World of Warcraft: Forever's beta is now closed, meaning I can no longer appreciate the pretty god rays in Ashenvale. To soothe this yawning ache in my soul, however, Blizzard has released a fun little stats tracker to tide me over with the knowledge that I apparently jump in MMOs way more than I thought I did.

If you played the beta and sign in, you'll be given a full list of fun little stats including your hours played, where you spent the most time, what killed you the most and, crucially, how often you jumped.

I jumped 7,738 times. And considering I played the beta for 57 hours (putting me in the 69th percentile—nice), that means I averaged around 135 jumps an hour, which is… honestly a lot more than I thought I'd jumped. Now of course, jumping is a time-honoured tradition. Even in a game with a /wave emote, simply jumping around someone to acknowledge that you see them is a far more efficient means of communication.

It also makes you go faster when you're running somewhere. This is absolutely correct and not at all unsubstantiated, don't look it up.

The enemy that killed me the most was the Silithid Swarmer in the southern barrens, which I'm going to chalk down to those bastards being a touch overtuned rather than any skill failing on my part (I do not know why the minions it summons have so much health). I'm also heartbroken to find out that I spent the lion's share of my time in The Barrens, presumably killing lions. If you know anything about the absurdity (and sometimes obscenity) that takes place in Barrens Chat, you'll know why this news upsets me.

Anyway, I'll be able to jump a lot more when Forever goes live come November 4, where I'll be able to relive the experience of fighting 900 other players for a cactus apple on launch day once more. Though if my uncertainties about how its endgame's gonna shake out are true, I'll be thankful for the slower pace.

I think it's obvious and uncontroversial to say that the automobile is a tool of capital to subjugate the worker, to atomise them in their locomoting coffins and alienate them from their fellow human beings. It is bourgeois ideology made manifest: an expensive fantasy that you are separate from, free of, and superior to society.

I'm not just saying this because I'm 33 years old and have no driving licence. That's actually very radical and, dare I say it, sexy of me.

I am considering these weighty matters because of Car Park Capital, a recently early-accessed management sim and citybuilder that tasks you with putting an end to those familiar old plagues which never rest from menacing society: walkability, green spaces, and public transport. You are the lone force standing against urban comfort and livability, and your weapon is an ocean of asphalt.

It's satire, yes, right down to the little anthropomorphic steering wheel who lives in the corner of your screen and implores you to flatten, pave, and homogenise the Earth. But it's also bloody good—an almost perfect aesthetic recreation of hallowed sims of yore: games like Theme Park, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and the like. It's transportive—which I suppose is appropriate—moving you back to the blocky polygonal worlds and sprite-based punters of a simpler, more '90s era.

But it does not rest on its laurels. It's rather fun to dirty your hands in the business of buying up swathes of useful public land—filled with dense housing, public transport infrastructure, and other assorted vectors of communism—and bulldoze the hell out of it. Get that stuff outta here! We've got baking black blocks to array in neat, featureless rows.

In your remit as god-king sans portfolio, you're also responsible for things like crime and punishment and the construction of a suburban sprawl. This is great news. As you annihilate downtown apartment blocks (literally buying up their land, evicting their tenants, and bulldozing the buildings) the rubes you've kicked out need somewhere else to go. You have just the place: utterly unsustainable suburbs with zero transport links, where cars are as vital as air.

It's the perfect scam: as you convert more of the world into car parks, the demand for car parks increases, and anyone you can't more-or-less deport into car-dependence you can target with literal propaganda—billboards, loudspeaker-equipped vans, that kind of thing. In the event of public objection to your onslaught (which can happen—populations are prone to get restive as you hollow out their infrastructure right under them), simply deploy your own cops. It's the American dream come to life in a very good game you will feel very bad for succeeding at.

Phantom Blade Zero, the upcoming action RPG from Chinese studio S-Game, is looking mighty impressive, and the Unreal Engine 5 game even has fairly modest system requirements too. Yet, according to the latest update from the devs, you will need quite a lot of room on your SSD if you plan on playing it.

Taking to its X account, Phantom Blade Zero's developer gave some information before the launch date, October 28. The studio clarifies the game is a whopping 145 GB once installed, and you will need "at least 300 GB of free disk space for the pre-load process."

That is a hefty install size, and a hefty amount of temporary space to keep free for the preload decompression, too. The studio also clarifies you need an SSD to play the game, and instructs users to download the latest graphics drivers ahead of the big day. The pre-load process starts on October 26.

The other system requirements aren't too bad, with an Intel Core i7 8700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 or AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT needed to run the game on Minimum settings.

Minimum in this case, however, means getting 30 fps at 1080p resolution, presumably on the lowest graphical settings with upscaling enabled. We don't yet know what kind of upscaling is being used for this requirement.

To play the game at its recommended settings (1440p at 60 fps), you will need an Intel Core i5 10600K or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT.

These specs don't seem too bad for an Unreal Engine 5 game, though we don't know exactly which graphical settings or upscaling settings are being used to get this figure.

Still, for many, the biggest problem will be that monstrous preload and install size. I know I personally don't have a single game on my SSD as big as Phantom Blade Zero, and I'd want to make some room before the big day. 145 GB could fit around 2,400 copies of Balatro, so I've just got to hope it's worth it.

The Golden Joystick Awards' Ultimate Game of the Year voting is now open—celebrating its 44th consecutive year, the votes will remain open until 8 pm ET / 12 am GMT, October 30. It's a stacked roster of nominations this year—with some of our own favourites here at PC Gamer listed to take the crown.

Here's an official list of the nominations:

• 007 First Light
• Big Walk
• CONTROL Resonant
• Crimson Desert
• Dispatch
• Forza Horizon 6
• Phantom Blade: Zero
• Pokémon Pokopia
• PRAGMATA
• Resident Evil Requiem
• STAR WARS: Galactic Racer
• The Blood of Dawnwalker

Speaking personally, it's a tough one for me to pick—Crimson Desert is maybe the most technically impressive in terms of scope, releasing with not only a billion systems but also receiving massive updates over the course of the year. So many, in fact, I'm sort of wondering when anyone else at Pearl Abyss is gonna take a break.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer has devoured hours of my time, and I've been playing it so much I've developed a new callus on my thumb, whereas Dispatch was a short-but-sweet romp and one of my favourite superhero stories in recent memory.

The awards will be hosted by Alix WIlton Regan, the new voice of Lara Croft (and also the female protagonists in Veilguard and Inquisition), as well as a bevy of special guest appearances.

Regan says: "We’re celebrating the greatest games of the past 12 months—and, more importantly, the incredibly talented teams who made them happen. The people who put in thousands of hours creating virtual worlds for us to get hopelessly lost in. Get ready for an evening of special guests, spectacular games and plenty of silly jokes."

You can go ahead and cast your vote now at goldenjoysticks.com—the show itself'll be debuting on all major streaming platforms (YouTube, Twitch and X) on Wednesday, November 11, but you've only got until October 30 to get your votes in.

Consumer RTX 5090 stock in the US (and many other countries) seems to be virtually non-existent at the moment, despite Nvidia's claims that production is still ongoing. So, what's happening to all those brand new consumer cards?

A leaked video reportedly taken from inside a Chinese factory may have the answer. Posted by HKEPC on X, the footage shows what appears to be a huge number of consumer RTX 5090 cards being dismantled en masse for AI server conversion (via Tom's Hardware).

Workers are shown dismantling the GPUs, removing their three-fan coolers and heatsinks, and stacking the PCBs for conversion to dual-slot cooler configurations suitable for AI server racks. The scale of the operation looks truly vast, with what looks to be hundreds, possibly thousands, of GPUs getting the chop shop treatment.

According to HKEPC, the GPU and VRAM are desoldered and transplanted to a separate PCB ready for cooler transplant. Once converted into an AI server-suitable form factor, the GPUs are then tested on vast arrays of benchmarking rigs, ready to begin their new lives as AI workhorses rather than consumer graphics crunchers.

The horror, the horror, etc. These "grey market" facilities are said to be scattered throughout the country, despite the RTX 5090 not officially being available for sale in China. Nevertheless, this facility looks to be stuffed full of the highly prized GPUs, with skilled technicians pulling them apart for repurposing.

Reports of this sort of activity are nothing new, but this footage showing the scale of a single operation is still unsettling. If facilities like this are hoovering up GPUs and converting them at this sort of rate, it's perhaps no surprise that RTX 5090 consumer cards have become so difficult to find elsewhere.

We've stopped tracking the GPU in recent months on our GPU price watch page, as the only US listings we can find are from third-party sellers for vastly inflated prices. A gaming GPU for $8,000+ simply makes no sense at all, even if it happens to be Nvidia's top-level card for this generation.

And to see them being converted for, shock horror, AI crunching instead of good old gaming purposes? Well, chalk up another way AI server demand is making 2026 a year to forget for consumer PC hardware.

As AI continues to get smarter, the schemes using it have often become more successful. However, one South Korean cyberhacking gang, reportedly led by a self-taught hacker using AI tools, doesn't seem to have made off with a king's ransom.

Despite allegedly obtaining 8.2 million records and demanding 360,000,000 Won (around $271.77K) from victims, the gang is said to have ended up receiving 300,000 Won (around $210). This is according to Yonhap News Agency, Seoul Economic Daily, and The Chosun Daily, which corroborate reports.

Altogether, the gang reportedly accessed files from over 90 firms, but 60 successful hits came from hacks using AI tools (a mixture of AI coding and an autonomous penetration testing system). The stolen data is said to have included customer information like names, registration numbers, phone numbers, and addresses.

The cyberhacking gang is also said to have sent threatening emails to those affected, saying, "If the data breach becomes public, the company’s reputation will be damaged, and government fines may be imposed." Payment info was not caught up in these breaches, and South Korean police say stolen data has not yet made it onto the dark web.

As noted by The Chosun Daily, police got to the ring fast, which might explain why only one small business appears to have paid the ransom fee. Police received a complaint from an affected company in June of this year, but the investigation officially started in August, leading to the arrest of seven individuals between July and September, including the 32-year-old alleged ringleader.

Reportedly, the ringleader majored in arts and physical education with no IT background, but learned about hacking via YouTube videos and other unnamed sources. The police believe the individuals worked on simulated hacking at a security firm between 2019 and 2022.

38 of the affected firms reportedly suffered losses, though no total monetary figure has been declared for how big those losses might be.

Still, the fact that a gang led by someone with little hacking experience managed to use AI tools to get access to secure data is certainly a worrying use case for the budding technology. And it's not the first time we've seen AI tools used in such a way. At the start of the year, Google published a list of ways AI is being used by threat actors to more efficiently hack businesses and individuals.

As AI continues to advance, this sort of activity appears to be becoming increasingly common. Although if the gains are sometimes as small as those reported here, perhaps it's an indication that cybercrime isn't always as lucrative as some might hope.

Valve's mandatory AI disclosures are once again at the centre of the discourse, mostly thanks to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who has long been vocally against them. The debate has been reheated in the same month Epic Games proudly announced it will pivot to "AI first" development on its forthcoming Star Wars and Marvel crossover. Then it announced an AI game jam, before walking back its requirement for AI to be used.

But the true battleground has been on Elon Musk's X, where Sweeney's refocused his reticule on Steam. One of his most repeated notions this time around is that forcing developers to disclose AI use is inherently political.

"Forcing developers to write a political statement to be used against them by the hate mob they're [Valve is] helping organize is abhorrent," he wrote on October 24 in response to some AI loving guy who works at an AI company.

Later, to another user: "These AI statements are just as partisan as mandatory political essays or forcing developers to list their voting history to drive cancel campaigns and public struggle sessions."

And then: "There is a real economic cost to Valve’s foray into forced political disclosures. Besides taking 30%, they’re also taking a potentially even larger fraction of developers’ revenue and livelihood by undermining their business with these AI hate campaigns."

(Later, when a user wrote this is a "big opening for Epic if Valve doesn't figure this out", Sweeney replied "Yep!")

On October 25: "They [Valve] are burning down the businesses of good developers to enforce their politics. A year from now they’ll all be using AI, games will be better and made faster, and they’ll pretend their hate mob posting the death threats wasn’t wrong but merely misunderstood."

In Valve's defence—and I rise in Valve's defence trepidatiously—the AI disclosure was initially imposed due to a seeming uncertainty with how use of this "legally murky" technology was unfolding in the game dev space. "Today's changes are the result of us improving our understanding of the landscape and risks in this space, as well as talking to game developers using AI, and those building AI tools," Valve wrote at the time. "This will allow us to be much more open to releasing games using AI technology on Steam."

"We'll continue to learn from the games being submitted to Steam, and the legal progress around AI, and will revisit this decision when necessary."

Why didn't Epic Games Store do the same? I'm not taking a swipe at EGS here, easy as it may be, but Epic Games' shopfront publishes a tiny slither of what Valve's does. In 2024, 1,100 games were released on EGS. Steam's figure was 18,433. Given that volume and the "legally murky" environment, the AI disclosure starts to look a whole lot more sensible.

Leaving aside whether insisting on AI disclosures in 2026 is inherently political—and I'm not denying it is, if inadvertently—Sweeney's posts on X do labour to imply that Valve is an anti-AI company taking a steadfast anti-AI stance, which, manifestly, it is not. Gabe Newell himself was an enthusiastic supporter of OpenAI in its infancy, donating $20 million to the then nonprofit enterprise. His most recent public comments on AI are not unlike those made by very many other enthusiastic tech billionaires, albeit less hyperbolic. That Valve will refresh its AI disclosure requirement in the medium to long term future seems inevitable to me.

But I do wonder what Sweeney dislikes more: anti-AI sentiment, or Steam?

It's an unusual time for him to revive this debate with such vigor. We are living through peak slop. The majority of games that release on Steam every week are irredeemable. The latest Claude model is facilitating the rapid thieving of game concepts and even code. Graphical assets, in-game music, in-game voices, generated using AI, immediately signal their provenance and are ugly as hell.

I don't doubt AI use in game dev will increase, but it will probably need to tend sharply away from the sensorial. Optimistically, most serious developers will realise that the vast majority of us don't want to see or hear that shit. I suspect that for most people, anti-AI sentiment, at least where games are concerned, isn't principled: it's a visceral emotional response.

Top Steam games by revenue (October 13 - 20)

Modern Warfare 4's official release date was October 23: its placement here is thanks to a pre-order incentive granting early access to the campaign. It's not a bad result, obviously, but I'm surprised it didn't topple PUBG. COD games do seem more spiritually at home on console, I guess.

Enshrouded hit 1.0 after a stint in early access, hence its reappearance here. Of particular note is something not shown in the above list: Over the Hill, the chillaxed offroading sim by the creators of Art of Rally, hit number 11 on the revenue charts for this period. That's a damn good result, and well deserved.

To provide a little bit more (slightly random) context: the new Castlevania game, which released on the same day as Over the Hill, came in at number 15. It's surprising that an offroading game would outperform a new entry in one of the medium's most beloved series. But then: the Snowrunner and Mudrunner games are extremely popular.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

As reported by IGN, veteran actors Jennifer Hale and Mark Meer, who voiced the female and male Commanders Shepard in Mass Effect, respectively, directly addressed fans of the series in an October 21 Instagram Live. The two reflected on BioWare, and commiserated over its tragic fate. Here are some highlights from each I pulled from the stream:

Both actors' reactions strike me as so characteristic of their respective backgrounds: Hale is one of the voices of videogames (not to diminish Meer's own extensive resume). She jumped to BioWare's place in the industry and its current crisis. Meer, a standby of the Edmonton theater and improv scene, fixated on the closure's effects on this city he clearly loves.

Both are 100% correct about the collective joy and meaning people found in BioWare's work. That's something private equity can't take from us⁠—at least not with current technology.

As for Hale's optimism regarding the rights and potential future of the franchise, well, I Want To Believe. Not to obnoxiously needle what seemed like an offhand idea, but I don't think Kickstarter's walking through that door. Aside from Double Fine's Broken Age and the utterly baffling case of Star Citizen, many gaming crowdfunding successes⁠—like Pillars of Eternity and Wasteland 2⁠—still required further, traditional investment to go gold. BioWare and/or its IP would be orders of magnitude more expensive.

There's also precedent to look back on: EA has not done anything with Ultima in over 20 years. Many people don't realize this series was foundational to the development of both Japanese and Western-style RPGs, as EA's poor stewardship has allowed it to almost completely fade from our collective memory.

But I think we're all still waiting on a hero, a man on horseback, and the only riders with deep enough pockets to intervene here are billionaires, other companies on the scale of EA, or the state. With other publicly-traded companies, you'd risk replicating what BioWare went through under EA. I would love it if the Canadian government stepped in, nationalized BioWare, what have you, but it feels like a pipe dream.

The only semi-plausible happy ending I can picture looks like what happened to The Onion: A benevolent/eccentric super-rich guy steps in to save the day with little concern for profitability. Does anyone know one who enjoys RPGs (or immersive sims, for that matter)?

You'll never play every game. In fact, most people won't play most games—plenty of games release on Steam to approximately 0 user reviews, and last year, more than half of the 19,000 games that came out had fewer than 10. But that doesn't mean indies and anything else outside of the biggest blockbusters are all sent out to die. So far in 2026, all-original indies have been making waves.

That insight comes courtesy of Sensor Tower (via GamesIndustry.biz), which recently published an industry analysis report sharing some trends among the year's breakout hits. For reference, a breakout is defined in the study as a game which sold at least 500,000 units in its first 30 days. While ultimately based on estimates as not all publishers release sales numbers, the report is full of interesting tidbits.

The most noteworthy findings in the report are thus: there were 76 breakouts between September 2025 and August 2026, up from the previous year's 55. Indie breakouts shot up from 13 to 33, making up 43% of the pack, and 35 of the breakouts were non-sequels—around 53%. 27 of those were made by indie studios. Nine of the indie breakouts were friendslop hits like Meccha Chameleon and RV There Yet?, while 18 were debuts in other genres, such as Escape From Duckov and Megabonk.

Triple-A blockbusters have not really budged, according to the report. Last year they had 27 breakouts, this year they had 28 (notably, due to the methodology used, some huge games are excluded from this report: no free-to-play games like Marvel Rivals are included, and Call of Duty isn't accounted for.) But this does suggest a strong showing for cheap, often low-spec indies with novel ideas and multiplayer, and if you're longing for something new amidst all the proximity voice chat, you'll be happy to hear that both non-sequels and non-friendslop are making up a sizable portion of the year's hits.

