First reported by Game Informer, Warner Bros. Discovery provided the slightest of acknowledgements that a sequel to 2023's Hogwarts Legacy is in the works as part of a recent letter to its shareholders.

It's the sort of victory lap / "Gentlemen, to money!" deal you usually expect of the form, and I cannot overstate how tiny the HogsLegs mention is. "We expect Games [capitalization theirs] to more meaningfully contribute to segment profitability going forward as our pipeline expands," the company wrote, "including the second installment of Hogwarts Legacy."

So, it exists⁠—which you probably could have guessed based on the first game's' explosive sales success back when it launched. God willing, the sequel will meaningfully contribute to segment profitability going forward.

PCG news writer Morgan Park liked Hogwarts Legacy well enough in his review, but found the experience soured by the real world context of its release. The wholesome adventures of Harry Potter and his assorted demi-human companions (who may or may not have been buried under an oil pipeline) have taken a darker cast with each passing year due to the strident anti-transgender political activism of Potter author J. K. Rowling, who still owns and profits from the Potter IP.

It's not just icky public statements or whatever: Rowling has been a leading voice in the global movement to get so worked up about trans people and bathrooms that you pass discriminatory laws about it. She has put that Potter money where her mouth is as a financial backer of anti-trans causes in the United Kingdom, and recently threatened to sue Amnesty International over its criticism of a Rowling-funded, trans-exclusionary women's support network.

Nasty stuff, and Rowling's agenda has already cast a pall over HBO's coming adaptation of the original books. The nastiness certainly didn't hurt Hogwarts Legacy's own prospects back in 2023, but anti-trans persecution has only grown more acute⁠—and Rowling more personally associated with it⁠—in the intervening years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hate-love relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's all about bias, baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet the Khajiit

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

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

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

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

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

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

Local Color

Other mods that pair well with this dish

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

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

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

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

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

Khajiit has quests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CD Projekt has confirmed that nine employees working on The Witcher spinoff Project Sirius have been laid off, saying it has "adjusted the size of the Sirius team to reflect the project's needs at this stage of development."

"As a result, four people in Boston and five in Warsaw are leaving the company, while nine others have been invited to internal recruitment processes for potential roles on other CD Projekt Red projects," a rep said of the cuts, first reported by Kotaku.

It hasn't been a smooth ride for Project Sirius, which we first learned about in 2021 when CD Projekt acquired The Molasses Flood to work on an "ambitious project" based on one of CDPR's existing properties. The plan at the time was to keep The Molasses Flood operating as a distinct entity with its own "identity," but that fell to the wayside in 2025 when CD Projekt fully absorbed the studio into its own structure.

That move followed trouble with Sirius that ultimately led to a reboot and "updated direction" for the game. Five years after The Molasses Flood acquisition, we still know virtually nothing about the game—its proper title hasn't even been revealed yet.

And while the number of people being laid off is small compared to the massive cuts at companies like Xbox and Electronic Arts, 18 employees represents a significant chunk of the Sirius development team. CD Projekt said in its Q1 2026 financial report that 83 people were working on the game, meaning that more than 20% of the team has been cut.

Oblivion Remastered has led a rather odd post-release life. The closest we've got to a new Elder Scrolls since 2011 released in April last year, received a fair amount of acclaim, then essentially went silent. It twitched into activity a couple of times in the months following its release for patches 1.1 and 1.2, but since then? Nada, and the game still has its fair share of performance woes and missing quality-of-life features.

But take heart, because a year after its last patch, Bethesda has remembered it released an Elder Scrolls game. In the wake of Oblivion Remastered's Switch 2 release—which reportedly runs rather well—the studio took to X to promise players that it's working on getting the improvements it made for the game's Switch version ported over to other platforms.

"We've heard your feedback asking for an additional patch for Oblivion Remastered," wrote Bethesda. "The Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game has a number of optimizations that we are looking into bringing to other platforms and we will share more when we are able."

Which is good, of course, but it is a touch absurd that an Elder Scrolls release has spent a full year in stone-cold silence, with fans unsure as to whether anything was going to happen to the game ever again. Bethesda even maintained a 'suggestions for Oblivion Remastered' channel in its official Discord that whole time, which gradually went from earnest suggestions for new content and improvements to players imploring the studio not to abandon the game entirely.

I would hope, but not expect, that porting over the optimisations from Oblivion Remastered's Switch 2 version would not be the last we hear of the game. Oblivion's a classic—and one of the funniest games ever made—it deserves more care and attention than it's getting right now.

Good news for the Bethesda RPG-starved: The Elder Scrolls 6 is significantly more corporeal now than it was eight years ago, when Todd Howard appeared at E3 (RIP) to announce it with nothing but a logo, a mountain range, and some rousing music. A couple months after Xbox CCO Matt Booty said the game "looks amazing," CEO Asha Sharma went to Bethesda to watch a "live playthrough" that she has now called "incredible."

This praise may come as a shock to the approximately zero people who expected the head of Xbox to publicly say the publisher's one guaranteed upcoming blockbuster looked like doggy doo doo. (Xbox's CEO also notably did not address the hundreds of flags placed outside the office by the Bethesda Game Studios union, each representing a worker from the studio laid off in Xbox's recent, brutal cuts).

Sharma praised the "scale and grandeur" but said "the story is even greater," which feels like a borderline preposterous statement to make after a brief live demo of an RPG destined to be dozens of hours long. Her tweet offers no actual new information about the game, but does reaffirm that the head of Xbox is going to rizz up Xbox games whenever the opportunity arises.

But wait... does her tweet actually contain a tiny scrap of new information about The Elder Scrolls 6? That depends on what you make of the eight asterisks that follow the name and colon. Do they merely symbolize a placeholder for the title, or do they represent a cryptic clue that whatever the game's subtitle is, it's exactly eight letters?

PC Gamer's Elder Scrolls loremaster Jody Macgregor took his best guess as to where TES6 will be located back in 2018, with High Rock and Hammerfell the two leading theories. With those in mind, we've got a few of our best guesses at the title in a poll for your approval.

If you're not up on your Elder Scrolls lore, allow Jody to explain the meaning behind a few of these candidates:

• Dominion: The Aldmeri Dominion was heavily foreshadowed as a future threat in Skyrim, and the name Dominion nicely mirrors Oblivion.
• Sentinel: The rumored codename for The Elder Scrolls 6 is Guardian, a synonym for the name of this city (capital of a kingdom of the same name) on The Iliac Bay.
• High Rock: As teased in Starfield, a strong candidate for TES6's setting.
• Redguard: While already used as the subtitle of a spinoff, the name of the people who inhabit the area it's set in would fit here as well.
• Evermore: A city in High Rock close to the border of Hammerfell, it would make a convenient starting location and its name sounds cool.
• Balfiera: These islands in the Iliac Bay might be part of The Elder Scrolls 6, but as a videogame name it doesn't look great on the page.

That's all we've got until the next cryptic clue comes down the pike. If you've got your own idea, let us know below.

We're up to our necks in Persona. Whichever entry you're keen on, there's something for you. Persona 3? Enjoy the port of Persona 3 Portable, or the Persona 3 remake, or its Episode Aigis DLC. Enjoy Persona 4? Why, that's getting a flashy remake of its own. Or maybe you're a Persona 5 fan? Revel in the veritable mountain of P5-themed stuff that is sprinkled all across videogames like the fallout of a meteor strike.

Oh, unless you like Persona 1 and/or 2, of course, in which case please return to your hole and cease speaking.

So it goes. Despite being the games most obviously in need of a gloss-up, Persona's PS1-era games have never gotten much love from Atlus and Sega. But maybe that could change? In a recent chat with GamerBraves, Persona series producer Kazuhisa Wada said that—so far as he's concerned—Persona 1 and 2 remakes are damn-near a necessity.

"At this point, I can’t say for sure [if Persona 1 and 2 remakes will happen]," said Wada, but added that "personally, I think it’s something we should definitely do. I think we have to do it."

Of course, right now, Wada and Atlus are preoccupied with Persona 4 Revival, which comes out in February next year. “Persona 4 is, personally, a very important work for me, a very important title, and I think it’s a title that speaks to a lot of people within the series as well."

It's not shocking that the Persona team's focus has been fixated on 3, 4, and 5. P3 was the game that knocked the series into the social sim high school drama we all associate it with. P1 and P2, meanwhile, were different beasts, more in line with the Shin Megami Tensei games the Persona series originally sprang from than later entries. I'd be very keen to get a chance to play them on modern systems.

Sovereign Tower is so much more than it seems—which feels rather appropriate for a game where you play an itinerant leper who accidentally becomes the ruler of a magical kingdom, the titular Sovereign. Nobody is quite sure what to make of you, especially if, like me, you start suggesting eating cats or recruit a literal wolf to join your Knights of the Roundtable.

At first glance this is a cosy visual novel management game with a soft colour palette and handsome art. You sit on your throne listening to requests, demands and grievances, and then you send out your growing gaggle of knights on quests in an attempt to keep everyone happy.

But Sovereign Tower quickly reveals itself to be a complicated juggling act where nearly everyone needs your help, and those who don't probably want to kill you. There are fires everywhere, and you'll never have enough knights to put them all out.

It takes some of the fundamentals of the excellent Reigns series, but stretches them out, filling the space with more elaborate storylines, surprisingly meaty roleplaying systems and, most importantly, time travel.

Time to kill

Time is the dreadful spectre looming over Sovereign Tower. Most quests can be completed whenever you want, or simply ignored, but each act features main quests and random emergency quests that must be tackled within an allotted timeframe. Sometimes these are also tied to the satisfaction level of the various classes of your citizenry—scholars, merchants, nobles and the people—or the wealth contained in your treasury.

So you'll need to send out your knights in time, and keep your people happy and your economy strong. That's easier said than done.

If you want to get more nobles on your side, you might have to piss off the merchants. If you want a full treasury, how are you going to pay for your knights' armour to be repaired, or equip them with expensive magical equipment and fast horses? And if you're too cheap, how are your knights going to succeed in their quests?

Quests also challenge specific abilities—strength, agility, charisma, luck, magic and wit. You're not going to want to send a scrawny magical knight on a quest that involves lifting heavy objects. And your brawniest warrior might have a tricky time taking down a rogue necromancer.

Each adventure also contains certain keywords that relate to the attributes and preferences of your knights. Angelica, the first knight you'll recruit, loves animals. So if the quest involves killing a bunch of critters, she might not be your first choice. On the other hand, she might be the perfect choice, with her attribute allowing her to pacify the animals without bloodshed. Quests can have unexpected outcomes, which means that it's worth sometimes going with your gut and taking a risky punt.

Preferences work differently. One of Angelica's preferences is diplomacy, so if you send her to end a dispute between some druids and a mob of angry peasants, this will make her happy. She loves mediation (yes, she's a dork). Keep their satisfaction high and your knights will be loyal even as you make the worst possible decisions. Let it drop, however, and you might notice some empty spaces around the Roundtable.

There's one more wrinkle: you don't automatically get a full list of everyone's attributes and preferences. As the Sovereign you might have a lot of power, but that doesn't mean you immediately know everything about your employees. You'll need to hang out with them, then—spend a bit of time getting to know them. Or you can just get one of your advisors to spy on them.

Sovereign Tower manages to make what could have been disparate management, roleplaying and relationship systems feel incredibly cohesive—and crucially, fun to explore and exploit. Key to this is the fact that all your knights have a degree of agency that elevates them above mere pawns. They can surprise you on quests, or even come to you with alternative solutions to difficult problems.

It's exclusively thanks to one of my knights that we defeated an intimidating rival. He suggested we kidnap the guy's son to put him off his game. He's also the reason I got the option to assassinate a rebel leader instead of negotiating with her. And, off the record, that horse race I won? Where all the other competitors mysteriously died? Yeah, he might have had something to do with it.

OK, so your people dig you, you've got an enviable roster of talented knights, you're fabulously wealthy, that must be all you need to worry about, right? Sorry, no. Life is unfair.

Those time-sensitive quests I mentioned before will sometimes just appear out of the blue. A village is about to be destroyed by a flood! Send your knights to help in one turn! But, oh dear, all the knights who could save the day are already busy on a three-day adventure. I guess the village is going to become a water park.

Give me more time

It can often feel like you're only ever a few turns away from a daunting crisis. The murder of a knight, a betrayal, a kidnapping, a civil war—sometimes you'll be able to resolve them, sometimes you won't. Luckily, a lot of crises allow you to just carry on even if you don't find a solution. But you might not be happy with the results. And that's where time travel comes in.

Locked in a crypt in the bowels of your tower sits a magical artefact possessed by a powerful demon. Specifically, it has the power to turn back the clock—whenever you want. If, you know, you're cool with working with a demon who is maybe a little bit too enthusiastic about breaking the timeline.

