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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How private equity acquisitions work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EA's uncertain future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early BioWare

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Dragon Age

Mass Effect

The closure of BioWare is a tremendous loss, not just for gamers but for Canada: The Edmonton-based studio was named one of the country's best places to work multiple times over the years, even after the Electronic Arts acquisition that ultimately spelled its doom. It's not entirely surprising, then, that its shutdown caught the attention of one of the country's top politicians, who had some harsh words for Electronic Arts about it.

"This is private equity, this is what it does. Buy up businesses, run them into the ground, and rip them apart for short-term profit," Avi Lewis, leader of the New Democratic Party—traditionally Canada's third-largest political party, although it's run aground a bit over the past several years—wrote on social media.

"The developers at BioWare know how to run the studio. They know how to make the games we all love. They should be given the first opportunity—and the federal support—to buy it and run it themselves. And if we want to avoid the Mass Effect effect in Canada, we should be keeping private equity out, not welcoming it in."

The NDP are a center-left party, although the ol' Overton window has resulted in a more centrist style in recent years—a drift Lewis was elected specifically to correct. He's been fairly forceful on that front, speaking out in support of anti-fascist causes and calling for the nationalization of vital industries in Canada that have been swallowed up by larger international interests. Predictably, that led some of his followers to jokingly (I think) call for BioWare to be nationalized.

This is private equity, this is what it does.Buy up businesses, run them into the ground, and rip them apart for short-term profit.www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...

— @avilewis.ca (@avilewis.ca.bsky.social) 2026-10-22T21:26:28.216Z

While the "Mass Effect effect" line is a bit of a clunker, Lewis showed off his gamer cred in response to an inquiry on X: When asked who he romanced in Mass Effect 2, he replied, "If I'm honest, I'm a Mass Effect 1 on the PS3 type of guy."

After EA's announcement this week, PC Gamer reached out to BioWare veteran David Gaider to ask for his reflection on the closure and his memories of the studio. Gaider joined BioWare in 1999 to work on Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn and went on to be lead writer on the early Dragon Age games, leaving BioWare in 2016 and co-founding Summerfall Studios in 2019.

Gaider on BioWare

The loss of a legacy hurts

The day after the closure of BioWare and cancellation of the next Mass Effect game, a purported trailer for Mass Effect: Universe has surfaced on Reddit. The authenticity of the trailer is unknown at this point, but at the very least it sure looks legit.

Straight to it, here's the video:

Man, that looks like Mass Effect—and sounds like it, too. The music is right, and at least two PC Gamer employees are pretty sure that's Liara's actual voice. Shepard's out, but the new guy seems suitably Shepard-like, although I can't help but notice the absence of the N7 logo on his uniform. Maybe the new guy was meant to be a rawer, rougher kind of troubleshooter—more of a housecleaner than a world-saver—or perhaps the ascent to the rank was meant to be part of the character's progression, which would've been cool.

There are no obvious AI telltales here, at least none that I can see, and adding to the trailer's "real deal" potential, a redditor claiming to be an EA employee said yesterday that a trailer for the new game had been produced and suggested that it was not as early in the development process as was widely believed.

Not long after the trailer came to light, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg said on Bluesky that it is indeed real, and that BioWare had been working on the game until its closure.

Whatever the case—and we're still working on verifying its provenance—the trailer is also just the right blend of sexy, violent, and corny: Even if this isn't a real trailer for what BioWare was working on (and at this point it seems pretty certain that it is), it's a Mass Effect we would definitely play.

Yesterday, EA announced that it's closing BioWare, the studio behind beloved RPG franchises like the original Baldur's Gate games, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. Alongside BioWare's closure—and the cancelling of its next Mass Effect project—EA is reportedly laying off around 400 people in an effort to "align talent and investment" in the wake of its record-breaking private equity buyout.

While recent years have brought no shortage of high profile studio closings and game cancellations, the news of BioWare's shuttering has prompted an outpouring of sympathies and frustrations from the fans, fellow developers, and former studio staff. Among those mourners is former BioWare game director and ex-general manager Casey Hudson, who reacted to the news on X to say that BioWare's influence will continue even if the studio itself doesn't.

"This is sad news on multiple fronts—for those of us who worked there, for our friends and colleagues at BioWare who are impacted, and for fans who were looking forward to the next Mass Effect adventure," Hudson said. "I started my career at BioWare and will forever be grateful to the founders, Greg and Ray, for inviting me to join in BioWare's legendary journey. Its legacy will live on through those who were part of it and continue to create games through a passion for unforgettable stories, worlds, and characters."

During his tenure at the studio, Hudson had a major influence on some of BioWare's most-loved releases, working as project director on both Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the Mass Effect trilogy. After leaving BioWare in 2014, Hudson returned in 2017 as its general manager—before ultimately departing a second time in 2020, following the troubled development and launch of Anthem, the studio's ill-fated live service shooter.

Since then, Hudson's been acting as proof of his own assertion about BioWare's lasting influence in game development. Following the 2021 founding and subsequent 2024 closure of his NetEase-acquired studio, Humanoid Origin, Hudson announced in 2025 that he'd started yet another new company: Arcanaut Studios. There, he—and a team stacked with other ex-BioWare devs—are currently at work on Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, a "narrative-driven action RPG" that Hudson has called a "spiritual successor" to KotOR.

Hudson's far from the only developer who's reaffirmed BioWare's continuing impact on game development since the news of its closure broke. CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski noted how BioWare offered crucial support during the development of the Witcher 1, while Larian CEO Swen Vincke wrote on X that the studio "led the way in making RPGs big."

Legendary immersive sim developer Warren Spector offered a more blunt reaction to BioWare's shuttering, calling the closure "utter bullshit."

In spite of a bloodletting that saw the end of BioWare—a lion in winter, sure, but still a studio with a rich legacy—and around 400 employees laid off, EA seemingly still has videogame irons in the fire. Per a report from Variety, the corporation is working on a new Battlefront game, said to be in the hands of Respawn and DICE.

This is not officially confirmed, of course. In its gore-flecked letter to staff and rubber-neckers in the wake of yesterday's BioWare news, EA only said that its future involved "bringing together our Respawn and DICE studios to collaborate on a future project."

This, it boasted, would allow it to "balance our resources, and leverage the technology to deliver a shooter portfolio that unlocks growth." Which certainly gets me excited about things to come.

Nevertheless, multiple sources tell Variety that the "future project" is, indeed, a third Battlefront. Which is probably a good idea, in all fairness. I don't think either of the previous two modern Battlefront games have quite lit the world on fire—in fact, the second one's lootboxes were so bad it sparked an uproar that made it all the way to the Belgian Gambling Commission—but the notion of a big boisterous shooter filled with Star Wars stuff feels like something that could be pretty cool, right?

And hey, Respawn's done a good job on those Star Wars Jedi games to the point that we all now go around referring to them as the 'Star Wars Jedi' games like that's not an absurdly bad name. Meanwhile, DICE rather pleased our resident FPS czar Morgan Park with Battlefield 6; he scored it 82% in his Battlefield 6 review and called it "automatically one of the best shooters of the year." So sure, sign me up to see what the two can do with a Battlefront game together.

Immersive sim legend Warren Spector shared some thoughts on yesterday's closure of BioWare, and they're uncharacteristically spicy—so much so that he led into them with a warning for sensitive readers.

"I try very hard not to curse at any time but especially in public. Unfortunately for my vocabulary and the delicate sensibilities of some who read this I can’t control myself. Hell, I don’t want to control myself," Spector wrote in a brief message on LinkedIn.

"BioWare is more than just another studio. For decades it's played a central role in the history of our medium. They, for many years, as effectively as any studio, married art and commerce. Their work changed things."

And then, the cursing, and the warning that sensitive readers should cover their eyes while Warren gives 'em both barrels: "This is such bad news, such a devastating historic event all I can say is that it’s utter bullshit. Anyone who participated in this travesty should be ashamed."

It is perhaps not the eruption of ear-scalding profanity you were expecting (or hoping for), but the truth is that Spector has been a studiously even-tempered professional throughout his career. I don't know if I've ever heard him publicly say anything harsher than "heck" or maybe "gosh darn" for as long as I've been following him—PCG pal Joshua Wolens described Spector as "so pure, like if hot chocolate was a guy," and I think that pretty much nails it.

Easy as it is to joke, though (and I suspect Spector is playing to character somewhat here), his message does very aptly reflect the weight of the moment. The closure of BioWare is a pronounced symptom of an industry (and a world, really) that's gone wrong in some very fundamental ways. What kind of multi-billion-dollar game company, supposedly one of the best, looks at a studio like BioWare and says, "Nah, I can't do anything with that?"

The fact that EA managed to make mild-mannered Warren Spector—who's supposed to be enjoying his retirement—straight-up call bullshit on the whole thing speaks volumes about how bad a botch this really is.

But he wasn't finished. "Maybe all of the people who participated—the folks in suits (real or virtual) should lose their damn jobs," Spector continued. "I ask them to ponder this: What do you contribute to gaming? What price do you pay for failure? I’d love to see THEM on the unemployment line instead of the people who do real work. Why is it always the do-ers and makers who pay the price? Someone explain that to me!

"I wish I had more curse words."

Spector is correct: As we've seen so many times before, it's never the C-suite that suffers when the axe falls and hundreds or thousands of the people who actually make games get put out of work. Roughly 400 people lost their jobs at EA yesterday, including those impacted by the BioWare closure; CEO Andrew Wilson, meanwhile, was paid more than $38.5 million in 2026—$8 million more than he was paid in 2025. Regardless of whether or not Spector has more curse words at his disposal, I think he picked absolutely the correct one for the moment: This is bullshit.

Yesterday was a pretty bleak day for the videogame industry, as BioWare announced the end of its more than 30-year run. It's closing down and development on the next Mass Effect has ceased. For Star Wars: The Old Republic lead writer Caitlin Sullivan Kelly, however, the announcement was upsetting for an additional reason: SWTOR was snubbed.

In BioWare's post, shared on social media, the studio listed Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Anthem. But not the MMO that's been running for nearly 15 years.

Quoting the announcement, Kelly said, "No mention of the game that's been going for almost 15 years, that supported the studio and all of its projects with income and manpower and time (sometimes to our own detriment). Heartbreaking."

The desire to get recognition for hard work and maintaining a successful MMO when so many others have fallen by the wayside is entirely understandable, but there's important context that makes this seem less like a snub than is being implied.

While BioWare did create SWTOR and ran it for many years, it's now a Broadsword game and has been since 2023. Which is fortunate, because now it's safe from the impact of BioWare closing down.

Now, this alone should not preclude it from getting a mention. Baldur's Gate got a nod, even though the latest game in the series was developed by Larian and, like SWTOR, won't be affected by the studio's demise.

But I'd argue that most of the nods are for franchises, rather than individual games. It doesn't mention Dragon Age: Origins or Inquisition, either, just Dragon Age. Since KoTOR is in the list, that also covers SWTOR, which is technically a sequel.

It's not the only omission, either. It's wild that Anthem—a catastrophic failure that kicked off BioWare's worst era—got a nod and not Jade Empire. Sonic: Chronicles also doesn't get a look in, but that's perhaps a bit more understandable.

All that said, SWTOR absolutely deserves a shout out. Its creation was a vast undertaking, featuring more writing and voice work than any of BioWare's games before or after. And since then it's weathered so many storms and persevered. While it doesn't boast the player numbers of WoW or FF14, it's still undeniably been a success. It's also the one BioWare game that will continue even after the studio's demise.

So BioWare should have absolutely celebrated this feather in its cap, but I don't think it was snubbed.

Following the shocking closure of legendary RPG studio BioWare, Electronic Arts has posted a lengthy missive laying out its plans for "EA's next chapter," which sounds very much like cuts almost across the board.

I'll spare you the corporate gobbledygook about challenging assumptions, confronting assumptions, and imagining new possibilities, and cut straight to the chase: The plan is to do fewer things with fewer people focusing on its biggest franchises. What that works out to practically:

• Shooters: More Battlefield, more Apex Legends, and "bringing together our Respawn and DICE studios to collaborate on a future project."
• Action-adventure: Marvel's Iron Man and the third Star Wars Jedi game are still happening, but "beyond that, we will concentrate our efforts on fewer simultaneous, large-scale projects."
• EA Sports: Full commitment to EA Sports FC, plus a new American football game creatively codenamed "Project Gridiron," and Fight Night is coming back.
• Lifestyle: The Sims will continue but "Project Lotus," originally presumed to be a sort of precursor to The Sims 5, has been paused. The Skate dev team, meanwhile, is being cut to "build a healthier and more sustainable business."

Of course, there's also a gross little nod to BioWare and the end of Mass Effect: "As we focus on these larger opportunities, we've had a small team at BioWare working on early-development for Mass Effect. We've made the decision not to move forward with this development, which means we’re closing the studio and our Edmonton workspace. BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not take this decision lightly."

The message doesn't specifically reference the layoff of around 400 employees at Electronic Arts reported by Bloomberg, but it does say some of the changes announced today "are difficult, especially for the people and teams across the company who are directly affected," which is the sort of mealy-mouthed guffola put out by C-suites when they don't want to say with clarity that they just hacked out a significant chunk of their workforce.

One other thing I find interesting about this announcement: It's attributed to Cam and David, who I assume are Cam Weber and David Tinson, recently installed near the top of EA as president and chief studios officer, and president and chief operating officer. The name of Andrew Wilson, Electronic Arts CEO, is rather notably absent. Make of that what you will—but for the record, EA confirmed that Wilson is still the chief executive.

The post is short on detail, but the broad gist of the whole thing—cuts and concentration—aren't entirely surprising given the company's recent acquisition by Saudi Arabia, which saddled it with $20 billion in debt and owners not known for their liberal mindset. Plans for massive cuts were reported in early August, and a possible merger with Saudi-owned Savvy Games Group has also been rumored. But former BioWare lead writer Patrick Weekes made the call more than a year ago, when the EA acquisition first happened, predicting that "guns and football" games would be fine, but "gay stuff" would be out.

European game rating agency PEGI has begun increasing its age ratings for games that contain "paid random items," a process that's seeing games initially rated as low as PEGI 3—suitable for all age groups—bounced directly to PEGI 16.

Word of the change came from Connor Hindle, policy manager of the UK's Games Rating Authority. "Since June, newly submitted games have been assessed against an expanded set of criteria within the PEGI rating framework, including new criteria relating to interactive risks," Hindle wrote on LinkedIn (via GamesIndustry). "As the UK administrator of PEGI, the Games Rating Authority has now begun applying these updated criteria to selected existing digital products."

