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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Longtime FromSoftware dataminer Zullie the Witch has come out with a new video showing off the close-up details of Elden Ring's two new NPC invaders. Knight Leontiel and Noble Broken Mask were both added to the game as part of Elden Ring's Tarnished Edition DLC.

Knight Leontiel is a straight "hey, I know them" reference to Lucatiel of Mirrah from Dark Souls 2, boasting an HD remaster of her signature conquistador fit and nimble greatsword. Take off the mask, though, and Leontiel practically is Lucatiel, even down to a burn mark over her left eye that corresponds to the hollowing rot Lucatiel suffered in Dark Souls 2.

Noble Broken Mask, meanwhile, may obliquely give us a better idea of what his base game counterpart and spiritual rival, Goldmask, is supposed to look like. Goldmask's model has a face, but it seems like a generic placeholder element. Broken Mask has an austere, pinched face with striking pale gold eyes, and Zullie points out that he bears a more than passing resemblance to the typically obscured faces of Elden Ring's perfumer enemies.

Zullie provides character creation slider information for the two so you can perfectly recreate either one as your own guy⁠—most FromSoft NPCs are made using the same tools available to players. This is not the first time Zullie has done this: She has previously made videos zooming in on Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree's NPCs. All the way back in 2016, she did the same for Dark Souls 3's cast.

Even with everything coming out right now, it's kind of a great time to revisit Elden Ring thanks to the Tarnished Edition. Even if you don't shell out for the new stuff, the servers will be more populated for the next few weeks than they likely ever will be again. And if you need help finding the new Tarnished Edition gear, PCG guides writer Sean Martin has got you covered.

Cyberpunk 2077 now is one of the best RPGs money can buy. But Cyberpunk 2077 then, which is to say when it was new, was not. It was pretty okay on PC, aside from a horde of bugs, but it was such a performance catastrophe on the PlayStation 4 that Sony literally booted it off the PlayStation Store. Even when it was allowed back in the building six months later, Sony slapped a notice on it warning people that it was still potentially dodgy.

Speaking to Game Developer, CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said that failure arose from the studio's ambitions for the game, which led it to develop on PC first. "We want[ed] to push the boundaries of what is doable in terms of cinematic feeling and whatnot [in Cyberpunk 2077], and PC was just the best suited rig for that," Nowakowski said. "There was this, as it turned out, false belief that toning it down to whatever was the current gen is not going to be that much of a challenge."

There was also a little bit of belief in a Polish take on the ol' Bioware magic: Nowakowski said the studio "got a bit lucky here and there" with The Witcher 3, leading it to believe that Cyberpunk would ultimately be fine too.

Of course, Cyberpunk 2077 was most definitely not fine, and with that humiliation firmly burned into its collective consciousness, CD Projekt Red is approaching The Witcher 4 with a little more care and consideration to ensure the new game runs properly on all platforms it's coming to. If development hits a snag on any single platform, for instance, the studio stops to fix it rather than simply pressing ahead and coming back to clean it up later.

"For example, technically, we should hit, let's say, 10 checkmarks," Nowakowski said. "Back in the past, if we missed one or two, we were like, 'we're gonna catch up with that later on.' Sometimes we did, but sometimes we didn't, and then two milestones or three milestones down the road, you have like four or five missing checkmarks and it's not that easy."

The net result is parity right from the get-go: "You come to the studio, you launch Witcher 4 right now. You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it's going to run," Nowakowski said.

'We're doing our best to ensure our game runs' is a low bar, sure, but given how poorly Cyberpunk 2077 went at launch it's not surprising that CD Projekt is making the point—and so, here's hoping it's able to pull it off. The Witcher 4 still doesn't have a release date (and probably won't for a good long time yet) but is currently "targeting" a 2028 release.

Blizzard is scrubbing through its new World of Warcraft Mythic Plus Dungeon top-1% rankings for people who paid for carries, World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas says.

The timed dungeon mode offered its first-ever rewards at that level this past season in the Midnight expansion, which ended August 11. Unlike similar high-end rewards in PvP combat, this ranking level in Mythic Plus dungeons was a flat percentage of players, rather than a set score they had to achieve.

Some players paid for the privilege, and the glowy red-and-black bird mount that came with the title. These boosts were particularly controversial, as the percentage cutoff meant that every successful carry removed a player that legitimately earned the score.

"The team is doing a thorough scrub of this for Season 1 and will share more with the community soon about how we approached that review, as well as the final results," Hazzikostas said.

A constant grind to keep a reward in sight

"I hit 1% M+ rating yesterday and it lasted for 5 minutes," wrote one typical person on Reddit just before the end of the season. "The 1% cutoff is going up by about 2 points every day. Ninety percent of +21 [level] groups in the group finder are 'note' keys where you need to pay the keyholder to be invited. People are also buying actual boosts en masse because of the new 1% title and resilient keystones making it possible. Playing organically is no longer possible."

The 1% rewards have not yet been awarded in game. Hazzikostas and associate game director Paul Kubit said they are popular and will continue.

Blizzard recently removed the Mythic raiding mount from the accounts of players determined to have paid for them in the game's large-group content, primarily with real-money transactions, which are forbidden by WoW's terms of service.

Carries paid only in gold to specific guilds or individuals appear to be legitimate, based on past Blizzard posts and enforcement actions, but some players caught by the corrective wave in raids say they paid in gold and had their mounts removed anyway. (That's happened in the past when the sellers who got people a ranking or reward took in-game gold in some cases and real money in others, or when cross-server boosting communities were involved.)

Sales are not the only part of the new Mythic Plus rewards that players are heatedly discussing. The decision to make the cutoff a percentage rather than a fixed rating means that people near the cutoff had to play nearly continuously at the end of their season to keep their ranking.

A percentage cutoff to keep things exciting—but did it work?

Kubit, who is in charge of the Midnight expansion, said making the cutoff percentage-based keeps people playing even as their numbers increase over the course of a season.

"This is aimed at the 1%, which is by definition pretty elite, one of those people who really like to push the upper end of what mythic plus gameplay is all about," he says. "We want to make sure that you do truly feel like you can do that, as opposed to laying off the gas."

Numbers suggest that goal may not have entirely played out as expected, however. Raider.io, which tracks Mythic Plus Dungeon statistics, shows that more people played Mythic Plus dungeons at the start and end of Midnight's first season than did the first season in The War Within expansion (about 5.2 million, compared to about 2.5 million), but the drop-off at the end of the season was actually steeper in Midnight than it was in War Within.

Just 12.3% of players were still doing the dungeons at the end of Midnight Season 1, versus 16.8% in War Within. Those numbers of players remained fairly static for the six weeks at the end of both seasons.

Players enthusiastic about a new reward, but mixed on how it was awarded

Players' reactions were decidedly mixed.

"That uncertainty makes the end of the season feel more stressful than exciting," said one typical poster on Reddit.

"The reason a percentile is used is because it correlates with season difficulty. In this particular case 3900 is feasible this season but may not be feasible in others," countered another in the same post.

The addition of "resilient" keys, which don't drop in level once you've completed that difficulty in all available dungeons, has made pushing ever-higher levels—and selling those timed dungeons—easier.

Player versus player rewards were initially based on percentage, as well, near when World of Warcraft first launched. In the Burning Crusade, the top .5% of PvP arena players were awarded Elite mounts. After players complaints about the grind and rampant sales, that was changed to a fixed rating in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, then eventually to the modern system, which requires a fixed rating plus a number of wins above that rating, to help keep the number of sales down.

Class balance makes earning the bird tougher for some players

The composition of groups that are successfully timing Mythic Plus dungeons has also become more homogenized than ever before. While Raider.io charts show a broad variety of the 40 possible character classes and specializations, the vast majority of Mythic Plus keys over level 20 (required for the 1% title) contain some combination of the same seven "meta" specs in each five-player group: guardian druid, unholy death knight, devourer demon hunter, mistweaver monk, augmentation evoker, restoration shaman and retribution paladin.

The top tank specialization, guardian druid, was seen 518,467 times in dungeons recorded on Raider.io at that level over the course of the season. The bottom tank, blood death knight, was seen 7,635. Since many keys are run over and over again by the same players, that boils down to an even tinier number of players who actually completed dungeons at this level.

"When we're thinking about world record folks, then some of the fun of that gameplay is identifying, 'What if I switch to this character in this particular spec, and solve the puzzle that way?' But when you get closer to the 1%, ideally for anyone there, we want you to play the classes and specs that you like playing, that you feel like you're good at," Kubit says. "You shouldn't feel forced into any particular meta spec."

"Obviously players are going to gravitate toward certain specs when we're talking about the 1%," says Andrew De Souza, lead encounter designer. "Ninety-nine percent of players are able to get to Keystone Myth [3400 rating, compared to about 4000 for the top 1%] with any given comp."

Dungeons are designed for all classes to play, but 1% mounts may get more specific

They do watch dungeons to make sure they don't require a specific class, he says.

"In some cases that's going to naturally fit—poisons and curses in Altar of Fangs [dungeon], that's probably going to lean towards [having] a shaman," he says. "We are saying okay, but what if there's not a shaman? What does this pack look like? So we're absolutely making those considerations. It's okay if this class dunks on this trash mob. They're allowed to be awesome here—just within reason. We are trying to serve the largest audience possible."

Blizzard is now figuring out how to implement specialization-specific 1% cutoffs, Hazzikostas says, though it won't be this season—Season 2 just began—and the details remain to be hammered out (including, for example, whether it would still be the top 1% in that scenario). He mentioned the possibility in an interview with PsyBear that ran earlier this week, then kept an eye on the discussion.

"While the spec-specific title reward is something we're excited to explore," he tells us, "there are still a number of logistics, factors, and scenarios we'll need to account for as we build out that capability, to ensure fairness across the board. But it seems from our initial discussion of this idea that this is something the community is equally excited about, so we'll share more when we can."

On Friday, August 28, indie developer Ryan Laley posted a video on X to say his Gamescom 2026 attendance was being cut short after discovering that all his team's laptops had been stolen from its booth during an alleged overnight theft. In the post, the visibly distraught dev called the incident "a huge blow financially and mentally," and confirmed that police reports had been filed.

Laley's post earned an outpouring of support on the platform from gamers and fellow developers—including Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red, which offered to "check the Arasaka hardware archives and see if we can send a few things your way." Laley, however, was just one of a number of developers and publishers that reported similar thefts over the weekend, generating concern about the efficacy of Gamescom security practices.

Just hours after Laley reported the theft of his team's laptops, fellow indie developer Tessera Studios made a similar post, saying that they had arrived at their Gamescom booth two days prior to find that their storage had been forced open and robbed of controllers, a Steam Deck, and two laptops which "contained not only our Gamescom demo, but also personal, company, and critical information."

"The damage that this caused to us was pretty huge," Tessera Studios co-founder Marcos Neila said in an uploaded video. "But as far as we know, there [is no] insurance from Gamescom, so we don't really know if we are going to get something in return."

Publisher iam8bit said they suffered another theft during the event, claiming that on Friday its staff "arrived to our station in the business area hall to discover that our two laptops had been stolen overnight, despite the presence of Koelnmesse security."

In addition to losing the stolen equipment, iam8bit said the theft could result in the leak of unfinished builds for Petal Runner and Escape Academy 2—the games it was presenting during the show.

"This is hugely disappointing for us and our development teams at Nano Park Studios and Coin Crew Games who worked tirelessly to prepare for this show," iam8bit said.

While sharing Laley's post on Friday, games marketing and PR firm Ukiyo Studios said on X that, of the more than 15 events the company attends each year, "Gamescom is the ONLY event we have a dedicated storage room" to protect its equipment after a PC was stolen from its booth in 2024.

"We've had something stolen at Gamescom each year. Always chalked it up as 'the cost of doing a show in Germany,'" Ukiyo Studios said in a follow-up post. "With all these others now reporting their thefts, hopefully Gamescom does a better job with security, but not really holding my breath."

The next day, Ukiyo Studios posted an update to say that "an Xbox controller, drinks, and food" had been stolen from their booth during the intervening hours.

Other attendees and developers have shared their own frustrations with Gamescom security. Dead by Daylight senior community director Eric Pope called the event's security "an absolute joke," claiming that a security guard "just walked away" after being asked about after-hours booth security.

"Security at this year's Gamescom was a farce," Insider Gaming senior editor Grant Taylor-Hill said. "Several times, I saw kids strolling into the business areas unchecked, waltzing past sensitive meetings and content without being pulled up. They obviously knew they shouldn't have been there."

Gamescom acknowledged the reported thefts in a statement shared via its official X account.

"We are aware of stolen hardware and take these reports very seriously and understand the frustration of affected exhibitors," Gamescom said.

According to Gamescom, "uniformed guards provide general security across the venue," while "individual stand security can be booked separately." Exhibitors, it said, "are advised to insure equipment against theft," which it says is noted in event terms and conditions.

"All cases have been reported to us and to the police, and investigations are already underway. We also want to ensure that the reported cases are individual cases, which we are very sorry to read," Gamescom said, "because security has one of the highest priorities to us as an event and to see that indie developers are affected makes us very sad.

"At an event of this size, however," the event organizers continued, "there will always be individuals attempting to take advantage of the situation. Our security measures are designed to minimize such risks as effectively as possible."

Just two months after the release of the PvP arena shooter Empulse, 1047 Games is halting work on the game and its predecessor, Splitgate: Arena Reloaded, saying that neither is making enough money to support their operating costs. The studio itself will remain but its "focus is changing," and its next game "may look very different from what people expect."

The original Splitgate: Arena Warfare was something of a phenom when it debuted in 2019, which was a blessing and a curse: The crossplay beta test was a mess because the game was so popular, and its final release was delayed so 1047 could revamp its server infrastructure. The money flowed in and 1047 co-founder and CEO Ian Proulx mused about being the next Riot Games, but the wheels came off with Splitgate 2; its follow-up, Empulse, showed early promise but failed to cause much of a stir, and just a month after that game's release, the company laid off a number of employees.

And now work on both games has ended entirely. "The reality is that neither game is generating enough revenue to support the ongoing cost of dedicated servers," 1047 said in a Steam update. "We have continued covering those costs because we wanted to give both games every opportunity to grow, but we have reached the point where that is no longer sustainable."

The good news for fans of Empulse and Splitgate: Arena Reloaded is that, like the original Splitgate before them, both games are being given peer-to-peer support: Dedicated servers and matchmaking will end on September 3, "but players will still be able to host matches, find games, and play with friends forever." Empulse will also get a final new map, and a price reduction.

1047 said in a separate post that it will continue to operate, although there's a distinct curtain falling vibe to its "What's Next" message.

"To everyone who worked on Splitgate, Splitgate: Arena Reloaded, and Empulse, including those no longer at 1047: thank you. You put years of your lives into them, and we are grateful for what you helped build," the studio wrote.

"And to everyone who played, gave us feedback, made videos, argued about balance changes, discovered ridiculous movement tech, or brought friends into a lobby: thank you for being part of this with us.

"Thank you for the last 10 years. See you in the server browser."

World of Warcraft's developers are making some subtle shifts in dungeons and raids to help players with its more-difficult content, in the hopes that a variety of knock-on effects result, including increased participation in the game overall and a better balance of tanks, healers and damage dealers.

In the case of WoW's timed-dungeon Mythic Plus mode, it was a matter of making it just a bit easier to get to the mythic-level rewards of the weekly vault, says Paul Kubit, associate game director in charge of the Midnight expansion. The team tested it out in the first season of Mythic Plus, which just wrapped up.

Reducing Mythic Plus difficulty to entice support players

Players are often less-willing to queue for dungeons as tanks or healers because the level of responsibility is much higher—taking the big hits, keeping the group alive, directing where the party should go—and other players can be swift to judge when things go wrong.

Hopefully the reduced difficulty for the weekly "vault filler" keys, where players are typically looking to complete the minimum level of Mythic Plus dungeons that will get them the maximum level of gear available, helps with those stressors, Kubit says.