Last week, the other shoe dropped for legendary RPG studio BioWare: shortly after EA's acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the gaming giant shut down BioWare and canceled Mass Effect 5.

Fans have spent the intervening days combing through the detritus of the next game in the series' leaked remains, and some have even signed a change.org petition to save the series. Right now, that #SaveMassEffect petition has hit over 180,000 verified signatures.

Notably it does not call for EA to walk back its decision to shut down BioWare. Instead, it's about keeping the Mass Effect series going: "We are urgently petitioning EA to take decisive action by committing to the continued development of Mass Effect," Joe Smith's plea reads. "Alternatively, EA could consider licensing the Mass Effect intellectual property to another studio that shares the passion and vision to keep it alive and allow it to flourish anew."

Of course, EA is not beholden to the demands of a digital petition—the chances that this will inspire a revolution of the heart throughout the industry's C-suites are not high. One could argue that, if the publisher held the legacy of Mass Effect or, indeed, the computer RPG itself as a priority, it would not have shut down BioWare in the first place. But this petition has proven a lightning rod of enthusiasm for fans of the series, who are sharing their memories of the games along with their signatures.

"You’re gonna have to pry Garrus from my cold dead hands," wrote Savannah. Another from Joe reads, "My wife and I absolutely love the Mass Effect series. We’ve had so many good times together sharing Commander Shepard's story over the years. It really devastated both of us when we heard that BioWare is done and, in turn, Mass Effect 5 wasn’t going to happen." Austin wrote: "The trilogy and even silly Andromeda has made a permanent impact on my life. I’ve been playing for 13 years."

While it's hard to imagine EA doing a 180 on this, it's also hard to imagine Mass Effect staying down for good (even if that might be where we're headed). Maybe Canada's New Democratic Party leader Avi Lewis has the right idea, and BioWare should be publicly funded for the collective good. Either way, the immediate, broader future for games made under the EA banner looks a mite grim.

With the closure of RPG standby BioWare, we've been consulting the PC Gamer rolodex and reaching out to developers for their thoughts and reflections on the legendary studio. Lead SEO editor Lauren Morton spoke to 16 devs who joined this industry because of BioWare games.

I was happy to hear back from Christoffer Bodegård, developer of our current RPG of the year frontrunner, Esoteric Ebb, on what BioWare meant to him.

Despite my experience with League of Legends (the videogame) being incredibly minimal, I've spent years in admiration and awe at League of Legends (the music). Riot has found a real knack for taking its champs and turning them into bona fide popstars, rockstars, and hip-hop stars—bringing in talented and well-established artists across the globe and carving out a space in the mainstream music world with certified bangers fronted by fictional characters.

Some might argue (it's me, I'm some) that Riot Music found the height of its success towards the end of the 2010s with the likes of K-pop girl group K/DA's Pop/Stars and hip-hop group True Damage and their song Giants. The former, in particular, made waves when it released—it topped charts and led to K/DA becoming the first K-pop girl group to be certified platinum. That's not to say it hasn't done anything good since, mind, as 2023 saw Riot convert six of its champs into the boyband Heartsteel, with a distinctly cheeky vibe.

It makes it even more surprising, then, that Riot Music has barely done a thing with any group in the years since. K/DA returned in 2020 with a new look and new EP—which was a banger, by the way—but True Damage and Heartsteel were one-hit wonders, and K/DA has lain dormant for the last six years.

Until now, that is. Over the last couple months, as League of Legends ramps up for its annual Worlds finals, it's been bringing them back from the dead. Heartsteel was the first to make a comeback with the significantly softer Live My Life, and it was… fine. Certainly not my favourite, and the kind of vibe shift I hadn't quite expected from its previous bad-boy persona.

Next came True Damage with Know My Name. It's probably the group that feels closest to its old tone, though I'm sincerely missing Keke Palmer's vocals this time around. The thing that made me more sad with this group's return is its music video—listen, I know Faker is a big deal. But the thing I love with these groups are the champs it puts forward. Having an entire music video dedicated to T1 with barely a glimpse of the champs who serve as a mascot for the song defeats the point of these fictional groups in the first place, at least for me.

But it feels like Riot was saving up all its hype (and perhaps budget) for the return of K/DA. It is still wild to me that the developer has sat on one of the biggest mainstream successes it's seen—I literally only played League of Legends a few months ago, while I've owned the Secretlab K/DA chair for over five years, for example—but the wait has truly been worth it.

It feels like someone at Riot Music really understands what makes K-pop as moreish as it is, because new single Firestarter has been on non-stop repeat for me since it came out. It also brought Fortiche on board for the music video—that's the studio behind both Arcane's animation and the original Pop/Stars MV—for a real full-budget experience.

K/DA is also the only one of the three to get more than one song out of its revival. The group has a four-song EP that just landed, one which grew on me massively over the course of, erm, listening to it on repeat for six hours straight. But it's one that boasts immense production value, as well as the benefit of having K-pop superstars Soyeon and Miyeon from I-dle returning and giving K/DA that much-needed familiar sound.

I think in a battle of the League of Legends bands, K/DA was always going to emerge victorious. It's the one that broke MOBA containment, after all. But with the group sharing the joint stage alongside True Damage during the Worlds finals in New York next month, it's clear Riot has its favourite. And can I blame them? Absolutely not, because K/DA is my favourite too.

Almost a year ago now, Team 4 debuted a new kind of Overwatch, and as part of the huge spotlight we learned that the live service FPS would undergo a new cadence with yearly themes comprising several seasons. Five new heroes were also added straight away; Mizuki, Emre, Anran, Domina, and of course Jetpack Cat.

Ahead of being added to the game, Overwatch's community was overjoyed to see Jetpack Cat, an adorable little ginger kitty in a flying mech—what's not to love? But sentiment quickly shifted after she took to the battlefield. Jetpack Cat broke the game with her new Apache helicopter meta which saw her haul Bastion high into the air so he could gun down the entire enemy team while in turret mode, it was truly horrific.

Who could've predicted that the adorable little cat would cause so much havoc? Well Team 4 had an inkling while Jetpack Cat was in the testing phase. "Internally we were like, 'oh, that's a little scary'," Associate Game Director Alec Dawson tells me. "We were play testing [Jetpack Cat and Bastion] a little bit. I think at one point it was also Jetpack Cat, Bastion, and Mercy. The full trio. It's like an even scarier helicopter."

This Jetpack Cat meta became so strong that it dominated OWCS from the get go. I haven't seen a new hero utilised so heavily and quickly in Overwatch's esports scene for a long time, so it brought home just how busted this team-up was.

Jetpack Cat would eventually undergo some reworks, for example, there was a nerf to how quickly she can move while carrying another hero. It helped to even the odds a little, but she can still be very frustrating and a hard hero to deal with. But the choice to leave Jetpack Cat initially un-nerfed was a deliberate decision according to Dawson:

"We want to make sure we put some of those moments in front of players. Allow them to experience a little bit of that crazy stuff before we come in and try to make sure it's in line, right? It's really that fine line of not taking away all the fun, not diluting it, not trying to take away some of the extremes, and seeing how it actually plays out. Because those are the moments that are going to be really exciting for players, those are going to be the moments that they remember in Overwatch, and that's important not to whittle away too early."

I have always been one of those pro-Dark Souls 2 revisionists, but man, they really chafe your hams on this one. Iron Keep, Shrine of Amana, Dragon Shrine: Mention these levels to even the most hardened Souls veteran, and they're liable to break into a cold sweat, flashing back to waves of frustrating, overlapping enemies rushing them down to ruin their day. That's not to mention the co-op first DLC zones that mercilessly brutalize the solo player.

FromSoft is a longtime co-op innovator, but its focus has always been limited, diegetic systems meant to supplement solo play, not replace it. Enter legend modder Yui, whose Seamless Co-op series removes the speed bumps of FromSoft co-op, introducing shared story progress and a siloed system of servers and saves to protect your vanilla game progress from anticheat scrutiny.

Even though Dark Souls 2 is rapidly approaching its 13th birthday, it is the most recent game to receive the Seamless Co-op treatment. Its mechanical weirdness and lower popularity compared to other entries may help explain why it's gone last. As a longtime fan of this strange, prickly game, I'm delighted to have found a new favorite way to play it⁠—one with way less trial and error, and way more laughs.

I reunited with PCG contributor Tyler Colp and senior guides writer Sean Martin for this adventure. Together, our ka-tet burrowed its way to the maximum Depth Five difficulty of FromSoft's tied-for-most-frustrating game, Elden Ring Nightreign. By comparison, Dark Souls 2 in co-op has been a cakewalk, and I'm not complaining.

Take that Iron Keep area I mentioned: Its first zone puts you through the ringer, a gauntlet of lightning-quick samurai wannabes who swarm you on non-OSHA-compliant catwalks over a lake of lava. Your reward for getting through them? The Smelter Demon, a sphincter-faced lava golem whose most powerful trick is having a trailing, invisible hurtbox behind his every sword swing.

Even though we suffered a few deaths on the way, it never felt frustrating. Part of that is due to your progress not resetting if one player dies. Unless you're fighting a boss or a PvP invader, you just respawn back at the bonfire and can rejoin your fellows. During the two states of exception, you can spectate your still-living squadmates. If everybody dies under any circumstance, it's classic Dark Souls respawn rules.

The Alonne Poseur gauntlet (they're just nerds cosplaying my GOAT, Sir Alonne) became an easygoing war of attrition, as wars of attrition so often are. It's worthwhile to experience Dark Souls 2 "as intended" at least once, but if you've bounced off in the past or want to revisit it, I can't recommend Seamless co-op enough.

Goth WHAT?

One surprise boon has been a lively PvP scene: You can still get invaded even when undead in Seamless Co-op, and it's apparent that a stay-behind network of Dark Souls 2 PvP sickos has been activated, dusting off their Ice Rapiers and Chaos Blades for one last dance.

As in the base game, invasions make for an interesting complication to regular gameplay that I'm always happy to confront, and I really appreciate that Yui's mods make invasions more commonplace than in the vanilla experience. FromSoft typically has PvP be more opt-in, while Seamless Co-op requires you to consciously opt out of the possibility.

As a DS2 PvP old hand myself⁠—I got into a lot of duels on the Threshold Bridge back in 2014⁠—I like to insist we do things honorably and 1v1 invaders. Unless they're really annoying or break etiquette themselves; at that point, it's weapons free. I'm still not sure how I feel about the unfortunately-named invader "Goth Bitch," a naked woman who repeatedly cyberbullied us in the Harvest Valley zone. She was really good at Dark Souls 2 PvP.

There have certainly been technical hitches⁠—mostly weird latency or mismatched details between our instances of the game⁠—but Seamless Co-op mostly just works. Its smoothness and ease of use is especially impressive given that it's a free mod, and Yui was diligently, rapidly squashing bugs in the days immediately after launch. The mod will be there for you whenever you and your friends want to spin up a game, but I'd act soon if you want to take advantage of the reactivated PvP (or get harassed by a nude warrior woman in an evil swamp).

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin remains available, as ever, on Steam, while you can grab Seamless Co-op over on the Dark Souls 2 Nexus.

Jordan Thomas grew up during the shareware era of PC gaming, fed a steady diet of free game demos by his father. "This is embarrassing in a way, but the first one I remember connecting to enough to do drawings at school—and it's so immature—but it's old Commander Keen," he says. "It was a quick segue from that into Wolfenstein and Quake. So weirdly, Commander Keen was a gateway drug into darker games that would then become my focus for a very long time."

Indeed, Thomas' debut in the games industry was dark in the most literal sense, as he was hired by Ion Storm Austin to work on Thief: Deadly Shadows. There, Thomas built that game's most famous level, The Shalebridge Cradle.

Following Ion Storm's closure, Thomas moved to Irrational, where he led the design of BioShock's Fort Frolic before moving to 2K Marin and directing BioShock 2. After working on BioShock Infinite, Thomas founded the indie studio Question, creating games like The Magic Circle, The Blackout Club, and South Park: Snow Day.

Question's most recent game is The Killing Stone, a dark roguelike deckbuilder inspired by Shakespearean drama which has just launched out of early access. "It's set in the 17^th century, and you can play it in 17^th century authentic dialogue—so it's for the real sickos," Thomas says. "It's a series of very strange, deckbuilder-with-a-twist style challenges, where you're trying to un-curse a family's decks, which is pulling sins out of their souls, sins that they inherited from their matriarch."

Thomas took a break from Shakespearean sin-eating to show me around the water-cooled pleasure district of his Steam library. We talked about Hellraiser's hidden influences, immersive sims' hidden comedy potential, and how Path of Exile helped Thomas survive development of The Blackout Club.

What game are you currently playing?

I've spectated my friend's playthrough of Hellraiser: Revival, and now I've just started it myself. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Hellraiser fan from way back, and this is the most lurid possible incarnation of this. But I am really interested in the idea of a decaying relationship in non-Euclidean space, and the people who made this game get that. They're doing it with the chassis of another game that I loved and that fell away. And oddly, I didn't expect that to arrive as a Hellraiser sequel, but that was Condemned.

I prefer melee to shooting for many reasons. I've long since reached saturation point with guns in this country and in my life, so I moved into melee and stayed there. But there wasn't a lot available in first-person [in 2006]. Condemned was right up my alley, and I still would have loved to do a sequel to it or something.

[Monolith]'s programmers of the enemies were early pioneers in finding semi-systemic, often designer-aided, smart things for the enemies to be doing, that helped you believe they had an agenda and they were thinking about things before you entered the room. Again, I wish I'd had the chance to merge Condemned with the immersive sim genre, where the spaces were more plausible and you could approach these spaces from any angle. Condemned was a little more linear, though you still had some freedom in their arenas.

You're on the trail of this Serial Killer X character, and you're ripping locker doors off walls, and it's all about breakable melee weapons. And this is where you'll see it in Hellraiser, exactly that formula for the first half.

Also, my friend Xalavier voices the protagonist, so I just wanted to see him put through hell. Strange Scaffold helped out with [The Killing Stone], and [we're] very grateful to him for that.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

Just before Hellraiser, I played REPO with my regular crew. Speaking of immersive sim systemic interaction, man, I've never laughed so hard playing a multiplayer game. And even if you account for the friends-as-content success model, which is huge right now, it's still just so well thought out and so expressive that we keep coming back to it.

I tell the story, when I'm trying to sell other imsim nerd types on it, of the moment that a friend was carrying my severed robot head back to the cart to safely resurrect me at some point in the future, and I was controlling a third-person camera around my head, and I'd got just enough battery life to scream at my friends not to turn around and look backwards, because there was a monster behind them that only kills you if you look at it.

I was like, "This game is amazing." I'd never seen a moment like that happen before, where my limited agency death mattered, the camera mattered, the limited communications governed by the battery. All of that came together, plus the enemy design, to create this moment of "Don't look behind you."

The Blackout Club is a long conversation that would eat a lot of our time, but it's definitely true that [in terms of] four friends going into a hostile space and starting out relatively vulnerable and having to improvise—lots of people crack each other up playing The Blackout Club too.

But The Blackout Club also had this live story component, which was so all-consuming. The thing I'm proudest of about that game is that people are playing it when they're not playing it. They were off on the Discord trying to solve mysteries like true crime. Whereas REPO, it's all about the physical … every piece of your body is physicalised.

On Thief 3, I've told this story before, but I got a feature into the game because Paul Weaver, the executive producer at the time, was trying to shut everything down, but he wanted to say yes because I'd built up a lot of good faith, and it was the oil slicks, when they're placed near stairs, would fling guards [down them]. He said, "You can have it if it makes me laugh." We showed it to him and he immediately cracked up.

A little while after Ion Storm Austin shuttered, we were pitching around a comedy immersive sim that's like Burnout with people. It was all about trying to get the most horrific things to happen, and REPO probably would have been very good friends with it.

That's why I'm not particularly devoted to continuing to bang the immersive sim drum anymore … people who took pieces of it are solving things in a way that renews the conversation.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

It might be X-COM, the original.

I played it for research for what would become The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. What I chiefly remember—before the trauma began with such a strange, hand-me-down [project]—was the game Exquisite corpse. That's what we call it here. Where you draw a piece of a monster and then fold it down, and somebody else draws the torso of the monster and fold it down, and you unfold it and get this ridiculous thing. That was The Bureau.

But for pure research, looking back at the original thing, I was reminded that the power of negative space is media agnostic, or genre agnostic, if you prefer. It [had] these very heavily pixelated tiles, but the movement of the enemies, the camera paid attention to it off in the fog of war. I remember people talking about being deeply scared by this game when they played it back in their formative game years because of that movement.

That part still holds up. You are constantly worried about what's out there in the darkness. And it made me think that my love of top-down tactics would not necessarily be mutually exclusive with my love of horror, right? That I could do something like that. Unfortunately, not at the time, not for The Bureau, because the goals were very different. But that's the main thing that struck me about it.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

[For] the entire development cycle of The Blackout Club, myself and Ken Strickland—who was not yet working with us, we were working together when he was still at Ubisoft on the South Park stuff—we played, constantly, Path of Exile.

I was in a rough spot. I was essentially awake all the time during the day, trying to help the team drive the development, but at night running the live encounters and scheduling the next ones and wanting to take notes for everything that I thought players were thinking and what needed to be woven into the live story.

Originally, the thought was I would have more support on that. That didn't happen. All we had was once every week or two, we would have a visit from an actual actor, and I would be Cyrano de Bergerac-style whispering into their ear … but yeah, running all of that, there was this incredible need for stress relief. Path of Exile absorbed all of that damage to the tune of 7613 hours.

The main thing I remember about it is a permanent remark being made in my head over the joy of pruning and also building branches of this ridiculous character-growth bonsai, where optimising for just that one extra point could make all the difference in your build. I really prided myself on not taking builds from influencers or anything, just building my own. Of course, I was collaborating with another [person who is] much more talented than I am at systems design in the form of Ken Strickland. So the dialogue was really wonderful because he understood what the hell I was talking about.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

There are probably two answers. The first is Darkest Dungeon 1, because my family loves it. You can steer Darkest Dungeon 1 in such a way where the really gruesome stuff isn't necessarily there. The power of Wayne June's narration affects everybody regardless of age. So it's become a strange collaboration. I remember hearing a young voice say, "Let's play the torch game!"