These changes were announced in March, and are part of PEGI's new "interactive risk categories" that include "purchases of in-game content, paid random items, communication features, and features that incentivise players to continue playing." The new categories reflect the ways we view videogames have changed: While rating systems like PEGI and ESRB were initially created over concerns about violence and sex in videogames, the real dangers turned out to be much more insidious.

As a result, any game with loot boxes is now rated PEGI 16 by default, and that's led to some serious upjumps: EA Sports FC 25, for instance, is rated PEGI 3, as are previous games in the series, but FC 27 is PEGI 16: The former game has "no rating issues," but the newer one has a detailed breakdown of the various purchase options on offer, including FC points, a season pass, and player packs.

While PEGI is dropping the rating hammer on loot boxes and other in-game purchases, North America's ESRB has indicated that it will not follow the lead: An ESRB rep said in March that its research indicated that adding "non-content related features" to its rating process could be confusing for parents. EA Sports FC 27 is rated E (Everyone) by the ESRB, with a note that it offers user interactions and in-game purchases.

Star Wars Zero Company's 1.2 patch introduces a new granular difficulty system in addition to the usual bugfixes and tweaks. These new options exist alongside the original difficulty levels (easy, normal, hard, ironman beskarboy etc.), and home in on more creative/tactical tweaks, rather than just beefing up enemies. The highlights:

• You can remove the injury system, so downed operatives are instantly killed.
• Alternatively, you can lower the injury allowance before permadeath, and/or add a risk of death to getting downed.
• The patch allows you to lower or eliminate health scaling, so operatives are more fragile by the end of the game.
• It also allows you to restrict the respec function by degrees, removing class and even weapon swapping.

I like these options a lot: They're sharp, targeted changes that make Zero Company harder by restricting your options, forcing you to think and play more creatively. The game's normal, default difficulty, with all of these modifiers added, represents a more interesting challenge to me than the shipped hard mode, and I think my first replay will mix in a few of them. These options remind me of survival mode in an RPG, or skulls in Halo⁠—creative difficulty options that eschew ballooning enemy health bars just make me excited.

Zero Company goes down a lot smoother than the XCOMs of old (which much of the Bit Reactor team worked on). That smoothness isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I thought Zero Company already had a reasonable skill ceiling with the options it shipped with⁠—you can read more in my 90% review. But a modular suite means you can tweak pain points without taking the leap of a full difficulty level jump.

My friends and coworkers who thought Zero Company went down too smooth should be well-served by this update. The only classic tactics disconnect I see remaining is fog of war. PCG online editor Fraser Brown is a strategy connoisseur, and he felt let down by how Zero Company shows you the full map and locations of all enemies on every mission. XCOM, by contrast, would obscure portions of the map and enemy activity unless you were directly observing them.

I'm agnostic on the issue, myself⁠—I think Zero Company offers interesting tactical challenges regardless. This big patch is a nice win for developer Bit Reactor, which has reportedly started bringing back furloughed employees following the critical and apparent commercial success of Zero Company.

What's going on?

• EA released Skate (stylized "skate.") in early access in 2025: an online, free-to-play reboot of the popular skateboarding series
• A new fan-made "modding platform" called ReSkate makes Skate playable offline
• ReSkate also adds support for private servers, custom maps, and other mods
• ReSkate had been downloaded 350K times as of Tuesday
• The creators of ReSkate tell PC Gamer that they'll comply should a cease and desist demand come their way

EA's reboot of the Skate series is a free-to-play online game with mixed user reviews on Steam. Aspects of Skate are well-liked, but a common complaint is that it lacks the spirit of skate culture, exchanging grittiness for brand-name premium cosmetics and tidy-looking maps in an online-only ecosystem that prevents true DIY modding.

Enter ReSkate, a new "modding platform" created (with AI assistance) by a pair of coders who go by zee_x64 and ReGlitched. The modders have experience with other custom server projects, namely R5Reloaded, which allows free-to-play shooter Apex Legends to be modded and played privately.

In just a few days, ReSkate was downloaded from GitHub over 350,000 times. The software hooks into a particular version of Skate on Steam and allows it to be played offline, in custom servers, and with custom maps and other assets.

"Honestly didn't realize how big this was going to be," zee_x64 told PC Gamer over Discord this week. "We were just doing it for the love of the game."

The modders say they aren't trying to undermine Skate developer Full Circle or "replace the live game," and have no personal issues with Skate's microtransactions. "For me the game is free to play and they need to make money somehow to be able to keep developing the game," zee_x64 said.

To that end, ReSkate will only work with the current version of Skate and isn't being promoted as a way to get premium content for free. Mods that unlock premium cosmetics are disallowed, at least in ReSkate's official channels.

Still, ReSkate does allow us to download a free-to-play game and then break out of its walled ecosystem, adding our own cosmetics and custom maps, and playing it without the need for EA's servers and anticheat software, which also makes it playable on Linux via Valve's Proton emulation. (But does not make it possible to cheat in official servers, because ReSkate doesn't interact at all with EA's servers.)

Lawyers have sent letters over less, and if EA comes knocking with a cease and desist order, zee_x64 says they won't put up a fight. But ReSkate is open source, and there are already over 70 forks on GitHub, so it may not be something that can be put back in the box.

The player response

On the unofficial Skate subreddit, players are posting videos of custom cosmetics and maps—Counter-Strike maps made it in immediately, of course—and debating what ReSkate's effect on the live game will be.

One person is excited simply to have the option to choose any shirt color for their avatar. "The fact I can just open up a modding tool app; design the material type; design the colour; and not wait for the devs to release a specific version and wait for it to release on rotation is just great," they wrote.

Others are less convinced that ReSkate is a boon, with some expressing sympathy for Skate's developers on the expectation that the platform will negatively affect the game's future. One popular comment speculates that EA could come to "see [Skate] as a failed experiment and shuffle resources elsewhere."

AI tools sped up development

Custom server projects for defunct MMOs and long-running live service games have been a thing for a long time, but they aren't typically released while a game is still in early access. A 2026 wrinkle in this particular case is that the modders say development was substantially accelerated by AI coding tools.

"We used AI to help reverse [engineer] the game as I don't see any reason not to when the tooling exists," zee_x64 said. "Without it, it probably would of taken years to do the same thing … that also doesn't mean we blindly just prompted AI until it worked, we still had to use our previous knowledge to get it actually working."

Antivirus flags complicate the install

A heads-up for potential ReSkate downloaders: Windows antivirus doesn't like it, and you may have to create an exception for the file to avoid it being quarantined, an uncomfortable step despite the modders' assurance that it is a false positive.

"Some antivirus software may flag ReSkate because it uses techniques that can resemble malware, such as DLL injection, process/memory modification, and downloading files over HTTPS," says kushWRA1TH, a mod in ReSkate's Discord server. "These are used for its game-mod functionality and do not by themselves mean ReSkate is malicious."

Even if ReSkate itself is not malicious, downloading and using it does carry a risk, as it could contain exploitable security flaws. (As can any software.)

The modders note as well that they cannot vouch for every fork of the code, referring to versions created by people other than the original modders. As an open source project, ReSkate's inner-workings are available for anyone to analyze or modify.

Here's a neat thought: One of the most popular multiplayer games on the planet right now has no matchmaking button. FPS fans are flocking to Wardogs for its fresh ideas around teamwork, economy, and "all-out warfare." It's pulling in the largest crowds this sort of round-based, milsim-y FPS (a category that also includes Squad and Hell Let Loose) has ever seen.

It's very much filling the Battlefield-shaped hole in my game time, and that's in no small part due to its server browser.

Man, is it nice to press play on a main menu in 2026 and get options like this:

Check out that beaut: A complete list of official servers in my region, sortable by players, ping, rulesets, and maps. And would you look at that: A prominent community section featuring persistent servers rentable from third-party vendors.

No forced matchmaking. No skill-based algorithms. No disbanding lobbies (in community servers, at least). This is exactly the sort of convenient, community-forward setup that still appears regularly in niche milsims and indie shooters, and one that fans have been begging Battlefield to get back to.

It was around this time last year that EA was making a big to-do about Battlefield 6's community server support. Devs insisted that the Portal server browser, which doesn't support third-party server providers and instead allows players to spin up one semi-persistent lobby at a time, would "tick every box" for a proper server browser.

It did not: At launch, Portal servers were buggy, dominated by XP farming lobbies, and buried under a pile of Netflix menu tiles. As plenty of us predicted, interest in the Portal browser as an alternative to official matchmaking quickly died out, and now it's only good for goofy minigames and, somehow still, XP farming.

When asked at the time why Battlefield 6 couldn't just have a real browser—the kind that lets you see all of the official servers as well as community-hosted ones—DICE lead producer David Sirland offered an answer that, in retrospect, is pretty weak sauce.

"Matchmaking servers spin up in seconds (get filled with players), and spin down after the game is over. That couple of seconds, plus when servers lose a lot of players, mid-game is the only time you can join, which makes it a tricky combination (and full of queuing to join issues)."

And yet, here we are: Wardogs has millions of players, and they seem to be navigating those "issues" just fine. Even the supposed drawbacks of manual browsing are barely a thing in Wardogs. There are currently so many official and community servers that finding one with a few spare slots takes seconds, and players cycle in and out of the 100-player matches so often that queues are rarely a long wait.

Meanwhile, the benefits are obvious: Community servers have admins that can punish cheaters and griefers faster than automated tools, and when they're allowed to flourish, these servers can be recognizable social spaces with regulars and customs. Developer Bulkhead isn't doing anything unique here, just what most PC shooters did 20 years ago.

The reality is that pulling off a server browser really comes down to will. Battlefield 6 doesn't have a real, prominent browser because EA doesn'tdon't want one. DICE built it like a console game (really, like Call of Duty) with algorithmic factors that get thrown off when folks can just hop into whatever server they want. So Portal was the compromise—a walled garden with restrictive, fake-persistent access to dedicated servers. It was a miscalculation about where the wind is blowing in the FPS scene, and it's still hurting an otherwise great game.

Wardogs' server browser is far from flawless. Basic features like favoriting and tiered queueing are still on the way, joining a server as a group is harder than it should be, and server admins are missing crucial tools—but it's a strong start for an early access game, and immediately more legitimate than Battlefield 6's sorry excuse for community support. In more ways than one, Battlefield could learn from Wardogs and smaller shooters like it.

The main thing preventing me from playing Star Wars Zero Company in its iron man "beskar" mode is cowardice, but the second thing preventing me from doing that has been the state of the game at launch. I've had it crash on me a few times, and the thought of my one and only run being lost because of a mid-save crash is enough to keep me playing with iron man off—even if Zero Company is much easier than XCOM and actually losing seems unlikely.

Fortunately, a 1.1 patch is here, and the first patch note is "Fixed various crash issues." Following that, "Fixed an issue where Beskar saves were temporarily deleted" and "Fixed a crash issue for Beskar mode."

There's also a fix for "an issue where shots can be missed, even when the chance to hit is 100%." I've been assuming that ZCOM was rounding up the numbers and actually I'd been missing 97% chance shots the several times I completely whiffed a point-blank sure thing in my playthrough, so it'll be nice to actually land those attacks instead.

The other main bug I experienced was overwatch not triggering even when enemies jog through multiple targeting cones on their turn. That doesn't seem to have been addressed, although several other bugs involving overwatch triggering against units outside the targeting cone or behind solid objects have. Maybe I'll wait one more patch before turning on the beskar mode then.

Bit Reactor, the studio that created Zero Company, reportedly furloughed most of its staff shortly before launch, and has been operating with a skeleton crew since then. Which explains why it's taken two weeks for some fairly fundamental issues to be addressed. Here's hoping some of those staff can get brought back on to help speed up the rate patches come out.

Electronic Arts has copped to using "AI voice technology" in the upcoming NHL 27, saying that doing so will "bring more variety to the game" and allow it to react more quickly to changes and feedback.

The use of generative AI in NHL 27 was first reported by ESPN sportscaster John Buccigross, who also serves as the play-by-play man for EA's NHL series. "They're using some AI stuff now," he said on the Chirping Zebras Podcast last week (via IGN). "They played me some stuff back in my voice. It's like, wow, that's pretty good. If it means less work and the same check, I'll take it."

EA didn't respond to my inquiries about Buccigross' claim last week, but in a blog post shared today on the game's first update it confirmed that AI is in fact being used in the game.

"We’ve been following the discussion around the new commentary team and want to clarify our approach," EA wrote. "The broadcast is built on a direct and ongoing partnership with John Buccigross and Darren Pang. With their full consent and active collaboration, we are using AI voice technology to expand on the 50+ recording sessions they have already completed.

"This process allows us to bring more variety to the game, react faster to league changes, and incorporate player feedback more quickly. Update 1 is our first step in an ongoing commitment to improve authenticity, with fixes for player-name pronunciations and repetitive lines. We will continue to expand player and city-name coverage in future updates."

The comment about fixes reflects something else Buccigross related about the process: The AI is sometimes off.

"They were playing me back some of my AI voice, and they're playing it like, 'Score! And the crowd gets out of their chairs!'" he said. "I was like, no, they're not chairs. I know, AI, they look like a chair, but we call them seats. Little things like that, you gotta go back and listen because those words matter in sports."

NHL 27 isn't coming to PC (at least, there are no announced plans in that regard, and according to Wikipedia the series hasn't appeared on PC since NHL 2009, when Dion Phaneuf was still with the Flames, so you can probably draw your own conclusions) but this is relevant nonetheless for the broader implications it reflects.

EA is fairly up-front about being pro-AI—Laura Miele, EA's president of enterprise development, said earlier this year that the advent of AI has enabled "a real rise of creativity" at the company—and there's an expectation that EA will lean into it even harder to help manage the massive debt load its taken on as a result of its acquisition by Saudi Arabia.

There's also none of the apologetic tone in this statement that so often accompanies 'yes, we used AI' admissions: Instead, the focus is entirely on the virtues of the technology, and that EA had permission from the nominal owners of the voices to use them. In other words, EA has decided that this is the way forward, and we can expect to see generative AI play an even bigger role in its games in the future.

With Electronic Arts now almost fully owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, a Bloomberg report says the wealth fund is now giving thought to merging it with the PIF's other gaming crown jewel, Savvy Games Group.

No decisions have been made at this point, according to the report, which also says that any potential merger would likely wait until the completion of the PIF's acquisition of Chinese mobile gaming company Moonton for $6 billion, a deal that was announced in March. The proposed merger would also have to overcome various regulatory hurdles.

