Outlast has long since established itself as a horror gaming staple with an impressive track record of two mainline games, a DLC, and an online multiplayer game that still scares the bejesus out of me. So it's hard to believe that there was a time when developer Red Barrels was unsure whether or not it'd even be able to get it out of the door.

After trying and failing to convince Ubisoft to let him make a horror game and just generally feeling like it was time to move on, Philippe Morin, co-founder of Red Barrels decided to leave and form a small 10-person team with developers from other big-budget studios. Their first pitch: a horror game.

“We thought at first that we’d come up with the pitch within three or four months and shop it around to a few publishers," Morin says in an interview with GameSpot. "And we’d find out pretty quickly if it works or not." Unfortunately, it turned out to be the latter, at least at first.

Morin explains how many of the publishers they approached would “rather invest $50,000 in 10 mobile games than $500,000 in [Outlast].” This was likely equal parts because of how obsessed everyone was with mobile games back then and thanks to how niche the horror genre was perceived as. 13 years later the horror genre is still perceived as one of the smaller areas of interest in gaming, despite all of the amazing games released and the revival of two staples, Silent Hill and Resident Evil.

“We were experienced game developers,” Morin says. “But we didn’t know much about that side–publishing and marketing and sales and all that. So we had to learn on the fly.”

Red Barrel finally had to turn to a publicly funded investment program, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) to finance Outlast, with a whopping $1 million dollar investment. But even that wasn't enough. The developers had to take money out of savings, credit cards, and leverage home mortgages to get the project over the line; a huge financial risk. “Everything was pretty much on the line,” Morin recalls. “Of course, it meant working very long, long hours. We were in a sprint to release the game before running out of money.”

Luckily this story ended well, very well actually. After just five months Red Barrels managed to hit the goal of 400,000 copies sold and while not all of them were at full price after sales it was still enough for the team to get some "pretty significant bonuses."

Outlast would go on to sell 15 million copies as of 2018 and spawn three other games, the final being the recent multiplayer horror game The Outlast Trials which achieved an all-time concurrent player count peak just 11-days ago of 147,955. Pretty solid for a multiplayer survival horror game.

Volume.art is a nice, free, cool thing on the internet, and I just think that's something worth celebrating these days. The microgame collection sees you manipulating volume sliders through various abstracted, surprising, and very funny ways.

It starts strong with "A man named Bow" by Alice Bottino, which kinda reminds me of the Smash Bros Home Run Contest minigame, at least as far as you're winding up to send something from the left side of the screen to the right. You drag back on the mouse to aim a bow and arrow, attempting to land it a set distance (and corresponding volume level) away.

Some of my favorite entries came from Lunacid developer Akuma Kira, like "What's This About," a riff on the criminally-maligned Elder Scrolls Oblivion persuasion pie minigame. You've got to reach a set likability level with a Gamebryo-perfect lumpy potato man, while also accounting for a game-accurate slow decay in persuasiveness as you rapidly cycle between cruelty, honesty, humor, and sucking up.

If I hadn't known about the Oblivion gag going in, it probably would have been my favorite entry⁠—"What's This About" features fairly prominently in volume.art's promo on social media. Surprise and delight is a big part of this thing, and from here there be, uh, spoilers? I guess?

"Ctrl+Alt+Date" by Iodine really did something for me: It's a loving little parody of dating games and romance sidequests, presenting you with suitably deep and emotionally complex dialogue choices like "Uhhhh" vs. "You're worth so much more than that," all to woo your volume rocker boo and get the music pumping. It's a great gag.

Returning to Kira, "In the Zone" was another favorite of mine. It drops you in a simple 3D environment clearly evoking the STALKER series, and tasks you with following a Geiger counter to the site of highest radiation (and thus, volume) in the tiny, open-ended level.

There are 29 games in total, and it took me a little under an hour to get through them all. Volume.art is brisk and goes down very smooth⁠—I found that this microgame format is a great fit for a themed game jam. For me, it evoked nostalgic memories of getting carsick playing WarioWare in the back of my parents' minivan, but I've seen some commenters compare it to old Flash games. Either way, volume.art is well worth checking out.

At a glance

• The rough prototype looks to have been binned early in development, and it's largely avoided discussion before Doneda's work.
• Some portions appear to have been part of an interconnected area, others are likely different versions of the same concept.
• It may have been related to what became the Undead Crypt in the final game.
• Doneda uses Elden Ring Nightreign to load in and explore what remains of the levels.
• The files contain a coliseum zone, mines, a strange underground tower (potentially a sequence of arenas, like Nightreign's DLC?), and a crypt portion.

Doneda, the dataminer who showed off the unused levels, has been proving a genuine authority on Dark Souls 2 in particular. Previously, they made a Nightreign-compatible version of Dark Souls 2's Eleum Loyce. Doneda has also shown off a tantalizingly ambitious early version of Dark Souls 2's The Gutter.

In hindsight, the entire pre-Sekiro Souls series (perhaps sans-Bloodborne) seems defined by difficult, rushed development cycles. Hidetaka Miyazaki took over Demon's Souls partway through as development foundered, and the final game was missing an entire archstone world. Dark Souls has its rougher, less beloved back half, particularly Lost Izalith. Dark Souls 3, though far more consistent than the prior games, had a striking world state system completely struck from it at some point.

Even among that field, Dark Souls 2 had it rough: Wunderkind Miyazaki was completely focused on Bloodborne, DS2 attempted a divisive new combat feel/hit detection system unlike anything FromSoft made before or since, while early trailers and cut content point to significant story rewrites. That's before you get to the backlash over a significantly downgraded lighting system in the final game versus its early trailers⁠—I never minded that much, but people were big mad about it back in 2014.

All of which is to say: It's not surprising to see so much cut and prototype stuff lingering in the game's files. The sheer majestic scale of the coliseum makes me wistful for the version(s) of Dark Souls 2 we never got, but it increasingly looks like a small miracle that the game came together as well as it did. I wonder where this complex was planned to fit in the game, but the iteration of DS2's story it corresponds to may be all but unrecognizable to me anyway. We'll likely never get a full accounting of this oddity in the game's files.

Gamedev may as well be conducted in a black box as far as many players are concerned, so it can be easy to think of a good game as one where development went smoothly and a bad game as one where things went terribly awry. But in the case of The Outlast Trials, making something sickeningly good took a lot of struggle.

As Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin told Gamespot in a recent interview, it took six years to turn the vague notion of a co-op Outlast game into something ready to launch via early access. It was "a fucking long time," as he recalled it, and the product of "a shit-ton of prototypes."

"[The Red Barrels team] went too far trying to make [The Outlast Trials] systemic, random, and trying to reach our ultimate goal of infinite replayability," he told Gamespot. "We needed to come back to something that maybe added less replayability, but definitely felt more like Outlast." The article notes that a seemingly shippable build was produced within four years, but playtests went poorly enough to send the team back to the drawing board.

I suppose concerns about replayability have been put to rest now that it's mutated into a sizable live service game with around 20,000 people playing as I write this, though the game's ongoing development isn't entirely free from strife—as the article points out, players are mixed on its use of AI-generated imagery, and Outlast 3 was seemingly put on the backburner after Trials proved a huge success.

I have not played Hades 2 since October 4 of 2025. That's not because I "fell out of love" with the game or whatever, I simply plugged 65 hours into it, beat the 'main story', had a jolly old time, and went on to play other things. But one thing about it has persisted: its soundtrack. God, I can't get Hades 2's soundtrack out of my head.

I'm going to outline some of my favorites, but before I do that, I do want to give flowers to the more ambient tunes on Darren Korb's masterwork, here. Edge of Erebus, Spider Silk, and particularly The Song of Sirens—perhaps the most faithful rendition of their mythological namesake before Korb, genius that he is, clubs you over the head with a rock band.

What really cements Hades 2's soundtrack in my mind, however, are its show-stoppers. These boss themes are the real events, so much so that Korb will often bring in a guest musician to set the track on fire.

Scylla and the Sirens' Discography

The entire collection of Scylla and the Sirens' songs are just excellent: Coral Crown, I Am Gonna Claw (Out Your Eyes then Drown You to Death), Rock and a Hard Place (feat. Charybdis), and Bewitching Eyes.

If just one of these tracks existed, I'd call it inspired: But having Scylla become your number one hater after a few defeats, writing a bespoke diss track and then following that up with Charybdis performing death metal screams is both a really funny joke and also a complete and utter earworm. Erin Yvette's got an excellent set of pipes, too, which really ties the whole thing together.

The Titan of Time/The End of Time

The Titan of Time is already a great boss theme on its own. Chronos' signature percussion being a ticking clock is an obvious choice, sure, but sometimes the obvious choices are the best ones, and it still makes clever use of time signatures to great effect (like some of my other favorite videogame music).

But The End of Time, which plays after unlocking the Dissolution of Time incantation to put him down for good? The drums on this thing, good lord. Guest star Louis Cole, who I'm just now finding out is also a bassist and a keyboardist, goes in on those drums like a dog ripping apart a piece of meat. Again, turning drums into the leading instrument for the Titan of Time is a no-brainer—but it's the execution that matters, and holy crap. You owe it to yourself to give this one a listen.

The Sightless Shepherd

And yet, even for minor bosses, Darren Korb busts out the big guns. Which is wild, because while The Sightless Shepherd is a boss fight for an important character in Greek mythology (Polyphemus is the cyclops that Odessyus blinded, pissed off, and revealed his true name to—a mistake, by all accounts, since his papa is Poseidon) he's also just the first boss in the surface area.

But Sam Gendel absolutely tears this theme up with his saxophone solo, a piece of music I literally used during one of our top 100 debates to try and get the PC Gamer team to vote for Hades 2. And while it didn't work, I still had everyone in the voice call's heads bobbing.

Olympus Aflame

Olympus Aflame plays during the Vow of Rivals boss fight where you need to take on both Heracles and Prometheus at the same time, and while it's perhaps the most bog-standard fantasy of all of these soundtracks, it's still earned a permanent spot on some of my TTRPG playlists for that reason. It's sort of the perfect encapsulation of Olympus, orchestral trumpets reaching a feverish, panicked crescendo as their mountain crumbles down around them.

As we've seen with some of these other tracks, Korb's composition can get a little showy, but Olympus Aflame feels to me the proof of mastery over the 'basics' that allows him to go buck wild with other entries on the game's soundtrack.

Hades 2 certainly isn't the first time Korb's cooked this hard—pretty much all of Supergiant Games' music has a special place in my heart. Bastion, Transistor. Heck, even though I've not played a single moment of it, a lot of the music in Pyre has made its way into my regular rotations.

But it definitely feels like the epoch of his work, bar none. In an already-stacked discography, Hades 2 has enough hits to very nearly eclipse the rest of his work under its heft. While I'm done with the game itself, I'm nowhere near done with its soundtrack. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go rock out to Sightless Shepherd again.

I'm standing on top of a flying fortress hundreds of feet in the air, as around me, 15 or so players wage a losing battle against a swarm of flying robots armed with rockets and lasers. It's utter chaos. We fight further and further into the ship, unlocking platforms, defeating waves of enemies and giant turrets which pop out of the deck to gun down unsuspecting looters. But I think we're done.

Time is running short and we've once again stalled at this stage of the puzzle. All that's left now is to try and make it back to ground in one piece and live to attempt another day. This is the Frigate, one of Arc Raiders two new raid-style activities, and it's exactly what the game needed.

Rather than content you can complete the day the update comes out, Frozen Trail's Frigate and Fallen Emperor represent a deeper loot chase, tied into upgrading the new outpost and workbenches to fashion special weapons which fire explosive bullets or incendiary grenades.

More than that: they're properly fun. I've raided a lot in Destiny 2, completed its dungeons more times than I can count (including soloing some) and I'm quite impressed with the variety of these endgame challenges, how they demand cooperation from players, but also really tie into the features and loot chase that Frozen Trail added.

While the Arc Frigate is a pitched battle blasting endless waves of robots as you try to unlock its cargo hold with a bunch of other raiders, the Fallen Emperor is more of an individual challenge. This series of mostly randomised encounters sees you solving puzzles and painstakingly platforming your way through its labyrinth of hazards and Hydra turrets, which love to pick you off when you're dangling in some precarious position.

It's a race to perpetrate a bank heist in the corpse of a colossal robot, and if that doesn't get your juices flowing, I don't know what will. Part of the fun is Frozen Trail's new Grappling Hook item, an easy to craft traversal tool that lets you scale and swing in a much more enjoyable way than the game's existing Snap Hook—I always carry one now, just for ease of exploration.

The Fallen Emperor is also smart in terms of loot, designed like a kids' gameshow (did anyone here watch Jungle Run?). Players who want the guaranteed big score at the end are incentivised to rush there, lest another raider beat them, but since there are loot containers between each encounter and concealed in them, other players can filter in and still have a chance at getting rare items and rewards for encounters without making it to the end.

The same goes for the Arc Frigate—it's not just about who gets there first; these encounters are layered with loot, and often reward exploration as much as pushing for the end goal, especially as the new upgrades require a wide range of materials.

Though Frozen Trail has its bugs—my reward pass still isn't fixed—this is such a positive update for the game's direction. If the PvE-mode test is anything to go by, we'll soon be able to play Arc Raiders' endgame events like the Fallen Emperor, Frigate, Matriarch, or Harvester without fear of getting ratted and having our loot stolen while we're trying to fight big arc, work together, and puzzle stuff out.

I'm not a player who minds PvP or the way it elevates the tension and excitement of the extraction shooter genre, but I think there's a good case to be made for a PvE-only option when running PvE-centric endgame events, which often require cooperation. It's also uniquely frustrating getting ambushed after successfully completing one.

This happened to me after landing a huge loot haul on the Frigate and basically being the only raider to make it out alive—I was riding high, I wasn't cautious, and of course some punk with a Kettle was waiting at extraction. He even said "Hello" before he ratted me. It's a sucky way to end these cool events and it dissuades players from investing in their challenge, so hopefully any eventual PvE mode that does appear will include these.

Still, these new raid-style events have me so excited for the future of Arc Raiders. I can't help but fantasize about how fun and rewarding a Destiny 2 length raid in Arc Raiders would be, or something similar to Building 21 or Koschei Complex in DMZ—a dedicated mode with its own timer, challenges, and bosses. I can't wait to see what endgame content Embark cooks up next.

Hellraiser: Revival's commitment to being both gnarly and horny has already been thoroughly documented, with PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon describing it as "nasty nasty" in his preview . This uncompromising attitude to both gore and kink went down well with fans, but it has also been celebrated by Hellraiser's creator, Clive Barker.

In an interview with horror site Dread Central (via FRVR), Barker admitted that he had concerns about the project going into it, but was thoroughly impressed by the final product. "I'm proud as f**k at the end result," he said. "I was fearful at one point that the game would be overly censored, but I'm genuinely astonished by how far they've been able to push it."