The other one is Baldur's Gate 3. I didn't realise this until last year, but the mod scene for that game has breathed life into a thing that I already played beyond playing, right? And if that continues, if it becomes Skyrim-like in its infinite divisibility, then I have no reason to uninstall it.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

I'll say Audacity, because since The Blackout Club, I had to do a lot of my own audio editing of the often-live or very lo-fi recordings that we got of the actors in their own homes. We had this special provision from the union to go into their homes and set up their ability to invade players right then and there, which was amazing. So we had this crazy tour of various actors' homes.

I'm very proud of that, actually. For a low-budget game, we were very loudly pro-union and we wanted to work with union talent. I'd approach Critical Role and say, "Hey, I think you guys would make good gods. Would you like to haunt players and have them figure out slowly, maybe at some point, who they're talking to in real time?" So they're all union, of course. And Ashly Burch, the main character that you play at the start, is union. So we went to SAG and said, "We're doing something that's never been done before."

Anyway, I had to edit some of what we got from them into what we call god-casts, and it would be a current event summary … so I had to learn Audacity. And even now on the Killing Stone, I'm constantly using it to tweak things here and there.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Terrible. It's terrible. In fact, there was a snapshot going backwards through time of desktops that I had to just completely core dump. It's like, OK, this is horrific, so we're just gonna do a snapshot of everything here in case I need it again, and it goes into a folder which just looks like that previous horrible desktop, and then the new one becomes that bad.

By the way, it's mainly because of Audacity. For some reason, I don't want to organise or store all the variants of this given voice line that I've messed with, I need them all still there at a glance.

On May 24, 2000, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney shared a public statement (the specific platform or venue eludes me) on the closure of Looking Glass Studios, a canonical PC gaming institution and originator of the immersive sim genre (maybe don't call it that, though). The statement was resurfaced by immsim enthusiast account Sinnoware on Twitter, and Sweeney has since responded.

Here's Sweeney's original statement from 2000 in full:

Responding to the post's resurfacing, Sweeney stands by his assessment of this prior moment of studio closures and industry uncertainty: "Sometimes the creative magic that makes a game loved by some isn't accompanied by the economics of a viable business," he wrote. "Game businesses are businesses, and though one can invest in anticipation of future profit or growth, ultimately a company must earn enough to pay the bills.

"This is a challenge all game makers face, and it's magnified during downturns. The solution? Make a great game, make it efficiently, and set the budget based on the size of the audience that will pay for it. Technology that helps achieve that is, in my opinion, good."

A number of prominent industry figures took issue with Sweeney's take. Danny O'Dwyer of Noclip and Arkane co-founder Raphael Colantonio both emphasized the lingering artistic impact of Looking Glass. Gloomwood developer Dillon Rogers wrote Sweeney's statement off as "the mindset of an asshole CEO."

I'm not particularly fond of Epic's games or Sweeney's 'metaverse' vision for the future of the industry. I am a huge fan of Looking Glass. Indeed, many of my favorite games were born of beautiful, doomed studios that were ultimately sacrificed before Mr. Market: Looking Glass, Black Isle, Troika, and now BioWare.

That's what's tough for me here: There is an uncomfortable ring of truth to Sweeney's words, even as I find them infuriating. If the future of the industry fully belongs to Roblox, Fortnite, and EA Sports brought to you by Jared Kushner and the Saudi Public Investment Fund, I don't want to be a part of it. But that's who's winning.

Whatever I feel like saying about Thief's incredible fictional world or Ultima Underworld's inescapable influence, the market leaders can just point to the scoreboard: More hearts and minds, more money, more influence, more impact. These are not what's most important to me, but they are what matter to the wealthy few who own and shape the future. All of my protests about artistry and meaning end up sounding like cope. "By MIT Grads, For MIT Grads" was, unfortunately, a very sick burn.

If you disagree with Sweeney's premise for what truly matters in games, I think it's worth being realistic about where he has a point. But there are also aspects of his argument where I think it's valuable to push back and reframe things.

Sweeney speaks in terms of balance sheets and profitability, and while that's relevant to Looking Glass' story and those of many smaller studios shut down in recent years, there's a more arcane logic behind many recent shutdowns and mass layoffs:

• Bluepoint: A remaster studio shut down by Sony after it was pivoted to a multiplayer God of War.
• Arkane Austin: A successor to Looking Glass that was mired in the confused, live service-adjacent Redfall.
• BioWare: My hobby horse remains the cancellation of the original Dragon Age 4 in favor of Anthem.
• Tango Gameworks: There was seemingly no reason. It looks to have been operating within its means. Thankfully it was saved by Krafton.

On that note, we've been keeping a running tally of ways to get laid off in the videogame industry that defy common sense. Many studios are being shut down based on mathematics well beyond my ken. They had clear remits and devoted fanbases, but were sent to chase down short-lived industry fads, then punished for it. Others are amputated or hollowed out seemingly for short term, quarter-to-quarter improvements in stock price. And as O'Dwyer pointed out, Epic laid of 1,000 employees in 2026, even as it remains an industry juggernaut⁠—would it have had to close its doors if it kept paying those salaries?

It feels almost trite to point out that the impacts of layoffs, shutdowns, and failed business strategies are softened the higher up you go in a company's hierarchy, with the crowning absurdity that the executives calling these shots never bear the brunt of the consequences. Things are somewhat different in Japan, which coincidentally has been relatively insulated from this crisis.

In the absence of a new and cooperative industry that altogether sheds things like leveraged buyouts, high-paid executives, and high store fees (which to be fair, Sweeney has been ahead of the curve on criticizing), I do think there are stabilizing compromises that the CEOs and billionaires of this industry could choose to make at any time, ones that prioritize sustainability and human decency while still making them money. I'll let you know if that ever happens.

The idea of playing Deus Ex entirely in third person has always seemed like sacrilege to me. I like my immersive sims to be, well, immersive, to let me see the world through my character's eyes and interact with it up close and personal.

Yet having just watched several videos of Deus Ex being played in third-person, I've realised that perhaps I wouldn't be so averse to experiencing Ion Storm's cyberpunk classic from a new perspective. Especially if that new perspective involves Max Payne-style bullet dodging.

Over the last week or so, YouTuber dan2091 posted numerous videos of a WIP third-person mod for Deus Ex. Presumably, the mod is dan2091's own creation, though there's no information in the video's descriptions or the channel more generally to confirm this.

In any case, the various clips demonstrate that there's more to the mod than a simple camera shift. One video shows a system that lets JC Denton wear different clothes, making the most of the player's ability to see their own character. Another video shows bespoke ladder climbing animations, while a third showcases a new dual-wielding system. The latter functions regardless of whether the player is in first-or-third person too, which is neat.

What most caught my eye across the videos, however, is that JC is considerably nimbler in his third-person incarnation, able to both roll and shoot-dodge while blasting enemies with his dual pistols in a manner highly reminiscent of Max Payne. In fact, I'm pretty sure that those rolling and dodging animations are taken directly from Remedy's earlier titles, either Max Payne 1 or Max Payne 2. Either way, the animations fit Deus Ex surprisingly well, perhaps because both games have a similarly grungy, dilapidated aesthetic.

It's an interesting experiment, although this isn't the first time Deus Ex has dabbled with a different point of view. Both Human Revolution and Mankind Divided were hybrid first and third-person games, switching to an out-of-body experience when players entered cover or performed takedowns. Even the original was a little bit third person, switching to a shot/reverse shot camera during dialogue sequences.

While I still prefer to see Ion Storm's world through JC Denton's eyes, I'd happily take an exclusively third-person Deus Ex if it meant we actually got another Deus Ex. Sadly, that looks highly unlikely. A new game in the series by Eidos Montreal was reportedly cancelled by Embracer Group. while Adam Jensen's voice actor Elias Toufexis confirmed that we won't see the series return this year.

The development and release of Civilization 7 has been a rollercoaster for both fans of the series and developer Firaxis. The most recent entry in the long-running 4X series shipped with an age-transition mechanic where players would switch between civilisations at multiple points during a game. It was a radical design shift that divided the community, received well by some players, but going down like a glass of cold sick with others.

Earlier this year, Firaxis introduced an update to Civilization 7 that made age transitions optional and reimplemented the traditional, single-civ mode of play. Yet according to Firaxis, this was not a decision the studio made easily, and was particularly tough for creative director Ed Beach.

This was revealed in an expansive oral history of Civilization by Polygon, which charts the trajectory of the series game by game. The roots of Civilization 7, it seems, were in a long-held frustration of series' creator Sid Meier:

"I was always frustrated by playing a Civ game and having a civilization with one period of time, where I had special abilities and special powers," Meier explains. "And for the rest of history I would just play sort of as a vanilla Civ where I didn't have anything unique about what I was doing."

This idea was carried forward by Beach, who made it a central feature of Civ 7. "I know, just as a fan of history, that all civilizations have a long lineage where the came from Rome, or they came from Greece, or they came from an African civilization or a Mesoamerican civilization, and all those cultures were all very unique in history," Beach says. "Why can't I capitalise on that and be able to have something cool and unique and fun about myself throughout all of history?"

However, as noted by executive producer Dennis Shirk, Civilization 7 ended up "polarising the audience" when it was released, particularly disliked by veteran fans of the series. "Our hardcore players that have been around since Civ 1 didn't necessarily want that direction. They wanted to play the same thing and have that fantasy of playing it nonstop straight through."

In the end, Firaxis decided to fold Civ's traditional play structure back into Civiliation 7 via the Test of Time update, though Beach admits this decision was made with some reluctance. "The Test of Time update was personally challenging for me because it wasn't part of the original vision of the game," he says. "But it was clear that a lot of fans wanted to be able to say, 'I started as a certain set of people and I want to see their story all the way through.'

"That was a vision we needed to get back into the game, because people definitely wanted to play that way and they had not been given full service by the game as the way it first shipped."

Unlike with the base game, Firaxis conducted several public workshops while developing Test of Time, using the feedback to shape the update. Beach describes this experience as a "good process for us" and one that Firaxis is keen to use in future. "We want to keep those types of engagements with the fans going and bring the workshop back whenever we need to."

Firaxis seems to consider Test of Time a big success, with Beach saying he "knew it was going to be well received" because of the workshop. Yet the update doesn't seem to have done much to shift the consensus on Civ 7, with Steam reviews remaining decidedly mixed. Firaxis is currently working on a new update designed to coincide with the launch of Civ 7's first DLC, Earthrise, so perhaps that combination might help shunt the game's reputation to be closer in line with previous entries in the series. But as described by Shirk, there does seem to be a general acknowledgement that Firaxis changed things too dramatically in Civ 7.

"There are some places that we found, even when we want to take those big swings to really change the formula and give players something new to chew on, that it is a step too far. We found that out with Civilization 7," he says. "So we’ve been working ever since to keep putting in things that will surprise and delight our new audience, really re-engage our existing older audience and have them take a second look."

The more information that dribbles out from BioWare's cancelled Mass Effect game, the sadder I feel about the whole sorry situation. We've already seen an in-engine trailer that introduced a new protagonist and reintroduced Liara T'Soni, and we've heard that the game was set in a 'galactic Cold War' that combined all three of Mass Effect 3's possible endings. Now, it seems the new Mass Effect would also have had a sophisticated system for dealing with the choices players made in the original trilogy.

This is according to Mass Effect's Franchise Technical Director Romain Toutain, who ran a Twitch stream during which he provided commentary on the recently leaked trailer, offering some insight into the game that trailer was supposed to reveal (via Kotaku). Although the stream was in French, a clip was posted on Bluesky by user @loustica-lucia, who added English subtitles to Toutain's commentary.

During his stream, Toutain mentions that BioWare was working on a novel way to account for the many choices players made while playing the Mass Effect trilogy, pointing out that "all of the choices made in the first Mass Effect games were taking into account."

Indeed, this is partly the reason behind the cancelled successor's name as shown in the leaked internal trailer. "One of the reasons why it was called Mass Effect Universe is that you had so many choices that you could plug your saves together to create parallel universes." Toutain quickly clarifies that his explanation is "to keep it simple," adding "It's not exactly how it worked. You had different timelines, basically. You could almost generate timelines, kinda like Zero Time Dilemma."

It sounds like a significantly more complex version of Dragon Age: The Veilguard's choice import system. Indeed, Toutain goes on to explain that "everything was stateful" in reference to Universe's tech, and BioWare had a system that let them pause the game and ask a "system that solved logical equations" about the game state and the possible consequences of choices being made by the player. "'Is this valid? And if it isn't valid, what conditions must be met for it to be valid for the game to set these conditions? And if the content doesn't exist, then we know the content doesn't exist, so we'll either have to create another branch, either that, or we know we have to create the content.'"

Toutain then cites an example: "So, if you killed a guy and you needed that guy for your mission, the game will make sure you can complete that mission. Or, if that's what the designers have decided, well, no, the mission's failed because you killed that guy. Or else, something that was bound to happen doesn't happen just so that a path remains open, so that you can get [around] the problem."

According to Toutain, the ultimate goal of the next Mass Effect was to give players "absolute autonomy". How well these ideas would have worked in practice is another matter, of course. But it certainly seems that BioWare had some ambitious plans that reached beyond the scope of the original trilogy, and it's a darn shame that we'll never know how they would have shaken out.

As reported by The Verge, Xbox Chief Operating Officer Helen Chiang is leaving the company after three months in the role⁠—though Chiang had previously been a Microsoft employee for 21 years. Xbox had not previously operated with a COO in its hierarchy, and the role was created as part of CEO Asha Sharma's controversial brand "reset."

Sharma announced the personnel change in an October 23 internal memo, and did not offer an explanation for Chiang's departure. "Her immediate responsibilities are being split up between other Xbox leaders for now," Sharma wrote. "We'll share more on COO leadership as plans are finalized."

Microsoft shared a boilerplate statement on the departure to Eurogamer: "We don't discuss individual personnel matters. We're grateful for Helen's years of service and wish her well." However, an anonymous source within Microsoft also told Eurogamer that Chiang was "terminated for policy violations."

According to Sharma's original reset announcement, the COO was tasked "with end-to-end P&L [profit and loss] responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services." Given Xbox's current focus on cost-cutting and maximizing revenue, that sounds like a fairly key role in Sharma's project.

It's hard to imagine Chiang's departure having any significant impact on Xbox's strategy or its execution, but it hardly inspires confidence to see such a quick turnaround in an executive-level position, particularly given the overall instability and uncertainty at Xbox.

Penguin Colony is a work of cosmic horror that I would recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in scares from the beyond, even though its unique penguin platforming can be frustrating to wrangle. It's a radical recontextualization of an H.P. Lovecraft classic with a clear affection for the writer's storytelling, but also scathing contempt for his racism.

For my money, it's not October without a weird-ass new indie horror game leaving a lasting impression on me, and Penguin Colony has satisfied my annual craving. You are a penguin witnessing the events of the Lovecraft story, At the Mountains of Madness. Your powers are honk, slide, swim, and hop.

Rather than being limited to a specific bird, you are able to possess any penguin you come across, theoretically using different species' abilities to tackle different movement challenges. Aside from using little baby penguins to squeeze into tight spaces, I was almost exclusively a Rockhopper main: Their impressive vertical jump was a boon in many areas. They shoulda hooped instead of investigating The Strange.

The GOAT, PC Gamer Tales from The Hard Drive host Lenval Brown, narrates the adventure from the perspective of a customarily neurotic and verbose Lovecraft protagonist. Brown's delivery lends everything a similar emotional weight to his iconic performance in Disco Elysium, and he makes for a comforting, familiar presence⁠ even as things go all nasty crazy style.

Waddle on

I remain conflicted over Penguin Colony's movement and mechanics: I didn't find them especially fun, they got in the way, but that also felt weirdly appropriate. As a penguin, waddling around is kinda shitty and sluggish, particularly as the levels shift away from their native habitat.

Most charitably, there's a Foddian (Getting Over It, Baby Steps) quality to the mechanical exploration. It got me to really lean in for some tricky traversal as the atmosphere reached its most suffocating and intense in the caves and structures deep under the arctic ice⁠. I felt frustrated and restless as Penguin Colony's coolest levels opened up before me, held back as I was by this little penguin body. But that dovetails quite well with Penguin Colony's whole premise: that you are an inhuman observer of a human (and something else) story.

A more clear-cut negative was an inconsistency with a mantling (do penguins mantle?) feature (was this intentional?) that felt more like a clipping glitch, letting me clear some ledges but not others. Penguin Colony's appropriately minimalist UI has one glaring exception: A Shadow of the Colossus-style circular stamina meter that appears only when your stamina is depleting. It is distractingly massive and neon-colored, and it usually wasn't clear what the relationship was between what I was doing and the stamina bar's drain. It had a mind of its own, and was never a welcome sight during my playtime.

At its best, though, the penguin parkour contributed to this feeling that I was a small, insignificant thing skirting the edges of a drama I only partially understood. We as humankind are effectively unknowable elder gods to the rest of the animal kingdom, and Penguin Colony largely succeeded in evoking a one-of-a-kind sense of dual-layer cosmic horror through its mechanics.

Side stories

None of what follows is an explicit "Vader is Luke's da" spoiler, but this is definitely a game that thrives on surprise and interpretation. If you are already convinced you'd like to play, please leave the browser tab open⁠—ideally on multiple devices and refreshing regularly⁠—until you've completed Penguin Colony. Then come back and finish reading.

Penguin Colony is not a 1:1 retelling of At the Mountains of Madness. Lenval Brown voices a new character named Howard Blakely⁠—as opposed to the original story's William Dyer⁠—and the passages he narrates are a pitch-perfect imitation of Lovecraft's distinctive prose.

Each level ends with a brief interlude where you control members of a party of Māori warriors who inherited a tradition of fighting and containing the evil at the south of the world. Blakely is a sympathetic American working with an expedition of Nazis, specifically their famous division devoted to finding The Ark of the Covenant, Thor's Hammer, the Easter Bunny, etc. The warriors are on a quest to stop the Nazis and suppress the outer evil they inadvertently awakened.

The war party interludes gradually built up the feeling that I was getting dispatches from another, "better" game. And I love that: I don't think I've ever played a game like Penguin Colony before, one where it feels like the full story is happening in another room, and I only get a keyhole view of what's really going on.

