Fallout: New Vegas writer and former Obsidian creative officer, Chris Avellone, has given a new interview to Fallout content creator TKs-Mantis, and it's a hefty one. Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising assertion is that Bethesda doesn't have the source code for New Vegas (I've asked Bethesda about this, and haven't had a response yet), but there's plenty more: including one particular road not travelled for the series, alongside a healthy crank on the specul-a-tron about where Fallout might go next.

When being asked about the early stages of Fallout: New Vegas' production, the host mentions the potential of a setting like New Orleans. "Holy shit," says Avellone, "Yeah so one of the designers / producers on one of our other projects suggested New Orleans's location, and I was so stoked for that.

"It's going to be a weird reference, but there is an old comic franchise that was started by this author-artist Matt Wagner called Grendel. And a lot of the Grendel stories are very post-apocalyptic. There was one that was written in New Orleans, it was called Four Devils, One Hell."

I haven't read this, so I looked up a plot summary, and it involves a PI investigating the murder of a chef while four Grendels manifest their own visions of hell in New Orleans. One "is insane and believes himself to be a knight in the service of Charlemagne" and likes to fight vampires, one's trying to mess with the PI, one's an English curator on the hunt for some mysterious treasure, and the last is a gentlemanly gambler. I can kinda see where some of that might map onto Fallout's own brand of post-apocalypse.

"It's a fantastic story but as soon as I read it, which is while I was doing Fallout research ironically enough, I'm like, man, this makes me want to do a Fallout New Orleans so bad," says Avellone. "'Cos the vibe was so cool. The flavor was cool. And like it's still Fallout, but in a different area that felt different. There's a lot of potential there. [It would've been] so sweet."

Elsewhere in the interview, another location pops up: though not in relation to New Vegas. Avellone offers up some thoughts about what the Fallout TV show has done well and not-so-well, before ending with "the show's laying all the groundwork for whatever I guess Fallout 5 is going to be as far as I understand it."

He's asked about the fact that Bethesda supposedly said 'don't do San Francisco' when pitching, and confirms with a simple "yeah." Bethesda also later asked for the removal of a line of dialogue in New Vegas that said San Francisco was nuked. Asked whether he thinks this means Fallout 5 is heading to San Francisco, Avellone says "it's quite possible."

Avellone left Obsidian in 2015, citing creative and business disputes with management. He has since written for several notable RPGs, including Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and is currently collaborating with Red Info, the studio founded by Disco Elysium lead writer Robert Kurvitz, on a future title. As for New Vegas, the hopium continues to waft around a mooted remaster, the most recent rumours landing last month.

While us mere Earth-dwellers are stuck in the middle of the RAMpocalypse, those bourgeoise folks up on the International Space Station have no such worries. The current crew are reviewing plans to replace network servers on the gigantic floating tin can—and discussing when they can activate their new laptops.

And what magnificent machines they appear to be (via The Verge). The crew's new computers are custom HP ZBook G9 Fury models, and they've got specs sheets that would make many modern gaming rigs weep.

With Intel Core Ultra 9 processors and Nvidia RTX Pro Blackwell mobile GPUs nestled inside, the new HP machines [PDF] certainly have processing and graphics needs covered—along with a serious dose of AI crunching power. Each also comes with 128 GB worth of DDR5 ECC SODIMM memory, and "multiple NVMe SSDs." Must be nice.

Actually, ECC memory is more of a requirement than a luxury. ECC stands for Error-Correcting Code, and memory modules with such a system are used to ensure data integrity within machines operating in high-stakes scenarios.

On Earth, they might be used for crucial servers in a data center setup, or within certain industrial systems. In space, they're used because... well, you're in space. Data is kind of the reason we're going in the first place, and NASA loves a dose of extra redundancy.

Do the astronauts really need that much of it, though? I only ask because we're sort of struggling down here on terra firma. Oh they do. Never mind. Forget about it. Important space stuff, I understand.

HP says that its new machines have also undergone extensive battery and radiation testing, including "bombardment with neutrons in specialised radiation chambers." I'd imagine that isn't on the list of tests for most of our best gaming laptop picks, but I'm prepared to be surprised.

Even the glass of the LCD screens has had a thorough going over, as broken glass in zero gravity can leads to some very unfortunate results.

The HP mega lappys have received the NASA seal of approval, and are deemed fit for the challenge of operating in one of the most unorthodox environments you could possibly think of. The first batch of laptops were launched back in October, and they should be coming online sometime soon.

Once they're up and running, may I suggest a quick game of Kerbal Space Program, just as an extra testing procedure? It'd be rude not to, given the circumstances—and someone's got to be the first to try it out in zero G.

Rather than juggling way too many tabs in Chrome, I sweep them all into OneTab and promptly forget about them—extensions and plugins are great. If I still had my own blog, I'd probably use them for all sorts of things, but third-party platform add-ons also represent a security concern.

It's important to double-check the provenance of anything you're considering adding, though I suspect few attackers will be quite as ambitious as the person who bought 30 WordPress plugins and then installed backdoors in all of them.

That's according to Austin Ginder, the founder of Anchor Hosting. He began to investigate after noticing the previously dormant Countdown Timer Ultimate had begun pushing out malicious code. A number of the affected plugins have since been taken offline (via TechCrunch).

Countdown Timer Ultimate was originally built by a team called Essential Plugin. Due to a decline in revenue, the founders sold their entire business on Flippa, a private marketplace for buying and selling online outfits like Essential Plugin. The platform itself shared a case study on the six-figure sale in 2025. According to Ginder's timeline, the new owner allegedly planted the backdoor barely a month after that glowing post went up on Flippa.

The backdoor wasn't weaponised until about April 5, 2026, according to the blog, with the WordPress plugins team moving to shut down all 31 of Essential Plugin's offerings. Quick action is definitely welcome in a situation like this, but Ginder criticises the fact that no users would have suspected anything was up until the attack began.

He writes, "WordPress.org has no mechanism to flag or review plugin ownership transfers. There is no 'change of control' notification to users. No additional code review triggered by a new committer."

Worse still, Ginder reports this sort of hijack is not uncommon. Ginder shares one story from 2017 where someone "purchased the Display Widgets plugin (200,000 installs) for $15,000 and injected payday loan spam." He also shares another story from earlier this very month, where someone launched a supply chain attack via the previously trusted Widget Logic WordPress plugin.

For context, the Essential plugin team's website is still live, touting "15,000+ Global Happy Customers." That's a lot of users who could have been potentially affected—how many of them would have no idea until either WordPress took the plugins down, or they independently stumbled across news coverage of the polluted plugins themselves? It's hard not to see Ginder's argument.

I love money so much. I’d marry a banknote if it was socially acceptable, and then I’d cheat on it with coins. But I also love PC games, and oh no! They’re more expensive than ever. And don't even get me started on console exclusives, that demand you pony up for the hardware too.

That’s why I’ve taken some of 2026’ biggest games and suggested budget alternatives. A mix of indies, underappreciated gems, and the downright bizarre. Can I persuade you to snub Forza Horizon 6 to instead play something called ‘Wreckreation’? Let’s find out!

Grand Theft Auto 6

Rockstar has supposedly spent over a billion dollars working on this long-awaited sequel. But will it really be any better than Sleeping Dogs? Ok, probably, but if you're as miserly as me, you can still get your fix of open world crime action for a lot less than GTA 6 is likely to cost.

Samson

The titular Samson is a low-level criminal who owes some awful people an awful lot of money. Each day you do odd jobs, usually involving punching lots of people in the head, to keep on top of that debt. That ticking clock gives crime sandbox tropes a nice new layer of tension.

It’s janky, to say the least, and some of its quirks can irritate. It’d be nice if Samson didn’t celebrate taking painkillers by throwing his melee weapon away. But there’s more than enough good, interesting ideas here. When was the last time you played a crime sandbox where a car repair payment was as terrifying a prospect as a mob hit?

It’s a wannabe gritty cops-n-crims drama where you can also knock down sandwich boards to win more nitro boost tanks for your car. We should treasure such nonsense, especially at such a reasonable asking price.

The Precinct

An open-world crime sandbox where you’re actually trying to stop the criminals. I ran over countless civilians in the tutorial chase and wasn’t fired for it, which is either cutting satire or a sign that the game needs a little polish (actually, I was punished for my pedestrian slaughterfest with less options to call for backup—well, I’ve certainly learnt my lesson). But I really like its commitment to gamifying the more mundane parts of police life. Are you a bad enough dude to correctly identify these parking violations?

Shakedown Hawaii and Retro City Rampage

If you’re more into GTA for the chaos, Shakedown Hawaii and Retro City Rampage are silly riffs on the early 2D games that are great fun if you just wanna indulge your inner Trevor. Not having to render 3D 4K AAAA megagraphics means it can just keep piling on the explosions, tanks, and other destructive delights. Great Steam Deck companions, these.

Resident Evil Requiem

Capcom celebrated 30 years of Resident Evil this year with an outstanding mix of tense survival horror and fun shooty bang-bang action, only slightly weakened by basically turning into The Leon of Us in its second half. But you can make yourself just as terrified alone at your desk at night for a fraction of the price with these alternatives!

Fear the Spotlight

This horror adventure has a lovely graphical style inspired by the PS1, though if we're honest with ourselves, no game on that machine ever looked this good. It nails the foreboding atmosphere, as you explore a school and slowly piece together the grim tragedy that’s got it all spooked up. Its monster is a little goofy (spotlight head man isn’t going to be making Freddy Krueger lose any sleep) but it still kept me constantly on edge, and it knows how to tell a great, spine-tingling story.

Crow Country

An atmospheric trip to a cursed theme park that's made no less scary by all its characters looking like they're made of Duplo. It also puts modern controls on the analogue stick and tank controls on the D-pad so you can switch between them without ever entering the options menu, which I think deserves a round of applause from you right now.

Pokémon Pokopia

Last month’s mega hit lets you build, craft, and feel smugly vindicated if you’ve been droning on for years about how great Dragon Quest Builders is. Arguably the Switch 2’s first killer app, thanks to its innovative idea of being the first Pokémon game in forever that doesn’t run like absolute tripe. But what if you don't want to shell out for a new handheld and then pay Nintendo game prices on top? There is another way…

Ooblets

The game for people who find Animal Crossing too stressful. You move to a lush island full of adorable little guys. So cute, in fact, that Pikachu and co might wanna start looking into cosmetic surgery. Instead of battles, your ooblets get into competitive dance offs, which is categorically better. It’s also got funny writing, a fabulous soundtrack, and a pastel aesthetic that’s like filling your eyes with sweets.

Before the Green Moon

Pokopia is surprisingly melancholic. If you want a farming sim that does something similar, try Before the Green Moon.

It's a love letter to Harvest Moon 64, but with a darker edge. Earth’s on its last legs and you’re trying to earn enough money to move to the moon. But after a few weeks of farming and getting to know the excellent characters, good luck abandoning them.

It also adds a welcome shot of realism to a genre that’s gotten far too people-pleasy. There’s one NPC who never likes you, no matter what you do, just like in real life. Cosy gaming and hard truths, together at last.

Forza Horizon 6

Speeding onto PC in May, this ridiculously pretty racing game might even be kind of enjoyable, if it can stop itself yelling at me about how much fun I’m allegedly having. The series peaked with Lego DLC a couple games ago, as I’m sure we all universally agree. If you'd rather not pay AAA prices for the 6th time, try one of these more humble racers instead.

Wreckreation

This is the slightly janky Burnout Paradise spiritual successor of my dreams. Drive into oncoming traffic at 200mph while bashing into rival cars so they crash horribly. Bliss. It’s a little buggy and has an open-world overly fond of forest. But when the racing feels this exhilarating, who cares?

I love its clever tweaks of the Burnout formula, like a road rage mode where you’re penalised for taking down certain cars, that make ancient arcade racer thrills feel fresh again. If you’re a Burnout fan this is a must-play, especially because it sold about four copies on launch. Bah!

Death Stranding 2

Finally released on PC last month to excellent reviews, Kojima Productions achieved the impossible—a PS5 game ported to PC that doesn’t run like expired garbage. But it still demands that Sony premium at checkout, and when it comes to quirky sci-fi adventures, there are much cheaper alternatives out there.

The Alters

This survival game definitely helped itself to some of the best bits of Death Stranding. The parts where you painstakingly explore its hostile planet make a good case that Kojima should have abandoned Earth completely.

The unique hook is that you can only survive by creating clones of yourself that represent alternative paths your life could have taken. One is from a timeline where you didn’t end up divorced, and if he humblebrags about it one more bloody time, I’m gonna make him sit through Death Stranding lore explainer videos until he begs for death.

Echo

Speaking of slightly dodgy cloning experiments, this is probably my favourite stealth game not called Metal Gear Solid V.

You have to escape a space palace which is steadily filling with clones of yourself. The lights keep cutting out, and when they come back on, you’ve got a fresh batch of You’s to deal with.

Each wave of clones is based on your recent behaviour, too, forcing you to constantly shake up your stealth strategies. A fantastic idea that’s executed brilliantly.

007 First Light

On May 27, IO Interactive will take a break from its outstanding recent Hitman games to make us play as someone slightly more heroic. But if you're as broke as me, you may want to find your espionage thrills elsewhere.

Operation: Tango

A co-op game where one of you plays the spy and the other plays the hacker in their ear. Played online with voice chat, you have to rely on your communication skills to successfully pull off missions and try not to kill each other (though there’s achievements for doing exactly that).

I thought this would descend into me and a pal bickering about who has to be the hacker, but this terrific bit of co-op espionage actually manages to make the hacking just as exciting as being the spy on the ground.

18 game recommendations later and I’m still hungry for more. Let me know what great alternatives you’ve found to AAA gaming in the comments, and I’ll ignore them all to play more Wreckreation. I mean, add them to my wishlist. Thanks!

There are some questions in life that are rightly acknowledged as fundamental to our existance as human beings. Who am I? Why are we here? What's that smell? What are they eating, that looks tasty? And it's the same with PC gaming, and one of the most important question any PC gamer has to deal with is the one I posited to you, my dear readers, the other week:

Where does your PC live?

There is, of course, a right answer, and I am very sorry to say that only 37% of those of you who took up the challenge answered correctly. That said, it is still a majority of you, so there is some hope for our PC Gamer brood.

Where does your gaming PC live?

Votes (%)

Beside me, always with me, on my desk

37

On the floor, as it should be

34

On its own little stage attached to my desk

12

Next to my TV, because I'm a grown up

7

Hooked under my desk, like a stealth assassin

7

Shut away in a cupboard

2

Bolted to the wall, as the lord intended

1

010203040

Percentage

Votes (%) Data

Product	Value
Beside me, always with me, on my desk	37
On the floor, as it should be	34
On its own little stage attached to my desk	12
Next to my TV, because I'm a grown up	7
Hooked under my desk, like a stealth assassin	7
Shut away in a cupboard	2
Bolted to the wall, as the lord intended	1

More disconcerting, however, is the fact that 34% of you think it's acceptable to keep that expensive repository of game-playing componentry down on the floor. Among the dust and cobwebs and carpet and crumbs. Heathens.

There are some other interesting nuggets in the data, though, such as the fact that a healthy 7% of folk who answered the quiz are rocking a living room PC. And the Steam Machine isn't even out yet. And, I know it's only one percent, but the fact that there are 81 PC Gamer readers out there with their PCs bolted to the wall... well, I salute you.

Over the past week we've been asking you lovely people about your AI use. And I've got to say, I'm both surprised and not about the results so far. Turns out a lot of PC Gamer readers are resolutely not using DLSS or FSR... if they're being honest 🙃

Microsoft's fabled Project Helix chip, the AMD-engineered basis of the next-gen Xbox console, will reportedly be used by Asus, MSI and other brands to make third-party gaming machines. However, consumers won't be able to buy the Helix chip separately.

So says KeplerL2, one of the most reliable members of the tech-leak illuminati. Posting on NeoGAF forum (via WCCFTech), KeplerL2 said, "it won't be sold directly to consumers, but you will be able to buy an ASUS / MSI / etc Helix machine."

The idea that Microsoft will branch out from producing and selling only its own Xbox-branded hardware isn't new. Nor is the idea that an OEM like Asus would get involved. After all, we already have the economically monikered (not) Asus ROG Xbox Ally X handheld gaming device acting as something of a harbinger or early template for this approach.

However, the Xbox Ally X isn't a perfect model for the future living room console. It uses an essentially off-the-shelf AMD APU in the Ryzen Z2 Extreme, a chip that's not only available in non-Xbox handhelds, but also in everything from laptops to desktops, albeit under different branding as part of another tranche of the AMD Ryzen product range.

Project Helix, on the other hand, will be exclusive to Microsoft. Sure, it's engineered by AMD and most of not all the IP will be available in other chips. Currently, that's expected to translate into Zen 6 CPU cores and a GPU most closely related to AMD's next-gen RDNA 5 family of PC graphics cards.

But the precise mix of CPU and GPU core count—and perhaps some specific features in the ray tracing and / or machine learning spheres—may be exclusive to Helix. Moreover, console chips are traditionally built in big numbers and with few if any variations.

That tends to make them cheaper to make and deliver more bang-for-buck compared to traditional gaming PC hardware solutions, albeit at the cost of losing most if not all end-user configuration options. Console chips are what console chips do.

The catch, of course, is the possible confounding influence of console subsidies, where the expectation of games license revenues allows console makers to sell machines cheaper or even at a loss but still make a profit on the overall business.

Still, one of the interesting possibilities around the Helix chip has been the idea that if it were sold separately, it might form the basis of a powerful but relatively inexpensive PC gaming rig.

Exactly how Project Helix will be engineered isn't clear. But if it has on-package memory, the result would be a solution that just needed a motherboard to drop into and some storage and Bob's your next-gen-gaming parental sibling. Or, perhaps more likely, it will be a soldered-on chip with no socketing to speak of.

One might imagine, then, if Microsoft is banging its own-branded Xbox Helix boxes out for, say, $800 a pop with a fancy chassis and packaging, plus some controllers, some kind of bare bones setup, maybe using your existing case, SSD and PSU to cut the price even further then—hey presto—there's your $500 comprehensive gaming rig upgrade.