"We saw a lot of success in season one making it just a little bit easier for you to get into higher difficulties of Mythic Plus, and get the loot which comes from it," he says. "People are a little bit more willing now to say, 'Well I'd like to try out tanking. I'd like to try out healing.' Some of the inherent stresses are cut by the approachability of the mode itself."

Giving players easier, and more flexible, Mythic raids

In the case of raiding, Blizzard is giving players another one-boss instance where they can get their feet wet in Mythic difficulty in a variably-sized group that can even be done with strangers. Midnight's first season was the first in a long time to offer not one, but two different one-boss raids that many players successfully did in pick-up groups even on the highest Mythic difficulty. One of them offered variable raid sizes, allowing groups of 15-25 characters to enter the fight.

As part of this month's 12.1 patch, developers introduced a new raid instance type, called a Lair. Lairs take the place of world bosses, which were simple to kill and could absolutely annihilate the frame rate in the zone where they were being fought as full 40-man raids of players jumped randomly from layer to layer depending on where their members were located.

Lairs are in instances, to solve that problem.

"A giant dragon, or bird, or Ettin just wrecking the side of your zone has always been really cool," Kubit says. "But as gameplay has evolved, world bosses haven't as much. World bosses can fight a lot of players, an uncapped number of players in a lot of cases, and that can cause lag."

Lairs may branch into more difficult territory in the future

Lairs are also available on world difficulty—the same difficulty level as world bosses—plus the typical raid Normal, Heroic, and Mythic Difficulties. Like the Sporefall raid in the first Midnight season, this season's Tidebound Grotto Lair offers flexible sizes that make it easier for guilds that can't field a full 20-man Mythic team (or pick-up groups looking to tackle the content).

"You'll often see us, in .7 patches looking at where we have some ideas, but we'd like to get a little more data, test players' appetites before we commit fully," Kubit said. "Sporefall was a great example, where we were able to test flex Mythic and say, 'How is this going to work out?'

"It's been a good response from players. This has allowed more flexibility for folks to be able to get into that Mythic level of difficulty, without that strict restriction. That's something that we're happy to carry forward into Lairs."

The Tidebound Grotto is about as hard as the early bosses in the Venomous Abyss, which is this patch's traditional eight-boss raid, requiring a full group of 20 to tackle on Mythic difficulty. (Normal and Heroic difficulties remain flexible for any group size from 10-30.)

"It's on the more-approachable side. But who knows? If more Lairs show up in the future, we may find the Encounters team wants to explore a bit more, with more difficult Lairs as well," he says. "I'm really curious to see where we go on this journey with players."

We find ourselves at the end of another month, and as ever, the passing phases of the moon leave us asking the same question: What's going on with Haunted Chocolatier?

Knowing all too well how the hungry masses clamor for details about his next game, Stardew Valley developer Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone has posted another of his intermittent check-in blogs to confirm that, yes, he's still hard at work on Haunted Chocolatier. And while he's still not sharing many specifics, Barone sounds like he's satisfied with his recent progress.

"I'm still here, still making progress. Thanks for waiting and sorry it’s taking so long," Barone wrote. "I’ve been very productive on this project lately even though I am busy with many things. Working on Haunted Chocolatier is what I’m most eager and driven to do, out of everything."

While he acknowledged the years that have already gone into Haunted Chocolatier's development—he first announced the game in 2021—Barone said he doesn't "stress too much about how long it’s taking." The ongoing success of Stardew Valley affords him the ability to prioritize his own criteria for quality over meeting any arbitrary deadline. As he's said in previous development check-ins, he's unwilling to release anything he's not entirely satisfied with.

"I won’t compromise on the quality of the game by rushing it or releasing it too early," he said. "Then all my time would be wasted, anyway."

That said, all that effort is apparently paying off: Barone said he's pleased with how the game is coming together. Considering he's on record as being his own harshest critic who inflicts "torture" on himself "over every last detail," that's not likely something he'd say lightly.

"I am certain, at this point, that I will enjoy the game when it is finished. In fact, I already enjoy playing it in its unfinished state, especially after some recent additions I made," Barone wrote. "I hope others will like it too when it’s ready."

Before you get your hopes up: No, we still don't have an idea of "when it's ready" will be. But the developer said he's grateful for our continued patience.

"I feel a little embarrassed writing any of this because you guys probably just want the game at this point, not to hear me yapping about it. I get that," he said. "It can be hard to 'keep the faith' when you are waiting a long time. I really cherish those who do keep the faith, though, and I wish you, your family, and your pets, peace and prosperity through all seasons."

In May, Barone said Haunted Chocolatier is "way bigger than Stardew Valley," as "the amount of maps, the amount of monsters, the depth to the whole item system, and all the equipment slots" have all been "cranked up." Based on that description, we'd better settle in: We've probably got a lot more time politely twiddling our thumbs ahead of us.

It is high time I paid for my crimes. There are things I've done that can't be forgiven, mostly relating to that time I drove a Chinese anti-air missile truck into Beverly Hills, and someone should make me face consequences for that.

Alas, in GTA 5, no one will unless I make them. So I made them. I have installed Ambient Hit Squads, a mod inspired by Red Dead Redemption 2 that will dispatch armed men to eliminate you every so often as you're out exploring the game's world.

This functions more or less as it should in my nightmare-frankenstein version of GTA, already lumbering under so many mods. Once in a while, my map will bloom with red dots as armed assassins arrive to kill me, and the clatter of gunfire will join the now-constant chorus of cars ramming each other, pedestrians, geometry, me, and themselves.

But of course, these hitmen have to navigate this reality too. For the guys who are just there—just men on the ground running at me, that's not so much of a problem. For the ones in helicopters, it is an irresolvable problem.

They are trapped in a new circle of hell, constantly trying to orient their choppers toward me while other mods wrestle to send them unstoppably forwards. This is, at least, very funny, and has the effect of making the helicopters look like they are piloted by drunk drivers as they bob up and down through the sky.

And as for the guys on the ground? Well, I just shoot my car gun at them.

The Grand Theft Auto 6 leak party is presumably over: The Netflix showcase has wrapped, and Cyberleek has made off with more than $200,000 in a perfectly predictable yet somehow still very lucrative rug pull. I imagine the leaker is now looking for a good hole to hide in, and for their sake it better be a deep one because it sounds like Take-Two's hunt is zeroing in on something.

Take-Two Interactive filed subpoena requests with Discord and Microsoft shortly after the GTA 6 leaks began to flow, seeking "business records and investigative records associated with Microsoft’s internal investigation of the 'cyberleek' persona sufficient to identify the user(s)," as well as detailed information on potentially thousands of users who interacted with certain Discord servers. Subsequent subpoenas seeking similar information were filed with X and YouTube.

Those requests were very broad, but a newer filing made on August 28 (via TorrentFreak) is much narrower: "Take-Two has identified one additional Discord user and obtained additional identifying information for a previously identified Discord user, as well as additional information concerning the community servers identified in its prior subpoena for which it now seeks more targeted information. These additional accounts and server are believed to be involved in the same infringing activity as that described in Take-Two's first request."

A footnote adds that "Take-Two's investigation of the infringement at issue is rapidly evolving and ongoing," and says the information sought by this subpoena is different from what was covered in the first, "and provides additional clarifying information regarding one of the user IDs specified in the first subpoena."

Also interesting is that while previous subpoena filings were public, the details in this one are sealed. A motion requesting the seal remain intact argues that the filing in question is "not subject to the presumption of public access," and says that even if it was, Take-Two's "countervailing interests" would take precedence because the document "reveals highly sensitive, confidential information about an ongoing investigation into copyright infringement and the misappropriation of Take-Two’s confidential information."

"Public disclosure of this information could compromise Take-Two's ongoing investigation and even tip off the alleged infringers as to the nature and progress of Take-Two's investigation and information Take-Two has gathered about the infringement, creating a substantial risk that the infringers will delete, destroy, or otherwise conceal evidence of their infringing activities, and/or take further steps to evade identification."

At this point, a ruling on the request to keep the document sealed hasn't been made, and the subpoena itself hasn't been issued.

Also on August 28, Take-Two withdrew its request for a DMCA subpoena filing with Google, repeating that the situation "has been (and is) evolving rapidly as new information becomes available."

35 hours into The Blood of Dawnwalker I'd already witnessed the aftermath of many barbaric slayings and village razings. I'd cleared out a site of industrial-scale slaughter, and partaken in an obscene medieval take on The Running Man. I'd sucked countless kiloliters of blood from humans, rats and monsters alike. But somehow, this exceptionally morbid horror RPG still had another novel way to make me wince.

I was exploring the depths of a troll-infected cave deep in the Carpathians. Coen of Laslea—me, the player-character—and his sketchy companion were looking for someone important. I hardly expected them to be living well, but the way I found them, pinned to a wall and half-consumed, exceeded my expectations for mainstream videogame cruelty.

For two years this human-shaped creature had been constantly eaten alive by grotesque kobalds. By dint of being a vampire, their flesh always grew back. They were a wall-mounted, self-replenishing feast of human meat, lost in a network of caves where they were unlikely to ever be found.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is one of the best blockbuster action RPGs I've played for years, probably since Elden Ring, but it's unrelentingly violent and bleak to the point of sometimes being unintentionally funny. There is no hope in Rebel Wolves' blood-slurried take on 1300s Romania, where brutal feudalism has been supplanted by populist vampirism. The Witcher 3 feels like daytime melodrama by comparison. I respect its severity, but I did yearn for a gutful of the Transylvanian white wine crowding my inventory.

Eerie vrakhiri

When we meet him, Coen is an everyman peasant working the land in Laslea. Years ago, Skender Dragosti, the murderous lord who formerly ruled over Laslea and the greater Vale Sangora region, had been conquered by Brencis, a century-old warfaring vrakhir, or vampire, sick of watching all that blood go to waste.

Brencis is not as outwardly cruel as Skender but his manner of industrially harvesting the blood of Sangora's peasants is frowned upon by some, while for others it's a reasonable price to pay for the execution of their former oppressor. But when the slightest hint of resistance is detected in Laslea, Brencis and his men swoop on the village, raze it, and abduct Coen's family. The Blood of Dawnwalker is about trying to get them back and, to varying degrees depending on your choices and temperament, also taking the fight to the vrakhiri.

Which is easier than it might otherwise be for a peasant, because Coen soon becomes a Dawnwalker: vampire by night and regular human by day. In this way, Rebel Wolves has its cake and eats it too. Coen can fight with swords at all times, but witchcraft and vampire powers can only be used by day and night respectively. He doesn't need to cower in the shadows at sundown. He's a very versatile bloodsucker.

It's great fun to slay Brencis' men. Coen's swordplay is similar to Kingdom Come's directional approach: I have to pay attention to how my foe is swinging all the better to block in that direction, and then exploit any weakness this opens up. This can be gruelling in the realism-focused Kingdom Come, but it's much more approachable here, thanks to an icon signalling every incoming move that's visible no matter how close or far the enemy is (this can be toggled off at higher difficulties).

It's also more approachable because I can trigger hectic waves of spectral crows in between strikes, or warp behind my enemies to suck their blood and replenish my health. I can boil the Brencis' blood, temporarily extract their souls, scream at them until they're immobile, or possess them, all the better to turn them to my side.

Like The Witcher 3 before it, The Blood of Dawnwalker borrows a lot from the quietly radical combat approach taken by Rocksteady's Batman games. Like Geralt of Rivia, Coen "sticks" to and circle-strafes his primary target, but unlike Geralt of Rivia, Coen's swordplay is precision-oriented and gratifying, albeit maybe a little too easy for hardened players. The lock on system can be imprecise—it's always a pain on rare occasions when I want to choose an enemy rather than let the targeting choose for me—but I actually went out of my way to fight people and monsters, rather than avoid conflict like I thought I would (and which I mostly can't, anyway). It helps that Coen's skill trees are riddled with some truly overpowered delights.

Days gone

But it takes time to hone these skills, not to mention all the other minor and major perks and buffs in each of Dawnwalker's three skill trees. And time is framed as a crucial currency in The Blood of Dawnwalker. Coen's days are separated into 16 units of time, and nearly everything I do—from completing major quests through to levelling up my bloodsucking prowess—spends one or more units.

And my quest is urgent: Brencis' coronation occurs in 30 days, and that's my deadline for saving my family. After that they're done for. Little wonder I don't want to fetch slivovitz for one of my dad's old war mates.

This pressure feels overwhelming at first. Should I prioritise assassinating Brencis' three vassals, all the better to weaken the regime for a (presumed) final showdown? Is it really a good idea to spend my time doing the bidding of local witch and love interest Anca? As Dawnwalker's early hours wore on, a handful of other urgencies emerged to complicate how Coen should spend his precious time, not least the fact that some tasks can only be completed by day or night.

The concept is similar to Persona and Majora's Mask, but the way it's implemented is the glue holding Dawnwalker's jumble of familiar components neatly together. It encourages a more tactical approach to questing than I'm used to in action RPGs: I often found myself browsing my journal and plotting out how I'd make the next couple of days matter. This didn't always involve heroics. For example, by day I'd buy up manuals from nine-to-five vendors, all the better to learn new skills, because spending skill points passes time. By night, with my vampiric shadowstep ability, I could access rooftops or cliff shelves inaccessible to mortals. Sometimes my plans would be waylaid by the sudden emergence of a time sensitive problem.

The calendar system sure does apply urgency to Coen's task, at least at first. Urgency is almost always baked into the narrative of blockbuster RPGs, but it's problematic to reflect that urgency in actual gameplay systems. Sure I want to save the world, and sure I want for my actions to matter. But I'd also like to pick some nirnroot and play some Gwent, thank you very much. There’s a reason the Pathologic games remain a niche concern.

Rebel Wolves tries to sidestep this problem in a couple of ways. First, the player is always amply warned before embarking on a time-spending activity: I can waste as many IRL hours as I like harvesting St John's-wort and the position of the sun or moon won't change. It takes me knowingly triggering the passage of time for my precious hours to be spent.

Second, the pressure is largely illusory. By day 20 my Coen felt virtually unbeatable, and I had a small handful of promising ways to take the fight to Brencis. Maybe I could have fetched that old bastard his slivovitz after all.

But illusory or not—and it'll likely depend on how much you drag your feet—the calendar system does give Dawnwalker a greater sense of choice and consequence than most of its big budget action contemporaries. It's largely up to me how I'm going to save my family, when I'll do it, in which order I'll take measures to make it easier, or if I'll bother at all. But I can't deny it was deflating to discover that all my careful clock strategising was ultimately for nothing: pretty much everything of any importance can be tied up well before the 30 day deadline, with lots of frivolous traipsing around to boot.

Despite this, it feels like Rebel Wolves learned the right lessons from Breath of the Wild or, before it, Gothic: Dawnwalker provides an explicit goal and then gestures vaguely at its world. Completing quests can either teach or strengthen Coen, but he has to find them first, and this is where players' experiences may vary. I was on day 21, and pretty much ready to stick it to Brencis, when a colleague let slip that there was a major companion whose presence and attendant quest had eluded me for 30 hours.

Quests vary in size and interest. Some are long and winding; others amount to "kill these guys" or "follow these glowing yellow hints to an encounter". I definitely got sick of searching for yellow hints, just as I did rotating an object for points of revelatory interest. But I never got sick of fighting, nor did I ever lose interest in the Vale of Sangora itself.

All in vein

Maybe I'm just a sucker for European miserablism, but The Blood of Dawnwalker's valley of bloodletting is one of my favourite open worlds since The Witcher 3. Its take on 1300s Romania is subtly daubed with fantasy, but like CD Projekt, Rebel Wolves has a knack for gorgeously downcast panoramas. Though Coen can move at lightning speed by dint of his vampire powers (by night he can even transform into a galloping wolf), I often found myself slow-walking the fir forest backroads and alpine highlands of Sangora, taking in sights reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's landscape paintings or the covers of Tolkien-themed black metal albums. Though it’s not immune to open world busywork, Dawnwalker at least knows its open world needs to feel like a world and not a sandbox of mini-games. It’s a place I inhabited, rather than a map I traversed towards quests and rewards.