You get out what you put into this cryptic mystery: It's suffused with unique, cursive hieroglyphs, and I eventually realized that they're a replacement cipher for the alphabet. It pays to play with a notebook and pen nearby⁠—cracking this code was a rewarding little side activity that added to my understanding of the deeper plot.

The back half of Penguin Colony takes place among the twisting megastructures of an alien city under the ice, and Origame Digital manages to evoke an incredible sense of scale and ancient, terrible purpose with these levels: They reminded me of 2022's criminally underrated Scorn, as well as the stunning Ash Lake in Dark Souls' deepest depths. You don't fully understand what you're looking at, but you get that it is of a staggering profundity.

Case of the vapours

I notice a tendency in cosmic horror writing to shy away from the more unseemly aspects of H.P. Lovecraft's legacy, this instinct to say "Thank you for the outer horrors and cyclopean ruins, H.P., I'm going to tactfully gloss over what you named your cat, as well as your assorted thoughts on untermenschen, as though you are my least favorite uncle cornering me at a family gathering."

Penguin Colony proverbially says "fuck it, we ball" in this regard, making Lovecraft's racial fixations a very real, very impactful part of the horror. Blakely is an "enlightened" man of modernity who gets along just peachy with his expedition mates from the Third Reich. He is the neurotic, asylum-bound Lovecraft protagonist at his most cowardly, self-indulgent, and contemptible, and very much feels like a stand-in for old Howard Phillips himself.

The Māori warriors are everything Blakely is not, with minimal dialogue compared to Blakely's voluminous narration. Their laconic characterization is instead delivered through their actions and fellowship with each other. Their camaraderie stands in contrast with Blakely's solipsistic navel-gazing. They are proactive, and oppose the influence of outer beings rather than waiting to be changed by them. They are motivated to protect others, even to the point of self-sacrifice, in contrast with Blakely's vulgar, "scientific" curiosity or the Nazis' brutal nationalism.

It rules that this is all roiling just under the surface of Penguin Colony. It invites you to draw your own conclusions about what you're witnessing, rather than didactically explaining a point of view. The only times it indulges in explicit political messaging are with a land acknowledgement and content warning at the beginning of the game, then a blistering indictment of the industry's inaction regarding the genocide of Palestinians by Israel after the credits. I found these direct addresses of the player to be all the more impactful paired with Penguin Colony's otherwise cryptic delivery.

Even with its rough edges, I love Penguin Colony: It's a rich, multilayered piece of interactive storytelling in an impressively compact package. It's a unique exploration of cosmic horror, one that rebels against genre grandaddy H.P. Lovecraft's signature 19th century freak boy racism with a tale of indigenous revenge. One you observe through the eyes of a penguin.

It's hard to discuss BioWare's demise without detailing the corporate meddling that led to one of gaming's most celebrated and enduring studios getting the axe. BioWare made mistakes, undeniably, but the buck stops at the executives who gutted its teams and never understood, for instance, the popularity of Dragon Age.

But things are bleak enough and you know all this already. So instead, I want to celebrate BioWare's impressive impact, which will continue for as long as studios are designing RPGs.

Even if BioWare ceased to exist after its incredible run of Infinity Engine games, it would still be considered an icon. Baldur's Gate was, for so many people, the CRPG, defining an era of roleplaying games and echoing across the decades. We're still talking about it, and studios are still designing games built on that old foundation.

Owlcat, Obsidian, Larian—three of the biggest RPG studios of the current era have all dipped into that well. Without BioWare we'd not have the Pathfinder CRPGs, Pillars of Eternity or Tyranny, and Baldur's Gate 3 certainly wouldn't exist.

Obsidian as we know it would likely be a very different studio without BioWare, if it existed at all. It formed after the closure of Black Isle Studios, which published Baldur's Gate, and it relied on BioWare's Infinity Engine for Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment. That relationship continued under Obsidian, with the team following up BioWare's Neverwinter Nights and KotOR with celebrated sequels, before making Pillars of Eternity, BG's spiritual successor.

The modern resurgence of CRPGs, born out of a love of BioWare and Black Isle's library, probably would not have happened if the two studios had not made such a huge impression. Disco Elysium, for instance, owes a great deal to Planescape: Torment, and if ZA/UM had never created Disco, we wouldn't have games like Esoteric Ebb or Zero Parades either.

Following Baldur's Gate, BioWare gave us Neverwinter Nights in 2002, a game that was still undeniably a CRPG, but one that catered to the demand for 3D graphics. Neverwinter Nights was solid, but its real legacy was the Aurora Engine and the Aurora Toolset.

BioWare gave players the power of game creation with the toolset, with which they spawned countless worlds, modules, mods and persistent servers—effectively community-run MMOs. It was my first foray into modding, when I created a D&D adventure for my flatmate's birthday. I was a broke student, so I couldn't afford a gift, but I could absolutely skive class and make a cool game.

Folks are still playing with the toolset today, in a community that has persevered for over two decades.

Also in 2002, a small Polish developer was founded. CD Projekt started life as a localisation studio, and it worked with BioWare and Interplay to create the Polish version of Baldur's Gate. From that relationship, it was given the job of porting Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance to PC. Unfortunately, that port was a victim of Interplay's demise, but bigger and better things were on the horizon.

The company formed a new studio to develop its own games, known as CD Projekt Red, and started work on the original Witcher. The studio then licensed the Aurora Engine from BioWare, which it heavily modified to create Geralt's first big videogame romp.

CDPR's joint CEO Michał Nowakowski paid tribute to BioWare after the closure announcement, saying, "Bioware has been a massive part of CDPR history. We befriended them when localizing and selling Baldur’s Gate games in Poland, Czech, and Slovakia. And later they were [a] great help when lending us their engine for Witcher 1, sharing their wisdom and even giving us a spot at their booth at E3."

As the popularity of CRPGs started to wane and consoles began to dominate, BioWare adapted and pivoted. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was still secretly a CRPG, but one that you could play on console with your controller, with so much of the classic CRPG complexity hidden from view.

KotOR kicked off a series that continued with KotOR 2, from Obsidian, and BioWare returned to the series for SWTOR, a MMO that continues today under developer Broadsword. At the time of its launch, it was the most expensive MMO ever made, and it continues to be an astonishing achievement in terms of the absurd amount of dialogue and voice acting.

With KotOR, BioWare really started to refine the features that would go on to influence so many RPGs (and games in other genres). BioWare RPGs have always featured big, game-changing decisions, letting you determine through your choices who lives, who dies, and who gets to become the protagonist's love interest. But in KotOR, we started to see this really become codified.

The romances, the alignment system, the ability to influence companions and even turn them to the Dark Side, these systems are part of the DNA of modern RPGs. Even now, we describe games that feature big, signposted story branches as having BioWare-style choices.

Jade Empire didn't make nearly as big a splash in 2005, but it's here we see BioWare experimenting with action-RPG mechanics. I love Jade Empire, and it further developed the BioWare-style choices, but it also felt a bit like it was following a trend rather than setting one. Story-driven action-RPGs weren't new.

With Mass Effect, though, it attempted something different, and it was duly rewarded. KotOR and Jade Empire saw the studio try to adapt to changing tastes, but with Mass Effect BioWare had finally figured out how to move on from CRPGs.

The studio that gave us Baldur's Gate developing a third-person shooter sounded like a disaster waiting to happen, but instead BioWare made something incredible. Never before in a BioWare game had we been able to play such a well-defined protagonist, but the studio maintained the player agency it was so loved for, letting us create all these different versions of Shepard. There's so much more to the character than the binary Paragon/Renegade system.

Mass Effect is also where BioWare's experiments with choice and consequence really paid off. Do we wipe out an alien species or allow one of the galaxy's biggest threats to survive? Do we betray the Council or risk the deaths of countless humans? Do we date Liara or the space racist? And then we got to see these choices reverberate across the sequels. Years of decisions culminating in a fight for the galaxy's survival.

With BioWare's closure, we'll never get to see what it was planning for the fifth outing, though after Andromeda I'm not sure we would have been happy with it—even though the leaked trailer looks rad. But Mass Effect lives on. The Amazon series is reportedly still going forward, and not one but two new games are on the horizon that are carrying the torch: Owlcat's The Expanse: Osiris Reborn and Archetype's Exodus. Both are coming next year.

In 2009, BioWare finally released Dragon Age: Origins, which had been in development for seven years, underwent some significant changes, and was framed as a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. And boy did it live up to those high expectations. A few months after launch, it had already hit 3.2 million sales. BioWare moved on from CRPGs, only to go and release this all-timer a couple of years later.

While the stuido would go on to chip away at series' the CRPG elements, culminating in 2024's not-so-great action-RPG The Veilguard, Origins at least showed the world that CRPGs were still viable, and that console gamers were perfectly capable of enjoying a more methodical, complex RPG.

Origins went on to influence a new generation of videogame developers, not just as an RPG, but as a successful blockbuster game that stopped pretending queer people didn't exist. Sure, Femshep could date Liara in Mass Effect, but BioWare obfuscated the queer romance by making the Asari genderless, even though Liara is absolutely female coded. It could also be argued that the Liara romance played into the fetishisation of lesbians, titillating straight men without actually depicting a queer romance.

BioWare continued to represent queer relationships in its other RPGs, sometimes with specific characters, and sometimes by making every character playersexual. And it got a lot of shit for this from the conservative nutjobs. Thankfully, those idiots were fighting a losing battle.

Just look at how many RPGs have followed suit. Not just in allowing the player to embark on a queer romance, but their depiction of queer characters in general. Even the fairly conservative Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, where the game director constantly complains about "wokeness", features a genuinely fantastic queer romance. Sorry, bigots, you lost!

That it was able to do so much of this while trapped inside EA's dev-killing prison is even more impressive. Mass Effect and Dragon Age came out of the previous era, despite EA being the publisher at the time of their respective launches, but BioWare continued to take big swings despite the less than ideal situation the devs found themselves in.

Yes, I write for PCG and I am about to defend Dragon Age 2. What a shock! But DA2 is a great example of what BioWare was capable of, even when EA was going out of its way to set it up for failure. Despite an absurd deadline that led to extreme crunch and so many cut corners, BioWare was able to put out some of its greatest writing, while introducing beloved and enduring characters like Varric, Cassandra and Hawke. The game was compromised from the get-go, but there's still so much brilliance in there.

BioWare just kept beating the odds. It was the same with Dragon Age: Inquisition. EA wanted all of its games to use a single engine, Frostbite, leaving BioWare working with new tools that simply weren't designed for RPG development. It was apparently a bit of a nightmare for the team, which once again had to crunch to get the game out the door. But again, it was fantastic—finding a middle ground between Origins and DA2, while also going mostly open world.

Inquisition was BioWare's last great game, but what an exceptional run! It sucks that its reward for all these achievements was death by a thousand cuts, and that it became a punching bag for the anti-woke mob. But I refuse to accept that this mars its legacy, or that its demise is anything other than incredibly sad.

And yes, I've been a pretty vocal BioWare detractor over the last few years. I could barely get through Andromeda, bounced off Anthem immediately, and I thought that The Veilguard was unmitigated rubbish, full of annoying characters, repetitive combat and a poorly constructed narrative. At the end of 2024, I said that I'd finally given up on BioWare. And earlier this year, I wrote about how BioWare could feasibly make a comeback, but that it never would.

None of this meant that I wanted to see BioWare's demise. What I wanted was to see that old boldness return. A new game, some big swings, the philosophy of the BioWare of old, even if so many of the people who made those games happen had left or been made redundant. It's a shame we never got to see what that would look like.

I don't want to dismiss the incredible work so many other developers have done elevating the RPG genre—they own their achievements. But at the same time, it's impossible to imagine RPGs without BioWare. Its importance cannot be overstated. You did well, BioWare, and even this grumpy old man will miss you.

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta has just ended, and I'm basically sold, for now. I've had such a good time, in fact, that I dipped at around level 26 on my warrior (and 16 on a Shaman) because I didn't want to spoil or burn myself out before the full thing releases in November and I am consumed in a quest-drunk fugue.

But there is one thing that's rattling around in the back of my mind: This version of WoW is designed to be played perpetually (so in MMO terms, for about 10-20 years, give or take) at the level cap. There won't be any expansions, and the game will continue to expand horizontally.

Which leaves a major question hanging over its endgame. Now, collecting a few interviews together, we've seen a smidge of what that'll look like. In an interview with SkillUp, associate production director Clay Stone contrasts overtly horizontal progression systems (such as the Legacy tree) and gear, which he notes "our intention very much is to try to limit the amount of power progression as we release each raid tier."

Speaking to IGN Nordic, lead game designer Tim Jones says that "we're not going to make a Tier 2 raid without making the loot better … Tier 2 and Tier 3 raids will therefore have better gear, but we're going to be responsible about it. We still want gear from previous raids to remain useful, such as the Onslaught Girdle."

In other words, Forever'll still absolutely have a vertical progression, but your best-in-slot might include gear from all sorts of raids, which… oh, boy.

I'm not going to put a wooden plaque on my chest and say the end is nigh. If Forever's raid tiers only increase your overall item level by a couple of digits, then it really is not that much of a problem. It's essentially playing out that power creep in slow-motion, and if it takes a decade for there to be a numerical difference between, say, tier 1 and a hypothetical set of tier 10 gear that matters for more people than just hardcore min-maxers? It's all gravy, baby.

But as someone with a vested interest in these sorts of systems, I can't help but wonder if Blizzard is just making broad, sweeping assumptions about the way it has to do things at endgame. Forever is going to be purpose-built to keep folks in this rehashed version of classic Azeroth for a very long time. Is it not poison to the entire exercise, then, to purposefully introduce vertical progression at all?

Going up, up, up

I can see a few issues—or let's call them challenges—with this approach. Firstly, three tiers is manageable. But if Forever continues to add raid tiers, then those small incremental increases in gear power slowly stop becoming incremental at all.

Unless a character can set foot in a tier 3 raid comfortably without getting gear from the first two tiers, what you've done is essentially created an attunement questline. That questline being, 'do several tiers of raiding to get up to snuff'.

In a game that resets every expansion, or season, this is a non-issue. But Forever'll have the task of bridging that gap the wider it gets—either with catch-up gear, which kills the older raids dead, or by issuing stat squishes, which never feels good on the other end of things.

The other problem is that, even if you do solve those problems, you've only got so many players. The wider the raiding scene is spread apart over the course of these raid tiers, the harder it becomes to find a group or a guild to do the specific raid that you need.

This can be solved, as these interviews mention, by giving each class useful best-in-slot gear from lower tiers so that they have an incentive to go back and do them. But there's another problem there, too: Characters only have so many equipment slots, and what's considered a BiS getup is dependent on a ton of other difficult-to-tune factors.

My point being: Blizzard really cannot rely on gearing to keep Forever's raiding scene alive in the long run, and yet (at least to start off with) it'll be mimicking old patterns. Just smaller, more controlled, and slower-paced. It's a little like trying to avoid an iceberg by designing the world's slowest boat. Sure, you're avoiding it for longer, but if you don't put a steering wheel on the damn thing you're gonna crash.

This is by far Forever's biggest risk. Playing the game casually is going to rock. Questing is going to rock. Levelling alts is going to rock. Forever has already convinced me of all of these things—but the delicate, finickity balance of a pseudo-horizontal endgame is far harder.

You have to wonder if a developer who has been designing linear progression systems for over two decades is simply finding it hard to break from that ingrained patterning. Jones' words: "We're not going to make a tier 2 raid without making the loot better." They're sticking in my craw, because… well, why not? Why are there tiered raids to begin with?

You could do as Guild Wars 2 does—new classes or skill trees to unlock that require endgame feats, character power for specific zones that'll stay relevant in perpetuity, an equivalent of "masteries". Basically, expanding the definition of what endgame is, and then having raids be a part of that ecosystem, rather than trying to slow-death power creep.

Blizzard's going to have to learn some very hard lessons to get there, though. I think this attitude towards tiers will work absolutely fine for a while, but there will come a point where the developer has to wonder if it wants to keep kicking the can down the road or really, genuinely reinvent what an endgame is in World of Warcraft. And that'll be either very exciting or very, very messy. Perhaps both.

Fans of Deus Ex, Dishonored and Gloomwood like to roll the words 'immersive sim' around their mouths as often as possible, savouring the fond associations with first-person drawer-rifling and guilt-ridden murder.

Yet there's something like consensus emerging among the makers of these games: it's really hard to sell an immersive sim while calling it by its name. "Is it a good marketing term? No," says New Blood Interactive CEO Dave Oshry. "It sucks. It's awful."

New Blood was first known for its boomer shooters, namely Dusk and Ultrakill, but has sunk years into two early access imsims, the well-regarded Gloomwood and Fallen Aces. Oshry likes to joke that he's "dumping all the money into immersive sims so we can go broke like the great studios that came before us, like Looking Glass."

Yet he'd never heard the term immersive sim until Gloomwood lead Dillon Rogers started work on his Thief-and-Resi-riffing open world. "He's like, 'That's what these are called'. I'm like, 'I have never heard that before in my life. What the fuck are you talking about?'"

Oshry wasn't new to the genre. He'd grown up adoring Deus Ex and Thief. "But Thief was a stealth game," he protests. "I called it a stealth game. Deus Ex I called an FPS-RPG because it was an FPS, but it was an RPG. You had points that you put in stuff. That's what an RPG is, like Diablo."

Of course, ploughing points into skills and traits is something that's proliferated across mainstream games of all kinds in the decades since. But it's true: back in the year 2000, it was largely the preserve of RPGs. Deus Ex, with its dialogue, narrative choices and deadly greasel combat seemed a natural enough addition to that genre.

"System Shock and Deus Ex, they were RPGs," Oshry says. "People called them RPGs. That's the funny thing about an immersive sim. You're immersed in this world. You're building your character. Yeah, that's called an RPG, brother. That's a roleplaying game."

Does this age-old squabble over definitions really matter, so long as the games are good? Well, perhaps it does. Because immersive sims are considered to be niche and unworkable by many major publishers. Whereas RPGs? "They make lots of money and sell lots of copies," Oshry says. "You could argue that Baldur's Gate 3 is an immersive sim, because of the way that Larian builds their games. It's not first-person but you can stack boxes and use spells to pull things towards you and solve problems in unique ways."