Well, however realistic that ever was, KeplerL2's post seems to consign it to history. It ain't happening because you won't be able to buy the Helix chip separately. That still leaves the likes of Asus or MSI to potentially undercut the official Microsoft console, however.

Given how pricey the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X is, Asus isn't a great candidate for that solution. MSI could be better, but even then, what with the memory and broader computer chip crisis, it would be a tall order for any OEM to hit a spectacular price point with a new device.

Arguably, Apple has just about achieved that with the MacBook Neo, though that obviously isn't a gaming device. But even Valve is struggling to cope with chip prices to the extent that the upcoming Steam Machine's launch has been disrupted.

All of which means that Project Helix doesn't immediately look like it will be the budget PC gaming saviour some observers once thought it might just deliver. It's still an intriguing chip and, personally, I can't wait to see what mix of AMD tech Microsoft has gone for. But I doubt it will end up being the basis of a new generation of cheap gaming PCs.

Capcom's new sci-fi hit, Pragmata, was released to glowing reviews late last week, and much praise has been heaped on its relatively excellent performance. That's with ray tracing enabled instead of the game's path tracing option, of course. Path tracing is known to be a resource hog, particularly in a game world covered in shadows and reflections.

However, some have pointed out that the difference in image quality between conventional ray tracing and full path tracing can be quite pronounced. This thread on the Radeon subreddit is one example, where some gamers are positing that the difference is so massive, it might be an attempt to make regular ray tracing look worse in order to make path tracing look better.

Is me getting insane or there are people celebrating this? from r/radeon

Or indeed, to make all forms of ray tracing (and therefore graphics cards capable of running it well) the defacto standard for a good-looking game, presumably in order to sell more GPUs. Or it's down to "lazy devs." There are a whole host of accusations bouncing around in here.

The thread references a YouTube video where clips of Pragmata are compared next to each other, running with ray tracing, path tracing, and conventional lighting. And yes, in certain areas, the difference between images appears to be quite considerable.

To test these differences out for myself, I jumped into Pragmata to grab some screenshots. I'm not very far into the game at this point (a honking great robot is impeding my progress, so I'll be looking at this guide later), but I've grabbed some comparisons from the early game areas so we can all take a look.

Path tracing, 4K Max settings

Ray tracing, 4K Max settings

Image credit: Capcom

For the sake of keeping things simple, I've gone for a direct comparison between two path-traced images and their ray-traced equivalents, as it's no great surprise that turning RT off entirely lowers the shadows, lighting, and reflection quality. Or indeed, removes certain examples of those things entirely.

As you can see from the comparison above, there's actually a fair difference between the shadows in this dimly-lit scene. The path traced version shows much cleaner cut lines at the edge of the shadow geometry, along with some extra detail that really does help the game world look more "real".

Check out those papers in the top middle section of the screenshots. The standard ray traced versions look to be sitting almost flat with the floor, while the path-traced version adds a lot of shadowing, and thereby the illusion of considerable depth.

The tipped over cart is probably the biggest demonstration of path tracing versus ray tracing here. Not only are the shadows it casts on the floor much more well-defined, but the cart itself gains some highlights that give it more of a 3D effect.

Path tracing, 4K Max settings

Ray tracing, 4K Max settings

Image credit: Capcom

I've captured my other comparison shots in a more brightly lit room, complete with some ray-traced reflections. Hugh and Diana's reflection on the back wall is a fair bit blurrier with standard ray tracing, and the path traced version even manages to pick up some netting draped over a crate on the opposite wall.

What's also interesting to note is the lighting on the crates over to the right hand side of the image, and the lighting of Hugh himself. His super-chonky spacesuit is a lot darker in the standard RT version, and there's a moodier tone to the scene overall.

I'd struggle to call the ray-traced version of either of these scenes ugly, though, or like they come from a different game. In fact, I've been playing Pragmata with path tracing turned off for performance reasons—and I'd say the "standard" ray tracing version looks pretty damn good overall.

Is ray tracing worse-looking than path tracing? Sure, absolutely. Do I feel like the art style was built with path tracing in mind? No, not really. It just helps with realistic lighting and reflections, as it's bloomin' supposed to.

And really, I think performance is likely to be the crux of the argument. At 4K Maximum settings, RT on, using an RTX 5070 Ti (with DLSS Balanced and 2x Frame Generation), the frame rate regularly bumps into the 144 Hz refresh rate limit of my monitor.

It's remarkably smooth to play at these settings, and the RTX 5070 Ti is not quite a fully-fledged, 4K-ready card. And as for the visuals? Yeah, it looks grand to me.

Turn on path tracing, though, and the frame rate drops into the mid 80s. Take frame generation out of the equation, and it's clear that Pragmata's path tracing demands are a bit too much for this card to handle. Here's hoping for massive path tracing performance improvements sometime soon, ey?

But the key question is, is this a conspiracy from Big Graphics Card™ to get gamers to upgrade to an expensive GPU? Personally, I really don't think so.

In Pragmata's case, I'd say the image differences are far more likely to be due to a relatively mild, performance-friendly implementation of ray tracing, with path tracing thrown in for the mega-GPU-ed amongst us.

Because, y'know, we all jump up and down when a game comes out with poor optimisation, and Capcom wants those glowing review scores. And while yes, the game can look noticeably better with path tracing turned on in some scenarios, I'd say it was still a bit of a stunner with regular ray tracing, too.

My advice? Keep the RT somewhere reasonable, forget about path tracing, and enjoy those extra frames. Now, where's my royalty check? That shadowy man in an overcoat did promise me a mega payoff, after all.

After nearly 30 years at Microsoft, during which she earned credits on dozens of games ranging from Monster Truck Madness 2 to Fable, Mass Effect, Forza Motorsport, and Halo, Kiki Wolfkill has left the company. In a farewell message posted to LinkedIn (via GamesRadar), Wolfkill revealed that she'd concluded her career at Microsoft on April 17, saying the decision to leave was "difficult but exhilarating."

"I'm so grateful for the opportunities that Microsoft has given me and the career that it let me build in an industry that I love," Wolfkill wrote.

"At the same time, there is a version of me outside of Microsoft that I'm excited to grow and evolve. I have so many learnings to carry forward and more impact to be made and I couldn't be more inspired to climb the next mountain! More to come on that front."

As cited by Mobygames, Wolfkill served as art lead or art director on an array of Microsoft Games. She became executive producer at Halo studio 343 Industries in 2008, and then the studio's head of "Halo transmedia and entertainment," a role she held until 2022 when she rose to head of Xbox film and TV. From there, she oversaw production of the Halo TV series and worked (indirectly, unintentionally, and from a great distance) with PC Gamer editor Wes Fenlon to give us one of our greatest headlines ever, "Master Chief had sex."

Thanks for that one, Kiki.

Fallout: New Vegas is one of those games that only seemed to rise in peoples' esteem as time's gone on—especially since it seems like a milestone marker for the last remnants of the series' more oldschool CRPG spirit before Fallout 4 saddled gamers with a voiced protagonist.

But it's a matter of public record that Obsidian wasn't brought on for further projects—which, according to writer on the game and prolific videogame narrative guy Chris Avellone, was something Bethesda really hammered home.

During a recent interview with YouTube channel TKs-Mantis, Avellone made what I can only describe as a series of faces as his interviewer praised the New Vegas DLC Dead Money, which is infamous for stripping you of every belonging you own to build a more survival horror-esque atmosphere.

"The reason I'm making these expressions and hesitations about it is because—despite what I thought would be cool as an examination of Fallout, it was so different from the core experience that it was obviously a huge turn-off for a lot of people."

And while TKs-Mantis tries to brush these concerns aside, Avellone insists that "when it comes to sales and reviews it matters—and also Bethesda used review scores against us for the DLCs for, like, why they didn't want to keep doing things with us anyway. Even though they didn't wanna keep doing things with us anyway. So whatever."

His subsequent ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as he left Obsidian on bad terms with upper management in 2015, then encountered further controversy when allegations of sexual misconduct saw him removed from Dying Light 2 in 2020 (those charges were later dropped in 2023)—basically, he's not got a lot of reason to mince or be careful with his words. Still, they're nonetheless wild. According to Avellone, Bethesda raked Obsidian over the coals with slides.

"It was fun, it was fun—they had a whole powerpoint. Not even about the DLC, they had a whole powerpoint about all the things Obsidian did wrong, and we were like 'wow!' and they showed it to us. And we were like… 'okay'. This is hugely morale-boosting."

He continues: "I thought we [made] a good product for you guys that kept Fallout in the public consciousness, but you guys don't seem very happy about it despite the fact you reaped a lot of the rewards for it."

As far as Dead Money goes, Avellone says that he thinks "the vision for [a] survival horror experience … Was a little too different from the core experience of Fallout that was kind of a turn-off to people." Which, hey, fair enough. I think it's probably true that weird, novel experiences tend to age better, removed from the expectations that come as a package deal with most DLC.

With The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, developer Owlcat is taking its first leap out of the isometric RPG genre it's claimed a foothold in with games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker and into something more inspired by the glory days of Mass Effect. Heading into a hands-on preview of the game, my big question is: can the studio really pull that off?

The mission I get to play feels like a direct answer to that question—an hour of third-person combat and visual spectacle, the perfect taster of whether Owlcat has the technical know-how and design expertise for such a major genre shift. The result? I'm feeling much more confident in what the studio has cooking, even if I don't get to see much of the RPG part of this action-RPG.

Taking place early in the game, the demo sees me trying to escape a space station besieged by hi-tech mercenaries. To be frank, I'm missing a lot of context—the game clearly has an explosive intro in which me (a customisable main character) and my companion J (my identical twin) are thrust into some kind of conspiracy, but somehow get out with a new ship and dock at a friendly port. But now the bad guys are here too, intent on apprehending me, and I need to survive long enough to escape and fly off into the great unknown.

Considering my level of confusion, it's probably a good thing that conversation is kept to a minimum. A chat with the guy who seems to be in charge of the station lasts just long enough for me to make a persuasion check that enables a slightly morally grey choice—convincing him to order his people to cover our escape with their lives.

From there, I'm off through a gauntlet of corridors and waist-high cover, fighting armoured thugs as I go. The core combat I would describe as agreeably solid rather than inspiring. Ducking behind barricades and shooting enemies as they pop out of cover feels a bit lightweight, but so did Mass Effect—and as in BioWare's classic series, it's spiced up with special abilities that add to your options.

These come in the form of gadgets, which are equipable items rather than picks on a skill tree, allowing a lot of freedom to mix things up between fights. Mine include a shock tether that can stun enemies in place for easy headshots, a swarm of nano-insects to chase foes out of cover, and later a wrist rocket that's great for chunking through armour. None of it's revolutionary, but it's enough to add some tactical nuance and flashy moments to the gunfights.

I can also boss my companion around, telling them to focus on a target and draw fire so I can get some breathing room. I can even pause the combat to survey the battlefield and issue orders—yes, this is technically a real-time-with-pause game—though it's deliberately simplistic stuff with only limited actions available, and easily ignored if you just want to stick to real-time blasting.

Primitive creature that I am, I quickly forget most of that in favour of a button that makes things go boom. Every companion in the game has an Exploit—an ability that allows them to interact with the environment in combat in some way. In J's case, it's agreeably straightforward: when I hover my reticle over anything even mildly explosive, a big prompt appears for her to blow it up, with dramatic results. With the right timing it can be a godsend in tricky encounters, sending grouped up foes scrambling as fuel tanks erupt into flame over their heads.

I don't know if making things explode can ever truly lose its lustre, but Osiris Reborn certainly doesn't want to find out. As soon as I hit the point where these shoot-outs might start to wear out their welcome, the game shakes things up by sending me out onto the surface of the station.

With mag boots sticking me to the hull and open space all around me, there's no real up or down, allowing for some mind-bending visuals as the 'floor' curves away from me or turns into wall or ceiling depending on my orientation. The noises of combat are muffled, as if I'm only sensing the vibrations, but comms chatter comes through clear, creating a disorientating soundscape. Most importantly, my explosions now make enemies fly off into space.

Mechanically, it's not that different—I'm still just crouching behind cover and shooting people, and all my abilities work the same—but the devil is in the details. It's atmospheric and visually creative enough to add a new injection of drama to my desperate escape.

Along the way, Osiris Reborn is keen to keep reminding me that, in the midst of all this action, this is still a choice-driven RPG. Tactical decisions lead to branching points in the level—at one point I figure that taking a detour through a damaged part of the ship would be the safer bet over braving a stretch open to enemy heavy weapons fire, and end up having to navigate a series of tight corridors beset by hazardous coolant leaks.

Similarly, during quieter moments exploring and hunting for supplies, character stats open up some extra options—such as using J's Athletics score to move some heavy debris out of the way, allowing access to a new section.

It's a light touch, and I doubt getting a few cold burns or moving some boxes will have a lasting impact on the plot, but it's enough to make it feel like I'm embodying a character rather than just making my way through a shooting gallery.

I'm certainly hoping for more conversation and exploration in the full game, but this mission has little time for that, throwing me from fight to fight as if to say "See, we can do more than just isometric combat!".

A few more zero-G bullet exchanges later, I'm finally back inside the station for the last stretch, and rewarded with the best 'blow stuff up' button yet: I'm now close enough to my ship to order one of my allies to fire its enormous turrets down into the fight. Shooting big holes in the windows of a space station might be considered a bit reckless, but with my helmet still firmly on I reckon it's worth it.

Sniper pinning me down in cover from an unassailable position? An overwhelming squad of mercs all bearing down from the flank? Turns out there aren't many problems that can't be solved with the application of a hail of bullets big enough to punch through spaceship armour.

It makes for a perfect dramatic exit as me and J flee through the airlock and hop aboard our ship, blasting off as free agents ready for more adventures.

It's a tantalising start, even if I remain rather confused about why all those guys wanted to kill me in the first place. The action in itself isn't mind-blowing—if this was the new Gears of War, you'd be disappointed. But a good cinematic RPG is more than the sum of its parts, finding magic in the combination of third-person combat, deep character interactions, world-building, and storytelling. It's reassuring to discover that Owlcat has a good grasp on the part of that formula it seemed most likely to struggle with.

I'm still keen to see more of how the other parts come together, of course. Peppered throughout this demo are just enough little moments of character development and decision-making to intrigue me—I particularly enjoy an ongoing conversation about what to name the new ship—but too few to get a good sense of the texture of the wider adventure to come.

So, too soon to declare the second coming of Mass Effect just yet, but Osiris Reborn is definitely promising: a confident leap forward for a studio that seems determined to make its mark on RPG history. We still have a while to wait to see the finished product, however—the full release is now scheduled for spring 2027.

Peter Molyneux has somewhat of a reputation for overpromising that I will now proceed to gently rib him for—sweeping statements about carving your name on a tree and that name still being there years later, to the fiascos of Godus and the awkwardness of Curiosity, which promised a life-changing revelation inside a blockchain cube and then… didn't do that.

Given his flirtation with the blockchain, you'd be forgiven for thinking Molyneux might be rather taken with AI. After all it, too, promises the world and delivers very little—alright, that's a tad mean. I like Fable, and while it was never the game Molyneux said it'd be, it was still a decent RPG that existed and had charm. Which is more than can be said for the deep dream nightmares the torment nexus has been cooking up over the past few years.

Well, consider me flummoxed, because in a recent interview with the BBC, Molyneux is actually pretty tepid on the tech: "AI is not of a high enough quality for us to really use in games right now," with a shocking dose of reason and proportionality. "I think we have to be very, very careful that there are safeguards in there, so we can't abuse this power that AI gives us."

Before you get too excited, Molyneux does seem to think AI will still usher in some sort of industrial revolution-tier reimagining of the world, which is not an opinion I share (at least, of the technology in its current, frequently mistaken state):

"It's going to cause disruption … But you know what? We're human beings. We've always evolved. We've never stayed still. Societies have changed, and we just deal with it."

More than anything else—more than Larian being chastened out of using the tech for concept art by its fans, or Capcom swearing off AI assets, or Arc Raiders phasing out its AI voice acting—this is what has me hopeful that the slop isn't here to stay.

I mean sure, it has its use-cases, but even those have narrowed over time. Using it in concept art doesn't just thin out the creative process, but it also winds up leading to big fiascos that can cost games awards when a piece of "placeholder" invariably slips through the net (there's a reason why placeholders are meant to be noticeably bad).

Molyneux, of all people, saying that it's not very useful feels like a "Jason figured it out" moment. Bless his cotton socks, but I'd honestly expected the man to be arm-deep in AI praise at this point. Maybe he's just mellowed out a little.

I've had my mitts over more mice in the last year than I'd like to admit, and out of those, there are a few that have really stuck out for different reasons. When it comes to shape, though, apart from the Zowie EC2-DW I'm currently testing, my absolute fave has been the Pulsar X3 CrazyLight Mini, and I've just found out Pulsar has launched a slightly bigger version which could end up being even better.

The Pulsar X3 CrazyLight Medium is about 5–6 mm longer, 2 mm wider, and 2 mm taller. That might not sound like much, but when it comes to gaming mice, these little changes can make a big difference.

In fact, it's the subtle deviations from straight-up symmetry that make me like the X3 so much: it has a very slight ergonomic lean to the top, alongside a much more obvious curve to the base and sides that allows your thumb to rest nicely. It's not got anywhere near the same lean as a more heavily ergonomically-oriented mouse like the Zowie I mentioned, but that makes it better for relaxing that palm grip into a hybrid claw grip, if that's your jam.

I started my review of the Mini version by pointing out that even though it's a 'Mini' mouse, it suits my medium-sized hands. That being said, I have wondered whether a slight increase in size might make the mouse even comfier. I'd say a couple of millimetres on each axis might do the trick, although I'm a little unsure about adding to the height.

At any rate, if you'd considered picking up the X3 before but the 'Mini' designator had put you off, now might be your chance. It's a few grams heavier, but that still makes it just 48 g. That's essentially the same weight as the Razer Viper V4 Pro (minus a gram), the current best gaming mouse and an absolute joy to use. So don't worry about the weight.

