While union members outside Bethesda's Maryland office celebrated a recent Microsoft visit by positioning a field of red flags representing laid-off workers and a giant inflatable rat on the lawn, inside the building CEO Asha Sharma was apparently having a delightful time watching a playthrough of The Elder Scrolls 6. So that's nice.

"The scale and grandeur are incredible", Sharma said, referring to the game and not the huge blow-up rodent covered in scabs.

Sharma was careful to refer to the game's subtitle with a string of asterisks—eight asterisks to be precise, which sent us down a rabbit hole of trying to guess what eight-letter name it could have.

Coming in with 14% of the votes in our subsequent poll on the subject was Sentinel, which is the name of a prominent city on the Iliac Bay and also the kingdom it's the capital of. Sentinel is a strong contender because the rumored development codename for The Elder Scrolls 6 is Guardian, a synonym for Sentinel, and naming the game for a city would make for a nice throwback to The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall—which was also named after a city and is still beloved by hardcore fans of the series.

It's now an ever stronger contender thanks to an easter egg in Starfield, as unearthed on Reddit. During character creation in Bethesda's sci-fi RPG, your employee number is displayed on the bottom of the screen: 190514-2009140512. Divide those numbers into pairs and you get 19, 05, 14, 20, 09, 14, 05, and 12. The 19th letter of the alphabet is S, the fifth letter is E, the 14th letter is N, and you get the idea. Yep, it spells Sentinel.

This might not be the only hint hidden in Starfield. Eagle-eyed watchers noticed a suspicious scratch on a spaceship console in the trailer, and suggested it was shaped like the Iliac Bay, sometimes called Starfall Bay all the way back in the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena. To find any more easter eggs we'd have to go back and replay Starfield, though. Er, you guys have fun with that.

Lord of Undead is a "grim" third-person RPG about building an army of vicious zombies in order to maliciously raze the villages of mortals. The goal is to defeat peace and innocence, all the better for evil to prevail. You also get to build houses. It sounds pretty fun and, as far as I can tell, it's the second most popular game releasing on November 19 behind GTA 6.

Lord of Undead does have some advantages. The most obvious is that GTA 6 isn't coming to PC. It also has the most "Follows" of all Steam games releasing that day. Follows are different to wishlists: to follow a game is to see news and announcements about it in your news and updates feed, but you won't receive a notification when it releases. Wishlist data isn't public, but follows, for some reason, is.

Lord of Undead has a fairly impressive 2,649 follows right now, slightly more than Parry Survivor, which enjoys 2,062. Parry Survivor stars a school-uniformed anime character who must fend off waves of masked boys. It's from the creator of Kunkun League, Black Gunner Wukong and Evolve or Die, all of which have between 150 and 450 "very positive" reviews.

We have other games to look forward to as well: at least 30 more. Cute Country has 736 follows and is described on its Steam page as "super cute cure simulation operation single machine masterpiece" (I think it's basically a city builder with mobile game RPG elements). Then, with 123 follows is Phantom Vice Auto, which Chris Livingston has already written about.

Looking further afield, Man Simulator has a modest 9 follows. It's a "comedy simulator" where you get to be a slobbish middle-aged man: there's law mowing, fishing, hammering, wood chopping, barbequing, beer drinking, and it promises "meme-style presentation and humor".

And it wouldn't be a day on Steam, let alone GTA 6 launch day, without yet another first-person horror game. Flick is "a first-person body-cam horror game scientifically engineered to spike feelings of dread", which may help to alleviate our feelings of FOMO.

What else? Let's just list 'em shall we:

• Lord of Undead
• Parry Survivor
• Cute Country
• Phantom Vice Auto
• Flick
• Moba Team Manager
• Astro Industry Wars
• The Creator: Live Together
• Dig! Dig! Dino!
• Iona's Island
• Blyte
• Boom Rush: Desert OPS
• Core Logistics
• Sokobomb
• 树人：中国班主任
• Veil Breach: Raven County
• Neo Light
• Man Simulator
• Desert Island Time
• Utopium
• Cats and Pillos
• Anomaly Corp.
• Dungeon Cooking
• Divine Move
• Maximum Security Boyfriend
• G.E.M. Grab & Exit
• Sweet KOL (extremely NSFW!)
• Black Market Space Station Shop Simulator
• Crowns & Tiles
• Space Tenacity
• Ship Shape Slam!!!
• Pavel Repin's #tacticalunderground (DLC)

Curiously, there are actually more games releasing on November 19 than the day before and after (six on the 18th and 12 on the 20th). The same is true the Thursday before (27) and the Thursday after (5).

Will major publishers release anything close to GTA 6? And I'm talking, through the entirety of November? So far, according to our list of upcoming 2026 PC games, not really, though Devolver keeps promising it will.

Top Steam games by revenue (August 4 - 11)

Soulslike extraction RPG Mistfall Hunter disappeared from the top 10 after debuting in at number 3 last week (it ranked 12th, so almost).

Another interesting fact gleaned from just outside the top 10 is that Gears of War: E-Day came in at number 11, which is—as far as I can tell—the highest its reached since Steam pre-orders started on June 7. By contrast, Forza Horizon 6 hit number 4 on the revenue charts during the week pre-orders commenced.

I don't mean to seem like I'm ragging on Microsoft—I'm happy to do so for more important reasons—but Halo: Campaign Evolved has dropped pretty severely, coming in at 69 after enjoying 5th place last week. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, by contrast, is dropping much more slowly.

It's neat to see Big Walk rank so highly, and it was overall a big week for niche Steam indies: Iron Nest is a heavy turret simulator and ReStory is about fixing old electronics.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"EA didn't finish the game so I'm not finishing this revi"

Phantom, on the new Madden game, which is copping an absolute flogging by Steam users.

At the finale of Deus Ex: Human Revolution you choose which button to press to trigger one of its endings while an AI explains the differences between them. It was not a well-liked way to wrap up the game, and when just over six months later Mass Effect 3 came along with a remarkably similar structure for its ending we were all a bit baffled it came down to this. Three games' worth of agonizing decisions would all be resolved by the simple mechanistic choice of a button press?

It wasn't the only thing about Mass Effect 3 people found worth complaining about, but it was right up there. It remained a pain point even after the free extended cut DLC expanded the endings to make them a little more satisfying, and a fourth option where you refuse to choose was added to satisfy players who got to the end and wanted to flip a middle finger at the whole arbitrary concept.

The other three options were to destroy the Reapers, with the downside that all synthetic life including the geth and EDI would also be wiped out, to control the Reapers, with the downside that Shepard would have to become one, and to synthesize all organic and synthetic life in the galaxy, with the downside that it worked by baffling space magic.

It's been over a decade now since Mass Effect 3 came out and our blood has dropped below boiling point, so hopefully we can look back on it without cartoon smoke coming out of our ears and have a sensible discussion about what we chose and why. I've finished the trilogy three times now and pressed all three buttons, but which did you choose—or did you refuse to choose at all—and were you satisfied by the ending you got?

"Built like a brick wall on roids." That's the passive ability Lee Sin—err, Xizun, the blind monk, used to have in League of Legends, which itself used to be a very different-looking game called Onslaught: War of the Immortals. It certainly looks like a game that was pitched the same year Finger Eleven's "Paralyzer" was a charting single, and now we can take a closer look at it than ever thanks to League 'tuber Necrit and Riot's Paul "Pabro" Bellezza.

The full story here is outlined on a video Necrit uploaded last Thursday, but the basic rundown is that he asked to see League at its most primordial and Riot delivered in the form of an ancient investor pitch: a mix of video footage, design documents for a few champions, a lore breakdown, and screenshots. While leaks had revealed some of this stuff in the past, there's plenty of new details to comb through.

The game is barely recognizable. Rather than the empty field that is Summoner's Rift, it takes place in a cartoony cityscape split between "order" and "chaos" realms. Players would take the role of customizable immortals they could temporarily bring to the fight in climactic moments, and certain heroes were even exclusive to one of the two realms—an allegiance players would have to declare when they began playing.

It's easier to point out what's familiar than what's new. Annie is here and still has a flaming teddy bear minion, though she and most other champions look very different; Sion has a beard, for God's sake! The only character who truly hasn't changed much is Singed, though his name is Zij for some reason. These days I only call him that if I have a really bad cold.

My favorite bits are about the old lore, since it's edgy in a way that's both typical of the era and sort of precious in 2026, despite the cartoony art style. It's a world where the two factions existed on neutral terms until "an antichrirst of sorts" was born and tore a hole in reality so big chaos now threatens to consume all existence. Riot's logo is also drenched in blood in the pitch video.

League of Legends Classic has been a big hit with me so far, but I think after seeing this it's plain to see we didn't go back far enough. We have not achieved true classic-ification until Sion has a highlighter-orange beard and nobody recognizes a single aspect of the game.

David Brevik's gaming history began before the arrival of the IBM PC. The veteran designer grew up playing games like Lode Runner and The Oregon Trail on the Apple II. "One that comes to mind right away is the original Wizardry," Brevik says. "That had a huge impact on me. That was on the Apple II Plus, and I loved that game."

Studying computer science at college, Brevik worked at numerous software and games companies before cofounding Condor, where he designed games like NFL Quarterback Club and Justice League Task Force. It was with Condor that Brevik pitched Diablo to then-publishers Blizzard Entertainment. After Blizzard acquired Condor and the studio was renamed Blizzard North, Diablo was released with the expectation of modest sales. Instead, the ARPG would become one of the most influential games of all time.

Brevik left Blizzard in 2003 and has since designed games like Marvel Heroes and It Lurks Below. Today, Brevik is President of Skystone Games, which has published games such as Tiny Bookshop and Mistfall Hunter. But he took a break from searching for the next big hit to guide me through the isometric dungeon of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

Strangely, a game that I'm playing the most recently is an old game of mine. I made this game called Marvel Heroes, which was in the 2010-12 range, and it's an ARPG with the Marvel superheroes. I originally went to that company to be the creative director, but over a period of a few years I became the CEO of the company, so I barely worked on the game for a while. I had to hire another replacement creative director, but I was still very involved in the project.

Eventually I left the company. Being a CEO was basically raising money. I like making games. The point was, not long after I left, the company went out of business and the game shut down. It was a game that I spent many years of my career working on, and nobody could ever play it again.

Along came some die-hard fans who ended up making their own server for the client, and they resurrected the game. So I've been playing this resurrected version of Marvel Heroes on this fan-made server. That's been really fun. Mainly I've been doing it a lot with the community. I was very involved with the community when I was playing. Made a lot of great friends, and I would stream the game almost every night.

It was a little weird because, after I left, they changed the game. They had one more giant update that changed Marvel Heroes [from] the way it was originally designed. They released it on console and made an update to the PC version and changed it to Marvel Heroes Omega …. A lot of the characters changed when they made this Omega update. They changed away from skill-tree builds to a more modern more casual version of the skill trees.

It's just been a real treat. It definitely has problems. I would I would prefer that there were more things to do, a deeper endgame besides just grind[ing] for a couple special items. But I think that overall, that it's still just really fun, even if you just play a couple of the characters. There's like 60 something different characters you can play.

Some of the characters that I really enjoyed originally, I didn't enjoy as much in the new version. Some of the Omega version characters I like a lot more, and probably the character I've been playing most is Thing. But I really enjoy Iron Fist and Deadpool and Elektra and Thor.

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

I had been on yet another Minecraft kick. We were starting a new server and, I often play Minecraft with my family and friends. All my kids are grown up. In fact, my very youngest goes off to college in about a month [and] my second eldest kid has a kid of her own, so I'm a grandpa.

But we get together and we make a server from scratch and play as a family. And we've been playing for a very long time, so when there's an update or the moment hits us, we'll end up starting a new server. I'm definitely the most hardcore of people. I love making all the different machines you can make and making giant contraptions for the server.

It's also changed a little bit. It's been this weird, almost cyclical thing where at first we were playing together and I had to guide them through the game a lot, and then they were too cool for school and wanted to do their own thing but really needed my help a lot. And then it was like 'Oh, we can play together again'.

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

I loved Eye of the Beholder. I mean I love/hate Eye of the Beholder. I hadn't played it in a long time, and there was some other came recently that I was that reminded me of it. I was like 'Oh, I should go back and try it again'.

Eye of the Beholder was, in 1991, one of the best games that I'd ever played. I was super into it. The graphics, the immersion. This is pre-Wolfenstein [3D], so 3D stuff was not really a thing. But this had some fake 3D-style graphics that you were taking a party through a dungeon, and it was turn-based and grid-based.

I had mapped out all the levels on graph paper. I was really into it. And then at the end, I killed the final boss, and a little dialogue box pops up and says "Congratulations, you win!" or whatever. Then quits to desktop.

So that's the worst ending of any game I've ever played. But I really love the game. It's amazing.

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

It turns out that [in] Marvel Heroes I have 540 hours, but there's a bunch of others. Right behind that is my other game It Lurks Below. I have 529 hours in that. And No Man's Sky, I have 400-something hours in that.

I like space games, so they kind of had me at hello, and I just found it fascinating. I loved going around the galaxy, exploring planets, finding things, building bases all over the universe, hunting for special ships, and they've had so many updates. I keep coming back for all of thee updates when they add new content.

It's just been something I've really enjoyed. I enjoyed the combat in the game, the dogfighting-style combat …. I didn't really like the story very much. It's kind of out there too. It was supposed to be maybe a highbrow thing or something, but I just couldn't really understand what it was. I couldn't relate to the story in any way.