From the perspective of the PIF, and by extension Saudi Arabia—the fund's chairman is Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the nation—a merger would seem to make sense. Savvy Games Group is a behemoth in its own right, with subsidiaries including esports org ESL Faceit Group, Pokémon Go publisher Scopely, and—soon—Moonton. Bringing that and EA's own significant operations under one umbrella would presumably simplify the PIF's gaming strategy going forward.

The PIF may also be motivated to make a merger by the fact that money, even for the ever-flush Saudi kingdom, is getting a bit tight. Mergers typically result in the elimination of duplicated operations and services, and their related expenses. As we've seen many times in the past, that means layoffs: EA employees are already bracing for deep cuts as the company moves to take on the $18 billion debt load incurred as a result of the PIF's acquisition of the company earlier this year, and it's not unreasonable to think that the new Saudi owners would be looking for other ways to pare back costs.

How a proposed merger would fare under regulatory scrutiny is less clear. The resulting company would be a global powerhouse, effectively under the control of a single person—a person who's been credibly accused of ordering the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, don't forget.

That might seem like the sort of thing that's destined to run into roadblocks, but bin Salman is also close with current US president Donald Trump, while the PIF's acquisition of EA in the first place was facilitated in part by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. Those connections may have helped the PIF avoid the aggressive (and ultimately futile) actions faced by Microsoft when it acquired Activision Blizzard, and they may prove useful again in the future too.

Electronic Arts declined to comment on the report. I've also reached out to the Public Investment Fund and Savvy Games Group for comment, and will update if I receive a reply.

Given that Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda were widely considered disappointments, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard had a divisive reception, there's a certain amount of skepticism about the Mass Effect game BioWare is currently working on. Some have even suggested it might not come out at all.

Armando Troisi, a cinematic designer on the Mass Effect trilogy and lead cinematic designer on Mass Effect 2, thinks it's all a bit much. "I think BioWare, when they break it down and do that singleplayer, interactive narrative-driven, deep combat, progression-driven game, really, there's nobody that can touch them," Troisi told FRVR. "It's kind of like the [Master] Chief, it's like going on a walkabout and finding themselves and coming back. I think BioWare can do it if we just leave them alone to do what they do best."

Troisi said that when he was working at BioWare the studio knew what kind of game it was best at making, and that all they need is to get back to that. "The vision was always clear," he said. "There was a BioWare formula and they were going to iterate on that formula and keep turning out best-in-class cinematic RPGs and that's basically what the mandate was. And then they had to live through the live service era—which is still happening but is maybe not as prevalent—and we're all beholden to companies and stakeholders and all the rest of that."

Anthem has become emblematic of the problems of live-service games, but Veilguard was also intended to be one until a pivot late in its development, and Andromeda is what Mass Effect looks like when development is led by the team responsible for Mass Effect 3's multiplayer.

The upcoming Mass Effect game, Troisi said, still has "a lot of people" working on it who were responsible for the original games, "and they're the OGs, you know? I don't think there's anything that I could tell them that they don't know what to do."

What they actually need, he suggested, is for people to "get out of the way" and let them get on with it. "I think that they can do it," he said. "I'm rooting for them."

The studio behind Star Wars Zero Company furloughed up to 80 percent of its staff in the lead up to the RPG's launch, a Game File report reveals. That means affected staff are technically still employed by the company, but will receive no wage during the furlough period.

A representative from Bit Reactor confirmed the furloughs to Game File, though didn't indicate how many employees are affected. The rep said uncertainty around the game's launch performance was to blame for the furloughs, and that they were Bit Reactor's decision and not EA or Disney's.

Other sources claim up to 80% of the studio has been impacted. According to the Bit Reactor rep, it is hoped that furloughed workers will be brought back with full pay.

A former Bit Reactor staffer, Zachariah Scott, who was let go by the studio earlier this year, addressed the furloughs on LinkedIn yesterday. "It is sick and weird to have all of these EA and Disney folks as well as Bitreactor Senior staff making all of these 10/10 posts about Star Wars Zero Company being such a huge success and praising the work of the team while seemingly concealing the fact that the team was furloughed weeks ago," Scott wrote.

He went on: "It is a gross but all too common sight to see, another corporate game hitting the top of Steam while the team is left looking for work and cut off from any possible profit sharing. It would be such a different story if they had been upfront about it earlier, and now it feels like they're trying to keep the team in a holding pattern with good vibes and more empty promises."

Star Wars Zero Company was released on August 28 to near unanimous critical praise, with Ted Litchfield calling it "a new all-timer Star Wars game and a stunning debut for Bit Reactor". The tactical RPG is currently the top selling game on Steam right now, and that's only a third of the story: the game released for PS5 and Xbox consoles too.

It paints a pretty bleak picture of where the industry is at present: even a studio that has just shipped a critically acclaimed, well-selling Star Wars game published by EA is showing severe symptoms of decline in the days after launch.

Star Wars Zero Company is enough like XCOM that everyone's been calling it ZCOM, but there are some ways it isn't quite XCOM enough for me. For starters, the radial menu you use to select each character's actions, a controller-friendly system that flings all your abilities out in a circle around the active character like a medieval jailer's ring of keys.

The first time I panned over to find an enemy I wanted to attack and then had to pan back to the character I'd selected to pick an attack off their radial menu I found myself wishing for a more traditional way to play. And look at that, there it is in the options menu. Go to the Gameplay section, scroll down to Ability Selection Style at the bottom of the General area, and bump it from Radial over to Linear.

That puts moving and shooting and overwatching and etcetera onto a numbered row of boxes down the bottom of the screen where God intended, getting them out of the way when you're trying to line up the perfect angle to punch someone into a wall from. There's also a Hybrid option if you're indecisive and feeling a bit "¿Por qué no los dos?"

I'm still in the early hours of Star Wars Zero Company, but playing with a mouse and keyboard, Linear Ability Selection just feels better. Between this and the fact you can bother a gonk droid, maybe it is a 90% masterpiece like Ted says.

It's kinda weird that it took somebody this long to make a Star Wars squad tactics game, but studio Bit Reactor has, for all intents and purposes, knocked it outta da park. Star Wars Zero Company is a superbly executed⁠—if familiar⁠—tactics game, but it's also a new all-timer Star Wars story: I'm talking Rogue One, Knights of the Old Republic, TIE Fighter-tier.

Melt away everything else, and it's got a Terminator skeleton of pure XCOM, the trendsetting tactics series many of Bit Reactor's senior developers cut their teeth on. But the studio struck out from there into more uncharted territory: lavish production values, zoomed-in action game-style exploration, and some truly knockout set pieces and story beats.

Crucially, none of it came at the cost of challenge or crunchy complexity. It feels like Bit Reactor has pitched a big tent where tactics sickos, RPG storytelling fans, and Joe Sixpack cinematic console game-enjoyers can truly find something to love, not just tolerate.

Zero to hero

Zero Company takes place in the twilight of the High Republic, and sees you inhabiting a Commander Shepard-y point of view character, Hawks. Hawks is a disgraced former Republic officer and, at least in my save file, a Zabrak (Darth Maul guy) who delivers every line in a charmingly incongruous cowboy drawl. While Hawks has a largely set character, their gender, appearance, and dress are highly customizable, including your choice of combat class and Bit Reactor's admirable embrace of Star Wars' cantina-going humanoid aliens. I felt a sense of ownership of my Hawks the same way I do with Geralt of Rivia.

The entire cast shares a similar easy charisma, both in your home base crew and recruitable story-centric operators⁠—it's a winning, "family of friends" ensemble straight out of the BioWare playbook. There are a lot of comfortable Star Wars archetypes among them⁠—ponderous-but-loveable alien bruiser, uptight princess, and laconic bounty hunter, to name a few⁠—but, like the comfort zone combat mechanics, they're executed extremely well and belie surprisingly affecting twists.

There is some serious "Aerith dies in Final Fantasy 7" stuff in Zero Company's back half that knocked my socks off, and Bit Reactor went to such great lengths establishing a narrative status quo, the moments that upended it felt like I was getting smacked in the chest.

Even when the story's cruising at a relatively calm clip, your lovable crew can be at each others' throats. The cast has the sense of friction and conflict I'm always looking for in an ensemble, and the ex-Separatist characters are some of my favorites. Former bean counter and Zero Company operations lead Runa is abrasive, smarmy, and unpleasant in the best way, while Umbaran bubble boy Luco hates your guts, as well as those of your clone buddy, Trick.

Zero Company is basically Star Wars A-Team: You're mercs with hearts of gold who do private war stuff for the highest bidder, but in, like, a cool, fun, and ethical way. Galactic Republic Intelligence drops a fat contract in your lap to investigate a kooky cult (it's always a cult), leaving Hawks and crew to turn-based battle their way into saving the galaxy.

You gear up and manage your operation from the Den, a small but well-realized home base in an asteroid-bound smuggler city. From the galaxy map, you can choose to execute from a selection of text-based, noncombat espionage operations reminiscent of the War Table stuff in Dragon Age: Inquisition, while each "Cycle" (read: day) at the Den is capped off with a full-fat combat mission that moves time⁠—and, when appropriate, the story⁠—forward.

You explore the Den with full on, action game-style driving third-person controls, and this is one of Zero Company's neatest tricks. Every environment is as tactile and richly detailed as something in Jedi: Fallen Order, and major story missions even feature exploratory interstitials between the fights. But, as soon as combat starts, Zero Company seamlessly zooms out to a classic, tactical view.

The exploration gameplay is almost painfully simple⁠—interact with points of interest for small bonuses, otherwise you're mostly walking down corridors⁠—but I found it had a really outsized effect in this tactics game context. Even as a first attempt, it adds this revelatory immersive quality, while Bit Reactor managed a level of presentation and wow-factor that I'd love to see in other tactics games and CRPGs.

Squad wipe

You're limited to four squadmates on a mission, and can embark on a variety of odd jobs between main quest blowouts: Hostage rescue, steal the thing, blow the thing up, and the surprisingly rare "kill all the guys." Even on side missions, there's an impish, trolling quality to Zero Company's design that I always love to see.

Enemies will spawn just far enough away that you'll struggle to reach them on a first turn, but they'll have no problem counterattacking after you've committed. Reinforcements often spawn right in your path to an exfiltration, and it seems only enemy snipers have access to the really good rifles that can pinpoint strike you from across the map.

Zero Company's difficulty feels very well-judged to me: I felt pressured enough on Normal, but not overwhelmed. My guys would get downed here and there, but I only had to take a second try on one fight in my playthrough.

I'm a huge sucker for gimmick battles in a turn-based game⁠—the Iron Throne in Baldur's Gate 3, for example, or the flaming oil tower from Divinity: Original Sin 2⁠—and Zero Company's main campaign missions are consistently full of "oh shit" challenges that had me grinning. One of my favorites had me and my squad trooping out in explore mode down a suspiciously deserted catwalk with the MacGuffin of the day at the far end.

Once we grabbed the thing and the trap was sprung, enemies started filling in the path to the exit, and droid bombers began strafing the bridge in a turn-by-turn expanding killzone that pressured me to stay moving even as bad guy reinforcements blocked my path.

In other missions, things could get really weird: One memorable main story level gifted me a one-time, functionally invincible super-unit to clear a path as I had my normal guys follow along and complete objectives⁠—it felt like a reverse-escort mission in this delightfully surprising way. Another jaw-dropper, season finale of a mission hit me with what I can only describe as "Spec Ops: The Line type-shit," a simple-but-devastating mechanical twist that perfectly complimented the narrative one.

Buildy boys

I was surprised at how much RPG buildcrafting there is in Zero Company. We're not quite at Rogue Trader levels of spreadsheet psychosis, but there are some fun synergies to exploit. A little ways in, Zero Company introduces multiclassing, and then we're really off to the races.

My jam has been the Gunslinger: They get stronger the more attacks they make in a round, and also get a quickdraw ability that refunds its action point cost on a kill. Crowds of one-shot, dopey battle droids came to resemble juicy Thanksgiving turkeys to my quickdraw-addled mind, powering me up for DPS attacks on beefier foes.

Astromech droids are support gods in Zero Company, and I almost never went out without one. They can't make direct attacks, but they can refresh squadmates' AP and get bonus slots and uses for utility items like grenades. They're support-casters that feel like College of Lore Bards in Baldur's Gate or the Officer class in Rogue Trader.

In addition to Zero Company's main cast, you can hire generic mercenaries more in line with the anonymous, proc-gen squads of XCOM. I mostly stuck with the canon crew, but I was pleasantly surprised at how seamlessly the custom operators slot into the Den. They draw from a selection of "personalities," each with their own voice actor, and they can be found chilling around the Den like Mother Base soldiers in Metal Gear Solid 5. They even have relevant commentary on the story as it unfolds, and will converse with each other as well as the story squaddies.

Hanging over all of them is the threat of permadeath. I didn't experience its consequences directly in my playthrough, but even the threat of it lends each fight higher stakes⁠. I can't help but admire the chutzpah of hanging permanently missable story content on such a lovable, fragile cast. These systemic risks are also supported by the story in a really clever way: Some characters leave the stage in shocking, permanent fashion. It all contributes to a narrative that feels tragic and grown up in a similar way to Rogue One.

Complete package

Zero Company has been a treat from beginning to end, and I've found little to complain about. There's small stuff, some patchable, and some less so⁠; EA has indicated there will be a day one patch I did not have access to in the review period. My biggest issue: I'm a pretty anti-waypoint guy these days, and Zero Company's exploration segments are so linear, the ever-present Skyrim quest marker felt like it was leading me around by the nose⁠—I'm shocked there isn't already a toggle in the options.

I experienced two hard crashes in my playthrough, as well as one severe graphical glitch that required me to reload a save. Smaller issues popped up here and there: minor graphics hiccups, flickering UI elements, a long hang time while the game would try to resolve an enemy turn, but nothing I found particularly odious. I am sorry to say that Zero Company is not a Steam Deck candidate, and it's hard to see how Bit Reactor could make it fit that box. Bottoming out settings and maxing FSR resulted in a soupy, unparsable, 15-20fps mess for me.

Minor issues aside, Star Wars Zero Company is one of the best games of 2026 and a new all-timer Star Wars videogame. While I don't see it having the modding/sandbox "forever game" gravity of XCOM 2, it is excellent, substantial, and highly replayable. I've found it to be a mic drop of a debut from Bit Reactor, a sense that's only compounded by its crowd-pleasingly anachronistic price tag of $50.

This month, the biggest leveraged buyout in the history of private equity went through and now EA is owned by a consortium made up of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and the investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. We don't know what EA will be like under its new owners, but Employees are bracing for the worst. The company took on $20 billion in debt as part of the deal. Will that change the way it does business or encourage it to rely on the formula that's gotten it where it is?