Barker, who worked closely with developer Saber Interactive to shape Revival's world and to advise on the game's story, reckons that Saber Interactive's work on the game is a prime example of how to approach adapting a license. "I think what was achieved in the game is a wake-up call to anyone who's been involved in the making of a franchise like Hellraiser," the author and director explained.

Barker reclaimed the American franchise rights to Hellraiser several years ago, and Hellraiser: Revival is written as a legacy sequel that ignores the trajectory of the films after Hellraiser 2. "There are many of the Hellraiser movies that were made by the Weinstein brothers that were created simply to hold onto the rights," Barker explained, pointing out that "less and less" money was spent on those films over time. "It's not the fault of the writers and directors, but just the way the system works in some cases."

But it seems the experience of working with Saber on Revival has whetted Barker's appetite to further explore the universe he created. "I have many ideas that I'd like to see realised in the Hellraiser universe, and I'm planning to keep my fingers in that pie," he said. For now, these ideas are being explored in a new series of comic books, but Barker says that he'd "love to go further in the movies."

Barker also strongly implied that Hellraiser: Revival does not represent the end of his collaboration with Saber. "I'm looking forward to working with them again on some other projects." It isn't clear whether this would be a sequel to Revival or an adaptation of a different work by Barker.

The positive reception to Hellraiser: Revival will likely be a relief to Saber Interactive too, following this summer's Rideshare Stimulator controversy. In August, Saber CEO Matt Karch denied accusations that the company had replaced Rideshare Stimulator writer Stella Sacco with ChatGPT, then issued an apology to Sacco for the way he publicly spoke about her following the allegation. Alongside all this, Saber admitted to using generative AI in a general sense, but the company's CCO Tim Willits assured players the tech is not used in Hellraiser: Revival or ongoing projects like Jurassic Park: Survival and Space Marine 3.

Red Barrels' Outlast series has long held a reputation for pushing the envelope further than most horror games, with depictions of violence, gore and nudity that can be shocking even within a medium well versed in delivering scares. But it isn't just audiences who have found the studio's games shocking beyond the virtual horror norm. As co-founder Phillipe Morin recently revealed, there have been numerous instances where people in and around the studio have found working with the material frightening to the point of being traumatic.

In a chat with Gamespot, Morin discussed the studio's unflinching approach to horror, explaining that it wasn't a deliberate attempt to court controversy, and was simply a "personal preference" on Morin and the other co-founders' behalf. "We didn't start like 'Oh, we've got to make the goriest game out there'" Morin explained. "It was just, 'we're making a horror game, so obviously we'll make it gory. I remember even the scriptwriter early on was saying, 'There's never too much blood.'"

Nonetheless, the intense and graphic nature of Outlast' horror has proved triggering within the studio. During the interview, Morin recalls one incident involving an individual associated with Red Barrels—possibly an employee, though Morin doesn't state this explicitly. "We started pushing and pushing, and you know, I remember there was a playtest, and somebody, after a couple of hours, basically ran out of the studio to go cry outside." Apparently, this person never returned to the studio.

Morin says that Red Barrels is not oblivious to the potential effect of its games on people, and that this informs how the studio approaches recruitment. "When we do job interviews, we always make sure that people are fully aware of the kind of content we create and the kind of conversations needed to create that content," he explains, adding that "People have to be comfortable with that because obviously you hear stuff in the studio that [if] you said the same thing in a different studio, you'd end up in a meeting with HR."

Yet these attempts at transparency with potential employees have not always been successful, as Morin explains. "We had one case of somebody who started working with us on Monday, and then on Thursday they resigned because even though they knew about the gore and the violence, they had a blind spot for other things, more so about religion, and they were not comfortable with that." While Morin doesn't specify when this occurred, it's likely that it happened during the development of Outlast 2, the story of which revolves around a violent Christian cult.

Yet while some people may have found Red Barrels' horror to be too much, the broader audience has absolutely lapped it up. The most recent game in the series, The Outlast Trials, sold half a million copies in its first week of early access, while the series as a whole has attracted a whopping 60 million players since 2013. Hence, if Red Barrels ever does make Outlast 3, it's unlikely the studio will soften its approach.

Original Story: This one is thin, man, but it has to do with one of my favorite games of all time, while the circumstances of the rumor are just kind of neat and weird, even if it turns out to be nothing. User Few_Interview8222 on the Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines subreddit reported back from a Genitorturers show in Brooklyn, New York. Partway through the set, the band supposedly told the crowd that a VtMB remake is happening.

Genitorturers played at Brooklyn's The Meadows as part of their "Live + Lewd Tour" on October 15. We've reached out to both rights-holder Activision (one of several, it's complicated) and Genitorturers' representation, and will update this story if we hear back.

Why would an industrial metal band started in Orlando in 1986 have this information?

In addition to a killer score by Rik Schaffer, Bloodlines featured wonderfully era-appropriate licensed tracks from metal bands⁠—they were mostly used as diegetic music in the nightclubs and bars of Los Angeles. The Genitorturers track Lecher Bitch was the pitch-perfect theme of The Last Round, a downtown LA dive bar frequented by the Anarch faction of vampires.

What if they're wrong?

Multiple commenters on the Reddit thread point out that this could have been a confused, untimely, misinterpreted, or all of the above reference to last year's Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. It's the sort of almost-but-not-quite thing you might expect from an artist with tangential awareness of a secondary fanbase they picked up over the years.

A VtMB remake is also the sort of project you could see getting pingponged around between various actors and stakeholders: started, stopped, shopped around, etc. It'd be a situation ripe for collaborators on the periphery acting on outdated information.

What if they're right?

Rad! I think? It'd depend on who's doing it. More and more, I'm beginning to distrust anyone not named "Nightdive" when it comes to commercial remasters. See also: The recent Shogun 2 debacle and the fate of Deus Ex Remastered.

Bloodlines is such a wild, janky, PC gaming package that Nightdive is the only studio I'd trust to not only do a remaster right, but also to bring on legendary modder Werner "Wesp5" Spahl, the man who's been keeping Bloodlines alive with one of the most impactful unofficial patch projects in gaming. A more ground-up remake would offer equally daunting challenges, like matching the one-of-a-kind mood and look Troika managed to evoke.

Why should you care?

Bloodlines is one of my very favorite games and an incredible RPG that's well worth your time. To the uninitiated, I like to pitch it as an evolutionary missing link between 2D Fallout and New Vegas. Bloodlines boasts the open-ended design and reactivity of Fallout in 3D for the very first time (Bloodlines leads Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson were senior talent on Fallout 1).

Unlike New Vegas' wide open world, however, Bloodlines had a more linear, but still loose sequence of zones on a world map to explore. Bloodlines' Y2K, gothic, noir interpretation of Los Angeles is one of the coolest worlds ever presented in an RPG.

A Nightdive treatment would be my preferred outcome: build on Wesp5's work and compensate him accordingly, then make it more accessible on more platforms at a modest markup over the original game. Bloodlines 1 can be had for $20 on Steam and GOG, but it's practically always on sale.

Even if it turns out to be nothing, this is still just a neat, newsworthy little incident to behold—Genitorturers shouting out an obscure, beloved RPG like this 22 years later, and maybe getting a couple genre nerds like me a little too excited on the way.

Every time I check in on Star Wars, there's a new stupid little creature (colloquially known as a Glup Shitto) everyone's into. The latest of these is Biddy Blas, a braggadocious pod racer and mama's boy who stands out for his shrill Huttese quips. "Ding dong pookie, ding dong," he crows. "Scrib doon!" If you love that, here's a video of him doing a little victory dance.

If you hate that, here's a video of him dying in a fireball.

He's become the subject of meme after meme and people generally like the little brat. The voice actor for Biddy Blas, a British wrestler named Richard Summers-Calvert, has responded to all the love—and as you might guess, he basically looks like the opposite of Biddy Blas. All the attention has left him "overwhelmed and overstimulated," as he said in a video he shared on X, and he's hoping to show up for new fans of the Shitto du jour at cons and the like.

In a follow-up video, he said he had some "good news" that he wasn't ready to announce just yet, and thanked all the Biddy-heads for the doors a sudden spotlight like this opens. "I know you're doing it for Biddy. I know you're doing it for him. But I benefit from him as well … I appreciate all the love. And hate, and frustration." It is a racing game, after all.

This all seems like further proof that the true heart of Star Wars has never been the cosmic conflict between good and evil, the ill-fated schemes of devilish bureaucrats, or even the swashbuckling battles between space ascetics with laser swords. No, the true heart of Star Wars is watching a crusty little freak say nonsense words and going on a wiki to check if "jizz music" was a real thing George Lucas signed off on. In the Disney era, it has been amended to the more family friendly "jatz music" (which I don't hate), but a true jizz wailer never dies.

I heard it on the wireless: election fever is sweeping America. The world's loudest democracy is headed to the ballot box to vote in its next slate of soda jerks and Chevrolets and whatever else it is they have over there. It's all very exciting.

Can I help? Yes. I've already solved my own country's politics, now it's time to help the benighted and backward people of places like "Connecticut" and "the Oklahoma Panhandle"—fantasy names from a land beyond knowing. People love it when foreigners tell them how to do their own domestic politics, and especially when they have as robust a methodology as I have: a copy of Crusader Kings 3 and most of the DLC.

Using Paradox's premier 1066 simulator, I will ascertain the best way to remove a burrowed-in leader from power. Which real-life figure is this a videogame analogue for? Don't worry about it, don't email me about it, and don't launch a cruise missile at my house.

Don't email me about how the midterms don't choose the president either. I don't know what those words mean.

King of New York

I first had to create an accurate, 11th-century simulacrum of an American president. None of CK3's historical rulers quite fit the bill, so I decided to create a ruler from scratch.

I created an 80-year-old lecher named Wenzel and put him in charge of the Holy Roman Empire. His defining trait was 'lunatic'.

So that was sorted. Next, I needed a position from which to actually act in the world. I needed to be someone who could effect change in the HRE and test my theories as to the best way to go about removing a leader. This was easier: I simply nosed through Wenzel's myriad direct vassals and picked one who seemed most like some guy, thus to represent the working masses of the American Empire. I've quite genuinely forgotten his name, but he had very few traits and was prone to tuberculosis.

We were off to the races. I immediately cast about to find some means of dislodging the boss. My first solution was simple: plunge the realm in an internecine civil war that scourges the land with blood and fire. Unfortunately, I soon realised I probably wouldn't be allowed to suggest that as an option for the American people in an international videogames publication, so I decided to, like, win an election or something instead. Whatever.

Well, okay, not just win an election. The bloodless paths to power I saw were to either get myself nominated as the old man's heir (HRE elections aren't as regular as modern-day America's—at the time of writing—and so I couldn't replace him directly via one) or to butter him up so nicely that he declares me co-ruler.

I opted for both. My first move was to ply my delicate kaiser with flattery and gifts. He liked flattery and gifts, and as a bonus, by showering him with them I significantly decreased the odds I would wake up to find all my lands redistributed among his wretched children. I increased the odds I would wake up at all, at that.

With my other hand, I penned fawning letters to his most powerful vassals: 'My esteemed lord, my honourable lady, your most munificent worshipfulness…' On and on I went, doling out what little gifts were available to me, and starting schemes to sway and cajole the realm's most powerful. It all seemed, almost boringly, to be coming together. Perhaps the great secret to overcoming your political enemies is… just being plain old nice?

No. Absolutely not. Being nice is just the vague flouncing about you do before you get serious and start organising the guillotines. Though I had successfully gotten a fair few influential figures on-side, none of them seemed inclined to support me for the big chair. As for Wenzel? He was fond of me, but he was also ancient and deranged, and was apparently too busy getting deep into religious superstition (quite literally, he acquired the 'superstition' modifier while I wasn't looking, somehow) to dedicate much thought to power sharing.

Time to get serious.

Not time to get serious

Somehow this goddamn idiot caused a plague. I don't know how, I don't know why, I don't know if what I am describing is even really possible within the mechanics of Crusader Kings 3, but our awful pervert king caused a plague and proceeded to ravage my counties with it. This is what happened regardless as to whether it's possible or not.

It was called "Wenzel's Cough" and it quickly tore through most of my subjects (eh) and my entire family (uh oh). My wife had it, my daughters had it, my sons had it, I had it. The whole castle probably looked like a boss arena from Hunt: Showdown—walls caked in viscous emissions and baking like an orchid hothouse.

The busywork of not dying distracted me from the quest to depose Wenzel. I isolated the capital and secured a personal physician, whom I oriented in the general direction of my family and said "Just go nuts chief." He locked me in a room with a trillion bees (this actually happened), which somehow gave major relief to my consumption. I lost the ominous 'Dying' warning at the top of the screen and was free to return to politics. Most of my family got relief too, save one son who died. Fortunately, it was one I was mostly unaware of up to that point.

With my attempts at diplomacy foiled, I figured it was time to try war. Wenzel had about 7,000 men in his army whereas I had 1,400. Defeating him on the battlefield would need allies. I began a scheme to sway one of his most powerful vassals: a Tuscan duchess named Matilda with a decent army. Perhaps I could marry her? My current wife was an obstacle, true, but an obstacle with a boutique variant of tuberculosis, so it might all work itself out.

At some point while all this was happening, Wenzel developed the traits "Irritable" and "Withering mind."

And then this idiot duchess went and declared a war of independence against Wenzel without me, practically guaranteeing her defeat, imprisonment, and possible execution.

What's the real-life lesson here? You can't rely on the tender feelings of powerful people to hand you your salvation in dark political times. They have their own stupid ends and will pursue them to your detriment.

You also can't rely on your loved ones to die from plague at times that are convenient to you, so my plan might not have worked even if Matilda hadn't gone war-mode. Sometime after our Tuscan duchess declared war, Wenzel's cough abated in my lands. The city gates swung open again, and the cloud of death lifted from over my realm.

Except for me, of course. Despite my physician's daring bee treatment, my condition had worsened to the point that the 'Dying' notification was back. Even more galling: I kept proccing events that showed every individual member of my family recovering fully from the disease, one by one. "The sound of laughter echoes in your halls again," beamed CK3, as a new notification asked if I wanted to have my last rites performed or if I wanted to go to hell.

Idiot Matilda lost her war around the time I choked out my last on my deathbed, surrounded by my family who were all absolutely fine. In the imperial capital, Wenzel tottered along, muttering to himself as he roamed cavernous palatial spaces. He had new traits: high blood pressure and a faulty heart, but refused to die. A new plague was working its way north through the world towards him. He refused to die. An exploding heart, deranged mind, and multiple competing plagues, and he refused to die.

I died, though, having not figured out how to remove a senile moron from power. Well, good luck America.

Ah, zone chats in MMOs—trade and general chats, /shouts and /yells. Intended as a way to render the social glue that binds these videogames together, they are often instead a tableau for (and I say this somewhat affectionately) absolute lunacy, pock-marked with some of the most vile verbiage you'll see online.