The beauty of this time travel system is that the game acknowledges your foreknowledge constantly. New dialogue options and actions appear, allowing you to use what you learned in the now-defunct timeline to make changes big and small. There's a lot of "I know what you're going to say", which can result in some entertaining reactions, and it also means you get to skip a lot of exposition and dialogue you've already read before. But the big stuff is game changing.

You can thwart murders, end wars before they begin, unite warring factions, and simply make different decisions that completely change the character of your playthrough. But it's not as simple as just fixing all of your mistakes.

Sure, you probably don't want one of your knights to get murdered. But if you turn back time, then you're killing off all the possibilities that stemmed from that event—and some of them might have been positive. Fiddling with the timeline means you might never meet certain knights, or you might miss out on alliances or magical artefacts that would bolster your power considerably.

So you can ignore this tantalising power, letting the cards fall where they may, and just deal with the consequences. Developer Wild Wits has taken a big risk by letting you simply not engage with the game's strongest mechanic—but its confidence in the rest of its systems has paid off.

In my first playthrough, I only fiddled with time once. I was constantly being tempted, wrestling with these cosmic, ethical conundrums, so it's not like the time travel system ceases to have an impact just because you abstain. Even without mucking around with Sovereign Tower's big hook, I was still smitten.

The playful writing, eccentric characters and tense juggling act left me riveted. It's simply a great management game, visual novel and RPG.

Now, though, I am taking a leaf out of The Master's book, always asking myself what Doctor Who's archrival would do. At the end of my first playthrough, I opted to travel right back to the start, using my knowledge of the future to change everything. But even with this power, I can't always predict how the new paths will play out, prompting me to keep hopping back, over and over again, until the timeline is just right. For me, at least.

Playing Sovereign Tower has been a damn delight—the most fun I've had at my desk all year. And I fully intend to keep playing. I've got mistakes to fix, and an adorable wolf barking at me, wanting to bound off on another adventure.

In a new episode of The Examined Game podcast (spotted by GamesRadar), longtime Bethesda environment artist and The Axis Unseen dev Nate Purkeypile spoke about his time at the legendary studio, including what he found to be Starfield's biggest design misstep.

Purkeypile had the title of "environment artist" at Bethesda, but his work seems to have extended into what would traditionally be considered level design. In addition to setting up the layout for Starfield's city of Neon⁠—which remained largely the same in the released game, according to Purkeypile⁠—the dev spoke about his contributions to Little Lamplight and Diamond City in Fallouts 3 and 4. He left Bethesda a year into Starfield's development, and released his first solo game, The Axis Unseen, in 2024.

Purkeypile spoke about the importance of deliberate design and points of interest in making areas late in the interview. "I think it's good to spend as little time as possible in menus, especially when it comes to exploration like that," said Purkeypile. Host Steven Lake asked if this was an issue Purkeypile saw coming in Starfield's development, a more disjointed, menu-driven system of travel.

"It's very accurate that if I was in charge of Starfield, I would not have done it that way at all," the developer asserted. "I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts," something that sounds like Obsidian's approach to The Outer Worlds. "Even early on, I was drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those procedural planets with repeated dungeons panned out.

"I was like, I don't think this is a good idea. If you're going to do the thousands of planets thing, you really need to go the full No Man's Sky route and have it actually be generating unique content all the time, not just stitching stuff together in slightly different ways. That's not procedural. You go to like the major city in Starfield and it's huge, but then like outside the city, there's nothing. And it's like this doesn't even make sense as a world."

This is certainly a big stumbling block I encountered playing Starfield, but I'm bummed to see Mass Effect 1 catching strays⁠—it feels like I'm the only person in the world who liked ME1's uncharted worlds. But even here, I see a distinction from Starfield. There were maybe two dozen procedurally generated planets in Mass Effect, and they contrasted sharply with the more structured gameplay in the main story.

Back to Starfield, this has been a frequent topic of conversation on the PC Gamer team: There's not really a Starfield equivalent to being on your way to Riften, only to get distracted by a dozen different sidequests en route. It's a problem that, hopefully as a matter of basic structure, we won't encounter in Fallout 5 or The Elder Scrolls 6. Elsewhere in the same interview, Purkeypile talked about how he's looking forward to how the Fallout 3 remaster will change the game.

So I've recently given in and decided I won't be waiting for Deltarune's final chapter before I played it all in one go—too many of my mates were talking about it, so I sat my butt down to get ahead of the invariable, accidental spoilers and chew through chapters one to five.

You don't need me to tell you that Toby Fox, developer of Deltarune (and Undertale preceding it) is an excellent composer. The dude made Megalovania, which has somehow survived being piledrivered into memedom, even by the Pope of all people, and still, inevitably, slaps. But the rest of his discography is flooded with bangers. The man can work a leitmotif, lemme tell ya.

Deltarune is no different, though for this Soundtrack Sunday, I want to focus heavily on one song from it: The Third Sanctuary, because this song might be one of my favourite tunes in a videogame ever. I cannot stop listening to this thing, even if it's a nightmarish affront to rhythm.

Spoilers for Chapter 4, if you've not played it yet.

The Third Sanctuary plays in Chapter 4 during the recreation of the church dark world, spawned from the hands of your good time pal and occasional chalk-eating high school dinosaur friend (I promise you this makes perfect sense if you play the game) Susie.

This attempt at recreation is somewhat flawed—see, a dark world in Deltarune is a reflection of the objects around it, who turn into its inhabitants, but it's also a reflection of the person who created it. Susie is uncertain and conflicted for so many reasons I could write a whole other article on them.

An uncertain, mysterious prophecy weighing overhead that Susie has sworn to defy. A realisation that her new mentor figure died years ago, his ashes scattered over a hammer in the next room over. The dark world she creates is a mirror to the one the chapter primarily takes place in, reflecting this—and The Third Sanctuary represents this fragile ground by, well, just give it a listen.

Even if you don't know anything about how music is constructed, you can sense the trepidation and strangeness in it—the starting, the stopping. The next bar of the song starts just a half-heartbeat before (or after) you think it's gonna.

That's due to its use of unusual time signatures, which I'll try my best to explain. A time signature is a representation of rhythm in a song, the most ubiquitous form being 4/4, four beats in each bar. The second (bottom) number represents what kind of beats they are, also known as the note value, and the first (top) number represents how many of them are in a bar.

Britney Spear's "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is a good 4/4 song to get your brain around the concept—sing the titular line to yourself while counting to four, and you'll feel the rhythm: Hit(1) me Ba(2)-by One(3) more time(4)!

Another time signature you might be familiar with is 3/4 time, where there are three beats in a bar—this is what most waltzes are constructed out of (bum-BAH-BAH, bum-BAH-BAH). There's also 5/4, which is most famously associated with the Mission Impossible theme tune.

I won't go too far into the second number, but to keep it very simple: It's always 2, 4, 8, or 16—2 is a half-note, 4 is a quarter-note, and so on. These can be interchangeable, for instance, you could write a 3/4 song as a 3/8 song, if you wanted—you'd just have to adjust the length of the notes accordingly, but because the number of beats in a bar isn't changing, they can be functionally identical-sounding.

So, what time signature does The Third Sanctuary use? Yes. Yes is the answer.

The Third Sanctuary starts out in 9/4 time, then jolts to 11/8 time with a random 4/8 thrown in there (because why not), interludes with 5/4, back to 11/8, jumpscares you with two bars of 12/8, back to 5/4 for a bit, and then the finale: A dance between 12/8 and 11/8, alternating, because who needs to be able to keep track of anything.

You can use an excellent visualiser, created by YouTuber 17a and embedded above, to keep track—and while this might seem like utter madness, Toby Fox isn't just goofing off here and attempting to make drum cover artists have a heart attack, he's using it to tell a story.

This chapter's been out for a while now, so I am by no means the only person to come up with this analysis. But The Third Sanctuary's time signatures of 12/8 and 11/8 don't just clash with each other, they slowly come together over the course of the song, as though comforting each other in the darkness of Chapter 4—quite fittingly, finding each other in the dark.

The melodies present in those final bars swell and grow hopeful, despite the uncertain, stuttering strangeness of the time signatures they're trapped in. More importantly, the main melody bridges the gap between those time signatures and flows over them in a determined way, just like Susie herself after discovering the grim truth of a (yet-to-be-revealed) prophecy.

The Third Sanctuary is incredible not just because it sounds good in spite of its time signatures, but because through them it tells the story of the entire chapter. When a friend of mine showed their musician pal the track, their analysis pretty much accurately summed up the major themes of the story despite the fact they'd never played it.

And then there's the covers and the fan songs that have spun out of it. For the former, I'd like to share this lovely rendition by the Live Videogame Orchestra—something about hearing actual, breathing musicians manage to get a handle on the track is kinda magical.

But there's also fan-inspired renditions. The hilariously-named 5ndth Sanctuary by IamDaDogeOfDaFuture is one of my favourites, having a wild run from 11/8, up to 15/8, up to 29/8—and still somehow managing to tickle my brain in a pleasing way. Here's the song impossibly mashed into 4/4. Here's the song in 5/4. People are playing with time and it's awesome.

Toby Fox has successfully created his own little genre-pod of Math Rock enthusiasts in Deltarune's fanbase, and I couldn't be more delighted. The Third Sanctuary is an utter mess, it's a drummer's nightmare, and it's also one of the most thoughtful moments of storytelling in a videogame, one that's inspired countless of time-signature mad renditions.

I leave you with 4rd (not a typo) Sanctuary. This actually isn't a fan-song, it's a version Toby put in Chapter 5. I'm not analysing it in this article, I've got other things to do, but I'd like you to listen to it anyway.

A Game of Thrones CRPG is such an obvious licensing fit and yet, culturally and corporately, always appears to be two zigs and a zag away from actually happening.

Perhaps Warhorse Studios was the most likely candidate, in the wake of two unflinching medieval simulations under the Kingdom Come banner. But the Czech studio's owner, Embracer, is also cradling the clumsily named Middle-earth Enterprises, and so Warhorse's future belongs to The Lord of the Rings. As for that other RPG powerhouse, Obsidian? I've seen Josh Sawyer complain too many times from his social media armchair about HBO's unrealistic battle formations to expect that will ever happen.

And so we turn to history, just as George RR has done so many times when sourcing inspiration for his novels. Turn the clock back to 2012 and you'll discover the largely forgotten Game of Thrones—its place in the annals not helped by the fact that Telltale released a game with the exact same name just two years later.

2012's Game of Thrones was a Cyanide production, one of the Parisian developer's long list of eurojanky projects with a fantastical bent. Though today best known for Styx and Blood Bowl—the latter of which manages to be both mechanically and thematically crunchy, down to the bones—the studio was experimenting at the time with CRPGs. In the same year as Game of Thrones came Confrontation, set in the universe of a French tabletop wargame, and Of Orcs and Men, a Styx predecessor in which you played a chunky greenskin.

All three launched to mixed reviews, but it seems to me that Game of Thrones is the pick of the bunch—low-budget and coarsely textured, but elevated by its commitment to weaving a story through the dense fabric of Westeros. This is, I suspect, partly down to the fact that it wasn't conceived as a television tie-in.

Yes, you'll come across the voices and likenesses of HBO actors while pottering around the Gift and King's Landing. A smug rendering of Lena Headey is stinking up the throne room. The Night's Watch is held together by James Cosmo's Commander Mormont. And at a critical moment, you'll benefit from being swept up in the mystery machinations of Conleth Hill's Lord Varys. But otherwise, it's evident that Cyanide's staff had their noses buried deep in the novels.

That's most apparent in the Game of Thrones RPG's structure: you'll flit back and forth between two perspectives, chapter by chapter. It's a common device in fantasy literature, but far less so in our own medium, and has a profound impact on the way the game is experienced. For one thing, you're embodying two different character classes: a fire-flinging priest of R'hllor, who shares his unusual choice of god with the red witch Melisandre, and a brother of the Watch who deals in mace-swings and headbutts.

Cyanide takes full advantage of the split to tell its tale from different angles. While you begin the game battling apparently unconnected plights, the two gradually intersect, and it becomes apparent that your dual protagonists might not share the same interests. The priest loses his titles, and must become a Lannister lapdog if he has any hope of regaining his seat as a lord of the realm. Meanwhile, your man in the north finds himself hunting down lapdogs to protect the Night's Watch from coming apart at the seams. As it turns out, a handful of gold can be all it takes to turn a Brother against his fellows. And the Lannisters are famous for their access to gold.

The action kicks off a month or two before the opening stages of HBO's Game of Thrones, which gives you a front row seat to the events that precipitate war in Westeros. Robert Baratheon is still stumbling around, filling his belly with boars that haven't yet managed to gore him. And Cersei Lannister is busy moving chess pieces around the board. You might not be a pawn, but you certainly play one of her knights, and quickly wind up complicit in dark schemes.