And like The Witcher 3, Rebel Wolves keeps a tighter leash on its fantastical leanings than most fantasy studios. Supernatural themes regularly puncture the bleak and rugged realism—this is, of course, a vampire game—but the fantasy elements only serve to emphasise the humdrum nastiness of the Sangora peasants' lot: this is a world of hand-to-mouth poverty, tyrannous cruelty and materialised superstition. The latter almost feels like a delirious symptom of the former. I highly doubt Dawnwalker is an authentic rendering of 1300s peasant life in Romania or elsewhere, but it is determined to capture the phantasmagoric mystery of pre-enlightenment, and the horror and indignity of an oppressed people, without resorting to folksiness or misplaced nostalgia.

Boy, is this an unremittingly pessimistic experience. Choices are almost invariably between two evils. Quests move inexorably towards bad or worse endings. Rarely did I ever select a dialogue option with complete confidence that it was the right or magnanimous thing to say. In fact, by the end, I had my Coen acting very much at odds with how I envisioned him in the early hours. My allegiances—or rather, my notion of who was the worst of various competing evils—were in constant flux. I experienced three endings (there are more) and not one of them offered any hope.

And this is what I admire most about The Blood of Dawnwalker. In the opening hours it clocks as an almost on-the-nose allegory for 20th century European history—Brencis equals incoming communism, Skender equals outgoing monarchy—but by the end it registers as a more universally human story about the vile extremes of power, the powerlessness of its subjects, and the latter's susceptibility to persuasion when nothing feels real except tragedy and toil. It's also—and I find myself sometimes forgetting this aspect entirely—a vampire story. None of its narrative components are especially original, but they cohere into something viscerally affecting. There is no morally righteous way to solve the problems of this world.

It's a very well optimised game too. On my unimpressive system I was generally able to stick to 60 fps on low at 1080p, and even at these settings I found Dawnwalker gorgeous.

Life drain

It's understandable to feel exhausted after playing Dawnwalker, despite its relatively modest 40 hour runtime. It can be so doggedly miserable that you just have to laugh at it, and I did laugh occasionally, but not for the rare and minor sparks of light. When these occur, it feels like being shaken from a disturbing dream. I mostly laughed for shock at its audacity. There are no heroes here. Everything, always, sucks. I learned nothing, but I felt a lot.

Blood of Dawnwalker is an effective piece of worldbuilding and storytelling then, but it doesn't make good on its promise as an innovative piece of RPG design. Maybe Rebel Wolves worried that too many players would fall afoul of the passage of time and thus loosened its severity. Certainly, the prologue implies a greater role for this system than what eventuates. In the end, Dawnwalker doesn't have the courage to allow this system to show its fangs. I feel like if it did, we’d have a modern classic on our hands.

It also suffers some commonplace open world trappings. There are lots of icons denoting almost identical tasks. There are Ubisoft-style towers to scale. The freedom of fast travel tends to diminish the scale of the world with time (why doesn't fast travel incur a time cost?).

But I mention these shortcomings out of a sense of almost begrudging responsibility: despite its obvious indebtedness to The Witcher, The Blood of Dawnwalker is a distinctly dismal horror RPG whose unyielding darkness and sense of benighted adventure will leave more of an impression than any of its flaws. I hope this series gets the chance to return with a fiercer appetite for my blood.

Miyamoto Musashi, the legend goes, defeated his rival Sasaki Ganryu with a single blow to the head using nothing but a crude wooden sword carved from an oar.

This is, of course, ridiculous: In truth Musashi first parried dozens of Ganryu's strikes, softened him up with a flourish of reflex combos, and then ran him through with the Flashing Void, a spear harnessed from the power of lightning in an ancient demonic hellforge. He was perhaps a bit too modest to recount the more baroque details of the battle in his memoirs, but blessedly Capcom is less bashful.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword whips ass.

I've been told that two words don't qualify as a review, though, so let's talk caveats. I'd put the action in this long, long-awaited reboot up against the best Capcom's ever made, though it's spread out across a 10K that should be a sprint. It begins with a foundation of weighty swordplay that made me feel the muscle and bone behind each strike, and eventually challenged me to parry increasingly ostentatious bosses with a patience and precision I haven't exercised since Sekiro. The reward each and every time was the exhilaration of locking in and nailing the timing, graduating from a quick game over to a calm, clean execution.

Well, not that calm—other than the adrenaline a few of Onimusha's harder fights left pulsing in my hypothalamus, this game sets itself apart from FromSoftware's taciturn tone with a swagger reminiscent of early 2000s Capcom. One of its great strengths is the use of legendary actor Toshiro Mifune's likeness as Musashi, an act of digital necromancy that could've easily left a rotten stink if it wasn't handled precisely this deftly. But it doesn't just work, it makes the game.

I loved Onimusha's lavishly animated cutscenes just as much as the combat: Musashi is brash, fiery, and incredibly expressive, tilting his head with a cocky boast, cartoonishly gawping at monsters, contorting his whole face into a snarl when he gets his blood up. A throwaway moment where he scratches the back of his head exactly like the real Mifune does so much to make Way of the Sword feel like an homage to bloody '70s samurai flicks down to its bones.

Onimusha needed to nail that authenticity, because the dozen samurai roles I've seen Mifune in add up to significantly less screen time than the 35-odd hours I spent finishing the story and a healthy chunk of sidequests. Too long? Yep! Unfortunately the Capcom that made Resident Evil 9 and Pragmata lean, briskly paced adventures wasn't talking to the Capcom that thought Onimusha needed a dull hub world, grindy crafting materials and bosses that show up for an encore to an encore to an encore well after I stopped applauding.

Kyoto drift

There's a distinct whiff of modern videogame bloat to Way of the Sword compared to the tight 3 ½ and 8 ½ hours of the now-vintage Onimusha 1&2. It spends its first third steadily introducing new combat mechanics and devoting quite a bit of time to how a young, not-yet-famous Musashi finds himself wearing a magic gauntlet that absorbs the souls of the demonic Genma trying to move into east Kyoto. The initial pacing means it's slow to really show its teeth, though I found that a nice change from the soulslikes that are now legion.

Onimusha wants you to feel cool from the start: Duels with the basic Genma tend to feel more empowering than challenging, which narratively dovetails nicely with Musashi's gauntlet steroids but means only boss fights really allow the swordplay to shine until the midgame.

In between major plot beats that whisk Musashi off to new environments like a bamboo grove and a sunset-drenched mountain fortress, there's busywork to do in feudal Kyoto. And it sure is bogged down by dreary, muddy streets that immediately blur together. There are engaging moments here and there when a trinket on the other side of a wall enticed me to find a ladder that led to a hidden crawlspace to a gate I could unlock from the inside, but these detours never really rose above the bar of not outright boring.

Kyoto mostly exists as a vessel for upgrade materials, scattered in plain sight and squirreled away in corners that are occasionally more fun to track down. These items and the gangs of Genma roving the streets respawn periodically, which ended up reinforcing how insignificant most of my time spent in Kyoto felt. Same with the trifling basic sidequests, delivered by nameless NPCs that give you an icon on the map; there's not even an attempt to offer hints for you to puzzle out a location yourself.

Oni-curious

You can sense the nervousness behind this whole side of the game: that players needed something to keep them playing longer, so how about collecting dozens and dozens of pieces of leather and iron to upgrade the stats on their gear 2% at a time? What about an exciting boss that gets some new moves the second time, and then really drags down the pacing each time you fight it again? Even Capcom seemed to know it didn't nail the balance here, considering how many times the writers have Musashi grumble about having to fight someone he's already whooped.

Strip out 90% of the upgrade economy and corresponding time spent in Kyoto and Onimusha: Way of the Sword would be a much leaner game. And a better one, with just a brisk hour or so of scraps in between showstopper bosses.

What saves Kyoto from being a total waste are the Curious Cases, a fancier set of sidequests delivered to Musashi by poet Lady Murasaki, a pioneering 11th century author.

These vignettes are a touch more involved, calling on a recurring cast of Kyoto's citizens to deliver morbidly funny Japanese fables. Each concludes with Murasaki commenting on the story as she writes them into legend. I rarely go digging into a menu to read up on extra lore, but I devoured every bit of it in Onimusha—the care put into the mythology does so much to make this feel like a jidaigeki historical drama as much as an action game. There are only a handful of Curious Cases in the whole game, yet they each left more of an impression on me than any sidequest I encountered in 25 hours with last year's Assassin's Creed Shadows.

Sword is life

Onimusha's crafting-driven bloat would've annoyed me more if every boss that awaited wasn't such a thrill to take down. The heavy clank of steel-on-steel and the way the camera pivots around Musashi as he redirects the enemy's blade in a shower of sparks was still triggering something primal within me 30 hours in. (Should I buy a sword? Surely a katana would fix me.)

The elegance of the combat is that each duel demands the same thing—precisely parrying a few times to build up a "burning" meter for your blade to deal more damage, then using the deflect technique, an extra button press with slightly more generous timing, to sap the enemy's stamina and deliver a critical hit—but executing that plan is never so simple. When I fumbled my parry timing and blocked instead, bosses punished me by smashing my own stamina meter, turning the fight into an oh shit oh hell panic.

Take one of the minibosses that Onimusha reheats three too many times: Byakue, a demon carrying a giant axe whose entire body is covered in ofuda talismans. When Byakue broke my guard, its axe split in half to reveal a jagged maw that sucked down souls and sent it into a primal rage. I learned to start watching for new moves in that state: a grab where it used its flowing paper-flesh mane to bludgeon me, and an explosive slam that caused the earth to erupt with poisonous Malice.

Where other action games like Nioh ask you to nail multiple complex button inputs in the heat of the moment to parry, recover stamina, and swap sword stances, Onimusha's happy to keep swordplay simpler mechanically but more cinematically rewarding. Crossing blades will either prompt you to mash the attack quickly to overpower your enemy or to lock into a brief minigame of alternating light and heavy attacks until you outmaneuver them and deliver a vicious blow; both moves are easy but look and feel badass thanks to the detailed physics and animations that send enemies staggering or leave them bisected anime-style, crown to jewels.

What this Onimusha does differently from every other game of its kind is embrace the physicality of the brawl. The way Musashi braces for an impact; the way he shifts to an overhead strike for a heavy attack that's easy for enemies to sidestep if you don't lead with a lighter horizontal swipe; the way walls and boards you can pry off the ground are an opportunity to deal quick and ruthless stagger damage. Way of the Sword toys with the idea of making these physics interactions its specialty, but it never really commits to them, with boss fights mostly falling back on more straightforward 'git gud' tests of patience and timing. It leaves a lot on the table for a sequel to build on, but even with their full potential unrealized the physics still make Musashi feel like he has a body. Literally built different, etc.

Strategic complexity comes mostly from the secondary weapons, Musashi's Oni Armaments; most of them play a key role, from peeling health or power souls off an enemy to smashing half their stamina meter in a single hit. It's so tempting to wait to use these until the perfect moment, but holding onto that meter just a little too long risks a boss getting in a clean hit and stealing the souls for themselves. It's a dance of patience and aggression that was still tripping me up when I had a boss down to the last 10% of their health, then suddenly lost my rhythm and was dead seconds later.

There's a fantastic clarity to all of the action: you could teach a Videogames 101 course using the boss attack patterns (tricky, but always learnable) in Way of the Sword, and the instant post-meter burn regret of popping too early. This is the kind of stuff Capcom's designers have excelled at for decades, just with a bit more emphasis on patience and timing than usual.

The panache and silliness of old Onimusha still comes through in much of the character design, too—just wait for the boss who's basically a demigod rockstar riffing on the Japanese high school delinquent trope, exaggerated pompadour and all.

Samurai spirit

I was pleased by how beautifully this action ran on my 9070 XT, often hitting 120 fps with all the settings turned up and AMD FSR4 set to quality. Other than brief hitches when loading or transitioning between cutscenes, performance is fantastic. And I think this is the best-looking RE Engine game Capcom's made when it comes to the facial animations, art direction and cutscenes—which makes it an extra shame that so much of the game takes place in a perpetually overcast, muddy Kyoto. Truly a baffling choice.

A shorter, more linear Onimusha with less time spent picking up boring junk would've truly been all killer no filler—but even with the filler, it's going to be a strong contender for the best combat of the year. But that's a box I really expected Capcom to check from the moment it brought Onimusha back to life.

More impressive is the lengths to which it goes to live up to Toshiro Mifune's resurrection. This series started with the fun but shallow premise of digitizing a famous actor as a samurai. Way of the Sword asks how to imbue that idea with purpose: What if the emotional core of the story revolved around Musashi's fabled journey from arrogant vagabond to a noble warrior? What if one of the other figures it plucked from history was the inventor of Kabuki, at this point a ferocious young girl who cares more about the people of Kyoto than Musashi does? What if the big bad, another famous Japanese warrior, was an absolute motherfucker? This is the most fun I've had with a game's alternate history since Command & Conquer Red Alert's campy FMVs, and pushes the game up a tier from period action game to proper period piece. Bring on Way of the Two Swords with haste.

Throughout all of Fable's showcases and demonstrations this year, one aspect of it has proved difficult to figure out—how big it's going to be. The original Fable games were decently-sized, but not massive, and monster roleplaying games like Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 have dramatically shifted expectations on what an RPG's scope should be.

But it turns out that Fable will stick closely to tradition when it comes to its size, with the caveat that players could potentially hang around in Playground's RPG forever depending on how invested they become in the world they help to forge.

Speaking to Polygon in a Q&A session, associate game director Will Kennedy explained that Fable will have a total of around 40 hours of things to do in the world. "We have around 15-20 hours of mainline quest gameplay, we have around 15-20 of side and open-world exploration content gameplay," Kennedy said.

That's the traditional baseline for an RPG. But Kennedy also pointed out that Fable's life-systems, which allow players to interact with NPCs, commit crimes, buy property and so forth may significantly expand the runtime. "And then, of course, the life systems are limitless, so you can play them for as long as you want." To this, fellow associate game director Craig Litter added that "You can literally play it forever if that's what you want to do."

It's worth stating at this point that you can play any game forever if you really want to do that. I could probably play Doom forever even though the base game is not all that long. Nonetheless, if Fable's life simulation elements put it within touching distance of, say, The Sims, then maybe the 'play it forever' claim isn't so far-fetched.

We were expecting to find out how Fable shapes up relatively soon. But Playground's long-awaited RPG has been pushed to 2027 in order to avoid the looming behemoth that is Grand Theft Auto 6. Alongside its life simulation, the reboot is swapping out the series' old morality system for a more nuanced, character-specific reputation system, although you'll apparently be able to bypass it if you're rich enough—just like in real life!

Games get remade for all sorts of reasons, but I think you'd struggle to find one with as heartwarming a basis as this. The Battle of Olympus—a side-scrolling platformer originally released on the NES in 1988, is getting a remake early next year created by its original husband-and-wife team.

Admittedly, that statement is slightly misleading. Per Time Extension, programmer Yukio Horimoto and artist Reiko Oshida (now also Horimoto) were not actually married when they made The Battle of Olympus—though they were in a romantic relationship at the time of the game's development.

"We fell in love and wanted to make our game together, so we talked about the game concept for a long time," Horimoto explained to VG247 in an interview from several years back. "I like Greek myths and legends, so we decided to base our game on those legends. Given those circumstances, we talked about the game and our mood influenced it."

Alongside Greek myth, The Battle of Olympus is heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda 2, with Horimoto stating that he directly imitated many of that game's actions. " I wanted to make the same kind of game, and so many parts of the game, like the player's attacking motion, ducking motion, and jumping motion: They were all influenced by The Legend of Zelda."