Take, for instance, the time-honoured tradition of "Barrens Chat" in World of Warcraft. Combine a big zone that spans around 10-15 levels along with proximity to a major city, and you get a certain kind of verbal hooliganry that, in my journeys through WoW: Forever, I was actually pretty nostalgic for.

I mean, sure, the Chuck Norris jokes have gotten a smidge old. But while collecting Zhevra Hoofs, I would find myself possessed to ask Barrens Chat philosophical questions, and while I never received much in the way of wisdom, responses were always entertaining.

I'm not so fond of trade chat, though, which—at least on the horde side of things—has mostly been dominated by a bot by the name of Margrave Tyrael. Who, I kid you not, was literally sitting there for days spitting out the same automated messages, questioning why Blizzard was deleting beta characters.

I fell for it, at first. Then I started trying to warn people not to fall for it. It didn't work.

Things are no less cursed in my other MMO of choice, Final Fantasy 14. I shan't repeat some of the obscenity I've seen in Ul'dah here, but it does always stagger me that the same kind of infectious absurdity can persist, particularly in a videogame whose moderators are altogether far more heavy-handed with banning folks for ill behaviour.

Which leads me to my question, dear reader: Zone chats. Are they a force for good, or ill?

Personally, I'm weirdly fond of them. I don't think these chats are particularly healthy to engage with, and they're certainly not worth arguing with some rando over. But the belligerent nonsense of the masses feels somehow pure. Unsullied by the algorithmic mechanisms that drive us, purposefully, towards enragement and bickering. Instead, we piss people off all by ourselves. And that's kind of beautiful.

I am a stakhanovite, a hero-worker. My productivity is not measured in grams but kilos. My working hours have been divided and subdivided into ultimate efficiency: not a nanosecond is wasted.

That is, in Flesh Grinding, whose demo I've been mucking about with. Not in real life, where my working hours consist mostly of staring at a blank Google Doc and wondering if I'm a moron who could never actually write at all.

Anyway, Flesh Grinding, which releases in Q4 2026—not to be confused with Fleshgrinder, which releases in Q1 2027; good luck—is a labour simulator. It's also one of those PS1-style horror games that are so fashionable right now. But mostly it is a game about working.

Working, specifically, with flesh—great, distended chunks of the stuff that plop down from the ceiling and amass in shiny piles. You must pick them up, walk them to your grinder, then turn them to mince. You must do this until your IV drip runs out of fluid, at which point it is time to return to your home and upgrade yourself, spending the millilitres of blood you scrounged from your grinding on upgrades.

Hit your goal (a kilo of meat at first, then five kilos, and so on) and new areas open up with new machines—feed a lump of flesh to this thing and it will spit out IV-replenishing potions, that kind of thing, which add entirely new aspects of the fundamental flesh-grinding loop to think about and strategise for.

You're no longer just trying to run as quickly as possible between your flesh pile and your grinders. Now you have to figure out when in the process to stop at the new machines, how to run a perfect loop that wastes the absolute minimum amount of time you get each day on the factory floor.

In this way, it is exactly like real life.

No, really. Or, well, sort of really. I've definitely worked jobs that felt as grey and arduous as standing at Flesh Grinding's, uh, flesh grinder and attempting to maximise the return of each stifling second—to cram as much compensable work into every fragment of time I had before the inevitable burnout set in. It wasn't quite an IV drip of unknowable motivating fluid or an endless parade of shapeless flesh: it was writing freelance marketing copy, which was worse.

I'm rather impressed by Flesh Grinding for condensing this experience down into its sickly gameplay loop. It's a laborious work sim that nonetheless feels quite moreish, that tempts you to return day after day to make some new tweak to your routine or to test out a new machine.

That's what's really horrifying, I say. I mean, sure, the blood and strange ethereal figures and creepy grandmother and ever-multiplying religious icons are also, probably, scary to someone, but surely far less than the constant reminder that the trade you make for being alive is selling eight hours (at least) of your day, every day, to distant and unknowable forces, and all the wear on your body and mind that entails. And then you spend your off hours trying to compute how to come in the next day and do it all even more efficiently. What a horrible scam we've played on ourselves. What a, um, grind.

Ghostwire: Tokyo, Tango Gameworks' spooky, neon-drenched action-adventure game, is now officially a good old game. Granted, it's not that old, but 'good' seems about right given that contributing writer Imogen Mellor scored it a 72 in her review. But what I mean is that it's joined GOG's Preservation Program.

If you're wondering why a game from 2022 would need to be preserved already, well, it kind of doesn't. You may be thinking the game is finally free from its seemingly arbitrary implementation of Denuvo, but that was actually removed shortly after it was added. What this release does is remove Bethesda.NET integration (providing any extra goodies on your first launch of the game) and come with a promise from GOG that any stability issues that arise as decades pass and operating systems change will be addressed in future patches.

That may just come into play given that Tango Gameworks would be closed right now if Xbox's sudden closure of the studio hadn't been canceled out with an acquisition by PUBG owner Krafton. It's worth noting that the game still appears to be published by Bethesda Softworks, so if you're trying to avoid Microsoft products for any genocide-related reasons, you'll have to weigh that as a consideration.

As for Ghostwire itself, it proved surprisingly popular with over 6 million players. We called it a great game that Elden Ring overshadowed around release alongside the quietly adored Teardown and Sifu. Like its left-field follow-up Hi-Fi Rush, Ghostwire seemed to hit pretty hard for the cult it attracted. Hopefully Tango can capture some of that juice in the games it's currently developing under Krafton.

I've nothing against games that feature simulated animal petting, but it's never been something I've considered buying a game specifically for. Sure, it's nice when your character can stroke a virtual dog or fuss with a clump of polygons shaped like a cat, but it rarely amounts to more than a canned animation. That said, I am suddenly more tempted to shell out on The Blood of Dawnwalker, as Rebel Wolves has announced that the next update to its vampire RPG will introduce "directional animal petting".

The Blood of Dawnwalker already features a directional combat system in the vein of Kingdom Come: Deliverance. And this system lies at the heart of the animal petting being added to version 1.1 of the vampire RPG—according to an update the developer posted on X: "What happens when you merge a directional combat system with an ability to pet dogs and cats?" Rebel Wolves asked. "Directional. Animal. Petting."

Sadly, Rebel Wolves didn't provide any further detail about this system. But it did offer plenty of insight into what else is coming with update 1.1. Aside from being able to stroke cats at different angles, perhaps the most significant addition is a new Story mode. This will feature an "additional combat assist" for players who aren't interested in mastering the game's swordplay, letting them focus mainly on enjoying the narrative and making decisions. It's worth noting this will not replace the existing Story mode outright. That difficulty setting will still exist, but under the new name of "Forgiving."

Elsewhere, The Blood of Dawnwalker will now allow players to rework their abilities through the Draught of Mind Rebirth, which gives you back the points you've allocated into the RPG's various skill trees and lets you spend them elsewhere. That's it for major new features, but smaller changes coming in 1.1 include improved combat targeting, better traversal, in-game camera tweaks, and updates to the RPG's FrameGen tech.

In total, Rebel Wolves promise 1100 changes coming to The Blood of Dawnwalker. It's unlikely any of these will relate to the game's controversial time mechanic, even though the studio has said this system might not feature in the sequel. And a sequel to The Blood of Dawnwalker is coming. Rebel Wolves is already working on it after the first game sold 1 million copies in its first three days on sale.

What's it take for a game to snare me? Over the Hill is a co-op (or singleplayer!) offroading adventure that launched on Steam this week, and even just playing a bit of it has made me determined not to just play more but to 100% it. That's a feeling I haven't had about a game in a while.

Here's what my brief excursion into Over the Hill has already shown me:

• A beautiful open world
• Weather conditions and a day/night cycle
• Sweet-looking vehicles
• Challenging driving physics
• Secrets to find
• Cosmetics to collect
• Vehicle upgrades to unlock
• Wildlife to photograph

I'll be honest, it's the last one that really got me to commit to hundred-percenting it. I was driving slowly along up a bumpy trail, stopping occasionally to pull my little Jeep up a hill with my winch, when I suddenly heard the familiar croak of a raven. I zoomed out my view and eventually spotted the bird flapping over the trees nearby. I switched to camera mode and took a picture of it. Nice.

But a moment later I saw the flash of something slinking through the tall grass near my Jeep, and after following it with my camera for about a minute, it finally stepped out into full view.

A coyote! I photographed it as well, and decided right then I was going to find and document every single animal in the game.

And I'm enjoying driving around in Over the Hill so much, I think I'm gonna do it all: find every point of interest, unlock every vehicle and cosmetic, acquire every upgrade, and track down every meteorite.

(Yep, you can locate meteorites hidden around the world using a special piece of installed gear, then figure out an offroad route to reach them, then attach your winch and pull them free. I've found one already. And I'm gonna find the rest.)

And here's a bonus I didn't have on my list up top: Over the Hill is verified on Steam Deck. As soon as I'm done typing this I'm gonna kick back on the couch for the weekend and do some more driving. Over the Hill is also 20% off on Steam until October 28.

One day into Wardogs Season 2, Bulkhead Interactive has decided to scrap the bribery plan it announced last week as a way to help convince players to join the Blue team. The problem isn't that the plan didn't work—it actually worked far too well.

THE PLAN:

• "Lonestar cash and XP bonus. Season 2 only. New Bakurani spawn."
• "We're looking at how we can help the win rate of a certain team." -Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer (via "Road to Season 2" devlog)

THE REALITY:

• "We were wrong. We fucked up," Brammer admitted in a new video (via RPS).
• Blue team is now winning "by far, the most," Brammer said, even though the actual boosts are not terribly substantial: 5% Lonestar cash and 2.5% XP.
• "Median" players didn't get much from those percentages, but Bulkhead found that "top tier" players were seeing significant boosts
• Bottom line: it's gone.

"We're removing the Blue XP bonus, the cash bonus. We were wrong," Brammer said. Bulkhead co-founder Howard Philpott added that the studio thought Blue team bonus might work out this way, but said "I don't think we expected it to be this much of a swing."

I can't say I'm terribly surprised by the outcome. I'm not a Wardogs player, but I have been around long enough to know how these things go: If you dangle a competitive edge in front of gamers, they're going to jump for it. Percentage boosts are especially risky because they're performance-based and so much more likely to go spinning out of control, especially in the hands of, as Brammer put it, "tryhards."

And it's not just the extra XP and cash being earned that's a problem: Philpott said the bonus is also "impacting people joining games and starting games," presumably because if they can't be a Blue, they'll leave and try their luck with another game.

(Quick side note: I'm not a fan of the term 'tryhard.' Of course I'm trying hard! Why wouldn't I be? My nephew called me a tryhard once and I told him that maybe if he tried harder he wouldn't get his ass kicked so hard. He was 12 and I got some disapproving looks from other people at the Christmas party, but I stand by it.)

PC Gamer's Morgan Park, who is a Wardogs guy, also made the call when this plan was unveiled last week: "XP and cash bribes are a drastic move, but should have a real impact. It's unclear how big these boosts will be, but I expect Blue will instantly become the most popular team by a wide margin in Season 2."

Predictable as this outcome was, I don't see it as a particularly egregious misstep. Brammer called it an "experiment," and sometimes that's what you have to do—and the early stages of a massively popular videogame with teething issues can definitely be one of those times. Brammer also noted that other changes aimed at rebalancing things, including new spawns on the Bakurani map, have proven effective and will remain.

Alongside the removal of the Blue team bribery, Bulkhead is also fixing issues with driver progression, and is fixing a driver exploit that's letting players access tanks too quickly: Players who are "very clearly" taking advantage of the exploit (less than 1,000 in total, according to Brammer) will be given a 24-hour ban from the game and have their cash and XP wiped.

I'll be honest, I wasn't sure if today's mod counted. A peek behind the curtain: sometimes I select a mod to try for this feature and it doesn't work. Just plumb does not function. In those cases, I discard it and find another one. It's hard to write something about nothing.

Today's mod did not work. Mostly. I installed WeedFarm (based on PlantationV), which should, in theory, let you "Grow, harvest, and sell weed in GTA 5 with a full-featured farming system."

It does not do this. The farms? Present. The dealer you sell to? Also there. The various individual particulars of the mod, in general, are all correct. And yet try as I might, I cannot harvest a single paltry bud.

I believe this is due to golf and also a jetpack. You see, the controls from WeedFarm (based on PlantationV) are apparently unalterable. Although it comes with an .ini file—which with other mods will often let you rebind keys—it has no obvious means of changing its controls. Bringing up its uber-menu is bound to F3. Also bound to F3: my street golfing mod and jetpack.

This is an issue, as every time I attempt to bring up WeedFarm (based on PlantationV)'s master menu, I start golfing and the game asks if I want to equip a jetpack. I don't! I want to farm weed! I want to farm weed but I am compelled to golf!

It's an awkward situation. I did try visiting the dealer—perhaps he'd let me sidle into the mod somehow—but no luck there either. At one point, I punched his front door in frustration, at which point I learnt all my melee attacks detonate on impact now, and I don't know why.

As I watched the credits roll on Modern Warfare 4's campaign, a sobering thought infiltrated: I've been playing Call of Duty for over 20 years—two-thirds of my life. While I consider it primarily a multiplayer game these days, what I loved about Call of Duty all that time ago was its campaigns. In 2006, as a shy fourth grader at a new school, I made my first friend because we both played Call of Duty 3 on the Wii and spent a week recounting cool moments from the campaign over lunch. By 2007 (the year of Modern Warfare, of course), our lunch table was losing its collective shit over the part where Captain Price slides you the pistol right as he (as we thought at the time) dies.

As memorable as that sequence was, it marked the moment Call of Duty became globe-trotting romps about superhuman, super serious operatives who prevent WW3 before breakfast. It was pretty badass at the time, but what they gained in the sort of spectacle that makes great Sunday Night Football ads, they lost in relatability.

Sure, those early WW2 campaigns were shlocky riffs on movies, but they starred normal people who primarily wanted to go home—grizzled sergeants and green privates who fended off helplessness with humor. They depicted large-scale offensives won by smaller contributions. That's the energy that Infinity Ward tries to harness again in Modern Warfare 4. At times, it totally works.

This is the most fun I've had with a Call of Duty campaign in years, lending mostly to its new, non-elite faces. Over half of the 6-hour campaign revolves around a crew of young South Korean marines (plus a few Americans) running out the clock on their compulsory military service when North Korea suddenly invades. The guys themselves are familiar archetypes—a serious guy, an audience insert who doesn't talk much, an American who fills every silence with a joke—but they're basically charming enough that I cared to remember their names.

I like the idea, even if this latest "ripped from the headlines" premise of a North Korean offensive continues Infinity Ward's streak of flattening complex foreign conflicts through a conventionally American lens (while conveniently making the CIA's dogs the good guys). You'll never guess which global superpower is really pulling the strings this time, ya'll.