Everything else remains the same, from its XS-1 sensor to optical switches; it's just the size and weight that's changed. It's the same price, too, which isn't cheap at $156, but you're getting a very performant and presumably comfy mouse if you use a more relaxed palm grip. If it feels just the slightest bit bigger than the X3 Mini but keeps the rest the same, it's worth a look, I'd say.

When even a mid-tier pre-built gaming rig costs further above a grand than anyone would like, there's no ignoring it: PC gaming is an extremely expensive hobby. Thankfully, Intel may be moving to make high-tier performance just a little more accessible for those on a budget.

Robert Hallock, the VP & GM of Intel's enthusiast channel business, recently hinted that the company would offer more overclockable CPUs at lower price points. "What you will see is more and more unlocked SKUs over time. That is the goal," Hallock said during an interview with PC Games Hardware.

"[Overclocking] should not be a feature that is exclusively reserved for the people paying the most amount of money," Hallock explains. "Not everyone can afford the most amount of money [...] and that doesn't make them any less of an enthusiast than the person who can spend $500 on a CPU. They are still PC enthusiasts, and they deserve the same level of features, and that is what we intend to deliver in our roadmap."

In other words, although affordable Intel CPUs with overclocking haven't traditionally been available for those on a budget, Intel is looking to change that in the future. In current and previous hardware generations, overclocking has only been possible for CPUs with a 'K' designator, which are usually higher-end, and more expensive chips than their non-K designator counterparts.

That said, it's worth noting the Intel Core Ultra 5 245K is definitely not the tippy top of the CPU tier list, but it can also be overclocked. Perhaps Intel plans on K chips even lower down than the Core Ultra 5 ones being part of its future hardware line-ups.

Now, whether you'd even want to overclock low-end chips will be another question entirely. Eking out the most performance only makes sense if power and thermals permit it (and, obviously, if there's a big enough gain to make it worth it).

In the not so distant past, Intel was the king of the budget overclocking chip. You could pick up an affordable processor and, even if it had locked down multipliers for whatever reason, you could tweak the front side bus and mess around with it to your heart's content; you could almost guarantee an extra 1 GHz on a ton of old Intel processors. It's great to see at least some folk at Intel talking about loosening the artificial restrictions on its chips, and maybe going back to those good ol' days of CPU overclocking.

We'll have to wait and see what actually pans out in upcoming Intel generations—Nova Lake is what's next, and it's expected to launch later this year, though Robert Hallock has not yet specified whether this particular generation will get lower-end chips capable of OCing.

I know that plenty of PC gamers are still having a grand old time with almost decade old hardware (to the GPU crowd still rocking a GTX 1080 Ti: honestly, I'm so happy for you). But it's fair to say that most gamers don't feel like they're getting sufficient bang for their buck these days.

The memory supply crisis isn't just causing RAM and SSD prices to increase, it's having a knock-on effect on an array of components. After all, recent reports claim that the global CPU shortage is 'more acute for processors than memory'. While we wait for Intel's 18A chips to plug that gap, product shortages often mean higher prices on available stock. Higher prices mean fewer consumer purchases, and that could spell trouble for more than just Intel over the longest term.

While a commitment to making key components more affordable in the future should be music to my ears, obviously any PC is more than just its processors; a cheaper CPU is one thing, but if you can't find a decently priced, suitable motherboard to mount it into, what's the point? With component prices reaching for the sky, it's no wonder this is a longer term goal for Intel.

We're just a few hours out from the early access release of Masters of Albion, which creator and legendary hyperbolist Peter Molyneux is pitching as both his swansong and "redemption title." To mark the occasion, Molyneux recently took to YouTube to field questions from fans about his career, Masters of Albion, and where his god-game obsession stems from.

It's that last one that's most significant to me right now, because Molyneux—a founding father of the whole god game genre thanks to Populous, which he designed—says his obsession with the godly genre is making him a bit sad these days. Why? Because they've sort of all gone away.

"I think the big thing that made me the most saddest is to see that god games were withering," said Molyneux. He's not wrong. For whatever reason, god games feel permanently trapped in the late-'90s and early 2000s.

You get the odd modern iteration—Reus 2 hit in 2024, for instance—but it sure doesn't feel like a genre many people are thinking about these days. Which is sad, because more videogames should let you yeet villagers so hard they dip beneath the curvature of the Earth.

"If you compare it to other genres, like first-person shooters or battle royale, or even RTS games and roleplaying games, they've all moved forward. If you just look at the HUD of any game, pretty much, the HUD—the icons on the top of the screen have reduced and reduced and reduced in all those other genres, and it was a real sadness to me that god games have kind of been left behind." Videogame HUDs feel like an odd thing to zero in on specifically, but I think ol' Molyneux is treating them as metonymic for 'how far a genre has come forward' in general.

The way Molyneux tells it, it sounds like there's a vicious cycle going on where waning interest from devs leads to less appetite from publishers which, you guessed it, leads to waning interest from devs. "If you go to a publisher and say, 'Hey, we've got this great game. We're working on it. It's a god game.' They kind of turn their nose up and say, 'Well, we've run the numbers and god games are such a small slice of the overall games that people play; we're not interested in signing it'."

This is why, says Molyneux, 22cans is self-publishing Masters of Albion—though it's worth noting even Molyneux's curtain call isn't just a god game; there's a lot of Fable and Dungeon Keeper-flavoured stuff in there. I haven't been too blown away by what I've seen of it so far, but if Masters of Albion could help revive the god game genre, at least a little? That'd be fine by me.

Whenever I think of old-school programming, I think of people like Dave Plummer, the creator of the original Task Manager. Working for Microsoft in the 1990s, he built that app, which we now very much take for granted, brick by metaphorical brick. That isn't to say there was zero hackiness involved—far from it, as with much pre-2000s code.

Case in point is something I just learned about the original app: Plummer accidentally left his phone number inside it. "It's one of those tiny bits of old code that tells a story," he says.

It all started by him noticing, when developing the original app, that CPU utilisation was sometimes adding up to over 100%, which is "just not possible if the math is being done right."

After checking the math was right on his end and finding nothing wrong, the other possibility was that there was a bug in the kernel, as that's where the data was being pulled from. But it was difficult to get any of the kernel developers to take this idea seriously in part because of the "pecking order" at Microsoft in the '90s: "the kernel is where the silverbacks live."

"I was just a UI guy drawing little pictures of CPU usage. So, as you can imagine, when I proposed to the kernel guys that, 'hey, maybe it's your bug', they were what I would charitably call unsympathetic to my plight."

Plummer used 'asserts' in the code to help diagnose the problem, meaning if the correct and proper conditions weren't met—if the 'assertions' didn't hold—while the application was running, "it throws a fault and it stops in the debugger so that you can inspect the machine to determine exactly why your assertion proved false."

He added an assert that specified CPU usage shouldn't be above 100%, which was intended to help diagnose when and where the problem was occurring in the code. However, "it was a weird case that hardly ever happened and it never fired on my machine, of course, or on any of the machines of the other people on my team."

"So I did the one thing that I felt gave me the best odds of finding out if anybody hit this case. I put my name and home phone number in the assertion. That way, no matter who in the company hit it or when or where in what building, they would be given my contact info and let me know about it."

He never got a lead though, and before long he forgot all about it.

"And then we shipped the beta. Now, I don't know exactly how many people get the Windows beta, but if it's not millions of people it's certainly thousands of folks. And now they would all be armed with code that would display my home phone number in a dialogue if things went sideways."

Apparently, though, despite still having the same home phone number to this day, no one has ever called—not until he mentioned it on YouTube a couple of years ago, anyway. I don't like to imagine how the 'oh crap' realisation that he'd potentially doxxed himself must have felt.

These are, I suppose, just some of the lengths that were gone to in order to deliver those first versions of the operating systems and software that we're so familiar with today.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the bug, apparently that got caught on a lab machine and the kernel devs confirmed it was a problem on their side and fixed it. Sometimes it's the silverbacks after all.

I will never finish Crimson Desert. It's not because I'm unwilling to put in the time—I just don't think I'll ever stop being distracted. Today, it's because of superhero cosplay.

Crimson Desert has kicked player creativity into overdrive. I'm constantly seeing my fellow adventurers tearing around Pywel doing wild stuff I never realised was possible. But it's just as fun to see how they've styled their trio of heroes, especially main lad Kliff.

While the dye system is convoluted and obtuse (what a shock!), combined with the substantial gear options it's possible to create a pretty impressive cosplay. And while I was looking for outfit inspirations last night, I noticed more and more takes on iconic characters from outside the confines of Pywel, so now I want nothing more than to play Crimson Desert like a superhero game. Kliff's certainly got the skillset.

If you're similarly looking for a fit change, here are some ideas from the community to get you started.

Superman

The absence of good Superman games puts this cosplay at the top of my list—and the choice of screenshots is flawless. Now if only we could put capes on dogs, we'd have Krypto as well.

Spider-Man

With great power comes too many traders asking you to do odd jobs. Bonus points for the web-slinging antics in the clip.

Doctor Strange

Pywel's got its very own Sorcerer Supreme. With Kliff's little beard he'd make a respectable Tony Stark, too.

Captain America

This is some good cosplay, but I'm even more impressed with how Kliff's moveset actually matches Cap's, even without the shield-throwing (only Damiane can do that). He can chuck enemies pretty far, though.

Doctor Doom

Kliff is a good boy, but sometimes you need a genius Latverian supervillain to save the world.

One hero I expected to see recreated, but have been unable to find, is Green Lantern. We've got green dye and Kliff is never without his trusty lantern. I guess that's going to have to be my next quest.

In the meantime, if you've not got a superhero kink, Crimson Desert's fashionistas still have you covered, with plenty of outfits inspired by gaming and anime.

Link

Crimson Desert is my favourite Legend of Zelda. I'm as serious as a heart attack.

Mario

I would not be remotely surprised to discover a quest that requires Kliff to do some plumbing. And I'd bloody love it, especially dressed up like this.

Sub-Zero

I love this Sub-Zero cosplay, and AleXOlO2 has also recreated Altair, Geralt and more. My next port of call is Nexus Mods so I can get Kliff the lustrous Geralt mane. But I'm really impressed that the vast majority of the cosplays I've found can be recreated just by finding the outfits and dyes in-game.

Goku

Confession: I had to Google Goku's name despite playing countless hours of Dragon Ball FighterZ. There are just too many anime guys.

Dante

I'm tired of waiting for a new DMC, so this will have to do.

This is just what cropped up after an evening's hunt, and I suspect we'll see a lot more cracking cosplay as Pearl Abyss adds new outfits. But before I get too far down this rabbit hole, I've got a dour Scottish man to dress up.

As far as I can tell Titanium Court is the first prestige match-three game ever made. It's also a roguelite, kind of a deckbuilder, a tower defense autobattler, and a lo-fi visual novel. Occasionally there are goofball electric folk performances, and its meditations on the byzantine hidden meanings of road signs are right up my alley. But in total, is Titanium Court any good? Absolutely—despite one of its central hooks, match-three tile sliding, proving an obstacle for me.

Due to a sudden mysterious shattering of her world, our nameless protagonist is whisked away to an alternate universe where two nondescript factions are locked in a forever war. Almost by accident she becomes queen of the Titanium court, a "royal faerie court" whose inhabitants speak "mostly in riddles and nonsense". They're a weird bunch, not least because the purpose of their lives—taking the fight to the opposing red court—is not undergirded by any of the halfway-compelling motives you'd normally expect of daily bloodshed. The war is, as far as I can tell, totally meaningless.

Yet they fight every single day. In the morning, at High Tide, I'm allowed to shape the battleground. This is where Titanium Court's match-three component comes into play: If I match three trees together they'll disappear, leaving me with wood. The same applies for water and rocks, which are also important resources. Crucially, I can also eliminate enemy blocks during this phase, so there's always a tension between whether I should gather resources for the fight, or destroy as many of my foes as possible. Hopefully I can do both.

During this phase various random complications can appear. A giant jar, for example, will prove so compelling to my faery soldiers that they'll focus on opening it rather than defending the court. Giant shoes can sell me real estate. Sometimes a goat will demand a toll; if I pay the toll it helps me but If I don't, the fierceness of its wrath usually guarantees death. If my map is strewn with enemy catapults, I need to either eliminate as many as possible or make sure my court is secured behind rock tiles ahead of the oncoming battle. If it's full of warships, I should try to landlock my court by eliminating rivers.

Since my "plans" are made in the randomised match-three format, I can work in the direction of goals and strategies but, crucially, pulling them off is never guaranteed. Shops can sell me various buffs and boons to help in the looming battle, but the items available are also subject to randomisation. Since most have fairly specific use cases, it's usually a risk to blow my hard-earned money on items instead of hoarding it in the hope for, say, a health-replenishing hospital later on. Experimentation is encouraged—I can undo moves within the bounds of a single high tide / low tide sequence—but it often feels too risky on a macro level.

Once the shape of the battlefield is set I move into Low Tide where, based on the resources I've gathered, I can send out soldiers, resource-gatherers, and various other offensive and defensive aides—presented, of course, as cards—to help in the ensuing autobattle. If I've chosen wisely and my court is not destroyed, I move up a notch in the overworld grid towards one of several final bosses. If I haven't the day is over and it's back to square one, though not all is lost: every death pours a tad more wine into my Comfort glass. Every time it fills I get a new point to spend on various buffs and advantages at the beginning of a run.

Court in-between

It's a conceptually smart commingling of genres, but Titanium Court's writing and presentation is what helps elevate it above a clever but sometimes tedious roguelite. The writing is abundant and, for the most part, gloriously funny. A bridge is described "as a door defined by its presence rather than its absence". The protagonist has misplaced their keys and their locks. The faery court keeps encountering road signs but, of course, has no knowledge of cars: what can a brash octagonal red sign with STOP printed on it mean without that context? Something quietly disturbing and charmingly stupid, of course.

It's also tonally askew in a way that's delightfully, endlessly surprising. When my faeries fell castles the screen is festooned with victorious baseball pixel art or a cat aloofly knocking a cup from a bench. The music sounds like something released direct to cassette by a drain-dwelling loon, and I mean that in the most admiring sense possible. It's gently dreamlike, but also features the best one-note charred guitar wig out I've heard in a game. There's even an item that swaps out a boss battle with a musical performance by creator AP Thomson, a performance so amusingly prolonged that it feels designed to punish you for conflict avoidance.

There's a lot I love and admire about this gorgeous and distinctive artefact, which is as tangential and—yes, sometimes as self-indulgent—as all good weirdo art. Wandering the court between battles, and interacting with its landmarks and characters is never boring if you have an appetite for eccentricity.

But none of this can paper over the fact that, at least 40 percent of the time, you're matching three. And Titanium Court taught me, among other things, that I kinda hate matching three. No matter how much strategic complexity is added via curiously interacting blocks, I'm still tasked with interacting with everything via this dull fundamental.

The combination of randomisation with an inherently imprecise gameplay system like match three is what ultimately bugged me. Titanium Court lets me choose between three randomised battle fields at the beginning of every fight; one might have a lot of trees but no water, for example, while hosting lots of knights and wormholes. Another might have no trees but a lot of rocks, and warships. But there's no guarantee any will offer much hope. There are times when I'm down on resources, low on health, and my best option is a map full of, I don't know, archer faeries and wormholes, right before a boss battle, where I think: can I have that 40 minutes back please?

I don't think Titanium Court wastes my time—I've chosen to play it—but I was too often annoyed that my best-laid plans, my canny strategising, was flippantly undermined by a randomness the gameplay systems are too cumbersome to counteract. Too often I knew how to solve a problem but the problem could not be match-three'd away, and there's a harsh limit to how much forward-planning can be done to accommodate for unfavourable RNG. So maybe this is secretly just a card game? (If so, that's me bamboozled: I don't like them either.)

Certainly, there's a strange friction between the simple precision of match-three and the tense imprecision of, well, everything else. Every time I match three tiles it's a hit of dopamine that eventually feels ill-gained once I learn how capricious and unmalleable the battlefield can be despite my inputs. The appeal of match-three in Bejewelled, or Candy Crush, is the simple tactile pleasure of—wait for it—matching three, but there's also the dazzling visual rewards and the pursuit of high scores. Wedded to a game demanding much more strategic thinking, it often just feels annoying.

And yet, I admire what Titanium Court achieves, and I want more games that are brazenly intellectual and funny like this. I adored it 60 percent of the time, and I daresay a lot of people will be fine or else smitten with the match-three stuff. It's testament to the brilliance of everything else that I feel like I'd recommend Titanium Court despite not loving one of its star attractions. It's the kind of thing that can only be made by one person when no one is around to vet or shout down its manifold weirdnesses. I can't help but love it for that.

Smaller transistors make for faster, cheaper chips. Well, that used to be the case before AI came along and everything went a bit bananas. Still, a new report claims that TSMC is planning to begin manufacturing sub-1 nm silicon in 2029, which is kind of exciting.

There are few details in the Chosun Biz report other than the claim that their sources indicate TSMC is "set to begin trial production of sub-1-nanometer process semiconductors in 2029." Trial production does not mean chips you can actually buy, which would follow in 2030 or even later.

But given even the most advanced GPUs we can currently buy are produced on TSMC's fairly ancient N4 node, such as Nvidia's RTX 50 family topped out by the RTX 5090, which is itself derived from a 5 nm-class node, the implication here is that there is a roadmap of available TSMC nodes for many generations of GPUs, and indeed CPUs, to come.

Currently, the most advanced TSMC silicon you can have in your PC is actually found in Intel's Arrow Lake family of CPUs, including the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, which use TSMC's N3B node for the compute tile. Meanwhile, TSMC is expected to begin manufacturing chips for sale on its upcoming N2 node later this year.

Apple will likely be the first customer to release an N2 chip in whatever new iPhone it releases in 2026, likely during its usual September slot. But AMD has said it intends to N2 for at least some of its upcoming Zen 6 processors, albeit it's not yet entirely clear if that will be for both enterprise and consumer PC variants of Zen 6, or just the former.