I got it right on launch or whatever and I played it, and then would put it away, and then a new update would come and I'd play it some more, and every time an update comes, I play another 25-50 hours.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I have EverQuest still installed, and that's something I go back and play every now and then. And I played so many hours. Of all the games, that's by far and away—even though it's not part of the Steam library—the game that I put the most hours into. Maybe that or World of Warcraft. But both of them I spent many years of my life playing, and my wife and I would play together, so we'd play every day for years and years. I forget my playtime, but it was years of playtime. I have thousands of hours in EverQuest.

I even play the EQ '99, which is the old version of the game, the original game plus maybe the one expansion. Some of the [servers] are two expansions. I still go back and play that quite a bit. Level up characters now and then.

Even though it's maybe the ugliest game in the world at this point, I still really love that game. It was such a unique experience. It's like trying to explain Star Wars to somebody that wasn't there in the theatre for the first time. We'd never seen anything like Star Wars, and it was the same with EverQuest.

Even though it was totally painful, a total nightmare, and everybody's got like the most horrific stories from playing EverQuest…. I had done a dragon run with my necromancer, and I had bound myself right near where the entrance [to] the dragon was, so that when I died in the dragon run, I could just run back.

But the dragon run was a total disaster and there were these giants that you had to clear to the to get to the dragon first. I died fighting the dragon, and it turned out that it had taken so long that the giants respawned and I [had] bound myself right where the giants were. So I would respawn and a giant would kill me, and I would respawn, and the giant would kill me. I didn't know what to do. I ended up unplugging my internet.

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

Visual Studio. I still do a lot of programming. I still make a lot of prototypes. I still dream of someday making games again. So that is something that's still installed.

I still program almost every single day … I work on lots of different prototypes for game ideas that I have, and someday maybe I'll have the time to actually work on one. But right now, I'm so busy that I don't have the time to dedicate to making a project.

Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?

It's a complete mess. I have icons for games in one corner. I have tools I use for game development and other things in the middle. Other things that I have. I have the Adobe Creative Suite and other things that I can't live without. I've got all the Microsoft tools. And then I have some mobile games that I play, I'll have PC versions of those.

I have notes that are all over my desktop of different projects that are going on. Notes, feedback, all sorts of stuff. I give feedback on a lot of games and lot of ideas that people have. They ask me to give them feedback on stuff, and so I'll write up lots of notes.

I probably have 300 icons on my desktop. It's a mess.

Videogame music is ridiculously good, a behemoth that encompasses just about every damn genre out there. Orchestral, rock, metal, pop, hip-hop—you name it, there's absolutely a composer out there who has penned something absolutely fire within that genre.

But despite the stellar bangers that so many videogames are putting out, it still feels like they're mostly contained within the gaming zeitgeist. Which means that whenever I end up hearing tracks in the real world, I get some of the most insane whiplash imaginable.

I remember a helluva long time ago watching some random British television show with my Mum—maybe some kind of home improvement show, it was a long time ago okay? My memory is terrible—and being completely bamboozled by the inclusion of music from The Sims 2. Turns out I'm not the only one who's had that experience, as a Reddit post from six years ago shows that The Sims music appears in all kinds of random television shows. America's Next Top Model, German home improvement shows, kids baking shows. It's everywhere!

For me, the absolute weirdest place I've heard videogame music, though, is my local pub of all places. I'd popped in for a chill Sunday afternoon pint and a bite to eat, only to get to the bar, turn to my partner and ask: "Wait a second, is this L.A. Noire??" Sure enough, the buttery-smooth jazz number was the main theme for L.A. Noire. Which is an excellent choice for a low-key weekend vibe, don't get me wrong. But it was also the last place I ever expected to hear anything like it.

What about you though? Where's the weirdest place your ears have bore witness to a videogame track? A hospital? It would definitely be weird to hear it in a hospital, I reckon. Make sure to drop a comment and let me know.

I've long held that no RPG is quite as spectacular as Kingdom Hearts, and I'm careful to specifically use the word "spectacular." For every ounce it is great, it's specifically great to gawk at, ideally with a mixture of awe and bewilderment. This is a game series where, if you die at a climactic moment, Mickey Mouse can emerge from your Christian soul and start killing people with a giant stick. It's incredible.

A good Kingdom Hearts game is such a delight to watch in action that it's also kind of great television, so it makes perfect sense to me that an anime is on the way to the Disney Channel and Disney+. The news was announced last week at D23, Disney's big biennial fan festival. Notably, Disney+ has been named as a priority boycott target by the BDS movement protesting the role of various corporations in Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

As for what to expect, Kingdom Hearts famously has a long-winded plot that's impenetrable unless you're willing to play about a hundred spinoffs, many of which are on different archaic consoles. Given that, you might be wondering—will a season of TV explain this gargantuan story to me? Will I finally get it? While we don't have much to go off just yet, the answer is easily guessed: No.

While Disney has said the show "reimagines the iconic adventure with a brand-new story," series creator Tetsuya Nomura is involved, and you have to remember this is the guy who was hesitant to let Sora show up in Smash Bros. because it might not get on with KH canon. I'd be amazed if this series didn't pull from or at least reference the decades of convolution that have come to define Kingdom Hearts, and I don't even strictly think that's a bad thing. Picking through the endless sea of details is half the fun.

Will it be better than Seth Kearsley's abortive 2003 TV series would have been? We can only guess—but it's still Kingdom Hearts, so at the very least it will almost certainly be interesting.

Who knew that all I needed to be interested in maths was the command of a five-thousand-tonne artillery battery? If only my secondary school teacher had known. Turns out that the ticking clock of exam pressure is a hell of a lot less motivating than the boom of artillery shells growing ever closer, as enemy gunners zero in on your position, trying to blast your colossal cannon to kingdom come before you blast them.

But Iron Nest is a similar test of mental endurance. You hustle and bustle around your one-man gun emplacement, triangulating degrees and distances, praying that your next shell won't sail clear over the target, leaving you scratching your head as to which vital calculation you somehow messed up. It's an addictive challenge, bolstered by an array of wonderfully tactile gadgets and gizmos.

Sure, it's an artillery simulator of sorts, but it's more like one of the best versions of Battleship you'll ever play. It's about employing what you know and learn through each shot, to track down enemy positions and destroy them, often before they destroy you. And it's hard to overstate how satisfying it is when you land a shell squarely on-target, especially when it's the payoff for 10 minutes spent messing about with machines and the map table.

So who are you shooting? Iron Nest is set in an alternate-history version of 1920s Spain in which the Kingdom of Castille somehow got their mitts on a gigantic, city-levelling artillery piece, and is using it to maintain their grip on power. That's your job: shoot what they tell you, or don't. As the lone denizen of the Iron Nest—save for one presumably very deaf cat—your job is operating the battery by yourself.

You have to read the teleprinter and note vital info on your clipboard. Use the map table and its elaborate array of markers, coloured pencils, and measuring devices to triangulate enemy positions. You're inputting distance into a machine to calculate barrel elevation—which prints off a cute little firing solution ticket—and wheeling the gun on its axis to the correct bearing. And when all is prepared, you're flipping switches as if arming a nuke, and pulling the handle to take your shot.

There's just so much gravity to Iron Nest, in fiddling with its tactile machines and gadgets, but also in the methodical step-by-step that plays out before each firing. Despite its initial learning curve, before long the pre-shot preparation becomes a bit of a ritual, a process you refine through repetition and gain mastery with. It's strangely relaxing for a game about obliterating enemies with explosive ordinance.

And as you gain mastery, Iron Nest unfurls even more. You unlock a requisition station that lets you satisfyingly stamp cards to buy recon plane flyovers and different shell types, but it adds a new challenge element as you try to spend the bare minimum possible, relying on your smarts to bridge the gap.

You unlock a second barrel, letting you hit two targets in quick succession. That is, if you're able to juggle the calculations and tweaks you have to make between each firing without your brain melting. And thanks to its procedurally-generated objectives, with enemy positions changing even when you replay a mission, plus medals for performance, Iron Nest has a lot of replayability.

The only thing Iron Nest is lacking is co-op. It would be ridiculously fun to run around the gun with a friend, but the game is already a pretty incredible achievement considering it was built by one guy. It'd also be a great candidate for a Battleship-style head-to-head mode, where two Iron Nests try to triangulate and destroy each other, but multiplayer is listed on Iron Nest's roadmap, so maybe we can look forward to that.

While I'm still very excited for next year's PVKK: Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant (*gasps for breath*) which sees you commanding an orbital defense cannon, Iron Nest is the best artillery game I've tried. Its playground of tactile tools and machines makes it appealing to simulation fans of all stripes, while its smart yet addictive gun-prep formula feels almost endlessly repeatable, as you strive for that elusive yet satisfying sense of mastery.

The humble combo trial is a time-honoured tradition in fighting games. It's a quick and relatively easy way of trying out a new character, feeling out their general flow and kit in a low-pressure environment.

They are, also, fundamentally useless. The combos in question are rarely optimal, and often devolve into simply playing Simon Says a dozen times before throwing yourself to the wolves of online matchmaking and hoping for the best. I can't speak for anyone else, but I rarely retain any of the stuff I pick up during combo trials, and usually end up defaulting to the likes of Dustloop or trusted YouTube tutorials to figure out how to actually play a character.

That doesn't exactly change in Marvel Tōkon. It still presents you with basic moves, combos, and assist combos that you'll do once and move on from, the likelihood of carrying them over into real scenarios next to zero. But Tōkon also includes something that I really like, and sincerely wish other fighting games included: a series of challenges that force you to think about the tools you've been given, and how best to implement them.

Each character trial in Tōkon wraps up with five "Level-Up Missions". Instead of laying out all the inputs for you, the missions instead present you with a handful of criteria and leave you to cook up the combos yourself. Maybe you need to start or end with a certain string, or ensure you're throwing in a particular move or hitting a certain damage threshold during the combo.

In reality, it's something you can probably just go ahead and look up if you really don't want to bother with it. But I like the fact that, even with the inclusion of basic combo trials, the Level-Up Mission is something that tries to challenge you to cook something up yourself. It's arguably one of the best parts about a fighting game–even if everybody ends up using the same BnBs and optimal combos in the end, figuring things out and playing around with a character's kit is a great way to understand their fundamentals even if you don't come to the most min-maxxed conclusion.

And the best part is, these Level-Up Missions are genuinely tough. While the early stages mostly require you to start with a string, add one move, and end with a certain damage number, the later ones stack far more requirements on you. That's when you really have to start thinking about things like your meter, assists, jump cancels, and damage scaling to squeeze the absolute most you can out of these challenges.

Again, are these Level-Up Missions going to have much impact once you get out there against real players? Probably not, but they at least require you to interact with the systems that Tōkon throws at you. Especially in a fighting game, where tutorialisation is still kinda rubbish and mostly consists of multiple text boxes bombarding your brain all at once, sitting down and puzzling out how to really maximise my damage in one combo—including whatever parameters Tōkon wants from me—at least helped stuff stick a helluva lot more than it would have otherwise.

Having a relatively open-ended goal and then handing you the entire toolkit to accomplish it instead of simply following a piece of paper feels much closer to how fighting games actually shake out in real time. Tōkon's Level-Up Missions are such a simple yet smart way to navigate it, I hope it's a feature more fighting games crib from in the future.

They called me mad. They called me a fool. They said it would never work—my plan to build a business empire on the back of a single department store that sold three products and a silica mine. 'You'll bankrupt us!' yelled red-faced advisors. They saw no wisdom in my schemes at all.

And, frankly, they were correct. Fair play to those guys. We are very bankrupt now.

In 1995, PC Gamer—a monthly journal about computer videogames—issued a challenge to me directly. In the back-most pages of its 22nd issue, it tucked away an ad for a then-new game called Capitalism. "Good enough to make a convert out of Karl Marx himself," declared an included testimonial from, yes, PC Gamer.

I was too busy being two years old to issue a response at the time, but I'm here now. As one of surely very few people who have reviewed The Communist Manifesto for a major gaming publication, I want to know: can it convert me? And more than that, can it offer a way forward? Can I find, in Capitalism's thicket of spreadsheets and input/output graphs, a solution to our current economic and social malaise? I accept your challenge, PC Gamer from 31 years ago.

Business 101

Capitalism—the game—does not work how you expect it to. For one thing, it is not on Earth. It happens on a procedurally generated pseudo-region of an Earth-like planet that you can spin up with every new game. Want to build the free market on a vast archipelago? By all means. A single, contiguous mega-landmass? Absolutely. The only guarantee is that, wherever you end, it will look nothing like anywhere that exists on our actual planet. Also, cities like Lisbon and Chicago will end up a short walk from each other, much like they are in real life.

I admit it, my first forays into the world of business were jazz capitalism. I was hitting buttons and trying things out without much regard for structure or logic. I built a department store in central Jakarta (next to Tehran) and filled it literally, exclusively with laundry detergent.

This was not just an idle whim. Capitalism is big on the supply chain, strangely, which means all the goods you sell have to come from somewhere. The wares I flogged in my department store were sourced from Jakarta's nearest seaport, and the things Jakarta's nearest seaport had to offer were: cookies, leather shoes, and detergent.

Were the people of Jakarta buying my suds? Absolutely the hell not. They could not have been less interested, even as the industrious worker-bees in the department store's purchasing unit accumulated more and more boxes of the stuff, gradually entombing my sales team like soapy pharaohs. Supply outstripped demand by a gazillion to one. I was making negative $80,000 a year.

I asked myself what Warren Buffett would do and decided the answer was probably 'keep digging'. I added the cookies and leather shoes to my department store's roster of goods, turning it into one of those malls—you know the ones—that occupies an entire city block and sells unrelated three products. If this didn't work, the game was broken.