As for the remake, the Steam page describes it as a "handcrafted Steam remake", with Yukio and Reiko Horimoto's reformed Infinity Co "personally recreated in the code, redrawing the pixel art, and refining the game for modern PC players while preserving the spirit, atmosphere and challenge of the original."

Interestingly, this isn't the first time a veteran game developer couple has remade a gaming classic. A few years back, Sierra founders Ken and Roberta Williams returned to game development for a shiny redux of Colossal Cave Adventure (with the abridged name Colossal Cave). Unlike The Battle of Olympus, Colossal Cave wasn't the Williams' original design. The OG text adventure was made in the mid '70s by Will Crowther and Don Woods.

Like the Williams', Yukio and Reiko Horimoto have been fairly active in game development in recent years, having directed the fashion model sims Model Debut #nicola and its sequel in 2019 and 2021. It seems the pair plan to retire from game development for good after the The Battle of Olympus, however, as the Steam page says the remake will be the duo's "final major game product".

The Battle of Olympus will release into Steam early access in January 2027.

On Saturday, information began circulating online about a massive, 12-terabyte leak of Valve data that included prototypes of numerous classic Valve games. But it seems what is now being dubbed the "teraleak" contained far more than just old builds of Portal 2 and possible weapons from Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and may include prototypes of countless third-party games released on Steam over a ten-year period.

Specifically, the leak consists of Steam file groups known as 'depots' which were stored on Steam's servers between 2003 and 2013. A full list of these depots was shared on Reddit by user RefreshingCapybara, which includes depot names for hundreds of games as well as trailers, teasers, soundtracks, demos, game trials, and more. "Not to be hyperbolic, but this may be one of if not the biggest leaks to occur," RefreshingCapybara commented in sharing the list.

To be clear, the list doesn't show us what—if anything—is contained within those file groups. But as reported by Ars Technica, game preservation website Hidden Palace has identified numerous depots with obtainable builds in them. These include various prototypes of Spec Ops: The Line, Sid Meier's Civilization V, Mafia 2, and Grand Theft Auto 3.

According to Ars, it's also likely that the builds included in the leak are from a collection that has been amassed from various sources over time. Many game builds from before 2013—which is when Valve switched its content distribution pipeline from Steam2 to SteamPipe—were considered lost media up to now. Clearly, though, they were more accessible than Valve or anyone else realised.

As such, it's possible the leak is the product of multiple people pulling together builds from various sources (like old PCs) into one enormous archive. The most interesting clue to the leak's origins is a readme file contained within the leak, which includes the line "warm n good wishes to all hoarders who had stuff from this collection".

The fact that the build includes so many third-party prototypes may also make it legally perilous. "That archive contains a significant amount of third-party content, meaning we are dealing with a dramatically more dangerous situation than if it were just some Valve builds," wrote YouTuber and Valve specialist Tyler McVicker on social media.

Given the sheer amount of data that has been leaked, it will likely be some time before we know the true extent of what it contains. On the Valve side, dataminers have already unearthed a complete version of Portal 2's 2009 "beta", as well as prototypes for Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and even some files from Valve's cancelled puzzler F-STOP.

There was surprise and delight when Summer Game Fest brought the reveal of 1666: Amsterdam, the long awaited dream project from Assassin's Creed co-creator Patrice Désilets. But the mood quickly changed when eager players began exploring a playable prologue for the witchy action-adventure that was released alongside the announcement and began spotting in-game assets that had the distinct whiff of generative AI.

Désilets' studio Panache Digital Games copped to using AI in the production of certain assets, then apologised and promised to remove those elements in time for the early access launch. With that launch happening last week, Désilets now says that Panache has decoupled AI from its pipeline entirely and it won't be using AI in future.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, Désilets stressed that Panache was done with generative AI, and claimed that most of the AI used occurred in the early stages of the project. "Yes, we use some AI in the process, mostly at the beginning," Désilets explained. "In conception and pre-production. It's been totally removed and we won't be using any AI anymore."

As someone who likes their art made by, y'know, artists, I'm glad that Panache has done what it can to scrape generative AI out of 1666: Amsterdam. That said, it irks me when developers say they only used AI at the concepting stage of development, because that's the most fun and rewarding part of any creative project.

That's the part where most of the imaginative work happens, where you're most creatively free and unshackled from the discipline and hard choices required to actually finish the darn thing. Handing that phase over to the mediocrity machine seems like such a betrayal of the creative process to me. It also raises an interesting philosophical point: can you reasonably say a game has no generative AI in it if you used the technology to help imagine the thing in the first place?

Either way, 1666: Amsterdam is now out in early access, and the Steam page does not have an AI disclosure on it. With or without AI, players currently seem divided over Amsterdam as an experience. The game currently sits at a 'Mixed' rating with 66% positive reviews, with users praising the setting and exploration elements, while cruising clunky combat and a general lack of polish.

A ridiculous amount of games release on Steam every week and basically none of them make any money. It only takes a cursory browse of Steam's unfiltered new release list to understand why this is true.

But which genre is most likely to make money or be a hit? Ichiro Lambe, Matt Martindale and Dr. Tim Ermilov have collaborated on a Steam revenue report on weloveit.io and, as the name implies, the purpose of the site is to estimate the earnings of all Steam games, or at least, those with a price tag and at least one review.

The trio doesn't have access to Valve's internal sales data, so they rely on the Boxleiter method to estimate that data, which assumes that a games' review count is "roughly proportional of its sales, so multiplying reviews by a constant gives an estimated unit count." For a standard estimate (rather than a conservative or generous one) the multiplier is 35 times the amount of user reviews.

This may not provide exact figures, but as the site notes, it's a technique used by analysts and publishers and there aren't very many better ways to arrive at a sales estimate. And so, in the style of all great data enthusiasts, they've used the technique to map the success (or lack thereof) of over 100,000 Steam games in handy graph form.

Baldur's Gate 3 is estimated to have made $1,795,480,003 since its early access launch in late 2020. On the other hand Free Solo, a physics climbing game released in March, has made an estimated $34.

In the graph below every dot is an individual game (for a much better view of this graph you'll need to visit weloveit.io).

I was fascinated by the "genre economics" section, which uses user tags to get a sense of how genres rank on Steam. "A game counts towards a genre only when the tag is one of its six most popular tags," according to the study, so there needs to be pretty unanimous agreement among Steam users that the tag is accurate.

According to the data, sandbox games have the highest "hit rate" on Steam. Hit rate measures the amount of games with the tag that have made more than $100k. The sandbox tag has a 27.3% hit rate.

Of course,"sandbox" is unwieldy and impractical as a genre designation: the most popular games with the tag are unhelpfully different: Terraria, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Project Zomboid. But it does at least demonstrate that games promising some amount of freedom are preferred by Steam users, whether they be sloppy retail sims or $400 million cowboy adventures.

The next tag, FPS, is probably the "real" genre winner. It has a 21.6% hit rate, though keep in mind a lot of games that aren't strictly focused on shooting, like Schedule I or Portal 2, are tagged with FPS.

Here's the top 10 genres on Steam according to their hit rate:

There aren't a huge amount of surprises in that list. I guess I'm surprised to see visual novels rank so highly, though they are ubiquitous on Steam. Sports probably ranks highly because there are fewer games to which it applies compared to, say, "puzzle", a tag with a 9.5% hit rate.

The lowest ranking tags (according to report's list, at least) are probably more telling. Hidden Object games have a 5.4% hit rate, while 2D platformers have a 5.5% hit rate. Developing a game in either of those genres is thus, according to the study, risky business. Though they may also be cheaper to develop, and thus more common, and thus less likely to be discovered.

The full study is well worth browsing because it's full of great insights. For example: 2D platformers have severely dropped off in popularity since their heyday of 2016, but visual novels have remained almost consistently popular since 2014.

Top Steam games by revenue (August 18 - 25)

First of all, its worth noting that Star Wars Zero Company released on the 28th, and its review embargo lifted on the 26th, so next week's chart will better reflect its launch performance. It still came in at number 12, rising 12 positions for what must have been an eleventh hour rush on pre-orders (there were cosmetic pre-order incentives).

Based on the chart—which is, as always, a reflection of best performers by revenue and not necessarily by units sold—Mortal Shell 2 had a successful launch, but probably no where near as successful as How to Fish. The latter is a 1-4 player "physics-based fishing simulator, and while it looks like quintessential friendslop on the surface, it's a whole lot more violent than normal. It looks very fun.

The Wardogs beta obviously paid off as a taster for the full game, which releases next month. As for Stalker 2, it got a massive 2.0 update last week and a steep discount, hence its reappearance on the list.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

The early access RPG Entropy would be cool enough in a vacuum: Experimental, JRPG-style combat in a bizarre, fallen world. But it's also a second outing from the devs of one of my favorite RPGs in recent memory, Dread Delusion.

Dread Delusion was a first-person homage to the Elder Scrolls that, true to its inspirations, had some absolutely killer sidequests, like an ethical dilemma surrounding vegetarian zombies or a seemingly Blade Runner 2049-inspired investigation into a person erased from history (and their loved ones' memories). With Entropy's subgenre shift, I wondered if developer Lovely Hellplace would keep up this side stuff streak.

I needn't have worried: Speaking recently with lead developer James Wragg, he told me in no uncertain terms that he and the team can't help themselves. They love sidequests too much to not make them.

"Side quests are almost my reason for doing videogames in the first place," Wragg told me. "A big inspiration for Dread Delusion was playing Elder Scrolls games almost willfully ignoring the main quest, and getting lost in all the side content."

Wragg finds that RPGs really come alive in their side stories, partially because they're allowed to be strange, and to provide a contrast with the main plot. Wragg estimated that he wrote "about a third" of what's gone into Entropy, and that he likes to create outlines or broad strokes directions for areas and plotlines that other writers then fill in.

He praised Dread Delusion writer Harry Tuffs for bringing the zombified Kingdom of the Endless to life in exactly this way: "I knew the Endless were going to be like, vegetarian vampires," said Wragg, "and I gave this to Harry, and he made it way better than my original dumb ideas."

Wragg also shouted out returning writer Io Brindle, who spearheaded that investigative quest I loved so much in Dread Delusion, Missing Persons. Even still, before starting Entropy, Wragg had a notion that it would be less verbose than Dread Delusion⁠.

"I started off Entropy with the idea that we were going to write way fewer words," Wragg said. "I was like, 'Dread Delusion is like the length of a novel. This is crazy. This took so much work.' So for Entropy, I really wanted to cut the word count down loads. We were going to trim the fat and make it more succinct.

"As we've been writing it, we've found that we just like really getting into characters, and we just like fleshing stuff out with interesting themes, and that does actually take a fair amount of words."

Even though it will take a significant lift from Entropy's writing team, Wragg sounded more excited than anything else, and believes that Entropy's side content will hit the same high marks with players as Dread Delusion's.

Some of this writing work is also being put toward companions: Entropy has a large party size and allows for hiring more anonymous mercenary characters, but there are also story-centric party members with their own plotlines. All of them, mercenary or story-based, will be subject to permadeath, something I loved in the recently-released Star Wars Zero Company.

"We love making weird and wonderful stories, and we love deep characters who we can get into chats with and find out all their beliefs and backstories and stuff," said Wragg. "I think that one of the most interesting things about videogames is just how you can actually talk to the characters in a way that maybe you can't in a novel or a film. Just being able to meet a strange character and ask them some stupid questions is incredibly rewarding as a player."

Entropy is out now on Steam in early access for the very reasonable price of $12/£8.99, and it also has a quite generous demo that won me over to the game months ago. If Dread Delusion is anything to go by, the final game will see a significant expansion over this initial release, but I found Dread Delusion's initial early access launch to be a great introduction to the project.

Star Wars Galaxies Legends, one of many community servers offering a version of the defunct MMO with custom additions, reportedly had its assets decrypted by a hacker with the username levarrishawk (via Massively OP). In a post on the Star Wars Galaxies subreddit, Levarris confirmed the details of a Discord post shared by the server's development team.

"[W]e’ve confirmed that Levarris, aka levarrishawk from r/swg, used AI tools to decrypt our client side game asset files," the Discord post reads. "This gave him access to assets from all of our custom content: items, questlines … We do know that he’s actively offered these files to other servers, and while we can’t confirm that he’s had any takers yet, if you start seeing Legends‑exclusive content out in other worlds it was likely taken from us.

"We’re obviously bothered by this, but there isn’t much we can do outside of being upfront with all of you and staying focused on what makes Legends great."

Notably, no player data or personal info was accessed. The response from Levarris, who is a moderator for the Star Wars Galaxies subreddit, reveals the motivation behind this hack: some drama that goes back "roughly fourteen years ago."

Levarris claims that some folks who'd eventually work on Legends used a "honeypot" scheme to acquire dev tools that Sony Online Entertainment used when working on the live game, and then didn't share those tools with other community devs trying to revive it. "You don't get to protect and hoard from the greater community things built on stolen goods," Levarris wrote.

The subreddit didn't seem impressed with the stunt nor the rationale behind it. "I’m just trying to play around with a lightsaber after working 60 hours in a week," commented iceman2kx. "A moderator of the Star Wars Galaxies subreddit has decided to actively harm the Star Wars Galaxies community at large. Cool. Cool and good," BroReesta wrote on the same thread.

When I first tried Star Wars Zero Company for preview, its rhythm reminded me quite a bit of Mass Effect 2: Walk around your home base, upgrade stuff, talk to people, select non-combat activities and missions from a galaxy map, and enter levels that feel "strictly business." Heavy on the combat, with minimal nonviolent gameplay.

It really struck me that Zero Company evolved into this form that has a lot of appeal for the story-heavy RPG fan like myself, but emerged out of a very different, tactics game lineage. That process of reverse-engineering something very RPG-like from a separate but related genre has resulted in a game that I'm not sure the likes of Owlcat, Obsidian, or Larian ever would have made.

Zero Company lacks the branching dialogue trees and minute reactivity of many RPGs, but taking on the apparently herculean task of making even story-centric characters permanently killable has resulted in a game that feels more profoundly reactive and personal than most RPGs I've ever played.

Consequential

One of the coolest things about Zero Company is its simultaneous embrace of permanently missable/killable/losable main characters and triple-A production values, something I think I've only otherwise seen in Baldur's Gate 3, and there only through specific beats of the main story.

In Zero Company, if an operator gets knocked down three times without a stay at the medbay in-between, they're gone for good, no ifs, ands, or buts. Unless you tweak the setting in the game's difficulty—but come on, don't do that. Save scum like a true PC gamer.

Zero Company's focus on tactical combat as its north star means you don't see other forms of RPG choice and consequence, like alienating people out of your party in BG3 or Rogue Trader, but being able to permanently miss out on a companion's presence and subplot due to a careless mistake in combat feels more meaningful and personal than many of the authored choices in games I love.

There are very few RPGs that have managed to truly paralyze me with their binary moral choices⁠—Dread Delusion and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty spring to mind⁠—but more often, I feel fairly secure in the choices I make in such games, and even stick with them in subsequent playthroughs.

But a true sense of consequence can make things pop even if I know what I want to stick with. Being a commie in Disco Elysium is made richer by the very existence of its fascist playthrough, knowing how dark and depressing the story can get. Kim Kitsuragi's trust and friendship means so much more when you understand it's possible to lose it. Baldur's Gate 3's happiest endings feel almost saccharine to me, but I don't mind, because the bad guy endings are so grim. You have to really work to keep everybody alive by the final party.

Zero Company's companion questlines are excellent, and clone trooper Trick's in particular blew me away. The fact that I have to work to keep Trick alive and see that story makes it feel more my own, even if someone else sees the exact same thing. Bit Reactor has made systemic and authored storytelling compliment each other in a truly novel, rare way. The Fire Emblem series has managed something similar, but not at this level of production values (full voice acting!) or with a cast so closely intertwined with the main plot.