The argument is one I've heard made before—in fact, I've even heard senior Larian developers refer to their Forgotten Realms opus as an immersive sim. But you won't find that phrase anywhere in its trailers or on its Steam page. "If you market something as an RPG, I think you'll do better than marketing it as an immersive sim," Oshry says.

A couple of years ago, Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio told me the same thing. "Nobody wonders what an RPG is," he said. "We might debate whether the Bethesda RPGs are an immersive sim or not, but who cares? The market just understands what an RPG is. Same with Baldur's Gate. If you say, 'This is an immersive sim,' you're going to have a tiny percentage of people that are super excited because they know what it means. And then the other ones, they're going to be like, 'What is it?'"

During the making of Arkane's Prey, the developer wasted lots of time explaining to its intended audience what an imsim was. Time that might have been better spent selling potential players on the joyous possibilities of the gloo cannon. Bethesda was disappointed by Prey's sales, and set the studio to work on Redfall instead—a route that ultimately led to Arkane Austin's closure under Xbox.

You could argue that 'immersive sim' is an inside baseball term that broke containment. For the alumni of Looking Glass, it was crucial—a way of codifying a shared set of principles in a '90s era when the vocabulary of game design was far from locked down. Figures like Warren Spector began to spread its use through interviews and postmortems. And for fans, adopting the term felt a little like joining a club.

"I think the term immersive simulation, if you know what that is, then you know what you're getting," Oshry says. "'Oh, cool! It's a game where I can solve problems by stacking boxes and crawling through vents and stabbing people in the back.' But it's not a good marketing term. And I don't think it helps. It's very niche, because if you say immersive sim, people are like, 'So it's a simulator?' Mainstream people have no idea what that means, and the people who know what it means, you didn't have to sell it to them anyway. Because they're looking for games like that."

When New Blood first started promoting Gloomwood, Oshry attempted to sidestep the imsim problem, but created a new one. "In my marketing genius, I was like, 'Let's call it Thief with guns,'" he says. "It's an easy sell. But it's a blessing and a curse bringing in all these fans of the Thief games who expect all these things from you. And Gloomwood's obviously not just Thief with guns, it takes from Call of Cthulhu and Resident Evil. Like most of our games, it's a mishmash of so many genres. 'Thief with guns' was a really easy elevator pitch. But it comes with a lot of expectations."

By contrast, 'boomer shooter' has proven to be a straightforwardly useful marketing term throughout New Blood's existence. "There's people who are like, 'What do you mean, boomer shooter? Boomers didn't play these games.'" Oshry says. "That's not what it means. Also, yes, they do. My dad was a boomer, he played these games. I guess John Romero and John Carmack are Gen X, but Sandy Peterson sure as fuck is a boomer. But you say boomer shooter, people know exactly what it is. Yeah, it's a game like Doom and Quake and stuff."

You'll notice that, when New Blood bundles Gloomwood and Fallen Aces together with the Stalker-like Blood West on Steam, they're collectively called 'the stealth trilogy'. "Because that's what draws people in," Oshry says. "If we called it the immersive sim trilogy, nobody would fucking buy the games."

It seems like there's a new slightly-humorous-for-its-incongruity collab between game devs every other week at this point, and the latest in this sacred lineage is a team-up between Super Meat Boy 3D and Mouse: P.I. For Hire.

The latter game's titular mouse detective has been squished into a cube-like shape and sent to navigate a hellish labyrinth full of sawblades for the rest of his miserable existence. Oh, and the screen goes all black-and-white when you play as him, just like the FPS he comes from.

This might all seem downstream of cynical money devourers like Fortnite, but at least these games share something in both being indie(ish) cartoony pastiches with a gore-slick twist. Besides, Meat Boy is an OG when it comes to invasions of strangers' videogames.

You could play as him in the Bit.Trip games, and in turn CommanderVideo cameoed in Super Meat Boy. If you're too Gen A to understand a single word I just said about the halcyon days of 2010s indie gaming, that's okay. I'll just go lay down and die.

But if you want to jump up and die, spectacularly and repeatedly, that's what Super Meat Boy 3D is for. PC Gamer Australian Editor Shaun Prescott wasn't exactly head over heels for it in his impressions—he said it had "no vibe," lacking the skeezy-yet-tasteful tastelessness of Edmund McMillen's touch—but still felt pretty good as far its running and jumping and exploding were concerned. Seems like that's enough for some, as the game currently sits at a Very Positive rating on Steam.

Meanwhile, contributor Phil Iwaniuk said Mouse: P.I. For Hire was a "bona fide classic" in his 86% review for Mouse, adding that there's more to it than "just an eye-grabbing art style." Normally these crossovers go both ways to some extent, but I'm not sure how Super Meat Boy would fit into a noir detective story. Cause of death: giant sawblade? Seems pretty open-and-shut.

The Japan Actors Union, an org consisting of around 2,600 actors and voice actors, recently announced a series of measures to protect the rights of performers in the industry with regard to generative AI (reported in English via Automaton Media).

It's been a hot topic both in Japan and here in the west, with Leon Kennedy actor Nick Apostolides arguing AI voice acting was something of an oxymoron: "AI can speak lines, but there's nothing human behind it," he said.

Rather than a full-on ban or tight regulation, the union's proposed guidelines push for consent at "every stage." Companies would have to disclose when an actor's voice will be used for training, and they would also be required to negotiate compensation with actors. In other words, agreeing to have your voice generated for a short-form advertisement or whatever would be like licensing your likeness to go on a cereal box.

These consent guidelines would also apply to AI-translated performances, and in a more restrictive way to the mimicry of deceased actors, such as Tupac's controversial "appearance" in the upcoming Stranger Than Heaven.

The guidelines would ban using AI to copy a dead actor's voice unless consent had been obtained prior to their death. They would also require consent from the actor's living family, estate, or other administrative org, as well as royalty payments to those parties.

"It protects the dignity, honor, and legacy of deceased performers from commercial exploitation," said the union (auto-translated from Japanese). "We respect the wishes of the person during their lifetime to the greatest extent, and when generating AI, strict permission from the family (or administrator) who inherits the rights is mandatory to prevent desecration of the deceased."

Given the AI-related catastrophes we've seen in this field of the voicework world, like a facsimile of James Earl Jones slinging AI-generated slurs in Fortnite, these guidelines seem fairly gentle and reasonable. Time will tell if these pushes for actors' rights will take hold on a larger scale within the Japanese entertainment industry and otherwise.

Cozy games on Google

First let's check back in on the same Google Search data I pulled in 2023 to compare how much we, the audience, are actually seeking cozy games. We're looking at the past five years or search interest for the terms: cozy games, relaxing games, and casual games.

The main term "cozy games" is twice as popular as it was in 2023 when I identified the surprising spike the phrase had already experienced between 2020 and 2023. Google doesn't share raw search volume so this is all relative, not absolute, but it's still clear evidence that the interest in cozy games has continued to explode.

What is surprising to me is the comeback for the phrase "casual games." It's one we used a lot in the late twenty-teens but was eclipsed by "cozy" around 2022. Anecdotally, I think "casual" suffered from also being pejorative and may have fallen away in favor of the more positive tone "cozy." They aren't exactly interchangeable terms, but it's interesting to see casual make such a sharp comeback this year, which may mean some cozy gamers are reclaiming it.

Cozy games on Steam

Okay, then what about the supply of cozy games? Yeah, that's gone up too.

This isn't a perfect measure either. It doesn't capture every game that cozy gamers might like, only every game that has been user-tagged that way. Naturally, the number of games identified as "cozy" goes up as the term itself becomes a popular descriptor.

When you look at the number of games tagged as "cozy" that launched last year between the same dates as this year (January to October), it's 468 last year to this year's 1,341. That's a 186% increase. Subgenres like tidying up games, farm sim idlers, and desktop companions are all booming with dozens of new choices each month, spawning new and more niche microgenres in their wake.

The sharp rise in AI slop games contributes to that, certainly, but I'm not sure it's necessarily affecting cozy games more than other genres.

Cozy games in my inbox

A source that you can't pull from public data is my poor, overstuffed inbox (which I ritually clean). This is really the basis of my "gold rush" thesis: the biggest change in cozy gaming in the past three years is that developers and publishers are using the word much more than before. They sure are deploying it in subject lines from PR teams, lemme tell ya.

Back in my 2023 article I quoted a measly 15 emails from the year including the word "cozy." Let's look at the three years since.

What I'd suspected back in 2023 was that "cozy" gaming was about to get really weird as marketing teams started slapping the label onto things that may not really merit it. I am noticing that in my inbox a bit. I sure can't imagine a post-apocalyptic gunsmithing job sim self-identifying as "cozy" four years ago. Is it abusing the term? I dunno, crafty repair sims are yet another one of those exploding microgenres of cozy game, so even if it's zombies and guns it feels pretty fair.

I still recall being aghast that cozy gamers were calling roguelike action game Cult of the Lamb a cozy game back in 2022 because of its small community sim feature. So I'm not sure PR emails can abuse the word more than cozy gamers themselves, who have already long been stretching the limits of a really flexible term.

Cozy gamers in the wild

Back in 2023 I felt protective of cozy gamers. Approachable games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley had attracted newer gamers who didn't always have the same gaming lingo fluency, and I worried they could be targets for low quality copycats entering the space. I wanted them to love gaming and not get turned away by bad experiences.

I'm not worried anymore. Over the past three years cozy gamers have adapted fast. They've become an extremely savvy audience capable of taxonomically describing the exact real-time restocking shop sim that they're looking for. They trade game recommendations so quickly that it feels like even average cozy game fans keep up with new releases and announcements as a part time job. Cozy gamers have become, dare I say, hardcore.

I don't think cozy gamers are going to get less engaged any time soon, so the cozy gaming movement is aging out of "trend" status into an enduring corner of the broader gaming community.

What's next for cozy games then? Maybe a plateau or a wobble in the next three years as an inherently positive genre reckons with the cynicism from increasingly aggressive use of 'cozy' as a marketing tool and the growing number of disappointing AI copycats.

I still don't think it's peaked, though. Let's check back in in 2028.

There's a recurring motif in Alan Wake which isn't played for laughs, yet is pretty funny nonetheless. Whenever the alcoholic FBI agent has a chance to peacefully capture our fugitive novelist, he blows it by firing his service pistol wildly through the air. The local police chief tells him to cool his jets; the late night radio host wants to know what's the matter with him. But Agent Nightingale can't help himself.

It's as if the pressure of having a target in his sights is simply too much. He flips the board, all the pieces fly everywhere, and Alan Wake is lost amid the trees. "I'll get you yet," Nightingale hollers into the dark. "Even if it kills me, y'hear me HP Lovecraft?"

Wake, meanwhile, remains impervious to the man's vendetta. "I'd fallen off so many cliffs it was ridiculous," he thinks to himself as he slides on his arse down a steep embankment, escaping Nightingale's clutches once again.

It's all a little embarrassing. But I do sympathise with the humiliated drunk behind the badge. There's something about aiming a gun in Bright Falls that messes with your head and gets the better of you. And I've identified precisely what that thing is: a missing reticle.

We don't talk about reticles a lot—in the same way you don't tend to notice your own nose, even though it's bang in the centre of your vision. But they're a standard of the third-person shooter genre: a way to indicate what direction you're firing without literal crosshairs. More broadly, they're part of how you orient yourself in a 3D world; some players find that without a reliable point of focus in the middle of the screen, motion sickness gets the better of them.

Given that reticles often didn't feature during the shooter boom of the '90s, you can think of Remedy as early adopters. The studio equipped Max Payne with one in 2001, and stuck with the idea for the sequel two years later. The implementation of the reticle in those games was minimalist—a single, unchanging white dot—but it kept us steady. Steadier than a diet of painkillers did, at any rate.

Alan Wake, though, messes with the fundamentals. Its combat is rooted in a supernatural one-two punch. First, you direct your torch at the shadowy silhouettes that assault you to make them vulnerable to ballistic fire. Then you reach for your revolver or shotgun and shoot them in the head and torso until they burn up like a waste paper basket exposed to a cigarette. "I'd never fired a gun outside a shooting range," Wake narrates. "And now I'd just killed someone, or something." Typically for the genre, though, he soon gets over it, and starts shooting shadows in their dozens.

The torch is the closest thing Wake has to a reticle—a beam that roughly hits the spot your bullets are likely to land. But of course, the torch's light isn't painted on the screen as a fixed point; it's shifting constantly within 3D space. Any time Wake passes in front of a pile of logs or a fence post, the beam's length is cut by half or a third. If it's shining on a wall close to his face, the radius of the beam expands dramatically, becoming taller and wider than any enemy he might face.

You can pull the left trigger to focus your torch, in a move analogous to aiming down sights. But that comes with a complication: aiming drains your battery, and batteries are relatively rare in the forest that surrounds Bright Falls. Resource scarcity is one of the ways Remedy flirts with survival horror throughout Alan Wake.

What does all this mean during a fight? Usually that you're conserving energy. That you focus your beam only so long as it takes to break through the shadow armour of a charging opponent. Once they're weakened, you're incentivised not to aim down sights while firing your gun, in order to preserve battery life. As a result, you find yourself squinting at ghouls in the foggy mid-distance, attempting to put holes in them without any zoom or assistance from a reticle.

It's an unnerving feeling—as if the training wheels have come off and tripped you up in the process. And perhaps it's unworkable for those susceptible to certain kinds of nausea; it's notable that Alan Wake 2, launched in a more enlightened era of accessibility considerations, does have a traditional reticle that pops up when wielding your pistol.

But there's no doubt that the original's approach is effective, too. It lowers your confidence in your aim, heightens any panic you might be feeling, and tangibly plugs you into the game's atmosphere of unravellment. It's a quirk that elevates Alan Wake, even when it begins to repeat familiar patterns in its combat design.

The rather uncertain quality to Alan Wake's shooting is mirrored in its level design as well. Remedy spent three years grappling with open world tech before finally resolving to build the game as a set of linear levels, and that initial ambition is still reflected in the geography of Bright Falls. There's enough room between checkpoints to wander from the path, and at times, the route ahead is distressingly vague.

On top of that, Remedy literally sprinkles non-linear storytelling—scattering pages from the game's manuscript throughout its levels, so that descriptions of fights to come become foreshadowing, and pages from previous scenes induce lingering guilt.

In one instance, a waitress who is infatuated with Wake becomes possessed, drugging the writer with tainted coffee. After coming to, Wake is furious, and leaves her rocking back and forth on the floor of her trailer. Only later does he find the sheet of paper that lays out her haunting perspective. "Rose was smiling so hard it hurt her face," it reads. "She crushed a bottlefull of sleeping pills into the coffee. Deep down inside, she was screaming in terror."

Remedy has made more sophisticated and varied action sequences since Alan Wake. But the woozy fear of its first-ever horror game has no handrails, and that's what makes it distinct. By ditching the reticle, paradoxically, the studio achieved its aim.

Well, here's a headscratcher. Paolo Pedercini, developer of Future? No Thanks! recently admitted to using generative AI in his ecosocialist satire while also referring to the technology as "a technofascist, anti-human and anti-art project." Now, the developer has removed several AI generated voice lines from the game, following a backlash to his use of the very technology which the game lampoons.

You might remember Future? No Thanks! from another recent controversy, whereupon the game was briefly delayed after Steam held up its release while it reviewed some fleeting nudity in the game. Pedercini—who also goes by Mollieindustria—received considerable support during that debacle. But the reaction to Future? No Thanks' AI use has been rather less supportive, prompting Pedercini to rework the game and respond to the backlash.

Pedercini originally revealed his AI use in a blog post (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun). Apparently, the game contained several voice lines generated using text-to-speech, which Pedercini claimed, "used to be an uncontroversial technology and an early application of neural networks" before "AI bros started commercializing AI voices". Alongside this, the game also includes "a tiny fraction" of AI generated code, which Pedercini said he used for things like "fixing a shader I didn't write which broke after an update" as well as "finishing touches and minor debugging."

In this blog, Pedercini defended his AI use by pointing out that Future? No Thanks! "satirizes generative AI and the careless ways it can be used," adding that the "100% no-AI stance" adopted by many game developers "is very recent, and the game was being developed before a consensus emerged." He also cited his role as an academic and game design teacher, stating "I have to look into these tools which most of my students use, and I was trying to figure out if there are non-brain-rotting ways to do so."

Yet it seems these arguments failed to convince Pedercini's audience, as yesterday he published another blog post revealing he has now removed the offending TTS voice lines, replacing them with lines by human actors. Apparently, these lines were "recorded earlier this year," but Pedercini opted not to use them because he "thought the actual uncanny text-to-speech was funnier in that context."

Although Pedercini has removed the lines, he's clearly not happy about it. In the second blog, he stated that he believes that "the game is worse not, but only, like, 0.001% worse." He also included a "personal update" through which he responded more broadly to the backlash.

"Somebody from Bluesky (the Twitter/X clone) dragged me due to a post disclosing what I foolishly thought a minor use of generative-AI in Future? No Thanks!" he explained. "I gave versions of that statement multiple times before, whenever asked by festivals and events." He also pointed out that, per Valve's updated AI disclosure rules, "Steam doesn't require disclosure of generative AI for things like code assistance, so many people assume their favorite indie games don't use AI at all just because the developers stay mum".

The post then took a weirder turn. Pedercini admitted that his original blog "was not a good post," and that he thought "nobody would read it", before claiming that his AI disclosure resulted in "more insults than the time at the height of GamerGate when Adam Baldwin unleashed his half million followers on me." He followed this by linking to a list of game developers that reject generative AI, claiming that "all studios" who haven't disclosed genAI use are "using it for coding in some capacity" and began his signoff with "I drank from the chalice of blood. Nothing will ever redeem me and my cursed little game."

As for what to make of all this (at least, the bits that aren't about drinking blood), I can sort-of understand Pedercini attempt at deploying TTS voice lines for satirical purposes, and he's correct in saying that TTS has a history that goes back further than modern LLMs. If that was all the genAI in the game, it would be more defensible.

But the fact he's also used generative coding tools for clearly non-satirical purposes is much harder to defend. Also, if you're making a game that satirises generative AI, the primary audience for which is going to be people who are avowedly against generative AI, it's probably prudent to ensure that the creation of said game is as far removed from generative AI as possible.