There was, happily, more demand for shoes and cookies than laundry detergent, which is to say I was selling literally any of the former at all. Nevertheless, my expansion into the footwear and baked goods sectors had taken its toll. In spite of the new products' relative success, I was now making negative $300,000 a year. I added an advertising unit to my department store and partnered with a TV station.

This either helped or, more likely, coincided with an entirely unrelated change in my fortunes, because my annual profit suddenly skyrocketed to an incredible negative $3,000 a year. I went mad. I built an R&D Centre, a silica mine, and a new department store—this one selling CPUs, silica (a lot of silica about) and raw tobacco. Had I maybe started trying to sell directly to consumers raw materials I was meant to use in my own factories? Perhaps! Was I nevertheless now making an utterly inexplicable $400,000 a year? Yes!

I could only ride the high for so long. Eventually, my objectively boneheaded business decisions ricocheted back on me. The people of Bombay (where my second store was) were not interested in bulk-purchasing silica or computer chips, the fools, and even adding another advertising department didn't help. Though I did partner that advertising department with a newspaper rather than a TV station, and we all know traditional media is dead.

It wasn't long before the game told me I was out of cash in a Nickelodeon font.

Visions of the past

Here is the serious part of the article: Capitalism is genuinely rather fascinating. It is the crystallised end of history—that moment of triumphalism that marked the end of the Cold War and the seemingly final victory of liberal capitalism over all its foes. Its pregenerated scenarios, which you can play if you don't want to generate a random world for yourself, have names like The Fall Of The Berlin Wall and The Emerging Dragon (yes, it's about China).

It presents a vision of the world where consciously-held ideology is dead. In its place, ranks of men with big phones and suits chasing ever-greater numbers on ever-bigger spreadsheets—the "dog-eat-dog" world of capitalism. Was it good? No. Was it bad? No.

Capitalism, the game, does not sing the praises of capitalism the concept, nor does it criticise it. In this way, it reflects its era: good and bad were outdated—relics of a past where people deluded themselves by believing in things rather than chasing stuff that is concrete and consumable. Humanity had outgrown the distractions of faith and ideology. Now it could focus on reality, and the accumulation of CPUs and silica.

And air conditioners.

The aircon king of Guangzhou

My attempts to grow fat from detergent sales had run aground, but I did learn some things in that first run. Mostly, what I learnt—right there at the end—was 'hey, there's a button here to change the price of the things I sell'.

So I tried again, and a little bit slower this time. In Guangzhou (near Adelaide), I erected a department store, sourcing a thick gush of shampoo from the nearby port and selling it to anyone with hair. Crucially, this time I paid attention to things like 'product quality' and 'price'. The shampoo I was sourcing was a fair bit better than what Guangzhou already had access to, and by fidgeting with the price-per-bottle I could establish a neat equilibrium between supply and demand. Before long, I was making a stable $500,000 in annual profit.

What else did the port have to offer? Air conditioners and jumpers ('sweaters,' to our American readers). Guangzhou was hot; I suspected aircon demand would be high. I funnelled them into my department store.

It turned out I could charge essentially whatever the hell I wanted and get away with it. Demand was too strong to deter. I was charging people double what I was paying for them and raking it in. Before long, I got the jumpers on the shelves too, which inscrutably sold like hot cakes at the same time as the aircon units did—though, in credit to Capitalism's simulation, I am fairly sure the aircons sold better in summer, and vice versa for jumpers.

I was making $5,000,000 a year. I built factories, invented the video camera, purchased my competitors' jeans and sold them at a mark-up. I even started mining silica again, just for old times' sake. Pretty quickly, I hit $12 million a year. Which is kind of where I left it, since it rapidly became apparent I was simply too good at Capitalism for anything funny to happen ever again.

I'll say this, though: I like Capitalism (the game) a lot. The depth of its simulation is impressive, and not even 'for a game from 1995'. It just is. Here is a toy free market that consistently surprised me with the things it took into account and the things it asked me to take into account, from climate and environment to the nitty-gritty of the supply chain to the precise number and arrangement of business units in each of my outlets. It's a good time, if you are also the kind of person who gets excited by a nice spreadsheet.

Total conversion

Am I converted? Well, apparently I could be making $12 million a year in shampoo sales, which is only slightly less than I make writing about videogames, so maybe. I'm certainly into the game itself, which is probably the most I can reasonably ask of an entertainment product from three decades ago.

Does Capitalism, with its sepia snapshot of a period of post-Cold War triumphalism, represent a way forward for our current period of deep societal stagnation? Well, not quite. Capitalism captures not so much actual things that happened so much as it captures a vibe that existed in a select few places during a vanishingly small period of time.

You couldn't return to it if you wanted to—it was a product of a historical juncture, and no amount of nostalgia for an era when things felt better (whether they actually were is perhaps debatable) will change that.

Unless, of course, you start selling air conditioners.

Quake mappers are absolutely killing it in celebration of Quake's 30^th birthday. The Quake community has been running map jams of varying themes all year. In the last few months there have been two 'Quickie' speedmapping jams, a 1024 Jam where contributors had to build maps of 1024 units cubed, and a Limits Jam, with the fun restriction that submitted maps had to use the same technical and design limitations as the original Quake campaign.

Now, the Quake community has brought another bloodstained birthday present to Quake's afterparty with Q30 Deathmatch Jam. Organised by Quake mappers Annihilazor & Infiniti, the map-pack adds 22 new arenas designed specifically to be played with regular old Quake.

The maps run the gamut of Quake's interdimensional settings, ranging from gothic castles through sci-fi kill-zones to an industrial brown sewer called The Filth Pit. Numerous notable designers from the fan community have taken part, including a collaborative map called Overflow by Mazu and Makkon. The latter was one of the organisers of the excellent Quake Brutalist Jam 3, while the former designed that Jam's showstopper map—a five hour long mini-campaign with its own internal story.

If you want to give the maps a whirl yourself, Q30 Deathmatch Jam is designed to work with numerous modern Quake sourceports, including Ironwail, Netquake or Nightdive's Kex port as seen in the Quake Remaster. In each case you can play it as a standalone mod by dropping the folder straight into your Quake directory and using the in-game console to call it up. If you want to play online via Netquake or QuakeWorld servers however, you'll need to copy the map, loc files, and skybox data into the relevant folders of your competitive multiplayer install.

None of this is to mention all the other Quake-related events that have happened this year. As mentioned, January had barely begun when the community released Quake Brutalist Jam 3, a massive mod themed around concrete megastructures which was essentially a new FPS in all but name.

Then, at QuakeCon id Software launched a brand new episode for Quake, developed in collaboration with Machine Games to celebrate the shooter's 30^th anniversary. While Microsoft's brutal layoffs cast a pall over the proceedings, Dawn of the Machine is nonetheless a fantastic collection of maps, and a worthy successor to Machine Games' Dimension of the Machine from 2021.

If you've ever fancied giving PC game modding a go but have struggled for motivation, maybe a share of €30,000 will provide the incentive you need. Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord developer TaleWorlds Entertainment has just announced a modding contest for its War Sails expansion, inviting players to create the best add-on for its nautical DLC.

The competition is actually three competitions, with players asked to submit mods in a trio of different categories. The first is the Conversion Mod contest—which asks players to create "total or partial conversion mods" using War Sails, reimagining the expansion's ship battles and naval campaign travel.

Conversions are something of a speciality within the Mount & Blade modding community, with huge overhauls like Shokuho and Eagle Rising giving players whole new historical settings to explore. So it's no surprise the contest would have some focus in this area. The top prize for this one is €12,000, with €6,000 and €3,000 available for second and third place respectively.

If a complete rework of War Sails seems a little ambitious, there's also a 3D art contest and a scene design content. The former revolves around building new ship types for War Sails, while the latter challenges modders with creating "Seaborne Village Raid scenes"—plotting out an exciting coastal assault by placing navigation meshes, spawn points, environmental details and so forth.

The winner of each of these competitions will take home €2,000 for their efforts, with awards of €1,000 and €500 for second and third place. The submission deadline for all contests is November 22, while TaleWorlds says that winners will be announced in January next year.

If you're curious why the competition has been announced, it mainly seems to be a way to showcase War Sails' modding tools, which were released a few days prior to the competition announcement. But there are likely other motivations too. War Sails is controversial among Bannerlord players, with a Mixed review rating on Steam.

Many of these negative reviews complain about bugs, technical issues, and difficulties getting the expansion running. But others suggest War Sails would have fared better as a standalone experience rather than an addition to Bannerlord. This is because the naval features tend to exist around the periphery of the game and so don't receive the attention they perhaps deserve on a conventional playthrough.

Moreover, War Sails' additions like ship navigation and naval combat required significant rewrites of Bannerlord's code on TaleWorlds' part, thus rendering many mods incompatible with the DLC. While some modders have strived to address these compatibility issues, they nonetheless make the expansion a harder sell for players who are heavily invested in Bannerlord's mod scene.

War Sails having some enticing mods of its own may go some way to resolving this divide among the community, so it makes sense for TaleWorlds to incentivise modders to focus on the expansion. But it does seem like some TLC for the DLC wouldn't go amiss, either, especially now that work on the modding tools is done.

Four long years after it was announced, we finally have some idea when we'll be able to play Kingdom Hearts 4. At Disney's D23 fan event, Square Enix revealed that the sequel will arrive sometime in late 2027.

That isn't everything new that Square Enix had in store for fans either. The reveal was accompanied by a new trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 that showed off a new world the sequel will take players to—Coco's colourful land of the dead. The trailer shows Sora fighting enemies in the crowd of a concert and riding sky rails, as Mickey, Goofy and Hades strive to reunite with the series' errant hero after he disappeared at the end of Kingdom Hearts 3.

Obviously, it would have been nice if Square Enix had committed to a specific date. But even having some idea of when the game will be released is a big deal after years of near-total radio silence from Square Enix. It was only in June that we received our first glimpse of the game since the sequel was announced in 2022, so going from that to knowing roughly when we'll be able to play it in the space of two months is quite the surprise.

Despite the dearth of information about the game over the years, we do have a rough idea of what Kingdom Hearts 4 will involve. The sequel will commence a new story arc which Square Enix is calling the Lost Master Arc, and will be primarily set in Quadratum—Kingdom Heart's Equivalent of Tokyo. As the latest trailer demonstrates, however, it will still involve the usual jaunt through various Disney worlds

While Square Enix has kept the lid on Kingdom Hearts 4 over the years, series director Tetsuya Nomora has repeatedly reassured fans that the game is on track. And both Square Enix and Disney have plenty of reasons to continue supporting it, since Disney recently revealed that Kingdom Hearts ranks among the company's "billion-dollar franchises". Turns out players really love it when you combine Disney characters and Final Fantasy-style JRPG action. Who knew?

An electrician once told me that turning your computer off and then on again uses more electricity than just leaving it on for hours, an oversimplification if not an outright lie that I believed for years. While it is true that turning your PC off and on puts wear and tear on the components, so does leaving it on for hours and hours.

Now that turning a PC on takes an amount of time so miniscule you don't even have a chance to get a drink before it's ready to go, there's no good excuse for adding to your power bill by leaving it on. Of course, we do things we have no good excuse for all the time, like starting another campaign as Karl Franz in Total War: Warhammer despite all the other campaigns we haven't even tried yet.

Where do you stand on this, the most divisive issue in PC gaming this side of Dragon Age 2's relative position in the series tier list? Our strategic director Evan Lahti is team turn if off, because any more hours his PC is on are hours dust is being sucked into the system. Meanwhile, our US news lead Andy Chalk got into the habit of leaving his on back when he ran a BBS and still does. Our former hardware editor Jarred Walton used to turn his desktop PC off because its RGB lights were too bright, but would leave his laptop on, necessitating the addition of a third option to my otherwise neat poll.

The Rideshare Stimulator AI fiasco almost, but not quite came to a close today when writer Stella Sacco shared that she had received a private message from Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch, who apologized for his hurtful comments to the press regarding her employment and capabilities.

In a separate post on LinkedIn, Karch reflected on the controversy and seemingly alluded to his personal contact with Sacco. But he also couldn't resist taking a swipe at Portal writer Chet Faliszek, who has publicly criticized Karch for his actions—most notably in the form of a 26-minute vlog on YouTube.

The briefest of recaps if you haven't been paying attention (bless you):

• Saber Interactive releases a trailer for Rideshare Stimulator, a mundane job sim where you play a cabbie.
• Writer Stella Sacco claims to have worked on the game before getting fired, her workload then taken over by an LLM.
• Saber's official statement on the matter admitted to AI use in Rideshare Stimulator, but denied that any writers were replaced wholesale by AI tools.
• Saber CEO Matt Karch supplied his own statement to This Week in Video Games, belittling Sacco's competency, asserting that she was not replaced by an LLM, but also that "I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI."

Today, Sacco shared a post to Bluesky saying she had been messaged by Karch, and that "he apologized unreservedly for the way he spoke about me in the press." While Sacco noted that she and Karch remained opposed in their personal stances on the use of AI, she concluded that, "Apologies are simply in too short supply these days to spurn one when it's offered."

Great. Awesome. That'd have been a wonderful place to end things. But Karch also shared his own further statement on the matter to LinkedIn. Karch did not mention Sacco by name, but mostly reflected on his experience, particularly the negative consequences of responding to a feeling of personal insult with a public statement. Karch also noted that he is sticking to his guns when it comes to deploying generative AI in games.

"Resolve issues human-to-human," Karch wrote, seemingly alluding to the apology Sacco received from him. "Escalating disputes through media channels or public statements rarely solves anything. Real resolution happens through direct, personal connection. If you cross a line, own it directly with the person involved."

