The Verge reports that Dan Greenawalt, studio head of Forza Motorsport developer Turn 10, is planning to retire after nearly 27 years, quoting an internal memo from Trevor Williams of Playground Games. "Dan Greenawalt has decided that this is the right time for him to retire from Microsoft," Williams is reported to have said, clarifying that Greenawalt will stay on temporarily as an adviser during a changeover period.

Microsoft announced in September that it plans to merge Turn 10 and Playground, the two Forza studios, into one entity as part of the same restructure that will merge Obsidian into Bethesda and hand Halo over to Activision. Oh, and that restructure will also see another 268 employees being laid off.

Turn 10 had already been turned into a support studio for Playground's Forza Horizon following the 2023 reboot of Forza Motorsport, with former developer Fred Russell saying last year that the Motorsport series died in a prior round of cuts at Microsoft.

Nine years ago, Matt Filer officially began work on the OpenCAGE mod tools for Alien: Isolation—following two-and-a-half years of work on prototype versions. During that time the tools have been available for anyone to use, which is part of the reason Creative Assembly's legendarily scary horror game has a variety of mods already. (Though the VR mod works differently, since it's actually enabling an unfinished mode that shipped with the game.)

OpenCAGE has finally made it to version 1.0, which can be downloaded on Steam. Filer proudly told us his mod tools have "now reached the point where you're able to implement full custom maps, missions, modes, characters, weapons, animations, sounds, models, textures, and more!"

As a demonstration of what's possible, Filer is making a Halo-themed custom map. "It features custom cinematics, enemies, weapons, all on a brand new map with a custom HUD," he said. "It has reached a point now of being able to make full total conversion mods, which has always been my end goal, so it's cool to finally be here!"

Alien: Isolation just won our scariest videogame poll, and I consider it a well-earned victory. It's one of the few games I've seen frighten even people who aren't normally bothered by horror thanks to how unpredictable and relentless the xenomorph is when pursuing you. And those dead-eyed Worker Joe robots are no slouches either.

Hopefully some creative mods will give us reason to go back to Alien: Isolation, and help tide over the wait for the upcoming Alien: Isolation 2, which is likely to be available some time in 2027.

As reported by Eurogamer, FromSoftware has shut down multiplayer (invasions, co-op, messages) in Dark Souls 2 and 3 for an indeterminate amount of time due to an undisclosed "server issue." The company shared the news in an October 30 post on X, "The Everything App."

The closure affects all platforms for each respective game, and the company said that it would provide an updated timeline for server restoration once it had more information. This isn't the first time something like this has happened with FromSoftware's back catalogue. In early 2022, on the eve of Elden Ring's release, a catastrophic remote code execution vulnerability was discovered in all of the Dark Souls games. That resulted in PC servers for the series getting shut down for months.

But there are key differences here: It's only Dark Souls 2 and 3 this time around, while the issue extends to all platforms, not just PC. That gives me some hope that this issue is not only less serious, but it will take less time to resolve as well.

It honestly couldn't have happened at a better time for PC players, though: Legend modder Yui's Seamless co-op series runs on its own servers, separate from the official FromSoft ones, meaning the party's still going if you download the mod and play that way. Dark Souls 2 finally got the Seamless co-op treatment at the end of September (Dark Souls 3 has been covered for awhile).

As its name implies, Seamless Co-op makes it easier to play through the entirety of these games together with a friend or friends, offering shared progress and no disconnects on death or defeat of a boss. I've been loving Dark Souls 2 Seamless Co-op alongside my PC Gamer colleagues Tyler Colp and Sean Martin.

On October 29, bedrock fanfiction website Archive of Our Own (AO3) was taken down for maintenance that was initially predicted to last 12 hours. Later that day, the estimated downtime was upped to two to four weeks. On October 30, the site's volunteer leadership shared a more substantial update about the security intrusion behind the takedown.

At the time of writing, the team is "still in the early stages" of determining the scope of the intrusion. AO3 has assured readers and authors that the archive itself and associated data (bookmarks, kudos, etc.) remain intact. Donor information is stored on a completely separate system, meaning that data is safe.

The AO3 team is "unable to rule out" that its user database was compromised in the hack. AO3 user accounts include emails, usernames, IP addresses, and hashed (encrypted) passwords. In an abundance of caution, the team advises users to update passwords they may have reused from AO3⁠—but that's just good practice in general, gamers.