Loss leader

If there's anything I want Bit Reactor to do next, it's to even more tightly wind the threat of permanent loss into the plot. It's not possible to piss off squadmates enough that they leave your crew through the Bond (approval) system in Zero Company. I would love to see that wrench thrown into things in Bit Reactor's next project.

There are story moments in Zero Company that genuinely imperil or drive away your companions: I want to see even more of that. Zero Company's permadeath is a unique melding of story and gameplay in the current field, but otherwise, the game's story and gameplay are fairly siloed from each other. The non-combat operations and exploration gameplay have fairly limited effects on the story and tactical side of things: You take on a mission, or you don't. You have access to new resources, or you lack them.

With more time, resources, and experience making this sort of game, I would love for Bit Reactor's next project to be even more of an RPG, to embrace consequence and reactivity even more deeply. It's already a phenomenal first outing, and I can't wait to see what's next.

When Total War: Warhammer first debuted, I was much more into the wargame setting's sci-fi counterpart. This would be cool if Space Marines were in it, I remember thinking, somehow unaware that Total War: Warhammer would end up being one of the best strategy games on PC. Not that my theory was wrong: Space Marines are finally in Total War, and it is, in fact, cool. Just ask the folks who picked this year's Gamescom award winners: it won best PC game.

It's the third award Sega took home this year, along with best audio for Alien: Isolation 2 and best lineup for its whole gaggle of games. It's easy to see why, particularly in the case of Total War 40K—PC Gamer's Fraser Brown said it took a mere hour of playtime to cement the game as the highlight of his year. "It's immediately obvious how special Total War 40k is—I don't think a tutorial has ever made me giddy before," he wrote.

According to Gamescom's website, the winners are chosen "by both an expert jury of gaming professionals and the community." In other words, it was a favorite among both professional nerds and the pro bono sort.

If it wasn’t clear before why people have been so vocally insistent that this game should happen ever since Total War first embraced fantasy, it should be now: there are many ways to adapt Warhammer 40,000's galaxy-spanning eternal war in videogame form, but Total War's combination of scale and gruesome, exacting detail seems a particularly good fit.

Warhammer thrives on extremes, and a game where I can watch a single ultramarine hack an ork to bits up close then immediately zoom out to see an enormous whirlwind of violence in wide shot is an exciting prospect indeed. As for whether that'll pan out into a good game once it finally releases, we'll have to wait and see.

There are big-budget blockbusters, and then there's GTA 6. If you want any sense of just how big this thing is, look no further than a recent interview Rockstar North co-head Aaron Garbut gave The New York Times (via Techradar). In it, he said the studio dedicated an entire new team solely to making NPCs.

"We art-directed each individual one of them," Garbut said in the interview. "Every room in the game, somebody thought about this … Who's sitting where, what they're drinking, the marks that are left on the table. The pictures on the wall will have the people that are in that room, with their tattoos on their arms and their family behind them.

"That whole thing has been made, and built, and photographed, and placed in this random room in a random building in a huge city, in a world." He revealed that GTA 6 has over 600,000 animations—double the amount Red Dead Redemption 2 had, both of which dwarf GTA 5's 55,000. Considering the game's map is also three times as big as Red Dead 2's, it seems like the game operates on an unprecedented level of scale and fidelity.

This all lines up with what PC Gamer's US editor-in-chief Tyler Wilde said of the game in the wake of recent leaks earlier this month: even if GTA 6 doesn't reinvent the open world crime-'em-up, it "will be impressive for the same reason Rockstar games typically are: The absurd amount of effort and money the studio puts into making them as big and detailed as the mainstream hardware of the day can manage."

Elden Ring is one of the best videogames I've ever played, and now, four years from launch, is possibly the last time you'll get to experience it as an event. The Tarnished Edition DLC looks small on paper⁠—two new classes and a smattering of armor and items⁠—but it is still something new, something unexpected added to our 2022 game of the year.

What in any other context might make for a Horse Armor-style embarrassment is one of the most exciting releases of 2026 for me, and I'm only, like, a quarter joking. Elden Ring is the type of game that made a couple borked quests getting patched into a massive communal treasure hunt. New weapons, armor, and classes at this late date feels like a profound gift, even if I'm paying for the privilege.

But, in addition to the material additions coming to Elden Ring, the Tarnished Edition DLC serves as an enticement to the playerbase, something to bring them back all at one time and bring life back to the Lands Between's ailing multiplayer invasions and co-operative boss battling.

I still remember how magical the first days of Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree were, the density of asynchronous messages and ease of matchmaking. The Tarnished Edition won't be able to match either of those highs, but its launch may represent the biggest spike in player activity we could ever expect to see in Elden Ring again.

If you've somehow missed the boat on this one since 2022, I envy the first experience you're about to have. Elden Ring's fantasy is somehow both mythic and anthropological, zoomed out, and deeply personal.

You're an anonymous warrior on a quest to become God's Husband (gender-agnostic). The God in question is a man and woman, separate but the same, consubstantial with, and plotting against themselves. Her pope is a giant turtle, and she is perpetuating a millennia-old conflict involving both racial animus and metaphysics. You can make her goth half- (single? step?) daughter God instead if you so choose.

It's all set in a world of literally impossible beauty, one of the best fantasy settings ever rendered in a videogame. It's dominated by the alien, iconic view of the Erdtree, an ethereal, skyscraper-sized growth that's visible from every part of the Lands Between. Elden Ring is, perhaps, one of FromSoftware's most bright and cheerful creations to date, but it's also one of the weirdest. In four years, it's lodged itself into my psyche like almost no game world I've ever seen.

But enough about all that nerd stuff: FromSoft had already ruined all other 3D action games for me by the time Elden Ring came out, and while it lacks the pure focus of Sekiro's perfect block symphony, I think it matches that more straightforward action game as a fantasy combat experience. Elden Ring is one of the broadest, deepest, and most exquisitely designed action-RPGs that's ever been made.

It even contains Sekiro in a limited sense: One of the character build options added in the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion is a perfect block mechanic lifted straight out of the ninja sim. Like no other game I've played, Elden Ring balances mechanically pure "it's your fault if you die" combat with a myriad of class fantasies and character build options. Knights, barbarians, spellcasters, rogues, priests, samurai, nude men with earthenware hats, you can inhabit any of these roles while engaging in some of the tightest, richest, and most challenging action combat put to silicon.

Which, funnily enough, feeds back into the relatively small additions of the Tarnished Edition DLC: When the mechanics in play are this good, with so much already up in the air, even a minute adjustment feels momentous. FromSoft has not released a full-fledged, solo/async experience like Elden Ring, since Elden Ring, and until it shows off what it's working on next, the Tarnished Edition release will be the closest thing we have to playing a new FromSoft joint at launch.

I have a love/hate/hate relationship with Elden Ring Nightreign, which also no longer seems to be getting updates. In addition to being a Switch 2 exclusive, FromSoft's upcoming Duskbloods looks to have more in common with Nightreign than Bloodborne, firmly in the realm of "a multiplayer thing." PCG contributor Tyler Colp's sense of FOMO withered on actually playing the game, and mine is rapidly following suit. With no FromSoft fix on the horizon to truly tickle my fancy, I can only turn, once again, to the Lands Between.

You might think making one of the most influential games of this century would be a source of unending happiness for its creator. But for Dean 'Rocket' Hall, founder of RocketWerkz, the relationship with his most famous creation isn't that simple. "When DayZ happened, it was like dying," says Hall of the mod which, alongside Minecraft, helped establish survival games as a cornerstone of the medium. "It ended my old life. My relationship with everyone who I knew up to that point changed completely."

This isn't to say Hall doesn't recognise his good fortune: "It was obviously an amazing thing that happened to me," he stresses. But there is a sense that, while Hall gained much from the creation of DayZ—fame, respect, and to a certain extent, fortune—something was lost too. "I loved making the mod, and I loved that feeling, and I've been chasing it ever since."

Chasing the feeling of making DayZ has taken over a decade, sent Hall down numerous rabbit holes and even led his studio to the precipice of bankruptcy. After all that time, Hall still hasn't found what he is looking for and admits he may never find it. Yet as he continues his search, RocketWerkz is beginning to find success on its own terms.

Hall of fame

What is it, exactly, that would rekindle the feeling of making DayZ for Hall? Specifically, he says he's searching for a solution to a specific problem he sees in survival games. "You see it time [and] again. If you go see commentary on a survival game, people will say it gets boring, or the end game sucks," he says. "And it's such a hard problem, because what you do [to] solve it [is] brute force it with heaps of content."

It's not clear when exactly Hall identified this issue, but it was likely between RocketWerkz's first and second released games. When the DayZ mod launched, Hall was working at Bohemia Interactive, the creators of ArmA 2 which served as the original basis for DayZ.

This wasn't the first mod Hall had made for ArmA 2. Indeed, it was modding that landed Hall his job at Bohemia, after his co-op mod for ArmA 2 became the most popular mod on the defunct ArmA fansite Armaholic. Despite running a major video game developer, Hall still regularly makes mods today for games like RimWorld and Barotrauma.

"People think I'm a game developer who came up from [being] a modder, and I would say I'm a modder who makes games during the day," Hall explains. "I was born a modder and I will die a modder. And I think if there's a lesson out there for any aspiring game devs, I think it's mod games. You will learn even faster than making them."

DayZ's surging popularity led Bohemia Interactive to begin creating a commercial version of the mod. Hall initially led the project, but he left Bohemia in 2014, which is when he founded RocketWerkz and began work on a project called Ion.

Ion would later be cancelled, with RocketWerkz pivoting to Stationeers, a space-station construction and management game inspired by one of Hall's favourite games, Space Station 13. Yet when it was released in 2017, Stationeers received mixed reviews, and has struggled commercially throughout its existence. "It's built up about seven years of losses," Hall says, though he adds that in 2025 it "actually probably broke even."

Close to the sun

While well received by players, Stationeers struggled commercially and remains in Steam early access. Following Stationeers, RocketWerkz began developing Icarus, a free-to-play, online survival game with a run-based loop. Players would land on a planet, go through the basic survival loop while completing an objective, launch back into space, and begin another mission that would start the cycle again.

This was Hall's attempt to solve that problem of survival games running out of road. But there were two problems. First, players didn't like the loop, as they perceived it as losing progress. "It just didn't work. People didn't want it. It was hilarious, but that's life."

Second, on launch, Icarus was not the financial success that RocketWerkz needed it to be to survive. As such, RocketWerkz pivoted quickly, abandoning the free-to-play aspect and committing to a rigorous post-launch support scheme where it would release weekly updates like clockwork. "After the beta weekend, I levelled with the team. I was like 'We do this or it's over.' We might even do all this work and still go bankrupt, " he says. Hall is open about how gruelling a process this was. "The last couple of years, I've been enjoying it, but before that, I hated it, and we were looking at ruin, basically."

Nonetheless, Icarus has slowly established a trusting audience, one which RocketWerkz could then sell larger, paid expansions to. "Icarus, at times, we can have a 50% attachment rate to DLC at purchase," Hall explains. "I can tell you right now, the studio would be bankrupt if we didn't do that strategy."

Yet even here, the margins can be slim. "People will go and say: 'There's too many DLC, this is crazy'. And I'll post our financials. I'll be like 'Hey, a lot of our DLC, even on Icarus— which is really good—sometimes we'll only make $100,000 from it. It might have cost us $120,000 to make. So we're not printing money."

Indeed, Hall says that it's only in the last year that Icarus has really begun making money. "We've increased our revenue 80% in the last year," he says. "Our dream for a long time has been to make more per day than we spend, because as a game developer, you need to build a big cash reserve, especially now because there's no investment money out there."

Rocket purr-kz

The experience of making Icarus has taught Hall a lot. He says he's learned the value of community, how a relatively small audience can be more valuable than hundreds of thousands of players—provided the audience is dedicated enough. "My encouragement to devs is: focus on getting fans, not on selling product."

He also believes a small audience can be just as emotionally gratifying as a large one. "I think seeing that 100 people love what you do is chemically the same as 100,000 at least," Hall elaborates. "If you're a musician [like] Freddie Mercury and you pack out the Wembley Stadium, seeing 100,000 people right there waving lighters is probably insane. But as a Game Dev, I don't know whether there's as big a difference. So if I can make a mod that 100 people love, that's like crack cocaine to me."

It was this line of thinking that informed RocketWerkz' approach with Kitten Space Agency—the studio's freely available spiritual successor to Kerbal Space Program, a game which Hall personally adores. "With Kitten Space Agency, the game is completely free. It's funded entirely by contributions. So that really puts it in front of the gamer's face," he says. "If you want this game to exist, how much is it worth? Because it's all on you."

While letting players determine the value of a game has its own risks, Hall likes it as a funding model, saying it absolves him of the need to justify a price point, and allows him to focus on the creative aspect: "I think if I could, I would just do all my games for free, because it stops you having to be focused on dumb stuff, and allows you to focus on the good stuff, which is what you get to do for modding."

Beyond survival

One thing Hall is still yet to learn, however, is how to solve his perceived problem with survival games. Icarus ended up using the exact brute-forcing solution he wanted to avoid. "Make no mistake, that's all we ended up doing with Icarus. It's such a crude, basic way to make your game, is just to solve it with content, I am really proud of what we've done with that. But it's like banging a nail in with a rock."

What is the solution, then? One idea Hall has identified is "to layer pressures in that hit you at different points." He cites Valheim as an example. "It does it with these boss fights. And the fun part of the boss fights in Valheim is not the boss fights, it's preparing for the boss fights."

Another example Hall points to is EnviroMine, a mod for Minecraft that adds an insanity meter to the experience. "The more time you spent underground, you built up this insanity meter, and it was this weird extra pressure that I'd never considered, that just totally changed how you played the game," Hall explains. "It was one of those mechanics that made me go 'Oh, I wish I'd come up with that'".

Both examples suggest that survival games need to aspire to a higher level of experience to become self-sustaining. But Hall doesn't think either have landed on the perfect solution. In fact, he's not sure if anyone ever will, and that includes himself. "I think I am going to die without having solved it," he says.

But this won't stop Hall from trying. Now that RocketWerkz is solvent, he's putting every penny it earns into the pot for its next project—which he's described as a DayZ/ArmA style game. "I've never made any money from RocketWerkz. All the money goes back in," he says. "Our aim was to try to build money so we could make a big game, and that's really hard."

Retro gaming is just regular gaming to a sick, twisted mind like mine (and that of everyone I know, since we spend all our time playing old crap). But what makes something retro in the first place? Is it bits? Console generation? The size and contents of the box it came in, assuming it came in one at all? Whatever it is, it seems like the Wii and PS3 are being grandfathered into the definition—at least on Game Center CX, a Japanese retro gaming TV show.

According to an article from Automaton Media, the show—which is essentially a let's play variety show starring comedian Shinya Arino—recently held a vote as to whether Wii and PS3 games should be awarded the "retro" moniker and considered for inclusion. The poll reportedly got over 14,000 responses with 71% voting in favor, and when a second round followed, that percentage rose to 80% among nearly 17,000 voters. Arino declared that games from both consoles will indeed be considered for the show moving forward.

So what does this have to do with PC gaming? Well, we have a retro gaming scene too, and if we agree for the sake of argument that those consoles are retro on the basis that they're turning 20 this year, that would mean the following PC games are also retro: Medieval II: Total War, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Dawn of War - Dark Crusade, Neverwinter Nights 2, the first season of Telltale's Sam & Max reboot, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and perhaps most upsettingly, Company of Heroes.

Personally, I think it'd be a lot more fruitful to split our medium's history into distinct eras—something like console generations, but maybe less arbitrary than those divisions are—but it's also fun to have a label that gets thrown around once we've all agreed something is for old fuddy-duddies.

In that sense, I think the Wii and PS3 completely fit, even it's hard to swallow the notion of The Last of Us as being a game that debuted on "retro" hardware. Still, it's hard to imagine that definition will be useful for very long (if it is even of any use now). In 2046 are we going to say GTA 6 is a retro game, as if it has much of anything in common with games we hold as undeniably retro now, like Excitebike or DuckTales?