I asked Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at industry analysts Newzoo, who spent nine years as a senior manager at EA.

"I think everything is open at this point," Rosier says. "I suspect that sports will remain the key focus for EA, particularly European football, soccer, because of the importance of that sport in Saudi and in Middle East territories. You see a lot of synergies in that context. You can also expect that they will push even more for esports, also given the popularity of esports in Saudi and in some other territories. The question mark is probably the second-tier or third-tier IP in the portfolio of EA."

As someone who had to double check whether the FC in EA Sports FC really does stand for football club (it does), I am personally more interested in these lower-tier properties.

"They have a lot of dormant IPs that have not been used for so many years," Rosier says. "You know, they have IPs like Ultima, they have IPs like Wing Commander and this and that, and it's not being used at all. So the question is, would some of them be maybe sold, or will they hire studios to leverage these IPs? Because we see every day the importance of IPs."

There's a real "monkey paw curling" element to the idea of Ultima and Wing Commander being revived. I remember the browser-based Evony clone Lord of Ultima from 2010, an attempt to jump on the "play now, my Lord" bandwagon with the Ultima brand that lasted a mere four years before being shut down. Much as I'd like to see something more respectful, like a tasteful remake of Ultima 4 and a remaster for Wing Commander Privateer, that would rely on anybody at EA actually caring about those games beyond their value as "intellectual property", a possibility Rosier dashes with the next words out of his mouth.

"I think there are plenty of IPs like that at EA that nobody cares about at this moment," he says. "I think probably they will leverage that either by just selling it or trying to find external studios that can work on that. Maybe mobile games."

Of course, in between its big-budget live-service blockbusters and the forgotten games they acquired when the world was young, EA owns something else close to my heart. "Then in the middle you have these IPs like the BioWare IPs," Rosier says. "They've been struggling as a studio, as a brand have been struggling in recent years, and I don't know if they will keep funding that one. I think that's the biggest question mark for me."

Surely EA wouldn't pull funding from BioWare before it had a chance at redemption, right? Dragon Age has always been swingy, a series defined by constant reinvention and ups and downs. Mass Effect had a golden age that lasted for two-and-a-half games, and that's a foundation you can build on. Right?

"I will believe it when I see it, the next Mass Effect game, let's put it that way," Rosier replies.

Of course, BioWare hasn't had much to say about the development of the next Mass Effect, but that's because the studio has had its head down working hard.

"I've worked many years with BioWare, sometimes it can stretch for years and years until something comes," says Rosier, who spent over four years as a senior franchise demand planning manager during his time at EA. "I think everything can happen at this moment. They can pull the plug very, very easily. And if the new investor, they don't have that many feelings about the history of the portfolio, they will take the most financially sound decision most probably."

Saudi Arabia's purchase of Electronic Arts, the biggest leveraged buyout in private equity history, officially closed earlier this month. With that deal done, a new Game Developer report has found that an awful lot of employees are expecting much more stringent control over what kinds of games they are and are not allowed to make.

This isn't really new, strictly speaking. After the buyout was announced, current and former EA employees alike expressed concerns about a potential crackdown on some games, particularly those that are visibly diverse and inclusive, like The Sims. Former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes summed it up aptly, predicting that "guns and football" will be fine, but that "gay stuff" will likely be out.

Despite EA's various efforts to reassure employees that its "cultural values"—a functionally empty term to begin with—will remain intact under Saudi ownership, Game Developer has found that doubts persist among employees. One current employee told the site they believed the purchase was a way to distract from its "regressive" human rights record by "co-opting an established and comparatively progressive company culture."

That's a known phenomenon called "sportswashing," and it's been raised multiple times previously with regards to the EA buyout—in no small part because Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler and, through his chairmanship of the country's Public Investment Fund, EA's new boss, has previously stated outright that he's happy to use it to achieve his goals. "If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by way of one percent, then I will continue doing sportwashing," he told Fox News in 2023. "I don't care."

Being a private company grants EA a certain freedom to do what it likes, but that doesn't mean the company will necessarily just embrace an anti-inclusive agenda: Instead, one employee predicted that "projects just won't get signed because they don't align explicitly with what the Saudi government wants," or that EA won't even pitch them in the first place to avoid antagonizing its new owners.

"It's certainly hard to feel good about being bought out by a regime that's very much at odds with progressive society, so it is surely detrimental to anyone who finds this buyout morally odious," one employee said, raising the point that Saudi Arabia's notoriously oppressive regime is in itself an issue for some employees.

Another said that "if EA had a culture that had any semblance of a moral backbone, it wouldn’t get into bed with a prince who's disgusted by many of its current employees' sexualities and ethnicities," adding that the presence of Jared Kushner, through his Saudi-backed Affinity Partners investment firm, "just adds insult to injury."

The problem many employees are faced with is that moral objections sometimes have to take a back seat to the practicalities of survival, and the videogame industry is in an extremely bad state. One employee said they "feel gross just thinking about it, but there's nowhere else to go. I'd love to leave, but the jobs aren't there, and I have bills to pay." Employees who own vested shares in EA will make a good dollar on them thanks to the PIF's premium buyout offer, which may help dull the moral sting, but employees who don't hold shares, including many who are classified as "temporary fulltime," won't even get that.

In a way, that reflects the broader state of EA as a whole. Being owned by the ruler of a regime that continues to oppress women and members of the LGBTQ+ community, and who is credibly accused of ordering the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, is bad on its face, but the massive debt EA took on to finance the deal means massive layoffs seem almost inevitable, along with the cancellation of games that don't meet sufficiently lucrative financial targets. None of that has happened yet, but the mood among the rank and file certainly sounds grim.

"There was a time where execs engaged more and provided more earnest answers about the company, and it genuinely felt like they cared about us," one employee said. "It was years ago though. Now it's mostly just tired corporate bullshit."

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?

Star Wars Zero Company is giving the people what they want. And that is: more XCOM. The turn-based shootouts, perishable soldiers and those beautiful moments where you survive by the skin of your teeth because of judicious use of overwatch—it all unapologetically calls to mind the two games that have defined the modern tactics genre. It's what we've been waiting for.

I've played through 18 cycles of a preview build, and there were moments where it felt like I was checking out a Star Wars-themed XCOM 2 mod, but with huge production values. It is, at times, incredibly familiar. Which isn't surprising, of course. Developer Bit Reactor was founded by Greg Foertsch, former Firaxis art director, and a bunch of Firaxis veterans followed him to this new venture.

Risky business

But inviting comparisons with XCOM, especially XCOM 2, is risky. Look at what happened to XCOM: Chimera Squad. It was a genuinely compelling twist on XCOM 2, but the ways in which it wasn't quite as good as its predecessor were massively amplified by its association. After dabbling in Zero Company's early game, I can't help but wonder if this is happening again. It is very XCOM, but it isn't XCOM.

When it works, oh boy it works. In one mission, my squad was surrounded and outnumbered. My troops were in good positions, though, so I thought I'd be able to chip away at the enemy numbers. And then a series of shots with 80-90% chances to hit missed. All of them.

I was screaming at the RNG gods. Why would they do me dirty like this? After the enemy turn, every member of my squad had taken a battering. But it wasn't over. I had tricks up my sleeve, most notably some abilities that gave my squad extra action points and free shots. My next turn was going to be my time to shine.

Once I was in control again, I activated a backup ability, so when my clone buddy Trick fired at a Separatist, one of his comrades followed it up with a free attack of their own. Some deft repositioning also allowed one of my crew to get behind the enemy frontline, so he didn't have to worry about shooting goons hiding behind cover. But then I had a better idea in the form of a cover-destroying, bone-crushing grenade. Things were looking up.

My leader ability also meant I could dole out an extra action point to someone—which I gifted to the beefiest member of the crew, who then charged at a Separatist and beat him to death.

I'd prepared for the next enemy turn, too, by holding back one member of my squad in the previous turn. Instead of attacking, I taunted a big group of enemies and activated his retaliation ability—this meant that four enemies would exclusively target him, and every time they shot at him, he'd immediately shoot back.

By the time enemy reinforcements arrived, we'd cleaned up. They walked through a door into the combat arena, only to be greeted by three overwatch cones. Zero Company eschews XCOM's omni-directional overwatch, which feels restrictive, but appropriately tactical. Anyway, the Separatists were goners.

Damn did it feel good. I got that XCOM 2 buzz, but there were also some Zero Company-specific tricks in there too—particularly the flexibility and even greater emphasis on teamwork. That this is so present even in the early game, when the bag of tricks is at its emptiest, is reassuring.

The astromech droid class is a prime example of Zero Company's slightly different approach. These little droids aren't frontline glory hounds, instead filling a support role. It's another way to get extra AP, or revel in some squad-wide buffs, and their self-heals mean that, while they are vulnerable, they don't need to be constantly protected.

This class is made all the more interesting because Zero Company, like XCOM, makes each one of your crew matter, because you're only ever going to be fielding a handful of troops. So that astromech might be a lifesaver, but can you afford to go into a fight one gun down?

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm is tempered by all the times the fights feel like a lesser example of the XCOM 2 model. One where fog of war, patrolling units and surprise attacks are replaced by regular enemy reinforcements spawning in clearly defined areas, which has a devastating impact on the tension that's normally inherent in tactics games, and especially XCOM.

I confess I'm also getting pretty bored of the combat arenas, which tend to be small, mostly open spaces littered with crates. Zero Company has an entire galaxy to play with, but while there's a variety of tilesets with some cosmetic differences, most of the locations have already started to blend together.

This issue is exacerbated by the range of foes—people with guns, and droids with guns. There's the odd exception, and I know more exotic enemy types appear later on with greater frequency, but it still feels comparatively conservative for a galaxy where space wizards exist.

Then there are the problems with clarity and precision—which Zero Company is a bit lacking in. I've made far too many positioning mistakes because of this, and I've been disappointed to discover that Bit Reactor is clearly expecting us to use a gamepad. Zero Company is just unpleasant to play with a mouse and keyboard. In a tactics game, this is wild.

Midnight Snack

While the battles feel comfortably XCOM-adjacent, a lot of the most novel and forward facing elements draw from Midnight Suns, which Foertsch was working on at Firaxis before he left to set up Bit Reactor. The more concentrated theme of camaraderie, the pre-battle conversations with your squad inside a base you can freely explore—on top of some pre-mission exploration in the combat levels themselves—and the mid-fight team-ups all evoke Firaxis's heroic tactics game.

Some of these elements have a mechanical payoff, like the bonuses individual members of your squad receive from working together. But even the arguably fluffier parts, like the aforementioned conversations, or those brief moments where you get to explore an area prior to a fight, walking around as if you're in a third-person action game, make a significant impact.

The cinematic presentation and subtle nods to RPGs elevate the workmanlike tactical gameplay, ensuring that the whole feels richer. Zero Company has character and panache—of the kind you don't often see in a tactics game.

In most cases, though, it doesn't go as hard as Midnight Suns. The Den is so much smaller than the Abbey, the conversations are brief and the team-up mechanics—though extremely handy—are restrained.

There is one place where it goes harder, however, combining both XCOM and Midnight Suns in a way that makes the stakes feel so much higher. While Marvel's heroes could not be killed, any member of your squad, even the full-fledged bespoke characters, can die. We cared about our very mortal XCOM squads despite their lack of identity, filling in the gaps ourselves. But we don't need to do that here, and the risk of losing a member of the team feels so much more pronounced.

If permadeath isn't your bag, though, you can simply turn it off.

I've been a bit more down on Zero Company than I expected, but 18 cycles only lets you explore the tip of the iceberg, and I still think there's a lot to like here. Squad management and progression is really strong, for instance, and I've already had plenty of fun mucking around with builds, using different combinations of classes and weapons to create potent killers.

At the moment I'm really digging my pistol-wielding gunslinger. Pistols are pretty weak, but you can fire them more often. To take advantage of this and shore up the weapon's weaknesses, I've turned him into a crit hit monster—basically a sniper with a pistol. He's a bit soft, though, and I've been having just as much of a lark building indomitable tanks who soak up damage and dish it back out again to devastating effect.

So I've been having a pretty good time, then. Just not as much as I expected. And a big part of that is probably because I was expecting Zero Company to push the blockbuster tactics game forward a bit more. XCOM 2 is a decade old but has yet to be shoved off its throne—and to do that will require a boldness that I've not really seen here. Little of it feels like evolution, and in some cases it feels like a step back—albeit an enjoyable one all the same.

Hopefully it takes bigger swings later in the campaign. Otherwise, I think it might leave me pining for XCOM and Midnight Suns again.

With Electronic Arts now officially owned by Saudi Arabia, CEO Andrew Wilson has made some changes at the top, appointing former EA Sports president Cam Weber as president and chief studios officer, and former "chief experiences officer" David Tinson—basically the top marketing and communications role—as president and chief operating officer.

The announcement of the promotions came in a message initially shared with employees that was presumably meant to be reassuring, but lands mostly as just empty pap. After waxing poetic about the company's long and eventful history, Wilson said EA is "entering one of the most exciting and transformative moments our industry has ever seen."

"Every era of innovation expands what's possible," Wilson wrote. "New technologies open new doors, but it is the creativity, ingenuity and courage of our teams that transform possibilities into unforgettable experiences. At EA, we've always believed our greatest opportunity is to create what others haven't yet imagined. This is the spirit that has guided us for more than four decades, and it will continue to shape our future."

It's the kind of wordy, meaningless positivity usually reserved for shareholder calls (when EA had those), but vaguely familiar to my reading, too: A slightly reworded take on the increasingly common promise that yes, we're using AI for game development, but it's all driven by human creativity.

AI does seem likely to feature largely in EA's future: Silver Lake CEO and managing partner Egon Durban said the new owners will "invest heavily in EA’s growth, including what AI can do to enhance game development and player experience," and less cheerfully, there's also an expectation of massive layoffs to follow as EA looks to manage the billions in debt it's taken on to finance this deal.

The promotion of Weber and Tinson was similarly exuberant: Wilson said EA will need "bold creativity and exceptional execution" as it moves into its next phase, but fortunately it has "a deeply experienced leadership team across the company."

I think it's notable that Weber was previously the head of EA Sports. Some observers, including former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes, have speculated that EA's takeover will leave it tightly focused on its dominant franchises—EA Sports FC and Battlefield, basically—to the exclusion of smaller-scale fare. Without wanting to read too much into it, putting the top EA Sports guy in charge of all EA studios can pretty easily be seen as movement in that direction.

