 2014 are now in positions of power on the right. This allows them to shape the online narrative, encouraging them to reach a fresh generation of men through an increasingly fragmented social media ecosystem that allows transgressive macho 'manosphere' content to trend."

The US government shows no sign of easing off on these behaviors. Posts on X promoting the new arcade site include animations using the Xbox, Nintendo, and Sega logos, the latter of which was probably chosen because it morphs well into "MAGA."

While the owners of properties used in past posts have thus far opted to stay silent, The Tetris Company did obliquely suggest that it might take a more aggressive approach. Following an Instagram post in which the company said "we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them," it added, "PS: The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of Build the Wall. PPS: We take copyright infringement very seriously."

As completely crappy as all of this is on every possible level, it seems likely there's more to come. A currently unoccupied sixth game window on the White House Arcade page says "a new adventure awaits," and encourages interested followers to "stay tuned." I've reached out to the White House for comment on the new virtual arcade and will update if I receive a reply.

Another day, another DLSS 5 story that actually kinda doesn't involve Nvidia itself doing anything, because it seems now AMD GPU owners can get in on the act. A new homebrew app has been released on Github that will allow you to run the DLSS Neural Rendering feature on a Radeon GPU. I've tried it and it works, but damn does it hurt the poor Radeon silicon.

From having DLSS 5 .dll files plucked from an early access version of NBA 2K27, we've had modders working hard to create surprisingly polished ways to essentially get the tech working in practically any game, even if it doesn't natively support traditional DLSS itself.

I've been playing around with it a lot this past week, even to the point of jamming it into Football Manager 26 just to see what would happen. And, y'know what, I kinda like the result so I'm keeping it. I wasn't expecting that, and I also wasn't expecting this technology, created by Nvidia, to appear so quickly on AMD GPUs. Historically we've found that where Nvidia goes, so AMD follows, at least in the GPU feature space, but it seems like AMD might not actually have to do much this time. Well, apart from actually make the silicon a little more tensor-friendly.

Because I have spent the afternoon trying to get the new app from user danielblnc on Github to work on my Radeon RX 9070 XT in Cyberpunk 2077. Essentially you download the DLSS-NR-on-AMD file, drop it into the relevant folder (the bin/x64 folder in the Cyberpunk 2077 directory in Steam, for example) and run it. So long as you have the necessary nvngx_dlssnr.dll file that's been doing the rounds installed in the same place it ought to work.

It didn't.

Initially Windows flagged it as containing a virus, but I did some checking around with VirusTotal and seemingly the Defender flag is a machine learning false positive. Probably. But even then I still struggled to have it running happily.

I am not entirely sure what I did wrong, but when I enabled the feature in-game all I got was a black output where the 3D world ought to be, even though the HUD and game kept on running. After some file deletion, redownloading, verifying of integrity (mine and Cyberpunk's), and a rollback of my AMD Adrenalin drivers, I finally got it working. Kinda. I mean it's still kinda crashy, and I can only now launch Cyberpunk 2077 directly from the .exe file rather than from Steam, but it works.

But my poor GPU wished I hadn't. Now, we know that DLSS 5 is a hell of a resource hog on an RTX 50-series GPU that it's designed for, with a touted 50 - 60% performance hit officially noted by Nvidia, so I should have known it would trouble the AMD GPU.

DLSS NR on Nvidia

DLSS 5 was designed for GeForce GPUs, so is a little more capable, but still a massive resource hog.

DLSS NR Off

DLSS NR On

Still… running at 4K RT Ultra settings is tough enough, and I was getting just 61 fps on the RX 9070 XT even with FSR 4 set to Balanced. And then flicking the DLSS Neural Rendering toggle to 'on' made that figure drop to just 9 fps.

And I thought the 73% drop Andy found with NBA 2K27 was rough.

DLSS NR on AMD

AMD GPUs running DLSS 5 looks great, but runs horribly.

DLSS NR Off

DLSS NR On

Now it's worth noting that the fact it is running at all on AMD GPUs is impressive on its own, but it's not going to make any Radeon graphics card owners any happier about it when they're getting unplayable frame rates out of their new ill-gotten pretties. An 85% performance drop is not sustainable. Nice for screenshots though, eh?

The issue is that AMD's RDNA 4 doesn't have the level of dedicated silicon for the sort of matrix calculations the feature is running… in the same way that RTX 20-series chips don't.

The Turing architecture does have Tensor Cores, but they're far weaker compared to those in the RTX 40- or RTX 50-series, and the shared resources AMD plucks from the standard RDNA 4 Compute Units for these sorts of calculations aren't as robust either. Hence the weaker performance.

Will they be able to squeeze more performance out of this feature on AMD chips? I don't know, but YouTuber Ancient Gameplays noted the app in a recent video, and states that performance has gone up 12% since the first version of the DLSS-NR-on-AMD software first hit Github, so maybe there's a chance. But, realistically, I think there's a hard hardware limit in there which is going to stop DLSS Neural Rendering from being a realistic part of AMD's armoury in this generation.

It took me quite a while to work out all The Blood of Dawnwalker endings. Similar to The Witcher 3, there are a fair few different options, each with a number of variables that can change based on your choices. There are also some secret endings to discover.

Obviously, this guide will contain spoilers for just about everything, you've been warned. Here's each ending, how they work, plus a short explainer about the epilogue and its different outcomes.

All Blood of Dawnwalker endings

There are seven possible endings to Blood of Dawnwalker.

• Four involve assaulting Griefberg Castle, either with allies, or by yourself.
• One involves making a deal with Brencis.
• The final two endings are secret and accomplished before the others.

Also two additional notes:

• The post-credit cutscene plays in every ending.
• Lunka's fate is the same in every ending.

All endings, except for one of the secret ones, involve an epilogue sequence which runs through decisions you made throughout the game—and there are some big differences, but I'll explain all of those in the epilogue section at the end if you're curious. Side note, make sure to have 800 Denarius on hand for any ending involving the epilogue, as the church will ask for a donation and you can give your sister Yanna a dowry.

Assaulting Griefberg Castle

Four of the game's endings begin with assaulting Griefberg Castle, and in every version, your assault changes based on a few key variables:

• If Ambrus or Bakir are still alive you'll have to fight them as bosses during the castle assault, with Ambrus in the entrance hall and Bakir in the dungeon. Bakir will also force you to fight some of the prisoners if he's present.
• If you killed Xanthe, you won't face her as a boss in the throneroom, but you'll have to complete her trap sequence, which involves additional combat and puzzling.
• If your 30 day timer has run out, your family is dead, but you will have realised that by the cutscene that plays when you run out of time. After this point, you can keep playing the game without a timer, but the absence of your family impacts aspects of the epilogue.

Below, I'll run through each variation of the castle assault.

A Lone Wolf's Hunt

Coen takes the fight to Brencis by himself.

This ending sees Coen assault Griefberg Castle by himself at either day or night, depending on which of the approaches you take. If you do fight Ambrus, Bakir, or Xanthe in the assault, you won't be able to drink their Vrakhir blood and gain their abilities if it's daytime, or invite them in, and will instead just kill them.

First off, you always have to fight the Unblinking Blasphemy boss, even if you completed the Who Pulls the Strings quest for the Manumits. You battle through the castle, free some prisoners by unlocking their cells, and eventually confront Brencis in the dungeon depths, just in time to save your family.

You can either fight Brencis here, or make a deal with him if you agree to bow and give up either Crake and the Manumits, or Lacra, though if it's the former, you'll have to go their hideout and mark it, as in the A Deal With the Devil ending (I'll explain that one in its dedicated section below).

If not, you'll fight and defeat Brencis, and choose whether to invite him in, or leave him in Anachora (vampire hell) to have his soul devoured. After this, the epilogue sequence in Laslea will begin.

This is genuinely one of my favorite endings—Vale Sangora becomes independent and there's some degree of lawlessness, but the Manumits protect the valley from the worst enterprising ruffians. You can read a proclamation on a tree in Laslea explaining that Svartrau city council plans to petition Bohemia, Hungary, or Poland to join their realms in the spring.

Since there are no more Vrakhiri, the plague returns, the Uriashi return to their villages, but Christianity also returns, the cathedral is restored, and Father Florin becomes a saint. I'm sure you're thinking "That's a good ending??" but just wait until I explain the others.

Rise At Dawn, Fall Before Dusk

Coen helps Crake and the Manumits restore Catalin Dragosti to power.

In this ending, Crake explains that Catalin Dragosti (the son of Vale Sangora's former tyrant) is waiting outside the valley with an army, and you attack Eastridge Outpost to let him in.

Unsurprisingly, Catalin Dragosti is as bloodthirsty as his father and immediately executes some defenceless prisoners, though you can save at least two of them if you object. After Rise at Dawn, you attack Griefberg Castle in Fall Before Dusk, infiltrating through the tunnels below and battling some Kobolds.

The key variations here are that you won't save any of the prisoners, since Brencis knew you were coming. Vlad will also get a load of Manumits killed by rushing the gate if you save him in the intro, and encourage his recklessness in the Old Friends, New Friends quest where you talk to him in the Manumit hideout.

Finally, you'll reach the throne room, where Brencis will try to murder Catalin Dragosti.

• If you let Brencis try to kill Catalin, Crake will rush forward instead and die defending him.
• If you save Catalin, both he and Crake will live.

After this, you'll continue to the banquet hall, with or without Crake, and will fight Brencis in a room with your family tied to chairs. Unlike the A Lone Wolf's Hunt ending, you can't make a deal with Brencis at this point, since you can't stop Catalin and his army. You'll fight and defeat Brencis, invite him in, or leave him in hell, and the epilogue in Laslea will play.

This is one of the worst endings in my opinion. Catalin Dragosti undertakes a campaign of retribution against anyone he sees as having helped the Vrakhiri, burning entire districts of Svartrau and filling the castle dungeons. As you see in a note on a tree in Laslea, he also imposes a large tax and encourages people to inform on each other. The epilogue also mentions his mercenary army loots and pillages towns whenever it feels like it.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of this ending is it reveals who Crake really is—a toady for Catalin. Under Dragosti's orders, he undertakes a genocide of the Uriashi, seeing them as monsters just like the Vrakhiri. The plague also returns, as does Christianity, but there is a slight silver lining in that this is the only epilogue where you can talk to Crake in Laslea.

Midnight Reckoning

Coen helps Lacra end Brencis' sinister scheme.