Over the coming weeks, the team anticipates that AO3 will be brought back in a "degraded" state, meaning incomplete or read-only access, as well as further intermittent downtime. As for why this happened, that remains unclear.

AO3 is a very widely-used service, and the sheer numbers game of weak passwords combined with emails in its user database could make it valuable on the black market. I also don't think you can rule out a more ideological motivation for such an attack, given fanfiction's long association with women and the queer community.

Either way: It's just poor form. Very meanspirited. An invitation to several lifetimes' worth of bad karma. I see AO3 on a continuum with The Internet Archive and Wikipedia as a holdout of a more utopian internet, a website that exists, uncorrupted by money, because people like it and it's good. Why would you mess that up for everybody?

The case as presented by Rebelzize seems fairly open and shut: A volunteer team being sued by a former volunteer over contributions excised from the project? There are potential material benefits to consider: Skyblivion has a level of scope and popularity that could leave participation in it as strong a resume line as shipping a commercial game. Fallout London's developers even pivoted to being their own indie studio.

But that's not a clear-cut monetary incentive, and the clout of participation is contingent on productive contribution to the project. While it is worth noting that we only have Rebelzize's accounting of events, I think there are green flags pointing to his trustworthiness:

• The call to action is for pro bono legal aid in line with the project's overall volunteer nature, not fundraising.
• The former volunteer is not named, and Rebelzize urges against the sort of Reddit gumshoe sleuthing you see so often in these situations.
• Skyblivion as a whole has run for a long time without major scandal.

Unless you, the reader, are or know a lawyer with expertise in IP/GDPR cases⁠—check out Skyblivion's website to contact them, in that case⁠—there's not much for a given fan of the project to do. Rebelzize noted that he has paid legal help lined up should the call for volunteers fail. Even if a lawsuit is filed, it does not sound⁠—at least from this vlog⁠—like it could imperil Skyblivion's release. I have questions, but ideally this whole situation will resolve cleanly enough that we never know exactly what happened:

• What, specifically, did this volunteer work on in the game?
• Did redoing this work have any bearing on Skyblivion's delay from 2025 into '26?
• What happened here interpersonally? Was there an issue of crediting the work done? Are there any missing details that, if they don't justify the volunteer's legal threat, at least make it more understandable?

At last call, Skyblivion was still scheduled to release this year, but time is running short for that goal. We Elder Scrolls-likers at PC Gamer have been excited about it for years. Skyblivion promises a more ground-up remake of TES 4: Oblivion⁠—complete with radically redesigned dungeons and biomes⁠—in Skyrim's engine. This is in contrast to the more graphics-focused Oblivion Remastered we got in 2025.

Earlier this month, Big Walk developer House House explained why their co-op puzzle adventure wouldn't be available for sale on Xbox: Microsoft's gaming division is a priority target of the the Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, which names the tech giant in general as a pressure target alongside Google, Amazon, and a host of other companies. House House isn't alone in taking this action.

Narrative platformer Celeste and party fighter TowerFall have delisted from Xbox recently, and Maddy Thorson of Maddy Makes Games fame took to BlueSky to explain why: "For those who’re asking, yes, we delisted Celeste and TowerFall on Xbox. We did this to support the BDS boycott."

For reference, Microsoft gets a cut whenever it makes a sale through its proprietary digital distribution storefront, similar to Steam. Console producers tend to take a loss on hardware, subsidizing it for accessibility to more consumers, so they can make up the difference by selling other stuff, a crucial slice of that other stuff being games.

So as long as sales trickle in for critically acclaimed games like Celeste and TowerFall, that's a bit of easy money for Microsoft—the choice to delist the game stops that. If you're an Xbox owner who wants to observe the boycott, you can always buy used physical versions of games where that's an option or switch to another platform for the time being.

But this is PC Gamer dot com, so you probably haven't even heard of the Xbox. You've certainly never seen one up close. You're probably playing Chessmaster 9000 on your second monitor as you read this, you beautiful freak. In any case, you can always buy TowerFall on Steam. Same goes for Celeste.

As reported by MMORPG.com, Square Enix has delayed Final Fantasy 14's Evercold expansion to February 2 from its initial January launch window. Preorders for the add-on will open up on Wednesday, November 4⁠—those preorders also come with early access to the expansion on February 19.

The news was delivered by FF14 honcho Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida at the opening day of Final Fantasy 14's 2026 Fan Festival in Tokyo. Yoshi-P explained that the team was committed to its January window, and were even "just barely" on track to meet that schedule. Quality concerns led Yoshi-P to make the call on three extra weeks of development time.