Electronic Arts has officially now passed into the hands of Saudi Arabia—specifically, the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, as well as firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. It is with a grim lack of surprise that I now inform you that this will, reportedly, involve a lot of layoffs.

The news comes courtesy of Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who posted to Bluesky: "EA officially goes private tonight, meaning: EA will no longer trade on the NASDAQ for the first time in 36 years, all stockholders of EA (including many employees) will receive $210/share, [and] EA will take on $18 billion (!) in debt, putting it on the hook to pay ~$1.8 billion/year in interest.

"EA's annual Ebitda is around $1.5 billion, which should be enough to service the interest payments. But the publisher has told debt investors that it will cut $700 million in annual costs including $170 million in 'organizational efficiencies,' per Bloomberg. In other words: mass layoffs."

This is, technically, a called shot—but it's a called shot in the sense of saying that a giant boulder rolling down a hill is probably going to flatten the sand castle it's headed towards. Maybe it hits a pebble and jolts out of the way at the last second—maybe $700 million in annual costs will be cut through, I don't know, pragmatic restructuring or executives reducing their salaries. Perhaps pigs shall fly. Anything's possible.

But given the state of the current industry, I'm inclined to agree with Schreier here. Large-scale acquisitions like this typically result in mass layoffs and studio closures, as was the case with Microsoft's $68.7 billion purchase of Blizzard, which resulted in a bloodbath of 1,900 laid-off employees across the company and Xbox.

That ugly trend has continued unabated: Microsoft's recent 'reset' saw 1,600 layoffs, with 1,600 more to come by 2027, Ubisoft has continued to make deep cuts as it struggles to stay alive, and yes, EA has already made significant layoffs of its own ahead of the acquisition—and that's just the past couple months.

There's a huge flood of talent, both institutional and new, that's now being dropped into a hiring pool already thousands strong—adding what's bound to be a rash of layoffs from EA to that pile is bound to be grim tidings.

All of this comes in spite of the fact that the wider industry is as big and as profitable as it always has been, with global games revenue surpassing $200 billion in 2025. Where's all that money going? Clearly not to the people making the things, that's for sure.

And now it's official: Electronic Arts, one of the most storied publishers in videogame history, has been fully acquired by a consortium made up of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. EA said in a press release that the takeover "brings long-term capital, sector expertise, and strategic support" to the company, which is now "positioned to accelerate creativity and innovation to shape the future of entertainment."

"This moment recognizes the extraordinary people whose creativity, ambition and passion have made EA one of the world's leading interactive entertainment companies," Electronic Arts CEO and chairman Andrew Wilson said in a statement.

"We're entering this next chapter from a position of strength with partners who share our vision and ambition. Together, we'll invest boldly, accelerate innovation, and build the next generation of games and experiences for the hundreds of millions of players and fans who inspire us every day."

While EA's new ownership is nominally a consortium, the deal leaves Saudi Arabia firmly in control of the company, with an ownership stake of 93.4%. That's caused some concern among observers who worry that the kingdom's notorious repression of human rights, particularly among women and the LGBTQ+ community, leave the company's future support for inclusive games like The Sims—or anything that's not "guns and football," as former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes put it—in jeopardy.

Wilson has previously said the company's values will "remain unchanged" under its new owners, but Saudi Arabia hasn't been shy about using videogames to sportswash its reputation in the past, and I see little reason to expect that to change now that it has full control of one of the world's biggest and best-known game publishers.

Still, money talks, as the saying goes, and an awful lot of it was thrown around in this deal. Saudi Arabia's purchase of EA is the biggest leveraged buyout in private equity history, which imposes significant financial risks alongside all the moral ones. No one really knows what to expect from EA going forward, but—again, invoking Weekes—it does seem that anything not EA Sports FC or Battlefield is subject to at least some uncertainty.

The specter of an increased focus on AI has also loomed over this deal, as EA has spent the last year and change laying off game devs—a move possibly aimed at helping lighten the $20 billion debt load EA has taken on to finance the deal. That didn't stop the company from giving Wilson $38 million for a year of whatever he does, though—$8 million more than he got last year.

In any event, Silver Lake CEO and managing partner Egon Durban effectively confirmed that EA is indeed looking to AI as the future. "EA’s franchises are some of the most beloved in entertainment, combining exceptional creative talent with a relentless focus on players," Durban said. "As long-term investors in technology, we admire how EA’s innovation fuels imagination and human connection.

"We’re proud to join with PIF and Affinity Partners to invest heavily in EA’s growth, including what AI can do to enhance game development and player experience, and excited to partner with Andrew and the EA team as they raise the bar for fans everywhere."

And yes, Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US president Donald Trump and owner of Affinity Partners, had similarly upbeat comments on the whole thing: "EA has created stories, characters, and communities that have become part of everyday life for hundreds of millions of people. We're excited to support the company as it continues to reach new audiences, inspire the next generation of creators, and expand the ways people around the world connect through play."

While a minority player on the financial side, Kushner was presumably key in getting the deal done: Along with being Trump's son-in-law, he has significant financial ties with Saudi Arabia through the PIF's $2 billion investment in Affinity Partners. Kushner is also a US diplomatic envoy to the Middle East.

With the purchase complete, Electronic Arts will be delisted from the NASDAQ.

Bad news for anyone holding out hope that some power-on-high would swoop in and put a halt to Saudi Arabia's takeover of Electronic Arts: A new Form 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission says the deal has green lights across the board, and will be done next week.

More formally, "as of July 30, 2026, all regulatory approvals required to complete the Merger have been obtained," the filing states. "Electronic Arts currently expects the Merger to close on or about the close of trading on August 4, 2026. Completion of the Merger remains subject to the satisfaction or waiver of the remaining customary closing conditions set forth in the Merger Agreement."

Realistically, I don't think anyone expected that this proposed takeover by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund would run into too many obstacles. The Federal Trade Commission fought like hell when Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, and ultimately lost; the PIF takeover of EA seems far less likely to trigger concerns about competition, because it's not a merger of two game makers into one bigger game maker, but rather a change in ownership.

Which isn't to say it's without risk. The acquisition will take EA private, leaving it—within regulatory limits—subject to the whims of its new owner. In this case, that's effectively Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, chair of the Public Investment Fund, and credibly accused mastermind of the 2018 murder of journalist and Saudi regime critic Jamal Khashoggi.

The impact of that change is already being felt. Some of the biggest Sims 4 content creators quit EA's creator network in 2025 over the buyout; one, Lilsimsie, wrote that "the values represented by the people acquiring EA are fundamentally at odds with what I stand for and support," presumably a reference to the Saudi kingdom's ongoing repression of women and the LGBTQ+ community. Former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes expressed similar concerns, predicting that "guns and football" games will be fine, but that "gay stuff" and "politics [they're] not going to like" are going to fall by the wayside.

Apart from that, the deal presents no small amount of risk to EA itself. The $55 billion deal is the largest leveraged buyout in history, and financing it will leave EA saddled with $20 billion in debt. That's a huge burden it will have to pay off. In similar situations, we've seen companies aggressively cut costs, paring themselves to the bone and casting aside anything but the most proven moneymakers. In EA's case, those moneymakers would be Battlefield and EA FC—the "guns and football" invoked by Weekes.

"The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has failed the American consumer," Players Alliance HQ, which has organized prior demonstrations against the takeover, said in a statement. "By approving this unprecedented and corrupt $55 billion acquisition, private equity and the Saudi PIF gains a dangerous foothold in the videogame industry, which now threatens the affordability and freedom of creativity deeply critical to the success of gaming." The group said it intends to continue its efforts "to hold EA to account and prevent their anti-consumer practices from spreading across the industry.”

A serious challenge to the takeover was never in the cards. One of the minority backers of the takeover is Affinity Partners, an investment company owned by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US president Donald Trump, and Trump is also tight with bin Salman. The current chair of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, is also a very vocal Trump supporter.

Remember when Battlefield 6 dropped in 2025 and it was a big hit, selling seven million copies in three days and becoming the first Battlefield game to outsell a competing Call of Duty? And then Electronic Arts rewarded the people who made it by laying off an undisclosed number of them? And also laid off the entire team working on an all-new, more story-focused game in the series?

I remind you of all this—and, since we're on the topic, of former Dragon Age boss Mark Darrah's recent characterization of the company as "a hedge fund with a videogame hobby"—because EA released its Form 10-K/A SEC filing yesterday, revealing among other things that CEO Andrew Wilson's "total compensation" for the company's 2026 fiscal year was $38,649,984, an $8 million increase over his 2025 pay driven in no small part by the success of Battlefield 6.

There are numerous factors involved in EA's decision to give over $38 million to Wilson for a single year of doing whatever it is he does, of course, but "business performance" is surely one of the big ones. And that category is led by Battlefield, which met "all milestones for a high-quality launch," including "positive critical reviews and stable services and gameplay."

"The highly successful Battlefield launch" warrants a second mention, alongside the move to sell the company to Saudi Arabia, in a separate category regarding the company's management "in an unpredictable external environment."

Big ups to Battlefield 6, then, and also to Wilson's pay package. His base salary, for the record, was 'only' $1.3 million, the same as 2025, but the bonuses and bonus modifiers add up right quick.

Here's a breakdown of the pay structure for Wilson and the other big dogs at EA, which also illustrates how his total pay shot up by $13 million in two years, even though his base salary hasn't budged.

There's a notable bump in Wilson's "other compensation," from $678,858 in 2025 to nearly $2.4 million in 2026. This, the report explains, is due primarily to an increase in his "personal security benefits." An assessment conducted in 2025 recommended that Wilson use private air travel for all personal travel as well as business travel, and as a result he "was permitted to use corporate aircraft for personal travel subject to a 75-hour cap," which ended up costing $1,245,946.

Hold on, there's more. You may recall Joshua Wolens pointing out in 2025 that Wilson's total compensation for that year was 260 times greater than EA's median employee salary—a big increase from the 170:1 ratio the previous year. Well, it's up again: The report says the ratio of Wilson's compensation to the median EA employee was 305:1 in 2026. That gap widened despite the median salary at EA also increasing, from $117,302 in 2025 to $126,612 in 2026, although EA noted that it had calculated a new median employee salary for the 2026 comparison.

It was a pretty great year for Electronic Arts then—unless you were an employee at Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, Motive, Ridgeline, Full Circle (it wasn't all Battlefield), or EA's recruitment, customer support, trust and safety, and IT teams who found themselves without jobs while five people in the C-suite collectively "earned" around $80 million. For one year, remember.

It's grotesque, but as Joshua said in 2025, this isn't a problem unique to Wilson or EA. Our system prioritizes shareholder value above all else, and the relentless drive for maximal profits and growth has fuelled an explosive increase in executive compensation across the board. In 2019, for instance, Wilson just barely squeaked into As You Sow's ranking of the 100 Most Overpaid CEOs, while former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick landed squarely in the middle of the list.

Ah, NOX. Poor NOX. Westwood's 2000 ARPG last graced our pages three years ago, as one of eight PC gaming classics that are still worth playing today, where Russell Adderson wrote that it "might have been everyone’s favorite ARPG" had it not, you know, come out in the year 2000—just a few months before Diablo 2.

Alas, that's how it shook out. But hey, it looks like NOX is getting a second chance over a quarter of a century on: GOG has announced it won its latest patron poll to choose a game to induct into its Preservation Program—meaning GOG will commit to keeping the game supported and easy-to-run from now until the end of all things. Or at least the end of GOG.

It was not an especially close-run thing. The games patrons could vote to induct into the program were: Lands of Lore 1 + 2, Might and Magic 7: For Blood and Honor, Silver, Albion, and NOX. With almost 10,000 total votes, NOX came away with 3,068. The game in second place, with 2,239 votes, was Might and Magic.

GOG hasn't said exactly what it's gonna do to NOX. Some games—like the recent GOG Star Ocean releases—don't get much more than a quick check to make sure they still work, but I suspect the storefront will go further with this one.

This is the second game, after Thief, to enter the Preservation Program this way, and as I wrote yesterday, GOG pushed the boat out with the work it did on Thief and created an excellent version of that game in the process. I have to imagine NOX will undergo similar treatment.

Serendipitously—almost like it was planned this way—NOX is currently on sale on GOG for $1.39 right now, and will be for another 15 hours at the time of writing. If you own the game, you'll get whatever GOG does to it for free. Did I just go and buy NOX as soon as I heard this news? Yes. I figure you might want to do that too.

Electronic Arts' big RPG series Dragon Age did not get a happy ending. The most recent game in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, failed to meet sales targets, and EA quickly beat feet in the other direction, putting the torch to BioWare on the way out the door. It's not often that game franchises are put down forever, but former BioWare stalwart Mark Darrah, the executive producer on Dragon Age: Origins through Inquisition, thinks that in this case, it's probably gone for good.

Making any game through EA is difficult "because of EA’s complicated relationship to shipping games at all," Darrah said in a new interview with FRVR. "Someone once described to me EA as a hedge fund with a videogame hobby that it wished it didn’t spend so much money on. And I think that remains true."

Because of that, and the "frightening number" of dormant properties EA owns, Darrah said he has "no concept of who could, would, possibly pitch [a new Dragon Age game] at EA."

"What I’ve heard is if you go and decide you’re going to make a [game based on existing IP]… the instant you’re about to start, suddenly like three different people who think they control it come out of the woodwork and essentially rip you apart and chew you up and spit you out," Darrah said. So even if someone other than BioWare pitched a new Dragon Age game, "what I expect would happen if they try to do that, is somebody at BioWare would essentially become one of those people jumping under the vents to rip that person apart. I suspect that it wouldn’t happen for a variety of reasons."

In some way, Darrah's outlook is optimistic because it presumes both the continued existence of BioWare, and the possibility that EA would let anyone make a new Dragon Age game—neither of which strike me as a sure bet at this point. Not just because The Veilguard "underperformed," but because EA's all-but-assured takeover by Saudi Arabia could mean a serious bloodletting as the company takes on billions in debt, putting all but the most essential of EA's games at risk. A new Mass Effect remains in the works at Bioware.

Former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider suggested in his own recent, less-than-happy assessment of the series' future that EA executives are likely to deem Dragon Age as non-essential simply because they don't understand it."They never knew what to do with it," Gaider said in June, adding that even when it exceeded expectations, as Inquisition did, it was treated as "a fluke."

Saudi Arabia's proposed $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts has cleared one potentially significant hurdle, as the European Commission says it will not oppose the buyout.

"The European Commission has approved, under the EU Merger Regulation, the acquisition of sole control of Electronic Arts Inc. of the US by the Public Investment Fund ('PIF') of Saudi Arabia," the ruling states (via RPS).