Alongside Lacra, you enter the Griefberg Castle dungeons via the ancient ruins below and destroy Brencis's ritual, before ascending through the castle to face Brencis himself. The key variables here are that in smashing the ritual, Lacra unleashes hell on the castle. Corpses start coming back to life, huge chunks of the castle are ripped up into the air, and the prisoners lose their minds.

When you finally reach the throne room, your family will be overgrown in the red roots (but still alive). Brencis will appear to confront you and Lacra.

• If you betray Lacra and choose your family, she'll fight Brencis, but he'll win and drink her blood. The outcome here is the same as the A Deal With The Devil ending (explained below).
• If you fight Brencis with Lacra, you can still save your family. I haven't played this variant to confirm, but there's a cutscene midfight that implies Lacra dies if you didn't complete her optional The Night of Horrors quest and eat the Mandrake with her.

As with the other endings, you'll defeat Brencis in Anachora, and can decide whether to invite him in, or let him be consumed by hell. However, he'll also reveal more in this ending about his plan—that he wanted to accept and harness the curse of Anachora that all vampires harbor instead of trying to resist it.

This ending isn't a particularly good one—as with A Lone Wolf's Hunt, Vale Sangora becomes independent for a time, the Manumits defend it, and both Christianity and the plague return. The negative here is basically everyone in the castle dies and it remains a cursed hellscape.

Lacra also doesn't trust you enough to tell you that this was going to happen and could've killed your family, which is a sad realisation about her character and goals. Lacra will appear briefly in the epilogue, but she appears in almost every epilogue provided you complete her questline. Taking this route to the ending also doesn't change her ending in the epilogue.

A Deal With The Devil

Coen makes a deal with Brencis for the freedom of Laslea.

In this ending, you meet Brencis at Shrike's Crag, the haunted site of a mass atrocity committed by Skender Dragosti (the valley's former tyrant). After meeting your father, who Brencis brings, he'll offer you a deal: He'll return your family and the villagers, and you can live in Laslea, exempt from the blood tax, if you find and mark the Manumit hideout.

You can also choose to kill Brencis here, though spilling any blood summons the dead, and you'll have to fight him with a million ghosts trying to get in the way. This is also inadvisable because you leave your father, Pieter, to the mercy of all the angry spirits you summon, which will lead to his death. Before you can agree to Brencis's deal, your father picks the absolute worst moment to trip over and hurt himself, summoning a legion of ghosts you have to fight through with Brencis to escape and save him.

All you have to do to complete this ending is head to the Manumit hideout and mark the door. Brencis swoops in, murders the Manumits, drags Crake out into the street, drinks his blood, and then disappears with him—not a great outcome for Crake, obviously. However, the epilogue in Laslea will play out.

This ending is not great. While it's made clear that Brencis's regime does eventually fall thanks to the Arbiters, bad stuff happens to Lacra and Father Florin, and Brencis continues to rule with an iron fist, slowly bleeding the valley for his scheme. The upsides are that the plague doesn't return, the Uriashi stick around, and Laslea gets to practice Christianity as an exception.

Secret endings

Leaving Vale Sangora

Coen leaves the valley to its fate and hits the bricks.

This is probably my favorite ending for Blood of Dawnwalker. You can do it anytime after the prologue provided you reach Level 11 Corruption and unlock the second level of Shadow Dweller in the vampirism skill tree, increasing the max distance of Shadow Step. Head to the Cursed Chasm in northwest Briar Sloughs, following the road that looks like it leads out of Vale Sangora.

Use the max level Shadow Step to get across the gap and follow the road to the still open pass. You'll be given the choice to leave the valley forever or stay. That's it. There isn't even an epilogue (besides the post-credit cutscene), so it really is a disavowal of everything in Vale Sangora, as Coen leaves with his newfound vampirism to make a new life.

Killing Brencis in the prologue

Coen thwarts Brencis's scheme without leaving Laslea.

As many of you likely guessed, saw, or experienced yourself, if you manage to beat Brencis's first stage in the prologue, you can defeat him there and end the game. I'm going to be frank—it's not worth it. Defeating both the Brencis fights in the prologue is incredibly hard, even on the lowest difficulty, and the ending isn't that much different from A Lone Wolf's Hunt.

The main difference is that the epilogue is, understandably, short as hell because you didn't do anything in the game.

The Blood of Dawnwalker's epilogue explained

The epilogue in Laslea has a few different variables depending on the ending you chose:

• Certain characters showing up in the town.
• The characters who appear in the scene with Lunka at the end are different.
• The notices on the tree in the town square can change, but invariably address who rules Vale Sangora, whether Christianity returned, whether you killed the Murohn in Svartrau Cathedral's Almshouse, and the fate of St. Tyna's Convent.

Below I'll run through the epilogue section post-Laslea, which shows you a series of tableaus you can examine. These explain the outcomes of various quests and choices you made:

Your family

• Your mother will be absent if you didn't make Anca's medicine correctly and she was killed in the prologue.
• Your family will be dead and absent if you don't save them in 30 days.
• Lunka will be corrupted by Brencis—her and Coen always leave the valley at the end after meeting Neberu.

Svartrau, The Plague, and the Uriashi

• The city will either be independent and somewhat lawless, still controlled by the Vrakhiri, or burned and sacked in retribution by Catalin Skender.
• The Uriashi will either retreat to the mountain or stay.
• The plague will return or remain absent based on whether Brencis remains in power.

Anca

• If you didn't let Anca use The Font, she disappears from Laslea in search of a different cure.
• If you did, she stays in Laslea and is accepted by the villagers.

Crake and the Manumits

• Defend the newly independent Vale Sangora from ruffians if Coen defeated Brencis himself or with Lacra.
• Kill all of the Uriashi under Catalin Skender's orders if Coen lets the army in and Crake survives.
• Are dead, because Brencis killed them after Coen made a deal with him.

Lacra

• Moves on and continues her travels and adventures.
• Is killed and sent to Anachora by Brencis and his court if he remains in power.
• If you complete Lacra's questline, she'll appear in the epilogue provided Brencis isn't in power.

Father Florin

• Is canonized and made a saint. This might only happen if you complete his A Hero's End quest.
• Is publicly burned alive if Brencis remains in power.

Echoes of Silenced Bells

• St. Tyna's Convent has its curse lifted but its zombie nuns wander off into the woods.
• It remains cursed and filled with undead.

A Study in Crimson

• You found the correct killer and the Svartrau murders ceased.
• You caught the wrong culprit and they continue.
• Vicho will also appear in the epilogue looking after Lunka if you befriended him.

Hive and Seek

• You killed the Kobold hive in Lacra's quest. I haven't seen the other outcome, but I assume it relates to sparing them.

Xanthe and Chariklea

• This tableau only shows up if you spared Xanthe during her The Cycle of Love quest (which you get by angering her). It basically explains how Xanthe keeps murdering women to keep Chariklea alive.

Okay, two things. First: Los Santos Customs will be taking a hiatus next week, as I spend nine days in a row sleeping and attempting to develop the antibodies to counter whatever exotic German illness it is I acquired at Gamescom 2026.

Second: it's snowing in Los Santos, just like the real-life LA.

I have installed WinterV Beta, with the aim of making Grand Theft Auto 5's weather a little more interesting than it usually is. The pitch is simple: what if there was snow? Well, reader, having played a little GTA 5 with WinterV Beta, I can assure you that there very much is snow. Plus, all the world's lighting takes on a kind of a sickly, ochre hue, which is also just like LA.

From the sky: flurries of flakes. On the roads: cars covered in a sheen of powder, tyre-chains inexplicably equipped (the snow does not, in my version of GTA 5 where a significant chunk of the exterior map has absconded to the phantom zone, settle). In the air: a crisp winter chill. Santa Claus is coming to town; fire a truck at him.

I can't tell you if the presence of snow on the city roads impacts car handling because, as we have established, cars in my GTA 5 no longer have handling. Nevertheless, it does change the vibe quite a lot. As someone who's spent a lot of the last month looking at GTA 5—a change is as good as a rest.

But also, it is time for a rest. I will see you the week after next, whereupon we'll probably finally convert this game into GTA 6. I can feel it.

Everyone has a price. Maybe it's $100, maybe it's $1,000, maybe it's for someone to see your innate value as a human being, or maybe it's $1,000,000. Popular streamer TimTheTatman recently revealed what it would take to get him to go back to Arc Raiders, and spoilers, it's not the third option.

There was apparently an ad deal floating around for the Arc Raiders and Subway collab, which TimTheTatman was approached for, but did not entertain. "I did say no to six-figures with Arc Raiders, I did," he revealed in a stream earlier this week. "I said 'No thank you'. And it was the Subway Arc Raiders ad. I said I just can't do it, I'm sorry."

This was met with the exact response you'd expect with people being baffled that he'd ever think of turning down such a lucrative offer. "That's kind of the funny part of being in a streamer position," TimTheTatman continued. "People say 'you're a fucking sellout' but then in the same breath I said I passed on six-figures from Arc Raiders and people are like 'you're fucking stupid'."

He revealed that he does actually have a price to play Arc Raiders again: they'd just have had to add another zero onto the offer. "If that Arc Raiders deal was seven-figures—hey boys welcome back to Arc Raiders and Subway, right, you see what I'm saying? 100% we're going back. But it's just for me, the game frustrated me so much—I got frustrated so much with that game, I just don't want to play it ever again. Even to a point where six-figures isn't going to get me back on it."

I can't say I'm surprised. Arc Raiders is in a bit of a rough spot right now, especially for streamers, what with all the cheating and stream sniping. Embark Studios' executive producer Aleksander Grøndal recently admitted the shortcomings of Arc Raiders and promised that its upcoming major update Frozen Trails will reset the game and provide enough incentive to get players to come back, though—even if they don't get a six-figure deal to do it.

Curse of Strahd is one of the most popular D&D modules for a reason—it's actually really compelling. Set in the misty, cursed lands of Barovia, Curse of Strahd is dominated by the titular Strahd von Zarovich, a vampire lord with a tragic backstory and a propensity for showing up at random intervals to give you a fantasy wedgie.

In the one Strahd campaign I played in, my first encounter with the man involved him bleeding our cleric and making my thief drink his blood—so, you know. Normal.

Anyway, per Deadline, we'll be getting a fully-fledged live action Netflix series about him dubbed Ravenloft—after the wider set of domains that darklords like Mr. Zarovich himself enjoy dominion over. It's being helmed by writer and executive producer John August and executive producer Alfonso Cuarón.

The latter of which worked on Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban. Fittingly, one of the darker Harry Potter films—and owner of exactly the kind of murky, grey aesthetic I'd anticipate in any series taking place in Ravenloft.