The observation that building a PC enjoys a similar appeal to clicking Lego bricks together is far from an original thought; when handed a big ol' box of PC case faceplates, side panels, and internal brackets, few could resist having a play. So, when I was left unattended with a box o' bits for the Corsair Frame 4000X, I set to work on building my dream PC case.

First, it's worth noting that a lot of the parts I'm about to talk about are compatible with the Corsair Frame 4000D PC case our Jacob reviewed. Second, let's talk about the all-important aesthetics: there's a range of options for faceplates and, as they're largely tool-free, you can swap them out to your heart's content. However, the RGB Flow front panel features an additional cable that you'll need to feed behind the modular front panel I/O every time.

The faff of threading this wire behind the I/O module, plus the fact I thought the RGB Flow looks a bit like a Cylon, meant I swapped it out for some tasteful wood panelling pretty sharpish. Mounting the radiator in the front of the case also meant I wasn't going to get the most out of the 4000X's full glass front panel, or 'pixel glass' face plate either.

I aimed to build something that was business in the front, with the dark walnut face plate, and something of a party in the back, with at least some of my many Miku Hatsune figurines. To be honest, "But where will Miku sit?" dictates a number of my PC building decisions, and this build was no different. For example, internally you can choose between a full-size PSU shroud, or a compact version that proved the perfect perch for Miss Hatsune.

To rewind a bit, let's talk about that modular I/O front panel. You can customise this and entirely swap it out. The MX-style green mechanical switch under the power button can be replaced for something more to your liking, and you've got a choice between a front panel with an audio jack, two USB Type-A ports, and one USB Type-C port—or an I/O module with only USB Type-C ports. I'm an old head, so I held on to my USB-A front ports.

Returning to the bigger picture, both the front and side panels can also be swapped out to dramatically change the look of the case too. Unlike the face plate, these aren't completely tool free panels. Instead, the top and side panels are held in place with a number of thumb screws. That's a fine compromise that balances both a secure attachment with easy-enough-detachment, though I do miss being able to pop off panels like I can on my Hyte Y40 at home.

But while we're on the subject of disassembling this customisable PC case, allow me one complaint: I hate reading digital manuals. My big box o' bits came with many smaller boxes, one of which featured a QR code on the underside of the lid. This takes you to a clearly labelled, nicely laid-out digital manual that I still hated scrolling through on my phone.

The rub is this: to check my understanding, it's way easier to flip back and forth through a physical booklet rather than scrolling up and down on a screen. Also, if I lose the physical manual, then that's my own fault—but if the digital manual disappears one day, that's out of my hands in every sense.

Anyway, manual gripes aside, the side panels also only come in black and white, making for limited colourways with other build possibilities. You could opt for a flat steel side panel, thereby rendering your PC yet another boring black (or white) box, but where's the fun in that? Another panel design lets you mount the Corsair Xeneon Edge LCD Touchscreen inside. While that would offer one more stage for my favourite Vocaloid, I wasn't about to drop another 200 bucks on this accessory—even if it does come in a fetching 'Atomic Purple'. Instead, I went for a typical fishtank look with a tempered glass side panel.

The Frame 4000X offers plenty of other options for laying out hardware, though it's less of a switch up inside compared to outside. Even Frankenstein's monster still needs a heart, lungs, and a digestive system, after all. Still, the case supports Mini-ITX, Micro-ATX, ATX, and E-ATX motherboards. You've also got multiple Motherboard tray options—this includes both the very sturdy, very premium Elite motherboard tray, plus the RapidRoute 2.0, a holey-moley design that makes it easier to zip tie your cables wherever you need. The back of the case features plenty of velcro cable management straps, so I stuck with the standard steel tray.

The inside of the case is pretty spacious, with room to support both a 360mm radiator installed up top, as well as one in the front of the case. The Infinirail system also makes it easy to customise the internal support brackets to fit whatever cooling system you're working with.

Speaking of support, this case also features a height-adjustable anti-sag bracket for your GPU. Unfortunately, I only had a small form factor graphics card to hand for this build, so I wasn't able to make the most of this feature. Not to worry though, because Miku was able to pick up the slack from her perch upon the PSU shroud.

Vocaloid brain rot aside, does any of that mean I was able to manifest my dream PC case with the Corsair Frame 4000X? Firstly, all of the bits I picked, including the case, totted up to about $170. So, it's definitely not the most affordable option, but that's the price of going all in on an ecosystem offering plenty of options.

You can push the price down by building on top of 4000D instead, but then you'll have to pay for parts that come with the newer case as standard, like that lovely full-tempered glass side panel. If that still sounds worth a go, you can configure your own Corsair Frame case here. Speaking of the 4000D, you can pick up a Corsair Vault version of this case in metallic purple for $130, so maybe I've found my dream PC case after all…

There's a lot to like about the newer 4000X's space, ease of access, and customisability. Much like the 4000D, you can strip the 4000X to the bare frame and then build it back up to be a PC case your way. But with so many removable parts, such a breadth of customisability options nearly became a bit of a nightmare for a scatter-brained PC builder like me.

In my infinite wisdom, I decided to remove the entire PCI backplate—despite the backplate's modular design encouraging you to unscrew only the select slats you need to secure your GPU. I realised my snafu way too late, and had to unscrew both the PSU shroud and the motherboard to get it back in place. Don't ask me why I took it out to begin with—just learn from my mistakes.

That embarrassing episode aside, I did enjoy my time building with this case. I'm also definitely intrigued by whatever Corsair has lined up for its customisable PC case ecosystem—what's holding me back from loving it right now, though, are the limited selection of colourways, and the pricing. But perhaps one day, sweet dreams will be made of this.

One of video gaming's great strengths is letting players step into worlds that previously only existed in words or on canvas or celluloid. Lush fantasy kingdoms, sprawling sci-fi universes, and of course surrealist dreamscapes where people have music printed on their butts.

Admittedly, that last one is a relatively recent addition to gaming's ever-expanding map of the human imagination. It comes courtesy of Hieronymus, an in-development FPS based on the works of late-medieval Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch.

Revealed at the Future Games Show during Gamescom, Hieronymus lets players explore 3D adaptations of Bosch's most famous works, such as his best-known triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. It sees you play as a woman named Helena van Aken as she attempts to unravel the mystery of her family's association with otherworldly powers, all while accompanied by none other than Faust himself. Or at least, the real-life alchemist who inspired the folk legend.

The trailer shows the player wandering through marshlands dotted with bulbous structures and mermaid knights, evading giant beasts as they stomp around the map, and watching some poor fellow get munched by a giant humanoid creature with a parrot's head.

Aesthetically, Hieronymus is instantly enticing. But how will Hieronymus actually play? Well, according to the game's Steam page, you'll be able to battle enemies with period-accurate weapons like a crossbow and an arquebus, employ alchemy to create projectiles that can stun creatures and influence their behaviour, and even catch and tame some of the weird critters that you'll find stumbling around.

Watching Hieronymus in action, my gut reaction is that visually it looks splendid, but mechanically it seems to need some work. The movement looks plodding and sluggish, while combat and interactions look quite slow and floaty and not especially engaging. Which is not to say I expect a game based on the works of Hieronymus Bosch to play like Doom Eternal, although now that I've thought about it, I really want to play an id Software/Hieronymus Bosch mashup.

I'm also curious to see how developer Hurdy-Gurdy Games deals with the fact that artworks like The Garden of Earthly Delights have a quite spectacular number of butts in them—which is something that Steam seems increasingly censorious about.

At the very least, I would expect the developers to replicate the butt which has musical notation printed on it—located in the panel of Earthly Delights that depicts hell. This particular rear end went viral several years ago after a tumblr blogger spotted the music inked across the cheeks of one of Bosch's tortured souls, then transcribed and recorded it for your listening pleasure.

Yet with or without the butt-music from hell, Hieronymus still looks like an intriguing prospect. A release date hasn't been announced yet, but I wouldn't expect to play it until next year at the earliest.

A massive cache of internal builds from Valve has reportedly leaked online, including beta builds of several classic Valve titles and possible weapons from Half-Life 2's cancelled third episode.

The leak, which began circulating on Saturday and comes from an unknown source, includes 12 terabytes of data currently being sifted through by data miners. The files are dated from a ten-year period between 2003 and 2013, and include builds and assets of many Valve projects across that timespan.

Thus far, data from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Left 4 Dead, and Portal 2 have all been claimed to feature in the leak. This reportedly includes the complete Portal 2 beta from 2009, a much sought-after artifact for Portal 2 fans.

The 2009 beta has a somewhat different story from the final game. It still takes place in the ruins of Aperture Science, but sees you guided through the initial test-chambers by pre-recordings of GLaDOS rather than Wheatley, and features other personality cores much more prominently. Curiously, a team of beta researchers and enthusiasts recently released a Portal 2 mod that attempts to recreate the beta build as accurately as possible, a project that took four years to realise.

In addition, Valve-focussed YouTuber and enthusiast Gabe Follower reports that the files include the Weaponizer, an unfinished weapon that has been previously linked to Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Information about the Weaponizer appeared in a separate leak that occurred in 2011, inside a directory labelled "ep3", while a gun that resembles the Weaponizer was shown in footage of Episode 3 that appeared in Valve's 20^th anniversary documentary on Half-Life 2 (via Gamerant).

Also apparently included are files (but apparently not a working build) of Valve's cancelled puzzle game F-STOP, a precursor to Portal 2 that was in-development for around a year before Valve canned the project. Also known as 'Aperture Camera' F-STOP featured a mechanic similar to the one seen in 2023 puzzler Viewfinder, in which the player takes photographs of the environment which can then be applied as 3D objects in the game world.

While it's not clear where the leak originated from, it has been linked to Valve's Steam2 content-server infrastructure, which was replaced by SteamPipe in March 2013, which would explain why the latest files from the archive are from that year.

I have contacted Valve for comment on the leak and will update this story with any response.

Activision has employed many different tactics in its unending battle against cheating in Call of Duty, from suing cheat makers for millions of dollars to employing complex technical solutions to ban cheaters as quickly as possible. In its latest gambit, Activision served cease-and-desist papers to one especially infamous Call of Duty cheat maker, filmed the entire exchange, and posted it online.

On Friday, a video appeared on the official Call of Duty X account (via Kotaku) showing a legal representative arriving at the home of Elocarry—a cheat maker who creates exploits for games like Rust and Apex Legends alongside Call of Duty—walking up to his front door and serving him a cease and desist order.

Now, if you're expecting some Dog the Bounty Hunter level of reality TV drama, expect to be disappointed. The whole exchange between Elocarry and the legal representative is brief and civil—pretty much "Hello. Here are your papers. Goodbye." The most interesting part occurs when the representative explains the papers are cease-and-desist orders, and Elocarry asks "What's that?", after which the representative suggests Elocarry call the relevant attorney's office.

Clearly though, the objective here is to serve a broader warning to Call of Duty cheaters. That not only will the publisher come after you legally, that it will also do so publicly and for the whole world to see. In a follow-up post, Activision says that it served 80 such cease-and-desist letters in its fight against cheat makers, disrupting 375 reseller operations and shutting down 30 vendors entirely.

Regarding Elocarry specifically, the cease-and-desist order appears to have had an effect. Further down the thread, the Call of Duty X account posted a screenshot from Elocarry's discord which states he has "temporarily paused sales" of Call of Duty cheats as he "review[s] a matter internally".

Activision also took the opportunity to discuss how these anti-cheat efforts are being carried forward into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. In another post in the thread, Activision stated that during last weekend's beta test "infection rates were lower, hardware bans were harder to evade and our time to action improved." Sadly, Activision didn't go into much more detail than this. But the publisher certainly seems keen to let players know how seriously it is taking cheating.

Modern Warfare 4's second beta weekend is currently ongoing, and unlike the first beta weekend is open to all players. Alongside the standard multiplayer test, players can also try a mission from the campaign and drop into Warzone for a bout of battle royale. PC Gamer's Morgan Park got hands-on with Modern Warfare 4 earlier in the year, coming away impressed by the level of detail on show, but unconvinced by its maps.

In his review of Transformers: War for Cybertron, Dan Stapleton referred to "the tingly nerd-joy of hearing original Optimus Prime voice actor Peter Cullen's authoritative dialogue". Every time the character appeared on screen, as he did many times in videogames like Transformers: Devastation and Fall of Cybertron or the middling movies, it was thrilling to hear him and realize, yes, they got the "real" Optimus Prime.

As noted by The Hollywood Reporter, Cullen has died at the age of 85. He joins a string of particularly beloved celebrities to have died in recent days, including Dolly Parton, Yayoi Kusama, and Red Alert 3 star and camp icon Tim Curry.

While most famous for his recurring role as Optimus Prime, Cullen also voiced Venger in Dungeons & Dragons, Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh, Monterey Jack in Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, and provided the menacing clicking sounds for the Predator.

His connection to videogames goes back to the first TV show based on a game, Pac-Man, in which he voiced Pac-Man's pet cat. As our Chris Livingston said after his recent viewing of the show, "What a waste of an S-tier set of pipes!" A year later, Cullen voiced Mario in Saturday Supercade, an anthology series with episodes based on videogames including Frogger, Pitfall, and Donkey Kong, making him the first actor to portray Mario in English.

Cullen also portrayed orcish warchief Orgrim Doomhammer in Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, a point-and-click adventure that Blizzard cancelled in 1998, but which has since appeared online in a playable form.

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

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

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

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

A native PC port of Nintendo's 1999 platformer Donkey Kong 64 is finally here, and the team that pulled it off is proud to say that they used zero generative AI tools in the process.

DK64 Rekongpiled, a recompilation or translation of the game's code for modern hardware (as opposed to emulation), dropped today. All you need is an original Donkey Kong 64 ROM to get it running.

In a post on Bluesky (and also in the trailer), contributor 2dos wrote that "no generative AI [was] used at any point in the process."

Everything in the original game is still there, including its old fuzzy 3D graphics, bouncy soundtrack, and the rest of the things that made Donkey Kong 64 an innovative and sometimes maddening game. It all runs at high resolutions and high framerates like any other modern PC game. You can even play with a mouse now, too.

The port is here just two months after a group of programmers decided to take the project on after seeing another group heavily use AI vibe code in the process. At the time, contributor 2dos wrote in the N64 Recomp Discord server that the competing project's use of AI would "make it progressively harder to manage as time goes on."

"Our DK64 recompilation project is backed by folks who have worked on and tinkered with the backend of the DK64 code for well over a decade, and do not rely on vibe coding to make code changes," they wrote.

Piles of ports using generative AI programming tools like Claude have shown up in emulation and hacking communities a lot in the last few years because it allows programmers to put them together in a fraction of the time. Experienced programmers, like the ones working on DK64 Rekongpiled, see far too many problems with the bugs and other problems vibe coding creates.

Instead, they prefer to do it as cleanly as possible using their own skills from messing with the game's code. Some of the same people who worked on the port previously worked on the DK64 Randomizer.

The release trailer for DK64 Rekongpiled features a goofy but exceptionally charming little scene where the villain King K. Rool—voiced by 2dos, of course—realizes his plan to keep people from playing the classic game on PC has been foiled by some pesky programmers. His henchman, also voiced by 2dos, can't believe they got it to run in 4K at 200 frames per second and ditches his boss to go play it himself.

Generative AI couldn't make anything as convincing as that, if you ask me.

Hand Elden Ring players a handful of new armor sets and weapons and they'll spend the next week or more experimenting and crunching the numbers to find out how they stack up against everything else in the legendary action RPG.

That is all that's been happening in the last few days since FromSoftware dropped the Tarnished Edition, a $5 DLC pack with new starting classes, armor sets, and horse armor.