"The Commission concluded that the notified transaction would not raise competition concerns, given its limited impact on competition in the markets where the companies are active. The notified transaction was examined under the normal merger review procedure."

The European Commission's approval of this deal came much more easily than its thumbs-up of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard a few years ago, which spawned an in-depth investigation and specific commitments from Microsoft before the green light was given.

But the EA deal is also quite a bit different: Not a merger, but a transfer of ownership that will see the company taken private. That carries significant risks of its own, including the $20 billion in debt EA will take on to finance the deal, but those factors don't enter into this ruling, which is based solely on its impact on competition within the EU.

There are still obstacles ahead, at least nominally. Game developers and US lawmakers alike have expressed "profound concern" about the deal and called on the US Federal Trade Commission to "carefully scrutinize" the proposed takeover.

That doesn't seem likely to go anywhere, though. FTC chair Andrew Ferguson is a stalwart supporter of US president Donald Trump, Trump is tight with Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman, bin Salman is chair of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund—which will own more than 93% of EA if the deal is approved—and the whole thing is being backed by an investment firm founded by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

From the archives: This feature was originally published in PC Gamer #305 (UK, June 2017). It appears below as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation.

No gaming genre can generate stories quite like the colony sim. Almost entirely unique to PC gaming, colony sims task players with building and sustaining a habitat for a group of AI characters, which could be anything from dwarfs to demons.

Although the player controls how the colony is shaped, constructing rooms or buildings and filling them with useful objects, they do not control the inhabitants directly. Instead, the colonists interact with their surroundings and other NPCs via AI systems that simulate their needs and desires.

Through these desires and the player’s ability (or inability) to meet them, colony sims produce incredible, incidental plotlines; tales of dwarves who delve too greedily and too deep, unleashing hordes of monsters into their fortress, of bitter rivalries between demonic creatures that tear apart the plans of an evil dungeon master, of prisoners who explode into riot because the warden forgot to build a shower block.

It’s the autonomous personalities of these AI individuals which separate colony sims from other populace-focused strategy games such as management sims and city-builders.

“You watch more named non-player creatures interacting with each other over a longer period of time in a colony sim,” says Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, “And you’re watching them more carefully than you generally watch, say, scheduled NPCs in an RPG. It gives you a chance to really get to know the characters, and how they respond to situations both you and the game world throw at them.”

But this also makes colony sims tough to develop. Since the release of Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper, which set the template for colony sims through the colourful and often fractious personalities of its demonic creatures, only a handful of similar games have been made. In recent years, however, the genre has witnessed an exciting resurgence, thanks to the dedication of a few tiny development studios.

Dwarf Fortress is the flagship in this resurgence. Created by Bay12 Games, Dwarf Fortress is an immense, 20-year development project currently halfway to completion. Its simple premise is that you build and maintain a colony of dwarfs, but the ultimate aim is to generate and simulate unique fantasy worlds in their totality. This includes everything from the terrain to the history, right down to what clothes individual characters wear.

The sheer scale of Bay 12’s project is mind-boggling. The aforementioned features are merely entry-level stuff for Dwarf Fortress’s preposterously granular simulation.

More recent additions include procedurally generated poetry, the result of a cascade of new features that typifies the rabbit-hole that is colony sim development. “If I recollect,” says Adams, “we were working on taverns at the time and we were dedicated to allowing the dwarves to play the instruments that had been in the fort. This led to procedural instruments, which led to procedural music, which led to procedural lyric descriptions, which led to procedural poetic forms and also dance forms.”

Such detail increases the range of unique events that can happen to the dwarfs in any given fortress. But it’s also important that the player is not ignored as a part of the game. Indeed, one of the immediate challenges in designing a colony sim is determining how much control the player should have over the colony and its inhabitants.

“It’s important at some point to have a conception of what the player ‘is’. For us, it’s the ‘official will of the fort,’” says Adams. “So you’d ideally be able to give orders and decide on other fortress-level activities, while the dwarves are in control of their own lives, and can even decide to disobey orders in extreme cases.”

Dwarf Fortress’s dedication to simulating every angle of fantasy colony life has made it legendary within the industry. But it is an extreme game in all senses, and this applies to its flaws. It is famously difficult to get to grips with, thanks to an archaic presentation and user interface, while its commitment to random numbers means your experience with it can vary wildly.

Rimming the changes

Not all colony sims are so uncompromising, however. Ludeon studios’ sci-fi colony sim RimWorld is a natural evolution of Dwarf Fortress’s design.

But not only is it more accessible, with a straightforward user interface and a modern art style, it also flips Dwarf Fortress’s design philosophy on its head. Rather than using procedural generation as a basis for its storytelling, it uses storytelling as a basis for its generation.

“RimWorld is designed at every level to generate story,” I’m told by Tynan Sylvester, founder of Ludeon studios and lead developer on RimWorld. “That’s always been the central pillar of the design, to the point that I deliberately decide every design conflict between ‘game’ and ‘story generator’ directions in favour of the latter.”

This concept is embodied by RimWorld’s AI Storyteller. Inspired by Left 4 Dead’s infamous AI director, this is an overarching AI system designed to maintain the pace of the game. The system comprises two principle components. “Story watchers” monitor the game state along specific parameters, such as player wealth or dangers encountered.

Then “incident generators” take those statistics and respond to them by triggering events in the game. These could be positive, like a much-needed cargo drop, or negative, like a disease epidemic.

“She [the AI storyteller] attempts to match a rising and falling pacing curve, and not to over-brutally murder struggling players,” Sylvester explains. “Though she also is not pandering or cloying. A struggling colony can still be hit by pretty brutal raids or disasters, because in extreme challenge lies the greatest drama.”

Although it helps to mediate the player experience, the AI storyteller adds another layer of complexity to the colony’s simulation, which already has potentially dozens of AI agents moving through it, all with their own goals, needs, emotions, and ambitions.

Add all the different rooms you can build, items you can craft, trading systems, weather systems, environmental hazards and hostile aliens also included in the game, and you’ve got one huge pile of overlapping, interlinking, and potentially conflicting systems.

This is another of the major challenges of colony sim design—structuring the development.

Knowing when to add features and game mechanics, and when to stop adding features and game mechanics, is crucial. “I think the characteristic design danger in this genre is drowning in your own complexity,” says Sylvester. “It’s very easy to just end up submerging players in complexity and micromanagement.

"My approach here is to treat player learning and player attention as precious, limited resources and ‘spend’ them accordingly. If any mechanic would require any amount of player learning or player attention, I try very hard to redesign it so it can be optional, or set things up so it only applies in some situations, or so it can be introduced gradually.”

Inner space

Considering the player’s experience of your colony sim is vital in other ways too. One of the toughest challenges when designing these games is not creating a system that produces interesting events, but ensuring it communicates those events effectively to the player. This is a problem that has been agonised over by Simon Roth, the creator of the colony sim Maia.

Maia traces its origins more to Dungeon Keeper than Dwarf Fortress, but has a similar commitment to simulating its alien world at an extremely granular level—particularly with its human colonists. In Maia, everything can affect a colonists’ mood, not just hunger, thirst or fatigue, but whether they’ve spent enough time around other people, and even the lighting of the room they’re in.

In total, Maia’s colonists have around 50 needs that can affect their mood, but communicating all this information to the player in a way that’s both clear and unobtrusive isn’t easy. “Presenting more information to the player has been the biggest difficulty in the game,” says Roth. “The thing is with the AI it’s so incredibly complex now, although the code is well laid out.”

Machine Studios has tried to solve this problem by giving the player both direct and indirect information about the colonist’s mental states. Unlike Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld, Maia’s 3D engine means Roth and the team can use detailed animations to communicate colonist emotions.

Ironically, this only works for obvious emotions and needs, such as hunger, anger, fatigue, etc. For subtler problems, the team needed a more direct solution. So they enabled the colonists to send the player emails.

“The emails were not such a big thing,” says Roth. “But since we realised we needed to present more depth to the player, the colonists can send emails. They can send these long procedural things.”

Alongside straightforward statements about their physical and mental state, in an unusual move, the colonists can also present the player with direct choices about how to deal with certain scenarios in the colony.

“If they’ve got a skill for a thing and they spot a potential problem in the base, they can suggest doing something to the player, and the player can either give them a yes or no answer”, Roth says. “It shows the AI are more self-aware than you realised.”

Although almost 30 years old, the colony sim genre has barely been explored. This recent smattering of games has pushed the envelope enormously in the last few years. But the great irony of colony sims is the more detail you include in the game, the harder it is to ensure that detail will be appreciated by the player.

Hence they need to be thought of like any storytelling medium. Ultimately, it’s not about how many words your story contains, it’s about how entertaining they are to read.

It took nine months, but Battlefield 6 is about to get its most requested feature. Naval warfare returns to the series on July 21 with the introduction of Tsuru Reef—BF6's new biggest map—a pair of boats, and more guns.

Perhaps more interesting is what's coming in phase 2 of Season 4 on August 18: OG Battlefield map Wake Island gets a modern update, complete with its aircraft carrier spawn points and beach assaults. At the same time, Battlefield 6 is hosting a Top Gun crossover that adds a new two-seater jet (styled like the films) and brings back a mode that first debuted in 2006's Battlefield 2142.

Top Gun: Carrier Strike—based on Battlefield 4's Carrier Assault, which is based on 2142's Titan mode—tasks two teams with sinking the other guy's aircraft carrier through the language of Conquest. Capture flags to launch missile barrages at the enemy carrier, culminating in an on-foot boarding assault on the carriers themselves. At least, that's how it worked in the old games. BF Studios says Carrier Strike has been reworked for BF6, which could mean anything from "it takes fewer missiles to win" to "there's no boarding phase anymore," which would be a shame.

It's funny and a little sad that old features are being reintroduced as brand crossovers, as if the only way to justify making a cool mode is to get Paramount to sponsor it, but at least Top Gun is an aesthetic match for Battlefield. It already makes more sense than when Battlefield 6 had an (admittedly fun) motocross course sponsored by Red Bull a few months back.

One other Top Gun-themed mode is coming as well, though this one's on the Redsec side. Top Gun: Fighter Sweep is a jets-only Gauntlet mission that takes place on a "modified Tsuru Reef." If you find Redsec as tedious as I do, the jets will also be usable on jet-only servers in Portal.

EA's press release has more quotes from Top Gun: Maverick actors (sans Cruise) than details about Carrier Strike. Miles "Rooster" Teller says it's "a huge honor to appear in a long-running franchise like Battlefield with its millions of fans, and talented people working on it," adding that "with Top Gun, it's like two titans meeting."

There's a zero percent chance Teller meant to reference the relevant name of the 2142 mode right? Battlefield's Top Gun festivities don't start until August, but the return of naval warfare next week should be a pretty big deal.

While former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider won't play The Veilguard, he knows enough to realise that the series ain't looking too hot right now. He's pretty sure it's dead, at least under EA.

When we asked if he saw a future in the series he considers "his baby", he wasn't hopeful.

"From Electronic Arts? Unlikely. Throughout the entire time I was there, we were always one breath away from the project being shelved. The thing that happened is that we kept releasing games, and it would sell much better than they thought it should, and it kept surprising them."

EA never seemed to understand Dragon Age, as evidenced by the Origins trailer that used a Marilyn Manson track and was filled with blood. Instead of a mature fantasy RPG, it was presented as some edgelord nonsense for teen boys. This misunderstanding continues to this very day. EA CEO Andrew Wilson, for instance, blamed The Veilguard's failings on a lack of live service features. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad.

Things were different with Mass Effect, EA's favourite RPG.

"It was funny," says Gaider, "because if Mass Effect releases didn't sell as well, they got excuses, because it was an action-oriented game. They thought it should sell more. It was slicker."

Gaider has nothing bad to say about the sci-fi RPG, and counts Mass Effect 2 as one of the "best RPGs of all time", but the differences in the way Dragon Age and Mass Effect were treated by EA must have stung.

"The way EA looked at it was that Mass Effect was the slick, modern RPG that had action, and they could sell really easily. Whereas Dragon Age was old-fashioned and focused on story. Our action, ranging from Dragon Age: Origins, was a little bit on the slow, cumbersome side, and then was too fast. They never knew what to do with it. So whenever a Dragon Age game sold well, we got excuses on the opposite side. Basically that it was a fluke."

It's worth noting that Dragon Age: Inquisition beat EA's sales expectations and became BioWare's most successful game. But EA has always treated Dragon Age, as Gaider says, like "the redheaded stepchild".

"They gave us a head of marketing at one point who literally talked about having to put lipstick on a pig in order to sell it. When you're on a team and you're hearing this, you're like, ‘Alright, what am I supposed to do with this?’"

Despite all of this, Gaider is interested in working on Dragon Age again—albeit not with EA. Though this is a more recent development.

"If you'd asked me that in the past, I would have said absolutely not. That I’d done my time. I left the Dragon Age team before I left BioWare. After Inquisition came out, I went to Mike Laidlaw and I said, ‘I've told all the stories with mages and dragons and what have you that I have in me. And I could keep going, but if I keep working on this, it's going to become rote, and I think that would be a disservice to the team. So I should step aside, let fresher voices rise’. I don't know if that was the right decision, but it felt right at the time."

If someone gave him the keys to Thedas now, though, he might be up for it.

"I do like a challenge," he says. "So if, out of some weird alignment of the stars, somebody handed the Dragon Age franchise back to me and said, ‘Breathe the life back into this baby’, that'd be a tough one, but I think that'd be an interesting thing to do. To go back to the basics of what made Dragon Age appeal to so many people in the first place. And go somewhere dark and dangerous, and do things that will make people upset. I think that’s what I would want to do with it."

If Richard Garriott can get his hands on Ultima again, who knows? Maybe there's still hope for Dragon Age.

There's a common thread amongst former BioWare developers: They are proud of what they worked on, have a lot of love for their former studio, and they have few good things to say about publisher EA. For understandable reasons.

David Gaider was with BioWare for a long time, joining the studio after the success of Baldur's Gate. He started as a writer on Baldur's Gate 2 and worked his way up to lead writer for Hordes of the Underdark, Neverwinter Nights' best expansion. But he's best known for Dragon Age.

Thedas is Gaider's creation, and he served as lead writer on Origins, Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, before leaving BioWare in 2016. He also wrote several novels and comics based on Dragon Age. "It was my baby," he tells us.

This is one of the reasons that the chances of him playing The Veilguard were always going to be slim—"no matter what".

"Whether it was successful or not, it was always going to make different choices than I would have made for it. The team took it, and they did their own version of it, and I don't really want to see what's changed. It's totally selfish—I just don't want to see what they've done with my baby, good or bad."