The report reads: "Described as a prestige fantasy series where adventure collides with gothic horror and tragic romance, Ravenloft and its Domains of Dread tackle adventure through character-driven stories of dark magic and supernatural intrigue.

"At its heart, the series follows the making of the vampire Darklord Strahd von Zarovich, whose story of power, love, obsession, and undead transformation charts his origins from tragic antihero to one of Dungeons & Dragons’ most notorious villains."

And hey, genuinely? I think this could work out great, assuming it can escape the executive Netflix meddling and second-screen scriptwriting that's been creeping its wormy fingers into games recently. Strahd's entire backstory is tragic enough and appealing enough that unwinding it underpins one of the most popular D&D modules.

I look forward to the season finale where, presumably, a group of four adventurers with increasingly absurd backstories and a sword made out of sunlight punt down his front door and kick his byronic ass.

PC gaming has always been an expensive hobby, but prices have become downright ridiculous as of late. It's bad enough that Nvidia's RTX 50-series cards cost slightly less than an international flight, but the memory supply crisis is also driving up the price of RAM and SSDs. Now it looks like motherboards might be next to see a significant price spike.

Board Channels is a forum for hardware manufacturers and partners to communicate. One poster recently wrote, "The price of upstream raw materials for motherboards has indeed risen significantly." They go on to say that the price of motherboard PCBs alone has increased by between 15% and 50%. Wi-Fi modules are said to have gone up between 10% and 20%, while capacitor prices have also gone up approximately 50% (via Videocardz).

As we've reported before, these price increases are likely caused by material shortages resulting from the Strait of Hormuz crisis and the ongoing Iran war. For instance, PPE resin can be thought of as the glue that binds the many layers of a PCB together, and a huge chunk of the world's high-quality PPE comes from petrochemical company Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) in Saudi Arabia. Not only does this company rely on the Strait of Hormuz to ship exports out, but Reuters reports SABIC's Jubail plant was attacked back in April.

The Board Channels source writes, "The rise in raw material prices for components has at least a 10% impact on the cost of motherboards." Therefore, the prices consumers see will likely have to increase to keep pace—though we've yet to see the peak.

"Looking at the price increases from major motherboard manufacturers in August, the overall increases were relatively small, only around 3%, and affecting a limited number of models," the source continues, "Among Taiwanese brands, MSI raised prices across the board, while Asus and Gigabyte only increased prices for their main models, with small increases ranging from 5-50 yuan. Domestic brands [in China] like Colorful and Maxsun only increased prices by 10-20 yuan, resulting in a relatively small overall increase."

For context, five yuan is about $0.74. 10 yuan is $1.49, and 50 yuan is still only about $7.44 at time of writing. But the source goes on to say, "There is still room for motherboard costs to rise, and it is possible that motherboard manufacturers will continue to raise prices for certain models in the coming months."

In other words, as with so much of hardware pricing right now, it's likely going to get worse before it gets better. Same old story, eh?

Silent Hill has gone international. Last year we went to Japan in Silent Hill f, and now the series is off to Scotland in Silent Hill: Townfall. As a middle-aged Scot who still remembers the '90s, when Townfall takes place, I was simultaneously nervous and excited about the rare opportunity to play a game that's so close to home.

What a relief, then, that Townfall not only feels incredibly Scottish, its Scottishness also perfectly matches Silent Hill's brand of unsettling psychological horror. And it's not such an unlikely pairing. Scotland is a brilliant fit for this kind of game—and I'm going to spend the next 2,000 or so words convincing you why.

It helps, of course, that the studio is both local and knows its way around the genre. Glaswegian developer Screen Burn has been serving up frights and mysteries since 2015, namely through Stories Untold and Observation. You might know it better by its former name, No Code. Co-founder and Townfall game director Jon McKellan also worked on Alien: Isolation prior to starting up the studio.

Welcome to St. Amelia

"We wanted St. Amelia to feel like a real place," McKellan tells me. "And I think, as with most writing, you write what you know, and it made sense for us to dig deep into our upbringings, into our past, and try and build a place that felt believable. To make the player care about this place, you need it to be believable.

Walking the streets of St. Amelia is an eerie experience because it all feels so familiar. There are still so many towns in Scotland that look like this—that mix of old fashioned architecture, cosy little shops and tiny fishing vessels sitting next to modern medical clinics and parked cars. The odd new flourishes squeezing into old spaces.

Outside a shop I notice a pair of charity boxes—one in the shape of a guide dog, another a swirly wishing well that looks like a helter skelter—that nearly everyone from the UK will recognise, not just Scots. These tiny bits of window dressing make the fictional town feel like a tangible place. I have absolutely been here before, even though I definitely haven't.

"A lot of it was going back through our old memories and trying to find things that we remembered, finding old photographs," says McKellan. "But also some genius out there had scanned every Argos catalogue for the last 30 years, and we were like looking at them and finding out, OK, if we need a TV in '90s, let's look at the catalogue from the '90s and find out which one would be more appropriate."

If you want a dose of '90s shopping nostalgia, here's an Argos catalogue from 1990. Enjoy looking at decades-old lawnmowers and kitchen utensils!

Being set in the '90s also means that technology can't really save you. You don't have a miraculous smart phone in your hands, and satnav was still very new. All you have is your CRTV, a chunky portable TV—just like the one I had as a teen—that picks up fuzzy signals, which you can use to solve puzzles and see where enemies are.

"They're kind of frail, they're unreliable," says McKellan. "I think all of that speaks really well to horror because you get these tools and they help you, but they're never going to be good enough to get you out of a jam. Relying on the analogue, it allows you to play within those limitations, which work well with horror. I think aesthetically as well, it adds texture, even just to the real-world tactile interfaces that feel just a little bit more grounded. Anything we can do to make the player feel like they're there is going to help with horror."

Weather alert

It wouldn't be an accurate portrayal of Scotland without our horrible weather, of course, which turns what would otherwise seem like an attractive, inviting town into a dour, dreich place. It's foggy and grey, the Scottish default. Normally, though, that would seem quite welcoming to me. Us Scots are a weird bunch and we're abnormally proud of our shite weather.

It's not just because we're pessimists revelling in misery (well, not entirely); there's actually a streak of optimism in the Scottish psyche, with so much Scottish art being about finding beauty in stark, gloomy places. Some of that art is even in my living room, where I've got a trio of prints depicting one of my favourite locations, the gorgeous island of Arran—presented as a jet-black rock—surrounded by a storm.

At a most basic level, it's just nice to be in your cosy home looking out the window at the rain pishing down or the fog rolling in. And Townfall preserves this. While there are plenty of horrors hidden in the buildings, the streets appear to be a lot more deadly, with the mist hiding horrors drawn from Simon—the protagonist—and St. Amelia's trauma. It feels safer indoors.

When Scotland is presented in videogames, it's usually a brief aside or approaching parody—all kilts and whisky and golf, with accents that call to mind fantasy dwarves. Townfall is more confident in its Scottishness—it doesn't need to scream about it at the top of its lungs. It's an understated familiarity, which lends it a more potent air of authenticity.

In the '90s, most of the world's experience of Scotland came through two movies: Braveheart and Trainspotting. Unsurprisingly, a Hollywood production featuring an Australian nutcase didn't quite capture the country. Trainspotting certainly did, though. It reflected the less palatable side of Scotland, the one the tourists rarely get to see: the squalor, the addiction, the depression and urban decay.

Townfall is much closer to Trainspotting than Braveheart, but rather than urban poverty and heroin addiction, it explores themes like medical trauma, the evisceration of small communities and the social impact of Margaret Thatcher's rule—one of Scotland's most loathed villains, right up there with King Edward I of England, the man also known as the Hammer of the Scots.

Trauma team

"The medical trauma is something that Simon's clearly involved with," says McKellan. "Without going into too much detail, I think again you kind of write what you know, and a lot of the experiences that Simon and the characters have have come from a real place and come from something that's pretty authentic in terms of how we cope with those things. So it also felt Silent Hill. It felt like the kind of story you would expect in a series like Silent Hill, without copying anything that's come before."

The way this is presented is extremely harrowing. In one early scene, we see a character Simon knows standing in the town square, when a huge tube suspended from the sky appears and plugs into his mouth. There's a hint of cosmic horror in the scene—tentacles dangling from the heavens—but also grounded psychological horror, that traumatic experience of being hooked up to medical equipment with feeding tubes pumping their contents into your stomach. It's nauseating.

"I think relatability is a big thing in horror," says McKellan. "The more you can relate to a problem, the more you can understand it. The more you can be frightened of it. The more you can be affected by it. And I think some of the themes and issues that we dive into in Townfall, some of them even very subtly in the background, I think a lot of people connect with it and have a stance on it, have an opinion on it. Like say the time period, the setting—it's all really relevant, and it creates a perfect storm for what has happened in St. Amelia that I think a lot of us could relate to, whether you're from Scotland or not."

But what actually happened in St. Amelia?

Townfall's introduction only provides hints. A company is referenced. There are protest signs scattered around the town square. Tension permeates everything. This is a town that has been through some shit—like so many Scottish towns of the era.

"I won't spoil what happened in St. Amelia and the journey that you'll go on there," says McKellan, "but there's a lot of imagery from those eras, growing up in the '90s and the era of Thatcher, things like that. It was a very tense climate at times, and I think there was a lot to draw from them for inspiration in terms of how it would look and feel for a town to be angry about something, and how it feels to protest."

The protest signs I see are real, as in Screen Burn actually made physical protest signs, scanned them and added them to the game, "to make sure it felt like this is what it would look like". The studio didn't simply want to make copies, it wanted to make the real deal, something authentic. Something that reflects "what life was like", even if the game isn't technically about what life was like—this is still Simon's story. And Simon is an outsider.

Stranger things

If you're a stranger to Scotland, you'll be fine in St. Amelia. While I can feel the Scottishness sweating out of Townfall's pores, it's often subtle, and knowing anything about Scotland is not a prerequisite. I've never visited Japan, but that doesn't stop me from getting something out of Silent Hill f, or being obsessed with Like A Dragon.

Simon is American. He is a visitor exploring an unfamiliar town. He's the perfect viewpoint for players—even if you are Scottish. The town, initially, is an enigma. We don't know what happened here or what's going on. We need to unravel the mystery.

"We wanted the player and Simon to be kind of in lockstep," says McKellan. "I didn't like the idea that Simon would come to the town but know his way around, or have amnesia and not know where things are. It made more sense that both Simon and the player see this for the first time. So all the discoveries that you make, Simon makes too, and that keeps you more more connected with Simon throughout the story."