Yet among the references to gamergate and accusing the entire industry of secretly using AI, Pedercini did make two other points worth noting. First, he said that players who bought Future? No Thanks and "feel betrayed" by his use of AI can request a refund by emailing their Paypal or Venmo information to him. Second, he promised that his next project "will be completely hand-coded", as he had already determined that "AI-assisted programming is bad for me."

The death of BioWare has provoked a whole lot of tributes, memorialisation, and plain old nostalgia as all sorts of people come together to remember the bangers the erstwhile king of RPGs put out in its prime. CD Projekt Red, imsim founding father Warren Spector, and we here at PCG have all been trading BioWare memories (and sometimes lamenting the influence of EA, which acquired the studio back in 2007).

But the BioWare classics were big enough bangers to transcend videogames in their influence. Over on Bluesky, award-winning sci-fi and fantasy writer Nora Jemisin (better known as NK Jemisin) has been mourning the studio too.

"RIP Bioware. The [Mass Effect] and [Dragon Age] games were a literal inspiration, and I can't count how many times I've replayed my faves," Jemisin wrote. "I made lifelong friends on ME3 Multiplayer. I still think Jennifer Hepler is the best game writer I've seen, and Jennifer Hale's the best VA."

Hepler was a long-time Dragon Age writer who "was pretty much in charge of the dwarf origin story" in Origins, and also shaped much of the setting's dwarven culture in general. Jennifer Hale, meanwhile, is Jennifer Hale: Dynaheir, Mazzy Fentan, Bastila Shan, the female Commander Shepard, and plenty else. Many people, myself included, first became aware of Hale through her contributions to BioWare's RPGs.

"Watching what's happening to the game industry [right now] is so frustrating," Jemisin continued. "It was the goose that laid the golden eggs, guys. All you had to do was not kill it." Alas, every new year brings bigger and more expensive games that demand bigger and more dramatic returns. When they fail to bring them in? It's devs who suffer, as evidenced by the swingeing bout of layoffs that have afflicted the industry over the last several years. Rarely ever touches the executives, though. Funny how that works.

The whistle has blown. The belts have stopped. The furnace is silent and cold. After 14 years of continual development, Factorio has received its final major update.

Developer Wube Software revealed that update 2.1 would be the last significant patch for its genre-defining factory building sim back in May, with the team deciding the game had "reached a good place to conclude active game development". The decision comes two years after Wube released Factorio's remarkable Space Age expansion, which lets players take their industrialisation efforts into the stars and across four wildly different alien planets.

If you were hoping Wube might sign off on Factorio on a similarly spectacular note, you may be disappointed. In its latest Friday Facts blog, the developer reiterates that 2.1 "isn't about new planets, enemies or research trees," and instead delivers "a big collection of quality of life, small features, polish, and the things we wanted to for 2.0 but didn't have time for."

This doesn't mean 2.1 has nothing of interest, however. Quite the opposite. The primary changes revolve around the space logistics introduced by Space Age, with Wube making it easier to ferry goods up into space and between planets. Rockets, for instance, can now carry multiple different items rather than just one thing, making it considerably easier to get space platforms built. On top of that, platforms can also transfer items between one another in orbit and automatically import items from all available locations.

Also on the space logistics front, Wube has added a constructable unloading bay that can be attached to landing pads, allowing inserters to pull out items and place them directly onto belts, into trains and so forth. This should make interplanetary logistics a bit easier.

There are also a bunch of non-Space Age related changes. Most interesting is an overhaul to the Biters that attack your base. Wube has altered the game so that biter expansion grouping scales with evolution, to ensure that clearing out biters poses a "meaningful challenge rather than lots of tiny annoying nests." Biters will also "choose more natural locations" to build new habitats and will expand their territory regardless of whether the player chooses to explore the map early.

Elsewhere, the update reintroduces fluid mixing prevention, makes some tweaks to Space Age's Quality system, and adds snazzy new graphics for assembling machines, oil refineries, rocket silos and heat exchangers. Finally, the patch adds a new rendering system that makes it easier for pumps to connect to rail fluid wagons. This might just be the thing I'm most excited about, because setting up fluid pumps is always an enormous faff.

While we may see some smaller patches in the future, 2.1 marks the definitive end of development for Factorio. As for what Wube's plan is going forward, the studio said it was working on some new prototypes back in May, but it stressed that "there will not be anything to share for a long time." For now, we'll just have to settle for playing one of the greatest games ever made.

I'm beginning to wonder whether Star Wars Galaxies Restoration can still be considered accurately named, given the community-driven revival project has gone so far beyond keeping SOE's 2003 MMO up and running. Previous updates have already added huge features like a new Jedi system and a galactic civil war. Now, the latest patch overhauls numerous aspects of the game, including a massive upgrade to its visuals.

Star Wars Galaxies Restoration: A New Dawn differs slightly from those previous updates. Where earlier patches have centred around one big new feature, A New Dawn is composed of various ideas suggested by members of the Restoration team. "We've expanded our team, adding 13 new team members to our project" the Restoration team wrote in a press release. "We asked everyone: work on something that they loved about Galaxies, and showcase that to the world."

This approach has produced an array of changes both large and small. The headline update is a game client upgrade that adds support for DirectX 12. This enables a bunch of snazzy graphical enhancements, including volumetric fog, clouds and atmosphere, a new water shader, greatly improved terrain distances, and support for upscaling tech like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS.

Beyond these visual changes, two major features of Galaxies have been overhauled. The first of these is the planet Kashyyyk, home to the Wookiees. The forest planet—which was the setting for Galaxies' second expansion Revenge of the Wookiees—has been given "new and revamped instances" as well as a rebalance to everything that was introduced back in 2005. The second feature (or to be more accurate, features) getting a rework are the Scout & Ranger professions, which have been given new traps, advanced creature tracking, and "expanded camp functionality" that includes a whole new prestige system.

Elsewhere, the Restoration team has given pets and mounts some TLC, including the implementation of mounted combat (both melee and ranged), while creature taming is more interactive. Player cities can be improved to a higher tier, while the Doctor profession should now be a little less passive. Finally, the Restoration team has introduced a drag-and-drop interface for moving furniture, so you no longer have to adjust your space sofa's position by typing in coordinates.

A New Dawn is being released today. If you fancy checking it out, Star Wars Galaxies: Restoration is completely free to play, and can be downloaded via the project's website.

The closure of BioWare has not come as a huge surprise. The LGBTQ-inclusive developer of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, which hadn't managed to transmute development mayhem into sales success and whose games aren't ideal environments for loot boxes, did not seem likely to be admired by its new owners, Saudi Arabia and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Employees at the legendary RPG studio started working on their resumes as soon as the acquisition was announced.

But even if BioWare's new owners had been miscellaneous investors rather than Saudi royalty, the outlook would not have been good: This is what private equity does.

Public companies are of course plenty capable of blowing things up all on their own. EA's pre-acquisition attempt to turn BioWare into a live-service shooter studio was one of the great missteps of the live service goldrush, and Microsoft's pursuit of shareholder value has led to thousands of layoffs and numerous game cancellations.

But there is a particular, systematic way that leveraged private equity acquisitions consume companies rather than nurturing them. In the wake of BioWare's closure and 400 layoffs across EA, we have updated our previously-reported overview of the process that has led to the demise of a number of game studios and other companies.

How private equity acquisitions work

Ostensibly, the goal of a private equity acquisition is to optimize the bought-out company's performance for long-term returns, tapping underutilized potential—like EA's mobile business—to increase profits. But private equity firms have gained a sinister reputation thanks to a counter-intuitive strategy by which firms cannibalize their own acquisitions to extract maximum profits at the expense of the acquired company and its workforce.

That grisly process begins with the leveraged buyout, the most common form of private equity acquisition.

"A leveraged buyout just means the company is bought using a combination of borrowed money, or debt, and private equity," Kiplinger senior investing editor Karee Venema told PC Gamer last year. "The purchased company's balance sheet is used as collateral against the loans taken out to purchase it."

In other words, the "leverage" in the leveraged buyout is debt. Crucially, the collateral for that debt is the assets of the acquired company, not of the private equity firm itself. The investors are able to limit how much capital they have to supply for the buyout, while limiting their financial risk if repaying the loan—in EA's case, a $20 billion loan from JP Morgan—proves insurmountable. The private equity firm might have agreed to the terms of the loan, but repaying it becomes the purchased company's responsibility.

Reading that might produce a faint, dissonant tingle in the back of your mind. You might be wondering, "If private equity firms can take out loans that only their companies are responsible for, could they bleed more money out of a valuable company than they paid and avoid any consequences when that company goes bankrupt?"

And you'd be right to wonder, because that's exactly what private equity firms have become infamous for doing.

If you're not terribly concerned about a company's long-term survival, there are myriad ways to drain it of as much value as possible. As the Guardian wrote in 2024, private equity firms have made a habit of hollowing out company workforces and raising prices to pull in unsustainable profit margins, aiming to cut loose before the resulting decline in product quality tanks sales and consumer sentiment. Others have liquidated company assets, selling off real estate, subsidiaries, and intellectual property to enrich the firms' investors.

Sometimes, those sold assets will end up driving the company further into debt through "sale-leaseback agreements," where the firm will arrange for the company to sell its real estate properties, pocketing the profits while the company is forced to pay rent to continue using its own business space. Meanwhile, the firm is likely extracting additional "management fees": standard 2-and-20 terms see firms taking an annual 2% of a managed company's assets and 20% carried interest on all profits above a certain margin, while the company might face additional monitoring fees, transaction fees, and more.

Private equity has maimed retail franchises like Party City. It has brutalized digital media outlets like the Gizmodo Media Group and demolished local news across the US. It's left hospitals full of bats and increased mortality in retirement homes. A report using S&P data found that in 2024, private equity-backed companies accounted for more than 10% of all corporate bankruptcies and over 50% of bankruptcies with over $500 million in liabilities—but "despite their role in precipitating bankruptcies, private equity firms often emerge financially unscathed."

"There have certainly been instances of this—the 2017 bankruptcy of Toys 'R' Us is top of mind for me," Venema said. "But there have been successful private equity buyouts, too."

Hilton, for example, was arguably better off in 2018 when Blackstone sold its remaining stake from its 2007 LBO—sometimes called "the best LBO ever" in financial circles. And Dell, Venema said, went from a $25 billion buyout in 2013 to being valued today at nearly $100 billion after going public again in 2018.

But in the games industry, we've seen other cases where private equity has caused carnage. Just this week, in addition to BioWare's closure and hundreds of layoffs at EA, Scum developer Gamepires announced that it's laying off employees after being acquired eight months ago by the Emona Capital-backed Splash Damage Group. Just a few weeks before acquiring Gamepires, Splash Damage had performed its own layoffs in November 2025, only two months after it had been purchased in its own private equity acquisition.

EA's uncertain future

EA's fate may not be as dramatic as that of Toys 'R' Us. Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in gaming in recent years, and EA's sports games and shooters are opportunities for profit and global influence, even as triple-A gaming struggles with enormous budgets and increased competition for attention.

What we know for now is that, after laying off around 400 people, EA is continuing development of Marvel's Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi entry, as well as a Sims game codenamed "Project Evergreen"—though after BioWare's shuttering, Sims players are understandably concerned about what ideological pressures EA's new owners will exert on its developers.

EA Sports is of course not going anywhere, and Battlefield 6 and Apex will get continued support. And EA has confirmed that Respawn and DICE are collaborating on a new project, rumored to be the next Star Wars Battlefront.

But if EA still has any capacity to support the development of games outside of the most mainstream, highly-monetizable categories, it's tough to imagine it lasting.

Electronic Arts shuttered BioWare earlier this week, and that sucked. A concept trailer for the Mass Effect game the studio had in development subsequently leaked, and that made everyone feel even worse because—keeping in mind that it was an early-development concept piece—it looked really good.

YouTuber Dantics has now revealed more about what BioWare was actually working on, which he claims to be aware of because he was part of the Mass Effect community council, meaning he "saw what BioWare was building, and provided feedback during development."

We haven't directly confirmed Dantics' role on the council, although others on social media have vouched for him, and BioWare community councils are definitely a real thing: The studio has referenced them in past updates, and they can also be seen in credits for games including Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Members of the ME5 council aren't known, but Mass Effect veteran Michael Gamble, the project lead on the next game, follows Dantics on X.

So, suitably caveated: Dantics said in a post on X that the next Mass Effect game was set 600 years after the Reaper War, and would put players in the role of a customizable N7 agent who would be "a cross between John Wick and James Bond." The galaxy in this future timeline was divided into three major factions: Humans, Batarians, Krogan, and others in one alliance, the "Council Races"—Asari, Salarians, and Turians—forming the second bloc, and the Geth emerging as the galaxy's third superpower. Instead of an existential crisis like the Reaper invasion, the new game would take place amidst a "galactic Cold War."

Dantics also said there would be connections between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, that there would be "brutal close-range executions"—certainly something I want from my heroic space opera RPGs—that "romance wasn't being sanitized," which in the wake of Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 I assume means the full monty, and that Liara would return as a powerful Asari matriarch.

In a separate video, Dantics said the new game was being designed to accommodate all three Mass Effect endings, rather than committing to one of them as canon: 600 years into the future, the Reapers are "outdated tech," and thus not nearly the danger they were back in Shepard's day, and advances in cybernetics, which would be in common use, fit the synthesis ending. And if your Shepard opted to just blow everything up and survived the war, well, he didn't survive the passage of 600 years, although his "legacy" would have lived on.

I'm always a little iffy on fictional settings that extend themselves centuries into the past or future, and yet don't seem to meaningfully change: It bugged me in KOTOR, and it bugs me here. 600 years is a long time, but everyone's still walking around wearing the same clothes, shooting the same guns, and flying the same ships. Six centuries of technological evolution, and what did we get? The Normandy with aftermarket ground effects.

(Forgive the resolution, the trailer is only 720p.)

Anyway, with that off my chest, Dantics' rundown of BioWare's plan for the game sounds pretty great: Similar enough to the Shepard trilogy to bring back fans put off by the poisoned well of Mass Effect: Andromeda, yet distant enough to enable BioWare to do new things. Not all that terribly new, obviously: There's big trouble in the shadowy corners of the cosmos and we're sending our best super-shooter to clean it up (with a little help from his friends), well, that's just Mass Effect. But Mass Effect is what we want, and sometimes you just have to admit that 'more' is good enough.

Alas, it's almost certain there will be no more. Unless EA is willing to offload the Mass Effect property to someone (the government of Canada, perhaps?)—and at this point it's shown no interest in doing so—then this is as close as we'll ever get to it.

One of the big topics of conversation around Onimusha: Way of the Sword when it released last month—and even before that, when Capcom first put out a demo of the game—was whether it was too easy. Viral clips of early game enemies standing around doing nothing gave the impression of a woefully easy game for action fans coming from the likes of Sekiro, Nioh or Ninja Gaiden. Once I played the full game, I found those fears mostly unfounded, but it's true that Onimusha's basic enemies pose little threat compared to its bosses, and mostly serve as fodder for you to cut through as you explore.

Way of the Sword's harder difficulty option being locked behind beating the campaign didn't necessarily endear the game to hardcore action players, either, so I'm not shocked that one of the most popular downloads on the game's Nexusmods page is one that amps up enemy aggression.

But I still mostly loved Onimusha, and didn't find myself craving the brutal difficulty of Sekiro or Nioh while I was playing it. With more than a month of hindsight to see how players have studied the blade, Capcom also seems pretty happy with the level of challenge it settled on.

"We've been looking at the data that comes back from people playing, so we can see where people are struggling and how they're progressing through the game. What we've seen in the trends in the data is that it's close to what we set out to achieve, in terms of difficulty," director Satoru Nihei said in an interview with PC Gamer.

Nihei elaborated that Capcom has observed players being able to progress through the story, but not entirely without friction.

"There are points where they do stumble, they do die, they do get defeated. But they're able to overcome that and progress. That was what we set out to achieve in terms of pitching the difficulty for the game: We wanted players to be able to progress through the story, but also have some challenge to it, so they get a sense of satisfaction from defeating enemies. It was never an intention for this game to be a particularly difficult game, like those other games you mentioned. We think it's hit the right spot in terms of the difficulty, in terms of where we wanted to place it."

My biggest criticism of Way of the Sword was its length, rather than its level of challenge. Its swordplay feels so good that I don't mind being able to run into a group of hapless enemies milling around the hub world of Kyoto and cut them down in a few seconds, but I did tire of Kyoto's generic sidequests, samey streets and how many times the game ultimately trotted out repeats of some of its boss fights.

Nihei said that Capcom has noted that feedback from other players, too. Ultimately the size of the game came from the priorities the dev team set out to meet early in development.

"We really wanted to have a game that was around the 20 hour mark. We didn't want to have a title that would be too small, but also looking at open world games that are 40 hours-plus, we didn't want to drag it out to that extent. So from the beginning there was this clear goal of … a mostly linear experience, and then we have the exploration elements for people who want to engage with them. That was what we set out to shoot for in terms of giving players enough volume to enjoy."

As for how many times you fight bosses like Byakue and Dohatsu-ten?

"We understand that some people might find fighting the same bosses to be a little draining, and it would've obviously been nice for us to be able to make a greater variety of bosses," Nihei said. "But also, at Capcom we want to make these very engaging, fun encounters that people can enjoy fighting again and again and again, so that was what we were aiming for when we created those bosses. But we've definitely heard the feedback."

Arkane Lyon may soon be facing closure, according to a new report by French site Le Monde, which says a deadline to find a buyer for the studio will land on November 13, at which point Microsoft could close the studio outright. Microsoft has since extended that deadline by a month, however, so it can continue to pursue alternative options.

Arkane Lyon was caught up in this year's vortex of Xbox layoffs, announced in July, which will see roughly 3,200 people put out of work. Xbox also dumped four studios: Double Fine, Compulsion Games, and Undead Labs all went independent (and almost immediately laid off large numbers of employees) while Hellblade developer Ninja Theory appears to be closing outright. Because Arkane is based in France, Xbox couldn't just drop the hammer on it. Instead, it began a legally-required consultation process "to review potential strategic options."

The Le Monde report says that on July 16, 10 days after the Xbox layoffs were announced, Arkane management informed employees that Xbox intended to close the studio. France's "Florange Law," however, requires companies with more than 1,000 employees who want to close a facility to undertake a search for a buyer first.