But Karch's fourth paragraph in the post threw us for a loop. "The digital ecosystem thrives on outrage and surface-level takes," Karch wrote. "Case in point: a 26-minute video essay from an unsuccessful writer dedicated entirely to analyzing a single sarcastic quote of mine and pretending he knew exactly who I am—which somehow concluded with personal remarks about my physical anatomy and encouragement to accost me.

"When 'industry analysis' devolves into personal insults and threats, it says far more about the creator than it does about the subject. Relying on outrage algorithms for industry insights is a trap."

PC Gamer's top news hound, Andy Chalk, clocked that this could only be referring to an August 14 video shared by Chet Faliszek, a veteran writer whose credits include Portal, Left 4 Dead, and the Half-Life Episodes. The video in question, "Who is the CEO of Saber Interactive?" is 26 minutes and 13 seconds long, and Faliszek repeatedly states that Karch's behavior is compensating for something. Faliszek also says to viewers that, if they encountered Karch at an industry event, they should "make fun of him."

To be fair to Karch: Faliszek does repeatedly mock and insult him over the course of the video, going so far as to extrapolate that he has a domineering character, and that his actions are, at least in part, meant to discipline and control employees at Saber. I can see a certain tit-for-tat fairness to getting back at the person who said that.

But also: Faliszek's primary argument in the video is that, separate from Karch's personal character or the ethics of Sacco's original treatment, Karch's statement to This Week in Video Games was a completely avoidable PR and marketing catastrophe that worsened the controversy.

Karch's own conclusion in the same LinkedIn post where he took a jab at Faliszek was that he should have not said anything and left it to the communication team. At the time of writing, Faliszek's video is coming up on 4,000 views⁠—small potatoes.

Karch ignored Faliszek's and his own advice and escalated again⁠—right as things were calming down⁠—by providing so much identifying information about Faliszek's video. He effectively expanded the story to "Saber CEO vs. Portal writer" in a way I am now professionally obligated to make note of.

On an August 13 episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, actor Matthew McConaughey spoke about almost playing Joel in HBO's The Last of Us TV series, and why he ultimately turned down the role.

McConaughey said he was in contact with showrunner Craig Mazin about playing the part, and that he seriously considered taking it up. "I wasn't really acting at that point," McConaughey explained. "I was doing more writing and looking at leadership roles in life." Even with that caveat he was still tempted: "It was really good, I was really excited."

At least part of the problem seems to have been that Mazin had a tough act to follow: McConaughey is a prolific Hollywood actor, and has lent his voice to TV animation here and there, but his only lead role on a TV series? The legendary first season of Nic Pizzolatto's noir anthology, True Detective.

"We pulled off a real coup with True Detective, at a time when [TV] series were not something that actors like myself or Woody Harrelson would hop over and go do," said McConaughey. "That one succeeded in a real fashion. Last of Us was really good, it just wasn't for me at the time. I don't know what would have been for me at the time."

McConaughey also expressed trepidation over the potential long-term commitment required by a successful TV show: "In success, this is something you'll be doing for years and years and years."

Maybe not so much with Joel in The Last of Us, given, uh, spoilers. The role likely still demands an obligation through flashbacks and the like, though. True Detective S1 made me a McConaughey sardaukar for life, but even for me, him passing on this role doesn't seem like a great loss for human flourishing. By all accounts, Pedro Pascal is killing it.

First reported by Empire on X, "The Everything App," Simpsons creator Matt Groening may have let slip the existence of some upcoming return for The Simpsons: Hit & Run⁠—though this was immediately disputed by another grandee of the Simpsons Industrial Complex.

"I think the original game is coming back in some form," Groening said in response to a question about the series at a Simpsons panel discussion, part of the ongoing D23 Disney fan event. Current showrunner Matt Selman immediately poured cold water on the idea, declaring "Or not," in response to Groening's statement.

Groening seems to firmly operate in an "emperor emeritus" role when it comes to day-to-day operations of The Simpsons, and it's perfectly plausible that his supposition was based on out-of-date information, and Selman, who's more hands on with things, is correct.

But I'm inclined to think this was a "It's a secret⁠—Ssshut uuuuuup" sort of interaction. We're living in a time of endless remakes and remasters⁠—Spongebob Squarepants: Battle For Bikini Bottom Rehydrated from a few years ago feels like it rhymes with Hit & Run, for example. Most persuasive of all, Selman himself, who wrote the original game, said "never say never" about the possibility of the series coming back just this year.

Groening's choice of words, "the original game is coming back in some form," seems to preclude a sequel and imply a remake or remaster to my eye. But if it turns out he was talking about an art book or retrospective documentary or something, well that'd just be poor form on his part I think.

The reason for all the hubbub was a clever little cult classic of a tie-in game from 2003, a PS2-era, GTA-lite sort of deal where you drove or ran around Springfield getting up to hijinks. I never played it myself, but some of my friends swear by Hit & Run. I think, for a certain band of zoomers and late millennials, it was a way of getting in on the GTA craze if your parents wouldn't let you touch the real deal, leading to lifelong loyalty and nostalgia. Jak 2 ticked that box for me.

It might seem silly to ask in our post-Red Dead horse testicles world, but how much exacting detail is too much? How much is not enough? Gamedev can go on forever if you don't prioritize the things that players actually notice, but if you're making an immersive fantasy RPG, it's critical that the intended illusions—bustling towns, lively taverns, festering dungeons, and so on—not shatter.

This tightrope walk is something CDPR has gotten better at over the years, but it loomed over The Witcher 3's development, as CD Projekt Red's Philipp Weber told Edge Magazine (via Gamesradar). The reason why is simple: wherever possible, gamers love to try and peek behind the curtain.

"If a village only has eight houses, people will want to see if the people truly exist in the world or if it's just fakery," Weber told Edge. "Lots of people nowadays are interested in those kinds of details, and it really came to haunt us."

"Today, if you said 'give me a Witcher 3 village that has eight houses', I could give you that in two hours," he said. But there was a time that "when it came to actually reacting to the player, there wasn't that much detail."

An example case named in the article is that when the player starts using combat moves in the middle of town, NPCs were programmed to drop whatever they were holding and scram. This mostly worked, except for the fact that mothers swaddling their babies would do the same: "For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies, left and right."

A big component of believability is just giving the NPCs apropos things to do, and cycling between those unpredictably. "We don't give them specific paths," Weber said. "We give them spots of interest that are available and then they're the ones doing the pathfinding ... for the 50 sailors at Novigrad harbour, for example, we made 200 possible spots, so even if all 50 were active at the same time, they would have options."

It seems like the human touch goes a long way here. Cyberpunk 2077's stylish and detailed NPCs are a great case study showing the value of a hand-crafted moment here and there. And while systems-driven simulation is a big part of why these digital nobodies are believable in the first place, CD Projekt has said in the past that the quality gap between manually programmed NPCs and their controversial AI counterparts is "like a canyon."

When I first played Half-Life at the tender age of 11, I found it a terrifying experience. Admittedly, I was scared of pretty much everything at 11. Wasps, heights, loud noises, football (or more specifically, everyone finding out how bad I was at football). I was an anxious child all around. Hence, playing an interactive disaster movie filled with weird aliens was an intense experience and lashings of violence was an intense experience.

Now I'm rapidly approaching 40, the idea of Half-Life being in any way scary seems ridiculous, especially when you compare it to modern horror games and actual real-life terrors like tax returns. But there is one part of Half-Life that still frightens me, and it appears right at the start of the game. Midway through the introductory tram ride, five words and a number appear on the screen:

SUBJECT: Gordon Freeman. Male, Age 27.

Every time I see this caption, it seems wrong, like it must be a typo. Surely Gordon Freeman is older than 27. I mean look at this man. That’s a fella in his mid-thirties at the youngest.

To be clear, this isn't a notion I've developed recently. I've always believed this. I must have seen the caption countless times, but it never really sank in, because I was busy watching all the scenery and cool scripted sequences that you get during that tram ride.

Basically, Freeman's youthfulness weirds me out. It also led me to wonder: how old are all the other '90s FPS protagonists? Is DoomGuy actually DoomBoy? Is B.J. Blazkowicz short for 'Baby Junior Blazkowicz?'. Is Duke Nukem even allowed to enter a strip club?

Riddled with doubt, I decided to try to find out the age of as many '90s shooter heroes as I could. The answers proved pretty surprising, and in some cases, instructive about game design.

B.J Blazkowicz (Wolfenstein 3-D)

Let's start with an easy one. William Joseph Blazkowicz has surprisingly extensive lore for a video game character created in the eighties. According to the Wolfenstein Wiki, Blazkowicz was born on August 11, 1911. Canonically, the events of Wolfenstein 3-D take place in 1943, meaning that Blazkowicz is 32-33 when he takes down MechaHitler.

The Wiki also states that B.J. is canonically the grandfather of Commander Keen and an ancestor of DoomGuy, which is a fun bit of trivia.

Kyle Katarn (Star Wars: Dark Forces)

I'm gonna skip Doom and Duke for the moment and deal with another straightforward case. Kyle Katarn is the protagonist of Star Wars: Dark Forces and Star Wars: Jedi Knight—Dark Forces 2. (And also Jedi Outcast and, in a secondary role, Jedi Academy, but those are noughties games). Because Katarn is a Star Wars character, and because Star Wars fans are, shall we say, fastidious, it's straightforward enough to find out Katarn's age.

According to Wookiepedia, Katarn was born in 23 BBY (That's before the Battle of Yavin—the concluding act of the OG Star Wars—for non-Star Wars heads). Before Rogue One changed the canon, Katarn was the original thief of the Death Star plans which occurred in the same year as the Battle of Yavin. That makes him 23 at the outset of Dark Forces. He was 28 in Jedi Knight, and 35 in Jedi Outcast. Each of these facts is like a needle being pushed into my ageing body.

Cate Archer (The Operative: No One Lives Forever)

Strictly speaking, No One Lives Forever is a noughties shooter, releasing in 2000. But spiritually it is 100% a nineties FPS, and for that reason I'm going to include it.

Like Katarn, finding out Archer's age is easy enough, as Monolith gave her a detailed backstory. The NOLF Fandom Wiki says she was born in 1942. The events of the original NOLF take place in 1967, making her 25 when she becomes a superspy for UNITY. Like James Bond, Archer is apparently also natively Scottish, born in Glasgow.

Prisoner 426 (Unreal)

Another easy one, albeit for different reasons. Unreal's nameless protagonist is also an ageless protagonist. Since Unreal's player character can be customised both in character model and gender, Epic never specified an age for them either. In short, Prisoner 426 is as old as you want them to be (so for me, 57).

Caleb (Blood, Blood 2: The Chosen)

The age of Blood's revenant protagonist is somewhat dependent on perspective. According to the Blood wiki, Caleb was born in 1847 (in Texas, apparently). Since the events of Blood take place in 1928, this would make him a sprightly 81 years old by chronology.

However, Caleb is murdered by his demonic master Tchernobog at some point between 1871 and 1928, so biologically he's likely significantly younger than his chronological age. Amusingly, Blood 2 takes place in 2028, which means Caleb would be 181 years old during the events of that game.

DoomGuy: (Doom)

Here's where things start to get tricky. Unlike his (alleged) ancestor B.J. Blazkowicz, DoomGuy does not have a specified age. It's generally assumed he's somewhere in his mid-thirties—mainly because the face at the bottom of the screen looks like it's seen some shit.

But I took a punt and reached out to John Romero, Doom's co-creator, and asked him whether, either publicly or privately, id Software ever determined a specific age for DoomGuy?

Romero quickly got back to me with a reply. Unfortunately, it appears id never officially pinned it down. "No, we didn’t invent Doomguy’s age, or Ranger’s," Romero wrote in response. "I think it’s assumed they are mid-to-late 20s."

If you're wondering who the hell Ranger is, well, spoilers for the next entry.

Ranger (Quake, Quake 3)

As Romero mentions above, id Software never specified an age for Quake's protagonist as they didn't with Doom. That would seem to be the end of that rabbit hole. However, Ranger also appears in 1999's Quake 3 and 2022's Quake Champions.

Quake 3 isn't all that helpful in determining Ranger's age. But Quake Champions is. According to the lore added by QC, Ranger is actually a Vietnam veteran, having served in the US military up to 1975.

According to the Quake timeline, the events of Quake are concurrent with the game's release—1996, which means 21 years elapse between Ranger's return from Vietnam and the events of Quake.

Unfortunately, the timeline doesn't specify when Ranger signed up to fight, or how old he was when he did. But the youngest he could (legally) have been to sign up was 17. The US began active combat operations in 1965, so it's unlikely that he would have served before then, and the implication seems to be that Ranger did his tour(s) of 'Nam in the early '70s. Quake Champions also includes a photograph of Ranger and his family taken in 1978, in which he looks to be in his mid-to-late twenties—though he could be older.

All of which suggests that Ranger is either a mid fortysomething or an early fiftysomething during the events of Quake, which would make him the oldest still-living protagonist on this list.

Duke Nukem (Duke Nukem 3D)

I've saved the most interesting case until last. There are a couple of ages banded about for Duke Nukem online. But most of those are for Duke Nukem Forever, and they suggest he's somewhere between 45 and 47 during the events of that game. The source for those isn't clear, however, and in any case, we really want the age Duke was during the events of Duke Nukem 3D.

To try to pin it down, I sent an email to Scott Miller, the founder of Apogee Software (later 3D Realms) the developer of Duke Nukem's 3D. He quickly responded with this:

"When I and Todd Replogle first came up with the Duke Nukem character, there were two things I decided to never reveal: what year the game took place in, and how old Duke was," Miller wrote. "I never wanted to say, for example, that the game took place in 2004, because whenever you nail down a date it often comes back to haunt you when you pass that calendar date in real life (eg. 2001: A Space Odyssey).