Whatever, Chosun Biz also claims that TSMC plans to begin mass production of the node following N2 in 2028. Known as A14 in TSMC parlance, where the "A" stands for angstroms, the next unit of measurement down from nanometers, a 2028 release would put it exactly two years behind N2 and thus maintain a biennial cadence of rolling out a new node every two years.

As things stand, neither AMD nor Nvidia, typically regular customers of TSMC, have actually moved beyond TSMC's N5/N4 class of nodes for consumer chips. Nvidia has said it will use N2 for its new Rubin family of GPUs, starting inevitably with AI chips, which are in production now.

We're expecting Rubin gaming GPUs at some point next year, and those too are very likely to use TSMC N3 silicon. AMD's plans are less clear, though. As mentioned, for server CPUs, AMD is skipping N3 and going straight to N2.

As to what nodes it chooses for its consumer CPUs and GPUs, we'll just have to wait and see. But if it weren't for that pesky AI boom bending chip prices out of shape, the future would look pretty bright for PC gaming chips, what with TSMC N3 already available, N2 due to come online very soon, A14 expected in 2028, and a new sub-1 nm node—perhaps pitched as A9 or similar—looking set for the end of the decade.

Aion 2, NCSoft's sequel to the original Aion set 200 years after the original game, launched in November of last year to some mixed opinions about its microtransaction schemes—that doesn't appear to've stopped the sequel from picking up steam, though. Literally, it'll be coming to Steam as part of a global release later this year.

Per this news post, Aion 2 will be arriving to North America, South America, Japan, and Europe some time in 2026:

"At launch, AION 2 will be accessible globally and will maintain servers in four regions with in-game language options for English, French, German, Spanish (Spain), Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Chinese (Simplified & Traditional)."

The question is: Has NCSoft made good on its promises last year to change things in time for this global launch? Things were so bad that the developer had to issue an emergency apology after the game went live in Korea and Taiwan last year, stating that they "were complacent and unthoughtful."

While I can't speak to it personally, I wouldn't hold my breath for a completely revitalised game with zero Pay to Win elements whatsoever. This is, after all, NCSoft making a free-to-play MMO.

Even so, it's not like any of these things have stopped the developer making bank. Aion reportedly made $68 million in the first month and a half of its release with over 1 million subscribers. This earnings report from earlier this year also signals that the game's been trucking along just fine on the balance sheets, responsible for a 12% bump in revenue for the quarter.

In other words, it's not surprising NCSoft's aiming at a global release—it remains to be seen whether other audiences can stomach those same monetisation woes, though. It's an unfortunate quirk of the genre that, while we all might complain about FOMO mounts and the like, they do seem to make companies bank regardless of how many pitchforks get waggled.

This year will be the tenth anniversary of the GeForce GTX 10-series, and since then Nvidia's gaming GPUs have undergone some fundamental changes to bring ray tracing and AI to the PC gaming masses. While compute performance, cache levels, and VRAM bandwidth are still key to getting high frame rates in games, today's GeForce graphics cards are far more versatile, capable, and complex than those from 2016.

But what of the future? What will Nvidia's next generation of gaming GPUs look like? With the chance of a Super refresh of Blackwell chips looking increasingly less likely, due to supply pressures on affordable VRAM, I've been spending some time mulling over what's next for Team Green.

To that end, I've looked back over 10 years' worth of GeForce cards, collated all the key information, and compared four tiers of models: 60-class, 70-class, 80-class, and the one at the very top of the chain. The latter is currently the 90-class, but with the GTX 10-series and RTX 20-series, it was known as the Titan.

I've got a few charts for you to peruse, and I'll discuss what each one can potentially tell us about the future. And then from all of this, a table of specs for the four primary tiers of RTX 60-series graphics cards I think we'll see in the near future.

Die size and process node

As I'm sure you already know, Nvidia doesn't manufacture the GPUs and other products that it designs. For that, it hires the services of TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), partly because it has a long history with this company, but mostly because it's the world's biggest and best when it comes to churning out hulking chips at the cutting edge of processor technology.

Just like all chip makers do, TSMC uses the simple phrase 'process node' to describe the hugely complex sequence of steps it carries out to manufacture hundreds of thousands of silicon wafers, coated with all kinds of materials and etched with light, that eventually get sliced up into individual processor dies.

Nvidia employs one of TSMC's most advanced process nodes, N3, to make its Rubin AI behemoths, but the Blackwell gaming chips that power the RTX 50-series graphics cards are made via a custom version of the previous N5 node, called 4N. The RTX 40-series GPUs were also made on this node, but for the 30-series, Nvidia used Samsung's 8LPH.

That was a bit of a surprise when it was announced because before the Ampere generation of GPUs, Nvidia's GTX 10- and RTX 20-series were both made on a custom TSMC N16 node, and its N28 process for a further three prior GTX generations.

I mention all of this because it's the first port of call we need to make before making an educated guess as to what RTX 60-series chips will be like. With Nvidia so heavily invested in AI now, I suspect that it won't use TSMC's most cutting-edge node, N2, but will stick with N3 for cost reasons.

This is important to understand because it will determine the approximate die density of these future GPUs, i.e. the number of transistors per square millimetre of die area. Nvidia's Blackwell and Ada Lovelace gaming chips have roughly the same density, as they're made on the same node: around 120 million transistors/mm².

Relative die density for the last five generations of Nvidia gaming GPUs

TSMC's N3 is reported to be in the region of 200 or so (higher with certain variants), and if that's what we can expect for the next round of RTX GPUs, then we're looking at 66% increase in density. However, this doesn't automatically mean we'll see chips with 66% more shaders and cache.

That's because the die density figure is for logic only, the stuff that makes up the shader cores and other processing elements. For GPU parts such as cache and PCIe/VRAM circuitry, the increase in density is much smaller, around 5% at best. So while Nvidia can jam lots more CUDA cores into its next-gen GPUs, it's quite limited as to what it can do with cache and analogue systems.

It's also steadily favoured using small dies for the majority of its gaming products, helping to improve wafer yields (the percentage of dies from a wafer that can be used) and profit margins (smaller dies mean more dies per wafer).

The exception to this has been at the very top-end of the GPU scale, with the RTX 5090's chip being fairly close to the maximum size that TSMC's equipment can make. The reason for this isn't about making the 'ultimate' gaming GPU: it's all about having a product for prosumer AI market.

Relative die sizes for a selection of Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics cards

If you're wondering why the GTX 10-series chips were so small, it's because they were made on a heavily refined TSMC N16 process node that Nvidia had been working with for quite some time.

Anyway, as so much has changed since the GTX 10-series era of GPUs, it's hard to ascertain whether this trend will continue or if Nvidia's next chips will be substantially larger or smaller. My gut feeling is that, having refined its designs with Blackwell and Ada Lovelace, Nvidia will probably stick to using similar-sized dies for the RTX 60-series.

Putting all of this together suggests that we're going to see RTX 60-series GPUs with around 60-70% more transistors than in Blackwell chips, but still the same size. The next question to ponder is how well Nvidia spend that transistor budget?

CUDA cores and cache

With a stack more transistors to play around with, you'd think the first thing Nvidia would do would be to ramp up the number of CUDA cores (i.e. the 'shader' units), but historically that's not always been the case.

Relative number of CUDA cores in selected tiers of Nvidia GeForce GTX/RTX graphics cards

In the above chart, you can see that the CUDA count jumped up significantly with the switch to Samsung for the RTX 30-series, but other than the top-end models, the number of shaders in 60-, 70-, and 80-class graphics cards has barely changed. However, this chart is also rather misleading, and for two reasons.

First, not all shaders are equal, and second, not all shaders are clocked the same. Since the Pascal era of the GTX 10-series, CUDA cores have become increasingly more capable and flexible. Better process nodes and chip designs have substantially lifted clock speeds.

A more appropriate chart, though still a touch limited, is one that shows the peak FP32 throughput for each GPU. This is a measure of how many 32-bit floating-point operations the chip is capable of handling per second, one of the most common routines that takes place in 3D rendering.

Relative peak FP32 throughput for classes of GeForce graphics cards

At first glance, this chart might seem no different to the previous one, but if you look closely, you can see that there is a noticeable gap between the RTX 20 and 30-series, and again between the RTX 30 and 40/50-series. All because of big increases in clock speeds and changes to the CUDA cores themselves.

Generally speaking, Nvidia has squeezed out roughly similar levels of FP32 performance for a given die density across the past five generations of GPUs, with the exception of the RTX 30-series which was noticeable higher. If you wondering why the switch to TSMC N5 didn't make much difference in that aspect, it's because RTX 40/50-series GPUs have vastly more L2 cache than all previous chips.

So much so, that for the chart below, I've had to use a logarithmic y-axis scale (base 2) in order to separate out of the various GPUs enough for viewing.

Relative L2 cache levels in various GeForce RTX graphics cards

Where Pascal, Turing, and Ampere GPUs had to make do with a handful of megabytes of Level 2 cache, Nvidia took a leaf from AMD's RDNA 2 book and significantly increased the amount of last-level cache. Such large amounts of cache can be tricky to get right, in terms of capacity versus latencies, but the huge slices of SRAM go a long way in reducing the pressure on the VRAM bandwidth, as well as helping overall compute and ray tracing performance.

As already mentioned, due to how poorly SRAM scales with process node shrinks, Nvidia can't lob in a pile more cache without significantly increasing the die size. So it will probably stick to very similar amounts of L2 cache as used in Blackwell.

We should still see a healthy jump in the number of shaders, and thus FP32 throughput, but it's unlikely to be in the same order of scale as we'll probably see with die density. For example, Ampere chips have an average density 81% higher than Turing chips, and on average, 180% more CUDA cores per die size.

However, while Ada Lovelace GPUs are 173% more dense than Ampere, in terms of transistors per square millimetre, the shader units per die size figure is only 57% larger on average.

I feel that Nvidia will err on the side of caution with its RTX 60-series, motivated by a desire to keep profit margins as high as possible, and that we'll see something like a 30 to 50% increase in the shader count, compared to Blackwell. Before I go all crystal-ball and attempt to predict the specs of the main RTX 60-series cards, though, there are a couple more factors to consider: ray tracing and AI.

Tensor and Ray Tracing cores

In the chart below, I've plotted Nvidia's quoted 'AI TOPS' figures for each GPU. This is a measure of the absolute peak throughput for the GPU's Tensor cores, as measured in trillions of operations per second, and on first impression, it would seem that RTX GPUs (GTX chips don't have these matrix/tensor units) are almost nothing but Tensor cores.

Relative peak AI TOPS for specific classes of GeForce graphics cards

However, the chart is rather misleading, because for each successive generation of Tensor cores, Nvidia has upgraded them to not only carry out more operations per second, but also expanded the data formats they support. The respective AI TOPS figures are for the smallest, and thus quickest, format each GPU can handle. So for the RTX 20-series figures, they're all in INT4, whereas for RTX 50, it's FP4 with FP32 accumulate, using sparsity.

To address this, I spent some time calculating the relative figures for when INT8 is used, if only to have an even playing field. This particular data format isn't used in DLSS nor gaming in general, but it's the one that I get the data most easily for.

Relative peak INT8 performance of the tensor cores in Nvidia GPUs

Yes, the number of Tensor cores has increased in the top-end chips, but the units themselves have become more capable, especially after the RTX 30-series. How far Nvidia will be able to push this with RTX 60-series is anyone's guess, but I suspect that they won't be any better in terms of operations per cycle, just more of them due to the increased die density.

Not that this is a problem, as such. Believe it or not, the tiny RTX 5060 has an INT8 figure that's only 6% lower than an RTX 2080's, so getting more of those cores will certainly benefit the performance of DLSS, even though it mostly uses FP16 and FP8 for upscaling (the data format used in frame generation isn't clear, unfortunately).

The one thing Nvidia can't do is throw a massive pile of Tensor cores into the RTX 60-series GPUs, even though they take up relatively little die space by themselves, compared to the entire Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) structure that houses the CUDA cores.

At least, not without increasing the size of the register file in the SM. From Pascal through to Blackwell, each one has 64 kB worth of SRAM that stores the data the CUDA cores process while grinding through an operation. The Tensor cores also use that register file, so adding more to an SM could potentially cause problems with running out of registers.

For its AI data center Blackwell chips, Nvidia solved this by adding a dedicated 256 kB cache in the SM, purely for the Tensor cores, and it's possible that it could do something similar for its RTX 60-series chips. DLSS 4.5 doesn't really load up the Tensor cores all that much, but DLSS 5 (whatever its final form looks like) may well be the polar opposite.

And it's a similar story when it comes to ray tracing. Each SM in every RTX GPU is home to a single 'RT core', but what's there and what it's capable of has significantly changed over the generations. I don't have any charts to show you for this one, but one only needs to compare the RT cores in Blackwell to the first iteration units in Turing to see that there will be more to come.

Fortunately, all that kind of stuff is pure logic, rather than a big slab of SRAM, so although the next-gen RT cores will be even more potent, I don't expect them to take up any more space than they currently do, relative to the rest of the SM.²

Putting it all together

Taking everything into account, and churning through various calculations with Excel, I've put down some ballpark figures for die size, CUDA count, L2 cache size, and VRAM capacity for the primary RTX 60-series models. I'm not suggesting that these are absolute figures or even targets; just think of them as being 'zones' for where I suspect the cards will fall into.

I think Nvidia will want to stick with similar die sizes that it already uses with Blackwell, but there's a good chance it could go smaller, especially if TSMC ends up charging a small fortune to use its N3 process node. If that turns out to be the case, then the above CUDA core counts are clearly going to be maximums, and the final numbers could be a good deal lower.

Due to the SRAM's poor scaling with node shrinks, I don't think next-gen Nvidia GPUs for consumers will be packing much more, if any, L2 cache than RTX 50-series chips currently do. Perhaps a little more for the higher-class models, but nothing outlandishly big.

So far, I've not said a word about VRAM, and that's because the global memory supply crisis has made that very difficult to judge. I do think that Nvidia will want to raise the capacities in some tiers, by using 3 GB GDDR7 modules instead of the usual 2 GB chips, if only to stave off some of the flak it got with the RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti.

However, I don't foresee any changes of note to the size of the aggregated memory bus width, i.e. the RTX 6060 will still be 128 bits, RTX 6070 will be 192 bits, and so on. The reason for this is that it will help to keep the number of VRAM modules required to the bare minimum, and in turn, help profit margins.

With memory prices still sky-high and showing no signs of drastically reducing anytime soon, we could even have another generation of RTX graphics cards where there's no increase in VRAM capacities at all.

The biggest unknown, though, is how high the GPUs will be clocked. Although the RTX 40 and 50-series graphics cards enjoyed a substantial boost over the previous generations, I'm not certain that TMSC's N3 will afford the same luxury, so I wouldn't be surprised if the RTX 60-series launches with clocks similar to those in the RTX 40-series.

If that's the case, then we're potentially looking at between a 25 to 50% increase in compute performance, compared to the 50-series. That might seem like an outlandish suggestion to be making, especially given that the RTX 40-series had far bigger increases compared to the RTX 30-series. Apart from the RTX 4060, which was merely 19% higher, in terms of peak FP32 performance.

Of course, I could be wildly wrong here, and the bump in the number of CUDA cores is much bigger than I think it's going to be. But I'm not totally convinced it will be an almighty jump. The only product that Nvidia really needs to push the boat with is the RTX 6090, to keep on top of the AI prosumer demand. For the rest of the range, Team Green has little in the way of competition, snapping at its ankles, forcing to stay well ahead.

That said, Nvidia can't rely on another DLSS moment to gift the RTX 60-series with seemingly outrageous levels of performance. Multi Frame Generation appears to be as performant as it's going to get, and Super Resolution upscaling certainly is. DLSS 5 is about changing the appearance of graphics, not outright boosting frame rates, so it's unlikely that Nvidia can lean on it to help out.

To push neural rendering and path tracing into the gaming masses, Nvidia will need to raise every aspect of its RTX GPUs, from CUDA count and cache levels to Tensor core performance and data bandwidth. Countering this are factors such as profit margin targets, process node costs, supply constraints for GDDR7, and a near-total lack of competition.

I've based my predictions on past data and trends, but with the semiconductor and PC markets being somewhat uncertain right now, I've also been somewhat cautious with my figures. All we need to do now is just wait for the inevitable 'leaks' and 'rumours' to see just how close to the mark I've been.

I wouldn't claim to be an AI datacentre expert—good ol' fashioned PC gaming circuitry, that's my bread and butter—but I, along with everyone else and their collective brothers, know that those servers stack memory like nobody's watching. That's the reason we're living through a veritable RAMpocalypse, after all. So I can certainly laugh along with the various bewildered posts on X responding to OpenAI's latest patent.

The chip architecture patent [PDF], published on April 2, 2026, is for "a system of high bandwidth memory (HBM) chiplets and compute chiplets [which] includes embedded logic bridges that extend communication distances from the HBM chiplets to other chiplets beyond the ~6 mm limit imposed by the JEDEC standard."

The funny part, though, is the batch of incredibly simple diagrams that cram a whole bunch of memory alongside a compute chiplet. It screams 'you've heard of memory, but have you heard of more memory?' Which just about sums up the AI industry, I'd say.

The patent covers expanding the number of memory stacks beyond the normal limits by using those those fast "embedded logic bridges."

One patent analyst says on X that it's "HBM stacked up like rice cakes." And Citrini research analyst Jukan asks "What the hell is this thing?"

Putting a patent on essentially 'more memory' seems wild to me, but I admit I am oversimplifying. I'm sure there will be plenty of technical hoops to jump through to get those HBM stacks communicating with each other effectively at such a distance from the central compute chiplet. Thank God there are some detailed diagrams to help us out.

Again, I kid, there are other more specific diagrams in there. Just let me have my fun. If these companies are set on continuing to gobble up our precious DRAM, we're at least entitled to the occasional laugh at their expense, are we not?

A former researcher for Samsung Electronics has been sentenced to seven years in prison by a South Korean court, for leaking core DRAM semiconductor tech to a Chinese competitor, CXMT.