The deadline for that requirement in Arkane's case is November 13, after which Xbox will presumably be free to close the studio. That option is definitely on the table: The Le Monde report says documents signed in July and published on a French government website on August 10 specifically reference "the plan for the complete and permanent cessation of the company's activities" and "the subsequent plan for the dismissal of all employees for economic reasons."

The report also says the Printemps Écologique and the Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV) unions were seeking to have the November consultation deadline extended to allow for redundancy negotiations and the buyer search to continue, and that has now happened.

"We have extended the consultation period by one additional month as we explore options, including finding a partner to support the studio through the development work still ahead," a Microsoft representative told PC Gamer, referring to the Marvel's Blade game currently in development at Arkane. "This is a defined extension, and we remain committed to keeping the Works Council informed throughout the process."

Regarding the documents referencing the planned closure of Arkane should a buyer not be found, the rep said that they "are part of the required consultation process and do not represent a final decision."

The Le Monde report says 217 people are employed by Arkane. Sources close to the studio say that despite being announced three years ago, at the 2023 Game Awards, Marvel's Blade still has years to go before development will be complete.

I'm always on the lookout for a new daily game I can play on my phone because, quite honestly, I'll do just about anything to delay getting out of bed for just a few more minutes in the morning. If you're into games like Wordle but are looking for an interesting new twist, here's a pitch:

Wordle, but it's about pricing used cars

Congratulations on your new job at The Daily Lowball, a used car lot where you have to prove to your boss that you know how much second-hand vehicles are worth. Each day in the puzzle, you're served up five real cars complete with photos and stats: the make and model, what year it's from, how many miles it's got on it, and how much it sold for when it was new.

Then you enter a guess how much you think each used car was sold for on the date shown. You're graded from A-F on your guesses by your virtual boss, and if you want to keep your daily streak intact, you'd better be accurate. Perform poorly enough on any given day, or string a few bad days together, and you're fired—you'll have to start your streak over.

It's an easy game to grasp but boy, we here at PC Gamer sure stink at it. My first day on the lot wasn't so smooth after I completely misjudged the resale price of a 2014 Audi Allroad Quattro and utterly biffed my guess on a cherry red 2005 Dodge Neon SRT-4. I did a little better on the 2008 Mercury Grand Marquis and the 2001 Porsche Boxter, and actually nailed the 2001 GMC Yukon. That gave me a C average for the day, so at least my streak has begun.

The other members of PC Gamer I sent the puzzle to didn't fare that well, either. I won't name and shame but there were two Ds and one F among my coworkers. If I'm the lone car guy at PCG, we're all in trouble.

Turns out it's fun to peer at used cars and try to figure out what they're worth, or at least what some real-world person thought they were worth when they bought them. And questions abound while I played a few more past puzzles, like "How does someone only have 8,000 miles on their 1985 Mazda RX-7? What, do they live in a walkable city or something? Insanity."

The site has a few other daily car-based games, like "Steal or Bad Deal" where you judge whether someone paid an acceptable amount for a used car or got ripped off, "Higher or Lower" where you're presented with two cars and have to guess which is more expensive, and a licence plate slot machine game where you try to roll a rare plate every day. Check out The Daily Lowball for yourself, and feel free to share your results in the comments.

Excitement over the Total War: Shogun 2 remaster turned to a very different emotion when it launched and turned out to be quite bad—so bad that Sega pulled it from sale just a couple days later. Now, Roger Collum, vice president of Total War at developer Creative Assembly, has posted an update on the situation in the Total War subreddit (via RPS), saying that the studio, like the fans, are "angry and disappointed" about the state of the game—which he says is not really CA's fault.

"This was not a Creative Assembly developed game," Collum wrote. "It wasn’t subject to our same internal reviews and quality assurance. We took our eyes off its external development, with all our teams focused on our next big projects. However, whatever the development arrangements, Total War is our franchise and our name is on it.

"The studio is full of craft people who care deeply about the experiences we give to our players. Shogun 2—CE did not meet that bar. We have to own that and we have to fix it."

Collum also addressed complaints about the apparent use of generative AI in the remaster, saying that Creative Assembly is a "craft studio," and that while it uses AI tools for tasks like "analysis, debugging, or speedy prototyping," it does not use generative AI to create in-game assets. "We demand the same of any external developers we work with," he wrote. "The situation with Shogun 2: Complete Edition is being investigated."

Collum didn't name the external developer of the Shogun 2 remaster, but the Steam page lists Warsaw-based Mataboo as the second studio on the project. Mataboo's website says it provides "complete end-to-end game development support," with services ranging from design and tool development to porting, optimization, compliance Q&A, and maintenance, on both PC and consoles. The studio has previously worked on games including The Blood of Dawnwalker, Silent Hill 2, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, The Medium, and numerous others.

Collum's statement doesn't appear to be going down perfectly smoothly among Total War fans. Many responses say that Creative Assembly is ultimately responsible for the game that goes out the door, and that the issues in the Shogun 2 remaster aren't small, intermittent, or otherwise easy to miss. Others point out that Creative Assembly's promotional efforts included a pre-launch livestream in which employees enthused about the game, apparently without having played it to any meaningful extent.

Collum concluded by asking fans not to direct their anger at individual developers. "As a team, we want to be transparent with our communications as much as possible, but that cannot be at the expense of the safety of our people," he wrote. "Please help keep Total War’s community spaces constructive and safe for everyone.

"I’ve said it before: when the team does well, it’s all about them. When we get it wrong, it’s on me. You absolutely have the right to be mad, and to criticise us, but direct it at me. We know we must earn your trust by making good games, and crucially, by how we respond when we get things wrong. We’re human, we will get things wrong, and I promise as long as I’m here, when that happens, we’ll hold our hands up and try to make it right."

"A small team of senior developers" from Creative Assembly are now working with Sega and the unnamed external studio to figure out where to go from here.

If you spent much time online this week, you likely noticed how it briefly felt like the end of days as government websites, game marketplaces, and furry image boards alike were pulled offline in a scramble to address newly-discovered security vulnerabilities in PHP—a scripting language used by roughly 70% of the world's websites, according to some estimates.

It was a harrowing incident, revealing flaws in foundational internet infrastructure that might have turned some of the most popular web destinations into attack vectors. And in an interview with Reuters, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says we should expect to see similar episodes on a regular basis in the years ahead as LLM technologies accelerate the discovery of exploitable security vulnerabilities.

Prince said that Cloudflare—a major cloud networking and cybersecurity provider that a number of websites rely on—is aware of "a bunch of additional severe vulnerabilities that are present in other pieces of critical software" like those that triggered the PHP panic earlier this week. And as both cybersecurity experts and bad actors task LLMs with identifying previously unrecognized weaknesses in the core technologies of the internet, there will likely be more to follow.

"I think we're going to have a couple years where every single week it's going to feel like the sky is falling," Prince said.

Previously, the rate at which exploitable flaws in software could be identified was limited by the finite number of experts able and willing to devote the necessary time and attention. Likewise for those seeking to weaponize those flaws.

For a user directing a workforce of LLM agents, however, those limitations are less relevant. Wiz Research, one of the firms that identified the recent PHP exploits with the assistance of LLM tools, wrote in a blog detailing its findings that "the economics of both discovery and exploitation" have changed.

"Frontier models were critical to making this process practical, enabling us to develop and adapt working exploits across multiple applications in hours," Wiz Research said. "As the time and expertise required for this work decrease, complexity may no longer provide a meaningful barrier, changing how we define what is vulnerable in practice."

But while Prince expects busy months ahead for those whose job it is to address the rising tide of LLM-empowered exploits, he said it will—in the long term—lead to more secure software as those newly-identified vulnerabilities are patched.

"The reality is, we're going to get a lot of this stuff cleaned up," he said.

In the short term, however, my advice is to stay on top of your browser and app updates. In the years ahead, some extra paranoia won't hurt.

Early BioWare

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Dragon Age

Mass Effect

I have never really thought much about gemstones or minerals, which is weird considering one of my all-time favourite games is Minecraft, in which I spend a bulk of my time strip-mining. But Abyssal Lapidary has made me realise that there is so much more to the dirt than just coal.

In the demo for Abyssal Lapidary I got to begin my stint as a lapidarist, someone who cuts, shapes, grinds, and polishes minerals to make pretty gemstones. The only problem is, like I said before, I don't really know stones.

Abyssal Lapidary doesn't exactly drop you in the deep end but it does expect you to pick up with the art of making and selling gemstones rather quickly. My first step was searching around the rather large house I'd found myself in which was apparently part of a declining business but it seemed rather nice; it even had a balcony.

Most of the doors downstairs were locked, part of the later progression of the game, the few things I did have access to included a station for fixing tools, breaking rocks, and a booth to talk to customers.

Throughout the day people will turn up to my humble business either looking to buy some precious gemstones or selling minerals and rocks that I can mine into. There's also a guy looking for mysterious artefacts, someone trying to give me a loan (suspicious), and a nice lady selling tea. I'm not 100% sure about what the tea does yet but I buy it anyways.

The rest of my day was spent sitting at my desk carefully hammering rocks into smaller rocks, looking to see if they had anything precious inside. I found some ordinary apatite, fine apatite, and crude duskstone; yeah I'm pretty good at this rock thing.

After selling my wares I managed to earn enough renown to apply for my Silver License which allowed me to access the gem faceting table; this is what I'm here for.

Turning regular clumps of gemstones into cut gems not only adds quite a bit of monetary value to them, it's also quite a lot of fun. The faceting table is essentially a metal sanding machine that you press gems into to whittle them into a desired shape like an old single cut, table cut, or point cut; there are likely more but this is all I have access to right now, and as I'll reiterate I don't know jack about gems.

Grinding the gems down can be surprisingly hard as there's only a small window in which you can cut them perfectly, grind them for too long or not long enough and they'll lose a lot of value. And I cannot afford to lose money right now.

Abyssal Lapidary can be quite slow at times, it's helped by the fact that you can fast forward time to stop you from just milling around or staring out the window for six hours. I'm sure there'll be more ways to fill your day as rooms and work benches open up around the store, but I honestly don't mind its methodical, relaxing approach to procuring, mining, and fixing up gemstones. Who knows? Perhaps by the time the full game launches I'll be able to tell a garnet from a chrysoberyl.

Archetype Entertainment has unveiled a new look for the protagonist of Exodus, its upcoming sci-fi RPG. We at PCG didn't love Jun Aslan's original face, but it sounds like there was more widespread discontent over his supposedly homely mug.

After a brief intro by studio GM Chad Robertson, we got a brief cinematic trailer of the new Jun⁠—with a little cameo by Matthew McConaughey, in case you forgot he's lending his voice to this game. And, I mean, yeah: Jun's a real prettyboy now. My man's looking like an industry plant. Cheekbones that could cut glass.

Previously, Jun was, perhaps, a little schlubbier, but only really by the standards of showbiz. I contend that he realistically could have been someone's workplace crush. He was an LA 6.5, but a Chicago 9. Prettier than most people you know, I'd wager. I didn't love Jun's original look, but I figured, hey, it's an RPG. I'll just mess with the sliders.

But it sounds like we're restricted to one face per sex in Exodus, based on the new trailer's description: "You can play Jun Aslan as male or female, and options like hairstyles, hair color, facial hair, and tattoos let you add your own personal touch." That sounds reminiscent of the facial presets from Baldur's Gate 3, but with only two characters instead of that game's two dozen or so.

I like making a cutie pie RPG character as much as the next guy, but now that he's gone, I find something endearing about the way Jun looked before he got his work done. You were beautiful just the way you were, honey. On a more meta level, I wish studios would double down when there's a backlash over minor aesthetic stuff: I don't even have a horse in the s&box race, but I prefer that game's original, controversial, sausage character model to the new realistic ones.

At the same time, as a clear attempt at a Mass Effect successor, Exodus has to live up to the generational good looks of Dutch Model Mark Vanderloo⁠⁠—BioWare based the default male Commander Shepard face on him. Even with a full character creation suite, it's hard to justify a custom Shep who always winds up looking like a potato man when the real Handsome Squidward is right there for the taking.

What do you think? Should Jun have kept his original face, or does his new look suit him? Sound off in the comments (and we've got a poll after the newsletter block).

I've been having a grand old time playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 with an RX 9070 XT, but there'll be plenty of people wanting to run the game on older hardware. So, I decided to dust off my old and much-beloved workhorse, the RTX 3060 Ti, and see how it does in the new Activision shooter. I've been quite pleasantly surprised by the results.

Which is good news, considering Activision lists this graphics card, alongside the AMD RX 6600 XT and Intel Arc B580, as the 'recommended' ones to "run at 90 fps in multiplayer on High graphics settings."

I've found this actually pans out, provided you're at 1080p or are fine enabling Quality upscaling at 1440p.

RTX 3060 Ti performance in COD: MW4

As you can see from the chart below, at 1440p native, the game struggles to reach this 90 fps target even on the Minimum preset. And as I noted in my general performance overview—which, by the way, you should read if you want to know which specific settings to alter to improve your frame rate—the Balanced preset offers the best bang for your buck by far, as going up to Ultra lowers your frame rate significantly.

COD MW4 preset performance - 1440p - RTX 3060 Ti

Frame rates were taken at 1440p native, using an RTX 3060 Ti, Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

Avg fps

1% low fps

Minimum

70

59

Basic

66

59

Balanced

64

56

Ultra

48

43

Extreme

43

36

020406080

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Data

Product	Value
Minimum	70 Avg fps, 59 1% low fps
Basic	66 Avg fps, 59 1% low fps
Balanced	64 Avg fps, 56 1% low fps
Ultra	48 Avg fps, 43 1% low fps
Extreme	43 Avg fps, 36 1% low fps

As with higher-end rigs, using the Balanced preset seems to give the best bang for your buck here, balancing visuals and performance. The RTX 3060 Ti maintains just above 60 fps on average when using the Balanced preset without upscaling.

I captured these frame rates during the same repeated 30-second run in a campaign mission, but I've found they translate pretty well to DMZ, although a few frames are shaved off in that mode, and a few additional are shaved off when looking into the distance across the expansive map.

The trick to get buttery smooth frame rates with a GPU like the RTX 3060 Ti is to enable DLSS upscaling in Quality mode.

Enabling Quality upscaling takes frame rates from just above 60 to around 90 or even 100 when using the Balanced preset, if you opt for the older CNN model. I didn't notice much of a difference in visuals between CNN and Transformer models, so I'd be opting for the former just for the extra handful of frames, but either way you're getting something very playable.

DLSS Quality vs native at 1440p

This compares playing the game at 1440p native to the two different versions of DLSS upscaling, set to Quality.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

Avg fps

1% low fps

DLSS CNN Quality

97

86

DLSS Transformer Quality

89

78

Native 1440p

64

56

0255075100

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Data

Product	Value
DLSS CNN Quality	97 Avg fps, 86 1% low fps
DLSS Transformer Quality	89 Avg fps, 78 1% low fps
Native 1440p	64 Avg fps, 56 1% low fps

Enabling DLSS on Quality turns gameplay from playable into a very smooth experience, whether that's using the CNN or Transformer model.

All of the above is speaking to 1440p, but if you have a 1080p monitor or don't mind dropping to 1080p on your 1440p monitor, you can get some very nice frame rates from a card like the RTX 3060 Ti. As you can see from my final chart below, you can push about 130 fps on average in the campaign if you play at 1080p with DLSS enabled, again on the Balanced preset.

Comparing 1440p to 1080p performance

This chart compares performance at 1440p to 1080p using an RTX 3060 Ti, with upscaling enabled and disabled.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

Avg fps

1% low fps

1440p Native

64

56

1440p DLSS Quality (CNN)

97

86

1080p Native

92

81

1080p DLSS Quality (CNN)

131

113

037.575112.5150

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Data

Product	Value
1440p Native	64 Avg fps, 56 1% low fps
1440p DLSS Quality (CNN)	97 Avg fps, 86 1% low fps
1080p Native	92 Avg fps, 81 1% low fps
1080p DLSS Quality (CNN)	131 Avg fps, 113 1% low fps

1080p with DLSS enabled performs very smoothly, suitable for a 144 Hz or 165 Hz monitor. Playing at 1440p with DLSS enabled gives about the same performance as playing at 1080p native (DLSS disabled).

There are two caveats here, though. The first is that I wouldn't recommend doing this if you're on a 27-inch, 1440p monitor because it can look quite blurry. I'd just stick to 1440p with DLSS enabled instead.

The second caveat is that, in DMZ, I found frame rates to be a little lower than the ones I recorded in my runs of the campaign mission. But I'd still stick to those settings I just described. At 1440p with DLSS enabled in DMZ I get about 80–95 fps, and at 1080p with DLSS enabled I get about 110 fps.

The settings I'd use in COD: MW2 with an RTX 3060 Ti

This is the resolution and upscaling combo setup I'd personally use to actually play the game if I had a 27-inch, 1440p monitor: 1440p resolution, DLSS Quality upscaling (CNN), and the Balanced preset. If I was using a 24-inch, 1080p monitor, I'd stick to DLSS Quality (CNN) and the Balanced preset, but obviously have the resolution at 1080p instead. With a smaller 1080p monitor, it's not as blurry to have DLSS enabled even at 1080p.

The final bit of good news is that I've found my frame rate to be pretty consistent, too. With an RTX 3060 Ti, I get frame rates consistently pushing closer to 100 fps than 60 fps at 1440p with DLSS Quality enabled and using the Balanced preset.

Comparing higher to lower detail quality

High detail quality on the left, normal on the right. Notice the yellow/orange tree loses all detail in the right-hand image.

High detail quality

Normal detail quality

A couple of final tips. One thing I'd recommend is avoiding the lower presets, and especially the bottom 'Minimum' one, as I found graphical fidelity takes a big hit when dropping that low. Everything is much more crisp at Balanced.

And finally: if you're okay sacrificing just a small handful of frames here and there, try turning your 'detail quality' setting up to High. I've found this eliminates some of the buggy, blocky trees and shrubbery you occasionally run into, and makes them look like actual trees.

I was genuinely surprised by the re-release of the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D earlier this year. A chip I thought long dead was back in 10th Anniversary form, after a resurrection process AMD's David McAfee described as "very hard, actually" to our Dave at Computex 2026.

Now AMD's Travis Kirsch has spoken to Japanese outlet Tech+ about more of the thinking behind the re-release, and it seems the idea started at the very top. "Originally, several years ago, I believe Lisa [Su, AMD CEO] was one of the people who suggested reviving the Ryzen 7 5800X3D."