"So never in the Duke storyverse is a date mentioned. As for his age it was the same thinking—if we had mentioned his age in a game, would we need to keep aging him for every succeeding game? So, I just wanted to fully avoid these issues. But, in my mind, Duke was in his mid-30s".

In short, Duke is forever a man in his prime, which is only fitting for the character.

Here are my memories of EverQuest in the year 1999. Me, six years old, pondering race and class options as my father offered guidance over my shoulder. His character was a gnome magician; I did not like the idea of being short. I settled on a half-elf, possibly because they looked the most like me, and named him Karokan. Dad, perhaps, chose my class and god for me, as I remember neither.

Then West Freeport. Then paralysing, all-consuming fear. The videogame worlds I had experienced before all felt finite. EverQuest, by contrast, felt incomprehensibly vast. I was scared of dying, sure—of the dreaded corpse run—but I was more scared of simply getting lost. I felt certain that if I strayed far from the city I would plunge into a fathomless ocean of map and never return. So I spent hours fighting rats and orc centurions outside the gates, dad's efforts to coax me out further than the East Commonlands confounded. I stayed home. I loved every second (hey, I was six).

The promise of EverQuest Legends, which released late last month, is simple: you can go home again. EverQuest in its infancy has been lovingly reconstructed. Its graphics are bright and rigid, its mechanics slow-going. Its UI does not feel contiguous or, really, designed. It sits scattered across your monitor as if surprised by a gust of wind. It's EverQuest (mostly) as the old-heads remember it, not as it endures, heroically, in the year 2026.

I used to live here

The weird thing is that this has already been done. In fact, it's still being done. Project 1999 is a fantastic free-to-play version of classic EverQuest that operates with Daybreak's explicit permission. If you want to nose around the game as it was back in the day, you can do it for free. Why fork out the $20 and recurring $10 sub for Legends?

Because for most people, these are fundamentally different propositions. Project 1999 has its check-in-daily stalwarts, no doubt, but for most people it is something you sign into once, get your shot of nostalgia, and stop thinking about until you want another one about five to seven years later. For those who never touched OG EverQuest, it's a historical curiosity. You can visit home, but you probably won't stay.

Legends, meanwhile, aims to keep you there. It's original EverQuest, yes, but only mostly as you know it. No more corpse runs, a tweaked and soloable MMO experience, in-game maps(!?)—all these things and more exist to fan your nostalgic curiosity into a full-blown dedication to this revitalized 27-year-old game.

Does it work? I think so. Make no mistake: the list of people for whom EverQuest Legends is not will forever be longer than the list of people for whom it is, but Game Jawn, a new studio comprised of EverQuest fans-turned-developers, has been smart in what cruft it's cut out and what it's left in place. This EverQuest has grown kinder in its dotage—it is more prone to hand out the candy pellet of a level up and forgive your mistakes in combat.

It's a game I've found myself dipping into at lunchtimes and on idle evenings. I can take a wander, marvel at some places, think 'hey I remember that,' and slaughter enough helpless creatures to net myself a level up. It is a satisfying, undemanding loop, despite the classic MMO trappings.

At the same time, it's still crusty as hell in ways that will charm you, if you're a certain sort of person. Your walk speed is glacial, you have approximately 4,600 distinct equipment slots on your body, and the game's MUD roots are still visible right there on its face—in the way you CONSIDER potential enemies, run WHO commands to check if pals are online, and play the entire game with one eye on the chat window. It feels sometimes inscrutable but never, at least in my time with it, cruel, where the rigorously old-school experience of Project 1999 is perfectly happy to send you scuttling off naked on a corpse run.

It is an MMO for MUD enjoyers and Morrowind perverts—no longer hard, but still authentically idiosyncratic. It is for people who can't truly enjoy something that doesn't demand you wrap your mind around it first. It is a charming struggle. It is the Linux of MMOs.

There are people for whom that paragraph is practically engineered in a lab to repulse them. We call those people 'most people'. But for the rest of us? For me? Legends is probably the only kind of MMO that stands a chance of hooking me in 2026. My six-year-old self would be delighted.

I don't know if Stars Wars: The Old Republic is the best MMO around—or even the best Star Wars MMO around—but there's something to be said for keeping the party alive for nearly 15 years at this point, even as developer Broadsword took the reins from BioWare in 2023. If you miss those halcyon days when the game had just dropped, well, you might want to give the imminent 8.0 update a look.

It was revealed in a blog post that went up Thursday, and it promises a pretty standard lineup of big MMO update features: a raised level cap, more spells and phat loots to futz with, and new zones to explore in the Twi'lek homeworld Ryloth. But there's also two new systems both tackling the MMO's prickliest design conundrum: difficulty.

The first of those is a difficulty slider, which lets you pick your poison between "a cinematic story-driven journey, a more demanding combat experience, or the ultimate challenge." Notably, you can group up with friends regardless of what you've all chosen, so it'll be interesting to observe how the scaling works out there.

There's also the new "venture" characters, which operate on their own difficulty system split between classic and expert options. These characters have to start a new story from the beginning, but they'll get special rewards for completing extra objectives as they play through the game normally. It's not clear what those rewards are, but the whole thing is apparently meant to "evoke the feel of the classic SWTOR experience" back when it was slightly less easy to roll over a dozen mobs at once.

It's a neat idea, assuming it doesn't morph into some battle pass-inspired FOMO nightmare. SWTOR probably isn't so different from its old self that fans are desperate for an OSRS-style revival, but it does still have a best-in-class leveling journey let down by the fact that you can faceroll your way through a great deal of it. If the rewards are fun to pursue and objectives non-tedious, it could brush the dust off those zones and get people grouping in them again.

In my Honour Mode playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, I romanced Gale—you can see my full thoughts on our under-appreciated wizard boy here. What solidified him as one of my all-time RPG romances, however, wasn't his wit or his very nice hair. It was a conversation in which he acted like a petty little bastard.

After your first amorous night together, Gale—like any self-conscious bloke might do—asks you how he performed in the bedroom. If you respond: "It was fine," he fully has a sulk, stopping just short of making a thread on r/AITA.

"Nobody weeps because the weather is fine," he says while his voice actor, Tim Downie, puts as much quiet, brooding petulance as he can into his words. "No monarchs were overthrown because their ruling was fine. No artworks were burned because they were masterpieces, but merely fine."

Then he threatens to blow himself up, calling himself "a fragile vessel in which to place potentially world-ending power. Perhaps it would be better to not shake such a vessel."

I want to point out, Gale sucks for this—it's an absolutely toxic, unpleasant, and thorny response to being told you were just acceptable in the bedroom, so much so that it horseshoes around to being meme-able. But it also cemented why I liked his romance, why I liked him—because it makes him three-dimensional, fleshed-out.

It helps that it works for his character, too. Gale was essentially groomed by the god of magic. In his first relationship since trying to impress someone who has complete and utter power over him, he's going to be sensitive to criticism. Especially after his ex told him to blow himself up—his insecurity is believably petty, because he's measuring himself to perfection.

It's this willingness for companion characters to be unpleasant that makes BG3's cast fly off the screen. Larian's writers weren't afraid of people hating or disliking their characters—many of them are actively hostile to you, or have moments where they can turn against you entirely. And the more I thought about it, the more I've come to realise that that is, in fact, the point.

Hate-love relationships

The strength of any RPG's structure, story-wise, is in its genre conventions. Simply put, most RPGs have the following set of circumstances:

• There is a world-ending threat (or at least, something that will muck stuff up on the regional/continent level).
• You have companions who'll accompany you on all your adventures.

Now, if you're a writer, you might think to yourself: Well, I better make these people bearable to get along with. If you're going to be spending 50-100 hours with somebody, they need to be pleasant to be around. And while that has to be true of some of your party members—an RPG cast benefits from having a Karlach, Minsc, Tali, or Wynne in it—it's a terrible assumption to make for your entire crew.

It's throwing away gold, for one: You have a reason to put the most eclectic, weird mix of strangers into a huge 'get along or the world ends' t-shirt. Characters who'd otherwise have absolutely zero reason to so much as look at each other, who would otherwise hate each other, must interact for the greater good.

This friction is the fuel for any great RPG—no, more than that. It's why they work in the first place. The grinding of flaw against flaw is the mill that makes the bread of some of the genre's best banter. Take Alistair and Morrigan for instance. On paper, these characters would be the worst two to form a party with. But you should put them next to each other, because Morrigan's dry cynicism and Alistair's cheerful wit is extraordinarily entertaining when they're inches from ripping each other's throats out.

And listen, I hate to harp on Dragon Age: The Veilguard more than I already have—especially since, given the development hell it went through, its writers may have wanted to do more with its cast, but simply couldn't. But it's unfortunately a good illustrative example of where this goes wrong.

As our own Lauren Morton pointed out, the cast doesn't argue with you, they don't bicker with each other, they don't have conflicting or impactful beliefs that dent the narrative (or your opinion of them) in any way.

They are all just blandly kind of likeable—or if they are unpleasant, they're unpleasant in ways that are vaguely-defined and blurry around the edges. Taash comes the closest to having an abrasive personality, and at the end of everything, they're really just sort of headstrong and opinionated in a way that'll make some people annoyed. And because of the story's resistance towards engaging in darker themes, they just come across as immature.

In a way, Veilguard's characters feel like empty vessels designed for the indistinct glob of fandom to project onto. Large fanfiction nets built to trawl for as many diehards as possible—and don't get me wrong, I've nothing against fanfiction. On the contrary, I think if your game has the sauce, you're going to have a smut-happy fandom whipped into an eager frenzy.

But there's a level of insecurity that radiates off characters who are built this way, a Netflix-esque, focus-tested glazed-over look in their eyes. And it's why I just can't love them.

It's all about bias, baby

Human beings are weird creatures. We'll project emotions and feelings onto inanimate objects if we have to—slap a pair of googly eyes on a roomba, and guarantee you'll come up with a nickname for it within the week, if not the next hour.

This affection for imperfection applies to how we form social relationships, as well. There's a name for it—the "Halo effect". Basically, if you form a positive opinion of someone, you're more likely to rationalise or dismiss their less pleasant behaviour further down the line.

The dark side of this is that we sometimes overlook awful behaviour from the people we love—but it's not an inherently terrible thing. Human beings are messy, we're flawed, we make mistakes, and if we didn't have a little softness for the people we care about, we probably wouldn't get much done. Giving grace to those closest to us is natural.

And I think this is why RPG characters that are thorny, unpleasant, and flawed tend to be treated with more affection than ones that are written to be frictionless—they map to a more accurate experience of what it's like to actually be friends with somebody.

You form an initial impression of them, negative or positive, and then when you get to know them better—when you're all socially bonded—the emotional systems we've developed for group cohesion kick in and give you the same chemical punt. Without those flaws to challenge our impressions of that NPC, they don't feel "real" in the same way.

There's even some science backing this up. Studies have shown that oxytocin, a chemical responsible for social bonding, kicks in when we read stories. Much of the same neurological processes we use to form connections in real life apply to a stellar narrative, too—it's why people get so attached, and why a good yarn can bring you to tears.

Which, I think, is why frictionless RPGs characters just don't work. If you don't create the same feeling of growing attached to someone—a strong first impression, later counterbalanced by discovering flaws or virtues—then there's an uncanniness to it that forces us to disconnect.

The term "immersion" gets bandied around a lot, but it really applies here. The success of a good story, particularly a character-focused one, is in how it pulls you in—and if I don't feel like I'm playing an RPG with real, vivid characters who I might dislike on occasion, I'm going to start tuning out.

You need to add scenes that rub people the wrong way—actions that are genuinely questionable, beliefs that are genuinely unpleasant. Not for every character, and not to every harsh extent, but that variety is still mandatory. In other words, in order for them to be loved, you need to be okay with your RPG characters being hated.

As I sit here, watching Saber Interactive's CEO have a normal one about how generative AI dialogue can totally improve videogames, I can't help but grit my teeth in the same, enamel-grinding fashion I have ever since companies like Ubisoft started promising a future with AI-powered "neo-NPCs."

If you'd believe the hype, these things are potentially good on paper, right? We live in a development environment where the ambitions of big-budget open world games are far outstripping their cost—wouldn't it simply be marvellous if you could populate a world with infinite dialogue chains and storylines?

In practice, the result is… pretty middling. While yes, some of the isolated tech demos we've seen have been impressive, the actual implementation of those we've seen in videogames, such as the life sim Seed, or Inzoi, which tried to pilot "smart Zois", fell flat.

Even when they're a source of entertainment, that fun is mostly found in the process of making them believe they're pregnant—and listen, I love toys. Putting aside my general distaste for generative AI, I don't think that every single videogame that comes out has to be a work of art. Toys are fine, you can smash action figures together and have a lovely time.

But that's not been the pitch, has it? Convai, an AI NPC start-up, wants to avoid a world without games where background "characters are given one line and repeat that one line over and over again, maybe two lines at best."

Ubisoft wants "fully personalised and immersive experiences", where its neo-NPCs make games "more alive and richer," whatever that means. Meaning Machine, a company that's pioneering reactive battle banter, is pushing for narrative-based games which are entirely powered by the tech. The dream is, in a lot of places, to use AI to try and tell stories.

The problem is, this pipe dream fails at the conceptual level, because this just isn't how good storytelling works. These people don't get it. And if they do get it? They think you're dumb. They think you're dumb as bricks.

In defense of miscellany

The main lie to the idea is the implication that background details, specifically what NPCs in said background say, aren't of any great importance. This couldn't be further from the truth.