One month isn't enormous in the context of most game development these days, but it is fairly impactful for the audience and overall pace of updates in a live service concern like Final Fantasy 14. Evercold will be the first new expansion for Final Fantasy 14 since the release of Dawntrail in July, 2024.

From the outside, Final Fantasy 14 has struck me as one of the more high-morale MMO communities out there, but I was permanently scarred by peak pandemic, Season of the Worthy Destiny, so my standards might be pretty low. In her 2025 state of the game writeup at the beginning of the Dawntrail era, PCG features producer Mollie Taylor observed that FF14 was in "a pretty weird spot."

But Mollie seems cautiously optimistic for Evercold's promised changes, while a recent roguelike mode added to FF14 has news writer Harvey Randall excited for the upcoming expansion's combat overhaul. Its new class looks pretty dope as well: A viking with two shields, laser cannons, and Wolverine claws.

Back in the '10s, Yacht Club cultivated a reputation as the studio that kept on giving—Shovel Knight Treasure Trove morphed into one of the best deals in the platformer genre, with one free update after another (including full story campaigns) for those who owned the original NES throwback.

But those awaiting the studio's follow-up, Mina the Hollower, spent a long time waiting, and delays left the company in dire need of a hit. "It’s make-or-break for sure," studio co-founder Cris Velasco told Bloomberg last year. "If we sold even 200,000, that would be really, really great. If we sold, like, 100,000, that’s not so good."

Well, we're a few months out from the game's release, when it sold over 500,000 copies in a few weeks, and Yacht Club is to remain afloat "...for now," co-founder Sean Velasco said in a Reddit AMA (via Eurogamer).

The future looks relatively bright for the developer, as other answers in the thread discuss that Mina the Hollower is due for some big updates soon, including randomizer and speedrunning options, and that most of the team is at work on a 3D game. Designer Alec Faulkner didn't provide any details on the unannounced game, other than to say "it’s gonna be soooooooo awesome."

It's good to hear the studio has the wind back in its sails, and it probably helped that Mina was such a hit. It seems set to hold its own the GOTY conversation later this year—and PC Gamer contributing writer Kerry Brunskill gave it a spiffy 90% in their review, calling it "a gloriously gothic combination of ferocious combat and beautiful scenery." If you've had your fill of the game itself, though, there's always Mina's fighting game debut to look forward to.

'Tis the season, spooky season, and I am also one of PCG's RPG guys. Thus, scary RPGs to celebrate the Halloween spirit must be organized and expounded upon. In a genre that often delivers numbers-based power fantasies in no particular rush, it can be difficult to elicit fear from the player. So when that does happen, I am listening, learning, and taking notes.

I've organized the entries in escalating order of scariness, culminating in a game I want to try some day, but freaks me the hell out just by reputation alone.

10. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 - The Sith Lords

Kotor 2 is one of my favorite games, and it delivers this overall grim, grimy, hopeless atmosphere like nothing else in Star Wars. Many RPGs consolidate their horror into one or two super-freaky parts, and The Sith Lords boasts a few memorable set pieces in this regard.

The academy on Korriban is particularly affecting for me: This ruined, haunted school where untold suffering took place in the relatively recent past. Seeing it in its gruesome prime in Kotor 1 only adds to the effect. You've seen what the beast can do, and now you're poking its corpse.

Shout out as well to the opening bit on Peragus, specifically the part where ghost ship Harbinger docks with the station. The whole sequence is a very fun and loving riff on System Shock, and I'll always remember this gnarly audio log that introduces one of the game's main antagonists.

6. Fallout

Fallout is a series that has reinvented itself over and over again, but no other entry has quite matched the sense of desolation in the 1997 original. Even the most gore-slick, in-your-face edgy portions of Fallout 3 don't quite do it for me in the same way.

More than anything, I just think of the ethering, "nothing is scarier" sight of the Vault Dweller standing alone amid tiles of empty desert, the drone of Mark Morgan's ominous soundtrack your only company⁠—assuming you're not just left in utter silence.

The incongruity of jolly old radio bops used to be a far smaller portion of the Fallout soundscape, with the music more dominated by stuff like "Vat of Goo" and "City of Lost Angels." As far as the visual experience goes, the yawning crater of The Glow remains one of the most quietly disturbing images I've ever seen in a game.