Regardless, it was not successful. At least not in the way, say, Inquisition was. It sold well and had plenty of positive reviews, but it's never been able to escape its Mixed user review rating on Steam, and it didn't meet EA's expectations.

EA's expectations, of course, are part of the problem.

One of the other reasons Gaider hasn't played it is that he knows "too much about what went on behind the scenes," characterising development as an "ordeal" where EA "handicapped" the team right from the beginning.

"Electronic Arts really did a number on them in terms of setting them up to fail, honestly. From everything I've been told about the game, it seems like that's exactly what happened. It didn't deliver on a creative level. It didn't deliver the sales. That's part of what EA likes to do too. They require a certain level of sales, and if you don't match that, it doesn't matter how good the game is. If it underperforms, you're essentially dead."

The Veilguard was not a great Dragon Age game—or at least it failed to capture what I found special and exciting about the series. And a great deal of the blame must be placed on EA's shoulders, as a company that is almost pathologically incapable of understanding what players want.

Take, for example, CEO Andrew Wilson's assessment of The Veilguard's failings. Was it because the quality of the writing took a dip? The shift to action-RPG? The companions who showcased a complete lack of agency? No, says Wilson, it's because it wasn't a live service game.

EA didn't just set up The Veilguard to fail, it also threw BioWare under the bus when the predictable happened, while completely misunderstanding what went wrong in the first place.

Unfortunately, Gaider hasn't had a smooth ride since leaving BioWare. He joined Beamdog and pitched a Planescape: Torment sequel to Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, which they liked but refused to fund. He's now creative director at Summerfall Studios. Its first game, Stray Gods, unfortunately launched around the same time as Baldur's Gate 3.

"Not to suggest that Stray Gods was in any way competition, but Baldur's Gate 3 came out and was such a huge hit that it was all anybody could talk about," he says. "So whatever chance there was of Stray Gods getting noticed disappeared."

Gaider is now working on a heist RPG, and while publishers have been enthusiastic about the pitch, nobody is funding it yet. Gaider says it's "make or break" for the studio.

It is time to do war crimes in a cool way. Battlefield 6, EA's big loud military-themed shooter that earned a coveted 82% from PC Gamer FPS czar Morgan Park, is free-to-try for a week. The trial period runs from yesterday, June 30, up until July 6.

The trial gives you access to five modes and four maps, which I will lay out in a conveniently bulletpointed form below.

Modes:

• Tactical Obliteration
• Breakthrough
• Conquest
• Escalation
• Casual Breakthrough

Maps:

• Railway to Golmud (Which, again, our Morgan really quite liked)
• Cairo Bazaar
• Contaminated
• Eastwood

Actually accessing the BF6 free trial is a little weird. Or at least, it seems slightly odd to me, as a man to whom the live-service world is scary and alienating. You don't get it by visiting the Battlefield 6 page on your PC storefront of choice (which is Steam, let's be real), you get it by heading to Battlefield Redsec (also available on the Epic Games Store and the EA App) and downloading that.

Redsec is, ordinarily, EA's portal to its already free-to-play version of the BF6 experience, but now you'll find some of the premium, full-fat stuff in there too. For a limited time only, of course.

I think you might want to check this one out. Why? Well, let me shamelessly quote our Morgan once again, who sang the following paean to BF6's unfussy chaos: "Place your palm on the pavement, and you can feel the low rumble of a hobby yearning for what we loved 15 years ago: the spectacle of scale, the unserious chaos of vehicular warfare, red grunts vs. blue grunts, the permission to make your own rules, and an environment where the guy obsessed with metas is having the least fun."

And if you fall in love with things exploding on big maps, then whaddya know? Battlefield 6 is 50% off on Steam for the ongoing summer sale. Almost like they planned it.

Electronic Arts' president of enterprise development Laura Miele says the rise of artificial intelligence in game development can bring about "a real rise in creativity" by removing tedious grunt work and enabling faster development processes overall.

Miele expressed her thoughts on the matter earlier this month during a Game Business Live showcase at Summer Game Fest, where she was asked if the growing use of AI tools will result in shorter development cycles overall.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

"Perhaps in some parts they will," Miele said. "I really believe in what I've seen, that I'm pretty excited about. I've always wanted to help our studio developers remove friction and I've always kind of wanted to be a hero to them and help them create career-defining experiences.

"And I think that AI, what I've seen, how AI has enabled removing friction from our pipelines and our tools and our workflows, has been pretty exciting. It's removed some tedium out of their jobs. And I've seen faster prototyping. I've seen faster creativity and shorter, faster conversations around creativity and coming to alignment. So, we're seeing it and I think there's a real rise of creativity that comes from removing some of the tedious tasks out of development."

Exactly what sort of AI is being discussed here isn't made clear, and there's a big gulf between, say, the AI-powered project management tools used by Shadow of the Colossus director Fumito Ueda at GenDesign and the generative AI slop machines that have become such a pox on, well, everything.

But EA hasn't been shy in the past about its enthusiasm for generative AI. CEO Andrew Wilson said in 2024, for instance, that the company is "embracing [generative AI] deeply," and that "about 60% of all of our development processes have high feasibility to be positively impacted by generative AI."

EA is also reportedly counting on the power of AI to bring down its operating costs and help cover the $20 billion in debt financing the company took on as part of its $55 billion acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. (If you're wondering why EA, the target of the acquisition, is also taking on billions of dollars of debt to pay for it, PC Gamer's foremost finance wiz Lincoln Carpenter explains. The short version: Everyone's terrified.)

Employees are reportedly less upbeat about the AI-powered future, which some suspect is being used to justify layoffs at the company. Whether driven by AI or not, EA has laid off hundreds of employees at BioWare, Respawn, Cliffhanger Games—which was closed outright—and elsewhere since the Saudi investment was announced in September 2025. The most recent round of cuts reportedly occurred earlier this week, putting an undisclosed number of people out of work.

The Sims 4 painted the town green with its outdoorsy, fairy-themed expansion, but if you don't want to work your way up the faefolk rankings to get to the good stuff, you can use Enchanted by Nature cheats for an easy shortcut. Some fairy features don't have their own code, but here you'll find cheats for most Sims 4 careers, skills, and traits that were added with the expansion.

If you need extra guidance, check out our main list of The Sims 4 cheats for a refresher on the basics. And if you're looking for other expansion commands, we've got lists for Businesses & Hobbies cheats and Life & Death cheats.

Enchanted by Nature career cheats

Enchanted by Nature added one new career to The Sims 4 with the Naturopath. It's a handy career for curing ailments, and you can even take things a step further with branching career paths as a Lifestyle Coach or Apothe-curist.

Enchanted by Nature skill cheats

The Sims 4 received two new skills with Enchanted by Nature: Apothecary and Natural Living. Sims skilled in Apothecary will learn how to make cures for ailments, while Natural Living sims learn how to thrive outdoors.

Use the testingcheats true command before setting a skill level via cheat code.

Enchanted by Nature trait cheats

Sims get three standard traits in this expansion: Disruptive, Mystical, and Plant Lover. There are Enchanted by Nature cheats for all three, but you can always add them via Create-a-Sim by:

• Using testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Using cas.fulleditmode in the cheat console
• Clicking your sim and selecting "Edit in CAS"
• Find both in the "Social" traits section

You can also add or remove traits in the console with the codes below. Traits marked with the fairy emoji 🧚 are exclusive to the occult sim.

Personality traits

Reward traits

Enchanted by Nature death cheats

Enchanted by Nature adds two overdramatic deaths for fairy sims, Death by Emotional Starvation and Death by Emotional Overload, but there's only a cheat for one.

Fairy death cheats

How fairy sims die from Emotional Overload

Fairies can detect and absorb other sims' emotions, but consuming Overload Moodlets can lead to Death by Emotional Overload. Here's how to get the process started:

• Use Detect Emotion on other sims to find overload emotions (look for an exclamation❗)
• Use Absorb Emotion until it triggers Enraged, Hysterical, or Mortified
• Continue until triggering Death by Anger, Death by Laughter, or Death by Embarrassment

Sims have been able to die from extreme emotions for a while, but the fairy sim option is still a new way to experience all three possibilities. If you're trying to avoid death or bring someone back, refer to our main list of Sims 4 cheats.

Enchanted by Nature fairy cheats

As Enchanted by Nature's occult sims hone their magical abilities, they'll also improve their fairy ranking. There are five ranks to work (or cheat) your way through, each with their own perks and special manipulation magic.

There's no cheat to directly equip the fairy rank to your sim, but you can use an XP shortcut to accomplish the same thing.

Remember a couple years back, when some of the top men behind the Dead Space series dangled a fourth game in front of Electronic Arts, and the response was basically, "Lose my number?" It sounds very much like that was the last gasp for the once-great horror games, at least for the foreseeable future, as producer Chuck Beaver said in an interview with FRVR that it just doesn't have the juice to satisfy the C-suite.

Beaver, who served as a producer on all three Dead Space games, said the challenge facing Dead Space is a familiar one: It needs the potential to be a huge hit in order for EA to give it the green light, and the "numbers just aren't there."

"Horror games have a bit of a ceiling, you know, and I think the number back in [former EA vice president] Frank Gibeau’s day was five million units to keep going on Dead Space," Beaver said. "I think the number is like 15 million units now, given the cost of things."

That's "a sadness in capitalism for all of us to suffer," he said—at least "until AI makes it apparently easy for you and I to just type 'make Dead Space 4'." This, FRVR clarified (in case it needed clarification), was a joke.

It's true, though: Game development costs are skyrocketing, at least for so-called triple-A games, and that puts the cost of failure way up too: It's "a high-stakes game for big boys only," as Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick recently put it.

But there's a deeper problem facing games like Dead Space, too. "Companies now are looking for the next Fortnite," Beaver continued. "They need something that is a perennial moneymaker." Singleplayer games like Dead Space that come to the table with no live service offerings or endless monetization options are a "dinosaur fossil of a business model" by comparison.

Yeah, it sucks—Dead Space was great—but Beaver's not wrong. Dragon Age: The Veilguard was well-received by fans and critics but considered a failure by EA because it failed to "break beyond the core audience," as CEO Andrew Wilson said in 2025. And the lesson it learned from that? "Games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement."

At the same time, it's also fair to say that while many of us have fond memories of Dead Space (which, by the way, is almost 20 years old now, in case you weren't feeling sufficiently aged yourself), it's not exactly a world-beater. The 2023 remake of Dead Space was quite good but not a big seller, and The Callisto Protocol, a grisly Dead Space-like headed up by OG Dead Space executive producer Glen Schofield, met with a similarly flat response. Schofield, who left developer Striking Distance less than a year after the game launched, said in 2025 that he may be done making games entirely.

A small group of protesters opposed to the Saudi Arabia-led takeover of Electronic Arts staged a "raid"—in the metaphorical MMO sense of players teaming up to confront a powerful boss—at EA headquarters yesterday, demonstrating in front of the Madden field at the center of the company's campus before attempting to present a petition signed by more than 70,000 people to EA leadership. Unfortunately, the delivery failed: While the protest went off with only one minor hitch, the attempt to serve EA the petition directly was stymied by security guards.

The "hitch" in question was EA's decision to place barricades around Madden field ahead of the protest, along with a small sign saying the field was closed for a "private function." Players Alliance, the group responsible for the protest, said it had not been in contact with EA over the matter, but that it believed the barricades were erected specifically to keep protesters off the field.

The protest did occur, directly in front of the barricades, and while it was small—as far as I could see on the livestream that ran yesterday, only about a dozen people were involved—it was enthusiastic and focused.

"Gamers raided EA’s HQ because we’re no longer willing to sit back while private equity firms and corporate executives turn gaming into another industry built on ripping off consumers," Twitch streamer and Players Alliance HQ member Zefrine said in a statement. "EA placed barricades around the Madden field precisely because the company is afraid of the growing public pressure against this buyout while regulators are still deciding whether to approve the deal.

"The pressure is working, and over 70,000 gamers stand with the Players Alliance to fight back against corporate greed and finally hold these corporations to account."

EA declined to allow the protesters to deliver those 70,000+ signatures directly, however. A Players Alliance representative said security refused to grant them access to the building, but told them that he would take the petition and "give it to the right people."

The group also emailed the petition to EA CEO Andrew Wilson and the US government's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

The EA buyout is controversial for a couple reasons, beyond the usual concerns about media concentration. First, the leveraged buyout—the biggest in private equity history—will leave the company burdened with $20 billion in debt, which could result in layoffs, studio closures, and cancellations as the company seeks to cut costs wherever it can.

There are also worries that the Saudi-led ownership could impose content restrictions on games: EA said not long after the acquisition was announced that it "will continue to be guided by our cultural values," but its failure to say what exactly those values are was notable.

The acquisition has also drawn the attention of game developers and US lawmakers, some of whom expressed "profound concern about the foreign influence and national security risks" attached to the deal, although they're generally calling for greater 'scrutiny' and promises rather than a halt to the whole thing—which, as we learned from Microsoft's buyout of Activision, doesn't add up to much.

But the great likelihood is that those protests and concerns, while entirely valid, will ultimately go nowhere anyway. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia and head of the country's Public Investment Fund, is a close associate of US president Donald Trump, and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner is also set to benefit from the deal through his Affinity Partners firm—which the PIF invested $2 billion into not long after Kushner left his White House senior advisor role during the first Trump administration. In 2025, Trump interfered in Netflix's planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which eventually went to Paramount Skydance in a deal backed by Kushern's Affinity Partners.

Cast your mind back to October 2024 and you may remember the time when Russia fined Google a website-breaking amount of money. Like grains of rice on a chessboard, a fine Russia levied against Google for blocking some pro-Kremlin channels had compounded to the point that Google 'owed' the country ₽2 undecillion. That's a two followed by 36 zeroes. That amount was later capped at a more generous ₽91.5 quintillion but, either way, it's more money than there is on Earth.

Which I suspect, as a tactic, was not much of a winner, as Russian courts have turned around and asked for a much more payable fine from EA, Take-Two, Battlestate, and NetEase (via Kommersant) for failing to localise the data of Russian gamers on domestic servers.

Law firm Semenov and Pevzner told Kommersant that Russia's media regulator, Roskomnadzor, had filed lawsuits resulting in ₽2 million fines against the four companies, while three remaining lawsuits against Embracer Group, Digital Extremes, and Epic Games are yet to reach a conclusion.

Which is not a lot. At the time of writing, ₽2 million is about $27,000. If the court were to impose the maximum allowable fine against the three remaining companies—₽6 million—that would be just over $80,000.