The first-person perspective really emphasises this. I don't know about you lot, but third-person horror isn't nearly as thrilling and stressful to me. It's more like watching a film, and while I love horror films, it's rare for them to actually succeed in making me scared. Videogames have an advantage in that you're participating in the horror, but if you're inundated with UI elements and seeing your character at all times, it sheds a lot of the uncomfortable intimacy. When you're seeing through your character's eyes, however, it's a lot more effective.

"It gives us a kind of intimacy with the environment that is hard to do in third-person," says McKellan. "With the environments we've got, because we're in first-person, we didn't have to scale everything up. We didn't have to make the doors wider to let the camera through with you. We could keep everything to the right scale and make it feel quite dense and claustrophobic. So in terms of the horror, it's really helpful. It gets you close to the horror. There's no one in between you and the thing in front of you."

McKellan also notes that it really helps with the storytelling, too, "letting you explore that town and feel like you're really digging through people's cupboards and understanding where they lived". It bestows St. Amelia with a stronger sense of place, which feels essential in a game where the setting is so critical and looms so large.

I can't imagine using the CRTV in third-person, it would feel so clunky, and that was a big consideration for Screen Burn as well. "You just can't do that kind of mechanic from a camera far away without relying on UI overlays and making it feel almost sci-fi," says McKellan. "So we felt like doing it diegetically in your hand was a must-have."

I played Townfall in a well-lit, hot room surrounded by other journalists as a fan blew directly in my face. There probably isn't a worse way to experience a horror game. But I was genuinely entranced. St. Amelia's thick, thick atmosphere, the obsessive attention to detail, the juxtaposition of the familiar and the horrifying—I was no longer an exhausted journalist trying to get through another Gamescom appointment, I was living through a horror story in my own backyard. And it was awesome.

Silent Hill: Townfall launches on September 24.

Last week, in the wake of a rash of developer hardware thefts at this year's Gamescom, the event's organizers provoked a wave of outcry by publishing a statement that many perceived as callously placing the blame on exhibitors who hadn't adequately insured their equipment.

Today, Gamescom released an additional statement on X, admitting that its initial response was inadequate and committing to improving the rigor of its security procedures with input from affected exhibitors.

"Over the past few days, we have received a great deal of criticism for the way we communicated about the theft of hardware belonging to several indie developers. That criticism is justified," Gamescom said. "Our first response did not strike the right tone, and it did not show the people affected the empathy they deserved. We are sorry."

After acknowledging the emotional, financial, and professional cost of the hardware thefts, Gamescom said it has "been moved by" and is "grateful for" the outpouring of support for affected exhibitors, which "says a great deal" about the industry and its consumers.

However, that generosity does not, it said, "relieve us, as the organizers, of our own responsibility to work together with our exhibitors and partners to create the best possible environment for everyone. We are therefore committed to jointly reviewing and further improving security."

In addition to its standard post-event assessment of exhibitor feedback, Gamescom said it's committing to both "a dedicated review of security for indie exhibitors" and to hosting a roundtable with indie booth organizers "so that we can develop concrete measures together." Gamescom also urged any additional exhibitors who suffered thefts during this year's show to report those incidents to both the event organizers and to police.

What the statement doesn't mention is any possibility of compensation for affected exhibitors. PC Gamer contacted Gamescom's organizers at Koelnmesse GmbH to ask how many incidents had been reported, whether any compensation has been investigated or offered to exhibitors whose equipment was stolen, and what forms of vetting and oversight Gamescom security staff are subject to. Gamescom PR offered no response beyond referring PC Gamer to its two published statements about the incidents.

"Our commitment has always been to keep making Gamescom better—together with the community, not just when things go well," Gamescom said in today's statement on X. "That is exactly what we will do here."

Making a live service game these days feels like trying to shoot an arrow at a flea while blindfolded. Striking gold with a hot new shooter or other team-based multiplayer game with a quirky twist seems like an exercise in futility, but that isn't stopping developers and publishers from trying to be the next big thing.

Personally, if I was trying to enter an already-volatile market, I'd probably be steering well clear of MOBAs. They're finicky, have a high barrier to entry, and require a ridiculous amount of time commitment to ever be remotely good at them. Even then, dragging a League or Dota player away from their game to try another one is a big ask. Hell, I'm still shocked Deadlock has managed to do it.

So I don't know whether to applaud developer Nirvanana for giving it a go with Project Zeta, or grab the team by the shoulders and give them a good old shake for doing something I perceive to be utterly reckless.

Though, as Nirvanana will maintain, Project Zeta isn't quite a MOBA. As the developer tells me, it's actually a 4v4 multi-team tactical arena battle. Not battle royale, just battle. "We tried not to be tied down to those traditional things," Nirvanana tells me as I sit down to try Project Zeta at Gamescom, though admits the game did start out as a more traditional battle royale.

But from there, it's evolved into a sort of battle royale-MOBA-hero shooter hybrid, pitting four teams against each other as they fight across a sprawling map for victory. I'm shown flashy footage of Twitch streamers popping off after winning teamfights, proclaiming how good it feels to win in Project Zeta—emerging victorious from a teamfight refreshes cooldowns for the winners, as well as resurrecting any teammates who fell in the scuffle.

It seemed all well and good, but I couldn't help but wonder how it felt to be on the other side. Making a victory feel amazing for the winners usually means making the loss feel particularly bad on the other side of things. "In the last test, that was actually the biggest feedback we received," Nirvanana admits to me.

Recent tweaks have apparently made it so that there's "bigger risk" for the winning team. "The more you're ahead, the more you have to seek out other teams and wipe them out … there's a higher chance of you making mistakes, and that's a bigger risk for the winning team." It's something I'm still not entirely convinced of, but it does at least seem like Nirvanana is doing its best to iron out any kinks as it continues to drip-feed playtests to its core audience.

How that core audience will eventually translate into playercounts with the full release, however? Nirvanana knows it's a tough ask. "You have to have a clear message," the developer tells me. "And you have to take the players that agree with that message, and you have to build a community before launch with those players. And I think that's the only way to secure success once the game launches.

"And so, through these continuous player tests, we want to bring in those players that agree with Zeta's message to our team. These people will be the evangelists, basically, that promote the game for us. One thing I can say with confidence is that Zeta is a game that doesn't exist in a genre that doesn't exist, and it has a very clear message. And so we're going to continue to put up the message that this is what Zeta is. It's about team fights, dense team fights, and those who agree with that will be able to come into our community and we will continue to engage with them."

It all seems like a very hopecore way of looking at things, though Nirvanana does cap it all off by admitting: "Games like us failed a lot. The track record isn't good." Well, for Project Zeta's sake, I hope it can carve out a slice of success in an increasingly difficult landscape.

If you're interested in checking out Zeta for yourself, there's a playtest running right now until 12am on September 7. You can sign up on the Project Zeta website.

As I'm making my way through the beginning of two-player co-op adventure Age Twisters alongside the founders of developer Piccolo Studios, I'm told the goal was to create a game that evokes the same feelings as watching a Pixar movie with your child. Now I am admittedly sprogless, but it wasn't difficult to latch onto those similar fuzzy feelings of nostalgia and familial love even as I completed puzzles alongside a man I'd only met minutes prior.

Age Twisters is the studio's attempt at a game like It Takes Two or Split Fiction, albeit much lower on the toughness scale—something which the developer itself admits, instead going for a game that's constantly evolving and different rather than outright difficult. It takes a granddaughter-grandfather duo and slaps a couple of age-bending bracelets on them, allowing each one to age up or down all the way from a young child to a hobbling old bean.

It's a wonderfully novel mechanic—each age has its own portrait, voice acting, and dynamic dialogue that'll shift as you age up or down across the story. Each even comes with their own quirks. I attempted to jump over a gap as an old lady but was unable to, and similarly found myself stuck when trying to jump up and grab onto a ledge as a tiny tyke.

That stuff's mostly flavour, but each age does come with unique abilities that are used during puzzles. Kids can swap back and forth with each other and random objects, useful for traversing large gaps or teleporting through danger. Youths are given the full rowdy power of rock instruments, being able to blast out on drums or guitar to slow down incoming projectiles or enemies. Adults can put their strength into punches to clear paths, while elders have large magnets that can be used to push or pull objects.

I only got to toy around with the first two powers while playing the demo at Gamescom. And while the puzzles were mostly simple in nature, getting to zap around ages at will and coordinate was still lovely and charming. While most of the puzzles we completed required both of us to be the same age, I'm told that later puzzles will require each person using different ages and their respective powers to complete.

Piccolo Studios says it played into stereotypes of each generation somewhat when creating these abilities, all in the name of humour of course. While the story is ultimately one of loss—it's all about figuring out what happened to the granddaughter's mother—it's one about trying to bridge the gap between generations. As the developer puts it to me, it's about remembering being young while understanding what it means to get older.

It all sounds well and good, and while I wasn't completely sold on the story, dialogue, or characters in my brief time with the demo, I think the puzzles and being able to shoot the shit alongside a loved one for a few hours will do plenty of the heavy lifting in Age Twisters. Its approachability feels like a great one for families to try together, though I'd imagine I'll also have a lovely time journeying through the game alongside my partner or a good pal.

Age Twisters is set to release on Steam in 2027.

If you happen to pick up a copy of NBA 2K27, in your eagerness to try out the first official implementation of Nvidia's DLSS 5 AI image tech, you won't find it labelled as such in the settings menu. Instead, it appears as a simple on/off toggle under the label "DLSS Neural Rendering." And while that might seem like a small change, I think it makes a huge amount of difference in terms of public perception.

Calling it DLSS 5 in the first place was, at best, confusing. Traditional DLSS, as in the upscaling/super sampling technology, is well established at this point. While some still refuse to get on board, many have become accustomed to the idea that it works well at its primary task, running your games at lower resolutions to achieve better frame rates while outputting a high-resolution image.

So much so, that DLSS updates are usually pretty well received. Slightly better image quality, slightly better performance. Ray Reconstruction niceties. That sort of thing. Given that DLSS is now a near requirement for smooth performance in many games (and I'm not opening that can of worms any further right now, believe me), the gradual, iterative improvements have been pleasing to see.

But DLSS 5 changes things. Quite literally. And while Nvidia has gone to great pains in recent months to point out that it's both developer controlled, and a toggled option that can be safely ignored if you don't like the imagery, shoving the tech underneath the DLSS iterative umbrella felt like a poor move.

Something in the association inferred, even if it was later made clear that it wasn't the case, that AI image alteration tech was just how games were going to be going forward, and you were going to have to get on board if you wanted to keep using DLSS in future.