Going dark

Playing a "cog in a machine" again unlocks Modern Warfare 4's most standout missions, many of which remind me of the series' best days. "Mayhem" and "Losing Ground" follow a futile attempt to hold the fictional Hajin City against the overwhelming invasion. They're loud, chaotic fights where your characters are noticeably terrified of what's happening (a rarity in a post-Price world) and your side is constantly outnumbered. Later on, "Counter Attack" ramps up the scale and intensity with a massive beachfront assault that can only really be achieved by throwing a silly amount of money at it. It's certainly a better use of resources than the overly gimmicky, Warzone-y campaigns of recent Black Ops sequels.

Even when the action gets smaller, Private Park (no relation) and friends are simply fun to follow. "Stranded" picks up with the squad crash landing behind enemy lines in North Korea, and its Infinity Ward's best swing at a sandbox level to date. The multi-hour mission establishes three non-linear objectives, side quests, and a hideout where you can craft better armor, guns, and camouflage. It's a comparatively quiet, isolating mission than the ones that precede it—almost like playing a micro Far Cry in the middle of a CoD campaign. It was a bit jarring at first, but ended up a major highlight.

I was worried this would prove to be another instance of sneaking Warzone into singleplayer, as the mission uses the DMZ looting system, but I was told the map was made just for the campaign, which is nice.

Infinity Ward could've crafted a whole campaign around Park's squad, and I'm still not sure why they didn't. Instead, their story runs parallel to the disconnected adventures of Captain Price, now a wanted fugitive because of some Modern Warfare 3 business that most people didn't see (the game acknowledges this by playing a lengthy recap video).

Modern Warfare 4 tries to explore a darker Price while replaying the hits—a car chase with shooting, a foot chase with jumping, a cinematic knife fight—but these sequences left my head as quickly as they ended. It's bizarre how different and less interesting this part of the game is, especially considering Price basically exits the story for the back half and never intersects with the real heroes.

It comes off as Infinity Ward checking boxes for the folks who are expecting Price stuff while also wanting, desperately, to do something else. This was billed as the conclusion of the Modern Warfare story that started in 2019, but in practice, it's more like a sprint to be done with it all. It's a shame they dragged Mads Mikkelsen into the bad parts of this one—he could've been a menacing presence in a campaign that actually had time to use him.

It speaks to the quality of this series lately that producing a regular campaign with extravagant setpieces, lavish cinematics, and basically great gunplay is a big win. Uncompromised by the influence of Warzone or Zombies, this is the first time in too long that Call of Duty's campaign does not feel like the afterthought.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is releasing soon, but also features early access for many of its modes, including its campaign and the hotly anticipated revival of the DMZ extraction shooter.

To get early access to both the campaign and DMZ, you need to preorder the game digitally, otherwise, you'll be able to play on October 23. Activision hasn't revealed an exact time for the campaign early access unlock on the 16th, but the PC preload is already live.

There also hasn't been any official info about the DMZ early access release time on October 20. However, some sources predict it will be 10 am PT (1 pm ET/6 pm BST). What we do know is that:

• Modern Warfare 4 will release on October 23 at midnight local time, wherever you are.

You'll need 115GB for the game's storage and you can find the official system requirements to run it on the Steam page.

As we draw closer to the DMZ unlock and the full release, I'll update this article with any official time announcements that Activision drops.

We are now in the second half of the most brutal war to play out on the pages of this venerable website—a war that will determine, through democracy and science, which RTS unit is the greatest of them all.

Two weeks ago, the conflict started with 16 units. Last week, eight survivors duked it out in the quarterfinals. Blood was shed and four more units were tossed into the void. It was tight—with two battles ending with the victor claiming only 10% more of the votes. My two faves, the noble Dolphin and humble Peon were killed off. I weep for these fallen heroes.

But there's no more time for sentimentality. Another battle is about to begin. Clean off the blood and get ready for the semifinals. It's time to choose which two units will be going head-to-head in the glorious final battle.

The semifinals bracket

During the quarterfinals, I made a prediction. One I was pretty confident about. But was I right?

I was pretty close, actually! The only one I got wrong was Peon, which has honestly shocked the hell out of me. In the first round, my sweet green boy utterly dominated the Glass Dragon, and it's been getting plenty of love in the comments. I did not expect to see it get knocked out by a tank. Just a tank! OK, it's probably unfair to call the indomitable Mammoth Tank "just a tank", but the Peon was robbed.

Clearly we've got some tank fans, but even more Star Destroyer fans. The sneaky Mirage Tank, another of my favourites, was blown to smithereens by Darth Vader's Executor Super Star Destroyer. When you've got that many turbolasers blasting at you, pretending to be a tree ain't gonna do you any good.

Spaceships are clearly doing well. The Pride of Hiigara was up against a bunch of horseboys, and unsurprisingly one of the most iconic videogame ships around triumphed over a bunch of lads who love a gymkhana.

I knew it was coming, but it still hurts to see the brave, noble Dolphin getting taken out by the Priest—a thief and a trickster who can't fight his own battles. In the war between nature (because what is more natural than a weaponised aquatic mammal who can destroy ships with sonic blasts?) and organised religion, organised religion won. A tragedy.

Anyway! That's all in the past now. We're down to four combatants, and your votes will determine who goes into the final. You'll have until the end of Tuesday (BST) to make your picks, but otherwise there are no rules. This is not a case of "Who would win in a fight?" unless you want it to be. Maybe you just think the Priest looks sexy in those robes, or you're broadly pro-Sith and must show the Star Destroyer some love. Right, let's get fighting!

Mammoth Tank vs Pride of Hiigara

Mammoth Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert)

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

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

Pride of Hiigara (Homeworld 2)

While other ships are spitting out missiles and other little projectiles, the Homeworld Mothership is spitting out capital ships. It is both a unit and your base—an impossibly huge mobile factory that can carry your whole fleet inside of it. Its direct offensive capabilities are extremely limited, but like I said: It can spit out capital ships.

I've picked the Kushan/Hiigaran version specifically because of its iconic design, which for me is right up there with the Enterprise D and Star Destroyers. While it's largely stationary in the original Homeworld (at least in the campaign), it's fully mobile in Homeworld 2, giving it an extra dose of utility. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Super Star Destroyer vs Priest

Executor Super Star Destroyer (Star Wars: Empire at War)

My colleagues have, for some reason, chosen to prioritize things like "funny voice lines" and "subtext" while proposing their favorite RTS units. Sorry, gang: you're about to get crushed by 19 kilometers of steel and turbolasers.

This enormous Death Triangle is the ultimate wish fulfilment vessel in Empire at War, one of my favorite Star Wars games. It's not a top-tier RTS, but it is top-tier Star Wars fantasy in game form, letting you move around a bunch of little toy ships and play out the "what if" of throwing Rogue Squadron's ace pilots up against a Star Destroyer. They've got a real chance in that fight, but not against the Executor, Darth Vader's personal ride.

The damn thing is practically the size of Manhattan, and you can really feel that scale in the game. It makes regular Star Destroys look like Doritos by comparison. It's swimming with so many turbolaser batteries it can bully an entire Rebel fleet by itself. Don't even try that A-Wing trick against it—that sort of nonsense only works in the movies. —Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor

Priest (Age of Empires)

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

As part of an interview that I conducted with Peter Molyneux in Guildford recently, a wide-reaching chat that covered everything from Molyneux's final game, Masters of Albion, and its new game-changing update, through to the origin of Black & White's famous titan creatures, I also asked the veteran designer why a third Black & White game has never been made.

Fans of the Black & White series like myself and countless other PC gamers (Black & White is currently top of GOG's most-wanted remaster list) have been desperate for a new release, be that a remaster of one of the original games or a brand-new third game, so the fact that it has now been 20 years since the Black & White 2: Battle of the Gods expansion was released is pretty dispiriting. But is there hope for fans of the series?

My reading of these comments is that they ring true and are entirely unsurprising—especially that god games are seen as a small piece of pie by publishers. Any gamer who has followed the gaming industry for the last 10-20 years will have seen how the major publishers have coalesced around, and increasingly bet the farm on, just a few genres and business models, the most infamous being live-service. Those bets, for most, have now proven to be massive follies, with countless epic failures (Skull & Bones, Concord, Suicide Squad, Anthem, Marvel's Avengers, Redfall, MultiVersus, and APB: All Points Bulletin, to name but a few) leading to, literally, billions of dollars being flushed down the pan.

Why spend money on making a new god game, one that will require a dev team to really get to grips with a variety of bespoke, complex, interconnected systems, in order to make a profit, when instead you can just try to make your own version of Fortnite and make a mega profit? Or, as real gaming industry history has shown, actually make a mega loss. Getting a god game project greenlit, even a sequel to one of the most beloved god game series ever made, was likely next to impossible. In this light, it feels remarkable that Masters of Albion is now a reality, even in Early Access, and it is likely only due to Molyneux's pedigree as the father of the genre.

A tantalising teaser for Black & White fans

Just when I thought this part of the interview was petering out into disappointment, with any new Black & White release still stuck in gaming limbo, Molyneux dropped a potentially bombshell piece of news for god game fans.

Now, obviously, Molyneux's studio doesn't own Black & White anymore, and he's not connected with EA or Microsoft now, either. He's clearly not involved in the project. And he also only says he thinks a remaster is in the works, not that it definitely is, so I think it is important to take this comment with a pinch of salt. However, this would be huge news if true. As noted above, Black & White is the number one game on GOG's wishlist, and one of the greatest (if not the greatest) god games of all time. So a well-done remaster would be superb.

If the remaster sells well, which I'm sure it would, it could also potentially open the door for a new game in the series. Right now, that feels quite far-fetched, but a remaster would at least inch us closer to it becoming a reality. I'll keep my fingers crossed, as a return of Black & White's famous creatures (potentially powered by new powerful AI?!) would be awesome.

In the meantime, though, I'll be digging further into Masters of Albion's New Beginnings update, which has really taken Molyneux's last god game to a whole new level. It's also teased its own possible titans, too, so there's plenty to be getting stuck into while I wait for more Black & White news.

Life comes at you fast, as the saying goes, and the folks at RuneScape developer Jagex can sure attest to that. Less than two weeks after announcing RuneScape Reignited—essentially a way for new and lapsed players to restart their adventures from fresh on separate, unique servers—the studio has decided to cancel it.

There was trouble with RuneScape Reignited almost right from the start, with complaints ranging from a potential community split to restrictions on character interactions and the need to pay for a separate subscription. Just a few days after the initial announcement, Jagex apologized for making veteran players feel like they were being shunted aside, and said it was "exploring a heavy set of revisions to Reignited based on your feedback."

A few days after that, it laid out a more specific list of intended alterations, and invited more feedback from players, "so we can follow up next week with more of our thoughts." With that feedback now received, it seems that Jagex has heard enough.

"It is clear that we missed the mark on this, and so we are not moving forward with it," Mod Ryan—associate creative director Ryan Philpott—said in a blog post announcing the cancellation. "Our goal is to see Runescape grow again, with returning players coming back and new players joining, but never at the expense of our existing community."

It's a very sudden about-face, but not unprecedented. In 2023, for instance, Jagex dropped a new RuneScape battle pass in the wake of massive player backlash; in 2025, the studio scrapped "Treasure Hunter" microtransactions, in what Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy said was "part of a wider transformation across Jagex, which is seeing a renewed commitment to delivering deeper value, greater fairness and long-term improvements for players."

It hasn't been entirely smooth sailing: Recent price hikes have not gone over well (no surprise there, though), and Jagex's cowardly decision to scrap in-game Pride Month events was allowed to stand despite players absolutely mauling the studio for it. But in terms of gameplay, at least, Jagex has demonstrated a willingness to react with relative haste when it's blown things sufficiently badly—and this definitely qualifies.

Despite the cancellation, Philpott invited new and returning players to jump into the game with a 10 day free trial beginning on December 2, which will offer full access to all worlds and content. The 2027 roadmap for RuneScape also remains in place:

"The future of RuneScape is still extremely bright," Philpott concluded. "RuneScape will always be built for and defined by its community. So please keep letting us know when you feel we're getting it wrong and shout with that same energy when you think we're getting it right too."

Attention fellow base-building ghouls and survival masochists, I've got good news and bad news. Starting with the good: Some of the best survival crafting games are no longer in early access, and have hit their 1.0 milestones. The bad news? Three of them piled into the same one-month window.

I've seen a million posts all asking the same advice: "Should I get Valheim, RuneScape Dragonwilds, or Enshrouded first?" And as someone who can't stop sinking hundreds of hours into mining the same three types of rock, I'm qualified enough to help you decide. I've also recruited my colleague, Chris Livingston, who is always up to in-game riffraff resulting in funny animal encounters or injuries like some sort of bizarre, survival-crafting Jeff Corwin.

Comparing Valheim, Dragonwilds, and Enshrouded

We've got our own opinions on who's who among the recent survival crafting 1.0 launches, but maybe you just need something to compare features before getting into recommendations. It's by no means everything included across all three games, but here's a quick comparison of the differences and similarities between features and default settings in Valheim, RuneScape: Dragonwilds, and Enshrouded.

Valheim vs Enshrouded vs RuneScape: Dragonwilds

Valheim vs Enshrouded vs Dragonwilds: Our picks

The developers of World of Warcraft: Forever, the venerable MMO's newest 'Classic+' flavor, say that even though the level cap is staying at 60, there will always be new gear to chase, and lower level gear has never been more powerful.

Blizzard Entertainment developers are wary of the drastic increases in power in WoW's modern version, including the recent Midnight expansion, which render previous seasons of gear irrelevant, require massive resets between expansions and lead to periodic stat "squishes" to avoid players becoming omnipotent gods.

"Classic wasn't far off from this," vice president and senior game director Ion Hazzikostas said of Forever's approach in a recent PC Gamer interview. "It's gradual. Going from [Classic raids] Blackwing Lair to Ahn'Qiraj that's actually only a couple of item levels higher. Those two largely coexist. C'thun drops are probably better than anything in Blackwing Lair, but that's like one or two items per player. This is a system that can last for a long, long time."

Associate production director Clay Stone says that's part of what makes gear in Forever—and Classic—meaningful.

"Your best-in-slot that you pick up from a previous raid tier may continue to be your best in slot for a long time. It's very much our intention to try wherever we can to not invalidate old content."

Then again, a long time isn't expected to be literally forever, Hazzikostas says.

"At some point, if you're running the Barrow Deeps raid that's coming out in December, you're going to have all the items that you want. That's fine. You're done with it."

Forever players will see gear progress at level 60: those modest item level increases, gear that's good in specific niche situations, and rare "chase" pieces should keep people hunting, Forever developers say.

An item might be especially powerful when fighting in a desert, or against a dragon, for example, making it particularly good in one especially tough fight.