Game adaptations often take place in the margins of their parent properties, and the Game of Thrones RPG might have felt peripheral to the point of triviality. But George RR Martin has always embraced the agency of bit players, expanding rather than reducing the cast of his stories over time, and that spirit allows you to feel part of something bigger here. It helps that Cyanide's storytelling is surprisingly tight for a studio which, up til this point, hadn't been known for narrative. Its dialogue is direct and upfront with its intrigue—a necessary frankness against the backdrop of a world dense with knotted histories. The lead performances, meanwhile, are dripping with theatrical, bassy resonance.

Mind you, a lot of the other voice performances are quite rubbish—presumably recorded by a tiny cast, desperately looking within themselves for a fourth or fifth accent that could feasibly be ascribed to a peasant in Flea Bottom. And I'd be lying if I said the budget couldn't be felt in other ways: the unremarkable streets of a King's Landing that's more Doncaster than Dubrovnik; the repeated visits to nondescript parts of Westeros; the fuzzy aesthetic tricks that developers often used to cover a multitude of fidelity sins during the Xbox 360 era.

But I'm quite fond of an element that was singled out for some of the strongest criticism in reviews of the time: the combat system.

Granted, I grew up on real-time-with-pause brawls. It came in the millennial starter pack with MSN Messenger and a now-defunct AOL email account, so I'm forgiving where others might be frustrated. But if you ask me, Cyanide squeezes real tension out of throwing you into scenarios where you're sweaty and surrounded—desperately trying to tagteam stuns and knockdowns with some temporary companion who unhelpfully spent his youth perfecting archery before joining you shoulder-to-shoulder in a tight dungeon. I even quite like the bits where, as a shapeshifter, you take control of a dog to rip the throats out of unobservant guards, and follow scents to root out betrayal in the Night's Watch.

Like a clutch of dragon eggs, Cyanide's Game of Thrones is a bag of mixed blessings. Sometimes when I'm strolling through Castle Black, I hear that giveaway sign of an underbaked noughties RPG: a supposed old man, speaking with the voice of an overworked 30-year-old voice actor. And in those moments, I wonder whether I might eventually ditch this genre also-ran for good.

But then I remember that one positive quality of noughties RPG fandom was that we accepted imperfection when presented with peculiar mechanics and fascinating worlds. And that, when I look at the far more lavish spectacle fighter Game of Thrones: Kingsroad, launched last year, I see almost nothing of the spirit of George RR Martin. Stories set in Westeros should not be smooth and slick. They should shudder and clunk into place, slowly and then all at once, like the tectonic events they depict. And that is what CRPGs are for.

Mark Darrah was a programmer on the original Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, along with Neverwinter Nights and Jade Empire, and served as executive producer of the Dragon Age series from Origins through Inquisition before leaving in 2020—and coming back in 2023 to kick in on The Veilguard. He knows a thing or two about BioWare RPGs, in other words, and speaking to FRVR he said he also knows why Baldur's Gate 3 was such a great sequel—so great that it has overshadowed the games that came before it, made mounts of money, and is still among the most popular games on Steam three years after release.

Darrah reckons that's a direct result of Larian's willingness to do its own thing with the sequel. Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity "feels like an Infinity Engine game," Darrah said (and he's 100% correct on that), and they're great, but Darrah says that's also a very limiting factor: "The reality is that the industry has moved on so much since then that I was like, oh yeah, this is a really faithful adaptation of that and it turns out that I didn’t actually want that anymore."

Larian, on the other hand, "are Baldur’s Gate 2 and Baldur’s Gate 1-flavoured, but they’re also Divine Divinity-flavoured. They are flavoured by their own track record, they are flavoured by what CRPGs have become in the intervening 20 years. So I think it’s a great sequel. I think they did what is the right thing to do given that large of a gap."

Baldur's Gate 3 really is more akin to Larian's Divinity games than its namesakes, and those Divinity games are brilliant RPGs too. Original Sin 2 took our Game of the Year crown in 2017: PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon said at the time that "there's never been an RPG with a story or characters this interesting that you can play co-op with four players," which is also a pretty spot-on description of Baldur's Gate 3.

The problem for Baldur's Gate owner Hasbro is that Larian's work was maybe a little too great: The company now finds itself in possession of a massively lucrative videogame property that nobody wants to touch because, basically, who wants to go on after The Beatles? Darrah has thoughts on that too—basically, do a Fallout: New Vegas with it.

"Get Larian to agree to license out the Divinity Engine and essentially let someone make an oversized expansion pack for Baldur’s Gate 3 and call that Baldur’s Gate 4," Darrah said. "That could work."

Conversely, it could take the approach suggested by PC Gamer editor Fraser Brown: Just don't.

Nobody is particularly surprised anymore when the newest hero or class added to a game ends up being its strongest by far. You can't really be the new flavor of the month without some extra sauce. But sometimes developers don't get the balance right and the new toy gets left on the shelf for other, more exciting options.

This is basically what happened when warlocks debuted in Diablo 4 alongside the release of its Lord of Hatred expansion earlier this year. Despite being a marquee feature of the expansion, warlocks were criminally underpowered compared to the rest of the roster. Other classes–with their newly juiced up skill trees—could smash their way through the game while warlocks were left to limp along in their wake.

Normally, I wouldn't care that much if one class couldn't compete with another in a largely singleplayer game, but warlocks also suffered from having a number of skills that forced them to stand still to cast, disrupting the flow of combat. They were not only weaker than everyone else but clunkier, too—the last thing you want in a fast-paced action RPG like Diablo. Even paladins, the other new Lord of Hatred class, weren't as flimsy as warlocks when they arrived.

Blizzard will be giving warlocks another chance next season. According to people like creator MacroBioBoi, the fussy skills are fixed and the buffs are huge. On the PTR, warlocks are capable of clearing out the hardest dungeon tier in the game even using severely unoptimized gear. In the current season, this was only really possible by exploiting bugs.

Blizzard dumped a ton of buffs into warlock skills and opened up ways to scale their damage that weren't available before. Builds that were mediocre are now cruising through the game without fear. MacroBioBoi showcased a build where you surround yourself with burning skull minions and had no trouble melting through high-level monsters.

A chunk of the warlock's power comes from a new seasonal gem that gradually makes you stronger the more enemies you kill, but MacroBioBoi suspects that even if you were to nerf that gem, warlocks would still be one of the strongest—if not the strongest—classes in the game. And the best part is that their newfound power has been distributed pretty evenly across their skills, so a variety of builds should excel when the season comes out for real.

A Season of the Warlock will no doubt help some players cope with Blizzard's controversial decision to rework the strongest items in the game. Mythic Uniques will continue to function as the new highest tier of items, but will be easier to craft and find than they are in the current season.

We still have no clues on what is missing from the PTR though. Blizzard said the mysterious lack of a new seasonal system (other than the jewels) will be cleared up at BlizzCon. My money's on a seasonal story that will finally tie directly into the main story as we get closer to a third expansion.

Last month, we covered Warhorse Studios' European trademark filings for Kingdom Come Salvation, which provided an early indication of what title we can expect for the third "Kingdom Come adventure" that Warhorse announced was in the works in May. Beyond the name, the filing featured tantalizing language about "services for matching users with computer games," leading to speculation that the next Kingdom Come could include online functionality.

This week, additional Kingdom Come Salvation trademark filings have emerged in the US (via Phrasemaker), containing expanded language about online services. But while it's tempting to read the trademark classification as a promise that there's jolly medieval Bohemian camaraderie in our future, we checked with a videogame IP expert who said we shouldn't get our hopes up.

In both the European and American trademark filings, the sections stirring up speculation are the goods and services classifications specified for the trademark. In addition to the IC 009 classification typically used for videogame trademarks, the filings also classify Kingdom Come Salvation under IC 041—a classification that the World Intellectual Property Organization says covers "services having the basic aim of the entertainment, amusement, or recreation of people," including online gaming services.

In the European filing, the language for the IC 041 classification is fairly general, referring to "online interactive entertainment" and "electronic games services provided by means of a global communication network." While the US filing uses similarly broad terms, it also includes these two eyebrow-raising service descriptions:

• Providing online computer games featuring virtual environments in which users can interact for entertainment purposes
• Providing online computer games featuring virtual worlds in which users can interact for entertainment purposes

While neither of Warhorse's previous Kingdom Come trademark filings included IC 041 classifications, the Salvation filings are "far from a promise that the next Kingdom Come videogame will feature multiplayer," according to videogame IP lawyer Kirk Sigmon.

"As part of our usual cautiousness, IP attorneys generally try to make sure that we file trademarks in enough classes to cover a broad spectrum of how the mark might be used by the company, as well as in view of the fact that certain terms can be read broadly," Sigmon said. "In turn, you can find plenty of examples of non-multiplayer games registered in IC 041."

As an example, Sigmon—who previously walked us through the basics of videogame patent law in the early days of Nintendo's Palworld lawsuit—pointed out the trademark registration for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Despite being a purely singleplayer game, its filing similarly featured an IC 041 classification, with language referring to "providing online computer games featuring virtual worlds in which users can interact for entertainment purposes." It's beneficial for both a trademark's owner and their IP attorneys, he said, to give themselves as much rhetorical space to work with as possible.

"One of the biggest reasons IP attorneys might register a singleplayer game that way (e.g., referencing a game being 'online') is that the term 'online video game' could be interpreted pretty broadly – for example, I might need to argue sometime in the future that distribution of a game via Steam and/or a game with downloadable DLC is, in some sense, 'online,'" Sigmon said. "Also, you never know if a game might go fully multiplayer in the future, so it helps to have that breadth. Along those lines, I’ve personally helped register trademarks in IC 041 for games that didn’t have traditional multiplayer components."

As for Kingdom Come Salvation, he said the filing could hint that the game "might be somehow online" in the broadest sense, but we shouldn't be holding our breath for any multiplayer features unless an official announcement materializes in the future.

Baldur's Gate 3 is known for being, well, smutty—so much so that when the game first came out, we were in fierce, rigorous, masterful debates over it (stop giggling). The game has a lot of sensual scenes, but it also comes with a streamer-friendly mode to cover up all the jiblets and tatas.

A streamer-friendly mode that failed, briefly, on one of Larian's own streams. Senior communications director Aofie Wilson has been streaming a Dark Urge run on various platforms, and has arrived at Act 3's House of Hope (spoilers for that, if you still haven't managed to finish a playthrough).

In this late-game dungeon, you can meet with Harleep, an incubi that Raphael keeps around—mostly to top himself in BDSM gear, a feat of self-love so vicious it'd make Narcissus blush and say 'bit much for me, mate'.

Anyway, that streamer-friendly mode failed during Wilson's playthrough when, for some strange reason, Harleep's nipnaps went completely uncensored as her character took to the sheets with Raphael's psychoanalysable, personified fetish.

The stream's still up on X, and you can see the clothes malfunction happen at around 1:26:00—as Larian's doubtless panicking staff try desperately to cover her up with a golden d20. Which, that being the reward for an honour mode playthrough, does seem a little denigrating of the badge of honour. My bard earned that title fair and square, and now 'tis being relegated to a censor bar. The degeneracy!

Both Larian and publishing director Michael Douse had a good laugh about it on X, with the latter writing: "Baldur's Gate 3 is now cancelled", and the former tweeting an image striking through both YouTube and TikTok as platforms on which you could find Wilson (dubbed "undiluted and raw" by her own stream overlay as the debauchery played out) continuing on, unabashed.

Anyway, Larian's not been given the boot permanently—both channels are back up, it's just this stream in particular that was shut down. And to quote Wilson's own words: "At least we had a nice time."

During his time at Bethesda Nate Purkeypile was an artist on Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield, as well as lead artist on Fallout 76. Now independent, he's responsible for stealth-archer bowhunting FPS The Axis Unseen, but when he spent some time talking to YouTube channel The Examined Game recently, his tenure at Bethesda was the main subject.

With Bethesda finally making the long-rumored news of a Fallout 3 remaster official, naturally that came up. Purkeypile is excited about the idea of seeing one of his children be taken over by someone else. "I'm personally looking forward to that," he said, "because we were like super tech-constrained making Fallout 3. And you could only place so many lights."

The Fallout 3 Bethesda released wasn't really what they'd hoped it would be at the time, he went on to say. "It's not like it's exactly how we intended," he said. "I get why people are more upset over like movie remakes and stuff, but in the case of games and particularly the art side of it, it's 100% not what we intended, and it was very, very constrained."

Fallout 3's concept art has always been a tantalizing glimpse at what we could have had, but even a simple change like extending the draw distance to give a better sense of the Commonwealth Wasteland's scale would be an improvement. Purkeypile is in favour of the kind of modern remaster that goes a bit further into remake territory, though.