One of videogames' biggest strengths is the ability to divorce themselves from pacing. Not entirely, mind—a singleplayer game with a linear narrative is still going to care about pacing a great deal. But an open-world game can take the time to establish, create, and put forward background details that would otherwise bog a story in any other medium down.

There are more obvious examples. Say, a town crier in a fantasy RPG telling you about some far-flung event you'll likely be dealing with—but there are more subtle instances of this sort of thing working brilliantly. My favourite example by far are Cyberpunk 2077's adverts, which are tailor-made to invoke the exact right amount of corporate overstimulation and dread in you as you muddle around Night City.

In a game with a stand-out story, all of these hundreds of little opportunities will be leveraged powerfully to draw you in—they can do more than just hand you information about the plot, they can create a sense of scale or place. Combat barks can characterise an enemy faction, journal entries can flesh out a culture, and so on.

The perception that these qualities in a game's overarching script are somehow "less important" is just completely backwards—they're the backbone on which the rest of the story lies. And even when they're not exactly award-winning, this background chatter still creates a game's sense of character.

Imagine a world in which lines like "Do you get up to the cloud district very often? Oh what am I saying, of course you don't " or "I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee" had been scraped out and replaced with the ability to, like, make them think you're Abraham Lincoln reincarnated, or something.

Heck, the fact that you're probably summoning to mind videogames with hilarious or immersion-breaking background natter proves my point, right? You're already able to tell when it's gone wrong.

Starfield's setting feels bland and dull when compared to something like New Vegas not just because of its main yarn, but because in the latter, its locations and background babble are hand-crafted and designed to surprise you, and in the former, procedurally-generated planets lie next to grey and perfunctory cities with all the rough edges sanded off.

Even just being placed next to a bunch of crap that wasn't hand-made causes Starfield to feel shallower as a result. Now imagine if all of those cities had AI-generated NPCs with disconnected, jilted, random stories to tell you—stories you couldn't even have a shared laugh at with your mate when they were bad. Does that sound better?

In this sense, the idea that AI-generated NPCs are some miracle fix that will give smaller studios the ability to tell stories in bigger worlds just completely falls apart, because those worlds are only made to feel big and textured because of thousands of little scripts that are laboriously written out by hand.

At the risk of stating the obvious, you can't just skip over that hard work and expect the same results! There's far more creativity in all the smaller choices a team of writers makes than the broad, conceptual idea that started them off. Background chatter, combat barks, NPC dialogue, side-quests, it all matters.

They think you can't tell the difference

The reason these bigwigs think they can get this crap past you has a lot to do with the same, broader, executive misunderstandings of what makes good art: People. It's a sentiment that was echoed by id Software's baffled Chris Hays, who has been watching Microsoft push statement after statement that the studio was still the same id Software, even after half of its staff were laid off.

Or take EA's head honchos, who Dragon Age creator David Gaider said believed "you made an RPG and the nerds in the cave would always show up for an RPG, because it was an RPG." It's no coincidence that Gaider, ostensibly responsible for one of gaming's best fantasy settings, was pre-emptively exhausted at the idea of AI-generated story back in 2023.

Nor is it a coincidence that Cyberpunk's quest director was unimpressed by the technology, or Larian's head writer, who called its output worse than their worst drafts. People who know what actually makes a story good aren't cringing at generative AI because they're luddites whose jobs are being threatened—if it was able to put something compelling together, they'd spot it.

They think it's garbage because it's garbage, and they don't want to have a hand in feeding you garbage. It's really that simple.

The biggest insult of suits peddling this crap is the idea that you just don't care. That you don't care if the music you're listening to is crap, you don't care if their games look hideous, and that you don't care if a game's story leaves you confused and hollow. They believe that you will merrily accept the substitute of a bunch of keys being jangled in front of your face over something that was carefully hand-crafted to make you feel something.

To those people, videogames are products. Hasbro thinks it can spit out another Baldur's Gate just by throwing the same amount of money at a different studio, Amazon's then-boss of games blithely said, in 2024, that videogames don't have acting. This is the prevailing attitude—a row of artless suits who are trying to sell you a bridge. Don't buy the damn bridge, I beg you. It won't make your games better.

At a time when game file sizes are growing ever larger and disk space is astonishingly expensive, I increasingly appreciate the value of a small game. And they don't come much smaller than TinySol, a solitaire game so diminutive that it can be loaded from a QR code.

TinySol is the creation of vintage computer enthusiasts Classic Bits, and was stumbled upon by YouTuber LGR Blerbs at the VCF Southwest convention in Texas. In what sounds like the beginning of a horror film, Blerbs was randomly handed TinySol at a booth on a 5.25-inch floppy disk.

Despite appearances, TinySol is a new(ish) game, having been in development since 2021. In the dot matrix-style manual that accompanies the hard copy, developer Classic Bits explains "I originally wanted a tiny game to shoehorn into ROM images for GRiD computers and that would leverage the sharp 640x400 AT&T 6300 monochrome video."

Weighing in at a paltry 3 kilobytes, TinySol lets players enjoy three-card Klondike Solitaire with simple black & white graphics. The program is so compact that it can fit within a QR code, which can be decoded with a snippet of code written on TinySol's packaging.

In the comments to Blerbs' video, Classic Bits provided some additional information on the game, saying that the game is "intentionally monochrome for max clarity on old displays," and that the QR code version is actually a "mini low-rez version with limited features". And while currently the 3-card draw is the only mode available, Classic Bits has added a one-card draw mode for an "upcoming release".

Fortunately, you don't need a hard copy or a QR code to check out TinySol yourself. The game is free to download via the Classic Bits website. You can run TinySol in DosBox by dragging and dropping the TinySol executable onto the DosBox application. It's worth noting that many of the three-card draws the game generates are not actually winnable, so Classic Bits has compiled 640 winnable save files that you can also download if you wish.

Immersive sims like Dishonored and Deus Ex are typically solo experiences, but there have been a few attempts to bring multiplayer into the mix over the years. System Shock 2 featured an infamously wonky cooperative mode that was overhauled in last year's Nightdive remaster, while Arkane's Deathloop successfully folded an invasion mechanic into its mix of roguelike running and emergent sneaking.

Now, you can also play Arkane's excellent System Shock successor Prey with a bunch of pals, albeit via unofficial means. The functionally named Prey Coop enables up to 16 players to explore the Talos 1 space station together. Prey Coop is the creation of modder null234, who says that the mod "syncs global campaign progression, story choices, enemy AI, inventory, doors, hazards and world physics across all connected clients."

Although Prey Coop is still in Alpha, null234 says the whole campaign is playable from start to finish on "both new and existing saves". Nonetheless, there are still plenty of kinks to be worked out, such as "visual rough edges, animation quirks, and potential bugs."

Frankly, 16 players running around Talos 1 sound like the worst thing ever, but playing Prey as a 2-player cooperative game should work fairly well. Prey is by far the most methodical and cerebral of Arkane's immersive sims, one that encourages ingenious use of gadgets and powers to get the drop on the Typhon menace. Working together with a partner to set up traps, fight enemies, and bypass obstacles seems like a viable way to play, especially if you compensate for the extra player by amping up the difficulty.

As far as I'm concerned though, you can play Prey with as many friends as you like, so long as you play it. Arkane's dark sci-fi adventure has gone up in my estimations every time I've played it, to the point where I believe it might just be the best thing Arkane has produced to date.

Sure, Dishonored 2 has the more galaxy-brained levels and flashier powers. But I think Prey's slower-burn has the greater satisfaction, especially over repeated playthroughs. It has the superior story, by some margin and the way Talos 1 unfolds as you explore is marvellous. I also find that treating the Typhon as puzzles to be solved rather than enemies to be fought also elevates the experience. There's tons of fun to be had in manipulating those inky aliens from the shadows using all the weird gizmos Prey furnishes you with.

Anyway, I'll step off the soapbox now. If you want to try Prey Coop for yourself, you can download it via Nexus Mods. Alongside the mod itself, you'll need to install Chairloader, forward the appropriate ports, and ensure all players have a legitimate copy of the game and the same DLL build of the mod. Full instructions are available here.

You could tell that Stalker 2 was a true sequel to 2007's survivalist FPS in that it was as broken as it was brilliant. GSC Game World succeeded in delivering the seamless open world it has spent two decades striving toward, but players' exploration of Chornobyl's exclusion zone was hindered by bugs, broken quests, and more performance issues than a drunk orchestra.

The sequel has received numerous massive patches already, but the biggest and—hopefully—best is yet to come. With the imminent arrival of the shooter's first story expansion, GSC has detailed the enormous 2.0 patch that will accompany the DLC.

Named 'Back to the Zone', the 2.0 update will bring both a visual and mechanical refresh to Stalker 2 upon its release next week, as detailed by GSC in an article on its website. The headline change is an overhaul to the Zone's lighting, which GSC says it has altered to provide more varied conditions:

"The sun still shines brightly outside, but now it plays differently across the environment on the ground—shadows and reflections included," GSC writers. Indoor lighting has also been changed to make it "more realistic", while the landscape and vegetation has apparently been reworked for a more natural look.

Arguably more significant, though, are the changes GSC has made to A-Life—the system that governs the behaviour of the mutants and rival Stalkers that prowl the Zone. Again, the focus appears to be on improving the Zone's atmosphere, making it more of an immersive space and less of a warzone.

"The Zone isn't one constant gunfight. It's a lonely place where life carries on by its own rules," GSC explains. "Every encounter or firefight is the result of stalkers and mutants simply doing stalker and mutant things."

Specific changes include giving creatures more places to be like campfires, bus stops etc, and increasing conflicts around those spots. GSC has also fixed some of the more immersion-breaking glitches experienced in the sequel, like enemies shooting through walls.

Other additions coming with the patch include a custom difficulty where you adjust parameters like combat difficulty, anomalies, and the in-game economy, new weapons and scopes, dynamic fog that you can use to your tactical advantage, and binoculars—which are pretty useful to have in a game like Stalker.

Back to the Zone will be released on August 20, launching in tandem with the expansion 'Cost of Hope'. This DLC—one of two GSC has planned—revolves around the series' authoritarian 'Duty' faction and will see players learn what secrets lie hidden in the centre of the Zone. While I'm up for further story adventures in Stalker 2, a smoother ride in the base game is easily what I'm most excited about.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer feature provided by:

Grand Theft Auto 4 multiplayer: Why everyone should try the 32-player massacre - PC Gamer #197 (UK, February 2009)

By Kieron Gillen

What am I supposed to do? The only response I manage is blinking, laughing loudly and then trying to work out how to activate the firehose. Some bright spark decided that the next game should be a race with trucks. 32 trucks. Of which about 25 or so turn out to be fire engines.

As you may expect, the result is chaos. Glorious chaos. Glorious never-had-anything- like-that-before chaos.

It’s one of those dark secrets of videogaming: if you want to play a GTA game and you’re willing to wait a few months, the PC version is always the best way to go. Always. Back in the day of GTA3, the PC’s generally more potent hardware led to a game that dealt with the cities better, included custom soundtracks and even worked as a shooter. And now, as the next-gen consoles start to get long in the tooth, the PC is building towards something else. Two relevant points here. First, that there’s a degree of future-proofing in GTA’s hardware settings, with options that will only become practical to turn on when PCs catch up. Secondly, the upping of the multiplayer limit from 16 players on the consoles to a 32 on the PC.

While it’s easy to dwell on increased scale of the multiplayer and how that impacts the experience, it shouldn’t overshadow how the addition of multiplayer to the GTA series is—in and of itself—a major step forward. Previously, to experience such a thing you had to turn to mod projects such as Multitheft Auto. Now, it’s just in there, and accessible.

The addition of multiple players changes GTA4's character. In singleplayer, it leans away from the inspired clownish stupidity that characterised the series up to this point—it’s simply a more serious game. But when you’ve got friends with you... well, that all goes out the window.

Other players turn the stupid up to a frankly awesome degree simply by acting like people. And if they won’t act stupid without encouragement, you can twist the rules to make it more likely they’ll go proper mental.

While there are a mass of free-for-all, team-based and cooperative game modes available, each of them is also tweakable with easily selectable options. For example, while playing the objective-control Turf War game, we limit the weapons to rocket-launchers only. This changes things, in a similar way that arming every knife-toting dangerous youth in London with an RPG would. It also brings out the subtleties in the control system: while the rockets are powerful, they’re also slow moving and require careful aiming.

That said, driving a car into a crossfire of half a dozen explosive projectiles and the resulting—here’s that word again—chaos is a less considered and more visceral thrill.

The options are what it’s all about. While you’re able to play multiplayer games across the three islands of Liberty City, in practice you’ll select one of the closed-off areas. These can be as intensely small as one of the peninsulas of the central island. Much depends on the game mode you’ve selected—for example, Mafiya modes have you trying to complete organised crime contracts to get the most rewards. Even straight deathmatch can be tuned to be more than just counting heads by racing to get the cash: suddenly scavenging from fallen bodies plays as much a part as just offing everyone.

There are also world options such as pedestrians and traffic, which are probably best left off to make larger games playable (the framerate was wincing when those 32 fire trucks lined up on the start-line). Actually, the race modes highlights much of what’s best in competitive GTA4 multiplayer.

Specifically, the GTA race. If only they added the ability to hit people physically when you’re riding alongside them, this would be Road Rash for the late noughties. Essentially it’s a race mode with added violence.