(And yes, players, developers are aware that this means bag space will be at a premium. "We're already thinking about that," principal designer Kris Zierhut says, mentioning the ideas of more bank space, trinket bags or even garment bags to hold the excess.)

Un-solving the game

Forever launches on November 4, and so far players have seen few of the pieces that will entice them at the end game. The current level cap in the beta is 30, and future items have been hidden from view and datamining to keep them guessing.

"We resurrected some old tech that keeps item stats and properties and tooltips secret, unknown to the client, until the item has actually been obtained by someone on the server," Hazzikostas says. "That's something we can use in modern WoW if we want."

Essentially a flag on items determines whether they are known, making them visible in the game's data. It trips when someone discovers an item for the first time, making sure that if the player links the item to others, it doesn't cause bugs

But until that moment, players can't get a sneak peek at what the piece of gear does. It's one reason why Forever doesn't have an Adventure Guide for dungeons; developers want the game to keep its secrets.

"Every single boss in our raids has some items that are very low percentage drop chase items, kind of like the Dragonspine Trophy was in Gruul's Lair—but for every boss," says Zierhut. "It might be three weeks, four weeks before somebody sees that item drop, and the whole meta is torn up again."

The goal is to keep the magic of exploration alive, he says.

"The goal is to un-solve the game, so players have to figure out again what's the best path," Zierhut says. "They don't know what the best items are. They don't know what to get. It's back to 2004 and nobody knows anything and figuring it out all over again."

Hand-crafted power

To add a layer of complexity—and, again, keep players from gaining power too quickly—items deliberately aren't optimized for players' preferred classes and stats. "Our items are much more idiosyncratic, and you don't get exactly what you want," he says, noting that knowing your class and choosing between gear sets will be one way players express skill in Forever. "None of the gear is perfect."

That's an old strategy—there are oft-discussed items from WoW's original launch that put strength on cloth gear, for example—but what is new is how much power items can have at a relatively low level.

Both low-level drops and crafted gear are powerful early, and that's on purpose, developers say.

"A lot of times tradeskills felt like an afterthought in Classic. Like, 'Oh, I could craft this item, but it's too much work and I'm about to out-level it anyway. Skip it. I'll level up my tailor when I get to level 60,' " Zierhut says. "I made a deliberate effort to make more crafting recipes worthwhile to craft while you are leveling up, including lowering the skill requirement to craft them.

"The typical item from tailoring, leatherworking, blacksmithing requires 25 fewer skill points than it used to. So you'll be able to craft that item right around the time it's your best-in-slot at that level and get the real value out of doing it."

Much of the tuning done so far to gear in Forever's beta has been to keep that idea of modest but steady progression across the whole leveling process.

"It's just a slightly different gradient in terms of power level," lead game designer Tim Jones says.

Remedy announced today that Control Resonant has surpassed one million copies sold, moving past Alan Wake 2 to become "the fastest-selling game in Remedy Entertainment's 31-year history."

Thank you for the support ❤️ For playing, sharing, and being a part of the community.#CONTROLResonant

— @remedygames.com (@remedygames.com.bsky.social) 2026-10-15T18:14:33.049Z

Three weeks to a million copies isn't exactly a blistering pace by conventional videogame standards: The Blood of Dawnwalker hit the mark in three days, Wardogs did it in one, and Subnautica 2 put out twice that number in just 12 hours.

But despite producing a string of unique, memorable, and critically acclaimed games, Remedy has never really smashed a massive home run in the sales department. Even Alan Wake 2, which won numerous awards for narrative and art direction in 2023 (and would have claimed so many more if not for the Baldur's Gate 3 behemoth) took two months to sell a million copies, significantly outpacing the original Control and making it the studio's fastest-selling game at that time.

Remedy's more pressing problem, though, is profit: It took more than a year, and two million copies sold, before Alan Wake 2 actually started making money for Remedy. Addressing that shortcoming was the top priority for Jean-Charles Gaudechon, who took over as the company's new CEO in February: Remedy chairman Henri Österlund said at the time that Gaudechon's appointment was intended "to lead Remedy into a phase of profitable growth."

So far, Gaudechon seems to like what he sees from Control Resonant, calling the million-sold mark "a very strong start."

"Control Resonant is Remedy's first self-published release of this scale, launched into one of the most competitive windows in years alongside the industry's biggest names. The game is unmistakably Remedy, with the bold ideas and distinctive style our players have come to expect from us," Gaudechon said. "A huge thank you goes to our players and to the team, who have made Control Resonant the incredible game that it is.

"We have always believed Control deserved an even bigger audience, and this launch shows what's possible: we see the game connecting with long-time fans while bringing a significant number of new players into the world of Control, which strengthens its long-term potential. With Control and Alan Wake, we now have two established franchises. Our focus is to build on what makes them special, support them, and grow them even further. There is a lot more to come from these worlds."

We'll get a closer look on how Control Resonant's success has impacted Remedy's bottom line in Remedy's Q3 business review, which takes place on November 3.

World War 2 Canadian air force pilot John Gillespie Magee Jr once wrote, in his poem High Flight:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things

He was talking about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, his favourite game and an icon of the PS2 generation of consoles. In San Andreas, tucked away in the Verdant Meadows Airstrip, the player could locate a jetpack, and tumble through the skies of Las Venturas like a glorious errant star. GTA 5? No jetpack. This is why it's an inferior game.

Until now. I have installed Aerowing - Wearable Jet Pack & Weapon System. Or, well, I installed it, tried to launch the game, crashed my PC, rebooted, tried to launch the game, crashed the game, rebooted, then launched the game.

It's a strangely lavish mod, I'll give it that. You don't just tap F and sort of limply ascend, which is mostly how it went in San Andreas. No, you get a whole animation, the camera circles your guy as he does a possibly-copyrighted Iron Man pose and launches himself skywards.

Then off you go, a speedometer in the corner measuring your courage as you glide along, launching one of three weapons: SMG, plasma, and "tube," which I'm pretty sure is just SMG again.

It's a rollocking good time, and it'll be even better once I find a way to proc it that doesn't also proc my street golfing mod. Until then, with silent lifting mind I'll tread the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand, and touch the face of God.

Just two days after the disastrous release of Total War: Shogun 2 - Complete Edition, Sega says it is removing the game from sale and putting the original back until it gets things sorted out.

WHAT HAPPENED:

• In September, Sega announced a remaster of Total War: Shogun 2, set to launch just a month later. Sean Martin, PC Gamer's number one shogunner, was very excited.
• In October, Shogun Sean took the remastered version for a test run and was not entirely impressed: "Any reason to return to Shogun 2 in 2026 is something to be celebrated, but I just wish Complete Edition felt more extensive and essential versus leaving so much undone."
• The next day, Shogun 2 Complete Edition launched on Steam, and it was ugly: Thousands of negative user reviews spurred by old bugs, ignored quality of life complaints, and maybe worst of all, accusations—thus far unconfirmed—of undisclosed generative AI use.
• Adding insult to injury, before the Compete Edition launched, Sega pulled the original from sale.

Which brings us to now: After two days of silence, Sega has finally made a move: It says "the current experience is not where it needs to be," and is thus "working with platform holders to remove the game from sale and to reinstate the original game while we investigate the issues."

Anyone who purchased Shogun 2 - Complete Edition will still have access to it, but how (or if) Sega will enable them to go back to playing the original version wasn't clarified.

Pulling Shogun 2 - Complete Edition from sale and restoring the original is obviously the right move, and today's message promises improvements to the game to bring it more in-line with expectations, so hopefully we'll see some of the more glaring bugs and QoL issues resolved.

But all of this is still a very bad look for Creative Assembly, which has had something of an up-and-down history with its games and players over the years. It's a particular shame coming so soon after the company's successful launch of the Lords of the End Times expansion for Total War: Warhammer, which has been widely praised.

The announcement of Total War: Warhammer 40k also has a lot of RTS fans, and WH40K sickos, very excited, and nonsense like this really takes the wind out of those sails: If Shogun 2 - Complete Edition allowed out the door in this condition, how are fans supposed to expect better in the future?

A few fans have also pointed out that in 2024, Sega's Aegis-CWA union accused the company of outsourcing Q&A and some localization services, resulting in the layoffs of 61 people.

As I write this, Shogun 2 - Complete Edition remains available for purchase on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store—Sega has not specified when it will be removed. It has also not yet responded to the accusations of gen AI usage in Shogun 2 - Complete Edition—I've reached out to ask about that and will update if I receive a reply.

Autumn is here in Forza Horizon 6's Horizon Meets series and that means a new Treasure Hunt to track down for some season points. These points will let you earn the new seasonal cars that are currently on offer.

This week's chest is in the east of the Takashiro region, at a rest area surrounded by long pampas grass southeast of Soni Circuit, pictured on the map above. To reach this chest, you need to:

1. When passing the entrance to Soni Circuit going west to east, turn right down the winding road.
2. Take a left down the road into the fields of long pampas grass.
3. Keep an eye out for the rest area on your left side close to the pool on the map.

You could also look for the brown spot on the map with the pond in east Takashiro (which marks the long grass) to find it.

Smash the chest to get 100,000 credits, 5,000 XP, and three Season Progress. Also make sure to complete the new photo challenge, too, if you're looking for extra points.

What do you add to the game that has everything? We named Caves of Qud the best roguelike of 2024 due in part to its sheer density of simulated, deep-future, science-fantasy stuff: You can begin a playthrough as a fairly normal guy, and by the end of your run could be playing a clone of yourself who later became a psionic four-armed turtle man wielding a gun that uses blood for ammo and fires vacuum pulses that eat life.

With a tapestry of potential interactions already so profoundly, magnificently weird, what could Caves of Qud possibly be adding in Diaspora, an expansion that will be entering early access in December? Well, playable trees is a good start.

According to publisher Kitfox, Diaspora "includes several new feature arcs centered around the influx of riotous life and culture into marsh-moated ruins of Qud." Chief among them is the ability to start a playthrough as a mutated animal or plant. Those among you with Qud experience might be thinking, 'Aren't there already animal- and plant-themed mutations?'

And there are. But where before you could begin as a human and mutate into beast-shape or plant-form, now—in a sort of beautiful symmetry—you can begin as a tree and mutate into a man. Or, you know, a progressively weirder tree. A tree with wings. And a scorpion tail, maybe. Who can say?

Alongside the new mutant animal and plant stocks—and an accompanying expansion to the catalog of potential player mutations—Diaspora's early access launch will also seed new creatures and artifacts throughout Qud. These will surely bring with them their own new and exciting forms of existential peril. The camelfolk trade caravans are getting some love, too—and their saltback tortoise steeds will, for the first time, be mountable.

As it's an early access launch, those are just the initial offerings. Throughout the course of its continuing development—expected to last "on the order of one year"—Qud's creators plan on adding a new multi-step questline, new factions and underground villages, "roaming, seasonal mega-caravans," more items, creatures, mutant stocks, and (take a deep breath) new fungal infections.

If that last bit doesn't sound exciting to you, you've clearly never enjoyed hosting a sentient skin infection of tiny mouths which occasionally "harmonizes into sensible speech" to reveal a secret about the in-game world. You can see why I'm excited, right? Hello?

Caves of Qud: Diaspora launches in early access on Steam on December 9.

We won't get to play Grand Theft Auto 6 when it launches for consoles on November 19, but they can't stop us from watching the Grand Theft Auto 6 launch trailer! So, let's do that.

It's definitely a trailer for a GTA game, but this one feels a bit more restrained to me than what we've seen in the past—or maybe more focused is a better way to put it, with a greater emphasis on character and narrative than the chaos of the previous games, or even the previous GTA 6 trailers. There's definitely a cinematic flair to it—makes me feel like I'm settling in for the season-ending two-parter of a Michael Mann series from a decade or so ago.

So what's cooking in our newest trip to Leonida?

"Jason and Lucia have always known the deck is stacked against them. But when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, in the middle of a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida — forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive."

The musical choice is interesting: Rather than the licensed music of the first two trailers (Tom Petty's Love is a Long Road in trailer one, The Pointer Sisters doing Hot Together in trailer two), this tune is a new track from Justice, an electronic duo who composed the GTA 6 score. If you dig it, here's the full version—it's pretty good!

We still don't have a release date, or even an official announcement, for the PC version of GTA 6, although there's no doubt one is coming—it always happens, sooner or later. A recently floated rumor said it'll be out sometime in early 2027, just a few months after the console debut, but I'm not buying it.

We all know the tale of Civilization 7. It came, it saw, it had you choose a new civ at the dawn of each age and that annoyed quite a lot of people indeed. Sic transit gloria Meier-i.

So I was a bit surprised when Amplitude sat us down for a look at Humankind 2 and focused so much on its culture system, reworked from the first game, but a big part of which is selecting new cultures to embrace as the eras chug along—Egyptians becoming Berbers, or Romans, or even English (a dreadful fate) if circumstances conspire to allow it in the game's sandbox.

But I liked what I saw. The other big talking point of the hands-off demo I got was on climate and biome, and how that intersects with and shapes culture. Humankind 2's vision of history is a dialectical one, where a culture is shaped by a biome which is changed by a culture which is influenced by a biome which… you get the idea. Climate isn't static, either. Just like real life, it'll undergo natural and unnatural disruptions depending on chance and player/NPC activity.

So it all feels like an intricate and natural take on (a type of) materialist history. Just, you know, a materialist history where the Egyptians might find themselves waking up to snow one day.

The white sun of the desert

Our demo started us off looking at a map of the world—as in Earth, the actual world—dotted with numerous tribes. The interplay of environment and culture kicks off immediately: each tribe gets a "First Tale" linked to the territory in which they begin, the founding myths that act as the kernels for the full-fledged cultures that will eventually develop. They provide buffs (+X Authority, +Y Learning, and so on) and changes to tiles and citizen roles.

These are the things that, from the jump, make you just a little bit better at existing in your chosen environment than the other guys on the map, and that are meant to make your faction feel less like it emerged, fully-formed, from nowhere at all. We ended up with a tribe in the general vicinity of modern-day Egypt whose First Tale, appropriate enough for the banks of the Nile, was "Flood Tamer"—the upshot being that they consumed less water and were better at putting water and its generation to positive uses than average.

Amplitude says that Humankind 2's different starting biomes will have a dramatic impact on the shape of your game, especially as you start drilling down past the broad bonuses of your selected First Tale and into the more specific trees of "Adaptations" you can make to deepen your culture's affinity for its chosen biome. As Ancient Egypt, sweating in the sun of the North African desert, we could spend culture points to unlock adaptations like mudbricks, camel herding, heat endurance, and so on—various ways to adapt to the sweltering heat and scarce water of your chosen home.