The Korea Economic Daily reports reports that the 56-year-old defendant, identified only as Mr. Jeon, was arrested and indicted last May. According to "legal circles", Jeon was sentenced by the 28th Criminal Division of the Seoul Central District Court on 22 April.

Those same legal circles report that the leaked tech was classified as "a core national technology", and that the court, under presiding judge Han Dae-gyun, stated that "Since damage was inflicted not only on the company but also on the Republic of Korea, we have no choice but to impose a severe punishment."

CXMT is China's most advanced DRAM manufacturer, and has received some publicity recently as a potential alternative solution to the ongoing memory supply crisis. Its DRAM modules occasionally crop up in system RAM kits that can be bought from Chinese online marketplaces like Temu, sometimes for slightly lower prices.

Jeun was indicted alongside 10 others last year on suspicion of similar charges, although he appears to be the first to receive a sentence. The court is reported to have found the defendant to have received 2.9 billion won (just under $2 million) from CXMT over a six year period, with 300 million of that figure said to be received in stock options.

According to The Chosun Daily, the leaked Samsung 18 nm process technology was developed at a cost of 1.6 trillion won (over $1 billion), and the court noted (via machine translation): "It is questionable whether the company provided sufficient compensation for maintaining trade secrets at the time of the crime"

As two of the big three DRAM module manufacturers (Samsung and SK Hynix) are South Korean companies, it's perhaps no surprise that its judicial system considers their technology of national importance. IP is key to maintaining a lead in these competitive times, and with memory demand remaining sky high thanks to AI server needs, it appears that protecting its technology is definitely a high priority for South Korea.

When you create anything, whether that be software or a short story about two characters that never meet, there's no telling what a fresh pair of eyes will bring to the work. Once a work breaches containment, your adoring audience may reward you with a short work of fanfiction—or make you kick yourself by immediately sniffing out a zero-day exploit. Well, Firefox claims that thanks to AI, 'the zero-days are numbered.'

Firefox teamed up with Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team earlier this year to leverage AI tools in finding and securing zero-day exploits before they have a chance to be unearthed in the real world. As part of that collaboration, Mozilla recently applied an early version of Claude Mythos to the Firefox bug hunt.

The bot found 271 vulnerabilities, which the browser team were then able to fix and ship as part of Firefox 150. Coupled with reports of Claude Mythos finding thousands of vulnerabilities in 'every major operating system and every major web browser, along with a range of other important pieces of software' earlier this month, this could be a security game-changer.

Firefox CTO Bobby Holley is quick to note that none of the bugs found by Claude Mythos "couldn’t have been found by an elite human researcher," but also highlights that much of security is a battle fought "to a draw."

"Vendors of critical internet-exposed software like Firefox take security extremely seriously and have teams of people who get out of bed every morning thinking about how to keep users safe," he explains, "Nevertheless, we’ve all long quietly acknowledged that bringing exploits to zero was an unrealistic goal."

This is largely because it can be so time-consuming for even a team of 'elite human researchers' to pore over source code and look for exploits. Holley reflects on the sense of 'vertigo' these sorts of AI-assisted findings brought up for the browser team, sharing, "Just one such bug would have been red-alert in 2025, and so many at once makes you stop to wonder whether it’s even possible to keep up."

But ultimately, Holley is hopeful for the future of security supported by AI assistance: "Our work isn’t finished, but we’ve turned the corner and can glimpse a future much better than just keeping up. Defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively."

Getting an Intel Arc card can be a good option in this otherwise eye-wateringly expensive market, especially as many of the GPUs' initial wrinkles have been ironed out. But problems still remain, and they sometimes surface with the release of new games, as some Intel Arc gamers found with the launch of Pragmata. But the company's latest driver claims to fix the crashes that were causing a stir.

Intel's 32.0.101.8735 graphics driver claims to fix "application crash while loading into game menu" for Arc A-series, B-series, and Core Ultra Series 1, 2, and 3 integrated Arc GPUs. This is the only fix that's mentioned, and known issues with other games such as The Finals, Fortnite, and Crimson Desert remain.

Assuming the crashes mentioned on Reddit are the ones this Intel driver fixes, which does seem likely to be the case, it seems there was already a workaround which involved manually deleting the game's shader cache and config files. Still, it's better to have an actual fix than having to mess with your game files.

Say what you want about its GPUs, but Intel's been doing a pretty good job of resolving these kinds of issues lately. For instance, last week's driver update claimed to resolve some flickering problems in Crimson Desert. And this isn't long after it was up for question whether the game would even be supported on the GPUs at all.

That's a far cry from how things were when Arc graphics cards first launched, and even when the B-series launched and for some time after. You still can't count on the full compatibility of an Nvidia or AMD GPU, but things are a lot better than they were.

At any rate, if you're a proud owner of an Arc GPU and you're keen to get dad-simming in Pragmata, it looks like you won't have to miss out on the action any longer.

On the CRPG-developer-romance spectrum, Obsidian are at one end—generally anti-romance—while BioWare and Larian are at the other end. As is Owlcat, whose Rogue Trader and Pathfinder games all feature romanceable companions. The reasoning behind that, and the particulars of how romance works in Pathfinder, is the topic of discussion in the studio's latest developer blog.

As Owlcat explains, while it's boring to "make a nice average waifu for everyone and for no one", sometimes they've gone too far in the other direction and away from the norm. "In fact," they write, "we had this situation early on during Wrath of the Righteous production. At some point we realized we had three female romanceable characters, and all three were cannibals."

Which explains why Arueshalae, the succubus on a path to redemption, has clearly-added-later dialogue about how she's unusual among demons for not liking the taste of human flesh. (Although that still suggests she knows what it tastes like.) Meanwhile, Wenduag the spider-legged mutant got to remain a cannibal, since if you're into her you're clearly into the freaky stuff. The third option is in spoiler territory. But Owlcat does note, due to that rewrite, "Arueshalae was somewhat shifted toward the 'average-pleasant' type, but fortunately, she didn’t become that type entirely."

Having romanced Arueshalae in Wrath of the Righteous, I did find her storyline a bit bland. Maybe if they'd left in some of the edginess it would have been better? It's hard to say. On my next playthrough I'll probably romance Daeran. It seems like a lot of effort went into his romance arc, with a waterfall added to the map just so you can have a scene together when you stumble across it.

Kingmaker had interesting romance options too, including a polyamorous couple you can either break up or join. In my first playthrough I was amused to start romancing one and then have the other show up and, rather than being jealous, basically give the whole thing their blessing and offer to get in on the action.

Don't expect to see more of that in future Owlcat games, though. As the blog post puts it, polyamory ended up being a lot of work and, "as much as we'd like to experiment in this area, the problem with polyamory in role-playing games is the complexity and cost of development, which are growing exponentially."

Owlcat just revealed two new companion characters for its Warhammer 40,000 RPGs, one coming to Rogue Trader as DLC and the other to Dark Heresy, which is currently in alpha. No word yet on whether they're romanceable—or whether they're cannibals.

Valve risks fines of up to AU$825,000 a day if it fails to respond to a transparency notice issued to it by the Australian government's eSafety Commissioner. According to a statement released by the regulator, Steam is "reportedly a hub for a number of extreme-right communities", and must explain to Australia how it is "identifying, preventing and responding to these harms".

Valve isn't the only gaming organisation under fire: Roblox, Microsoft (for Minecraft), and Epic Games (for Fortnite) have all been served transparency notices as well.

"We’ve seen numerous media reports about grooming taking place on all four of these platforms as well as terrorist and violent extremist-themed gameplay," eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said. "This includes Islamic State-inspired games and recreations of mass shootings on Roblox, as well as far right groups recreating fascist imagery in Minecraft.

"Media reports have also pointed to games in Fortnite gamifying the horrific events of the WWII Jasenovac concentration camp and the January 6th US Capitol Building riots, while Steam is reportedly a hub for a number of extreme-right communities."

I've reached out to Valve for comment and will update if I hear back.

The notice has been served by the same Australian government organisation responsible for forming new Age-Restricted Material Codes which, in theory, require age verification measures to be implemented to prevent under-18s accessing adult material. While that rule has been in force since March not everyone has implemented it, despite the threat of penalties "up to AU$49.5 million". Steam hasn't implemented any such measures. Nor has Rockstar, according to AFR, though Sony is in the process of rolling them out.

Sony is using Yoti for its age verification checks; other platforms, like Roblox but also Substack, use Persona, which has ties to Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. As I've written before, keeping children from accessing adult material is important, but surrendering personal information—including photo ID—to third-party companies is a legitimate privacy concern.

Still, the eSafety Commissioner isn't interested in how these things are done, only that they're done.

It's certainly not the first time Valve has faced criticism for allegedly allowing extremist material on Steam. A US senator took Gabe Newell to task for it in 2022, and yet another US senator did the same in 2024, deeming Steam an "unsafe place for teens and young adults".

The founder of laptop company Framework did something radical on Tuesday, setting him apart from nearly every other tech company in the world: He stood on a stage and said nice things about the personal computer.

"For the first time in history, more silicon is actually going into the cloud than it is into personal computers," Nirav Patel said. "What it means to own a computer at all is fundamentally different than it was even a year ago. You can lease effectively infinite compute from the cloud, by the hour or by the token, instead of having it sit at your desk."

Then he pretended—for all of five seconds—to pivot to AI before admitting it was a bit.

"This industry wants you to own nothing and be happy. We're fighting for a future where you can own everything and be free," he said. "We think a personal computer should actually be personal: Something you can own at the deepest level, and do what you want with."

As far as pointed criticism of the tech industry of 2026 goes, Patel is more or less wielding a butter knife. He's not directly calling out, for example:

• Microsoft for glazing generative AI or enshittifying Windows
• HP for leasing laptops
• RAM companies like Samsung and SK Hynix and Micron for shifting consumer memory production over to AI datacenters
• Nvidia's incredibly lucrative pivot to AI over gaming
• Or Meta's nakedly embarrassing one.

Framework even marketed last year's small form-factor desktop as a great PC for running AI models locally, instead of in the cloud—the company clearly does not view generative AI as more or less the enemy of humanity in the way that I do. (At least I have Dave Oshry on my side).

Even knowing that Patel is offering the lightest possible pushback against the status quo of 2026—and that a mantra like "we're fighting for a future where you can own everything and be free" is savvy marketing for a company that makes 100% of its revenue selling hardware—I'm not just drinking the Kool-Aid, I'm dumping a cooler full of it over my head like I just won the Super Bowl.

God it's refreshing! A technology company in the year 2026 that just wants to sell you a good computer. And not just a good computer, but one that you can keep upgrading with new parts for years.

In fact, despite announcing a new laptop model today with a redesigned chassis, Framework bent over backwards to stick to the principle the company was founded on—making its products as forwards- and backwards-compatible as possible, maintaining upgradability and minimizing waste.

The Framework 13 Pro is cool, but not nearly as cool as the fact that I can buy just the new CNCed aluminum chassis to stick the guts of my current Framework laptop in. Or I could go for a full upgrade kit that fits the new higher capacity battery, a welcome 13Wh improvement over the one I already have. I'm tempted by the Laptop 13 Pro's new default screen and Intel Core Ultra Series 3 mainboard, which Framework claims offers MacBook-caliber power efficiency. But I can also buy those parts piecemeal and slap 'em into my current laptop. All the old expansion cards, offering I/O like USB-C and HDMI and microSD, are still compatible.

None of this is really news or remarkable to the Framework faithful, but I do think it's revealing that even when the company had the opportunity to make a clean break and cut off support for components that are now six years old, it instead doubled down.

Framework is also, to my knowledge, only the second company to actually offer a product that uses LPCAMM2 memory. Everyone else has tossed upgradability out the window and just used soldered memory instead. There are, of course, benefits to that approach—Apple's uncharacteristically cheap MacBook Neo costs about as much as a single 64GB stick of LPCAMM2 RAM—but it feels a little ridiculous for a company with fewer than 200 employees to be pushing the hardware envelope instead of one of the competitors that's dozens of times its size.

Even if Patel's jabs at AI were ultimately mild, it still makes me feel a little bit more sane to hear someone at the head of a technology company making them. More significantly, Framework spent time highlighting compatibility with Linux, and had a rep from Ubuntu hop up on stage to talk about their collaboration.

"Oh, and you can also choose Windows, if you want," Patel joked afterward. That was the sum total of Microsoft's representation during the presentation.

I know I'm not the only one who feels madder and crazier by the day for being so sick of AI that I'd cackle with glee at this bubble bursting even if it took my whole 401k down with it. It's ruining the internet and making our hobby worse and far less affordable, and so far this year only Dell has managed to give a tech presentation that didn't make me want to scream.

The Verge's Elizabeth Lopatto hit the nail on the head when she wrote yesterday that Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want, tracing a line from 2016's $400 Juicero (a machine that squeezed throwaway proprietary juice packets for you) to NFTs, the metaverse, and how the tech industry is now dumping billions into use cases for AI it then tries to retroactively justify.

"Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer," she wrote. "It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers' job was to go along with that invented future."

I think it's beautiful that the one tech company currently offering the cure for Lopatto's terminal diagnosis is just… making good PCs, and is as committed to looking backwards as it is forwards. That old computer you bought awhile back? No need to throw it out. It's still got some life in it yet.

Peter Molyneux is playing the hits with Masters of Albion, returning to the god game form he helped define. Towns can be built, townsfolk can be menaced—all through the awesome, lightning-bolt throwing, boulder-dropping, peasant-flinging power of an omnipotent, hovering hand, just as tradition demands.

And it's all happening when Masters of Albion launches in early access in just a few hours. If you'd like to know precisely when you can extend your godly hand over your hapless subjects, then take hold of mine: I've listed the Masters of Albion launch time below for timezones around the world.

When does Masters of Albion launch in early access?

Masters of Albion launches in early access at 1 pm EDT / 6 pm BST on Wednesday, April 22. That provides a comfortable amount of launch day play time for the US and Europe, but anyone in Australia who's eager for a Molyneux rendezvous is going to be bleary-eyed at unlock hour.

Here's the Masters of Albion launch time for timezones around the globe:

• Los Angeles: 10 am PDT on Wednesday, April 22
• New York: 1 pm EDT on Wednesday, April 22
• London: 6 pm BST on Wednesday, April 22
• Berlin: 7 pm CEST on Wednesday, April 22
• New Delhi: 10:30 pm IST on Wednesday, April 22
• Sydney: 3 am AEST on Thursday, April 23
• Auckland: 5 am NZST on Thursday, April 23

If your timezone isn't one of those listed above, just plug the launch time into a handy timezone converter to find when you'll be able to play.

Does Masters of Albion have preloading?

It doesn't seem like it; there's been no mention of preloading on either the Masters of Albion Steam page or its various social media feeds. Its system requirements only ask for 20 GB of space, however, so it won't be a terribly long wait compared to the beefier install sizes we have to deal with nowadays.

It's best to assume that nothing you do on a work-issued PC is private. But is there no limit? No breaking point where people start throwing their laptops out of windows and joining Watch Dogs-esque hacktivist groups? Meta sure seems to be looking for it.

Reuters reports that the Facebook, VR, and now AI company will track US-based employees' "mouse movements, clicks and ​keystrokes" on "work-related apps and websites" for the purpose of AI training. It will also take screenshots, according to the report.

A Meta spokesperson told Reuters that the company will somehow exclude "sensitive content" and won't use the data for performance evaluations. Rather, their AI models "need real examples" of people using computers for everyday tasks in order to automate them.

If I were a Meta employee, I'd take this to mean that the company thinks I can be replaced by a robot that I was forced to train. Meta has pledged to spend $600 billion on AI by 2028, and according to another Reuters report, plans to lay off nearly 8,000 employees in May.

The mood inside Meta has been "horrid" in recent years, according to Ed Zitron, an AI industry critic who reports on what he's called "the most annoying bubble in history" in his Where's Your Ed At newsletter. Zitron's impression from sources inside the company is that there exists a "culture of paranoia," which an AI-training keylogger won't likely improve.

"Everyone I know at Meta hates working there," Zitron told PC Gamer on a call today.

Meta introduced a new AI model, Muse Spark, earlier in April, and claims that it's a step toward "superintelligence," a buzzword the AI industry has been bandying about for years now. A Meta executive acknowledged to Bloomberg that the model performs worse than competitor models at some tasks, but said that it's "early," and that the company has bigger LLMs in development.

In its report, Reuters notes that Meta's keylogging initiative likely targets US employees because laws related to employee surveillance are stricter in Europe.

It cannot be overstated how alien a concept "free-to-play" was just a few hardware generations ago. Long before we'd settled on a label for them, the only notable free-to-play games were browser-based MMOs, early MOBAs based on mods, and Korean games that had few players in the West. Free-to-play was niche in these parts, but by the late '00s, major publishers began experiments in what free versions of their tentpole series would look like.

One such experiment was Battlefield Heroes. The PC-exclusive spinoff was the first time a high-profile franchise dabbled with the model, though it was controversial for reasons other than its price—its third-person camera and cartoony art were bigger hurdles for Battlefield fans at the time.

But Heroes was fun. Back in the April 2009 issue of PC Gamer, 17 years ago this month, then-editor Tom Francis wrote a Battlefield Heroes preview that included an interview with senior producer Ben Cousins. You can tell from Tom's opening paragraph just how strange it was to make a big deal out of a free-to-play game:

"This is the first time PC Gamer has ever put a free game on its cover. Thanks to the influence of piracy and the phenomenal success of some pioneering free games in Korea, we’re at a point where one of the major PC game developers feels they can charge nothing for their next game."

That's right: free-to-play was once sold as a solution for piracy. It's fascinating to see EA open up about the challenges, advantages, and expectations of a free-to-play game. Francis again:

"Heroes is a huge risk. Senior producer Ben Cousins told us that in terms of simultaneous players, it will need to be the most popular Battlefield game of all time to be profitable."

Cousins goes on to almost perfectly describe a development approach that we'd eventually call live service, and he does so with a transparency and bluntness that's rare today.