It took a little while for people to figure out where to find everything added in the DLC. FromSoft did what FromSoft does and snuck them into places you wouldn't expect. But now that everyone feels like they've found it all, including some minor additions that weren't announced, the testing has begun.

By far the most popular new weapon is a greatsword you can steal from a new NPC who can show up for a duel. Leontiel's Greatsword is a direct reference to a character from Dark Souls 2 and comes with a powerful new move that mimics real life bullfighters, or matadors. When you use it, your character holds out a red cloth before stepping around your target and thrusting the sword into their back. It's easily one of the slickest animations in the game and, unsurprisingly, has players eager to see how it fairs against bosses.

Reddit user SaxSlaveGael put it to work on the one bull-like boss in the game, titling their post, "There's Only One Boss that truly deserves the Matador Treatment". When used on old Gaius in the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, the sword's Muleta skill works just like the real taunt that matadors do with the instrument it's named after. Gaius' boar was not ready for the feint and follow-up backstab. Is it the most efficient way to defeat the boss? Nope. Is it the sickest way to defeat the boss? Absolutely.

Another user, Ilamahradeys, took the sword for a spin against the Full-Grown Fallingstar Beast at the center of a crater in Mt. Gelmir. Their character must've been pretty over-leveled because one jab with the sword knocked off almost the entire health bar, instantly staggering the rock-like creature. I won't lie: Watching a boss as resilient and annoying as the Fallingstar Beast get completely dunked on, with style, no less, was one of the most satisfying things I've seen all week.

You'd think that in a game as challenging as Elden Ring players would only ever use armor for practical reasons. But, as is tradition with these games, "fashion souls" is more important to some people than pure defense. And those players are in love with the shiny new chestpiece from the Idus starting class. It's a svelte, polished chestplate that blends with a lot of other sets in the game. One player has it on to cosplay Casca from Berserk, while another is too distracted by the buff it seems to give to your greatest asset.

Elden Ring also attracts the tryhards who need to know how viable all the new stuff is for their 90th playthrough. There's a Reddit user who blasted through the game as the new heavy armor class. They say it's a particularly sturdy class that takes some time to fully come into its own. It's boosted vigor (health) and strength stats—two things melee-focused characters tend to stack—help it shine in the mid-to-late game when the nastiest bosses start showing up.

All of this has me excited to start up a new Elden Ring playthrough myself. The Tarnished Edition isn't a game-changing DLC by any means, but it has just enough new toys to play with to make me want to get in there and mess around. We don't always get a neat little package like this for only $5 and it's probably just enough to keep me busy until the flood of September games begins.

I don't envy Deadlock players who are dying to see the hybrid MOBA-shooter continue to grow in its pseudo-early access state. Valve is notoriously elusive when it comes to communication and has never made any promises to update it on a regular schedule.

This is the kind of uncertainty that drives Deadlock players to salivate over any new rumor or post by the developer-run Discord and forum account known as Yoshi. It's also what drives them to keep watch over the pizzerias near Valve's Seattle offices for spikes in visitors in the hopes that developers are lining up for grub as they finish the next major update.

This week, Deadlock players were hoping Valve would release its follow-up to the Old Gods, New Blood update, which added six new heroes to the game along with other major changes. Valve previously said a "large content update" was in the works alongside two other smaller updates to its ranked mode and items. But now that the ranked rework is out of the way, players were hoping to see another update before the end of the month.

According to a new post from Yoshi, the update is taking longer than expected. Yoshi doesn't specify if they're talking about the item update or the large content update—it almost implies they've been combined into one patch—but said it's going to have to wait until "late September."

"The delay is mainly due to the regular process of playtesting and iteration sometimes taking longer than expected, rather than a change in the scope of the update itself," they wrote. "We hope you will like the update when it comes out, and we'll make sure to give you a heads up (or order a ton of pizza) when things are a few days away or so."

Even though Valve has kept Deadlock an invite-only game since its debut, the last year of updates have gotten it to a place that feels like it could go fully public as an open beta. You never know with Valve, a studio that has spent years on projects only to quietly abandon them before. But the Old Gods, New Blood update was the first time it made a big deal of a new patch, creating an entire webpage dedicated to it and letting the community vote on the release order of the new heroes.

It was an unprecedented level of effort that seemed to suggest Deadlock had a relatively large amount of weight behind it for a Valve project. Since then, the updates have kept a steady pace.

Whether or not Yoshi's acknowledgement of the pizza thing is tongue-in-cheek, it does make it seem like the team behind Deadlock is aware that players desperately want more from the game and that it plans to deliver on that as fast as it can. I hope it also means Deadlock is closer than ever to opening the gates for everyone to try its sharply-designed mix of MOBA and hero shooter mechanics.

Nodusfall may look like developer miHoYo has slapped an Elden Ring-colored paint job onto Monster Hunter, but there's some signature HoYo innovation to find in between all those beastly battles and dark fantasy landscapes in its reveal trailer.

While there aren't an awful lot of specifics about the game right now, I've scraped together every gameplay clip and interview available to help explain what HoYo's breakup with anime girls is all about. From betas, to gacha, to gameplay and story, here's everything we know about Nodusfall so far.

Nodusfall release date speculation

Nodusfall release date details and speculation

Nodusfall doesn't have a solid release date yet—it doesn't even have a release year. That's typical for a HoYo game, though. It doesn't tend to announce release dates until a game's final round of beta testing is coming up.

Even though there's no release window HoYo's ever-reliable pattern of three open betas before release lets us predict that Nodusfall will launch sometime in 2028. Especially as its next game, Petit Planet, is out this winter, and Honkai: Nexus Anima seems set for a 2027 release, having just finished its second open beta.

The only thing that might throw a spanner in the works is that Nodusfall isn't your typical character/critter collector that HoYo is known for. So it might not be so typical when it comes to beta testing either.

Nodusfall beta and pre-registration

Speaking of betas, you can visit the official Nodusfall site and do a two-for-one combo by pre-registering and then answering a questionnaire for possible beta selection right after. The site mentions that this is for future betas, not for one ongoing right now. So you won't be fighting those Nodusfall bosses just yet no matter how furiously fast you refresh your inbox.

Nodusfall trailers

If you want a refresh on its gorgeous dark fantasy visuals and otherworldly boss designs that'd make Elden Ring and Diablo blush, here's the reveal trailer above. There's not much gameplay here, but what there is definitely throws up inevitable comparisons to co-op combat seen in the Monster Hunter series.

Nodusfall story and setting

The story of Nodusfall unfolds across a dark fantasy "mythic continent" teeming with corrupted legendary creatures, whose designs take inspiration from both Eastern and Western mythology. Like manticores, dragons, and giant bears. You take on the role of a "Weaver," a being "enlightened by the divine" and entrusted with sacred missions to restore order to the continent corrupted by the "Dreadnodi". So basically, you're a big important badass with divine magic powers and chunky weapons whose mission is to blast scary monsters to get new gear save the world.

On your way to annihilating ethereal beasts and untold horrors, you'll journey through distinct regions with landscapes and cultures that take equal inspiration from various real-life cultures and mythologies, with more regions set to launch post-release. My fellow Genshin Impact players will be familiar with this formula.

Thanks to its reveal trailer, we know that some of Nodusfall's landscapes include golden hills, fiery skies, dreary moors, misty forests, dusty deserts, and gargantuan canyons. So far so Elden Ring, but it sounds like there's more variety in the works.

What I'm most interested in seeing is just how dark Nodusfall ends up being. The reveal trailer suggested a mature story, which isn't a first for HoYo—Genshin has dropped its fair share of dark lore and ran—but not shifting to a wisecrack or bonkers anime moment right after would be new.

Nodusfall gameplay

Breaking from the single-player teambuilding mold that HoYo is known for, Nodusfall is actually a free-to-play co-op action game that pits you and your squad against mythical creatures. Pick a character, build a loadout, and work with up to three other players to defeat difficult bosses and get the resources needed to unlock new skills and forge new weapons.

Why yes, it is eyebrow-raisingly similar to Monster Hunter, but there are some key differences. Such as:

• Powerful "Divine Skills" collected from bosses
  • This might be how you transform into other forms mid-combat, as seen in the reveal trailer
• Finishing blow cinematics when an enemy's weakness is revealed
  • Both solo and co-op finishers
• Emphasis on squad variety required to defeat hard bosses, like an MMO
• PvP mode, where you can take control of a boss, or fight a player controlling a boss

And although not expanded on, Nodusfall's official site claims that you can "switch roles and loadouts at will". Which presumably means you're not locked to playing just one character or build per account.

In practice, judging from hands-on impressions and what little gameplay there is right now, Nodusfall looks like it's actually a mix of Elden Ring, an MMO, and Monster Hunter—not just a Monster Hunter wannabe. Yeah, this may just sound like even more games that Nodusfall is riffing on, but if there's one thing I've learned about playing HoYo games over the years it's that you should never doubt its ability to innovate on the familiar and create one heck of a satisfying combat loop.

We played Nodusfall

PC Gamer's Fraser Brown played Nodusfall right after its reveal and was pretty impressed, even as a HoYo skeptic. "First of all: Nodusfall is not remotely a soulslike," Fraser says in his Nodusfall preview. "Monster Hunter is a closer relative. Solo adventurers and groups can select contracts, and then go out into the world to hunt down big beasties. These are lengthy, elaborate fights with multiple phases, taking place in spacious outdoor areas."

"I became rather fond of the clash mechanic, where you charge up a strong attack, and release it right as the monster is about to hit you, countering the attack. It helps that I looked stylish doing it, with my already massive sword growing, transforming into a magical, glowing WMD."

Is Nodusfall gacha?

There is no character gacha in Nodusfall, which means you'll never have to rely on luck (or piles of cash) to get new characters—they're all obtained by simply playing the story. No official line on if anything else will be linked to gacha systems, but HoYo has stated that cosmetic monetization is "an important avenue" that it'll be considering for Nodusfall.

So no, Nodusfall is not a gacha game in the traditional sense, but it may end up incorporating some RNG pulls elsewhere. Maybe for exclusive cosmetics similar to Where Winds Meet, or maybe even some special type of gear. Or maybe we'll get the biggest win of all and Nodusfall will be entirely gacha-free! (Please let me dream.)

Survival game The Long Dark was supposed to be over when its final story episode was released earlier this year. Developer Hinterland announced its sequel, Blackfrost, two years ago and planned to go the early access route with it just like the first game.

According to a new update from the studio, however, those plans have changed a little bit. While it continues to work on Blackfrost in the background, a small team of developers have been moved back onto The Long Dark to make new DLC for its survival mode. Hinterland hopes going back to the 9-year-old game will help it endure an "uncertain" industry.

"When we first announced Blackfrost, the sequel to The Long Dark, the game industry was in a very different place," it said. "In the short time since, entire business models have been thrown into chaos, the geopolitical situation has become extremely complicated, the picture of what the next generation of console hardware will be has become a lot less clear, and the amount of time and money players spend on new games has declined as everyone turns to the comfort and security of games they already know."

Over the next two years, the studio plans to continue updating the survival sandbox mode in the game with bug fixes, quality-of-life improvements, new features, and new regions from the final story episode. It's also going to release new DLC, one of which will come out piecemeal like its previous Tales From The Far Territory expansion pass. The second DLC "will be… different from that," it said, withholding info because it's still early in development.

Hinterland assured everyone Blackfrost is still in the works but said that its early access launch has been pushed to next year. The studio remains independent despite having publishers reach out to help with the sequel. "We've not yet encountered a partner who we feel is truly motivated by what's best for Hinterland or for our players, so we'll continue to self-fund and self-publish the game."

Hinterland said it's considering raising the price of the standalone Survival Mode as well as the new DLCs to help offset the loss from people buying them on sale. "We’re also mindful that the economic reality faced by a ton of folks today is that prices are increasing everywhere and you probably can’t really afford for games to get more expensive as well," it said. "We’re really trying to find a good balance here."

Given the flood of layoffs across the games industry in the last few years and the cost of hardware skyrocketing, I can see why an indie studio like Hinterland would go back to what works as people are forced to be more picky than ever about what they spend money on. It's already hard enough making a splash on the crowded pages of Steam when you release a new game. I just hope it works out and it can continue to make the sort of things it wants to without feeling anchored to its breakout release.

It's easy to be cynical about the modern games industry, what with developers being laid off left and right and hardware prices skyrocketing thanks to AI datacentres gobbling up all the components. But it's also worth pointing out the positives too. For starters, games are more abundant than ever before. More games get released in a single day than most people could feasibly play in an entire year, and those games cover every genre and experience imaginable. If you can think of a game you want to play, it probably exists in some form. If it doesn't, someone is probably trying to make it.

As well as being omnipresent, games are cheaper than they've ever been too. This statement might seem spurious in the era of £70 games. But aside from the fact that, relative to inflation, games are technically cheaper than they were thirty years ago, it doesn't account for the endless stream of bundles and giveaways across all digital platforms. They're so frequent that, by the time you've finished playing your current game, there's a good chance you'll be able to grab what you want to play next on some form of discount.

In short, we're spoiled for choice in a way that's drastically different from how the gaming scene was thirty years ago, when games were significantly less numerous and generally less accessible financially. It's hard to estimate because everybody's experience varies. But I think, in 1996, if you were buying a new game every month, you would have been considered to be doing pretty well. For most people, new games would have been limited to Christmases and birthdays, and a lot of people would have experienced games through shareware demos or hooky copies burned onto a CD by your mate.

I don't want to turn this article into a Facebook post by your grandad, so let's stress that even if the number of game releases was far fewer, it didn't feel like that. Still, the idea of being able to hoover up a whole bunch of PC games for pennies was virtually unthinkable.

There was one big exception though—the MegaPak. The MegaPak was the closest thing we had to Humble Bundle (without the charity element), a big-box compilation of games that had typically been released one or two years prior. The MegPak was the production of Megamedia Corp, which has relatively little footprint online. But I can tell you that its handful of other publishing credentials include the Ukrainian Quake clone Chasm: The Rift.

The first Megapak was released in 1994, featuring eleven games. You can tell this because the box proudly displays the number 11 in massive yellow font, which I suppose indicates how novel the concept was. It has also led some database sites to label it as "Megapak 11", which was incredibly confusing for me when researching for this article because the Megapak line ended at number 10.

Nonetheless, it was probably right for Megapak to focus on the number of games for marketing purposes, because the quality of the titles in the pack is, shall we say, variable? The highlights of the first Megapak are Ultima spinoff World of Ultima: The Savage Empire, combat flight sim F-14 Tomcat, and Test Drive 3: The Passion—a title that makes it sound like a vehicular reimagining of Christ's crucifixion. Also included was Dinosaur Safari, an edu-tainment game that was halfway between an adventure game and Microsoft Encarta. I bring this up for no reason other than I played a ton of it on my dad's PC—Megapak notwithstanding.

This is a typical overview of the content of a Megapak, a lesser title from a big franchise, a bunch of fair to middling vehicle simulators, and a couple of oddball picks thrown in. As time went on, juicier games began to appear. Megapak 2 included Ocean's Jurassic Park, which people fondly remember today. Megapak 3, meanwhile, had TFX, a jet-fighting sim that was a cut above most combat sims of the era.

The heyday of the Megapak came in 1996, when Megapak 5 arrived. Among the pinball game and pool simulators were several genuine PC gaming heavyweights. Most notable was Jagged Alliance, the mercenary turn-based tactics games which alongside X-COM helped formalise the genre. Also included was Apogee's Descent rival Terminal Velocity, and Looking Glass' Flight Unlimited, a well-regarded flight sim which has been somewhat forgotten in the wake of games like Thief and System Shock 2.

These weren't the best games that would eventually feature on a Megapak. Megapak 7 has Caesar 2 and Heroes of Might and Magic, while Megapak 8 treated players to SimCity 2000 and Mechwarrior II. But Megapak 5 was the best expression of what a Megapak was meant to be, a snapshot of PC gaming in the present moment.