Our culture and selected adaptations let us actually scrounge up some water in the African desert, but Amplitude noted that this was no reason to rest on our laurels. Climate shifts, like the actual Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, can occur, turning biomes more arid or humid. Your carefully selected adaptations can be blunted by mother nature, though that's not to say it's impossible to adapt to radical change: toward the end of the demo we leapt into a save which saw Egyptian civilisation blanketed in snow, sheets of ice climbing the sides of the pyramids. Its adaptations now focused on warmth, whaling, and the long-term preservation of scarce resources.

The goal of all this is very Amplitude: factions that feel distinguished by more than a different aesthetic and a set of starting bonuses, and that feel uniquely tied to, and shaped by, the world around them. Having only really seen Ancient Egypt in action, I can't make any declarations as to its success, but I struggle to imagine a player starting in the Tundra, Taiga, Forest, or Brush biomes making the same moves our demo did.

Likewise, if our desert-adapted Egyptians suddenly marched into the Jungle, I get the sense they would find themselves at a serious disadvantage compared to the environment's native inhabitants. This is something you could feasibly exploit, one day. Amplitude suggested that, if you had a culture that was incredibly good at handling arid environments, you might willingly trigger some sort of nuclear apocalypse to render the whole Earth that way. Great news for you, bad news for your enemies who grew up in the snow (and for the billions of vaporised people, I suppose).

Culture shock

Amplitude is trying to move away from what it called "monolithic" cultures in Humankind 1—consisting of "a unity, a building, and a bonus, basically"—into something more skill-tree-based in the second game.

Every culture has a set of customs you can unlock, divided by tier, and which you equip and activate in a limited number of bonus slots. They do pretty much what you'd expect—Egypt can opt into a pharaonic tradition to buff its authority generation, or get better at wringing water from the desert sand—but it's another way the studio is trying to make each faction feel unique, tailored, and adapted specifically to its material conditions.

As the eras pass by, your culture will approach "Crossroads" points, where you can decide to diverge based on either common history, shared land, or foreign contact (the first being free, the second costing culture points, and the third costing even more culture points). New cultures unlock new customs, new city aesthetics, and new roles (Humankind 2's take on a pop and job system for your cities). There are 70 cultures total, said the studio.

This did not, in the small example I was shown, seem quite as jarring as Civ 7's implementation of its own similar concept, rather it was just one way in which Amplitude is trying to make each of your sessions in the game feel different. "With Humankind 2 you will make really unique cities that won't just be the same template over and over," pledged the studio, in contrast to the first game.

Also a contrast to the first game: production values. Amplitude touted its new effects and animations as it played—wonders now assemble themselves bit-by-bit in dramatic fashion when completed, for instance—and talked up the game's load times even on ageing rigs. It's not the most important thing, maybe, but it does look quite nice, and makes the game feel like more of a genuine competitor to Civ, with all that series' lavishly rendered cutscenes and wonder animations.

I certainly didn't see enough of Humankind 2 to make any sweeping declarations about it or its upcoming place in the 4X canon, but I'll tell you this: I'm intrigued. Amplitude seems to be taking a lot of good lessons from both its own back catalogue and the general 4X space for Humankind 2, and I'm eager to see how they all come together when the game releases next year.

A deep forest of towering trees can be an intimidating place, especially if you're only three inches tall. In co-op PvE survival game Trollheim: Gnomes, you're a wee little Sprýg Gnome looking for a new place to call home after Oden has driven you from Midgård.

That home is a dense, dark forest, and you're not the only one seeking refuge there. In addition to foraging, exploring, building your home, and dealing with survival systems like cold and hunger, your gnome will have to contend with other residents of the forest, which the Trollheim devs call väsen.

Väsen can be faeries, sirens, and you guessed it, trolls. But unlike the trolls in another 'heim I could name, Trollheim's trolls aren't just there to ruin your day with a well-swung tree trunk or to be defeated for their resource drops.

"When we talk about our NPCs, we don't talk about them as enemies, but rather as neighbors," said Jojje Dalunde, game director at Off-leash Interactive. "Because that's really what they are, and as you know, you can have good neighbors and you can have bad neighbors. In this game, you as a player get to choose if you are going to be a good neighbor or a bad neighbor. And the väsen in this world will react to how you interact with them and how you behave."

In the presentation, the trolls didn't look particularly friendly, yelling warnings at gnomes who go too close, throwing things at them, and swinging their fists. But that doesn't necessarily make them bad guys, does it? Maybe the gnome is on their turf, intruding on their homeland, and maybe this troll hasn't had great interactions with gnomes in the past.

Of course, it's your choice: if you want to attack the väsen instead of befriending them you can… but isn't the idea of making friends with the so-called "monsters" a fun one? (If I could give gifts to the trolls in Valheim, I definitely would. Anything to stop them from raiding my base.)

If you accidentally (or purposefully) make an enemy of one of your neighbors, it's not the end of the world, either. "There are ways to befriend väsen that you may have crossed," Dalunde said. "So if you were a bad neighbor, there are ways to make amends for it and find common ground."

The base-building looks nice, as your tiny gnomes can climb the towering trees and build elegant little homes amidst their thick trunks and long branches, then connect them with ziplines. Your glider? It's a leaf or a few feathers, because you're very small. You get the picture. Trollheim: Gnomes is coming to early access later this year.

Not many live service games have stood the test of time quite like Overwatch. 10 years in and it's still been able to retain its playerbase, maintain momentum, and even ramp it up. How, you ask? Well, besides having really cute skins and a very enticing game loop, Team 4 figured out exactly where Overwatch needed to stand years ago.

"Overwatch exists in an incredibly competitive space among live service shooters," Overwatch's game director Aaron Keller tells me. "Some of the biggest games in the world are here."

To have (and crucially, maintain) a successful live service game is the golden goose egg of this industry right now. With publishers like Sony trying to force it upon countless studios before pulling the plug on eight out of 12 projects when things start to go sideways. Even games that manage to land with an eager audience like Arc Raiders can struggle to maintain momentum. But for some, like Overwatch, the live service model has worked, so what's the secret?

"That's a big question," associate game director Alec Dawson says. "I think some of the things we've learned is to shut away fear as much as possible and push beyond, experiment within that experience. But what it really boils down to is coming to work each morning and making good decisions every day. We've lived that over the last two years." But unfortunately for any eager Sony execs reading this, "there's no secret sauce in particular."

"It's incredibly hard to make something that players can interact with every day for years on end," Keller adds. "You can get 95% of the way there, and your game could still die three months after release. It is much, much harder to come up with that initial sort of experience than I think a lot of people give it credit for. But once you've done it, you've kind of just started the race."

Free time and cash are both at a premium for most players, and with so many options available, games studios need to offer up exactly what they're looking for. Because if they don't, someone else will.

"Our players really want novelty and they really want variety, but they want it inside of a competitive framework," Keller explains. "If you look at other games on the market, there's ones that are really just more about the novelty side of the game, and there's other ones that are really just about straight up competition. There's not a lot of change in those games. We occupy this really unique spot in the middle."

Marvel Rivals came the closest to taking Overwatch's spot, but that didn't last long as it cemented itself as a casual game which is more concerned with balancing for fun. Alternatively, Overwatch offers higher skill ceilings and a "sense that your time was worthwhile in the experience," Dawson explains. "That the rules and structure of the sport were fair towards the outcome."

This isn't to say that Team 4 have uncovered the secret to perfect game balancing, I'm not sure that'll ever be possible, but the idea still stands that players should be able to take away some kind of lesson from each game, lessons that'll help form them into a more skilled player. Even if that lesson is to 'don't solo queue at 2 am'.

"There's a design value at Blizzard called control is king," Keller adds. The idea that players want to feel like they're in control of everything their hero does and therefore experience the cool moments that come from that. Overwatch's newest hero Doctrine is "a powerful example of something like that."

Doctrine offers two experiences: a primal and slightly simplistic one in which it feels good to just use his base kit to land shots. Then there's a more nuanced version, which offers players the chance to raise the skill ceiling with his Infuse mechanic.

"It's so satisfying to be holding down Infuse while you're trying to line up your shot, as the beam gets bigger, you get that sound effect, then you pull the trigger, and you see that connection. It's so satisfying. The hero team, and the audio team, the VFX animations, everybody kind of comes together to have that one moment where control really is king. That moment just needs to feel as good and as visceral as possible."

Doctrine is the only hero I've played since the new season came out last week, and I can confirm his kit is just as good as Keller makes it sound. It's a testimony to Team 4 that 54 heroes later they're still able to offer players something that feels unique, specialised, and just a hell of a lot of fun to play.

"One of the Blizzard greats, Chris Metzen, always described our company as a hero factory," Keller says. "This is just what we do, and you can see it in a lot of our other games, from StarCraft to Warcraft to Diablo, just all these characters that are really larger than life. It's what our fans can really throw their passion behind.

"I think that Overwatch really carries that torch forward. We're trying to make these amazing fantasies that people can just jump into and live out. I can't wait for players to see some of the archetypes that are coming next season, and especially Season 1 next year."

However, the surrealist elements are turned up. You'll be playing Redrick Roost, an inmate turned arson investigator—and instead of Kim Kitsuragi, you'll be getting "an opiate-dependent mathematician, Dr Astrid Albers, and a nunchaku-wielding truth-activist, the district bus driver Rico." God. We're so goddamn back.

The major point of divergence—aside from an emphasis on 3D physics, which cites "Larian's Divinity Engine games and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic" as an inspiration—is in its tone and theme. The site very plainly states that "this is not the 'end of history', but rather the 'beginning of the future' in the tripartite city of Arta-Tantor."

That "end of history" line feels like an indirect nod to Disco Elysium and the philosophical bedrock it was built on—the nihilistic representation of an end-point of societal evolution, represented, (as folks far more well-versed in this sort of thing have posited) in Disco Elysium by the Pale and the oppressive pressure of the Moralintern. To quote the game directly:

"Centrism isn't change—not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth."

Basically, in drawing this line, Summer Eternal seems to be distinctly saying its new setting will be altogether more lively. More optimistic? Maybe not. The protagonist has a dark and brimming set of alter-egos in a psychological "chicken coop" and the game takes place in the hottest summer on record. But even just looking at the artwork, there's less of an emphasis on slow, harrowing decay and more of a thumb on the wildfires of psychedelic revolution. Needless to say, I am very, very excited.

League of Legends Classic was Riot's attempt to capitalise on nostalgia for vintage-era LoL. It stripped away most of the champions and kits introduced since 2013, reverted to an older version of the Summoner's Rift map, and promised to roll out "new" old Champions at a faster clip than in the olden days.

But the nostalgia Riot must have hoped would sustain the mode hasn't proven sufficient enough to keep it running: the mode will go offline in January 2027, only six months after its launch.

"We’ve seen a lot of players have fun revisiting the olden days with Classic," a Riot spokesperson wrote in a new update. "At this point though, most have gone back to other parts of League."

As a result, the current season will be the last. "We’ll then put Classic back in the box for now, with the goal of bringing it back, likely as an event mode with adjustments and additions."

It continues: "There’s more we’re going to share in the future about what we learned from this run. That includes where we think we got Classic right, where we could have gone more classic, and where sticking too closely to the past may have held the experience back."

Refunds will be issued for Classic content rendered obsolete by the closure. And it's not the end of the line yet: there are at least seven more Champions still to roll out, including Mordekaiser, Yorick, Hecarim and Lucian in the forthcoming 26.21 update, and Vilibear, Urgot and Udyr in future ones.

"This game mode was a true labor of love from so many Rioters, and seeing you all dive back in to reclaim the nostalgia, reconnect with old friends, and relive your glory days made it a truly special moment for everyone. We will keep exploring different ways to play League and as always, we appreciate all of your feedback. Every post on social media asking for Classic, every vote cast in the Council, and every minute spent leashing for your jungler again helped us bring this to life, so thank you very much."

What was wrong with Classic? Back in August, League of Legends esports veteran Alex Chu (also known as Xpecial) offered his thoughts on why uptake might be slow for players accustomed to modern LoL. His words came at a time when a lot of the LoL community were criticising the concept.

Chu then speculated a future for Classic that never eventuated, or at least, likely won't now.

"The interesting part is what happens now that the reins are loosened," he added. "We could end up with a version of League that players vote for things that would never fly with a mass audience. More complicated drafts. The ability to ban a champion for an entire season. Forcing a marksman mid meta or a mage bot meta just because the council wants to see it. Modern League can't do any of that, because modern League has to appeal to everyone. Classic only has to appeal to enough people."

Chu's thoughts aside, it's possible that old LoL just doesn't have the nostalgic appeal of old World of Warcraft, old Runescape, or old Guild Wars. Those are spaces you inhabit and they are generally less high pressure and adversarial. They become a kind of home away from home, whereas LoL is always just a hugely competitive MOBA. A good one that you can build a lifestyle around, but a MMORPG it ain't.

LoL also evolves much faster than those older MMOs did. Back in 2013, LoL was receiving new champions every two to three weeks, which could affect the whole experience. By contrast, MMOs at the time generally only received seismic updates on a yearly basis at most: much more time for a game condition to sink in.

Despite some big changes happening with Overwatch lately, former game director Jeff Kaplan hasn't touched it since the year he left Blizzard. In fact, he actively avoids the game in every way he can, he told GameSpot in a recent interview.

Before Overwatch, Kaplan rose through the ranks on the World of Warcraft team, starting in QA and eventually becoming game director. He described his departure from the WoW team in 2008 as "a training moment" for when he would leave the Overwatch team, and Blizzard altogether, in 2021.

"I kind of went through a little bit of shock leaving WoW back in 2008," Kaplan says. "So, when I stepped away from Overwatch in April of 2021, I was kind of used to that moment of what it meant to give all of yourself, your heart, your soul–because it's not just a job, there's no one who can do this and have it just be a job–and then have this shocking moment where you realize it doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the team, belongs to the players, it belongs to Blizzard, but it doesn’t belong to you."

Kaplan says he "had a very almost clinical separation" with Overwatch after what he went through with WoW. As a result, he stopped playing it the moment he left and has actively avoided it ever since.

"After I said my goodbye to competitive Overwatch and the Overwatch subreddit, I never go back and read," he says. "I don't watch YouTube [videos]. I don't search for my name in Overwatch. I don't search for Overwatch. I sort of just disconnect. I actually tell all the algorithms like, 'Yeah, I'm not really interested in Overwatch anymore. I know you think I'm the Overwatch guy, but like, that's just not for me anymore.'"

In an interview from earlier this year, Kaplan said he fully expected to retire from Blizzard, but the company's former CFO broke him by threatening to lay off 1,000 people if Overwatch didn't meet certain financial goals. Kaplan called that meeting "the biggest fuck you moment I've had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition."

Kaplan went quiet for several years before reappearing with a new studio and a new open world survival cowboy game called The Legend of California, which he's heading up alongside former Blizzard developer Tim Ford. He says the new game is an opportunity to explore something more personal to him for the first time. "I didn't leave Blizzard to try to make a Blizzard game. I left Blizzard to make a Tim and Jeff game."