"The great thing is," says Cousins, "because we can monitor people’s reactions to different features on the fly, we learn whether a feature is worth putting in or not. If we actually hit our targets in terms of how sticky and addictive and fun the game is without adding a certain feature, then we now realise we don’t need to invest time in adding it."

This, too, might not make much sense if you can't remember a time before games were constantly patched and post-launch updates weren't guaranteed. It's now expected that player feedback steers a game's creative direction to a degree (modern Battlefield included), but this "developing alongside players" mentality was abnormal for multiplayer shooters in 2009.

Cousins also uses the word "sticky" multiple times to describe Battlefield Heroes' progression—a simple upgrade system for unlocking abilities and a currency for weapons earned by completing rotating challenges. Heroes had "dailies" before any other shooter I can think of, and while today there's a growing exhaustion with currencies and grind, Cousins attributes these "sticky" systems to Heroe's success.

"The first closed beta launched without [progression], and the result was sobering for the DICE team. 'Because we had none of this persistence,' Cousins explains, 'and we only had two maps… people's average playing time was only a few hours.'"

Though we couldn't know it at the time, Battlefield Heroes also offered a grim warning about live service uglification: "The costume parts you buy for your heroes get more exotic as you level, so high-level characters often look nothing like World War 2 soldiers."

Indeed, Battlefield Heroes became a blueprint for both dos and don'ts of free-to-play. At the time of our preview, better guns could only be purchased with currency earned by playing, but in late 2009, EA would infamously tilt the game in a pay-to-win direction.

But Cousins understood then what live service developers know now: it makes more money sense to cater to the hardcore players spending money. In a later Game Developers Conference talk titled "Paying to Win," Cousins argued that despite the online negativity, the data backed up the decision to let players pay for better guns.

Battlefield Heroes would go on to have a six-year run. EA quietly shut it down in 2015, alongside a handful of other free-to-play games, in a sort of purge that's become tragically routine in 2026.

In the year 2022, PC Gamer's Morgan Park asked if the then-pre-release extraction shooter Marauders could "dethrone Escape From Tarkov with dieselpunk spaceships and impeccable vibes." The answer, we would later learn, was "no."

Marauders launched into early access in October 2022 and came out of the gate with impressive concurrent player numbers on Steam, particularly given that it's not a free to play game. But updates came to a halt in August 2024 with the launch of the Retribution update, and the early access notice on Steam now carries a warning that the game hasn't been updated for more than 20 months.

Well you can reset that timer, baby, because it turns out that Marauders isn't quite as dead as it appeared. A "production update" posted today says developers have been "fully focused on the game" all this time, and that "what started as a round of fixes grew into a much larger, necessary change and we have made the call to commit to it rather than push smaller updates in the meantime."

"We've been reworking core systems and rebuilding mechanics that needed it," developer Small Impact Games wrote. "This isn't a patch. It's a full overhaul aimed at getting Marauders where it should be."

Which is cool, except, well, they seem to have forgotten to tell anyone about it. In fact, publisher Team17 seemed to imply in 2025 that the game had been abandoned, telling redditor Rasangus that active development of the game had stopped.

The whole thing is a bit strange—which isn't meant to suggest impropriety, just that it's weird for a game to suddenly pop back to life like this after two years of silence—but the reaction is, frankly, more positive than I'd expect. Naturally there's plenty of "let it die" commentary in the replies on Steam, but a good number of followers are excited at the prospect of Marauder's return, too. If nothing else, 11 pages of responses (and counting) just a few hours after the update was posted indicates to me that, yes, there is still some real interest here.

And maybe for good reason. No doubt a lot has changed since Morgan checked out Marauders in 2022, but even then he saw potential: "There's not a lot to it in this closed beta build, a fact that may sway the Tarkov faithfuls from committing to it for now, but Marauders definitely has it beat in theming and approachability."

What this ultimately adds up to is impossible to say, and I certainly wouldn't recommend dropping $30 on an early access game with a development roadmap on Steam that ends in "late 2023." There's also no getting around the fact that the extraction shooter milieu is even more crowded and tougher now than it was when the game went silent: Neither Arc Raiders nor Marathon were on the scene at that point.

But if Marauders really is back in active development (or, I suppose, if development has been ongoing all along and they just lost track of time), I think it'll be one worth keeping an eye on.

11 Bit Studios has revealed in its 2025 financial summary that it has two "completely new" and thus far unannounced games in development. It's also working on a "return to the studio's most important brands in a new, refreshed formula": An all-new Frostpunk game, and "a reimagining of the cult classic This War of Mine."

11 Bit said its financial situation is "stable," with the narrative-driven survival game The Alters selling 545,000 copies and Frostpunk 2 "approaching" 880,000 copies sold. "The Alters showed that we can build new, global brands, and we are consistently developing Frostpunk as a long-term franchise," 11 Bit CEO Przemysław Marszał said.

Similarly, 11 Bit's future strategy is a mix of old and new: A pair of unannounced brand new games, alongside a remake of the award-winning 2014 anti-war survival game This War of Mine and a Frostpunk game that Marszał said will expand the series "into a new genre."

"Projects like Frostpunk 1886 or the newly announced P15, which is a reimagining of This War of Mine, are not standard remasters," Marszał said. "They represent a fully modern, fresh take on the games that defined 11 Bit studios, designed from the ground up with a multi-year lifecycle and long-term community engagement in mind."

"Our strategy is primarily an evolution that allows us to explore the boundaries of the medium even more boldly," creative director Michał Drozdowski added. "We want every game under the 11 Bit studios banner, whether it's a completely new IP or a reimagining of already known worlds, to carry a unique, ambitious artistic vision and that special emotional charge that our players value most."

I'm curious about what the new Frostpunk game will be—a Cryostasis-style survival shooter where you're combing the outside world for resources and survivors could be fun—but the remake of This War of Mine is what I find genuinely interesting. The original is 14 years old now, but with the US and Israel unleashing wars of aggression in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere, killing tens of thousands of civilians in the process, the themes it explores have never been more relevant.

11 Bit has also done good things with This War of Mine through years of charity fundraising. Modernizing that for a new audience is not the worst idea a game company has ever had, and if 11 Bit intends to continue its support for civilians trapped in war zones with the remake, I'm all for it.

There's no word on when any of these new projects will come to fruition, but 11 Bit said 2026 will see the full release of Moonlighter 2, as well as new DLC for Frostpunk and The Alters. Work is also continuing on Frostpunk 1886, which is "planned for the turn of 2027/2028."

I'm not the keeper of the grand "games with horses" spreadsheet but to whoever is: time to add Palia. The next expansion for the life sim MMO is adding one of those features players are always asking for in MMOs: mounts. Specifically: horses. I was expecting the stock-standard mounts implementation—a glorified 'go faster' button—but it sure looks like Palia's put enough thought into its horses to be worth a second glance by the chronically underfed equestrian gamers.

Palia's next expansion is called The Royal Highlands, launching as a free game update on May 12. The expansion will add the largest "adventure zone" (read: explorable area) in Palia so far, a handsome (they insist, and I won't argue with) new villager named Eshelon, new furniture styles, ranches for your home lot, and three horse breeds.

One of the first things you can spot in Singularity 6's breakdown video on the new mounts is that there's a speed meter that transitions through different gaits. The equestrians in the room will have to give opinions on the accuracy there, but I'm spotting at least a walk, canter, and gallop. I'm a little less sure about that trot, but I'm no expert.

In most MMOs, mounts don't actually change how player movement feels and are really just a slightly higher camera angle and traversal speed. Guild Wars 2 has always been a bit of a notable exception with its mounts that all handle quite differently. Palia may not be going quite so far as GW2's Roller Beetle drifting movement, but different gaits and traits that mention changing how each horse handles—I spotted one called "Bulldozer" that makes a horse faster but worse at turning—is more than most MMOs get into.

Back at the ranch on your home plot you can feed and pet your horses. That's pretty basic stuff in the realm of horse care games, but the breeding system where you can produce mounts with favored traits is more than I expected from an MMO. Some traits are realistic like a chestnut coat or a cheerful disposition. Others are fantastical, like sparkly visual effects and status effect buffs. This is probably the second best thing to getting the horse ranching update I always wanted, and never got, in Red Dead Online.

When the Royal Highlands expansion launches in May there will be three (made up) horse breeds available: the Dawnspur, Phoenixfire Dawnspur, and the (Arabian-inspired) Akwinduu Thoroughbred. Someone in that video explainer has already beat us all to the "Mace Akwinduu" joke, sorry. During the reveal video, Singularity 6 says "starting with horses" so it sure sounds like we can expect more types of mounts, and maybe more horse breeds, in the future.

There's more going on in Palia this season that you can read up on in its Palia Path roadmap including an in-game event celebrating 10 million total players that begins today and a "sunkissed summer" event coming later.

Wordle isn't quite the draw for me it once was. I still play it most days, but I'm not hitting it first thing in the morning and I don't care about preserving a streak anymore. Sorry, Wordle: the spark is gone.

If, like me, you're on the hunt for a new daily puzzle game, you should take a look at Hunch, which has Wordle-style play but is much, much harder. Put it this way: it's gonna take you more than 6 guesses. Maybe a lot more. Hunch is the Dark Souls of Wordle, basically.

In Hunch, you've got the familiar 5-letter grid to guess the secret word, and after your first guess (mine is always SOUPY, what's yours?) you see which letters are in the right place (tallied in green) and which are in the wrong place but still in the word (yellow).

Thing is, Hunch doesn't tell you which letters are in the right places the way Wordle does. So if SOUPY gets you a green tally of one, all you know is one of the letters in SOUPY is in the right place. If you then try STAKE to see if it's the S, you might get zero green and one yellow tally, which means S wasn't in the right place, but still might be in the word.

Or, it might not: that one yellow tally could mean T, A, K, or E are in the word. Try POSTS next and find out that none of those letters are in the word: congrats, you've already burned 3 guesses just to eliminate that S.

It's Mastermind meets Wordle, essentially, so you can easily blow through a dozen or so guesses before you even really get a handle on what the word could be. Unlike Wordle, there's no limit on guesses, so you just keep on going until you figure it out. I've… I've had some really, really long runs before I figured out the word. Too long to share with you.

Hunch has a daily puzzle to wrap your brain around, and a cool "cascade" mode that requires solving three words consecutively. If you create an account there's even a multiplayer mode where you can challenge a friend to see who's got better hunches. Hunch was created by designer Bennette Sebastian and you can play it here.

As well as announcing a new object of my affections with the Framework 13 Pro laptop, the eponymous company has done something altogether more unexpected: it's unveiled a new wireless keyboard. A wireless keyboard with a built-in trackpad, specifically for living room or sim rig use.

Not something I had on my 2026 bingo card at all, but I am absolutely here for it. It came out of the Framework Desktop PC testing and using one particular keyboard/touchpad combo that was popular, but one that wasn't particularly well-liked.

"We knew we could do better, so we did!" So says a blog post shared with us about Framework's new Touchpad Keyboard preview.

The new board basically takes the same keyboard and touchpad architecture that the company built into its recent, small-scale Framework 12 laptops. Which does mean there's none of the fancy haptics from the new Framework 13 Pro touchpads, but it does mean you're getting decent chiclet-style low-profile keys with 1.5 mm travel.

The touchpad itself is a clickable Windows Precision Touchpad, which means you'll get access to all the multi-digit gestures your heart desires from either Windows or Linux operating systems.

It reminds me a little of the Kinesis Form, another wireless keyboard with a built-in trackpad, though that one's a little fiddly to use because of how narrow the pad is.

Anyway, for you nostalgia sickos out there, you'll be happy to see Framework's gone for a translucent rear cover for the board. So you can see the internal structure and relive those Game Boy Advance days.

But the keyboard itself isn't the end of the story, because as well as releasing the CAD files so you can create your own mounts for jamming the board into a sim rig setup, Framework is also going to be selling the heart of it via its Marketplace site. The Control Board, which features the Nordic nRF54 radio chip, enables Bluetooth connectivity, alongside a USB Type-A dongle and wired Type-C connection, and you can use that to build your very own wireless keyboard, or stick it into another frame you prefer.

We don't have any firm timings in terms of when the new keeb is going to be released, with Framework just saying that it will be "available later this year".

If you play Rust then the mere sight of the words "horse shield" probably have you gnashing your teeth and cursing the cheap no-gooders who rely on it. The whole thing is very simple. Ride a horse, equip a shield, and players on-foot have almost no chance against you.

Facepunch has already taken steps to address this on the game's staging branch, but for now it remains an issue in vanilla Rust. Cometh the hour, cometh the man: Take a bow, Rust YouTuber Fyx, who has, erm, fyxed the issue in their own inimitable way. They turned the horse into bait.

Necessary context here is that, while horses do spawn in the wild in Rust, and can be tamed with a saddle, and the fastest way to get one is to buy one at a Ranch. This is also the easiest way to get a thoroughbred (the fastest kind of horse). In other words, horses are valuable and desirable things in the world of Rust, and one just standing around with no rider is one hell of a temptation.

This is what Fyx relies on, and they've come up with four different methods of using the horse as bait to tempt players, who then get an extremely nasty surprise. Fair warning: a lot of videogame horses were harmed in the making of this YouTube video.

The first method is simplicity itself: disguising landmines around the horse. Basic, brutal, and oh-so-effective on the vast majority of players, who don't even get to mount up before they (and the horse) are sent to meet their maker.

Then things start to get a little more Acme Industries. Fyx rigs-up a false floor, under which are a whole bunch of shotguns that trigger the instant anyone steps on it. The horse is on the false floor. Players approach, some of them even hesitate for a moment, but again almost all of them can't turn down a free horse: they step forward to mount, and kablammo.

This is all proving rather profitable for Fyx, which is a good thing because they need to buy an army of horses to keep this up. Next is an even more elaborate shotgun trap, which involves the horse being left on a pressure pad. When the player mounts the horse, nothing happens…

But as soon as they move forward the pressure pad activates, and a door on the player's right instantaneously flies open and around half-a-dozen shotguns fire and take care of business. Even the most cautious of horse-rustlers (thangew) fall for this one.

Finally, a return to the basics. Sleeping bag on the ground. Remotely triggered C4 explosive under sleeping bag. Horse next to sleeping bag. Retreat to a safe distance with binoculars. Watch player approach. Detonate C4. Bye-bye!

I suppose what this video really showcases is just how many tools Rust offers players, and how many horses one determined player is prepared to sacrifice in order to take out those who would be horse shield meta chads. As Fyx himself puts it: "if you're tired of getting destroyed by the horse shield meta, consider this a public service."

A week after new Xbox chief Asha Sharma said Game Pass had become "too expensive," Microsoft has announced a pretty significant cut in the price: An Xbox Wire post says Game Pass Ultimate has dropped from $29.99 per month to $22.99, while PC Game Pass is going from $16.49 to $13.99. Naturally, as the lawyers like to say, "prices may vary by region."

The cuts don't take the cost of Game Pass back to where it was prior to the massive price hike in October 2025, when Game Pass Ultimate was available for $19.99 and PC Game Pass was $11.99. Still, it's movement in the right direction, and a $3 price hike on Ultimate is a lot easier to swallow than a 50% hike.

The reduction in Game Pass pricing does not come without a cost, however. Beginning with the next release in the series, Call of Duty games will not come to Game Pass at launch: Instead, they'll be added to both the Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass "during the following holiday season (about a year later)," Microsoft said. The change will not impact CoD games that are already on Game Pass, however.

That's a big change that may blunt the impact of the Game Pass price reductions, but it's possible Microsoft has decided that the economics work out better this way regardless. Microsoft reportedly lost an estimated $300 million in sales of Black Ops 6 because the game was available on Game Pass at launch, while a staggering 82% of the game's full-price sales in October 2025 were on PlayStation 5, where Game Pass isn't available. You have to sell an awful lot of Game Pass subscriptions to generate that kind of cash, and this step back from Game Pass uber alles could indicate that Microsoft is finally starting to accept (or at least acknowledge) the possibility that the service has plateaued.

"Our players cover a wide breadth of geographies, preferences, and tastes, so while there isn’t a single model that’s best for everyone, this change responds to a lot of feedback we’ve gotten so far," Microsoft said of the price and game cuts. "We’ll continue to listen and learn."

The Game Pass price-and-games cuts are also seemingly part of the ongoing disavowal of former Xbox president Sarah Bond, who resigned in February when Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer retired. Sharma promised to"recommit to our core Xbox fans and players" when she took the reins in February, leading us to wonder about the future of the "everything is an Xbox" strategy formed under Bond's guidance. A month later, we found out: It's gone.

From the initial internal desire to build the "MacBook Pro for Linux users" Framework has created something that truly feels like a next generation version of its 13-inch notebook. The new Framework 13 Pro looks like the culmination of six years of regular releases from one of the most considered manufacturers in the space.

But while it is using a whole new a chassis—for the first time fully machined out of extruded blocks of aluminium—and comes with a brand new Panther Lake mainboard, uses a whole new kind of memory module, has a bigger battery, a fully-custom display, and a brand new haptic trackpad, Framework hasn't departed from its original long-term, repairability focused ethos.

Every single one of the new elements is backwards compatible with every Framework 13 laptop that has come before it. You could be sitting on an old 11th Gen Tiger Lake machine from four or five years ago, and simply pick up the new Panther Lake mainboard, with its LPCAMM2 memory modules and PCIe Gen5 SSD support, and have an incredible laptop upgrade that will take just 15 minutes and one screwdriver.

Or maybe you're happy with your current machine and just want that shiny new 700 nit screen. I've personally swapped out a Framework 13 screen in maybe five minutes in the past, and this promises to be just as straightforward to do.

I'll admit when I first saw it was making the 13 Pro I thought we would be looking at the first departure from the original Framework 13 laptop in terms of design compatibility.

"Even while overhauling the entire product," Framework notes in a blog post shared with us covering today's Next-Gen event, "we focused on cross-generation compatibility.