While you all start in vehicles of the same class, it’s unlikely you’re going to finish in them. While there’s health to pick up to patch your charge together, it’s more likely you’re going to die and come back on the moped (I finished the aforementioned fire-truck race on one, overtaking a truck on the inside, firing an Uzi into it while it tried—and failed—to sideswipe me. And if that sentence doesn’t make you want to play videogames, I fear for you).

Inevitably, as the lower placed racers decide they can’t win and turn to fighting among themselves or making road blocks of debris, you turn a race game into a desperate Max-Max survival simulator.

It is hilarious.

GTA4 as a multiplayer game works well on this axis. Even when it’s at its most standard, in its team-deatmatch modes, you have a fascinating collision between characters who move and fight like extras from Michael Mann’s Heat, and moments that are straight out of a gangster-take on the Keystone Cops: cars full of thugs leaning out of the window of their stolen car and opening up optimistically before crashing off a bridge. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is what fellow humans add to GTA4: humanity.

In an investor-focused article on the Walt Disney Company website, the entertainment giant revealed an achievement that caught me off-guard: Kingdom Hearts, the mesmerizingly strange Final Fantasy x Disney crossover series, numbers among the company's "billion-dollar franchises."

The article, "How Games Are Helping Shape Disney's Next Chapter," looks to be a combination victory lap/game plan meant to be read by the market-minded individual. It's shareholder chic, touting the company's numerous sales-related achievements in the gaming space, such as its increasingly close relationship with Epic Games and the Fortnite Creative platform, or Marvel Rivals' success among Gen Z. Also, the Kingdom Hearts thing.

Disney executive vice president of games and digital entertainment Sean Shoptaw explained that the company boasts "nine games that have grossed over $1 billion at retail." Among that nine: Mobile game Marvel Strike Force, and Kingdom Hearts.

I truly do not know what to say about this development or its wider implications for Spaceship Earth. The Kingdom Hearts phenomenon passed me by, even though I am in a maximum risk demographic for being a Kingdom Hearts fan (late millennial, owned a PS2). I've always assumed it's the sort of thing you can't be initiated into past a certain age. It's like an elf I just can't see because the magic of childhood has left my soul.

Kingdom Hearts is still popular, though, and weirdly cross-generational. Its release chronology has it firmly being "a millennial thing," but it also feels like "a zoomer thing" as well, judging by the frenzied reactions whenever that big-shoed Sora reappears.

And it makes sense that it has accumulated $1 billion after 15 mainline games—a solid chunk of which are repackaged collections of past games—over a quarter century. To the big mouse, that's small potatoes (the new Spider-Man movie alone will clear over a billion before its theater run is done). Congratulations to the Walt Disney Company, Square Enix, and their respective shareholders.

We finally got another trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 in June, four years, two ages of man, and one geological epoch after its initial 2022 reveal. Perhaps the next billion in Donald Duck keyblade revenue is nearer at hand than any of us suspect?

I’m supposed to be stealing keys from several merchants in Leyawiin, but things haven’t exactly gone to plan. I accidentally wore my Grey Fox mask, a piece of armour that immediately marks me as a wanted criminal to every guard I pass. Even after finally sorting out my armour situation and making my way into Southern Books, the shopkeeper Bugak gro-Bol isn’t in bed when I enter and won’t stop following me around and trying to kick me out of his shop, because it’s midnight and I look like exactly the kind of shady character who might be breaking in to steal from him.

These are the same hapless adventures that I remember going on in Oblivion, but this time my Khajiit character isn’t out thieving at the behest of Cyrodiil’s Thieves Guild. I’ve already worked my way to the top of that organisation and become the Grey Fox myself. I’m back at the bottom of the totem pole now, working for a brand-new guild based in the modded territory of Elsweyr.

Meet the Khajiit

Wherever game developers leave loose lore on the ground, modders are always sure to pick it up and incorporate it. Khajiit lore in the Elder Scrolls games is varied and colourful, but has almost always been relegated to tomes and dialogue from cat-like merchants. Although the Khajiit homeland did appear in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, it didn’t show up again in a proper Elder Scrolls game until an expansion to The Elder Scrolls Online in 2019. In the meantime, modders have soaked up all the spare Khajiit facts available and designed the territory themselves.

One of the earliest fan-made forays into the Khajiit homeland is Elsweyr The Deserts of Anequina, originally published in June of 2009 by a Nexus Mods user called Iliana and including the work of dozens of other modders. I didn’t play Oblivion in 2006 when it released, but even 13 years later I can still intensely feel the awe that its opening fanfare and drawn-out 3D pan around the Imperial City must have inspired. In the same way I can appreciate how great a feat Elsweyr Anequina’s giant open expanse and huge cast of NPCs and quests are, despite playing through them 10 years later.

Anequina begins with a book, as plenty of mods do. It appears in my inventory to describe all the cities and quests available to me in the new territory. I also have to make sure I’ve turned off Oblivion’s default in-game borders that prevent me from exploring beyond the normal bounds of Cyrodiil. With that done, I’m able to wander across the southern border of the world and directly into Elsweyr over a bridge west of Bravil.

The first town I travel through is Riverhold, just over the southern border. It’s not immediately different from Cyrodiil—still lots of green, with bushes and waterfalls like other areas of Oblivion’s base game. Inside town though, I’m quickly face to face with all the various ‘furstocks’ of Khajiit. Most had never been seen in an Elder Scrolls game before, only described, and were left up to the imagination and resourcefulness of modders involved with Anequina.

Riverhold is full of Khajiit that lore-buffs will recognise, though they can’t possibly compare with the renditions from Bethesda’s own creations in The Elder Scrolls Online. Cathay, one of the playable races of most Elder Scrolls games, mingle with Ohmes, which have physical and facial features of Bosmer elves, just with fur on top. The house cat-like Alfiq and big cat Senche both seem to be based on the same cougar-esque large cat model, but scaled down and up respectively.

Whether by design choice or technical concern, neither Alfiq nor Senche can be spoken to. Other Khajiit speak plenty, though of course their voiced lines are only greetings like “Hello there!” and other small phrases that already existed in Oblivion’s base game for its Khajiit characters. Their more specific lines for quest giving are all text only. Elder Scrolls lore suggests that the scholarly Alfiq dislike speaking in front of outsiders, creating rumours that they are actually mute. I suppose my Khajiit thief is an outsider to them after all.

Local Color

Other mods that pair well with this dish

Beyond Riverhold, green shrubbery gives way to the arid desert that the northern region of Elsweyr—Anequina, as the mod is named after—is known for. Grassy hills quickly turn into steep sand dunes ringed with narrow walking paths that, to Anequina’s credit, feel as if they belong with the rest of Oblivion’s topology. Thanks to its notoriously floaty physics, it’s easy to break a leg stumbling down a dune while pursued by one of the many new monsters added in the mod.

The desert is dangerous, it turns out. In true Oblivion fashion, I learn the region’s fauna by running away from them at full tilt, turning back every so often to fire arrows into their knees. The desert is swamped with giant tarantulas, aggressive Alfiq, elephants that seem majestic and calm but absolutely are not when you get close enough, orc bandits, and many other things that want to kill me. It brings back fond memories of being chased by two very persistent wolves all the way from Bruma to Skingrad. Even a few remote villages of tribal Khajiit are hostile as soon as I got near their gates.

In between running from oversized arachnids, Anequina’s fully featured towns each have their own distinct design. In Dune there are camels for sale, and giant golden towers that look like a mosque on a postcard presiding over the open market in the lower half of the city. Riverhold is a treetop city of wooden homes all climbing the same waterfall topped with a modest lodge that calls itself a palace. Corinthe is a small town maze of back streets all branching from a central market, and its mostly single-story architecture crisscrossed with makeshift plank bridges between rooftops is the perfect hunting ground for the local Thieves Guild.

Compared with the Elsweyr I know from The Elder Scrolls Online, Anequina offers something a bit different. ESO’s wide-open world and detailed cities are beautiful, but all give me architectural fatigue. The steeply curved roofs that I’ve come to associate with the Khajiit thanks to that game are a constant presence in all of its cities in Northern Elsweyr.

Anequina features so much more contrast and more varied sources of inspiration thanks to all the different modders contributing to the buildings and city designs of the area.

Khajiit has quests

It isn’t all just exploration, of course. There are two dozen new quests and a few guilds to join. As in Oblivion, not all quests are of grand scale. In Riverhold my first encounter is with a man looking for his lost child. Solving this small mystery involves asking around town and using Oblivion’s odd speechcraft minigame to increase residents’ disposition towards me to eventually pry information out of them.

Outside town is a Khajiit highwayman not so committed to his task who simply gives up when I refuse to hand over the 400 gold coins he demands. Further into the desert I stumble over the dead body of a Khajiit lying next to a golden lamp. Having learned no lessons from pop culture whatsoever, I pick up the lamp and a dremora genie pops out to offer me a wish. Apparently I’m not averse to deals with demons because I wish, of all things, for love. I’m granted a random NPC friend for my trouble and the genie, now contractually freed from caring about my wants or needs, proceeds to attack.

With that problem behind me, I pull out my Anequina guide book again, the tome that started it all. I seem to remember seeing mention of the Thieves Guild. As the Grey Fox of Cyrodiil I find it only right that I should visit the local chapter and see what dark work needs doing. That’s where my great struggle lifting keys from the pockets of merchants in Leyawiin begins. In all my time traipsing about Elsweyr I’ve entirely forgotten how to be a proper thief. I do eventually manage to steal all three requested keys and return them to my new dispatcher Jinsiraga in Corinthe. After that I’m off to steal some horses, naturally.

These are only the beginning of my adventures in the Oblivion version of Elsweyr. Anequina understands Oblivion’s playfulness with its lazy highwaymen and desert genies. If not for having to install Anequina, I’d have never known it wasn’t part of Oblivion in the first place.

Few things in gaming are more routine than a Call of Duty multiplayer beta, but this year's is actually a bit different. The Modern Warfare 4 beta kicking off on August 21 (for pre-orders only) will include the usual smattering of multiplayer modes, and in a series first, it'll also include a chunk of the campaign.

"Entrenched" is the campaign mission that'll be playable early, and Infinity Ward has published a brief teaser for it (watch above). Based on what we know about the story of Modern Warfare 4, it seems we're neck deep in North Korea's invasion of South Korea by this point.

The mission will follow a squad of South Korean marines (plus one embedded American) in an uphill offensive—we've got trenches, APCs, shotguns, and that thing where an NPC buddy has an elaborate mo-capped brawl right in front of you. In short: a Call of Duty mission, and perhaps a good one.

Warzone will also make an appearance in a beta for the first time, but not until the second weekend. That's the one that's open for all, August 28 to September 1. The new Zodiac Resurgeance map will be playable, and I imagine we'll also learn the ways in which Warzone will be absorbing Modern Warfare 4's gameplay changes.

If you're not caught up, Infinity Ward's first CoD in four years appears to be more about refinements than anything else—clever solutions to things like muzzle flash, hipfire, and movement aimed at maintaining Modern Warfare's immersive qualities while not annoying serious players. I played a bit of multiplayer back in May against other journalists and had a good time, but next week's beta is a proper test drive.

As for why Infinity Ward is double-stuffing the beta, it has not said, though one could intuit that the studio is extending an olive branch to fans disappointed by last year's pretty bad Black Ops 7, and who might not see the urgency to buy another $70 CoD weeks before GTA6 arrives.

Disconnects are an unpleasant fact of life in an MMO, and if you play WoW long enough you'll start to recognize the telltale signs indicating one of your adventurer colleagues has fallen afoul of a network hiccup: They might simply halt in place mid-combat. If they were moving when the connection dropped, their character might proceed to run directly into a wall, or get caught in a brief loop of stuttery motion until the server has enough and logs them out.

Since WoW: Midnight's 12.1 patch dropped, however, players have started reporting some uncanny behavior from their disconnected fellows (via Kotaku). Rather than the expected unresponsiveness, disconnected characters have seemingly started to move and fight on their own.

The best available look at the phenomenon comes courtesy of redditor Stuperstrong, who shared a YouTube video on the WoW subreddit that they'd recorded of their Evoker friend disconnecting and continuing to participate in combat. In the clip, embedded above, you can see the dragon-winged Evoker exhibit the typical signs of a mid-encounter connection drop on the left side of the screen at around 39 seconds—and then they start fighting again.

The video is surprisingly unnerving: Speaking as someone who's played WoW on and off for over 20 years, there's something instinctively unsettling about seeing a player character performing actions when you've received all the visual signals that they absolutely shouldn't be. It feels wrong—and the stiff, robotic cadence of their inputs doesn't help.

Stuperstrong isn't the only one who's witnessed it. Other players responded to the thread with their own eyewitness accounts, like the brother of a warrior player whose game crashed while they were in a Discord call:

"He hung there through almost the entire boss fight we were on and then like 30 seconds into his [disconnect], his warrior charges the boss and starts hitting it," says redditor shlomo_baggins. "My brother was actively narrating his re-login. According to him his game hard locked, froze, and he ALT+F4'd and relogged in. Suuuper weird."

So who's playing when the player isn't? While this could all be an elaborate hoax, the best theory so far is that we're seeing an early manifestation of some sort of unannounced disconnect protection feature.

For a few years now, WoW has used NPC dungeon follower tech to let players run through casual content with a party of AI-controlled player characters who are—in most cases, anyway—surprisingly capable in combat. If disconnected characters are indeed starting to fight on their own, it's not unthinkable that Blizzard might have reworked that tech to keep a dropped connection from ruining a dungeon run or raid attempt for the whole group.

Either that or WoW's haunted. Blizzard hasn't yet acknowledged the phenomenon; until there's some sort of official explanation, all theories are on the table.