"I think a lot of these remakes have been done frankly better lately too," he said. "Like the Resident Evil ones and stuff, those were fantastic. Whereas for a while I think a lot of those updates were just like, 'Oh, we made the textures a little bit bigger, and like threw a sharpen filter in Photoshop,' and it doesn't really look that much better, or actually as good as other games that are coming out."

Luke Dale, best known to gamers as Hans Capon in the Kingdom Come: Deliverance games, is trying his hand at something new: Serving food and drinks at a medieval tavern in Prague, the capital city of the Czech Republic.

This is not a role in an upcoming videogame. As he reveals in a new video on YouTube, Dale went out and bought himself an actual tavern in Prague, which he is now renovating into Nobleman, "inspired by the places where noblemen would gather and conspire and socialize. Not a themed bar, not a tourist attraction, but a local space where local people can have a really good beer, amazing food, and a bloody great time."

Dale said he doesn't actually have any experience with running a pub and calls it all "a very terrifying thing," but added that it's something he's always wanted to do, particularly since much of what he's done in his career doesn't always "feel real." He was inspired to finally take the leap with Nobleman by his love of Prague, and the Czech Republic in general.

"Ever since I moved to Prague and ever since I've worked in Prague, I've just been so humbled and so appreciative of this country. And so for me, this project and creating this tavern is like a love letter to Prague," he said. "It's a love letter to the Czech Republic and how much I love this city and this country and everything that it's given me.

"You know, my girlfriend is Czech, my dog is Czech, and so much of my identity has been influenced by this culture. The beer, the food, everything about it is stuff that I just adore and I want to be a part of it and contribute to it."

Running a pub is a tough gig, but it does seem like it might be a good fit for his circumstances. Dale said in July that the success of the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series hasn't led to new roles in games, so instead he's shifted focus to streaming. He's built up a pretty sizable audience already—180,000 subscribers on YouTube, 73,000 followers on Twitch—and if nothing else, this venture should give him plenty of content.

Nobleman's grand opening is set for October 1. If you want to follow along with what's happening, you can sign up for updates at nobleman.cz.

I'm not that into the original Path of Exile, but playing so much of the sequel has exposed me to plenty of people who do. A huge topic of discussion around the current league is about loot and the lack of it.

Many players are unhappy with the majority of the loot coming from chests rather than monsters, and the inability to scale the difficulty up for more rewards. Basically, loot isn't very exciting, especially when you roughly know what you're going to get before you even finish an activity.

Developer Grinding Gear Games is already addressing some of the immediate issues in upcoming patches, but it's also planning on a much bigger rework in its next major update. Speaking to PoE streamer Zizaran in a recent interview, Christopher "Octavian" Laferriere said to expect "an extreme shakeup of the endgame" in patch 3.30.

"3.30 will have a huge emphasis on endgame shakeup," Laferriere continued. "We plan to get to as many existing league mechanics as possible and give them all something new, something interesting, something different from before, because one of the problems that we see is that the endgame has just gotten stale."

PoE has been around for over a decade and has accumulated a lot of unique league mechanics over the years. This is why people will tell you they're still a beginner with only 1,000 hours clocked. Balance tweaks aren't enough to spark new creative ways to engage with it all, so one of the focuses of 3.30 will be allowing different league mechanics to interact with each other more often. It will also include a reevaluation of what items should even be tied to a specific mechanic rather than something you can find anywhere. The idea is to make random loot drops more spontaneous and less deterministic—something Path of Exile 2 does really well.

Laferriere told Zizaran later in the interview that the scope for 3.30 will be so big that smaller additions—in this case, new transfigured skill gems—might be limited. The update won't be out for another four months, but it already sounds like it's going to be a significant moment, as POE borrows ideas that have gone over well in the sequel and sees how they fare.

Sovereign Tower has genuinely surprised me. At first glance, it's a cosy-looking management romp with shades of Reigns and Yes, Your Grace. It's colourful, a little silly and chock-full of charming eccentrics. This is not an inaccurate assessment, but it's also so much more—and a lot darker than the soft colour palette and whimsical tone initially suggests.

After opening the door to a magic tower, you become the Sovereign, the leader of a nation and a big player on the international stage. Yesterday, you were an itinerant leper. Now you're the boss. What are your credentials? Who cares? You've got destiny on your side.

Take the reigns

Each day follows the same broad loop, where you'll hold an audience with commoners, diplomats and your fellow rulers, dole out decrees and advice, and then send your knights on quests—typically given to you during the audience phase—all around the world.

The choices you make determine what the rest of the world thinks of you, from your knights to your citizens, who are split into merchants, scholars, nobles and "people", who I guess are just everyone else.

Every quest will challenge a specific set of abilities—strength, agility, charisma, luck, magic and wit—only a few of which will be revealed to you. If a manticore hunt demands a strong sword arm, you send your strongest knights—simple! But not quite. See, each knight has a list of positive and negative attributes, like a love of water or a fear of crowds, which can raise or lower their chance of success at a given quest.

These attributes are initially invisible, requiring you to get to know them, or to send one of your advisors to spy on them. The same goes for their preferences, which don't impact the quests themselves, but will affect their satisfaction level.

If you send someone who's afraid of the dark and hates to hunt into a gloomy forest to kill some wolves, there's a good chance they'll fail the quest and think you're a bit of a dick. But you can still make them try, anyway, and if you buff their abilities with the right gear, they might succeed despite all of the obstacles.

So the management side of things is surprisingly dense due to the way it works in tandem with this pretty full-featured RPG system. This could have easily been Sovereign Tower's big hook, but it's actually one of two, and its companion is what really makes the game properly impressive.

Time crime

Deep inside the bowels of the tower sits an artefact inhabited by a demon. This demon has a pretty neat party trick: it can turn back time. And it's very eager for you to use this power. Convenient? Absolutely. Suspicious? Oh yeah.

Here's the deal: if you're not happy with the outcome of a quest, decision or scripted moment, you can turn back the clock. This is of course handy if you've opted not to allow for manual saving, but this power goes well beyond an in-fiction way to savescum.

See, when you go back in time, your character retains everything they've learned in the now-defunct timeline. This means you can not only take a different path, entirely new options open up for you that reflect your knowledge of the future.

Say one of your knights gets killed off—not dying valiantly during a quest, but cowardly murdered in the tower. And through another knight's investigation, you discover who the culprit is, and why they did it. Well, now you have everything you need to go back in time to stop it from happening.

But should you?

You're not just thwarting a murder, you're killing off a timeline, and all the events that resulted from that crime. Maybe some of them are even positive. You could bring back some characters while losing access to others. And who's to say that the best timeline is the one where this knight lives?

Killing time

Aside from all that, there's the big conundrum at the heart of Sovereign Tower: should you really be making deals with a demon? Especially a demon who is so desperate for you to use this power. Well, I ain't telling.

You can stick to your guns and prove you've learned things from so many other time travel stories, refusing to engage with this system. And should you do that, you'll still have fun. Sovereign Tower is an excellent RPG/management game/visual novel hydra. But the temptation to meddle is so damn tempting.

This tension might be the game's most potent feature. The ethical, existential crisis that results from the discovery of time travel is a big part of the genre, but it's something few games really tackle. Sure, they might pay lip service to it, but as players we never really need to grapple with it.

Sovereign Tower, meanwhile, never stops testing you. Whenever a big decision is made, whenever something goes wrong, whenever you reach a milestone—the demon is always there, whispering in your ear: "Could you have done something differently?" And the answer is always "Yes". But do you act on that knowledge?

I've been roleplaying as a pretty rotten monarch. I've allowed whole towns to drown, I'm rude to peasants and diplomats alike, and I regularly send my most ruthless knight to steal, murder and cheat. My kingdom won an international horse race because we poisoned all the other riders. I suck. But I still agonise over the choice to turn back time.

It's a testament to the writing and the game's memorable cast of weirdos. This is not an abstract choice. The world and its inhabitants feel tangible, and eradicating a timeline is a weighty decision. I know I can gain a lot by making changes, but what will I lose?

I love that I'm wrestling with these questions. And as I'm still playing through Sovereign Tower, I don't yet have any answers. This might be the best part of the experience. I don't want to learn that there's a correct path—though I suspect it won't end up being that black or white.

Sovereign Tower launches tomorrow, on August 6, and while I unfortunately won't have a scored review up in time for its arrival—it's technically a short game, but it's greatly extended by time travel shenanigans—I'm already clearly smitten. If you want to wait for a score, however, come back in a couple of days for my full review. In the meantime, Sovereign Tower's Steam demo is still available, letting you play up to the end of the first main quest.

Dark Heresy is currently in beta, and Owlcat is keeping everyone informed about the inquisitorial CRPG's progress via a quarterly update. Said update collates news including the addition of daemonhosts to the enemies we'll face (if you've gone up against them in Darktide you'll know that's a big deal), community-voted customization options making it into character creation, and two new companions for us to collect for our squad like grim Pokémon.

The first of them, Laarthyr Cairnareth, is an aeldari corsair you might recruit or defeat depending how friendly to aliens you're playing it. He'll be worth having on your team thanks to his psychic powers, which he uses to find paths through the dangers of Warpspace via the labyrinth of tunnels his people use called the Webway. (If you need a guide through 40K's sea of proper nouns, Lexicanum is your friend.)

The second new companion to be revealed was Saro, a sanctioned psyker who stands in contrast to the defiantly unsanctioned psyker Idira, who was recruited in Owlcat's previous 40K game, Rogue Trader. Unlike her, Saro's mutant abilities have been turned to the service of the God-Emperor after a regime of thorough and brutal testing. As Owlcat's summary of sanctioned psykers puts it, "Their lives are usually short, and their existence is wretched, but their abilities, tempered by sanctioned rituals and an iron will, become a mighty force in the eternal struggle to defend the Imperium."

The update also includes some stats based on decisions players made in the beta. Apparently the most popular player-character choice was a Noble Officer from a Hive World, and the faction most befriended via Dark Heresy's reputation system was the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The most-bought item was the melta charge because, as Owlcat says, "Someone clearly likes big kabooms."

Owlcat recently reassured fans that, while its upcoming Expanse game is more of a cinematic-style RPG, the studio won't turn its backs on hardcore RPGs. And Dark Heresy sure seems like the kind of build-focused hardcore CRPG Owlcat is known for. It doesn't have a release date at the moment, and according to our Ted Litchfield, now is actually the time to get disgustingly into the previous game, Rogue Trader.

Baldur's Gate 3 is—my god—three years old at this point, but it continues to do numbers. I don't mean player numbers, though god knows it keeps doing those too, I mean that it keeps generating stats. How many deaths, how many murders, how many deployments of a weapon named "Poo-Scraper" in combat—that kind of thing.

Now, Larian is showing those stats off, in what seems to have become an annual tradition. In a post on Bluesky, the studio highlighted some of the dafter numbers that player behaviour in BG3 has produced.

First up, some normal ones: 500 million mod downloads and 13,000 mods uploaded. The story NPC that died most often across people's games was, by a country mile, the Tiefling leader Zevlor, who bit the dust 12.3 million times. Second place was the wizard apprentice Rolan, who died 8.6 million times.

You get the idea. Then the bizarre stuff comes. The Nut-Buster—literally just a rock—has been deployed twice in combat in the game's Creche area. Poo-Scraper, its accompanying blade, and property of the quasit Shovel, has been used four times in combat across Act 3.

It's that time of year again, you naughty number-loving nerds.

— @larianstudios.com (@larianstudios.com.bsky.social) 2026-08-04T17:02:27.680Z

Over 30,000 players have taken on the Netherbrain drunk, under 1% have managed to obtain 180,000 gold in a single playthrough and, most disturbing of all, just over 9,000 players experienced the game at a 9:16 aspect ratio. That is to say, they were playing with their monitor turned portrait.

But the worst stat, if you ask me, is this one: "More non-Dark Urge players have managed to murder Alfira than Dark Urge players." For reference, Alfira is the lovely, blameless bard you encounter in BG3's grove area during Act 1. If you're playing Durge, the game forces you to kill her during a cutscene (though you can, technically, avoid it with a bit of metagame shenaniganry). When I played Durge, it honestly upset me a bit. Alfira really is a nice person, toe to tip.

But more people have simply elected to murder her than have been forced into it by the game's narrative. I'd guess that's down to people doing (non-Durge) evil playthroughs, but still—congratulations, players, you are all monsters.

Dragon's Dogma 2 will be getting its first big proper chunk of DLC soon, and in addition to nixing those weird microtransactions that did more harm to word-of-mouth than the actual game, it's also slated to be getting a hard mode difficulty for players who have everything maxed out.

That's per a Q&A featured on the game's Steam page, where game director Kento Kinoshita stated: "We're working on a Hard Mode that will provide a satisfying challenge for seasoned players whose stats have reached, or are approaching, the level cap."