"The new Mainboard and Display Kit follow the same form factors and interfaces as our earlier generations, which means you can drop them directly into your existing system. We have the new chassis parts available in a Silver anodization option as well, and you can pick up a Bottom Cover Upgrade Kit that includes the new battery, new Input Cover Kit with haptic touchpad, or even an entire new Chassis to get every one of the improvements."

The core of the new Framework 13 Pro is based around "a massive leap in battery life". Much of that is down to the efficiency of Intel's new Panther Lake architecture, but there's also a larger 74 Wh battery (up from 61 Wh), that new power-optimised display, and LPCAMM2 memory to factor in, too.

The use of Micon-made LPCAMM2 is interesting, especially at a time when memory prices are at a premium, and I can't believe it's cheaper than standard SODIMMs right now. But Framework is going to offer 16, 32, and 64 GB modules from the Marketplace to support it. Just figure out which of your kidneys you can do without.

I'm a PC gamer, so the fact that Framework is offering the Core Ultra 5 as well as the Core Ultra X7 and Core Ultra X9 chips inside the new mainboards is big news for me. The X7 and X9 both get the 12 Xe core B390 integrated GPU, which absolutely slays when it comes to games. That means you're getting close to entry-level discrete GPU performance out of it.

To be able to run those chips for a long time, however, the bigger battery isn't just so in terms of capacity, it's physically larger, too. That means the bottom cover of the Framework 13 Pro has been redesigned to house the larger cells, making the 13 Pro just that little bit thicker at the front edge. That also means if you want the bigger battery for your standard Framework 13 you'll need the expanded housing. Luckily that all comes as a kit from the Marketplace.

The biggest weakness of all the Framework laptops I've used has been the screen. Even the updated 120 Hz version and the 16-inch panel share the same slightly ghosty experience in use. The new touchscreen panel being introduced with the 13 Pro is the first time Framework is bringing a totally custom panel to its devices, and I'm hoping that means it will have been able to clean that experience up.

The core specs sound great, with a 2880 x 1920, 3:2 resolution, 1800:1 contrast ratio, 30–120 Hz VRR, and the capability to go up to a full 700 nits in terms of brightness. We don't have any response time figures, so we'll have to see how it runs when review units turn up later in the summer.

But it's not just the components that have changed, Framework has also introduced a new haptic trackpad. "Touchpad feel is an area where Windows and Linux laptops have historically fallen behind Macs," says Framework, "so this is where we’re putting a lot of our focus across our mechanical, electrical, and firmware teams to deliver the best experience possible."

The first shipments of the Framework 13 Pro will be going out in June this year, with prices starting at $1,199 for the DIY edition and $1,499 for the full pre-built config.

If that were all Framework was going to announce today I would be happy. The new black chassis looks great and makes those colourful I/O modules really pop, and I am incredibly excited to see both the gaming performance and battery life of this tiny wonder.

But that isn't everything; it's also revealed a new wireless touchpad keyboard, updates to the Framework 16 and a new OCuLink Dev Kit to allow you to add desktop GPUs to an eight-lane OCuLink PCIe interface to its big boi 16-inch laptop.

The Framework 13 Pro and Wireless Touchpad Keyboard aren't the only new techie toys coming out of the Next-Gen event today, Framework is also working on upgrades for the Framework 16. And specifically one that will allow you to connect a full desktop GPU to the rear of the big boi laptop.

The key feature of the Framework 16 laptop is its large Expansion Bay on the rear. This is what allows you to plumb a full discrete mobile GPU into the machine via the Graphics Module and realise the dream of genuinely upgradeable graphics cards for gaming laptops. Well, up to a point anyway. So far we've had only two discrete GPUs available for the Framework 16—the Radeon RX 7700S and the GeForce RTX 5070—but it at least delivers on the premise better than the failed Alienware idea.

But the new OCuLink Dev Kit means that you'll now be able to connect an eGPU to the rear of the device, or even fully fledged desktop graphics cards plumbed in via an eight-lane PCIe connection enabled by the OCuLink interface. This upgrade provides 128 Gbps of bidirectional throughput across the link.

And it comes in three distinct parts. At the heart is the OCuLink Adapter Board that goes into the Framework 16's Expansion Bay Shell and exposes the PCIe interface via a connection on the rear of the laptop. Then Framework has developed a dock designed to house the discrete mobile GPU that would otherwise be installed inside the Framework 16 so that it can be housed externally on the desktop and connected via OCuLink.

For me, that's the least interesting bit, after all, I'd rather either have that mobile GPU installed or not at all.

The third part, however, has me sold. The PCIe OCuLink Dock is a wee board that allows you to take a normal desktop graphics card, pair it with a PSU to power it, and plug it directly into the laptop for a pretty minor performance hit. Certainly less than you will traditionally see with Thunderbolt or USB4, anyways.

Sure, it has a jury-rigged look to it, but that sort of science lab feel kinda works for me. I'll take having my big ol' graphics card floating about on the desktop if I can get that performance into my laptop from a single plug.

Though it is a dev kit and is actually designed so that Framework is just giving you the core electrical components; you supply the PSU, GPU, and surrounds to stop it looking so ludicrous.

Survival game Enshrouded has one of the best and most flexible building systems ever, but there's always been one little drawback to crafting a grand castle or carving a cavernous lair: there's never been a great way to share those creations with the Enshrouded community apart from a few screenshots or a walkthrough tour video.

The latest Enshrouded update solves that problem with its new adventure sharing feature. If you've got a creation you're proud of, whether it's a mountaintop stronghold or an entire town you've restored, you can now upload it and let other players visit it. You're not just sending them a castle blueprint, either: you're sharing your entire version of Enshrouded's world.

Using the new in-game main menu, players can browse community uploads and pick the creations they'd like to visit. To tantalize the crowd, there's even a new craftable camera you can use to take some real beauty shots of your bases to post in the browsing menu. If a player sees something they like, they can download it and step inside it. You can even subscribe to creators you enjoy.

For someone like myself who is terrible at building and always winds up living in a boring, featureless wooden crate, this is the moment I've been waiting for. Now I'll be able to download the creations of far more talented players and live in their beautiful bases for myself. Thanks for the hundreds of hours of hard work, suckers!

No, seriously, thank you. I hate living in my featureless wooden box.

This is just the first iteration of the adventure sharing feature, so it's not complete yet. For instance, at the moment you can't progress within that shared world, at least not yet, so just think of it as a sightseeing expedition for now.

"This update is only the beginning for the adventure sharing feature," developer Keen Games said. "In upcoming updates, we will expand on the feature, giving players the tools to build content and adventures for others to explore and enjoy, including logic systems for interactive elements, puzzles, spawning enemies… and traps!"

One other little issue: when excitedly booting up Enshrouded this morning so I could start stealing people's cool castles, I wasn't actually able to try out adventure sharing because the servers are, shall we say, struggling a bit. Hopefully, by the time you read this, it'll be smoothed out and you can do some proper castle shopping.

As you can see in the video above, adventure sharing isn't the only new feature in today's update: there's a revamped skill system, new heavy attacks, enemy awareness improvements, and lots more you can read about here. Important note: your character's skill tree has also been reset, so make sure you redistribute your skill points before jumping off any towers or starting any fights.

A huge moment of hype in Silent Hill f's pre-release was when it was announced that none other than ryukishi07 would be writing the script. A marriage made in heaven, and it turns out that the famous horror novelist wasted absolutely no time getting to work with the latest Silent Hill game.

"He is a super fast writer, and he's a very detailed kind of guy, too," director Al Yang told PCG's senior editor Wes Fenlon at GDC. "The final version of the script only went through like three, three and a half full revisions. About 60% of the script stayed the same, but that 60% was kind of the core themes and kind of the key beats. Those never changed."

The main beats in question are your regular Silent Hill motifs such as the atmosphere and troubled protagonist, but one area left blank was the location. "A lot of locations weren't set in the original script," Yang explains. "So for instance, with the school, that's something we brought up. We had a section of the game where Hinako is talking to Sho and Rinko, they're together, and they reminisce about school days. It would make sense, because they're classmates, to have this set in [the school]."

Silent Hill f developer NeoBards already had something of a template for a school set in a Silent Hill world: Midwich Elementary School is an important location in the OG Silent Hill game, and was also featured briefly in Silent Hill 3. But schools set in the Mid-Atlantic/ Northeastern US aren't exactly the same as Japanese schools.

"Japanese schools have a very particular layout, or windows and hallways are supposed to be a specific way," Yang says. "And we actually flipped it around by accident and Konami came back: 'Okay. Japanese schools do not have this layout, this is something that we need to change'. Lots of checks on all sides, and again, like I said, it's a collaborative effort."

Another check that came during the early stages of development was actually on ryukishi07's writing. After solidifying all the basics came the process of writing out actual scenes, a task which was made tricky because of the disparity between what can be described on paper and what the devs could actually show in the finished product.

"So a lot of the cut scenes, for instance, we talked about like budget wise, this is really cool, what you're writing here, but these are just words," Yang says. "If we actually show this, it's gonna take three months to build. But we understand the intent. So we're like, okay, how can we do that in the confines of our space? That's budgeting and working backwards."

The end product had some truly spectacular scenes such as the Ebisugaoka in Silence ending boss fight which sees Hinako taking on both the Tsukumogami and the Kyubi on a visually stunning astral plane. This in itself was impressive enough, so I can't imagine how wild some of the scenes which had to be restricted due to budget and time constraints were.

Troy Baker is arguably the most high-profile voice actor in videogames, and undoubtedly one of the most prolific. You can't get away from the dude: he's been Indiana Jones, Joel in The Last of Us, Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid, Bioshock's Booker DeWitt, Uncharted's Sam Drake, and the list goes on and on (and on).

But if you just can't get enough Troy Baker in your videogames, happy days: Baker has announced his intention, via a new interview with Eurogamer, to start making the things himself. Baker says he's inspired by Abubakar Salim, who played Assassin's Creed's Bayek among other game and TV roles, before founding Surgent Studios. Its debut title, Tales of Kenzera: Zau, won a BAFTA and was nominated for a clutch of other awards.

"I love Abu, I played the hell out of his games," says Baker. "He is someone who has a deep passion for games, and has found a way to turn that into a great business endeavour for him."

Now, time for a bit of name-dropping. "I've had an incredible opportunity working with the best in this industry, it's insane—Ken Levine, Hideo Kojima, Neil Druckmann, Todd Howard, Vince Zampella—these people are paragons of the industry. I've worked with these people, and I've learned so much from them.

"And, what I am excited about doing is taking those tenets, taking those principles of wildly successful titles—not just in terms of sales and figures, but the stories that have defined the industry—and being able to innovate and replicate and emulate those processes and practices into the stories that I want to tell."

Hey, if Baker can pull off a Bioshock or a Metal Gear as his debut title then more power to him. But right now it sounds like he's very much in the pre-planning stages.

"Somebody asked me in one of those meetings: 'what's your timeline?', and I said 'not rushed,'" says Baker. "So I am going to take my time, because I want to make sure that, when I finally do tell a story, it's one of just as high a calibre of those that I am trying to emulate."

Such is Baker's omnipresence at times it's easy to forget that the guy is audibly very good at his job: I thought his turn as Ocelot was excellent, and even when he's deliberately chewing the scenery as Higgs in Death Stranding there's a knowing charm to it all. I wonder how much inspiration Baker will take from Kojima: perhaps we'll end up playing a Troy Baker game, directed by Troy Baker, written by Troy Baker, with cutscenes by Troy Baker.

Was Baker's Indiana Jones a little bit like a Harrison Ford impersonator? Yes, but I suspect that was the brief. Amusingly enough in that case, Todd Howard thought Baker was in so many games he didn't want him as Indy:

"My favorite part of that story is how Todd Howard, when they originally brought my name to him, rolled his eyes like, 'No, I'm not putting Troy Baker in my game.' And I never thought that I would be [in it either]," said Baker.

GamesIndustryMindsEye developer Build a Rocket Boy is facing new legal action filed by the Game Workers branch of the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain, the largest game worker union in the UK. The union says the installation of surveillance software on employee's PCs without their knowledge, and the company's refusal to disclose the information gleaned from it, violates data protection laws "and the workforce’s basic dignity."

The installation of the Teramind surveillance software was initially reported in February by GamesIndustry, which said the software was put on company PCs without the knowledge of employees and only came to light after staff noticed their systems were running slower than usual.

The software was removed in March after more than 40 BARB employees filed a collective grievance against the company. But the company has refused to disclose what data was collected by the software, how it was stored, or why it was necessary to install the software in the first place.

"The IWGB Game Workers Union, representing the workers, alleges that BARB's use of the software violates both data protection laws and the workforce’s basic dignity, exceeding the legitimate remit of monitoring workers’ productivity or safeguarding the company’s security by recording individuals in their homes and without their consent," the union said in a statement released today.

The union added that the surveillance software "tracks users’ key strokes, records screen activity and captures microphone audio."

"Having borne the brunt of Mark and Leslie’s paranoia, these workers stood up for each other and stood up to bullies in management, forcing them to be accountable for their actions and get rid of Teramind," IWGB Game Workers' Branch chair Spring McParlin said. "Now BARB must meet our demands for data transparency. Their alleged actions are a violation of their employees' rights to privacy.”

Build a Rocket Boy has been embroiled in controversy since even before the launch of MindsEye: Gerhard and Benzies have both claimed the game was the subject of "sabotage" and a disinformation campaign, allegations that Gerhard said earlier this month are now in the hands of authorities in the US and UK.

Employees at the studio tell something of a different story, however, pointing the finger for the game's failure at mismanagement, crunch, and a lack of direction from the top. BARB subsequently laid off hundreds of employees at the studio, which also resulted in legal action filed against it by the IWGB.

As for MindsEye itself, it is indeed a big sloppy mess: The studio has pushed multiple updates since the game's launch which have improved some aspects, but the lack of direction and clarity of design, and a seeming unwilling to say "no" to Benzies, famed for his work at Rockstar, overwhelms it all. MindsEye is entertaining in its own way, and I had a genuine (although largely accidental) good time with it, but it remains a fundamentally flawed, bad game.

BARB declined to comment on the action.

Deezer might not be the first name that comes to mind when we think of music streaming, but it's still got skin in the game. The platform receives a huge number of uploaded tracks every day, and according to a new press release, "nearly 75,000" of those are fully gen AI-created tunes.

That's 44% of daily uploads, according to the company (via Ars Technica). Deezer says that its AI detection measures mean that a mere one to three percent of said music is actually consumed by end users, and that 85% of the AI-created tunes are detected as fraudulent and demonetized.

However, Deezer also points towards its "world's first" survey into perceptions and attitudes towards gen AI music commissioned late last year, with a total of 9,000 participants. The company reports that 97% of those asked couldn't tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and its human-made equivalent in a blind test, and that's... well, troubling.

80% of survey participants agreed that AI generated music should be clearly labelled to listeners, while 52% of respondents "feel that 100% AI-generated songs should not be included in charts alongside human-made songs". I didn't participate in the survey, but... yeah. I'll say.

As an ex semi-professional musician myself, I'd posit that the paid minstrels among us might need even more protection from generative AI than your average worker.

It's a tough game, creating music for a living—and while streaming services often pay artists relatively small amounts for their work, if the music of said human artists is competing against vast numbers of AI-created tunes that can fool many listeners, it's not looking good for your average bard.

Of course, there's a devil's advocate argument to be made here. If AI-generated music can fool listeners to such a high degree, then it perhaps further devalues the need for those that write it from scratch. I guess we need to decide as a society whether we value the fruits of human creation, and...

I'm getting off topic. Deezer's AI-generated music detection tools are now being licensed to the wider music industry to help prevent the spread, and the company says that, as the purpose of uploading these tracks seems to be to make money, it is essentially fraudulent behaviour.

It describes the spread of AI music as "a critical challenge for the music industry", and cites a CISAC study that estimates nearly 25% of creator's revenues to be at risk by 2028, which could amount to as much as $4 billion by that time.

It'll be a sad state of affairs indeed, if all this comes to pass. If you need me, I'll be in the corner, plucking gently at my guitar and lamenting the potential fall of the creative industry I adore. Anyone know any happy tunes?

My pet demon is far stronger than I intended and sometimes I'm not sure he needs me. Poor guy doesn't even have a proper name—he's just the demon that shows up when I press the Rampage button. He smashes everything apart while I run along behind him cleaning up stragglers.

Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred tricked me into playing an RPG character archetype that usually puts me to sleep: the summoner. I prefer to be the one solely responsible for those big damage numbers, not some no-name brute I ripped out of hell.

But I grew to enjoy taking the backseat while I cursed enemies and teed them up for my big demon friend. Lord of Hatred loosens up Diablo 4's restrictive skill trees while also giving them more power than they've ever had before. I found dozens of ways to support my demon as I carved through the islands of Skovos, and settled on one that was both potent and far from passive, challenging me to command my one-demon army while keeping him fed with buffs and clusters of monsters to crush.

My build was firing on all cylinders long before I hit the level cap or entered Diablo 4's post-campaign playground—something I haven't experienced in years. Lord of Hatred shifts the focus back to the fundamentals, back to chasing after the most creative ways to wipe a dungeon clean of demons in an action RPG that lost sight of that.

For the first time in a long time, I crafted a devastating build without having to grind for some ultra-rare piece of gear long after finishing the campaign. And once I had learned the language of the new warlock class, I could look at piles of loot and know exactly how I could use each and every piece. There's nothing like playing an action RPG and having those gears spinning in your head whenever you find a piece of gear that could get you one step closer to becoming an unstoppable god.

Lord of Hatred has revolutionized what it's like to play Diablo 4. It builds on the improvements Blizzard has made over the last few years and ties them together into an experience that deepens its interlocking systems and offers exciting choices to make along your character's journey. The last expansion elevated Diablo 4 into one of my favorite action RPGs of all time, and Blizzard has managed to make it even better.

Final stand

Storytelling has never been Diablo's strong suit for me, but the last expansion, Vessel of Hatred, impressed me by turning its demon villain into a metaphor for self-doubt and regret. There was nothing subtle about it, but focusing on the personal was a smart choice for a game that's ultimately about killing bigger and badder monsters. There's only so many times you can shove a demon into a crystal and expect me to be moved when they inevitably crawl back out. Focus on the characters and I'll be happy to stick around while I level up.