And what happens to DLSS 4.5, the current version of the upscaling tech? Does it simply update to DLSS 4.6, 4.7, etc, until we start getting into more and more decimals to avoid the big 5.0?

I asked this exact question to several Nvidia staff at my Gamescom visit, and received little in the way of a satisfying answer. It was made clear, however, that regular DLSS upscaling will continue to receive consistent updates, separate from DLSS 5.

Now it seems like we might have a clue to the solution of this branding mess. In NBA 2K27, it's been labelled as DLSS Neural Rendering, and it's an on/off switch that can be used independently of the upscaling, or ignored entirely for those who don't want to get on the AI image alteration train.

Our Dave first noticed this change in the leaked DLL files last week, which refer to it as "Nvidia DLSSNR." But the fact it appears in an official game settings menu under the "Neural Rendering" title feels like a step in the right direction. Nvidia seems painfully aware that it needs to rehabilitate its new tech, and separating the nomenclature would be a good start.

Of course, the naming scheme is only part of the story when it comes to the controversy. There are many who are dead set against the idea of any sort of AI generation tech entering their games, amid a wider AI backlash. Nothing's changed there, I would wager.

Separate from that, whether you like the look of the AI-altered imagery is still a matter of taste. It's developer controlled, as Nvidia has repeatedly pointed out—though if you start modding it into games yourself, like Dave has, you do get your own sliders to play with.

DLSS 5 in Cyberpunk 2077

The effect on the lighting of the character model is impressive and easy to mod in. Just computationally expensive...

DLSS 5 off

DLSS 5 on

Still, I've got a feeling we're going to see some relatively subtle implementations to start with—and inevitably, some goppingly ugly, AI beauty filter-like imagery as time goes on. There's no accounting for taste in a general sense, and there's certainly no accounting for taste when it comes to graphics.

It's also, in its current iteration, a massive performance hog. Nvidia claimed a 50-60% performance hit, but my early testing in NBA 2K27 shows it can hamstring an RTX 5080 by up to 73% at certain settings. That's a very powerful (and expensive) graphics card, held back significantly by Nvidia's new toy.

All of which means the DLSS 5/DLSS Neural Rendering controversy is likely far from over. But I can't help but feel that if the tech was unveiled as "DLSS Neural Rendering" in the first place, as just a new optional feature and not presented as the entirety of DLSS 5, a fair amount of the confusion—and perhaps even initial backlash—could have been avoided.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is the latest victim of the dreaded AAA videogame disease: Padded Runtime Via Unsatisfying Upgrade Materials. It could be a lot worse: thankfully there's no level gating in Onimusha that requires you to accrue an arbitrary set of stats before you can tackle a particular quest. It's not an RPG, and I'm sure as soon as Twitch streamers get their hands on it they'll be flexing on the hardest bosses without ever upgrading their gear by a single percentage point.

But for us mortals, Onimusha's runtime is padded out by a pretty boring hub world full of pretty boring upgrade materials like cotton and iron that you use to very, very slowly increase your damage, health, stamina, and Oni power gauge. It's a dull system that doesn't evolve a single bit over the entire game. There are also rarer upgrade materials that you use to unlock abilities and enhancements on the skill tree.

This structure encourages you to spend quite a few hours playing the least fun bits of Onimusha, but I do have some good news: there's a way to bypass some of the tedium that you can easily overlook.

Buy key upgrade materials from Yorimasa's shrine

A few hours into Onimusha: Way of the Sword, you'll complete a quest to purify Yasui Konpiragu shrine, saving its guardian Oni spirit from an evil Genma infestation. Once done, Yorimasa will begin selling you items for red souls, the standard "currency" you accrue from killing enemies. If you're anything like me, you'll take a cursory look at what's for sale, go "I don't need any of this stuff right now" and then go play about 10 more hours of Onimusha without bothering to revisit the shrine.

Don't do that! Check back in after you complete every major story mission, because Yorimasa's Monument expands the shop inventory several times throughout the game. And after awhile he'll begin stocking some of the key crafting items, including:

• Leather
• Fine Silk
• Tempered Iron
• Tamahagane
• Malacite Mass
• Byakue's Talisman
• Dohatsu-ten's Horn

Yorimasa doesn't sell all these right at the start, but early on you'll probably be getting the basics like cotton cloth and regular iron at a pretty steady clip, and won't need as many of these rarer materials. There are five upgrade tiers for your clothing, sword, and gauntlet, though, each of which require a substantial number of materials to work your way through. Unless you spend hours and hours doing sidequests in Kyoto and chasing down every shiny chest your Oni vision highlights for you, you're going to need more of these items than you accrue naturally throughout the game. (Even putting around 35 hours into Onimusha I didn't quite max out any of my gear.)

By the mid- and late-game, at least, you can supplement your findings with some stock bought from Yorimasa's finite supply. If you have the red souls, I recommend buying as many as you can; hunting for them really drags down Onimusha's pacing.

Unfortunately, this is also a very quick way to go broke.

Okay, so how do I get more red souls?

The higher tier upgrade items can cost upwards of 8,000 souls, so even after spending a few hours on a big story quest killing enemies you'll blow through your soul wallet by upgrading a couple skill tree nodes and buying some materials. If you don't want to run into a late game cash crunch, here are a few tips:

• Spec into the skill tree node that increases red soul rewards: It's not the sexiest option up front, but prioritize this early on so that you start earning more souls sooner so you can buy your way through the skill tree later
• Use Soul Suckers before big fights: These are the sorts of inventory items I have a bad habit of ignoring. Don't be like me: stick the red Soul Sucker in your Hozuki pouch and use it right before you carve through a big pile of scrub Genma to up your payout. If you're confident, it's also worth using one when you've got a Byakue or Dohatsu-ten close to death, then follow-up with the next tip for an even better reward.
• Finish off enemies with the Flashing Void: While you won't get this Oni armament until later in the game, using it as a finisher nets you more red souls. Do that! Otherwise I know you're just going to be sitting on that Oni meter saving it for the "right" moment.
• Upgrade the Reaper's Charm if you really plan to grind: I'll be up front and say that I didn't do this myself, because I didn't get my hands on the Reaper's Charm until I was far enough into Onimusha to be pretty over fighting the basic baddies, and reckoned the investment wouldn't pay out. But if you keep this charm equipped to a slot from the moment you get it, you can maximize your red souls earned with a baseline 15% buff even before taking advantage of the tips above. Just keep in mind there are only so many upgrade materials Yorimasa will sell you before you go all-in grinding for souls.

If there's one thing you should never underestimate, it's a gamer's love for completing little tasks. Whether it's battle passes, meaningless fetch quests, or in Arc Raiders' case, its expeditions. There's just the right amount of dopamine involved for a neuron activation, so you best bet that they'll rip through them at an unthinkable speed.

I'll concede that Embark Studios probably couldn't have foreseen the full extent of this love prior to Arc Raiders release, but still, the outcome is the same: gamers out-growing their once-beloved game because they managed to complete all their tasks way too fast.

"We didn’t really expect that amount of players to show up and play ARC Raiders," executive producer Aleksander Grøndal explains in an interview with GamesBeat. "That surprised us. We were a bit unprepared. That’s one of the hard lessons we had to learn. When January came and some of the problems started with the game."

January saw the first crack in Arc Raiders' armour, as the novelty began to wear off and players became more keenly aware of how limited its content was alongside growing concerns about cheating and stream sniping. Unfortunately, despite some hard work from the team, the latter two points still remain contentious.

"We have very dedicated people playing the game," Grøndal adds. "We had some challenges around how much content there is in the game, how much progression there is in the game. We had some, but the players wanted more.

"We bet on trying to update it fast and giving players more things to do over time. That was our strategy, to try to meet those demands from players. The issue with that was the team just couldn’t keep pace with the players. The players grew frustrated, because some of the things we shipped were perhaps not as good or as meaningful as they were hoping. That was another awakening for us."

Embark has been very upfront about how its dev team errs on the smaller side for a live service game, which means it just couldn't keep pace with competitors like Call of Duty, Overwatch, or even Valorant, all of which have enough employees to keep the content mills constantly churning.

As live service games have become more common, each one is competing with others for the industry's gold dust: player attention. But Grøndal concedes that "this is the challenge with running a live service" and that Embark can't "beat anyone on quantity". Instead, the goal has always been to provide players with higher quality stuff that "has the Embark finesse to it."

The issue with quality over quantity is that players actually really like quantity. Many will say that they prefer for stuff to look good, but that's not really a live service game's draw, instead its draw is to provide something for players to do whenever they want. Players were promised a 10-year plan, and they haven't seen that manifest in Arc Raiders yet.

So what's the solution? A better anti-cheat would be a good start, but really, Arc Raiders just needs to find its footing and get back to a good live service cadence if it wants to bring players back. As for when this could happen, it seems like Embark is gearing up for something of a comeback in October with its upcoming Frozen Trails major update.

Grøndal has said it will bring a rank redesign, more arcs, updates to storage, and a new map as it tries "to answer a lot of those questions that have been posed to us from a mechanical and content perspective."

But until then, all players can do is wait and have some hope that better things are to come.

The Blood of Dawnwalker's out now—which means that players are getting introduced to its slightly more experimental take on RPG time. For the uninitiated, protagonist Coen has about 30 days and nights to save his family, the ticking clock of which is tracked in the UI. Completing quests, levelling up, and ticking off side-objectives costs "time segments".

The idea, then, is to make it so that players have to (quite literally) spend their time wisely. In practice, this system doesn't have much in the way of actual teeth, acting more as a means to dissuade you from going all completionist on the map. In my playthrough, I've currently killed two out of three of Brencis' lieutenants and I still have 20 comfortable days and nights to spare.

Which is probably why some folks have decided to opt out entirely. The "Better Story Timer" on Nexus Mods has options to triple the already-generous 30 day limit to 90 days, makes it so that perks and skills don't cost any time to obtain, and increases the number of segments in a day from eight to a whopping 32.

This essentially means Coen can take his sweet time, pun intended, moseying around the Vale Sangora without a care in the world while his family rot in a dungeon somewhere. The mod already has over 13,000 downloads, hinting that a lot of folks don't appreciate the ticking clock in their open world RPG.

On the one hand, I sort of get it. The Blood of Dawnwalker's time pressure is, given the game's current generosity, a bit of a fib that mostly just gets in the way of you exploring the map at your own pace. It does have some interesting implications, mind—and I do enjoy being steered towards day-only activities and night-only questlines to keep things interesting.