That's couch-cushion money for companies at this scale, whose revenues are measured in the billions. In the unlikely event any of them were to pay, it would be tantamount to a rounding error on their balance sheets.

Perhaps this indicates that the fines themselves are not the point. A source spoken to by Kommersant suggests that the lawsuits are merely the beginning of a crackdown on foreign-made online games within Russia, a move which would likely redound at least somewhat to the benefit of homegrown games. For its part, Roskomnadzor says it has no such plans, but it would fit the country's previously documented attempts at "digital sovereignty".

The Sims 4's big ghost overhaul expansion turned the afterlife into an entire occult sim experience with new ghost abilities and a Soul's Journey quest to dog your sim past the grave. This full list of Life & Death cheats can help you max out your Thanatology skills, cheat to the top of the new active career as a Reaper, or quickly unlock those ultimate abilities for your ghost sims.

See our main list of Sims 4 cheats for a refresher on all the basics, or scroll down to get the trait codes you need for defying death.

Life & Death Career cheats

There are two new career paths in the Live & Death Expansion: Undertaker and Reaper. If you want to become a scythe-wielding dealer of death, the Reaper career is the objective-based active career you're looking for.

Life & Death new death cheats

There are a few new ways to die in Life & Death, technically, but mostly they're just new contexts for existing deaths like old age. You can find all the relevant base game death cheats in our Sims 4 cheats page. The one truly new death in the expansion is the Murder of Crows.

I have not managed to find any cheat code for the Murder of Crows death. Below I will tell you how to achieve the death quickest but I have not found a way to undo it, so proceed only if you're certain!

How to get murdered by crows

• Place a "Grim Standard Ascendant Crow" from Buy Mode
• Enable testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Shift + Click the crow and select Cheat Relationship > Set Min Friendship
• Normal click the crow and select Socialize > Provoke
• Repeat the provoke action several times until the crow is "dangerously" angry

How to get unmurdered (in theory)

As mentioned above, there is not a known trait cheat to remove the death by crow status easily. Below is a way to un-ghost yourself with cheats otherwise but this method has not worked for me and when re-entering Live Mode my sim remains a crow'd ghost. Here's how to remove a cause of death:

• Enable testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Enable cas.fulleditmode in the cheat console
• Shift + Click your sim and select "Modify in CAS"
• Open the "cause of death" panel in the top left
• Hover over the currently selected death and click the x to remove it
• Click the ✔️ in the bottom right to save changes and exit Create-A-Sim

Life & Death skill cheats

The Life & Death expansion comes with just one new skill track for Thanatology. Use the cheat testingcheats true before setting a skill level via cheat code.

Life & Death trait cheats

There are three new standard sim traits in this expansion: Chased By Death, Macabre, and Skeptical. You can easily add or remove these by:

• Using testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Using cas.fulleditmode in the cheat console
• Clicking your sim and selecting "Modify in CAS"
• Find all three in the "Lifestyle" traits section

You can also add or remove these traits in the cheat console with the codes below.

Personality traits

❗ Remember that Macabre and Skeptical are mutually exclusive traits. You'll have to remove one before you can add the other.

Grief style traits

Grief styles are part of the new system for this expansion that controls what type of mood your sim will usually experience while grieving a death. They're noted in the simology panel with all their other traits.

Reward traits

Soul's Journey cheats

Add bucket list items

To easily add items to your sim's bucket list in the Soul's Journey section of their Aspirations panel:

• Enable testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Shift + Click your sim
• Use the interaction path Pack Cheats > Expansion packs > EP17 - Life & Death > Add Unfinished Business Objective

From there, choose a bucket list category like "I want to create!" or "I wanna party!" which will open a menu to select a specific bucket list goal.

Earn Soul's Journey ranks

To easily complete ranks of your sim's Soul Journey, use the cheats below to jump to a particular rank. You can skip to the end of your Soul's Journey by using the highest rank cheat right off the bat.

❗You must become a ghost to progress to ranks "Newfound Purpose" and "The Big Picture" but you can use these cheats to skip ahead to the final rank after going see-through.

Ghost mastery cheats

After becoming a ghost, your sim will have ghost experience points to unlock in their Simology panel like other occult sim types. To jump ghost ranks and unlock ghost powers, use these cheats below.

Ghost Mastery ranks

Ultimate Blessings

After leveling up to Transcendent Wraith rank, you can cheat your way to unlocking the good or evil Ultimate Ability as a ghost with one of the cheats below. Use the interaction category "Ghost Mastery" on another sim to either grant them longevity and need fulfillment or drain their life force and siphon their needs meters depending on your alignment.

The Sims 4's small business-focused expansion added a couple new skills and several new panels and menus for managing your operation. With a full list of Businesses & Hobbies cheats, you can swap the alignment of your in-home hustle from lawful to shady, level up your painting and tattooing skills, or skip the work to grab some new aspiration reward traits.

See our main list of Sims 4 cheats for a refresher on all the basics, or scroll down to get the trait codes you need for unlocking those new abilities.

Pottery and Tattooing skill cheats

The Businesses & Hobbies expansion comes with two new skill tracks. Use the cheat testingcheats true before setting a skill level via cheat code.

❗Remember that the artistic pottery reconstruction art Kintsugi is not a separate skill track. You unlock the "repair ceramic" interaction at Pottery skill level 7.

Businesses & Hobbies trait cheats

There are two new standard sim traits in this expansion: Idealist and Shady. You can easily add or remove these by:

• Using testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Using cas.fulleditmode in the cheat console
• Clicking your sim and selecting "Edit in CAS"
• Find both in the "Social" traits section

You can also add or remove these traits in the cheat console with the codes below.

Standard traits

❗ Remember that Shady and Idealist are mutually exclusive traits. You'll have to remove one before you can add the other.

Reward traits

Hidden Traits

Businesses & Hobbies small business cheats

Find the Small Business menu in the very bottom right of your interface in "Owned Businesses" where you can see your small business alignment and renown level. You can control both values with the cheats below and then open the "Small Business Perks" menu from the same panel to buy perks with your renown points.

Small Business rank cheats

The easiest way to increase your small business rank is with a Shift + Click cheat. Make sure that testingcheats true is enabled first, then Shift + Click on your sim. Use this interaction path:

• Pack cheats > Expansion packs > EP18 > Increase small business renown

That interaction will move your small business rank up by one level at a time. If you want to set your small business to a specific renown level, use the cheat code values below.

Small business reputation cheats

The fastest way to directly set your small business alignment is with a Shift + Click cheat. Make sure that testingcheats true is enabled first, the Shift + Click your sim. Use this interaction path:

• Pack cheats > Expansion packs > EP18 > Set small business alignment

You can choose any of the seven alignment values by selecting their name. You can also achieve the same thing with these cheat codes:

Skill Mastery perk cheats

This expansion introduced skill mastery perks with powerful skill-boosting side effects which you can find at the top of the Skills panel. You can unlock these perks naturally, buy Mastery Perk potions from the Satisfaction Points rewards menu, or just cheat them. Your sim can only have four skill mastery points at once, so you can use the cheats below to add or remove them at will.

• traits.equip_trait [trait code]
• traits.remove_trait [trait code]

I suppose it was inevitable: Less than a year after Activision and Paramount confirmed that a Call of Duty movie is in the works, The Hollywood Reporter says a Battlefield movie is on the way too.

It's still very early in the process—the report says the "hot package" is currently being pitched to studios and streaming platforms—but Christopher McQuarrie, who's written, produced, and directed the last few Mission Impossible movies, among others, is attached to do all of the above for this film, while Michael B. Jordan is onboard as a producer and may also possibly star in it, depending on how things shake out. Electronic Arts is also attached as a producer.

That's kind of ironic, because when the Call of Duty movie's release date was announced, I suggested the plot (which we still don't know about) could very well end up something like Without Remorse, the tale of an unstoppable American hero caught up in a high-stakes conflict between the US and Russia starring—you guessed it—Michael B. Jordan.

Then again, The Terminal List starring Chris Pratt might be a better fit—it's a series, not a movie, but Pratt literally says "Now you're in the battlefield" in it.

This, as I've previously said about the Call of Duty movie, highlights the challenge both of these projects face: How do you make a film based on either of them that's not just a generic war movie with a brand stapled to it—especially given how much both series have borrowed from war films like Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, and, never forget, The Big Red One? It's literally the title of a Call of Duty game.

(21 years later, it still hasn't come to PC, but we remain hopeful.)

Call of Duty could follow along one of the Modern Warfare plots and probably do alright (hell, they could just remake Big Red One and call it a day), but Battlefield doesn't have that established cast of killers that's immediately recognizable as those guys from that game, even if you can't remember their names. I've played two or three Battlefields over the years, and the most I can recall about any of them is that one was modern, and two (I think?) weren't. And yeah, that's just me, but I'd bet good money that in this one thing, at least, I'm not too far off the norm.

Be that as it may, THR says interest in the Battlefield film project is running high, and "it will not be cheap" for whoever picks it up. The report also states that a theatrical release is being prioritized, so it's not clear at this point whether streaming powerhouse Netflix will get a shot at it.

There's no hint of a release date yet, obviously, but given that the Call of Duty movie project seems to be considerably further along, I wouldn't expect Battlefield to hit screens for at least a few years—and that's assuming it doesn't end up like the Splinter Cell movie, spending a decade in limbo before someone mercifully pulls the plug.

It was reported earlier this month that Amazon MGM Studios' head of global TV Peter Friedlander had requested script rewrites for the in-development Mass Effect TV series in order to make it "more appealing to non-gamers." Not very cool! But the claim may also not be entirely accurate, as writer and executive producer Daniel Casey said on Bluesky that it's news to him.

"So, I can’t talk about the specifics of what I'm writing (I've signed NDAs, etc)—but for whatever it’s worth, that article by the Ankler caught me off guard just as much as you," Casey wrote (via Kotaku). "I don't know where that 'non-gaming audiences' quote came from or who said it, but at no point has that been said to me."

So, I can’t talk about the specifics of what I’m writing (I’ve signed NDAs, etc) — but for whatever it’s worth, that article by the Ankler caught me off guard just as much as you. I don’t know where that “non-gaming audiences” quote came from or who said it, but at no point has that been said to me.

— @danielcaseytypes.bsky.social (@danielcaseytypes.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-04-20T22:11:54.105Z

Whether that's good or bad is a matter of perspective, I suppose, although frankly I think that if you're writing specifically to appeal to existing Mass Effect fans, you really are running the risk of alienating or shortchanging people coming into it with no foreknowledge of the series. In the bigger picture, though, I think it's better for all involved when executives keep their big ideas to themselves, and let the creative people—who are paid to be creative—do the actual creating.

Of course, at this point not much creation has been done, at least not as far as the public is aware: Casey, who co-wrote the screenplay for F9, is signed as writer and producer for the Mass Effect series, while Doug Yung is showrunner, but there's still no word on a cast, specific timeline, or what the series will actually be about, except that it will not be based on the original Mass Effect trilogy.

Encouragingly, the team behind Amazon's hit Fallout series is also involved in the production. Personally, I feel like Mass Effect is much more of a closed loop than Fallout, but who knows? Maybe lightning will strike twice.

In case you'd forgotten, there's also a new Mass Effect game in development at BioWare, although much like the series we know very little about it beyond the fact that it's happening.

This week is the most excited I've been about Battlefield 6 since it launched. EA announced that seven more maps are coming this year, and several of them are legitimately huge. Naval warfare is making a comeback, filling in a blank that's very much felt in its current pool of samey, landlocked locales. A remake of the fan-favorite Wake Island will even reintroduce asymmetrical beach invasions with functional aircraft carriers.

Taking in the 8-month roadmap as a whole, I can see a Battlefield 6 that I want to play a lot more of. But when can I actually play that game? Your guess is as good as mine.

This is one of the problems with roadmaps, or more specifically, the trajectory of live service updates. Not only do developers treat exact release dates like they're state secrets until days before they come around, but seasons themselves are now chopped up into smaller pieces, and the average player doesn't know which pieces to expect soon and which fall under a nebulous "mid-season" umbrella.

It's especially bad in Battlefield 6, which has so far split its seasons into three monthlong mini seasons. Each mini season gets a new gun, an event, and sometimes a map. The idea behind splitting the pie up this way is to create the impression that Battlefield always has something new and exciting going on, when in practice all they've done is demonstrate that individual Battlefield updates aren't worth showing up for.

Season 4, for instance, is hyping up the grand return of naval warfare, but on the day it begins, that grand return will amount to a single map. More are coming, but when? Don't worry about it, says EA.

Allow me to describe what I suspect is a common experience:

1. Player reads about Battlefield 6 getting two new maps, new features, a handful of guns, new modes—they get excited
2. Weeks later they hear the new season starts tomorrow, so they reinstall/update the game
3. The season begins, and they boot up Battlefield 6 to find just one third of the stuff they read about is actually there: a map, a mode, and two guns locked behind battle pass grinding
4. They try the new map for a while, but decide to wait until the season is actually feature-complete
5. They forget to check back in with Battlefield 6 until the next roadmap comes around, and the cycle repeats

EA seems to operate under the assumption that everyone who enjoys Battlefield 6 is hopelessly addicted to it—that by drip-feeding morsels of roadmap content every four weeks, our thirst is quenched right as our mouths are getting dry. That doesn't reflect how I play Battlefield at all, and the player numbers we can see suggest I'm not the only one.

Battlefield has never been my forever game. Its brand of casual competition, static classes, and joyous chaos make it the perfect FPS to get obsessed with for days or weeks at a time before I put it back on the shelf for a while. Even in a live service age where developers pin their hopes on constant engagement, a lot of people don't have one "forever" game as much as they have a rotation of "sometimes" games.

At its best, the FPS "season" is really just an expansion (or "map pack" if you're in your 30s) that you don't have to pay for. Seasons are fun when they feel like a true event—a significant milestone that signals to lapsed players that it's a good time to check back in.

The only "right" time to jump back into a Battlefield season is, paradoxically, right before it ends. It's really a baffling setup to continue on with, in no small part because it hasn't worked.

You could argue that Battlefield's problem is one of volume—that what it truly needs are more maps each "full" season to fill out the mini ones. That brute force strategy does work for Call of Duty, but personally, simply releasing what's promised in a season when it begins would go a long way. Make the occasion actually mean something!

After 80+ hours of Battlefield 6 I'm only coming back in bursts—I'm not a caged hamster that will eagerly appear when DICE refills my bottle every four weeks. The cage is wide open, and I can always go gorge on the dozen other shooters I could be catching up on.