The actual hard mode itself doesn't have a release window, but it is coming, with producer Naoto Oyama adding: "Please stay tuned for further updates regarding the details of Hard Mode and its release window."

As for whether Dark Arisen itself will provide a meaty challenge for gamers looking to get thrashed about again, Kinoshita writes: "Both the Forsaken Dominion and Lost Rites are expansion contents, so we've designed them to offer battles with an even greater sense of tension and challenge than the main game.

"We're aware that there's a very wide range of player level across the community, so with that in mind, we're adjusting the balance so that everyone can enjoy the experience—whether they're just starting their adventure, still progressing through the game, or have already completed multiple playthroughs."

Kinoshita adds that, even in the normal mode of the DLC, "the difficulty gradually ramps up as players progress through the expansion content, with enemy encounters becoming increasingly challenging along the way. As players reach the middle and later stages of the content, we've balanced it so that even those who have already hit the stat cap can still enjoy a meaningful level of challenge."

So, to clarify, Dark Arisen will have endgame-appropriate fights—the future hard mode will simply add another layer of self-flagellation to the game which, despite some changes to its thorniness, is still known for being kind of hostile in a fun, wrestling-you-in-the-mud kind of way. I'm glad that those who've nonetheless tamed the game's grisly systems will have some real challenges in the future, however.

Final Fantasy 14 isn't any stranger to crossovers—but Evercold will be a first for the MMO, wherein both the raid series and the alliance raid series (8-man and 24-man raids, respectively) will be crossovers. With the latter being a whackadoodle Evangelion crossover, and the former being a far more reasonable FF7 one.

This won't be the first time FF14 has had crossovers with other Final Fantasy games, mind. There have been seasonal events with Final Fantasy 15, for instance, and the Omega raid series in Stormblood was chocka with FF game references—although that was justified by way of a computer simulation. Still, we got to kick Kefka's butt.

In a recent interview with GamesRadar+, current FF7 remake director Naoki Hamaguchi (who will be involved in the crossover) tells the site his team was really pumped to "come up with all these ideas", but at "the same time we have to be really careful that it's not impacting the FF14 patch release schedule, because then that would be putting the cart before the horse".

As a matter of fact, both Hamaguchi AND producer of FF14 Naoki Yoshida had to tell their team to "calm down" and "be reasonable", with Hamaguchi in particular instructing his team to "look at our bandwidth to see what's realistic and to make sure that they can do their best work".

Which I'm glad for, to be honest. While I've grown fonder of Dawntrail's host of content as the expansion has gone on, I can't help but feel as though Creative Studio 3 was spread a little thin between making Final Fantasy 16 and its MMO, working on limited resources that, for instance, caused Occult Crescent's first Forked Tower raid to only have one difficulty setting.

As a matter of fact, criticism of Dawntrail has been so firm that it's finally gotten Yoshida and co. to start making big changes to the game with Evercold, which is a reassuring sign that things are on track. I'm glad that the directors of both games, then, are being purposefully reasonable about how much their teams can handle—which is good, because the prospect of getting to fight Sephiroth in my favourite MMO does fill me with glee.

In a new interview with PCGamesN to mark Owlcat's 10th anniversary, studio co-founder and creative director Alexander Mishulin talked about Owlcat's history and upcoming projects. Two things really caught my eye: Owlcat's still got hardcore CRPG fans covered, and the studio's bulked up to the heavyweight division.

"We will continue to make CRPGs because we love them," Mishulin said of the action-RPG versus CRPG question. "We do not want to become stagnant. We will be trying different approaches for our RPG games, trying to find the best possible fit for the idea of the game.

"We want to create the best possible RPGs, we like them, we play them, we get inspired by them and we want our games to feel the same, that we would enjoy them ourselves and hope that they will inspire someone else to create even better ones."

Owlcat's first three games share an engine, design sensibility, and overall structure⁠—you're a monarch or otherwise leading a state-level organization⁠—so the very Mass Effect-like The Expanse: Osiris Reborn represents a huge, if exciting, departure. I didn't think there was a danger of the studio permanently pivoting away from the house style that put it on the map, but Mishulin's statement is reassuring.

It's also backed up by the other game Owlcat has in development, Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy. It iterates on Owlcat's CRPG engine and the ruleset of Rogue Trader in a way that echoes the jump from Pathfinder: Kingmaker to Wrath of the Righteous.

But it's also a big departure in its own way: Owlcat is trading its customary ruler fantasy and light 4X elements for an ambitious, highly reactive, detective/investigation metagame⁠—it sounds rad.

The studio has massively expanded to work on two projects simultaneously: Both PCGamesN and Wccftech have reported that Owlcat currently consists of around 600 employees. Looking at other RPG big boys, Larian was north of 500 at last check-in, and Obsidian is currently in the low 200s following Microsoft's latest layoffs.

According to a 2024 fact sheet, CD Projekt Red has 1,134 worldwide employees, while a 2023 financial statement had its heartland studio in Warsaw accounting for 615 of them.

BioWare was likely pushing a 500-600 person headcount at its fullest extent in the 2010s (with the Montreal and Austin branches), but back of the napkin math has it now at 100 or fewer employees following post-Veilguard layoffs.

It's unclear how many separate offices Owlcat's staff is spread across. Originally founded in Moscow, the developer is currently headquartered in Paphos, Cyprus. This expanded manpower is certainly in the "Yep, that's enough people to handle two RPGs at once" range, and you could imagine Owlcat satisfying both action and CRPG fans by keeping up a multi-game approach, similar to what BioWare managed with Mass Effect and Dragon Age during its golden years.

I'm not sure whether to feel sheepish or smug that I exclusively come to Owlcat games late. On the one hand, I feel like a fairweather fan of this underrated RPG powerhouse, one whose output and ambition is honestly kind of scary.

But on the other hand: Owlcat has yet to have a single smooth launch. PCG weekend editor Jody Macgregor gave Rogue Trader a 59% in his review at launch in December, 2023, and I don't blame him one bit.

I hated this game when I tried the beta that fall. The fun unfamiliarity of being a 40K newcomer was outmatched by the frustrating unfamiliarity of a complicated new RPG system⁠—Rogue Trader is at least as intricate as Pathfinder, but without any built-in, D&D-derived muscle memory. The fact that "hit points" are called "wounds" made me feel indignant in a way I struggle to describe. You're not special, stop calling them that!

But perhaps Rogue Trader has earned its silly little proper nouns by now. With the release of its Infinite Museion DLC, I decided to finally dive back in and give it the second chance I'd always planned to, just like Jody did last year.

Similar to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Kingmaker before it, Rogue Trader has grown into an all-timer RPG. It's also hit one of my main quality indicators for the genre: I'm so obsessed with its character building that, dissatisfied with the first guy I made after 20 hours, I rolled a new one and beat its first act again in half the time.

In the Navy

When I played Rogue Trader in beta, there were no guides I could rely on, and its level-up screen made for a quagmire of effects, stats, and nouns with little indication of what was actually good. I'd recommend a guide, either from cRPG Bro or Revan619 on YouTube⁠.

For my playthrough on the notch above normal "Daring" difficulty, I'm following builds for my main guy and every single companion, but after 30 hours of gameplay, I do finally feel like I have enough knowledge to make tweaks at my discretion.

On my first guy, I made what's widely agreed to be the most powerful single build with the⁠—let me take a deep breath here⁠—"Death World Pyromancer Psyker Blade Dancer Executioner."

It's built around a few abilities that make you more powerful the more injury debuffs you have on you, as well as a set of powers that let you spend hit points and kill enemies to get a ton of extra actions per turn. It's certainly powerful, and it's always cool to be an edgelord with two swords, but it just felt janky and stale after a while.

I found I was having way more fun controlling the companion Abellard, whose build was basically identical to one buildsmith Revan dubbed "the most fun for new players." That's right gamers, the Navy Officer Warrior Arch Militant. Basically: You dual wield a sword and a gun. When you score a critical or parry an enemy with your sword, you automatically make a free attack with the gun.

Eventually, gun attacks make your sword more powerful, and vice versa. It feels badass, ultimate lightning tank mode in the middle of all the enemies, instagibbing beefy dudes with your signature one-two punch and parrying chumps left and right.

Tally-ho

I just beat the final boss of Rogue Trader's first act with my dark future seaman, and I keep playing it out in my head. Spoilers, but you get ambushed by a Chaos Space Marine with twice as much health wounds as the next-strongest guy in Act One. The world you're on just had its sun go out, and in-between shredding your party with his bolter machine gun, this bad hombre will blow up the last remaining shuttles offworld one-by-one.

That obviously can't stand, so I had my whole party turn and focus on beef boy, only sending my main man Abellard to tank the annoying support mooks. I knocked off the Space Marine's first 200 hit points wounds with three bolter salvos from my freaky gun nun companion, Argenta⁠—two on her own, and the third with an extra turn courtesy of fish princess Cassia.

That teed the boss up for a finisher from my Rogue Trader, wiping out his last hundo or so of health wounds with a critical charge and revolver shotgun to the face.

I felt incandescent. That was one of the best-feeling things I've done in a game in a month of Sundays, and I got a nice little achievement (only shared by 12.4% of players!) for taking him down without losing any of those shuttles.

There's also a whole RPG here, by the way⁠—companions, romance, skills, planetary management, Rogueing, Trading⁠—but that turn-based combat and buildcrafting is the perfectly-charred neapolitan crust of this pizza. Rogue Trader is redeemed, here's hoping Owlcat's upcoming Dark Heresy just bangs like this outta the gate⁠—it sounds like it will.

I don't need to explain what Baldur's Gate 3 is since it's one of those games you hear about endlessly, whether you want to or not, because it remains a universally acclaimed phenomenon. PC Gamer's Fraser Brown gave it our highest score ever in his review, a positively covetable 97, and everyone I know who's played it did not stop once the credits rolled. But if you've yet to take the plunge, now might be a good time: it's the cheapest it's ever been on Steam.

Granted, that's just 30% off, but it's still a historic low which takes the game down from $60 to $42. That's 28 Costco hot dogs, and I can personally say I've gotten slightly more enjoyment out of Baldur's Gate 3 than I would get out of 28 Costco hot dogs. In the following paragraphs, I will try to advocate for why that is.

For one, BG3 takes Dungeon & Dragon's fifth edition and turns into a buildcrafter's playground—its turn-based combat is a meticulous recreation of the real thing that combines 5e's RAW with Larian's trademark elemental field combos and prop destruction, lending the improvisational feel which characterizes tabletop play. The purchase of 28 Costco hot dogs prescribes a very specific sort of evening that invariably ends in physical agony.

BG3 is also a compelling bit of fantasy fiction in its own right, with an action-blockbuster story that'll have you battling otherworldly horrors, adjudicating the fates of entire towns, and falling in love with your troubled companions. Its sense of choice and consequence is shocking given the 100+ hour scale of its campaign, offering you the agency to become a paragon of virtue or an angel-murdering psychopath. 28 Costco hot dogs, on the other hand, only offer you one choice: sitting on the commode until your legs go numb.

On top of all that, BG3 is eminently moddable: you can turn the game into a roguelike, supercharge your player character for a solo playthrough, or try out that fancy new third-person camera to pretend you're playing a wayward Dragon Age spinoff. Admittedly, the hot dogs are pretty competitive in this category, as hot dogs famously allow for a variety of toppings. I'll call this one a tie.

Anyway, BG3 is quite a good RPG that feels like a bold step forward for a very old style of game. If you like 5e, there's not a better way to experience it in a videogame, and if you don't like 5e or are unfamiliar with it, it's such a solid fantasy game in its own right that it might just make you a believer.

Oblivion Remastered releases on Nintendo Switch 2 in August, which normally would be wholly irrelevant to PC Gamer. We've been merrily exploring revamped Cyrodiil for well over a year at this point. But you might want to hide your stealth archer in the corner of whatever dungeon you're exploring and check out Bethesda's latest promotional video for the Switch 2 launch. It's a little different from the usual fare of game footage and dramatic voiceovers.

To herald the Switch 2 version's imminent release, Bethesda brought back veteran Elder Scrolls voice actor Wes Johnson—who plays many characters across the series including Oblivion's default Imperial males—to reprise his most colourful role in the series, the mad, cheese-loving god Sheogorath.

In the video, Johnson—dressed as and in the role of Sheogorath—records lines in a sound booth and causes general mischief with the aid of an exasperated audio technician. As the video progresses, the Prince of Madness becomes increasingly baffled as to why he has to record lines he's already done before.

It's a shameless bit of marketing fluff, but it's nonetheless entertaining to see Johnson in full swing as Sheogorath. It's also a relief that he has apparently made a full recovery from the life-threatening medical emergency he suffered 18 months ago, during which he was hospitalised and put into an induced coma.