That's to say nothing of The Master. New Vegas' lineup of morally questionable faction leaders are some all-time great videogame antagonists, but they're not as unnerving as The Master. This twisted, gestalt creature gives me pause no matter how many times I two-shot it with a Turbo Plasma Rifle (or talk it into killing itself), and the simultaneous tragedy and inhumanity of its vision creeps me the hell out. And that unique FEV mummy death screen? Fuhgeddaboudit.

3. Lunacid

Lunacid's lonely, forgotten world calls to mind FromSoftware's best, but it's somehow even more cryptic and offputting than the work of that legendarily cryptic, offputting studio. There are plenty of particularly scary levels, for a start: The Accursed Tomb is an early winner, a pitch-dark labyrinth inhabited by faceless zombies, the top halves of their heads removed in a voluntary procedure meant to deliver enlightenment.

But the real freak shit lives in The Mausoleum, a semi-hidden zone patrolled by Death itself. The Grim Reaper will spawn and chase you down whenever you enter this area, lending a frantic urgency to any exploration. Things only get worse if you craft a turbo-hidden sword to kill this otherwise-unkillable foe.

Killing Death messes up your game. In exchange for its powerful scythe, nearly all friendly NPCs disappear, and you'll constantly be chased down by spectre enemies unique to this mode. The Death state can be reversed, but only with a ton of grinding.

This hidden mode, which always reminded me of the evil playthrough of Undertale or Nighttime Anor Londo in Dark Souls, is one of Lunacid's deepest layers of creepy weirdness. But the game is full of stuff like it, a constant process of uncovering new icebergs of lore and mechanics that made me feel like I never fully grasped what was going on.

1. Skald: Against the Black Priory

Skald is one of my favorite RPGs of the decade, maybe all time at this point, and it works on so many levels. As former PCG editor Robin Valentine pointed out in his 2024 preview, there is nothing else like Skald's combo of high fantasy (not quite low fantasy, mid fantasy? That sounds like I'm saying it's "mid") with cosmic horror.

You play as a group of outsiders stumbling onto a Class 5 Cthulhu situation, and while it calls to mind Bloodborne with its portrayal of an outer god-worshipping society, things weren't always like this. Skald provides context, reminders of a world that hasn't gone mad, to elevate the sheer what the hell you're witnessing in the Outer Isles.

It's insane that a game with pixel art graphics can evoke so much dread, and Skald hits you with moments of cosmic revelation that crescendo in one of the most bonkers endings I've ever seen in an RPG, the sheer outer darkness of it all underscored by the lengths Skald goes to make you care about its world and characters. Demon King is more stressful and unpleasant moment-to-moment, but the contrasts of Skald, the rollercoaster ride of its story, owe a lot to how much of a classic-style CRPG it is.

Demon King is a really scary game with RPG elements, while Skald is all the more memorable and horrifying because it is an RPG. And that's why it gets the crown for me.

Too scary to even play: Fear & Hunger

Taking inspiration primarily from Berserk in the first game, Fear & Hunger is an unforgiving voyage to a dark, dark place, one where shocking sexual violence, mutilation, and utter negation of dignity and humanity are explored in shocking detail. There is no compromise with good taste. The fact that these games are allowed on Steam and not the far more tame Horses is just one of those funny things! I'd like both to be there, to be clear.

Fear & Hunger's low-fi JRPG graphics and anime-esque art create the slightest distance from its horrors. The games also, I think, justify their dizzying level of transgressiveness with nuanced storytelling and a uniquely hopeless fantasy world. Fear & Hunger is one of my favorite examples to point to for the value of transgressive art, particularly as it pertains to games.

I'm fascinated by this series. I've read about it, watched let's plays, and spoiled much of the plot. I'd still like to play both games some day⁠—I own them on Steam⁠—but the thought of immersing myself in so much misery and degradation for the duration of a full RPG, let alone two, makes me physically queasy. I'll get around to it eventually.

Honorable Mention: That one part in Fallout 3, and that other part in Fallout 4

The Dunwich Building and Dunwich Borers, respectively. Both twist Bethesda's engine until it screams to make shock flashbacks to before the Great War work, and I just love the deep pool of water with the freaky eye at the bottom in Borers. Stumbling onto these bad boys late at night for the first time, not knowing what to expect? That's Bethesda's capacity to surprise and delight at its best. The rest of these games just aren't that scary⁠, but these moments deserve a shout.