Megapak 5 was also the first of them I personally owned, gifted as a Christmas present in 1997. The main thing I remember about it, outside of the games themselves, is the weight of the box. Each game came on its own CD in a paper sleeve, and if I remember rightly, the pack had a bespoke manual thick enough to kill a large insect or small rodent. You could feel the value of it in your hands.

The grab-bag nature of it was also part of the appeal. I was too young to have much foreknowledge of which games in the box were worth my time and which weren't, so there was an element of discovery in playing them. It was through Megapak 5 that I discovered Entomorph: Plague of the Darkfall, which was my introduction to roleplaying games and has been lodged in my head ever since.

The Megapak era burned bright and faded quickly, with nine volumes released between 1994 and 1998. What happened to Megapak Corp afterwards isn't entirely clear. A tenth and final Megapak collection appeared in 2001. But it was published by Empire Interactive rather than Megamedia Corp. All the games featured on this Megapak were also Empire-published titles.

Clearly then, the Megapak license transitioned from Megamedia Corp to Empire in some fashion. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any information online to confirm this, and there seems to be no mention of the Megapak name or Megamedia Corp in Empire's published accounts.

Either way, there is a clear indication of why the Megapak line came to an end. In 2000, Empire launched Xplosiv, its own range of budget titles, which, alongside Sold Out, became one of the two main brands you'd find piling up in the bargain bin of UK game stores nationwide. Hence the likely scenarios are that Empire bought Megapak to kill the competition, opted not to continue with the series after a poor performance from Megapak 10, or entered into a publishing agreement with Megamedia Corp for Megapak 10 while spinning up its own budget range on the sly.

Whatever happened, the upshot was that the era of big-box PC compilations ended, and the era of lurid orange DVD cases began. I don't begrudge that—I had plenty of fun with those later budget lines too. Nor would I choose to go back to the Megapak era over our modern age of abundant, easily accessible games.

There is one thing that I miss from that time though, and that's how much easier it was to judge a game on its own terms. Between algorithms pushing what they deem worthwhile to the surface of every storefront, and every game being user reviewed to oblivion the second it comes out, every game release is surrounded by huge amounts of noise. Perhaps that, ultimately, was the true value of a Megapak. Not getting cheap games that you knew you'd love. But getting cheap games that you didn't.

After completing the initial tutorial on Star Wars Galaxies Restoration—a private server revival project for the Star Wars-themed MMO that launched in 2003, was updated until 2005, and was shuttered in 2011—I was dumped out of a shuttle in Mos Eisley and into a warzone. Squads of rebel and imperial players were exchanging blaster fire and lobbing thermal detonators. When I asked the passing combatants why Tatooine was worth fighting over, a man in stormtrooper armor said I was lucky I wasn't PvP-flagged.

Despite the early-2000s assets and stiff animations, it was the most dynamic that an MMO had felt for me in years. But in the week I've spent revisiting Star Wars Galaxies, I've seen very little other excitement. I've killed no impressive enemies. I've done barely any quests. It's an MMO that's content to let me log in and do little of note whatsoever—and that's exactly what I've been missing.

In comparison, whenever the WoW itch gets strong enough for me to reup my subscription, I end up doing nothing but doing. Logging into WoW in 2026 means enduring a bombardment of refreshed weekly prompts and directives urging me to get on my flying mount and accelerate at breakneck speed towards whatever prescribed activity with prerequisite player count will provide my next predictable gear score increase.

A more civilized age

WoW has become a relentlessly efficient machine, ensuring players waste the least possible time while being propelled through seasonal ranks and escalating difficulty tiers. In terms of providing their users with those quantifiable successes, it's hard to argue that the MMOs of today aren't better designed than their older iterations. And yet, it's the moments when I step off the treadmill where they still feel the most magical.

When I can still find joy in WoW, it's not through the weekly content blitz. It's when I take the scenic route through an old leveling zone, and wonder what quest that dwarf running in the distance is doing. It's when I earn a grateful emote from a player of the opposite faction who can't otherwise thank me for helping them with a dicey fight. It's during the pinnacle of incidental MMO encounters: Receiving a sorely needed heal from a passing player who could've just as easily left me to die.

It's in those moments where it feels like the MMO rediscovers itself—where it recaptures the ways that multiplayer in a shared, persistent world can be a source of wonder, and not just a rote feature of the form. It's that wonder that motivated Star Wars Galaxies in 2003, and it's what its private server maintainers have worked to keep in suspended animation ever since.

Outer Rim living

My hours in Galaxies have been aimless ones. I've been casually puttering across the Tatooine wastelands, learning how to survey for minerals and water, how to harvest womp rat corpses for bones and how to use them to flavor what must be the world's worst tea—slowly gaining an understanding of its skill systems and crafting mechanics, but having no real idea whether I'm accomplishing anything another player would consider worthwhile.

I haven't used my blaster on anything more threatening than a nameless smuggler, and I'm not sure where I'd get a better shooting iron even if I wanted one. I could be answering the call to adventure as one of the galaxy's heroes, but the game's been content to let me ignore it.

And I've been content to go on ignoring. Because all that time I'm wasting out in the sands is time I've spent watching a bounty hunter tear by on a speeder bike and wondering what grim business he's on, or exchanging greetings with a Zabrak who's working on his carbine marksmanship. The hour I spent surveying eahiate iron deposits was one that led me through a sprawling, player-made city out in the dunes, its vacant tents and droid stalls and derelict cruisers parked in hand-built plazas proof that other players once shared that same space.

When I drift back through Mos Eisley, its scant environmental details and featureless wall textures feel vibrant, because the aliens, smugglers, and imperial agents I'll bump elbows with want nothing more than the pleasure of lingering there together.

Star Wars Galaxies has been dead for years—but it's a dead game that still remembers how to feel like a living world better than the market-leading MMOs that survived it.

Creative Assembly dropped a whole bunch of new information about Total War: Warhammer 40,000 at Gamescom this week, and yeah, this all sounds amazing. But what is it actually like to play?

I got an extended look at a preview build yesterday, where I was able to spend an hour exploring a slice of the tutorial, a little bit of the campaign, and finally a huge late-game battle, and oh boy. Folks, it's incredible. Total War: Warhammer 40,000 was, hands down, the coolest thing I saw at Gamescom.

Even in the tutorial battle, which starts you off with only a few Ultramarine units, it's immediately obvious how special Total War 40k is—I don't think a tutorial has ever made me giddy before.

Yes, the massive-scale scraps are one of Total War 40k's big hooks, but the smaller battles are actually great at showing off what sets this game apart from its predecessors. My tiny army of Intercessors—just some basic dudes—ended up feeling as powerful and versatile as a standard, full-featured Total War army.

As the green tide of orks charged towards my position, I stuck my lads behind some cover and opened fire. But they weren't just firing their basic bolt rifles. Units have multiple wargear options, so my small Ultramarine army made up for what it lacked in numbers with the diversity of its arsenal.

Grenades were getting tossed out, for instance, or launched from grenade launchers, leaving big holes in the ork horde. The devastation left behind was stunning. When a few eager orks managed to make it to my fortified position, it became a melee scrum, with my Intercessors proving that they can rack up the kills even when they aren't shooting.

And that's just the tip of the bloody iceberg. The variety of weapons represents the greater range of tactical decisions you'll need to make, depending on who your enemy is. Against orks, for instance, autos can be handy, letting you mow them down when they come into close range—which is where orks naturally like to be. But if you're fighting the aeldari, you'll benefit from long-range weapons, like the stalker bolt rifle.

Every unit still has a primary function, but this system just nudges them slightly beyond that function, giving them a few more options. So an Intercessor unit might not be the best choice for taking on some light vehicles, but with their grenade launchers they are more than capable of standing their ground and melting metal.

When another group of orks appeared, I decided to call in reinforcements. Assault Intercessors. I aimed their drop pods right at the green mess, so when they landed they took out plenty of extremely surprised orks. Then they just started hacking at them with chainswords, covering their armour in ork blood. In a matter of seconds, the orks were routed.

In the brief campaign slice, I got to create my own Space Marine chapter, decked out in red and gold, which I named the Blood Drinkers. [It has since been pointed out that this is the name and colours of as real successor chapter, that I created quite by accident.] The build didn't contain the full range of customisation options that Creative Assembly is planning—and we can expect even more after launch—but there were still plenty of colour and emblem options.

I didn't get to see much settlement development or management in this portion, as it's not ready for prime time yet, but I was still impressed with just how striking the campaign map looked, with its rotatable 3D planets and, when you zoom out, an entire solar system waiting to be played with. Creative Assembly's artists are firing on all cylinders. These are grimy, imposing worlds that look hostile to all life, but they're simultaneously gorgeous. And busy, too, full of geographical flourishes, gargantuan hive cities, miasma-filled forests, shipwrecks and wandering armies.

The campaign slice ended in a medium-sized fight, which I handled quickly because I knew I was running out of time and I desperately wanted to jump into the late-game brawl. I was not disappointed.

I was playing as the Ultramarines once more, arriving just in time to see the desperate soldiers of the Astra Militarum about to get overrun. While the Space Marines and Astra Militarum are separate playable factions, they are both part of the Imperium of Man, and thus work together. In the campaign, for instance, my settlement was protected by an Astra Militarum garrison.

Anyway! My buddies were in trouble, and the ork army seemed endless. I had some Predator tanks and Dreadnoughts at my disposal, but I was still fielding a tiny force—the rest of my units were up in space, waiting to be called down when needed. In another Total War, I might have been worried. But Total War 40k is eager to give you all sorts of tactical tricks to keep your warriors alive.

The cover system truly is a revelation. This isn't the first Total War to feature cover—that would be Empire—but this time it benefits significantly from an inherent dynamism. As buildings and walls get toppled, your cover disappears, but as the battle progresses you'll encounter new places for your troops to hunker down—a massive crater that just appeared, for example.

A greater focus on defense could have turned Total War 40k into a slightly plodding game, or made it static, even, with entrenched units taking potshots at each other. But the dynamism means that the battlefield is constantly changing shape, so you need to adapt on the fly throughout a fight. It was surprising to see just how much of the battlefield ended up being used. This is easily the most kinetic Total War has ever been.

You'll also have to consider how to beat cover. Positioning has always been critical to Total War's battles, but that truth is so much more pronounced here, when you've got opponents just chilling behind walls or in buildings. Thankfully you're spoiled for choice—you could drop some reinforcements behind them or on top of them; sacrifice some lower tier units as a distraction, while you send some Terminators in to flank the enemy; or you could just go all out, bombing the position or sending a war machine through the wall.

When Creative Assembly first introduced Total War: Warhammer, there were several game-changing features, but Total War 40k is next level. The Total War fundamentals have been preserved, of course, and I found that my familiarity with the series meant that, even with all the changes and focus on ranged combat, I was still in my element, but not a minute went by without me witnessing something or doing something that I've never experienced in a Total War before.

As someone whose dining table often hosts giant battles, I'm primed to love this stuff. I let out an audible whoop when I called in my beefcake Terminators, and watched orks getting completely squished as they walked into beautiful powerfists. Even if 40k isn't really something you've engaged with before, however, you're going to have a blast.

After the demo ended, one thing felt clear to me: I'd just played the future of strategy games. There were just so many "holy shit" moments. I may have only played for an hour, but I got a day's worth of fun out of it. My predilection for cynicism has been stomped by hefty Space Marine boots.

One of the most intriguing creative decisions Rockstar made with Grand Theft Auto 6 is reducing the number of playable characters from three to two. Since sequels typically operate on the rule of 'bigger is better', the logical progression would have been to add even more playable characters to the roster.

It turns out that Rockstar did indeed consider this. Speaking to IGN, studio co-head Rod Nelson explained that a GTA with four protagonists was on the table. But Rockstar decided against it due to concerns about spreading the player's attention too thin.

"As the narrative unfolds, we're quite conscious to try and make sure that players have enough time with each character," Nelson explained. "After doing GTA 5, we talked about different ideas of 'Do we have more characters? How do we follow up three characters? Is it four characters now?' But we worried about diluting the amount of player time with each, and therefore player connection with those characters."

This fear of diluting that time spent with each character is also what led Rockstar down the path of two protagonists. "The question became: how do you make players feel like 'I love them both'" Nelson adds. "Chemistry is a notoriously hard thing to do in any sort of entertainment. Either the characters and the actors that embody them have it—or they don't."

Nelson adds that "everyone involved worked at that pretty hard" and believes that the team eventually "got it." Having watched the extended trailer that recently aired on Netflix—the relationship between the two characters was certainly the element that stood out most to me.

For example, there's a moment toward the end of the trailer where Lucia gets beaten up and tossed down a flight of stairs. In the spectrum of horrible things that can happen to a GTA character, this is relatively minor. But I was surprisingly shocked by it, because everything shown up to that point had invested me in Lucia and Jason's relationship—more than I ever felt about any of the characters in Grand Theft Auto 5.

Obviously, there's plenty more to Grand Theft Auto 6 than just its two protagonists, like its world that's three times the size of Red Dead Redemptions 2's, and the fact it has a more nuanced version of the honor system seen in Rockstar's most recent Wild West adventure. But I increasingly believe it will be that central partnership that defines it over the other GTA games, especially since Rockstar appears to be sticking to the script when it comes to campaign mission design.

Welcome to your daily dose of doomcore, and no, I don't mean that peculiar genre of music. I mean the state of the PC gaming market. Not to be too much of a negative Nelly but things are not looking great out there.

You probably didn't need me to tell you that, but given I've been keeping my eye on the best deals for gaming PCs every week (minus holidays) for the past couple of years, I thought I'd share with you some more specific, cheerfully glum context. You're welcome.

Let's take a nice trip down memory lane to check out a couple of the deals I spotted for gaming PCs around this time last year.

Here we are: In an assortment I highlighted last September, an RTX 5060 Ti rig for just $1,000. Today, the cheapest we see any just-about-decent RTX 5060 Ti gaming PC retailing for, is about $1,200—this AVGPC Max for $1,209 at Newegg, for instance.

But that's not even half of it, because you'll notice the RAM in that $1,200 rig is DDR4, not DDR5. And if it wasn't DDR4, you could almost certainly expect such an RTX 5060 Ti rig to have just a single 16 GB stick of DDR5 in single-channel mode.

How about at the higher end? Well, there's this RTX 5070 Ti gaming PC I also highlighted last September. That was $1,900 for the whole package: RTX 5070 Ti, Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, and even a full 2 TB of storage. Y'know, back when we could recommend 2 TB of storage as a baseline for mid-range and higher rigs, while keeping a straight face.

And now? I think you know the deal. I actually struggle to find RTX 5070 Ti gaming PCs worth highlighting anymore—the GPU seems to be more lightly stocked than others. Currently, I've got a PC with the same base specs listed (on sale!) on our deals hub for $2,400 at Newegg. If you're okay opting for an RX 9070 XT instead, you can lower that to $2,099 at Walmart, which does net you a more recent X3D chip—our favourite, in fact—but you're also sacrificing 1 TB of storage.

More generally, I can tell you that after looking at gaming PC deals week-in, week-out for the past couple of years, pretty much every last bastion of hope for reasonable prices has now slipped away.

For quite a while and even until very recently, RX 9070 XT PCs held on to lower price tags while Nvidia PCs slipped out of stock, presumably because pre-shortage stocks were lasting longer as fewer AMD PCs tend to be scooped up by PC gamers than Nvidia ones. But recently I've noticed even the best deals on those seem to have slipped away. On the rare occasion there is one for a decent sub-$2,000 price, you're very lucky if it has more than 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage.

The lower end of the market is particularly dire. Before the memory crisis, there was quite an abundance of RTX 5060 gaming PCs going on sale for under $1,000, sometimes actually for well under this. This one I highlighted last October, for instance, cost just $749. It seemed to come with just a single 16 GB stick of DDR5 memory, but these days you're looking at almost $1,000 for the same thing, and that's if you're lucky (even deals like that are getting quite rare).