The responses to the video are similarly pleased to see Johnson in action. But there is an undercurrent of discontent to many of the comments. These mainly centre around the remaster's widely reported technical issues on PC. Not only do many Steam reviews report performance hitches while exploring Cyrodiil, but the game also suffers from a wide array of bugs. Some of these have been around since the original Oblivion released in 2006, while others are entirely new.

What doesn't help is that Bethesda and Virtuos appear to have abandoned the PC version. While Oblivion Remastered received a couple of patches after launch, the last one—update 1.2—arrived over a year ago. Consequently, recent Steam reviews have dropped down to Mixed, though the game still has a Mostly Positive rating overall. Let's hope the Switch 2 launch brings a bit of PC TLC too.

Sometimes I understand why modders flame out, burn their bridges, and give up entirely. Every time I look at a posts page on Nexus Mods, for instance. A perfect example of this has been the reaction to Relysia's True Third-Person Camera mod for Baldur's Gate 3, a labor of love that gives the traditionally birdseye CRPG an over-the-shoulder viewpoint.

Baldur's Gate 3 already has a third-person mode, you might say. All you have to do is plug in a controller and the camera will drop for a more console-RPG experience. And if that's not good enough for you, there's the Native Camera Tweaks mod. Hundreds of people on the internet have been tiresomely pointing this out over the last couple of weeks, every single one of them convinced they are the first person to make this vital observation the rest of us need to read.

Relysia has seen these comments and then, with admirable patience, made an eight-minute video documenting all the ways their mod is different. For starters, with the True Third-Person Camera mod, you can look up. The viewpoint when you play with a controller is locked into a downward angle and can't be changed. Native Camera Tweaks does let you look up, but when you need to bounce back to a more distant view you have to manually adjust the camera, where True Third-Person Camera switches with a simple press of the asterisk key.

There's also the fact True Third-Person Camera defaults to a slightly off-center over-the-shoulder view, where the other solutions default to centred third-person. It's the difference between Tomb Raider 2013 and Tomb Raider 1996. The Native Camera Tweaks viewpoint is adjustable, but you have to edit a file to do so, while True Third-Person Camera is compatible with Mod Configuration Menu for in-game adjustments to the POV position on the fly.

There's more to it than that, but basically, yes, it is a different experience. I've played with the mod for several hours and found it meaningfully distinct and the perfect excuse to start yet another playthrough.

Baldur's Gate 3 works better from this angle than a lot of other CRPGs because so much effort was put into making it look good in those up-close dialogue scenes. Not all of it, of course. Looking up when you're underground or on the bottom floor of a building sometimes reveals places where nobody expected you to do that, and you'll want to switch to the regular camera when you're sneaking or when a companion points out something they've spotted nearby but which you can't see. If Larian put this in as an option they'd have made a lot of extra work for themselves tidying up the kind of stuff that's forgivable when exposed by a mod.

The mod also changes back to the regular camera when combat starts, although Relysia is planning to address that in an update, adding "immersive combat mode, where the camera stays very close to the action throughout". I might stick to the top-down camera for combat myself, but it's always nice to have options.

A big part of the appeal of PC gaming is being able to personalize things to your persnickety preferences, and having multiple ways of doing that—even if it means having two mods with similar but different effects—is the perfect example.

You can download True Third-Person Camera from Nexus Mods, along with WASD Character Movement for the full "what if Dragon Age was turn-based" experience, and get Party Limit Begone while you're at it, because that's still the most essential mod for Baldur's Gate 3.

Videogames have always struggled a wee bit—and I'm being generous here—with the subject of romance. Explosions, dragons and alien invasions? It's got that stuff locked down. But the language of love has proved a bit more elusive. Developers, especially RPG devs, have refused to back down in the face of this challenge, however, and we're now at the point where the absence of romance has become more noteworthy than its inclusion.

Arguably, this is BioWare's legacy. It wasn't the first, but BioWare's RPGs really codified videogame romances—specifically romanceable companions—starting with Baldur's Gate 2. This has become so commonplace that even games that aren't really RPGs, like Star Wars: Zero Company, need to answer the question: can we knock boots with our colleagues?

But is this feature really essential in an RPG? Is it even warranted? If we were just talking about the BioWare model, I'd have to say absolutely not. But there are some caveats.

BioWare's actually designed some genuinely great relationships over the last few decades. In Dragon Age, the potential relationship between the Grey Warden and Morrigan is critically important for the series' overarching story, and equally important is how the development of that relationship really lets you get to know one of Origins greatest and most closed off characters.

Mass Effect also does some interesting things with its romanceable companions. The relationship with Liara, for instance, starts off a bit creepy. In the context of her species, the asari, she is effectively a child, despite being over 100 years old, which is clearly emphasised by her innocence and naivety. By Mass Effect 2, however, she's gone through a great deal and comes across as more self-assured and grown up, and while she only appears in the DLC, the relationship feels considerably more nuanced.

Shep's trilogy also benefits from having the same protagonist throughout, giving you the opportunity to develop a relationship across three distinct games and DLC. There's a lot of room to explore romance, then. But the series never quite manages to escape BioWare's formulaic approach to romance.

You have a handful of conversations, say that you're crushing on someone, and then just before the end of the game you sit through a sex scene. Your companions rarely have much agency—it's just another power fantasy.

This is not the only approach, though. In Baldur's Gate 3, for instance, Larian explores lots of different kinds of relationships with much greater depth, from the purely sexual to the exceedingly romantic. It's an incredibly horny game, but at the same time it doesn't treat sex as some kind of reward that you're working towards. Depending on the character, you might end up having a meaningless tumble in the hay within the first act.

Larian also used romance to enhance companion storylines. In my first playthrough, my PC's relationship with Karlach really elevated her arc and made the beats hit a lot harder. Baldur's Gate 3 relationships are also tested, sometimes, and can be sources of friction within the party. And they are woven throughout the game, rather than being relegated to a few chats and an awkward sex scene before the game's climax.

This approach, unfortunately, is the exception rather than the rule. And even when it is handled well, I find it can still too often veer into wish fulfillment. Case in point, the decision some games make—including Baldur's Gate 3—to have every single character effectively be pansexual, to make sure the player can hook up with whoever they want. It's fantastic that this allows for more queer romances, but I'm not sure it really counts if every companion is playersexual.

Romance has become a box that needs to be checked, where its only purpose is to please the players who have understandably come to expect it—but picking important story beats and mechanics just because they've become conventional only serves to homogenise RPGs.

I used to be all for companion romances, and I proudly celebrated Baldur's Gate 3's horniness and sexual free-for-all back in 2023. And like I said earlier, I still think it was broadly handled pretty well. But lately I've been skipping romance in my RPGs unless the RPG in question is genuinely trying to do something interesting with it—which is rarely the case.

And it's great! I played 150 hours of Rogue Trader and never felt the slightest bit of FOMO when I rejected my entire crew. And when I had to embark on a relationship in Dragon Age: The Veilguard to help out the guides team, I spent most of my time cringing—even though I romanced the only likeable character in the entire game, Lace Harding.

I'll give you this, though: Fable's approach to romance is hilarious. Marry every single character! Embrace polygamy! I kinda respect how the series makes it purely mechanical. There's no real relationship here, just the odd bonus. Is it saying something about the ancient institution of marriage. Nope! It's just having fun. And that's actually a great reason to include this kind of system. It serves a clear purpose beyond attempting to meet weird expectations.

PC Gamer is not a monolith, however, and it wasn't difficult to find a colleague to argue that, in fact, RPGs do need romance. So here's Harvey with another perspective:

OK, I've had my say, Harvey's had his say, but what about you lot? Do you crave romance in your RPGs, or have you had enough of them?

What is that quasi-critical darling and pillar of K-content Crimson Desert even about, anyway? The answer becomes less clear by the day, as now it's something of a full-blown trading simulator—given this is the developer behind Black Desert Online, a game where you can breed and sell horses when you get tired of adventuring, I'm surprised it took this long.

Trading was already in Crimson Desert, but a sizable economy overhaul arrived in the latest patch, which you can read about on Pearl Abyss's website. It adds 133 new trading posts, rebalances "types and quantities" for all trading posts, and introduces some new mechanics to simulate supply and demand.

For instance, when too many items are sold at a single location, that will affect local prices. And if you trade at remote locations ("hard to reach by wagon," as the notes describe them) you'll turn a higher profit. That's on top of the fact that trade profits in general have gone up, and there are 24 new types of "high-value" goods to move.

The response on social media is a mix of pleasant surprise and raised eyebrows. "I'm actually baffled," said Reddit user VictorBelmont. "I thought like three people actually did wagon trading." a reply from Hazel0mutt reads, "Probably because it was a shitty system. Now I'm excited!" The update seemingly continues a long trend of Pearl Abyss shrugging off critiques that less is more by insisting 'no, more is more.'

There's a host of minor fixes as well—certain challenges which were bugged before should be completable now, and there are "improved interaction animations" for animals like the platypus and the feathered weasel. That might sound negligible, but you don't get kudos from the Prime Minister of South Korea by cutting corners on your platypus animations.

Things haven't looked great for Dragon Age since its latest entry, Dragon Age: The Veilguard was released to a mixed critical and muted commercial response back in 2024. EA subsequently laid off dozens of BioWare's staff, and numerous former developers have recently said they believe the series is probably dead.

Yet, while there's little hope of a new Dragon Age game anytime soon (if ever), might there be a chance EA revisits the old Dragon Age games? The original Mass Effect trilogy got a spruced-up rerelease in its Legendary Edition back in 2021, despite the fact that EA hasn't exactly been desperate to push out new games in that series either (though a new one is apparently in the works, with the devs being too busy making it to talk about it). Hence, could EA test players' appetite for Dragon Age with a similar remaster for Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age: Inquisition?

Sadly, the chances of this happening are slim too, at least according to former Dragon Age producer Mark Darrah. In the same FRVR interview where he declared Dragon Age as probably dead, Darrah also pointed out that, while he had once envisioned a "Champion's Edition" equivalent to the Legendary Edition, EA is now unlikely to exhume the old games for a remaster due to the practical difficulties of doing so.

Basically, it all comes down to technology. Where all three Mass Effect games ran on Unreal Engine, which is a widely used technology, the three Dragon Age games were all built on different engines. Dragon Age used BioWare's Eclipse engine—an upgraded version of the Aurora Engine (which was also used by CD Projekt for The Witcher), Dragon Age 2 used the further enhanced Lycium Engine, while Dragon Age: Inquisition ran on DICE's Frostbite tech.

"There's basically no one at BioWare any more that understands the Aurora Engine," Darrah told FRVR. "There's basically no one outside of BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora engine. So, unlike Mass Effect, which is Unreal, there are basically no companies that could help you."

On top of this, Darrah reckons that such a remaster effort would require a new team, but claims that "EA doesn't like having employees, so, if you're going to do that, you're going to do that within the umbrella of BioWare, which means those people are not working on something else."

That said, Darrah does think that a remaster of the original Dragon Age would sell well, mainly due to how it's a bit crusty around the edges today. "Dragon Age: Origins wasn't the most attractive game. There's a lot you could do there to make it a lot better looking."

There was a point in the most recent Path of Exile 2 league that I thought I would have to quit playing the game. Every 20 minutes or so, the entire game would freeze. I'd wait for a solid 30 seconds before everything came back to life, praying I wouldn't lose my character the second I had control again.

When I looked up why this could be happening, I found dozens of Reddit threads about the same issue. People have been suffering from intermittent freezes and crashes since the game launched in early access and the only solution was to swap a setting that made it look considerably worse until developer Grinding Gear Games figured out a solution.

It turns out the freezes were just the first part of a troubleshooting saga that the developers have been on for the last year and a half. As of this week, the war against Path of Exile 2's constant GPU shader crashes is finally over thanks to a mountain of effort GGG put into diagnosing them.

Despite identifying the exact Nvidia driver code that caused it, game director Jonathan Rogers explained in a recent video that the graphics company won't fix anything unless you provide it with the steps to recreate it. "And those steps unfortunately can't be 'just grind to top tier juiced maps,'" he said.

"Even though ultimately this is a bug in the Nvidia driver and it affected a huge number of high level players, quite frankly, they just didn't really seem to believe that it was as common as we said it was," he explained.

GGG started by having someone just play the game for multiple hours hoping it would eventually crash. But with no real clues on what could be causing it, this was a crapshoot. "You really are just taking shots in the dark at that point," Rogers said.

After making no progress toward a solution, the dev team decided to build a system to at least prevent the game from crashing. The freezes I, and many others, experienced were the result of the GPU crashing and the game reloading the textures, shaders, and entire engine without closing down.

Rogers said the solution was "pretty good" but that they were still determined to figure out what was actually causing it. "So we went down an incredibly deep rabbit hole of trying to reproduce it," he said. GGG added a bunch of ways for the game engine to track useful data and a specialized replay system that could play back long gameplay sessions for hours on PCs around the office.