Lord of Hatred may have us chasing after a demon god, but it once again focuses attention away from those tectonic stakes and onto its cast of new and returning characters—including your own. Some of it doesn't land. The player character's reactions to events sometimes had me baffled, and a brief detour where you learn Mephisto, the literal Lord of Hatred, is a bad dad, was silly. But everything else is a satisfying conclusion to the story that started in the original campaign.

Instead of following a bloody trail left behind by Mephisto, I watched him—disguised as a prophet—convince crowds of desperate people that he would save them from the horrors of Sanctuary by performing miracles. Lord of Hatred puts your character in a tricky spot. You know exactly what Mephisto plans to do, but nobody, understandably, wants to side with the person who kills their way to solutions. As players of a game fundamentally about killing bigger and badder monsters, we couldn't have spared the protagonist from that judgment, which makes some of their frustration our own, in a meta way. Neither of us can convince the mob of Mephisto's deception, so we may as well do more of what got us here: kill more stuff.

A timer, in the form of an imminent eclipse brought on by Mephisto, looms over the campaign, bookending each section. Lord of Hatred's story is paced accordingly and flies by compared to what I remember of playing Vessel of Hatred's the first time. By pure hour count, it took longer to finish (around six hours), but it's hard to notice with how few detours it takes you on. It's all island-hopping and monster-slaying as you follow Mephisto and look for a way to stop him that won't be temporary. Diablo games rarely play with this level of finality when it comes to villains and that suggestion alone propelled me through the entire campaign before touching much else.

The best part is that it delivers on that in more ways than I had expected. Lord of Hatred is very obviously about the final confrontation with Mephisto, but it's also the end of the journey that started with the original campaign. Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that this expansion is concerned with more than the characters we've seen in Diablo 4 before and offers some resolution to bigger questions in the lore. The way these moments are rooted in those familiar characters, particularly with the bitter old scholar Lorath Nahr, exemplifies the tact the writers have when it comes to wielding nostalgia in such a historic series.

Lord of Hatred's campaign almost has me questioning whether Diablo 4 will have another expansion or if it's time to move on to Diablo 5. While I seriously doubt Blizzard is ready to build an entirely new game yet, I appreciate that this arc of the story is allowed to fully end before the next thing kicks off. For a live service game that isn't going anywhere anytime soon, Diablo 4 has been careful to not let the business model diminish the impact of its campaigns and I'm glad that continues to be true.

Glittering nightmares

Skovos Isles, the cluster of islands off the mainland where Lord of Hatred is set, turns the lights on in the dark world of Diablo with bright beaches, warm forests, and sun-baked streets. I'm not surprised that it was originally planned as a location in Diablo 3, a sequel infamous for daring to paint the gothic universe with some color.

In Diablo 4, the islands are as stunning as they are threatening. The rocks that line the shores are sharpened teeth and the forests are dense with dead trees that contort like broken limbs. It's not a vacation so much as it is a living nightmare, a dying land stuck in the same purgatory as the rest of Sanctuary. As fitting as Skovos is for Diablo, it was also nice to take a walk without seeing a half-eaten horse carcass and to chill in a city with people who aren't perpetually dying of hypothermia. Skovos expands the scope of the world more than Nahantu in Vessel of Hatred—despite being roughly the same size—by how isolated and different it is from the mainland.

At first glance, I thought the Lycander region would be where Lord of Hatred would stray too far from the aesthetic of Diablo. Its never-ending autumn, dense with tall oaks and green grass, seemed like the kind of place I'd like to have a quiet picnic. But deeper in the forest the grass is turning gray and the trees are becoming petrified: Lycander isn't luxuriating in the most beautiful time of the year, it's desperately holding onto what's left as prickly vines siphon its life away.

The wildlife is already gone by the time you get there. Bears and other animals have had their flesh replaced with coiled brambles. They crack and crumble as you defeat them, which is a devilish way of making them extremely satisfying to lay waste to when you know the gravity of the situation. But that tension has always been core to Diablo as you save the world from evil and then take it up as a sport for a chance at better loot. If anything, Lord of Hatred might be one of the best examples of Diablo successfully walking this line when the stakes are as high as they are in the campaign.

In much the same way as Elden Ring, Lord of Hatred's most grotesque and surreal locations lurk underneath the surface of its decaying world. To my delight, there are far more dungeons that look like they're suspended in a pocket of hell than there are caves and cathedrals like in the rest of the game. I love a good ribcage or spinal column to help frame an entrance or a boss arena surrounded by the corpses of demons hanging from chains. Diablo 4 already spent the last few years trying to reboot the series into a Diablo 2-esque wasteland with gritty and mundane locations. I'm thrilled that we've finally moved on to the kind of bizarre, otherworldly horror zones that I loved in Diablo 3.

Spoiled for choice

While playing what might be my favorite Diablo campaign, I had the time to fully customize a character and experiment with dozens of skills. I've put hundreds of hours into Diablo 4; I expected the real game to begin when the credits rolled, when you're free to run as many dungeons as you'd like. But I was proven wrong in the first 30 minutes of Lord of Hatred.

I was juggling multiple skills early on in the campaign and, after a couple of hours, had what I would confidently call a functional build. If you're not familiar with Diablo 4: This is unheard of. A critical problem that has only become more and more frustrating as Blizzard has improved the game is how limiting and, frankly, boring the skill trees are compared to the build-defining loot you can find after the campaign.

Lord of Hatred has almost entirely solved this problem by giving every class new skill trees that can hold their own for the length of the campaign and then some. Freestyling a build in Diablo 4 used to be like being stuck in a maze and constantly running into dead ends. A skill could sound effective, but you'd all too often discover that it was garbage unless you paired it with a specific item. Now, a lot of the most powerful effects are in the skill trees themselves. Your gear still matters, but it's been moved to a more supplementary role.

In practice, playing through the campaign on my warlock gave me the same thirst for experimentation that Diablo 3 did. I swapped skills in and out in between quests just to see if they'd make the cut for my final build and found it hard to stick with one set. This is how, after going through some combinations I still want to explore in the future, I ended up with the world's strongest demon.

All I wanted to do was find a way to make the claws I pulled out of the ground to carve through monsters more powerful. I prefer having them circle my warlock rather than fanning out in a cone, but that leaves them a little weaker as a tradeoff for the convenience of using them on the go. You can eliminate that tradeoff if you have a demon buddy and choose the upgrade that makes your claws also go off around him.

Warlocks have all kinds of demons to summon with various ways to make them synergize with each category of skills. Normally, Rampage summons multiple demons who smash monsters apart for a pretty high cost. The default version cut into my claw casting too much, so I tried out an upgrade that limited it to one big demon who could be resummoned over and over again for free.

Now, I know nothing in Sanctuary can stand a chance against a rampaging demon surrounded by deadly demon claws. I press Rampage and he slips out of the shadows and comes crashing down on rooms full of monsters. When I'm racing through a dungeon, it looks like he's hitting the ground so hard it grows talons to try to fight back. It's extremely satisfying to watch my personal kaiju crush everything with repeated thuds, and it's why I finally understand the developers when they describe the warlock as Diablo 4's most "heavy metal class".

State of the art

Stumbling into my Rampage build made Lord of Hatred's wide-reaching refresh of Diablo 4's buildcrafting click for me. Instead of trying to juggle your skill tree, your gear, and everything else all at once, you take it one step at a time. There are clever and powerful interactions between almost every skill in the tree, and the loot you find will give broad bonuses to different categories of skills, making it easier than ever to navigate Diablo 4's wide web of customization.

Smaller—but no less important—changes to loot and the new Diablo 2-inspired Horadric Cube crafting system have revitalized the chase for the best gear. Every item has potential to be great if you've got the right crafting materials, and because of that my characters have never felt more like my own. I remember when my gloves were just a forgettable common item on the floor before they became my most prized possession when I hit the jackpot during a crafting session. The more I tinker with the cube, the more I realize how powerful it is for shaping items into exactly what you need.

All of this is so delicious to feast on as an action RPG obsessive that I'm not as bothered by the lack of transformative upgrades to Diablo 4's assortment of endgame activities. War plans and its accompanying activity skill trees are a welcome new form of meta progression that spices them up with unique modifiers, like monster ambushes and bonus loot, but still lacks the deep curation that games like Path of Exile 2 offer. All I see are the bones of a system that could let you specialize in a particular type of dungeon and reward you for mastering its intricacies down the line, but it's not really there yet and it's the only thing that fell short of all the other things that surprised me in Lord of Hatred.

A year ago, I don't think I would've ever expected Diablo 4 to reach a place where it could support the ridiculously deep level of customization that scares people off of games like Path of Exile. Lord of Hatred made it clear to me that Blizzard isn't interested in making that type of game, but that it is interested in finding a way to translate the spirit of other great action RPGs—including Diablo 2—to Diablo 4 in a way that complements its approachability and enhances its faster-paced combat.

The Lord of Hatred campaign is about accepting the past and moving forward, as its characters bring everything they've learned into new battles. The same can be said about the ways Diablo 4 has evolved over the last several years and in this expansion alone. The changes in Lord of Hatred target Diablo 4's greatest flaws, and instead of slapping on quick fixes, Blizzard has found creative new solutions that avoid the pitfalls of the past.

The result puts Diablo 4 in a great position to keep growing, but it isn't necessary to focus on potential here: It's an exceptional action RPG right now. There's never been a better time to play Diablo 4.

I like to keep my mousey ears to the ground regarding all things gaming mice and mouse pads, so I'll be darned if my ears weren't pricked by the pure titillation that Razer put out earlier today. A black background, a gentle touch of ambient music, and a plain black surface, slowly tilting in the void. Can that be... a glass mouse pad?

It can indeed, and apparently not just any glass mouse pad but "the world's thinnest", the Razer Atlas Pro. The original Atlas launched a couple of years ago, but this one is seemingly taking things to a whole new, much thinner level at just 1.9 mm thick.

If you're wondering why that matters, it's mostly to do with comfort on your wrist. Even with rounded edges, a thick glass pad can dig into your wrist a little. To give a little context, the ever-popular Wallhack SP-004 is 3.9 mm thick and the QPAD Obsidian that I sometimes use is 4 mm thick.

I can't say I struggle too much with a 4 mm pad with rounded edges, but I certainly wouldn't complain about half of that being shaved off. Just as long as it stays strong, that is, but Razer is claiming it has tempered glass that is "rigorously tested to withstand demanding long-term use while delivering consistent performance", so all should be well if that's correct.

The Atlas Pro does have rounded edges, too, and if my time with the Razer Hyperflux V2 is anything to go by, I don't doubt it will look just as gorgeous in person as it does in the pictures. Aside from the thinness, that aesthetic might be one of the big pulls, as that thin, all-black or all-white surface looks wonderful.

Razer's head of design Charlie Bolton explains: "The Atlas Pro was an opportunity to challenge ourselves in a category that had largely stood still. By rethinking how glass should sit and feel on the desk, we created a surface that’s thinner, more refined, and designed to integrate seamlessly into modern setups—and that process is what led to the world’s thinnest glass gaming mouse mat."

None of this is to say anything about the pad's glide, of course, and that's what really matters. I've been testing a bunch of different mouse pads over the last few months; there really can be quite a lot of variation when it comes to texture and feel, both of which can impact how well you perform in-game, depending on your preferences. Fingers crossed Razer has nailed it for my own brand of slip-n-slide here.

Keeping up to date with drivers, fresh fixes, and security patches is key to keeping your gaming PC running smoothly—that is, until an OS update seemingly breaks everything. Case in point, a number of Dell and HP users found their diligent efforts to stay on top of Windows 11 updates rewarded with blue screens and boot loops.

Following April's KB5083769 update for Windows 11, several users took to Microsoft's Q&A support forum to report the issue. Those affected have reported seeing "a mosaic of weird pixels" upon initially booting after the update, followed by a blue screen and a boot loop where their machine would keep attempting and failing to repair the issue (via PC World).

Another poster claims that three people in their company have been hit by the problem, and that in one case, the employee's recovery environment is "so messed up I can't get them into it." Exceedingly unlucky machines like this aside, uninstalling the latest quality update via recovery tools and pausing updates altogether has fixed the issue for some. Even then, some users report their OS is seemingly determined to install the KB5083769 update.

It's just as well Windows 11 machines now let you skip updates during first-time set-up. Speaking of booting up fresh devices, Microsoft is apparently also "working on" removing the requirement to log in to one of its online accounts, too.

Saying it cares "deeply about Windows and [wants] it to be better," Microsoft has been attempting to rebuild user goodwill in a number of ways. That has included pumping the brakes on its AI feature rollout and pivoting to a more "intentional" strategy when it comes to Copilot integration.

Unfortunately, for those unlucky enough to have suffered the KB85083769 update fumble, the road to rebuilding their trust in Microsoft has just got a whole lot bumpier.

Tim Cook, 15-year CEO of Apple, has just handed the reins over to the company's hardware engineering senior vice president, John Ternus. In a 'community letter from Tim' to the 'Apple community', Cook explains:

"Over the coming months I will be transitioning into a new role, leaving the CEO job behind in September and becoming Apple’s executive chairman. A new person will be stepping into what I know in my heart is the best job in the world.

"That leader is John Ternus, a brilliant engineer and thinker who has spent the past 25 years building the Apple products our users love so much, obsessed with every detail, focused on every possible way we can make something better, bolder, more beautiful, and more meaningful. He is the perfect person for the job."

After joining Apple in 2001, Ternus started his current SVP role in 2021 and, among other things, has had a lot to do with Apple's shift over to its M-series CPUs, which are incredibly efficient and have given the x86 crowd more than a run for their money.

He also led the MacBook Neo charge, and that laptop looks to be very efficient for the price, too—at least when it's doing basic tasks in native apps. And I suppose the fact that it is basically an iPhone in a laptop's body could therefore be taken as a compliment to iPhones or macOS.

Ternus will be heading the company at a point when it is worth just shy of $4 trillion. Though Cook is eager to point out that "this is not goodbye" but a "moment of transition." With Cook staying as an executive chairman, he should still be able to work with the new CEO in directing the company if needed— though the reins are firmly in Ternus' hands now.

Where Unpacking is a game about unravelling someone's life through moving boxes, A Storied Life: Tabitha is one where you piece together who someone was by boxing up their possessions after they die.

It's a wonderfully thoughtful story, one which leaves some nice wiggle room for me to create my own narrative for who this woman was when she was alive. A Storied Life starts off when I receive a letter from this elderly relative, sent to me posthumously, and I'm tasked with visiting her delightfully cosy cottage to tackle her personal belongings.

Each item holds a little fragment of who she once was—an impressive amount of cat accessories and cat-themed decor, some witchy goods, and a handful of oddly-sourced and shady bits thrown in for good measure.

It's all about choosing what to keep, what to auction off, and what to throw away for good. It's where A Storied Life's puzzley elements come into play—each item has its own shape that has to slot nicely into the 'keep' box, while also keeping in mind each item's weight and fragility.

Something looking breakable? I can pop it in some bubble wrap to keep it safe. Soft furnishings can be vac-packed to save space, and paper pieces folded into neat squares. And if it's all a bit too heavy, a few reinforcements of the packing box lets me stuff weightier things inside. It's nothing too challenging, but is a nice way to encourage being thoughtful about which items I snag for myself.

I do wish there was another option to donate something rather than discarding it. It felt a little wrong to be chucking away stuff like homemade gifts and trinkets that I couldn't fit in my box, but the only other option was to recycle them.

Pedantry aside, the items I do claim for myself become the key to writing the story of Tabitha's life. Each possession comes with a handful of key words, and at the end of each chapter I slot them into a few passages to shape a narrative. It does mean that sometimes the story ends up a little weird depending on what I chose—like one chapter where I ended up having to say that I had a gang of cats over for dinner.

But being able to shape the idea of who my Tabitha was is incredibly endearing, and I became immensely careful over which words I was choosing to represent this fictional woman who had passed away. I paid closer attention to what each item was in later levels, thinking of the story they could help me mould at the end of the chapter.

It truly is a wonderful and cosy little game, one that you can easily tackle over a few short evenings. I snuggled in with a cup of hot chocolate and a blanket to play and write this, and it was the exact sort of vibe this game demands. A slow, careful, and thoughtful experience. It's also delightfully British in its quaint setting and handful of objects—I got a little chuckle out of the stereotypical bright plastic off-license lighter I fondly remember knocking around my nana's house when I was very young.

A Storied Life: Tabitha is out now on Steam, and if you're a try-before-you-buy kind of gamer, there's also a demo you can take for a spin first.

The Playdate is a curious little device. It's a handheld console with a crank built into the side, which developers can make use of for in-game controls. What devs can't do anymore, though, is get their games accepted onto the Playdate Catalog store if they use generative AI "for art, audio, music, text, or dialog."

So says an announcement on the Catalog developer blog. Panic Inc, the developer of the device, defines generative AI as the use of:

• Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Google Gemini
• AI-based image generation models such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Midjourney
• AI-base audio generation models such as MuseNet, Suno, Udio, and others

The announcement clarifies that games using AI in their development will no longer be accepted, but custom-written functions like enemy AI are fine. It also says that games already listed on the Catalog store that have previously used AI will remain, but they will be "flagged as such", with explanations provided as to exactly how generative AI was implemented.

"There are lots of people in the world who are extremely eager and excited to create beautiful music, art, and words for your Playdate creation," the statement opines.

"If you need any help at all finding people to help with any parts of your title, you can check out the collaborations channel in the Playdate Squad Discord or the Playdate developer forum."

The use of generative AI in games is a hot topic and sure to bring up some strong opinions. While a survey at the start of the year claimed that 50% of game developers think its inclusion is bad for the industry, some investors seem to think otherwise.

It must be a tempting option for the developers of small games for a relatively niche device, though, where budget and time constraints are pushed to their limits. Still, it's a no-go for gen AI-enhanced game development on the console-with-a-crank. The wheels, they keep turning. Something like that, anyway.