"It was like a final gift to our loyal users who had used our AM4 for almost 10 years, giving them one last chance to upgrade their PCs using DDR4 systems," Kirsch continues. "However, this required restarting the production lines, which took some time. In short, this was planned before the changes in the memory market occurred, and it was not considered as a solution to the DDR5 shortage."

That may be the case, but the timing still worked out pretty well for AMD. DDR5 prices had been surging since October 2025, while the chip's eventual release date of June 25, 2026 put it right in the middle of a difficult year for PC gamers. Many of whom may well have been looking to upgrade older, AM4 rigs without making the switch to the DDR5-only AM5 socket.

Kirsch was also asked about the current shipment ratio of AM4 to AM5 processors. "I cannot give you the exact ratio," he says. "But I can say that AM4, which supports DDR4, remains very strong."

"As you know, AM4 shipments were very stable until we started to see fluctuations in memory prices, while AM5, which supports DDR5, continued to grow," says Kirsch. "In terms of AM4, it continues to perform well. As for AM5, recently we have seen growth in models equipped with 3D V-Cache."

Well, you didn't expect actual figures, did you? And as for future platforms, Kirsch remains similarly cagey about any talk around the AM5 socket's eventual replacement:

"I cannot answer when AM6 will be released, or whether it will even be released at all. However, I would like to explain our strategy. Platform lifespan is paramount for end users. It is important to have the option to simply upgrade the processor three years after purchasing a platform.

"We understand that constantly refreshing the platform is not good for our partners or end users," says Kirsch. "So, when that time comes in the future, we will introduce a new platform, but we don't know when that will be."

AMD's next-generation Zen 6-based CPUs will use the existing AM5 socket, and rumours suggest they'll be pushing clockspeeds to new heights later this year. And as for the chips after that? We're probably looking at 2029 or later. So, there's plenty of time for AM5 to stick around, and who knows—maybe it'll be just as long-lasting as AM4 in the end.

Whether you dismiss it as 'fake frames' or embrace the tech as a real game changer, frame generation has fast become a headlining act of this GPU generation. We've since discovered that not all frame gen (FG) tech is created equal, but AMD has promised to address a key criticism of its own FSR FG.

Earlier this week, AMD's Jack Huynh announced that FSR 4.1 would be shipping early to RX 6000 graphics cards, though that wasn't all. Huynh also announced that improvements to FSR's frame pacing were on the way, too.

Personally, I'm more familiar with Nvidia's approach to FG—especially after unlocking Multi Frame Gen on my RTX 4070 Super earlier this year. AMD's FSR has often been criticised for how it struggles with frame pacing in comparison. Ie, you may have lots of frames , but not every one of them is displayed for a consistent amount of time, making for gameplay that's a different flavour of choppy.

The issue can affect frames both traditionally rendered and generated, and it's been a stumbling block since at least FSR 3. For example, CD Projekt noted gamers may experience micro stutter back when Cyberpunk 2077 got official support for the tech in 2024. As recently as August this year, Hardware Unboxed's testing demonstrated that pacing is still an issue in games that support both FSR 3.1 and FSR 4 (via Videocardz).

It's good to hear that AMD is focusing on this issue, but without a solid timeline or a list of hardware set to enjoy these frame pacing improvements, this week's announcement amounts to little more than, 'We know, and we're working on it!'

Also conspicuously absent was any mention of Multi Frame Generation on AMD GPUs. Currently, AMD's Frame Generation generates one intermediary frame, though third-party developers have managed to crank that far higher. We already know MFG is on the way for AMD hardware, the question is more 'how soon?'

Here's hoping AMD's officially supported frame pacing improvements for FSR arrive before an enterprising third-party can show them how it's done.

Writing (and reading) about PC hardware news at the moment can be downright depressing. Massive price rises. AI everywhere. Disappearing graphics cards. It's just a bit much, you know?

So come and bask in something deliciously old school with me: the release of a good-looking new product you might be able to buy without selling a kidney. Philips says its new 36M4C5500P display is the world's first 36-inch gaming monitor with a 260 Hz refresh rate. Lovely.

This ultrawide's got a curved, 1500R VA panel. Oooooh. A 3440 x 1440 resolution. Ahhhh. And an overclockable refresh rate that makes sense for casual and competitive gamers alike. Stone the crows and call the fire department, it actually looks pretty decent.

Sure, VA panel tech is nothing fancy. And many a curved ultrawide has passed the doors of PC Gamer Towers over the past few years. But a 36-inch panel size is something interesting, filling the gap between your standard 34-inch ultrawides and the more desk-dominating, 39-inch-and-up models.

The specs aren't exactly earth-shattering, but I'm hoping they might push it towards the more affordable end of the market. It's got Display HDR400 certification, dual HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 connectivity, and a tilting stand. Everything you might reasonably need. There's no word on pricing yet, but I've got my fingers crossed.

I even thought we'd make it through the press release without a mention of AI, but no, this display has "AI-enhanced gaming features" including Shadow Boost, Smart Crosshair, Smart Sniper, and Smart MBR sync. Most of which you can likely ignore. No product launch is complete without them, though, I'm sure you'll agree.

In these topsy-turvy times, it's downright refreshing to write about a new gaming product that simply looks nice, without having to bring up the global state of affairs. Many gaming monitors are actually very affordable right now, so if you're scratching around for something to upgrade without breaking the bank, it's products like this that I'd be keeping a close eye on.

There. A properly positive article, and I didn't mention the memory crisis once. Curses!

Can you have too much of a mediocre thing? If I was being unkind, that's the challenge I'd make to the new LG UltraGear Evo 52G930B. What we are talking about here, people, is a monumental 52-inch 5K2K gaming monitor. But it's based on an old-school VA panel.

Yep, not OLED. Not IPS. It doesn't even have mini-LED local dimming. It's just a huge, high-res, VA panel. At 52 inches, it's so big and so expensive it immediately poses another problem. Why wouldn't you just buy a 4K TV?

After all, this LG clocks in at $1,699 or £1,499, which buys you an awful lot of 4K TV here in late 2026. That kind of money puts you in reach of OLED TVs up to around 65 inches. And, like I said, the LG UltraGear Evo 52G930B isn't actually that well specced save for its size and resolution.

There is a counter argument in favour of this huge 52-inch ultrawide beast, and it goes something like this. For starters, this LG has various PC gaming-centric features. Most obviously, that includes 240 Hz refresh and the low latency that promises. But you also get lots of granular controls over image quality settings, such as colour spaces and pixel overdrive.

You likewise wouldn't expect to see the DisplayPort and USB-C interfaces that LG has included. Admittedly, various TVs have at least some of those features. But usually not all. There are also some ergonomic issues to bear in mind. This is a 21:9 aspect 5K2K display. That immediately makes this monitor a touch more usable than a similarly-sized TV.

Put it this way, there's only so tall you can go with a monitor on your desk before it gets a bit ridiculous. What this monitor offers is immense and immersive width with manageable height.

That it's also curved helps. The 1000R curve means it wraps around you from a typical PC gaming position, which is inherently much closer to the panel than you would normally sit when watching TV. The 5K2K resolution also means you're getting better pixel density than a big 4K TV, albeit you're still not getting great pixel density by PC monitor standards. Hold that thought, we'll come back to it.

All that said, the LG UltraGear Evo 52G930B isn't automatically an ergonomic master stroke. I have a pretty big desk and this thing barely fits on it. That extreme 1000R curve means that it isn't just very wide, but also quite deep. And, generally, if you are unconvinced by curved monitors, you really aren't going to like this LG. It's really, really curved.

Anyway, before we come to what kind of actual gaming experience you get from a monster like this, let's cover off a few more speeds and feeds. As I said, there's no local dimming and that means only limited HDR support.

Strictly speaking, there's HDR 600 certification. But without local dimming, there simply isn't the lighting control to deliver HDR visuals. However, you do at least get the intrinsic contrast of a VA panel. LG has rated this one at 4,000:1, which is about three to four times the static contrast that most IPS monitors offer. For the record, SDR brightness is rated at 400 nits.

Meanwhile, to go with the 240 Hz refresh, there's pixel response of 1 ms grey-to-grey. At least, that's the claim. For most VA panels, poor response is perhaps their most obvious shortcoming. And pixel response specs don't always tell the full story. So, we'll see about that.

On, then, to the experience this monster delivers. Out of the box—a particularly laborious process given the sheer scale of the thing—and it immediately feels unwieldy. I used a 49-inch 32:9 ultrawide as my primary display for about 18 months so I am not just familiar with using very large PC monitors, I'm absolutely a fan. But the LG UltraGear Evo 52G930B immediately feels too big.

That's not down to the width, which is comparable to one of those 49-inch ultrawides, but the height and depth. It's all so overwhelming and eats up so much desk space. Of course, the benefit is immersion and, crikey, does this massive monitor dominate your field of view when used at "normal" PC monitor viewing distances.

I think viewing it that close has surely got to be the point. Yes, you could push it back. But then why are you buying such a huge display? That close-up approach doesn't work so well for TVs, first because they are generally flat and that means the edges of the display end up being viewed at quite an acute angle. The other problem is pixel density.

Take a 55-inch 4K TV. That has a pixel density of just 80 pixels per inch, which looks really rough and blocky at PC monitor viewing distances. This LG improves that figure to 107 pixels per inch, or very nearly the same as 109 pixels per inch of a typical 1440p 27-inch monitor.

Okay, that's still not great compared to, for instance, the 138 pixels per inch of a 32-inch 4K monitor, let alone a 27-inch 4K panel. But it's tolerable in terms of things like text quality and overall image detail.

The same goes for the general appearance of this huge VA panel. It's definitely no OLED when it comes to lighting control. But it's punchy and vibrant and has very good contrast for a conventional LCD monitor. It's also pretty well calibrated in its various modes.

The one caveat to that observation is that you cannot enable pixel overdrive when using industry-standard colour spaces including sRGB and PCI-P3. Only the gaming-centric presets support pixel overdrive. The idea is to ensure greater colour accuracy in sRGB and DCI-P3. But, personally, I'd prefer the option to run those modes with overdrive.

Whatever, the most positive aspect of this monitor is definitely immersion. No other monitor I've used so effectively fills your field of view. That's true to an extent that I actually think is borderline impractical for, say, a first person shooter. It's certainly, far, far too big for esports where you want to be able to see pretty much all the screen within a relatively narrow field of view. You're not going to last long if an enemy pops up on the edge of the screen two or three feet outside of your central gaze.

For games that are more about exploration and adventure than precision head shots, on the other hand, let's say something like Witcher III or the Assassin's Creed series, this monitor is positively epic, if possibly a bit exhausting. Again, immersion is a singular experience. But actually having to swivel your head around extensively to see all parts of the screen, is that something you really want to be doing?

In that regard, the faster the action on screen, arguably the less sense this screen makes. Along with the ergonomic issues of actually viewing such a large screen, there's pixel response. And it's not great.

VA panels tend to be weakest when it comes to dark tone response and the LG UltraGear Evo 52G930B is no exception. Even with overdrive maxed out, there's visible smearing. At the same time, the fastest overdrive setting also introduces overshoot and inverse ghosting that's bad enough to be visible, in-game. As VA panels go, the response is fine as opposed to particularly bad. But compared to even an IPS monitor, it's a step down. Compared to OLED, it's absolutely hopeless.

However, for me where this beast really makes sense is strategy games. Frankly, once you've played one of the Total War series rendered across a huge 52-inch 5K2K panel, everything else feels positively puny. The sight of numerous battalions of infantry, regiments of cavalry, rows of siege engines, whatever, sprawling across your field of view is undoubtedly a seminal PC gaming experience.

Another obvious application for a screen like this is driving sims. Okay, the pixel response isn't exactly ideal, but the scale, the ultrawide aspect, and the wrap-around curve makes for one heck of a sim-rig screen.

At this point you're probably getting the impression that the LG UltraGear Evo 52G930B's appeal is pretty niche. And that's about right. As a general purpose PC monitor, it really doesn't make sense.

Certainly, it's miles behind the curve (waahwaah) by most technical metrics. Just about everything else at this price point is OLED these days. So, to have a plain old VA panel that doesn't even have local dimming in this segment of the market launching in 2026 feels like a bit of a throwback.

However, the combination of sheer scale and relatively high resolution does make for a unique proposition and, in at least some positive ways, an experience like no other. Well, almost no other. The obvious comparison here is the even bigger 57-inch VA panel as used by the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 G95NC and Acer Predator Z57.

Right now, you can bag the Samsung for $1,449 on Amazon. Not only is it even bigger, it's far higher resolution at 7,680 x 2,160 pixels and has full array local dimming with over 2,000 zones and therefore some proper HDR capabilites. Similar applies to the Acer, which is largely the same spec and available for $1,599.

Of course, that huge resolution, which is effectively dual-4K, makes for monumental GPU load. Even an RTX 5090 will struggle at times. But the value comparison certainly isn't comfortable for this new LG.

In the end, then, the LG UltraGear Evo 52G930B isn't going to make sense for almost anyone, especially not with something even bigger, higher resolution and more capable available for less money. But if you're gaming in just the right niche, if money doesn't really matter, and if you feel like it, well, what the heck, why not pull the trigger and march those armies across the Nile basin?

According to hardware outlet ChannelGate, the wholesale spot prices of several RTX 50-series graphics cards are on the rise once again in China, which is an ominous indicator for consumer pricing worldwide.

The 16 GB RTX 5080 is said to have increased by around 2000 CNY, which equates to around $300, while the RTX 5070 Ti has seen an increase of around 600 CNY ($90). In the RTX 5080's case, that puts the current wholesale spot price at around 14,500-15,000 yuan, which equates to a truly stunning $2,171-$2,246 range when converted to US dollars.

Retail graphics card pricing has already gone bananas in recent months, with US prices surging to hitherto unthinkable levels. The cheapest RTX 5080 we can currently find is a wallet-aching $1,850, while a mere $70 separates the RTX 5050, RTX 5060, and RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB on our GPU deals page.

Yes, that means the cheapest RTX 5050 we can currently find is $400. That's a silly price for Nvidia's slowest gaming GPU of the current generation.

While the 16 GB RTX 5080 has seen the largest jump in price so far (exacerbated by its reported discontinuation in favour of a 24 GB version), ChannelGate also says that Asus has just updated its pricing policy across the stack.

This amounts to a 1000 yuan ($150) increase for the RTX 5080 16 GB, a 200 yuan ($30) increase for the RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5070, and RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, and a 100-300 yuan increase for all AMD cards.

While some of those increases may seem small, they're an indication that we might be looking at an even grimmer winter for anyone who wants to upgrade their graphics card for reasonable cash. And without a major change, likely a grim 2027, too.

But hey, ChannelGate does give us some info on the expected wholesale price of the mooted RTX 5080 24 GB. The outlet says it could potentially reach 19,999 yuan. That's, err, just under $3,000 at the current exchange rate.

Well, this is all very depressing news. The global memory crisis continues to bite, working alongside GPU production shortages to create a graphics card market that looks increasingly ridiculous as the months go on. At least gaming monitors are still pretty cheap? Silver linings, and all that.

Our month-long RTS tournament is coming to an end. We started with a shortlist of 16 units, and now we're down to the final two—both of which were determined by your votes. This is what democracy is all about, folks! Determining what RTS unit has the right to call itself the greatest unit of all time.

It's been an emotional journey. Dreams shattered. Friendships ruined. Drug tests performed on a member of the clergy. But this is important, worthwhile work. But let's stop faffing around and get stuck in.

The final bracket

Well, it looks like my prediction from last week did not come to pass. A tragedy!

With the humble Peon failing to return from the dead, I was left with only one of my original picks in the running: the unstoppable Pride of Hiigara from Homeworld 2. As it turns out, it's actually quite stoppable. The indomitable Mammoth Tank from Red Alert gave it a beating, winning with 60% of the votes.

I will gracefully accept this defeat. I mean c'mon, the Mammoth Tank is a legend. Could it realistically destroy a mothership that can spit out a fleet of capital ships? Probably not! But this tournament is not determining which unit would win in a fight. "The best" can mean a lot of different things, and there's no denying the Mammoth Tank is awesome.

I do, however, take umbrage with the Priest defeating the Super Star Destroyer. 70% of the votes! This is madness. That wololo-ing thief has no honour. But even though this outcome is ridiculous, I must accept the will of the people. I just hope that was the horrible little man's last victory.

So we're down to two. Mammoth Tank vs Priest. I'm going to give you all until the end of Wednesday (BST) to vote. Can this icon of the Soviet war machine defeat God's pal? We'll find out next week.

Mammoth Tank vs Priest

Mammoth Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert)

God bless these great, trundling beasts—implacable Soviet strength wrought in steel and pig iron.

Mammoth Tanks are unfathomably costly and painfully slow, but whatever. I'm convinced just one of them could probably win the entire RA1 Soviet campaign by itself. Akh-knowledged. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Priest (Age of Empires)

"Wololo." I win. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor

The Genshin Impact 7.2 livestream codes have arrived, providing a bit of bonus currency to use when wishing on the new characters coming in this version. For those who don't know, Hoyoverse runs a livestream every six weeks for its games, showing off the new content coming with the update, but as an added sweetener, it also provides three livestream codes.

Banner wise it looks like we have electro character, Mitya, and also electro, Valeriy. As usual, I'll put the codes down below as they drop during the stream. Make sure to redeem them asap, since livestream codes usually expire within a day or so.

Genshin Impact codes: All current livestream Primogems

• HourOfRuin - 100 Primogems and 10 Mystic Enhancement Ore
• ExpertMitya - 100 Primogems and five Hero’s Wit
• PhotoTime - 100 Primogems and 50,000 Mora

How to redeem Genshin Impact codes

You'll need to reach Adventure Rank 10 to redeem your Genshin livestream codes, but this is relatively easy to achieve if you've just started playing. Once done, there are two methods to claim your codes.

The first is through the game:

1. Launch Genshin Impact
2. Open the in-game menu
3. Select Settings and then Account
4. Click Redeem Now and paste a code into the box
5. Claim your Primogems from the in-game mailbox

Or you can redeem codes online through the redemption website:

1. Navigate to the Genshin Impact code redemption website
2. Enter your info and select character region
3. Place a code in the box and click redeem
4. Grab your rewards via the in-game mailbox