On the other hand, if you strip those same time mechanics from The Blood of Dawnwalker entirely, it just becomes… well, a pretty decent open-world RPG, but pretty unremarkable. Regardless of my critiques of the system, the time mechanic is one of the most noteworthy things the game has going for it.

Still, it's a controversial feature, and it's no wonder that the posts section of the mod already has around 300 comments in there, most of which can be summed up by "thank god".

Personally, I think Rebel Wolves would do well to include some optional modifiers in the menu—though not because I'm one of those people, actually, quite the opposite. I sort of wish I had less time to complete my tasks. I think having modifiers for relaxed or more tense playthroughs would be a great addition to the game.

Metaphor: ReFantazio got me hooked on the interesting tension that comes from having to manage time pressures, and I think The Blood of Dawnwalker would be a slightly more interesting game if it was meaner. As does Shaun Prescott in our The Blood of Dawnwalker review, who wrote: "In the end, Dawnwalker doesn't have the courage to allow this system to show its fangs. I feel like if it did, we’d have a modern classic on our hands."

I had a lot of one-hour appointments at Gamescom, but none of them had time escaping from me quite like my 60 minutes with Petit Planet. It's Hoyoverse's attempt to tap into the Animal Crossing demographic, and by that I mean the developer has essentially taken Nintendo's cosy life sim and shot it up into space.

I was honestly flabbergasted at how brazen the whole thing was. From the text boxes, to the character animations, to the little audio jingles that accompany them—near enough everything (bar its cosmic setting) screams Animal Crossing. But you know what? I kinda loved it.

Like I mentioned, Petit Planet transports the cosy vibes traditionally reserved for land and sea and instead puts them in galactic pastures. That doesn't mean I'm locked out of biomes found on terra firma, though. After making my human character and being greeted by a delightfully pink bunny, I'm given two planets to pick from—one that's more your traditional forest-y vibes, and one that's significantly more desert-like.

I picked the former, of course—though it looks like you might have even more starter options in the future—and set to work on building up a little planet of my own. I got to do all the traditional social sim stuff: catch fish and bugs, shake trees to dislodge their fruit (plums, in my case), and make friends with the furry cast who launched themselves onto the planet alongside me.

As I progress more tasks, Petit Planet's landscape unfurls before me. I don't arrive with a beach to fish at, but I get one shortly after catching enough bugs to pop into a little magical eco-tank. I suppose it serves a similar purpose to the museum, in that you can drop all your first-time catches in there, though there aren't big shiny exhibits to walk around.

Doing all of this fills a jar that I can use to water a tree and progress my planet further to get new areas like the beach, or get the capacity to invite new neighbours. My time with the demo saw farmer fox Yunguo take an interest in my new galactic home, where we planted crops together before being given the ability to pop her house right next to my own.

Unfortunately I didn't get to play around too much with decorating in Petit Planet, but unlike Animal Crossing I have full 360 degrees of reign over where I can place and rotate my own house and the houses of my space villagers. There'll undoubtedly be tons of cute decor pieces I can smatter across my planet, too, which I'm incredibly excited about.

The one thing I didn't manage to get a feel for is just how gacha'd out the wazoo Petit Planet is going to be. The game's pre-registration gifts at least signal some kind of currency palooza, and I assume it'll go down some sort of character banner route for potential villager candidates.

I know it's Hoyoverse's bread and butter, but I do hope the gacha side of things doesn't encroach on the relaxing life sim part too much. The two things feel like oil and water, you know?

I am willing to play a lot more of Petit Planet to find out, which shows just how badly the game got its hooks in me in such a short amount of time. It's potentially the closest thing we'll ever get to Animal Crossing on PC, after all—and that status alone makes it worth my time. And probably my money.

Once in a while, something comes along that recalibrates your expectations and also sort of ruins your enjoyment of what was once impressive. The Xgimi Titan Noir Max does just that. It makes mainstream projectors look positively pedestrian.

That's not to say it's perfect. There are a few niggles that take the triple-laser shine off this $5,000 beast, especially for gaming. But Xgimi's new big-screen beamer is an absolute stunner and deeply, deeply desirable.

The basics begin with triple-laser RGB technology that's good for an eye-popping 7,000 lumens. That's combined, inevitably, with DLP and pixel-shift tech to deliver full 4K resolution at 60 Hz, plus 1080p at up to 240 Hz. Running at the latter setting, Xgimi claims that the Titan Noir Max is good for just 1 ms of latency.

That makes it a pretty plausible proposition for online gaming and esports, at least in terms of response. The ergonomics of playing Counter-Strike on a projector might be pretty questionable, but in performance terms, well, the Titan Noir Max delivers the numbers.

If that's the broad brush of what the Xgimi Titan Noir Max offers, the details are arguably even tastier. Xgimi is using a new generation of DLP chip that enables improved native contrast. That's combined with a 50-laser light source and Dual Intelligent Iris technology to deliver 10,000:1 native contrast. Factor in other digital contrast enhancements and you're looking at 100,000:1 claimed dynamic contrast.

Then there are the optics. This thing has some very trick lens hardware. It's built around a 15-element lens system that's said to deliver consistent edge-to-edge focus. You also get very broad optical lens shift of 130% +/- vertical and 50% +/- horizontal. That gives this projector immense installation flexibility without the need to resort to digital keystone correction.

And you absolutely, positively don't want to use digital keystone correction on any projector. It does horrible things to pixel precision and in turn image sharpness. It's also worth noting that this is, essentially, a traditonal long-throw projector rather than one of those nifty short throw things that can sit right below your projection screen.

That said, it has 2x optical zoom and a throw ratio of between 0.98:1 and 2.0:1, so it's actually pretty configurable. It can create both a pretty large image at short distance and shrink the image from distance to fit your projection screen.

All of that is built into a beautifully lush looking alloy cube chassis that's presented in a nifty carry case and goes some way to justifying the hefty $5,999 MSRP. The real-world pricing of this projector is a bit more complicated than that on account of it being the subject of a Kickstarter campaign. But hold that thought, we'll come back to the value proposition later.

Connectivity includes three HDMI ports, LAN, both optical and 3.5mm audio, and Wi-Fi. Note that the latter doesn't indicate that this projector has built-in smart TV functionality. It does not. It's a pure projector and that's fine by us. Devices like Firesticks, after all, are so very affordable, if that's your use case.

Still, you do get a very slick remote control with, again, a lush metal chassis that lights up when you pick it up and allows access to the Xgimi's various menus and settings. And, boy, are there a lot of settings.

That's immediately obvious as soon as you fire the Titan Noir Max up. After choosing your language upon initial boot, the system goes through an automated setup and focus routine, powered by its triple-sensor TOF, which among other things detects the range to your projection surface and automatically focuses the image and optimises framing and geometry.

In testing, I found the auto-focus worked really well, but the rest of the automated setup is more problematic. For starters, the automated digital keystone is on by default. Especially in a computing context, that's a bad idea. The Titan also failed to frame the image correctly on my projection screen, albeit it's not absolutely clear to what extent the automated features are supposed to be capable of that.

Whatever, that's not really a negative given how excellent the manual lens shift functionality works. Lens shift, for the uninitiated, allows the image position to be adjusted without compromising geometry. In other words, it means you don't have to be as precise in terms of physically positioning this projector to achieve an image that lines up with your projection surface perfectly.

Not only does the Titan have a really wide range of adjustment, it also provides a grid pattern that makes it super easy to perfectly align the image. Slightly less user friendly is the rest of the settings menu. Part of the problem is that there are just so many options, whether that's features like so-called AI-enhanced contrast, iris aperture settings, colour spaces, and much, much more.

It's definitely a little bit more difficult than it should be to ensure whether features like digital keystone are enabled or not. To me it's also a bit of a worry that there are no controls on the chassis save for a power button. Lose that remote control and you really are in trouble. Though I suppose you could say the same of most TVs.

Anywho, this is a complex device and I've barely touched on a whole range of further features and functionality. There's the Harmon-Kardon audio, which produces pretty decent sound in a pinch when you don't have access to some speakers, for instance. Or the broad HDR support including Dolby Vision, the MediaTek image enhancing chip or even Xgimi's own X-Vision chip that powers the AI contrast capability, known as Dynamic Black Level Enhancement.

But let's get to what really matters, namely how good this projector actually looks. Xgimi has clearly configured Titan Noir Max projector to pop from the get go because the dynamic iris functionality is enabled by default and hence maximum brightness is essentially toggled when hooked up to a PC. And it is really, really eye poppingly bright.

In practice, the sustained brightness capability is actually 5,000 lumens. The 7,000 figure is something that can only be sustained for short periods. But, seriously people, 5,000 lumens is still awfully, awfully bright. Happily, the Titan Noir Max has such fantastic native contrast, that doesn't translate into washed out black tones.

The caveat here is that this thing is so bright, light reflecting back onto the screen from the general surroundings is an issue. If you have a dedicated black-out cinema room with low reflectivity walls, that's not a problem. But in a regular room with white walls, it's an issue.

Still, this is one heck of a bright projector and that means it works better in the daytime than dimmer alternatives, though I personally don't think any projector looks great when there's lots of ambient light around. At night, well, you can adjust the brightness to suit.

I won't get too bogged down into the movie watching experience. It's frankly stellar once you've got everything setup correctly, albeit I wasn't quite able to achieve a colour balance I was completely happy with, no matter what colour space or colour mode I chose.

And you do need to dig down into the settings to get a good result because there's far too much image processing on by default in the non-gaming modes. The MEMC (Motion Estimation, Motion Compensation) motion smoothing feature is on by default in most modes, and it looks like absolute crap.

For gaming, all that nonsense is mercifully disabled to achieve the lowest possible latency and, indeed, the very last word in colour calibration is likewise less critical. That said, most of the colour options while running in Game Mode are atrocious, even for gaming. After a bit of a panic, I eventually discovered that, for whatever reason, the only colour space in Game Mode that gives decent results is Rec.709.

That's a relief because you absolutely want to use Game Mode to game. There's noticeable latency in all the other modes, even the pared-back Filmaker Mode that supposedly disables all the image processing to "faithfully convey the film director's creative intent."

That initial caveat aside, gaming at 4K on the Xgimi Titan Noir Max is to die for. So many projectors look a bit weedy and washed out when playing games. Not this beast. It's so bright, the desert sun in Cyberpunk 2077 is actually kind of painful when you point your mouse at it.