"Eventually with the replays and an incredible amount of work from our engine team, we managed to get it to happen fairly consistently," he said. "We got a replay that would reproduce it every five to seven minutes on average."

They took that replay, packaged into a file you could use to run it again, and shipped the specific rig it was running on to Nvidia—"PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there."

It took some time, but Nvidia finally got back to them and said it would look into it. It came back a few weeks later with a fix: by increasing the shader heap size, the crashes would go away completely. And earlier this week, the Nvidia Game Ready Driver 610.88 was released with this note: "Path of Exile 2: Fixed intermittent long pauses that could occur after extended gameplay sessions in DX12 mode."

"The saga is over and now our engine programmers can go back to optimizing some more normal performance problems," Rogers said, before popping open a bottle of champagne in celebration.

I would be celebrating too if it took almost two years to solve a problem that wasn't even your own fault really. There's nothing worse than being surrounded by dangerous monsters—or looking at a pile of valuable loot—and having the game go unresponsive for a solid 20 seconds. Fingers crossed that no other bugs will show up so everyone can have a smooth experience when it hits 1.0 later this year.

I know celebrities are just richer, more out-of-touch versions of us peasants, but I do admit I get a bit of a kick out of seeing them obsessing over the same videogames as me—Keke Palmer playing The Sims and Tekken, Doja Cat's current journey through Final Fantasy 14, that one time Lady Gaga played Bayonetta.

But there is perhaps no bigger celebrity nerd than artist The Weeknd. I mean, his Instagram profile picture is literally drawn by Final Fantasy royalty Yoshitaka Amano, y'all. The Weeknd knows ball. I'm not at all jealous, by the way.

But perhaps my favourite The Weeknd arc has been his journey with the Persona series since earlier this year. He's been posting an absurd amount of his time playing the games over on his alt Instagram account, and it's been an absolute joy to see him becoming just as obsessed with the series as I am.

He's been making his way through both Persona 3 Reload and Persona 5 Royal, but it's the latter game that really seems to have grabbed his attention. Particularly Tae Takemi, the doctor who you take all sorts of odd medicine from and, more importantly, serves as one of the game's romance options.

What started as sharing his devastation at fumbling her romance option has now progressed into a full case of Down Bad, and The Weeknd's Tae Takemi craze has known no bounds. Pop over to his Instagram stories and you're almost guaranteed to see something about her on there—as I write this, there's a surprisingly excellent mashup of his song Popular and Butterfly Kiss, the song that plays while in Takemi's clinic.

He's been posting goofy little tweets too—like one where he responds to a post of somebody getting his vinyl signed by Takemi's voice actress with a clip from his own music video where he's sobbing while typing "PLEASE talk to me!" All with Takemi's face edited over it, of course.

The biggest one yet, though, is what I can only assume is a Photoshopped image of him with a giant Tae Takemi tattoo blasted over his upper arm. It doesn't quite look real enough to be legit, and scouring some recent concert vids makes me pretty certain this is just once again The Weeknd Tae-posting to hell and back. But hey, would I be surprised if he actually got it? Absolutely not.

The Weeknd's even had the pleasure of visiting the Atlus offices to play a little bit of Persona 4 Revival early, as well as scope out what's going on with Persona 6. Once again, definitely not insanely jealous or anything.

It has sparked questions of whether he'll end up featuring on Persona 6's soundtrack, though. For those not familiar with the series, Atlus tends to go for a pretty distinct sound with each game in the series, and a lot of that tight branding and audio identity comes from sticking to just one or two artists each time. You could play just the vocals from a Persona game and immediately clock which one it's from based purely on who is singing it.

And of course, with The Weekend's current obsession and Atlus visit, people are wondering whether he'll show up. I couldn't imagine Atlus dedicating just a small track to him, but I also can't imagine an entire score with his vocals behind it. With Persona 6 looking like a grittier theme this time, The Weeknd's vocals are maybe a little too soft for the vibe. But hey, who knows? Maybe we'll be seeing him on the soundtrack after all.

The Genshin Impact 7.0 livestream codes are here, and with them, our first proper look at everything snowy Snezhnaya has to offer. This is Genshin's fifth full region added since launch back in 2020, but the home of the Cryo Archon holds significantly more importance than other regions due to the Traveler's often fraught relationship with the Tsaritsa's Harbingers, who've gotten in the way since we arrived in Mondstadt.

As per usual, miHoYo will drop three livestream codes during the special program, which I'll add to the list below as they do. There are also details on how to redeem them lower down if you haven't before. Since livestream codes usually expire within a day or so, make sure to redeem these as soon as possible if you want them. Otherwise, see you in Snezhnaya.

Genshin Impact codes: All current livestream Primogems

• Everwinter - 100 Primogems and 10 Mystic Enhancement Ore
• OntoSnezhnaya - 100 Primogems and five Hero’s Wit
• Odette0812 - 100 Primogems and 50,000 Mora

How to redeem Genshin Impact codes

To redeem your Genshin livestream codes, you'll first have to reach Adventure Rank 10 by playing the game a bit. This won't require too much progress if you're starting the game for the first time, and after that, you'll have two options in terms of code redemption. You can either claim them through the game itself:

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

Or you redeem codes online through the dedicated website:

• Navigate to the Genshin Impact code redemption website
• Enter your info and select character region
• Add a code in the box and choose redeem
• Collect your rewards via the in-game mailbox

Dungeons & Dragons announced it'd be doing a World of Warcraft crossover earlier this week—but it also, additionally, teased a Star Wars crossover at the end of its D&D Vision keynote. Further details can be found on the D&D Beyond site, revealing that the crossover will be coming in 2027 as part of a "Season of Rebellion".

"We want to let our community know that D&D Universes Beyond is additive to the incredible roadmap we have for our own worlds. We have been staffing up to support this initiative and look forward to what the future holds."

And, hey—cool! I like Star Wars, I like Dungeons & Dragons (no really, I do, no matter how much I moan at Hasbro), but there is a small, itchy part at the back of my brain that's wondering if Hasbro is trying, once again, to capture the same monetisation systems it created with Magic: The Gathering and apply them here, where they might not fit.

For context, Magic: The Gathering does heaps of licensed crossovers. We're talking Monty Python, we're talking Assassin's Creed. We're even talking Garfield. No universe is safe, there is no IP that cannot be turned into a little slip of paper. The bountiful world of trademarks is merely fertile soil for the ever-expanding Magic empire.

And, to Wizards of the Coast's credit, a lot of those crossovers have been neat—it's cool to see your favourite series/comics/little black cat thoughtfully represented by game mechanics, whether they be entirely bespoke cards or just reskins. So why am I hemming and hawing about this? Shouldn't I be happy?

Part of the problem is just the format. I hate to be that guy, but there's already a Star Wars TTRPG. Heck, there's even already a very popular D&D 5e Star Wars fan project. But I think there's this assumption that Hasbro—and some of its customers—make where they assume that the D&D, D20-based framework can be applied to anything.

And as someone who loves TTRPGs of all shapes and sizes, that just… isn't true. D&D is a great system for grand heroics, dungeon-crawling, and combat—but if you, say, want to do teenage superheroes? You should at least try Masks. If you want to do mech combat, you should at least try Lancer.

The reason Magic crossovers work is because, well, it's a card game. The nature of a Magic match doesn't really change all that much based on what your cards look like, the art within them, or the theming.

This isn't the case for a TTRPG campaign. In a TTRPG, the rules need to work with the story or vibe you're trying to put across.

The two announced crossovers, World of Warcraft and Star Wars, can easily work in a D&D setting. Heck, D&D's had its own space opera setting, Starjammer, for a while. But there is a little part of me that fears Hasbro will start stretching further and further into obscurity, because there's only so much IP out there.

For instance, D&D just isn't that great at horror. There's Curse of Strahd, sure, but I'd like to point out that Curse of Strahd's entire plot involves you finding a cool sword made out of sunlight and going to not-Dracula's castle to kick his ass. A D&D crossover with an actual horror property just won't have the same bite that a good game of Dread or Mothership does.

However, that's only a fear for now—and to Wizards of the Coast's credit, there have been announcements that play more to the system's existing strength, too. We're going to be getting both Dragonlance and Greyhawk settings coming back, with the former helmed by original co-creator Tracy Hickman, and the latter led by Luke Gygax. Plus, Drizzt! Drizzt is here, again. Oh, and freaking Dark Sun. There's tons to be excited about.

Fallout 4 remaster, Fallout: New Vegas remaster, Fallout 5, Fallout 3 prequel for Fallout 76, Fallout (the TV series) Season 3, and whatever Fallout game Obsidian is now working on… there's a whoooooole lotta Fallout coming your way if you're a Fallout fan.

But, uh, not for a while. What's a Jet junkie to do in the meantime? Well, how about Fallout: New California, a full conversion mod for Fallout: New Vegas that just released on GOG. Here's the trailer.

Fallout: New California may have just appeared on GOG but it's not so much new as it is newly accessible. The project has been around for quite a while, and if you don't believe me, we called it "the best Fallout game you'll play this year" way back in 2018—and at that stage it had already been in development for roughly seven years, originally called Project Brazil.

Officially hosted now on GOG, it can now be installed and launched easily if you own Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition, rather than downloading the files and other half-dozen recommended mods through Moddb and managing the install yourself.

What's Fallout: New California all about? Glad you asked. Here's what I've skillfully cut-and-pasted from the mod's page on GOG:

"In Fallout: New California you play as the kid from Vault 18. Orphan. Loner. Mutant. On the last big night of the Vault Ball season in 2260, you make a fateful decision that will change the course of your life—and eventually the future of the New California Republic," the developers say.

You read that date right: it takes place before Fallout 2, back in the day of the original Interplay Fallout games. Cool.

"You will face the New California Republic under president Wendell Peterson, the New Reno Mob's Bishop Family, the remnant Shi Clans, The Enclave Leonidas Squadron, the Super Mutant Army, and the bloodthirsty Raider Alliance that have banded together in the remote Athens-Tec Uranium Mine off the Long I-15."

I haven't played it yet myself, but some more text I strenuously Ctrl-C'd and Ctrl-V'd from our original article about the mod calls it "a remarkable achievement, and one of the most confident and professional mods I’ve ever played." Sounds good to me.

For the first time in three years, we're not getting advance notice on absolutely everything coming in the next Diablo 4 season. Usually, Blizzard spells it all out in the patch notes, but this time it's keeping its lips sealed until BlizzCon in September.

There's still a good amount of stuff to see in the season 15 blog post, including new seasonal items, returning items from past games, and further changes to the controversial Mythic Unique item changes from last season. But there are two sections that look suspiciously empty, suggesting that the full reveals will happen on stage at BlizzCon.

The first of these are called "Challenge Dungeons", which seem to be boss encounters that randomly appear while you're exploring the open world. Blizzard specifically says you'll enter these new portals to "fight against a fearsome boss" and that the difficulty level will be customizable once you're well into the endgame.

My first thought after reading about the Challenge Dungeons is that they might be a permanent version of the current season's Deathtoll Chambers. When you kill the seasonal world boss, you can jump into a portal and participate in a mini event that ends in a big loot explosion. Swap that out with a boss—maybe even one of the game's tougher lair bosses—and I can kind of see this being a fun way to make open-world exploration more unpredictable than it is now.

"Note that the encounters you experience here are built specifically to test the underlying system, and the final season 15 experience will feature different content," the post reads. It's possible this means the finished version will have different bosses, or maybe something else entirely. Either way, I think these have the potential to spice up a part of the game that is already kind of dull.

The second sparsely explained new system is another event that will catch you by surprise in the open world: Overland Ambushes. You'll see a message saying you're being hunted by a demon and will have 30 seconds to escape or fight it. "This encounter will test the mettle of Sanctuary's strongest warriors," the description says. "This is a difficult encounter."

I have a lot of questions about where this can happen, how often it can happen, and what you get out of it, but Blizzard seems to be intentionally leaving it vague. Your guess is as good as mine on how this one works, but it might become clear once the PTR is up next week to test it out.

The rest of the seasonal stuff sounds promising, too. There will be new "Soul Splinters" items to slot into your jewelry. Each one offers powerful damage buffs but comes with a cost, like increasing your damage taken or periodically stunning your character (you won't catch me using that one).

Blizzard is also reaching back into Diablo's past and releasing new versions of old Unique items from Diablo 1, Diablo 2, and Diablo 3. Leoric's Crown from Diablo 3, for example, will be worn in your helm slot but will count as a jewelry item to boost the effects of gems you socket into it. Even if it turns out to be terrible, I love when items break the rules like this, and I'm glad to see Blizzard trying some stuff out for the next season.