I got off to a bit of an awkward start with Castlevania: Belmont's Curse when it first booted to a black screen. A few minutes of troubleshooting later, I deduced that the game wouldn't display on a monitor with its refresh rate set higher than 120 Hz. Easily solved, but I kept thinking of that quirk when I selected the in-game 120 fps cap and then watched the game jarringly lurch down to a lower framerate every time I hit a cutscene.

Maybe these technical quirks were treats for reviewers that have been smoothed over in time for launch. They haven't stopped me from having a lot of fun with the eight or so hours I've played Belmont's Curse—I think I'm closing in on the halfway point, and it keeps getting better as it goes. But it's not quite the slam dunk I expected from the first new Castlevania in decades, with such a talented studio behind it.

Belmont's Curse has a bit of a juice problem. You've probably heard (or said) "it's got the juice" so many times in recent years that the expression has more or less just become shorthand for I think this is really good. As originally coined by some very smart game designers, though, it means something a bit more specific: the sort of polish that "feels alive and responds to everything you do—tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input." There are some quintessential ways to add juiciness to an action game: screen shake, hitstop (the brief pause for impact when your attacks land), enemy reactions, flashy particles and other effects. Most important are how your character feels when they move or jump or dodge.

Juicy doesn't have to mean fast, necessarily. But Dead Cells, which Belmont's Curse developer Evil Empire spent much of the last decade working on, is one of the fastest and juiciest action games ever made. Hollow Knight's fast nail swipes and precise dodges are also extremely juicy, which is one reason it has so resoundingly become the metroidvania others are now measured against.

Belmont's Curse is somehow intermittently, confusingly juiced and… dry? Soured? There are ways in which it just feels off that are still bugging me hours into the game.

There's a lengthy wind-up on Rose Belmont's whip, which you use to swing all around France and Dracula's castle, that becomes a frustration during spike-filled platforming challenges that require perfect timing on a swing. Even when I get the timing right, I often miss a grapple point because I'm holding the analog stick in the direction I want to move rather than pointing it at the spot I need to hook onto.

The first dodge Belmont's Curse teaches you is a forward slide, but it has so few invincibility frames on it—if any at all—that it's gotten me killed in more boss fights than it has saved me. Maybe I should've learned by now not to use it, but it's just one of a dozen small things that I find fiddly or confusing in this game that I thought Evil Empire would absolutely have on lock.

Another one: Some tedious platforming challenges require phasing through specific walls and floors using a skill that, by default, is bound to the left trigger on a controller—which is fine until you have to pump it with a tiny margin for error. Phase through a wall (hold), then wall jump from it (release), then phase through another wall (hold), then land on one above a pit of spikes (release). Why bind that action to the analog input with the longest travel time on the controller?

Rose can use the whip to pull herself towards enemies and deliver a smashing blow, but the timing on that attack feels set too early.

Popping a healing flask requires holding a button down just long enough that I often think I've healed in the heat of battle until oops, surprise, dead.

And I know this is a budget limitation, but Belmont's Curse is clearly so inspired by the Netflix Castlevania series—it even includes a couple of the same voice actors—that some of the early cutscenes, which are disappointing panning shots of static artwork, really cry out for a more lavish presentation. They deserved a proper animated treatment that Konami apparently didn't shell out for.

Belmont's Curse doesn't make a great first impression, but once I reached Dracula's Castle after a few hours in Paris it started kicking things up a notch, with clever platforming gimmicks I've never run into before and clues pointing in the direction of each of Dracula's minions. It's a little bit more puzzley and thinky than many older Castlevanias, and I could see this being my favorite version of the castle to pick apart by the time I'm through with it.

And it's not totally juiceless! There's great, punchy hitstop when your attacks connect; the animation work is slick; the presentation of the tarot cards, which double as special weapons and guides to each boss you need to defeat, is gorgeous. I love flicking through them in my inventory.

Were Evil Empire maybe trying so hard to ensure Belmont's Curse didn't feel like Dead Cells that it ended up with controls that didn't quite gel? It's a hard problem to articulate, but there's a little slack in this whip holding it back from being the return to Castlevania I want to wholeheartedly love.

Frank Klepacki has composed a lot of great game music over the years—in fact, he's responsible for the soundtrack in Eye of the Beholder 2, one of the best dungeon crawlers of all time. At heart, though, Klepacki is a real-time strategy guy—and he takes real issue with claims that the genre is dead.

There's no question that RTS is diminished, at least compared to its glory days. Back in the 1990s, games like Command & Conquer, Warcraft, and Dune 2 (especially Dune 2, I'd say) dominated the scene. But all that remains of any of them these days is the seemingly unkillable World of Warcraft—and how many players even know that Blizzard's one true behemoth is an RTS spinoff?

Speaking in the latest issue of Edge, however, Klepacki said he thinks the genre still has lots of life in it. "There was all of this doom-and-gloom talk about ten years ago, saying, 'Oh, we think RTS is dead now—why are you still trying to work on games that are in a genre that’s going away?’" Klepacki said. "Obviously, if there are games coming out, [the genre is] not going away. It’s just that other types of games have taken the forefront of attention. Everything runs in cycles, you know? That’s how it always is."

That's true: RPGs have ebbed and flowed over the decades, and flight sims were huge until they weren't, and then they were again. But Klepacki also pointed the finger at a hollowing-out of the industry and growing aversion to risk, particularly among big-budget developers: "I would love to see more unique ideas that are allowed to be triple-A titles. A lot of indie titles are taking those creative chances, but a lot of the middle ground has gone."

Real-time strategy DNA has persisted in the MOBA genre, but traditional RTS games are enjoying a bit of a boom too. More than 20 years after Frozen Throne, Blizzard dropped a new campaign for Warcraft 3 in September, a Game of Thrones RTS is in the pipe, and Company of Heroes and Ruse are back; Age of Empires and Age of Mythology are still rumbling along, Tempest Rising delivers a very C&C-like experience, and while the new StarCraft game revealed at BlizzCon is a shooter, Blizzard is still dicking around with StarCraft 2, too.

The days of building them around ensemble Hollywood casts may be over (at least for now), but the RTS itself? Be happy, Frank: it's definitely alive and kicking.

It's a classic move: A villain, or sometimes a hero, inserts himself into a seemingly inescapable situation. Danger everywhere—no way out! But just as the good guys (or bad guys) are about to pounce, he holds up the pin he's pulled from the grenade under his coat, forcing everyone to back off! Escape is at hand!

That seems to be the strategy now adopted by notorious Grand Theft Auto 6 leaker Cyberleek, and by "seems to be," I mean they stated it outright. In a message posted to their now-defunct website but preserved by GTA VI News on X, Cyberleek committed to not releasing anything more about GTA 6—including its ending, which at this point remains unknown—as long as Take-Two lets everything slide.

"CL has the ending. It was considered," the message states. "It would punish Take-Two greatly—but ruin the experience for the gamers, who did nothing wrong. Take-Two would show CL no mercy—why should CL show any to them? Still: Take-Two was punished enough.

"The ending stays unpublished. Proof: the latest leek—clips from the final missions, out of context, revealing nothing. The dead man's switch is active—story spoilers only. Left alone, it never fires. Whoever removes CL chooses it."

A dead man's switch, generally speaking, is a switch built to be triggered if its operator is incapacitated. Miles Dyson, for instance, blew up Cyberdyne Systems with an improvised dead man's switch in Terminator 2 (not that it did much good) and Roger Murtaugh did the literal grenade-pin thing in Lethal Weapon while trying to save his daughter from Shadow Company goons. There are variants—in Point Break, for instance, Rosie was ordered to kill Johnny Utah's girlfriend if Bodhi didn't check in by 3, to ensure Johnny's participation in a bank robbery.

My own personal favorite dead man's switch comes from Hawk the Slayer:

That particular variation on the theme notwithstanding, dead man's switches are meant as last-ditch failsafes: If something bad happens to me, something much worse will happen to you.

It makes me wonder if Cyberleek's sudden withdrawal and proposed détente with Take-Two means that they're starting to feel the heat. Take-Two takes this sort of thing seriously as a matter of course, and you can bet it's going to go extra-hardass on anyone who messes with its biggest game ever, which GTA 6 unquestionably is. I have no doubt that life for Cyberleek will become very unpleasant, very quickly, if and when they're ever caught.

The problem Cyberleek faces, of course, is that their leverage—assuming it's real in the first place—has a very short shelf life. In six weeks at most, the GTA 6 ending will be out there, at which point there will be no shot left to shoot.

At best, then, this threat grants Cyberleek an extra month to find a deeper hole to hide in. And even that is wildly optimistic: Take-Two might be operating quietly, but I have no doubt that it's also operating furiously, and that there's not much of a mood to play 'I won't if you won't' games.

Cyberleek also defended their cryptocurrency ask, saying it "was always a donation, never an investment," and denying that a rugpull happened; they also said they wouldn't release the full build of GTA 6, with "full story mode, played to the end," because their memecoin market cap didn't hit $30 million.

Ace Combat 8 rocks. PC Gamer's reviewer scored it a 92%, and I've been savoring the campaign, because I know it could be years until we get another bombastic flight sim melodrama of its kind. Although I do have another Ace Combat lined up to play after: Ace Combat Zero, which was included as a free pre-order bonus with AC8, and subsequently responsible for the majority of the new game's negative launch day reviews.

Not because Zero is bad—it's a series fan-favorite—but because Bandai Namco inexplicably bundled it into the AC8 launcher, meaning you can't download this 3.2GB port of a 2006 PS2 game without the 136 gigabytes of Wings of Theve. This decision was not well received.

But now there's a happy ending: in an update on the Steam page on Tuesday, Bandai Namco announced that Ace Combat Zero "will be made available as a standalone application on Steam." That doesn't mean it will be made available for purchase: Zero was a pre-order bonus, so only those who bought Ace Combat 8 ahead of launch will have it in their Steam libraries. No change there. You'll just be able to download and launch it independently if you already own it. It's currently going through "final quality assurance and compatibility testing" ahead of the split.

The biggest benefit from the change (aside from potentially freeing up 136GB of precious SSD space) is that Zero will now support Steam Cloud saves. Judging by the nearly 400 comments on the post in less than 24 hours, the news has gone over very well—though there are also quite a few requests for the standalone Zero to include achievements, which were part of the console release.

There's no date given for Zero's emancipation, but presumably it won't be too far off.

Following my experience being abducted by a small yellow taxi, something has become clear to me: I need a means to escape. The trauma of my kidnapping experience cannot be repeated. I have installed Eject for Grand Theft Auto 5, a mod that lets you punch out of vehicles at a moment's notice.

"A simple little fun script that allows you to eject from vehicles and parachute down," reads the mod's description—a claim which is 50% true. You can, indeed, eject from vehicles at the push of a button, but the parachuting down part is more of a screaming plummet. We make do.

The mod's defaults are relatively anaemic. Its "Force" setting sits at a measly 150. 150 what? No idea, but that's a small number, so I immediately increased it to 10,000. I also tried increasing it to 100,000, which seemed to crash the game on launch.

And then, off I went, sailing through the streets of Los Santos in my shiny car in the night (sometimes in the day) and whacking the eject key to hop out. The mod has not quite mastered preservation of momentum, so my attempts to, for instance, leap across an overpass and land safely back in my car, met mostly with failure. And by mostly I mean entirely.

Still, it did let me do this, so I'm calling it a mixed success.

10 years is a long time for anything, but for a live service game it's a milestone that very few are able to cross. Overwatch made it over the line earlier this year, and has since been able to do something of a victory lap because after all the highs and the lows, Overwatch is in the best place it's ever been.

"It doesn't feel like 10 years to me," game director Aaron Keller tells me. "Although, I could probably answer that question in a few ways. There's probably a year or two that might have felt like five or six years in the middle of this process, but there's always so much to be doing on the team and for the game." But Keller reiterates the good old adage "if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.

"Our team is filled with people that are not just passionate about making games, they're passionate about Overwatch itself, our heroes and the world in which they reside. So when you get to go into the office and talk about that all day, the time can fly by pretty quickly."

Alec Dawson, associate game director, joined before the launch of Overwatch 2 but also feels as if these last four years have flown by "in a blink of an eye … It's wild that when we started the year, we had these silhouettes of heroes that we didn't even know what they were going to be, what they were going to look like, and now we do," Dawson adds. "Sometimes it just goes by much quicker than you think it's going to."

Overwatch has undergone many metamorphoses, some good, others not so good. We had the early golden years, then we had GOATS, then a plethora of some of the best game cinematics ever, then we had early Brigitte taking a literal hammer to the game's balance.

After something of a content drought, excitement was renewed with the announcement of Overwatch 2, and while this did offer a lot of good changes like more heroes, content, and focused team fights in 5v5, it failed to meet the requirements of a sequel, and that's without the disappointment surrounding PvE.

There was a time when I thought that was it for Overwatch, that PvE and Overwatch 2 would be all anyone would ever talk about. But I've never been happier to be proven wrong, because all these years later Overwatch is going from strength to strength experimenting with things like perks and Stadium, tweaking the user experience with map voting and hero bans, and changing to a new annual content release format.

"I don't think we could honestly say we knew it would go this far," Keller says. "I believe that there's always been something special about Overwatch. There's something special about the world. This optimistic, hopeful take on the future. I do think that there's something special about the gameplay—it's so crisp and clean—and there's moments you have in Overwatch that you just don't really get to have in other games."

I've said it before but the current success that Team 4 is seeing didn't just happen overnight. It's been a long road, one marked with deliberate decisions and remedies taken by its devs. The passion the devs have exhibited, the humility to admit when things aren't working, and keeping player's best interests at the forefront are why the game is in such a good state today.

What promises have Team 4 kept over the last 10 years?

Next up

Moving on from its tenth anniversary year, Overwatch has a new seasonal cadence which has not only worked to spark excitement, but as Keller sees it, has bolstered the "belief that Overwatch is really going in a good direction." There's a steady flow of quality-of-life changes to its UI as we saw last season with new heal, burn, and team indicators. Team 4 has given players more freedom when it comes to picking Drives, and the narrative story is back to being central to Overwatch's experience.

There's obviously going to be a steady flow of new content and characters, but Dawson has also confirmed that map reworks and tweaks will be "something we want to continue doing". Informed by map voting and community feedback the team will ensure that reworks "can stand on its own" not only fixing problems but gunning for a better overall experience: "I think our next rework does a pretty good job of that."

"We're really far into development on Season 1 for 2027," Keller reveals. "We're talking about what Season 1 is going to look like in 2028, and getting started on that. We want it to feel like not just one big moment but that the game is fresh for players and that we are getting players to look at it through new eyes again—we want to do it in a different way each year."