The detail and precision thanks to the true 4K resolution is fantastic, too. Just to put this into context, a lot of digital cinema projectors are still 2K, so you're getting a far sharper image with this projector than you often do at the cinema. Of course, 4K support is pretty commonplace these days, so that's not unique to the projector by any means. But the high-quality optics make for an exceptionally sharp image thanks to the precision and consistency of the focus across the screen. It's pretty special.

At this point, so far so good. This is the best gaming experience I've had on a projector. But here come the caveats. First, the variable refresh rate support is problematic. Enabling VRR at 4K results in the image being downscaled to 1080p. The game itself is still running at 4K with all the GPU load that implies, and your PC will still be outputting at 4K. But the projector is downscaling the image. And that's pretty obvious. Long story short, you don't get true 4K with VRR enabled.

I assume this is related to the fact that, as with most 4K projectors, the Titan Noir Max uses a 1080p DLP chip to create a 1080p image that shifts the image four times per frame, very quickly, to achieve 4K. Doing that fast enough to make VRR viable at 4K is perhaps too much to ask, given the DLP chip is actually generating four different images for each rendered frame.

The 1080p modes are using the DLP chip at its native resolution, of course. So, there's no problem running VRR at 1080p 240 Hz. And, really, there's still decent image detail at 1080p. Like I said, a lot of commercial cinemas are still running 2K projectors today. Oh, and I found that there's relatively little visible rainbow effect in any mode, even without Xgimi's anti-RBE technology enabled.

All of which means it's hard to gauge the Xgimi Titan Noir Max as a gaming display. It has an MSRP of $5,999 which probably makes it irrelevant to nearly all gamers. It can currently be had for $4,999 and it was available to early adopters on Kickstarter for $2,999, though that early tranche of units is sold out. There are cheaper versions of the Titan Noir series available, too, starting from $3,999. But even that is a hill of money.

The things that the Titan Noir Max is really good at, aside from the sheer brightness, like achieving near perfect focus and geometry with absolute ease are certainly impressive. But are they worth paying thousands more for in a gaming context? I'm not so sure.

But, in all honesty, one of Xgimi's own cheaper projectors will almost certainly make more sense. The Xgimi Horizon 20, for instance, goes for $1,559, is a full 4K model with optical lens shift and 3,200 lumens and offers the same 240 Hz, 1 ms 1080p gaming mode. Indeed, the Horizon 20 is one of the cheapest 4K projectors currently available with lens shift and the projector I'd recommend to pretty much any mere mortal, even before seeing the new Titan Noir Max.

Money no object, then, the Xgimi Titan Noir Max is a stunning piece of engineering. It really is. But in the real world where money does actually matter, it's almost certainly overkill for gaming.

Nvidia has just announced that it intends to acquire Hugging Face, the biggest open platform dedicated to developing machine-learning applications. Considering Nvidia has been all-in on AI for the past few years—to the point that I barely remember the last time the company even mentioned gaming in an earnings call—it's hardly a surprising move.

What did encourage a sharp intake of breath from me though was the price of this purchase; Nvidia will buy Hugging Face for a total of $12,930,300,000. $11.9 billion of that will go to Hugging Face's investors, while employees that join Nvidia will be offered an ‌equity-based retention ⁠program of up to $1 billion, according to Reuters. But even though there's billions of dollars in the mix, that doesn't mean the walls are about to come down around Hugging Face.

"Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang writes, "Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face."

He adds that the platform will continue to support both open source and open weight AI models. This is something Huang demonstrably feels passionate about, as he dedicated his first ever X post to defending easy access to open AI models.

In today's announcement, Huang further elaborates, "Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch. They enable organizations to match the right model to the right job. That is how AI can advance safely, strengthen cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and reach factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses around the world.

"AI advances faster when people can build together."

Hugging Face was most recently in the news when a number of OpenAI's models breached an isolated test environment and hacked the development platform's internal network. OpenAI has since detailed how it's protecting itself from the kinds of attacks its own models carried out.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC last week that the company approached Jensen Huang about a deal a few weeks ago. He described Nvidia as a "perfect home". "During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility."

For those keen on an agentic, local AI future, this deal could well be good news; it is arguably the biggest consumer-facing resource for free downloads of local AI models as well as retrained and abliterated models. With Nvidia set to soon release its first RTX Spark laptops with entirely its own silicon inside—from CPU to GPU cores—its own focus is obviously on putting local AI in the hands of consumers as well as frontier AI in the hands of multi-billion dollar orgs. Keeping a platform such as Hugging Face rolling makes complete sense.

The nearly $13 billion deal is Nvidia's second largest to date. First place goes to the $20 billion Non-Exclusive Inference Technology Licensing Agreement with chipmaker Groq, though it looks like Nvidia's AI inference GPU still won't see the light of day this year. Nvidia's RTX Spark 'superchip', with purported RTX 5070-like performance, may arrive sooner rather than later. Our Andy rubbed his greasy mitts all over a host of RTX Spark laptops at Gamescom, though there's still little word on pricing. Here's hoping the RTX Spark laptops only make my eyes water in the best possible way when they go on sale in October 2026. But realistically, they ain't going to be cheap.

DLSS 5 is finally here. Well, its been officially released in one game, anyway, after modders got their hands on it last week and made the actual launch somewhat redundant. Still, I've been testing Nvidia's new AI image-enhancing tech in NBA 2K27, the latest hoop-shooting game in the long-running series, and I have bad news: even on a high-end RTX 5080 rig, it's seriously punishing when it comes to performance.

Which isn't a huge surprise, given that Nvidia itself estimated a 50-60% DLSS 5 performance hit in the briefings last week. Still, my early testing shows it can tank your frame rate considerably harder than that, even on a PC that costs well over $3,000 in 2026.

I threw a pre-release version of NBA 2K27 at one of our benchmarking rigs, an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 5080-equipped, 32 GB DDR5 behemoth. And while this particular PC can make mincemeat of the game's relatively lightweight hardware needs overall, turning on DLSS 5 can drop the average frame rate by up to 73% in certain scenarios.

It's capable of looking very pretty in this particular game, that's for sure. But my jaw has dropped several times during my testing, and not always for the reasons Nvidia may have hoped for. To the benchmarks, then.

DLSS 5: 1440p NBA 2K27 benchmarks

Given the RTX 5080 is Nvidia's second-fastest consumer graphics card, I had no qualms about turning up the settings to Ultra, including enabling ray tracing. I recorded my results during actual gameplay within NBA 2K27's quick match mode, making sure to play for long enough that cutaway shots to the player's celebrations and the crowd triggered several times.

It's worth mentioning, however, that given the lack of repeatability within this mode, these results are potentially more representative of the DLSS 5 average frame rate hit, rather than game performance overall.

DLSS 5 | RTX 5080 | 1440p gaming benchmarks

Results recorded during gameplay in NBA 2K27 at Ultra settings, ray tracing enabled, using an RTX 5080.

NBA 2K27 (Ultra preset)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Native

230

93

Native + DLSS 5

93

37

Quality upscaling + 2x FG

363

153

Quality upscaling + 2x FG + DLSS 5

168

75

0100200300400

NBA 2K27 (Ultra preset) Data

Product	Value
Native	230 Avg FPS, 93 1% Low FPS
Native + DLSS 5	93 Avg FPS, 37 1% Low FPS
Quality upscaling + 2x FG	363 Avg FPS, 153 1% Low FPS
Quality upscaling + 2x FG + DLSS 5	168 Avg FPS, 75 1% Low FPS

And my goodness, what a performance hit it is. The difference between the Native 1440p average frame rate and the average rate with DLSS enabled is a whole 137 frames. A 93 fps average still results in very smooth gameplay overall, but the drop to just 37 fps in terms of 1% lows is very troubling.

This is an RTX 5080 running at 1440p, after all. A 4K-capable graphics card that will currently cost you $1,550 thanks to the ongoing memory/component pricing crisis. And that figure is based on the cheapest we can find—I've seen them listed for $2,000+ in the past month or two.

Of course, Nvidia will tell you that upscaling and frame generation are here to save the day when it comes to smooth performance, and that proves to be the case. Still, watching a 363 fps average result plummet to 168 fps at the push of a DLSS 5 button is pretty jaw dropping.

Nvidia has confirmed that DLSS 5 performance improvements are coming in future, and by the looks of it, it's in desperate need of some. It's often very pretty at these settings, though, as I'll go into below. So... that's something, I guess?

DLSS 5: 4K NBA 2K27 benchmarks

There are no awards for guessing that, at 4K, the effect is even more pronounced. At Native resolution with no upscaling or frame gen assistance, the RTX 5080 spits out an admirable 183 fps average (still at Ultra with ray tracing enabled, no less), which duly plummets to 49 fps as soon as DLSS 5 is enabled.

That represents a staggering 73% decrease in average frames, and an instantly crunchy experience. Sure, 49 fps is perfectly playable, but with the knowledge that NBA 2K27 would be capable of so many more frames with the AI-enhanced pretties turned off, I'm not sure I could grin and bear it.

DLSS 5 | RTX 5080 | 4K gaming benchmarks

Results recorded during gameplay in NBA 2K27 at Ultra settings, ray tracing enabled, using an RTX 5080.

NBA 2K27 (Ultra preset)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Native

183

91

Native + DLSS 5

49

31

Quality upscaling + 2x FG

255

118

Quality upscaling + 2x FG + DLSS 5

92

53

075150225300

NBA 2K27 (Ultra preset) Data

Product	Value
Native	183 Avg FPS, 91 1% Low FPS
Native + DLSS 5	49 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS
Quality upscaling + 2x FG	255 Avg FPS, 118 1% Low FPS
Quality upscaling + 2x FG + DLSS 5	92 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS

What I would do, however, is turn upscaling and frame generation on to compensate. And here, the news is slightly better. A 92 fps average is more like it, with regular old DLSS set to Quality, and 2x frame gen enabled. I feel better already.

That was until I realised that, with DLSS 5 turned off, I'd be getting a 255 fps average at the same settings. That's a 163 fps drop with DLSS 5 enabled, for those counting. Which is a lot of frames to come tumbling out the bottom of your very expensive graphics card.

Given all of Nvidia's benchmarks are with a lower resolution DLSS setting and the full 6x Multi Frame Generation bean, on the one hand I expected DLSS 5 to actually need MFGto achieve smooth frame rates at all, or require Ultra Performance-level upscaling. So, the fact that I can achieve very playable frame rates with just 2x frame gen and upscaling set to Quality is still pretty impressive. But on the other, NBA 2K27 runs so well without DLSS 5 enhancement, the thought of slashing my frame rate by such a huge amount for some prettier, AI-assisted graphics stops me in my tracks. Speaking of which...