On top of all of that, Blizzard is bringing back Diablo 3's "Rebirth" system for recycling characters every season and massaging some of the pain points with the controversial changes to Mythic Uniques in the current season. Basically, Mythics will be easier to craft and find and the rarest ones, known as Iconic Mythics, will now have weaker, Unique versions so you can work them into your build earlier on in your journey. I'm still not sold on Mythics becoming a new upgraded tier of items rather than a select pool of truly rare items, but I'm willing to see how it all works out in the end.

Blizzard will have most of this to test in some form on the Diablo 4 season 15 PTR beginning on August 4 and ending on August 11.

New ZeniMax Online Studios co-head Nick Giacomini says that despite deep cuts at the studio as part of the most recent round of Xbox layoffs, The Elder Scrolls Online "is here to stay." But those layoffs, which saw more than 200 people let go including Giacomini's predecessor Joseph Burba, mean that previously announced timelines are no longer workable, and things are being moved.

"Instead of rushing to hit a previously announced deadline, we are giving our teams the runway they need to do things right," Giacomini wrote in today's update, invoking the same term—"runway"—Xbox used when it dumped Compulsion and Double Fine. "Some of our upcoming additions, like the Class and Combat Refresh and our new Trial, are highly complex, and we want to ensure they hit the mark before we put them in your hands."

What this means in practical terms is that Update 52, which had been scheduled for Q4 of 2026, will instead arrive in January of 2027, and season 1's new Crimson Veldt trial is also being bumped to '27. Less certainly, from the sounds of it, ZeniMax is now "targeting 2027" for TESO's promised class and combat refresh, although it is "discussing some interim options for the classes still awaiting their full refresh to improve your player experience in the meantime."

As for 2026, Update 51 will launch on September 27, one week later than planned, with a new challenge, "Rumors" game system, and "player experience improvements," while TESO season 2 will debut on October 21.

The impact of the Xbox layoffs are obviously being felt at ZeniMax, but Giacomini said in his missive that "we are not looking to just 'maintain' the game. We are looking to grow it."

That's appropriately upbeat for a new studio boss, but the reality remains that ZeniMax has been gutted by layoffs over the past two years. Original TESO director Matt Firor, who helped launch the studio in 2007, also departed following the 2025 layoffs and was replaced by Burba, who lasted only a year before he was let go in this latest round of cuts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's something defiant about the trend of deliberately ugly immersive sims. It is a statement: mechanics are king and beauty is a distraction, so here is something we scraped out of the vents on a PlayStation 1. I admire it. Not the graphics; the graphics look awful. I admire the sentiment.

The latest in this proud tradition is Parkside: Decayed Soul Manipulation (in environments not restricted by the PC Gamer style guide, that title is rendered in all caps) from Banana Hardsoft, which releases on the 31st of July but has a demo you can play right now. It's got a System Shock start with a Deus Ex finish: you're Alexander, a hacker in a rundown world where the billboards blare messages like "Do Not Hinder Law Enforcement". You hack a little too deep and men with guns kick down your door.

It's not System Shock's Trioptimum Corp, though, it's a gang of zealots set up like the Catholic Illuminati. They strap you into a machine that lets you remotely pilot a combat-ready body and send you off to kill a man. It's all part of the ineffable plan to serve the Divine Rod. Or something.

It's all very aesthetically piquant, even if Parkside deliberately keeps its plot mysterious by communicating it mostly through symbols and non sequiturs in its earliest hours. But who cares? You have a man to kill and many different routes to follow to do it.

This is where everything starts to feel more Deus Ex than System Shock. Your combat-body bristles with augments—cloaking, defence, literally possessing people, and son—that you can activate using experience, gained by poking your nose where it shouldn't be and pursuing objectives.

Me? I opted to jack up my speed and jump height (which, incidentally, made my body look scarier, and capped my maximum possible reputation with NPCs as a result) in the hopes that I could bound my way up the outside of my target's building. Parkside's maps are shot through with vents and ledges and other little eye-catching paths to follow—I figured I would surely find one if I leapt about the place a little.

I'd have to leap carefully. Here's the thing: Parkside has no saves. Instead, you can sup from a Divine Elixir in certain, limited rooms to give yourself a one-time-use checkpoint. I suspect it might rub some people the wrong way, but as a man who always wants to be protected from his own savescumming tendencies, I appreciated it.

Did my plan work? Well, no. There were vents, but I couldn't figure out a path up to them. What I did find was the corpse of a dead soldier on a nearby roof, who had also been observing my target, and the large assault rifle he had by him made short work of my mark. It also made short work of the approximately 8,000 cops who swarmed the building on hearing gunfire, and when I ran out of ammo, I simply hopped in a nearby car to escape the rest. Yes, a car. Imsims have cars now. It's a brave new world.

It scratches a lot of OG Deus Ex itches, and I'll be curious to see what the full game has to offer when it releases on the 31st of July. Next time I might even avoid having to wipe out every cop in the map, but no promises.

While we weren't too hot on the 2025 soulslike Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, it was a hit for Chinese developer Leenzee and publisher 505 Games, reaching five million players across all platforms. However, a report from the Chinese publication Gamersky earlier this year claimed that the game's director and producer, Xia Siyuan, had been fired from Leenzee. A number of staff were also reportedly let go.

Although the Wuchang IP was then sold to 505 Games' parent company, Digital Bros, for around $4.6 million back in April, the future of the series was left up in the air until today: 505 Games just announced that Siyuan is working on a sequel with his new studio, Indolphinity.

"Today, we're excited to share that 505 Games has officially entered into a new partnership with Xia Siyuan, the original creator of WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers, and his new studio Indolphinity … to jointly create a brand‑new chapter of the WUCHANG IP."

"As of now, the WUCHANG sequel has officially entered its preparation phase:

Indolphinity will lead the creative development, while 505 Games will provide funding and global publishing. Future development will remain firmly rooted in China."

“We are delighted to embark once again on a deep collaboration with 505 Games under our new studio banner, Indolphinity,” said Siyuan in a separate statement. "As a homegrown development team made up of Chinese creators, we have always believed that a rich cultural heritage is the essence of our games and their competitive strength."

"505 Games's respect for the creative process and its genuine understanding of developers' needs are perfectly in tune with our own values, and this shared vision gives us confidence in the long-term future of the series."

Of course, it depends on how this sequel pans out, but it sounds like those involved have high hopes for this up-and-coming soulslike. Digital Bros co-CEO Raffi Galante chimed in to say that they "strongly believe in Wuchang as a long-term global franchise."

While very few soulslikes can go toe to toe with FromSoftware, it's nice to know that Wuchang isn't being left to rot, and that its original team is getting another shot after all.

I'm surprised it's taken 13 years to happen, but Final Fantasy 14 is finally bringing Final Fantasy 7 to the MMO in a big way. Upcoming expansion Evercold is getting an entire raid series dedicated to the remake trilogy—that's 12 whole fights spread across three tiers which will trickle in over the course of Evercold's two-to-three year lifespan.

It's been a long wait, but as Rebirth and Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi tells me, the stars finally aligned to make the crossover happen. "I was speaking to [FF14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida] about the fact that Evercold and Revelation release dates were actually going to end up being fairly close together," he said. "And so, instead of having them as two separate things … let's do something that can really energise the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole."

As for what we can expect when the raid series lands? Well, that's all very mysterious right now. Hamaguchi kept tight-lipped on what sort of fights we'll see, though he did hint towards efforts being made to make a Final Fantasy 7 boss more suitable for Final Fantasy 14's raids.

"We're working with both teams to talk about lore and to make sure it's well established," Hamaguchi said. "At the same time, Final Fantasy 14 raids have their own way of working. For example, you've got to have quite big bosses for that to be able to work.

"So, I'm not confirming or denying whether Sephiroth will be making an appearance—but say, for example, you can't just have human Sephiroth be absolutely massive. So how would he appear? What would go on there? These are the kinds of things that we have to think about when we're thinking about how we can get the world of Final Fantasy 7 into 14 in a way that works."

I mean, hey, I certainly wouldn't say no to a giant Sephiroth. But I also can't help but think about when he made an appearance in Kingdom Hearts 2 and how, despite very much being normal human-sized, he was by far the most foreboding fight in that entire game. Of course, when you've got eight players of varying stature surrounding a regular dude, that might just feel like unfairly beating on a guy.

It seems that the ultimate goal, though, is making sure designs and lore are compatible for both worlds. "You really have to make sure that things make sense to the fans," he said. "If Cloud just appeared in FF14 like 'Hey, I'm Cloud,' without any consistent rules, people are going to be like 'Well, that doesn't make sense.' So we really have to think about how and why these worlds are going to be connected. And that's why we have [OG FF7 writer Kazushige Nojima] on board as well to make sure that things are all looking good from our side. If we don't have that all in palace, then players are just going to look at that and go 'This feels fake.'"

But everything has to go through the father of Final Fantasy 7's cast of characters himself: Tetsuya Nomura. The longtime belt-loving Square Enix artist is also assisting with the raid series—seriously, I'm kind of shocked to see just how many big names are working on this.

"I won't mention specifics, but when [Creative Studio 3] were saying 'We'd like to have this character as a raid boss,' we had a discussion on how we can make them big. I'll use an example that it is definitely not. So say Cloud is the boss. Nobody wants to go in there and just see Cloud looking like Cloud, but massive.

"The lore is really important in establishing why. Like [you need] a good in-game reason why the character would be big and be able to have people fight them at that kind of scale. So yes, we spent a lot of time discussing that. And then you can come up with an idea and be like 'Well, we could do this.' And then Tetsuya Nomura will say 'No, you cannot do that to that character. You cannot show them like that.' So these are the parameters that we're working with, and we're always coming up with new ideas to try and see what we can do."

I am so curious to know exactly who or what Hamaguchi is referring to here, and I'm already doing my best to dive deep into my brain and remember which formidable foes are particularly small. My first thought was maybe a tonberry—a 10-minute savage fight with a slow lil guy could be very funny—but I think scaling him up without any other changes makes a lot of sense.

Whatever it is, I'm already giddy at the thought of the raid series in Evercold. Part of me is a tiny bit sad that both the alliance raid and eight-player raids are crossovers next expansion—with the alliance raid being all about Evangelion—but since Hamaguchi seems positive about intertwining the lore in a way that feels right, I'm ready to trust his vision.

Final Fantasy 14 may be an MMO, but it's certainly never sacrificed the series' talent for excellent storytelling. It's stuffed with incredible worldbuilding, a cherished cast of characters, and heart-wrenching story beats that'll get players shedding a tear from just hearing a few notes from a song that played during a cutscene.

It is, however, also a story that requires hundreds of hours to experience the full breadth of its narrative—spread across A Realm Reborn and five meaty expansions, with a sixth one on the way. While Square Enix has pruned quests here and there in an attempt to streamline the experience, it's still a helluva lot of game to ask a new player to commit to.

I've had the good fortune to be playing since the beginning, but I can say with absolute certainty that if I was only just starting the game, I'd be damn near paralysed by how daunting the new player experience is—especially if you want to play with friends who are already across the finish line.

It's something that director and producer Naoki Yoshida seems to be thinking about as well, especially as the upcoming expansion Evercold marks the official beginning of the MMO's next arc with the Godless Realms Saga.

In fact, he's considering two things right now, he told the press during a media Q&A at the Berlin Fan Festival. Though he's being rather secretive about both of them. "The first one is something that we will carry out at Evercold's release or before Evercold," he said.

"The second one involves a system, but we're currently reviewing the possibility of this. We're still considering feasibility and addressing whether or not we would be able to introduce the system. And for these things that I'm talking about, there's a non-zero possibility of us being able to implement it for 8.0. So there is a possibility that we could make it."

Yoshida admits that he's previously been hesitant to allow players to potentially skip expansions or story, but the MMO has grown so much that a potential solution is becoming unavoidable. "I had previously said that I want players to enjoy the story, so I would like them to have a fresh experience right from A Realm Reborn," he said. "But now we are at this point, we've begun thinking about accommodating these kinds of requests."

As for when we can find out more, Yoshida hinted towards more details at the Tokyo leg of Fan Festival which'll be happening at the end of October. But overall, he's "thinking very positively about the possibility of incorporating something and accommodating those requests."

Honestly, I was surprised when Yoshida didn't do this for Dawntrail. Considering Endwalker marked the end of the Hydaelyn-Zodiark saga, I'd half-expected Dawntrail to act as a new, optional onboarding point for players picking up the game for the first time.

It wouldn't surprise me if it's the expansion Yoshida has in mind if the game does end up offering a secondary start point—it's essentially a bridge between the old arc and the upcoming one, and feels like the best fit besides Evercold. I can understand concerns about the narrative holding less weight if you've not experienced one base game and five expansions of it, but it's also a big ask. And when Final Fantasy 14 appears to be the golden goose of Square Enix, any way to make the MMO more enticing to newcomers feels like a win-win.