Have you ever said to yourself, 'If I was rich I'd get Looking Glass Studios back together and have them make a proper goddamn Thief sequel!'? Or, you know, whatever game gets you really wound up about such things. It's a pleasant fantasy, but not something that ever actually happens—except, apparently, in the case of the recently announced Thimbleweed Park 2.

In a new interview with Bloomberg, Thimbleweed Park creator Ron Gilbert said he didn't want to work with a conventional publisher because his experiences with them haven't been entirely great.

"I don’t mind the publisher earning back their money," Gilbert said. "It’s just that once they have earned back their money and become whole, they still want the majority of the money. Or there are really goofy terms, like you don’t make anything unless it’s a major hit. I always felt that was unfair."

That was the case when Gilbert first expressed interest in doing Thimbleweed Park 2: Publishers were interested but their terms weren't acceptable. Gilbert also didn't want to do another Kickstarter. That left the process kind of stuck, until a friend told Gilbert he knew "a wealthy outsider" who was a big fan of adventure games, and Thimbleweed Park in particular.

Gilbert was dubious, but eventually made contact with the purported wealthy benefactor, who turned out to be an actual wealthy benefactor. Gilbert put together a "very realistic" budget for Thimbleweed Park 2, higher than the cost of the original (which the report says cost just over $1 million), and the as-yet-anonymous rich guy threw the thumbs up on what Gilbert said is a far better deal than he'd get from any publisher: "This deal is a lot more fair in that he gets whole very quickly, and then it’s a reasonable split."

The audience for point-and-click adventures is relatively niche, but those who like them—as this story shows—tend to like them a lot. Adventures also tend to have a longer tail than some genres, at least in part because they're not dependent on cutting edge technology: Many of the best of them, Thimbleweed Park included, look (and, frankly, play) like they were made 20 or 30 years ago.

And Thimbleweed Park is still out there earning, too. "We’re almost 10 years from release and that game still sells," Gilbert said. "That tells me that there is an audience for that game and games like this."

Thimbleweed Park 2, neither a sequel nor a prequel, is currently expected to be out in early 2028.

Back in June, RuneScape studio Jagex held its first live event outside the UK (and its biggest to date): Deadman All Stars, an Old School RuneScape PvP tournament. I had the chance to talk to OSRS creative director Kieren Charles at the event, and he explained his philosophy on running the 13 year-old fork of the 25 year-old MMO amid its new lease on life.

"The game's bigger now than it was in 2007," Charles said of RuneScape's overall health, while OSRS is now older than RuneScape was when Old School began in 2013. Last August, Old School hit an all-time player count record eclipsing any era or version of the game, and Charles estimated upwards of one million active subscribers just for Old School.

Charles himself was part of the original RuneScape phenomenon, but as a player, one of the core mid-to-late millennial cohort that made the game ubiquitous in middle schools during the golden age of MMOs. "I grew up with the game," Charles told me. "I was 14 in the school library playing RuneScape. I was just the one who never quit."

But why choose the 2007 iteration of RuneScape as a starting point? The game first launched in 2001, and had already undergone major revisions like the "RuneScape 2" update in 2004. Charles joined the OSRS team a few years after it started, but looking back, he characterized the choice as "kind of arbitrary, but based on what players deemed the sort of golden [age]."

"Players actually wanted the 2006 version, but we didn't have a copy of that version of the game," revealed Jagex senior communications manager Danni Amos. "A [Jagex employee] found the 2007 server in their desk drawer, and we had to boot it up, see if it works."

Wisdom of the crowd

Old School is, as best as I can tell, the first instance of officially-supported 'classic' servers for an MMO. The first fan servers running preserved versions of transformed or discontinued MMOs preceded it, but the likes of WoW Classic were following Jagex's lead. Charles believes that Old School's community engagement leaves it the best of both worlds when it comes to fan-managed versus official throwback MMOs.

OSRS regularly gets new content, including full-scale expansions like 2024's Varlamore. Those udpates need to match the Old School vibe, and Charles said one of the best compliments he gets is that the new stuff feels like it could have come out in '06 or '07. But all potential new additions are also put to a community vote before getting implemented, and if a feature or addition doesn't meet the 70% approval minimum, it gets scrapped.

"We are already running an MMO that's entirely decided by fans, but it's backed by a huge development team who could still do things that are at scale," said Charles. "With fan server versions, it's never going to be at the same scale. It's hard to imagine it having the number of players like you can have with an official version, nor the development support."

It's an approach he doesn't necessarily recommend to every MMO developer, and the team has had stuff rejected which "really does suck in the moment," according to Charles.

But they've reached a point where they don't bring a feature to vote unless they're confident players will dig it. Besides, Charles said he'd still rather have a proposed addition get rejected than "spend six months or a year of development time to then launch it and find out people hate it."

While many great games come about from singular, forceful artistic visions, Charles described himself and his colleagues more as caretakers. "With Old School RuneScape, it's what the community wants. We're making it for them and looking after it for them," he told me.

"I'm fortunate as a creative director to be able to inherit such a good foundation for what we do going forward. I was part of the community directly before I joined the studio. I know what that feeling is, and I want to make sure that we look after that and keep it going."

Palworld went into full release in July after more than two years of early access, and it's going pretty well: A massive surge in concurrent players on Steam is slowly settling back down to Earth, but more than a month after that 1.0 launch it's still putting up numbers that haven't been seen since the early days of that early access rollout.

Work on the game continues and there's more to come, but Pocketpair's publishing and communications head John "Bucky" Buckley recently warned that players should maybe temper their expectations about what's next.

Buckley apparently set the bar higher than intended yesterday when he celebrated Palworld's "incredible" 1.0 launch by retweeting an image of a "Palworld v1.1 brainstorming session," adding, "time to get back to the grind!"

He also invited suggestions, and received more than 2,000 responses, some of them—like more storage slots—manageable, and others, like cross-server PvP or being able to play as pals, less so. Eventually, he was forced to pump the brakes on the whole thing.

"Shot myself in the foot here, 1.7k comments later, but things like 'add a new continent', 'add 20 more levels' and similarly massive undertakings are not really what we want to do with v1.1," Buckley wrote in a more recent message. "Open to ideas but, we’re not planning to spend a year making a massive update for 1.1."

Naturally, that didn't stop people from continuing to make unwieldy suggestions. Buckley made a trooper's effort to answer a lot of them: In response to a request for a "variant system" for pals, he said it wouldn't be difficult, "just exceptionally time consuming. A variant of 200+ pals would take a considerably long time to do. Realistically, a year or more unless we hyper focus it. Unless you don’t do it by hand and automate it somehow but…"

Replying to another user who asked why the process would be so time-consuming, Buckley wrote, "Because we would want to do it ourselves by hand rather than just automating it." (Pocketpair has been quite outspoken in its opposition to the use of generative AI in game development.)

Eventually, though—as it always does—it came to this:

Deeply relatable. There's no word on when Palworld 1.1 will be out at this point, or what will be in it, but Buckley also recently suggested that more collaborations are on the way, so at least you've got that to look forward to.

It looks like another bad day for Roblox: The US Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism has launched an investigation into child safety on the platform, saying the company "appears to prioritize revenue and engagement metrics over the safety and well-being of our children."

A letter (via Kotaku) sent to Roblox CEO David Baszucki by subcommittee chairman Josh Hawley and ranking member Dick Durbin says that while Roblox has repeatedly claimed that it is a safe platform for children, "the public record raises serious questions about this promise."

"Over the past decade, police have arrested numerous individuals for committing serious acts of violence and harm against children they met via Roblox, including grooming, sexual abuse, kidnapping, rape, and even murder," the letter reads. "Roblox is being used to trade child sexual abuse material, participate in sexually explicit (and often violent) virtual 'experiences' with children, bribe and extort children into producing explicit content, and lure children into in-person meetings. It is heartbreaking."

The past year has been quite a ride for Roblox and those who use it. The company has been aggressively fighting allegations that it is, as one investment research firm called it, a "pedophile hellscape," tightening restrictions on unrated games and using age estimation checks and new kinds of limited accounts to keep underage users away from inappropriate content and, well, pedophiles. Baszucki also took the very straightforward step of telling parents who are worried about Roblox, "Don't let your kids be on Roblox."

There have been missteps, to put it gently. Baszucki said in 2025 that Roblox's predator problem is "not just a problem, but an opportunity," which at the very least is a PR botch of ungodly proportions. He also mused about turning Roblox into a dating hub, which again is not the sort of thing to say when you're facing legal action from Louisiana, Kentucky, Florida, Texas, LA County, Australia, the UK, and various others over your alleged systemic child safety failures.

At the same time, somehow, Roblox earned praise from the US Attorney General Alliance "for its readiness to collaborate directly with policymakers and respond to community concerns." And separate from all that, the kids really like Roblox—although that might be softening. The Roblox audience is still massive but not as massive as it was, and that's hammered the company's share price, although it's still trading roughly around where it was through 2023 and '24.

What it all adds up to is a company, and a platform, that's under pressure from multiple directions, and this Senate investigation only adds to that.

The letter from Hawley and Durbin says "Roblox appears to prioritize revenue and engagement metrics over the safety and well-being of our children," which makes it worthy of scrutiny. The company is thus ordered to preserve all records related to child safety, abuse, and "financial exploitation," and to provide requested documents and information by the end of August 2026.

"Let us be clear: children on your platform are hurting," the letter concludes. "Congress will not look the other way."

Roblox insists that it too is not looking away: The company says the uptick in reports of suspected child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children cited in the latter—65,381 in 2025, more than double the number of 2024—simply reflects the company's ongoing effort to improve its systems and the safety of its users.

"Roblox is built on the foundation of safety," Roblox chief safety officer Mautt Kaufman said in a statement provided to PC Gamer. "We do not compromise on that commitment. We look forward to sharing the facts about how we work to protect children on the platform."

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, a WB Games-published 2011 action RPG about a different fellowship that went the other way, recently reappeared on Steam in a polished-up Legacy Edition package. While the modernizations are getting a favorable reception—it's currently enjoying a Very Positive rating on Steam—its original launch 15 didn't earn much attention for something with "The Lord of the Rings" in the title.

War in the North didn't review well, but looking back, there's a certain Bethesda-sized factor that might have stolen some of its thunder: Its original release date was November 1, 2011—just 10 days before The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim came out. On X this week (via IGN), a former Warner Bros. dev said that unfavorable matchup might have been avoided if the publisher had taken his advice back in 2011.

Christian Allen—current design director on Project Zomboid and former design director at WB Games Seattle, which coordinates Warner Bros. development and publishing efforts—responded to the Legacy Edition's reveal to share how he'd tried without success to get the publisher to revise its launch plans.

"Wow this is cool. 15 years ago I argued vociferously not to release this up against Skyrim, as it wouldn't get a fair shake. I got overruled," Allen said. "Nice to see it get a proper release."

In follow-up replies, Allen noted that, in addition to the oppressive cultural gravity of Todd Howard, War in the North also suffered from a strangely thin marketing campaign. Either WB Games "wrote it off," or it "thought hardcore LOTR fans would just know about it, somehow," he said. Unfortunately, even the Lord of the Rings doesn't sell itself.

Not long after War in the North's disappointing launch, its original developer—Snowblind Studios—was merged with Monolith Productions in 2012. There, many former Snowblind studio staff would contribute to Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, a production that Allen had initially overseen as WB Games design director. After releasing the sequel, Shadow of War, in 2017 and working for years on a Wonder Woman game, the studio was eventually shuttered by Warner Bros. in 2025 as part of "a strategic change.

As for War in the North, Allen's overall assessment is that it was ultimately a casualty of corporate shortsightedness.

"Quarterly revenue motivations drive more decisions than people realize. It's a big challenge with stock-price driven organizations," he said. "Must be hard to be an exec and go, 'Well, this game will do better if we hold it until March, but my bonus will take a 50% hit.' 🤷"

Maybe the games industry of today isn't all that different from those of previous decades, despite how often it feels otherwise.

We first started tracking the prices of individual graphics cards on August 14, 2025, and since then we've checked on an almost weekly cadence (we've got to have holidays, y'know). And it's not been a pretty year.

In the interests of full disclosure, the methodology behind this data capture has been to have one editor spend an inordinate amount of their work day tracking down the cheapest available version of each of the current generation of GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, and yes, even Intel. They must be new in-box, so no refurbs or open box sales, and they must be from reputable sellers—no vendors on Amazon called sdfgwegggggwawfdasfsreqwwqeccccawef, in other words.

This data captures the very cheapest prices these GPUs were available for throughout the year, but what it doesn't capture is the average price, which has often been much higher. Sometimes there might be a good deal on a particular graphics card, while the rest of the market is significantly more expensive. But our idea was to capture what a reader could spend in a particular week to bag the GPU chipset they wanted. And we're carrying that on, with our weekly updates page always housing links to the cheapest cards we can find.

Back in August of last year, things weren't particularly pretty at all. There was a mix of low stock and high demand, which meant that graphics cards from all the various manufacturers were well over their respective MSRPs… and had been since launch. Every GPU launched in 2025 had one thing in common: There was little initial supply and the promised launch prices generally evaporated in a puff of corporate greed.

And that was all before the RAMpocalypse took hold.

There was a beautifully innocent, AI ignorant moment in October, however, when—and I am getting a lump in my throat as I write this—pretty much every GPU except the RTX 5090 was available at or under its MSRP. We've never had it so good…

But then almost as soon as the Black Friday sales wrapped up at the end of November things went—and I hope you'll forgive the technical industry jargon here—utterly tits up.

The memory crisis started to bite into the GPU market, and graphics card prices started to rise back up again, starting with the RTX 5080, which then dragged up almost every GPU up the price ladder into the new year.