But while Team 4 gets stuck into planning content for the years to come, Dawson stresses that their overall mission will stay the same: "As much as the industry has changed, games have changed, genres, etc. Overwatch is still home for so many people. It's a really big responsibility that we take to heart of making sure that Overwatch can be a part of those people's lives as long as possible.

"To make sure they have the game and the heroes that they can relate to, make sure that they can play with their friends, and just keep having that place where they feel like, okay, this is where I want to be. This is where I want to spend my time. This is where I want to make memories. Hopefully, we can keep carrying that into the future as well."

New Blood boss Dave Oshry isn't interested in running a massive studio that follows the blockbuster strategy of milking its successful games for all they're worth. The publisher-developer combo has enjoyed a string of big wins with its boomer shooters, but Oshry's plan for building on success is to invest that money into new projects.

"I think a lot of studios would have a big hit like Ultrakill," Oshry tells us, "and then they would maybe open a big office, or just milk the shit out of Ultrakill and do Ultrakill spinoffs, or use that money to make sequels. And I've decided to put that money into projects like Gloomwood and Fallen Aces, artsy projects like Tenebris Somnia. That’s what I've decided to do with our success because I can, because we're independent."

The goal, says Oshry, has never been to create "a big studio with an office and hundreds of employees … I don't know why anyone would want that". And thankfully he doesn't have to deal with shareholders and investors telling him to just keep milking and keep growing.

"The fact that we're one studio and that I control everything means that I can make those kinds of decisions," he says. "If we had publishers or shareholders or investors, they would be like, ‘No, you need to take that money and reinvest it into things that are going to make more money so we can get bigger returns.’ They would be like, ‘You need to be working on Ultrakill spinoff games. You need to be working on Dusk 2, Faith: Chapter Four. Why haven't you made a survival crafting game out of this yet? You need to be reinvesting in the IPs and making money, money, money.’ And we're just like, ‘What cool thing do we want to do? What's coming down the pipe?’"

This isn't to say that New Blood doesn't support its games or give players another taste of the things that they dig. Dusk and Amid Evil continue to be updated, and there have been conversations about a new episode for Dusk or even a proper sequel. A Dusk spin-off is in the works, too, called Dungeons of Dusk, though it's from a different developer, not David Szymanski.

But this is still a far cry from the big publisher strategy of making IPs and bleeding them dry. Like Ubisoft, for example. "Look at fucking Heroes of Might and Magic," says Oshry. "Look at what's happened to that bloody series over the years. Everybody loves Heroes 3, and that was a million years ago. Ubisoft has whored that IP out all over the place for decades, and now finally you've got someone like Hooded Horse making something like Olden Era, and people are like, ‘Yeah, good, this is what we wanted’. But it's all about IP, it always has been with AAA."

Oshry offers Wolverine as another example. "It became designed by corporate, and look what happened. I don't think it was the game they originally set out to make, but it was the game they had to ship. At New Blood we’re never putting out games because it's a game we had to ship—because we had to meet a deadline or we had investors or shareholders. We're literally just trying to make the best games we can and make as many people happy as we can."

If New Blood followed the received wisdom that Sony or Ubisoft follow, it likely wouldn't be the success that it is. "If I just forced David to make Dusk 2," Oshry says, "we never would have gotten Iron Lung. Iron Lung, Markiplier, $50 million [box office] never would have happened if I made David do Dusk 2. And now David Szymanski has got a movie that made $50 million, funded by a YouTuber. That doesn't happen if I don't run New Blood the way that I do. It works. It works for us."

Looking at the state of the industry, the failure of big games like Wolverine, the so-called 'Xbox reset', the grotesque layoffs, it certainly looks like blockbuster game development, endless sequels and an obsession with IP is unsustainable.

"As we've seen with all the layoffs, developers are disposable, whether you make a hit game or not," Oshry says. "What is a hit? Your game can sell millions of copies, but it doesn't balance the balance sheet. So everybody gets laid off. Imagine working for six years on a game, it's not the game you wanted to make anyway, and then you get laid off because it's not the game that sells. And you're like, ‘Well, maybe it would have been if it was the game we wanted to make, and not the game that had to ship, like a Wolverine.’

"People are always like, ‘Oh, the industry is dying and imploding’. We're doing fine. I guess we're the lucky ones. But I think we made our own luck by making the kind of games we want to make, and knowing that they'll sell to the kind of people who like our games."

Epic intends to launch Fortnite on Linux, but first, it's "rebuilding Easy Anti-Cheat" to support the move.

"Once [EAC Linux v2 is] working with a critical mass of distro maintainers, we'll bring Fortnite to Linux via the Epic Games Launcher," the company announced. "We'll also make these improvements available to other developers so they can bring their games to Linux players."

More PC games than ever are playable on Linux, thanks in part to Valve's Proton emulation, which allows many Windows games to be played on SteamOS and has been essential to the Steam Deck's success. But some of the biggest multiplayer games have been holdouts, because opening the doors to Linux represents a security and cheating risk.

For example, former Facepunch COO Alistair McFarlane said last year that the studio's popular survival game, Rust, was unsupported on Linux because of cheating.

"There are no plans to support Proton or Linux," McFarlane said at the time. "It's a vector for cheat developers, and one that would be poorly maintained by both us and EAC due to the low user base. When we stopped support for Linux, we saw more cheat users exploiting Linux, than actual legitimate users."

Epic's move could potentially change that calculation for Rust and other games.

One hurdle: Most of the people I know who play games on Linux do so on a Steam Deck, but according to an Epic blog post that goes into the plan's technical details, the Steam Deck does not currently support the new EAC Linux v2 solution. Epic says that it is "actively talking with Valve" about making it happen.

Regarding Fortnite specifically, game security engineering director Rick Deist told PC Gamer on a call this week that Epic is "investigating compatibility with Steam Deck and SteamOS devices." (In related news, Epic has released a new Epic Games Store client which includes a Linux version for the first time.)

"We want to let players play where they want to play as much as possible," said Deist.

God, life is stressful. There's too much to do and too few hours in the day to do it. So when I get a couple of hours of free time in the evening I have to be pretty mindful of what I do, and let me tell you getting domed in Arc Raiders by some rando hiding in a bush is not at the top of my list.

It's a shame, because I love the world of Arc Raiders. I love its mystery, its grandiose landscapes, and its bizarre communal storytelling that you just can't get in most games. But there's finally a solution: the PvE test.

Embark teased the test a few weeks ago, finally admitting that due to a large portion of its audience favouring a more passive approach to the game, it would test out a temporary PvE toggle . While Frozen Trail released a few days ago, the PvE test has only gone live now, and it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Dropping into Pendola Pass has never been so chill, well, it's more chill than usual; as soon as I came out of my bunker I was met with hellfire raining down on me and the pinging of bullets as they shot past my face while a couple of players attempted to take down the newer arc, a Bully. 'Ok' I thought to myself, 'I guess I'll start here'.

The Bully isn't anywhere near as lethal as a Queen but it's tankier than I expected it to be for its size as it ate my Wolfpack grenade like it was nothing. I hadn't come equipped for a fight like this but thanks to the growing group of curious raiders we managed to take it down before long. It may sound boring to someone who loves the adrenaline dump of PvP, but for someone who just wants to explore the map, take down arcs, and perhaps help out their fellow raider along the way this experience right here is golden.

Instead of shuffling around bushes and hiding in the shadows I feel relatively free to wander about the surface and actually take in the surrounding views. You still have to be careful of arcs, but not having your blood run cold when you hear footsteps closing in to your location is such a welcome change.

In fact, it's quite the opposite now, hearing raiders close by reassures me that if things were to go wrong, someone would help—which is especially nice when arcs in the PvE mode will finish you off if they catch you moving while downed. After taking out a number of arcs on my way to the Observatory my hubris was bolstered, so when I saw the new Skulker, a seemingly small and insignificant enemy, I thought that it would be easy pickings. I was wrong.

Maybe I was just unlucky, but this Skulker had a couple of other friends with it, and it took way more ammo than I thought to take it down. I was pinned behind a couple of crates, quickly going through all my reserves and trying to come up with an exit strategy when I heard gunfire. I have no idea where it came from, perhaps it was an angel from above, but a stranger saw I was in need of assistance, helped take the Skulkers out, and then moved on.

They were gone before I could say thank you, so I decided to pay it forward instead. On my way to the extract I saw a bunch of arcs swarming an outbuilding, I didn't have much ammo left but I still wanted to help, so help I did. I started taking pot shots at some of the Wasps to distract them away from the shed and before long another raider popped their head out and together we took them out. Nothing was said, but after a thankful wave we went our separate ways and I extracted back to Speranza.

As I said before, I love Arc Raiders for its world, action, and crafting, but it also just feels really nice to help without the worry that the person you've just saved may shoot you in the back of the head and ruin any faith in humanity you had left. The PvE test is a welcome change of pace, and I'll be playing it almost exclusively while I still have the chance.

Grand Theft Auto 6, originally slated to be released back in May, was delayed to November—the reason given at the time was "to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve". And while that still very much holds true, the reality of the game's scope and stature was apparently kinda terrifying from a production standpoint.

Speaking with Bloomberg, co-head of development Rob Nelson commented on one reason for the delay—the amount of NPCs that were required to populate Leonida: "The projections they were giving us were horrifying." The solution? A kind of NPC emergency room, an entire studio set up in LA solely designed to handle the workload.

Another development co-head, Phil Hooker, comments: "I think when it became apparent that some areas weren’t going to make it, that’s when we decided to make the shift of date. We could hit that schedule, but it won’t be the game we want to make."

Being perfectly candid, for a moment: This fills me both with a sense of dread and relief. The former is acquired from the same residual existential fear I felt back in May of last year. Namely, the fact that videogames probably aren't meant to look this pretty or be this sprawling—that the industry simply cannot support them, and that GTA 6 is going to be the last of its kind.

The relief comes from the fact that, in an industry culture seemingly determined to figure out how to push creatives out of their seats as quickly as possible with AI? That a bunch of actual writers and producers were brought in to handle the load. There's this perception that background details in video games can be automated because, well, they're background details—they're not important, surely?

But in my humble opinion, those are, in fact, the details you want to get right. The background chatter and worldbuilding of a game is important because it'll lend said game its texture, even if you're just parodying Florida.

GTA 6 will be a better game because, when its developers panicked, Rockstar (which doesn't have the brightest industry track record, let's be clear) didn't cheap out on the massive writing load it'd accidentally saddled itself with, and that's commendable in a vacuum.

Now, is it healthy or normal that an industry giant can be so large it can pop-up an entire studio in LA full of writers just to handle a temporary task? Probably not, and it's certainly not something that's gonna last, particularly not at the industry's current price-point.

Dan Houser is a co-founder of Rockstar Games and so I would never presume to tell him he's wrong about any of the games Rockstar has made—except in this one particular instance, where I feel obligated to step up and say, 'Dan, I'm sorry bud, but you're wrong.'

The game in question is Max Payne 3, on which Houser played a central role, and one he seems rather down on: In an interview with IGN, he said the game was a "failure" because, simply put, he's not Sam Lake, the Remedy creative director who wrote the first two Max Payne games.

As a very linear game, Max Payne 3 "was a little different" from the open world GTA games he was accustomed to, Houser said, but he also really enjoyed the experience. "I loved what we did design-wise, the way the game didn't have loads, the way it felt like a 12-hour movie, some of the visual stuff we did with words on screen.

Alas, he continued, "I felt we were creating a really cool digital noir experience, and the consensus at the time was that people hated it.

"So I got that completely wrong," Houser said. "I know Sam Lake well, and he's a very good guy and really talented. I thought we'd done a good job of doing another Max Payne game. Some people liked it; lots didn't. So we got it wrong, or I got it wrong. I failed. My bit was not a success.

"The game is beautifully made, and it wasn't as successful as it should have been. So I would say a large amount of that failure was on me as one of the people making the decisions and also as the writer, when people really missed his writing."

Max Payne 3 is a really interesting case study because it's very much a Max Payne game—grim and gritty, filled with bullet time, body drops, and snappy commentary about how much life sucks—but it's also a full-on Rockstar game, and thus a very different vibe from the previous two entries in the series. Fans who were expecting more of the same—or insisting on it, really—were bound to be disappointed.

But Max Payne 3 itself is nothing short of a brilliant, powerhouse cinematic shooter. It really does feel like "a 12-hour movie," powered by lush cut scenes, a brilliant soundtrack by industrial rock group Health, and great performances across the board, in particular from James McCaffrey in the title role.

With all due respect to Remedy, this is where McCaffrey really hit his stride, digging deep to deliver some truly great lines:

• I wouldn't know right from wrong if one of them was helping the poor and the other was banging my sister.
• Look at me, I'm standing in a nightclub, listening to music I can't stand, I'm five thousand miles from home, I'm armed, and I'm drinking. You don't want to listen to advice from me, amigo.
• I had a hole in my second favourite drinking arm, and the only way we were likely to get Fabiana back now was in instalments.

• I'd killed more cops than cholesterol and still no sign of Becker. It wasn't the first time it dawned on me I should probably have gone over the plan in more detail, but it was too late for that now.
• I was a dumb American in a place where dumb Americans are less popular than the clap.
• I'd put a big shit-eating grin on my face and let these assholes take turns trying to kill me. That's my style and it's too late in the day to hope for change.

• We'd half destroyed Sao Paulo's most hallowed place of worship. Looking back it was strange how the cops never showed up. But things had a habit of only making sense to me looking back, long after I'd run out of time to fix them.
• I'd been sitting at the bar for three hours, or about five years, depending on how you looked at things. I tried not to look at things.

It is fair to say that Max Payne 3 wasn't a massive commercial success: In 2012, publisher Take-Two Interactive said sales of the game came in "lower than expected," resulting in a significantly increased net loss for the quarter. But that's hardly the only measure of success, and I think it's notable that Take-Two said the same, at the same time, about Spec Ops: The Line, a game widely heralded, then and now, for its daring, subversive narrative.

Max Payne 3 was a slower burn, but I think the passage of time has given us a far better perspective on what Rockstar actually delivered: As former PC Gamer writer Andy Kelly wrote a full decade ago, "Over the years I’ve developed a greater appreciation for the risks Rockstar took in breaking Remedy’s established, and beloved, mould."

"It’s a radical departure, but it works," the other Andy wrote in his very correct take on Max Payne 3. "It’s always interesting to see a familiar character thrust into an unfamiliar situation, and Max is hilariously out of place in Brazil. As if being a white American in a favela didn’t draw enough unwanted attention, he makes his life even more difficult by wearing the loudest Hawaiian shirt imaginable. He was comfortable in New York, but here he’s an outsider, and the game plays up to it brilliantly."

And so, Dan, with all due respect, I have to say, 'I'm sorry bud, but you're wrong.' Max Payne 3 may have been divisive in its time, and it may not have been the big hit you were hoping for, but I sure wouldn't call it a failure. I'd say Rockstar, and you, absolutely nailed it.