DLSS5: Image quality comparison

There's one thing I will say for DLSS 5: it looks pretty great in this game. I spent a good hour or two zipping around in the photo mode, marvelling at the visages of my ill-fated basketball team.

The photo mode, however, is where you'll see most of the benefits of Nvidia's new toy. In terms of actual gameplay, you'll spend most of your time in NBA 2K27 in a zoomed out perspective, cursing loudly at the fact you can't time a well-placed three-pointer for toffee.

Sure, there are cuts to player celebrations, slow motion replays, and half-time team talks. But it's when things are paused that you'll see most of the DLSS 5 difference—so that's exactly what I've done for the comparisons below.

NBA 2K27

A comparison of two screenshots in NBA 2K27 photo mode, one with DLSS 5 on, and one with DLSS 5 off.

DLSS 5 on

DLSS 5 off

My early concern about DLSS 5 was that it seemed to produce overblown, AI beauty filter-like imagery, which I personally find very ugly. However, as I pointed out in my DLSS 5 sneak peak, the implementation in this particular game is often much more tasteful.

The player above looks more realistic with DLSS 5 turned on. The highlights on the nose and forehead are shinier without looking completely blown out, which, combined with the more realistic shadowing on the facial features overall, creates a very pleasant image.

His beard looks a little more lifelike, as does his hair. And I'd pay special attention to his jersey, which has extra wrinkles in the fabric in the DLSS 5-ified image that give it a more 3D-like effect. Because you'll be paying attention to your team's ironing mishaps in your new basketball game, obviously.

NBA 2K27

A comparison of two screenshots in NBA 2K27, one with DLSS 5 turned on, and one with DLSS 5 turned off.

DLSS 5 on

DLSS 5 off

Switching over to two players together, I think this particular comparison shows off DLSS 5 at its best. Both of their faces look muted and poorly shaded in the non-DLSS 5 version, but swing the slider over and they suddenly come to life.

As your graphics card screams bloody murder, perhaps. But as much of a cynic as I am regarding the idea of AI "enhancement" of any sort, I can't deny that DLSS 5 in close up is capable of producing some lifelike human beings.

Once game developers have tweaked it for themselves, of course, and those settings sliders have been reined in from some of the horrors we saw in the earlier demo footage.

It's far from flawless, though. While some character models look noticeably more realistic, others get some heavy-handed AI treatment that isn't quite so seamless.

Above: NBA 2K27's photo mode, with DLSS 5 turned off to start, and then on and off again in sequence.

Take the footage above, for instance. While I would say there are some definite shading improvements once DLSS 5 is turned on, there's also a kind of overblown, over-contrasted effect to some of the facial features in this particular example that looks slightly off to my eyes.

NBA 2K27

Two screenshots showing the crowd in NBA 2K27, with DLSS 5 turned on and off.

DLSS 5 on

DLSS 5 off

And finally, here's a comparison between the crowds. You're going to need to fullscreen and zoom in on this one, but it's fairly representative of how you'll see the match attendees when you're actually playing the game. Aside from the odd camera cut, they're mostly there for background atmosphere.

And yes, the folks in the cheap seats get a miniature dose of DLSS 5 image enhancement, too. The effect here is very subtle, but it's probably most noticeable on the courtside commentator's face. Which will go past in a flash as you actually play, but hey—check out that ever-so-slightly more chiselled jawline.

So, is DLSS 5 actually worth turning on in this game? Well, I can't help but be impressed by the imagery (for the most part), and this relatively light-touch implementation adds a lot of character to individual members of your team. They're also noticeably sweatier, too, if that's your sort of thing.

But you're going to want plenty of frame rate headroom before you even think of touching the DLSS Neural Rendering checkbox, and that means running a very powerful rig—or cranking up the DLSS upscaling and frame generation to compensate. NBA 2K27 is a very fast-paced game, and the experience suffers quite badly when things get crunchy. You'll want smooth frames for this one, believe me—and if that means turning off DLSS 5, I say go for it.

Still, I can absolutely see why Nvidia picked this game for DLSS 5's first official outing. NBA 2K27 feels well optimised with the AI frippery turned off, and it's not the sort of thing that would otherwise be bothering most modern rigs.

But if my testing is any indication, DLSS 5 can look really good, but still be a massive drain on performance even in a properly optimised game. And I really question who among us will be prepared to make the frame rate trade off, even in a relatively lightweight game like this.

The real test will be in something properly demanding, and it's there where I think the wheels will come off. Better image and lighting quality is all very well, but for this sort of performance cost? I dread to think what it'll do to the already-addled frame rate of something like Borderlands 4, for example.

DLSS 5 is capable of looking much better than I expected, which is something of a relief. But when it tanks the frame rate this heavily, I can't help but feel that it's a technology designed for the next generation of graphics cards, and not the versions we're running today. Even the $1,500+ ones—and how many of us have the spare cash right now for another one of those?

I don't want to get anybody's hopes up, but with BlizzCon 2026 now just over a week away, it really is starting to look like something—possibly something big—is happening in the world of StarCraft.

The excitement began earlier this week when Korea's Chosun (Google translated, via WCCFTech) ran a story saying Nexon is close to finalizing a deal to develop a new game based on the StarCraft series. As Chosun noted, the series has been dormant since StarCraft Remastered in 2017; the last original StarCraft game, StarCraft 2, arrived all the way back in 2010. Despite that, the series remains hugely popular in Korea.

The StarCraft subreddit took some issues with the report: For one thing, Chosun suggested the new game would be StarCraft 3, rather than the StarCraft shooter Nexon is reportedly working on. There are also concerns that the report might be accurate, given CEO Junghun Lee's enthusiasm for generative AI and microtransactions. Still, the timing seemed right: BlizzCon 2026 runs September 12-13, which is now less than two weeks away.

That's how things remained until earlier today, when the StarCraft website started glitching, in the way that doesn't happen unless it's intentional: Images twitching, text flashing, all that sort of thing. The classic loss of signal right before something happens—that's probably not a coincidence, right?

It's a bit more conspiracy-coded, but the WoW subreddit has also noticed a rather peculiar gap in the BlizzCon main stage schedule—about an hour, early on the first day, that's unaccounted for. What might fit into that hour? Well, anything that takes 60 minutes or less, really, but the prevailing opinion seems to be StarCraft.

Whatever the situation, that gap is definitely there:

Our resident Blizzard pro Tyler Colp cast his wizened eye upon the BlizzCon floor map and saw nothing carved out for StarCraft, so even if a new game is announced, it likely won't be playable—although it's possible Blizzard is camouflaging a demo area in the Well of Eternity or whatever.

The rumored Nexon shooter isn't the only StarCraft spinoff game that may be in the works: Blizzard was reportedly "incubating" a StarCraft shooter of its own in 2024, under the guidance of former Far Cry director Dan Hay. It doesn't strike me as especially likely that two StarCraft shooters are in development simultaneously, but Hay's LinkedIn indicates that he's still a Blizzard, so at the very least it doesn't appear that he's found a new home for himself and his project at Nexon.

Adding to that, earlier this year Blizzard was looking to hire a "lead designer of innovation" for an open world shooter using Unreal Engine, the studio recently dropped a major patch for StarCraft 2, and most recently, it revealed that this year's BlizzCon rewards will include a 15-day co-op XP boost for Commander progression in StarCraft 2. That's pretty small, sure, but as Tyler said, this is the kind of stuff that gets fans wound up real good.

Given all the shooter hints, it doesn't seem very likely to me that a StarCraft 3 RTS will be the big announcement—if there is in fact a big announcement at all. A shooter would also seem to comport with Microsoft's post-Phil Spencer strategy of focusing on games with the potential to go over big with mass audiences. Anything's possible, and frankly I think actual StarCraft 3 would provide a much more immediate boost to Microsoft's gamer cred than an all-new shooter. But is Microsoft really going to take a risk on a niche genre when it's cancelling big survival games and MMOs? I suspect not.

One way or another, we'll find out soon enough—BlizzCon opening ceremonies kick off at 10:30 am PT/1:30 pm ET on September 12. I've reached out to Blizzard and Nexon for comment and if anyone spills the beans, I'll let you know.

As Microsoft continues to flail for a remedy to the reputational damage it's incurred as a result of its repeated mass layoffs, bungled industry consolidation strategies, and partnership with Israeli surveillance agencies, its gaming division is returning to a favorite page from its playbook in recent years: Hiking service costs.

Today, Xbox announced that it will implement a monthly cap on Xbox Cloud Gaming hours for Game Pass subscribers. Previously, eligible Game Pass users could use the game streaming service without a time limit; Beginning in November, however, they'll need to purchase additional cloud playtime through the Xbox Store once they expend their allotted cloud gaming hours.

The Cloud Gaming hourly limits will be determined by Game Pass subscription tier:

• Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours
• Game Pass Premium: 10 hours
• Game Pass Essential: 5 hours

Xbox acknowledged that the rollout of a monthly time limit on cloud gaming hours is "a meaningful change, particularly for players who regularly spend more time gaming through the cloud." But the company offered an estimate of the policy change's impact that suggests most Game Pass subscribers already aren't using cloud gaming much.

"We expect this upcoming change to impact 4% of Game Pass subscribers," Xbox said.

While it'll be rolling out the monthly cloud gaming cap for Game Pass subscribers, Microsoft will also be opening the service for players without Game Pass in November. Any users will be able to stream eligible games to supported devices after purchasing cloud gaming playtime through the Xbox Store.

Xbox didn't confirm how much cloud playtime will cost, but said it will provide "more information about pricing, purchasing additional hours, eligible games, market availability, and how players can check their remaining time" in November.

The changes to cloud gaming access, Xbox says, are a cost saving measure.

"We’re introducing this model because the cost of providing cloud gaming grows as more people use it and play for longer," Xbox said. "Moving to monthly limits allows us to keep offering the service while continuing to invest in its reliability and performance. We understand that for some players the practical result is a higher cost."

Evidently, the company doesn't expect the ad-supported game streaming it began testing last month will sufficiently move the needle on that front. And that needle's got a lot of moving to do: In July, Microsoft's annual financial filings confirmed that Xbox revenue had fallen by $1.7 billion over the last year.

Whether "the practical result" of a higher cost on cloud streaming will actually deliver needed revenue gains for Xbox, however, is unclear. In June, new Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball said the company lost "millions" of Game Pass subscribers after the service's 2025 price hike.

In the meantime, Xbox says it will "listen closely to player feedback before and after the change takes effect and share any adjustments we make."