A week ago, I asked PC Gamer readers to nominate the scariest PC games they could think of. I collected the top 16 submissions from that comment section (with some editorial discretion) and randomly seeded a bracket.

After a week of voting, we've finally got a winner. The scariest game on PC is...

🏆 Alien: Isolation 🏆

Some of you called it from the start, and Alien: Isolation plowed through its competition without much resistance, beating SOMA, Darkwood, Silent Hill 2, and finally Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Having a Xenomorph stalker is scary: reconfirmed. "Alien: Isolation completely destroys me, drenching me in sweat and causing me to take leave of my senses," Fraser wrote a couple years ago. It took him 10 years to get up the courage to finish it.

Our runner up is classic first-person horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which entered the final after a close battle with one of its younger siblings, Amnesia: The Bunker.

Solid arguments were made for the scariness of The Bunker, which Ted once said is the scariest game he's ever played, but The Dark Descent was a landmark PC horror game that lodged itself in a lot of our memories 16 years ago as a very scary thing that once happened to us.

Speaking to PC Gamer back in 2010, Frictional Games co-founder Thomas Grip said that their strategy was "to hint at things and then let the players build up an image in their head."

It was a worthy contender, taking out S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and F.E.A.R. before slaying one of its own on its way to the final. But ultimately, it was a harrowing stay on Sevastopol Station that shook PC Gamer readers the most.

If you haven't played any of these games, it's a good time to pick them up. Alien: Isolation is $10 on Steam right now, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent is just $4.

Thank you to everyone who suggested games and voted! We also recently crowned the best RTS unit: a large tank.

There are many scenes from Outlast that are burned into my memory, The Groom's sequence in Outlast's Whistleblower DLC, the finger amputation from the first game, or perhaps it was landing on a bunch of baby bones in Outlast 2. There's quite a lot to pick from over two games, a DLC, and the live service The Outlast Trials. But if Philippe Morin, co-founder of Red Barrels, had to pick the scene that made the team really stop and think about whether this was ok he'd go back to the first game.

For those who don't remember, or perhaps have never played the game, or maybe just wiped the encounter from your memory, as the protagonist Miles Upshur is navigating the abandoned Mount Massive Asylum he stumbles across an inmate engaging in necrophilia. It's a pretty startling moment, and was actually the last thing I thought I'd come across, even in an Outlast game. But that was the whole point of that scene.

"We felt like we needed something that's going to make people think that anything can happen in this game," Morin explains. "Then J.T. Petty, [lead writer for Outlast] came up with this whole dialogue of switching things around, having the [necrophiliac] say to you, 'You like to watch? You're fucked up!' So that was a really nice spin because it turned things around. Because obviously, yes, the player is making the choice to watch. So yeah, I mean that's probably the very first sequence that got a bit [heated]."

The only other time Morin can recall where the team spent so long debating whether or not to include a scene actually happened more recently, in The Outlast Trials. Specifically, the decision to include child mannequins instead of animated children in trials like Grind the Bad Apples or Punish the Miscreants.

Morin explains how the team questioned "what to do with the kids? Do we make them mannequins, or do we have actual characters? At the end of the day it's a bunch of polygons moving. But you know, in the player's mind, it's not the same thing. That was probably where we found our limit. Like, no, let's stick with mannequin kids, and not go too far with that."

This was undoubtedly the right decision. There's plenty of extreme moments in The Outlast Trials with objectives like Pervert the Futterman or Despoil the Auction, the gore and horror already present is more than enough to make players feel uneasy as is—trust me.

But as it is with most games, the best decisions tend to be made by the people who know the series best; its devs. "The team is always the first to react to some of these ideas," Morin says. "So sometimes if people feel like it's alright, let's keep pushing in that direction until like maybe the reaction becomes a little too strong.

"I remember discussing at some point when we went from 20 people to 30-40 people, because most people on the team were not with us for Outlast or Outlast 2, so we had to have a little chat about what kind of conversations are necessary to create this kind of content?

"And sometimes, yes, it might start with a very juvenile, gratuitous idea, but then you have to let it evolve, and be willing to talk around it to come up with an approach that feels scary and satisfying. You gotta be able to have those conversations. We often joke about that at Red Barrels. There are many conversations that would take you to an HR office in other studios, but here it's just part of our daily routine."

If you've played an extraction shooter like Arc Raiders or Marathon, you've probably experienced the agony of trusting another player only for them to shoot you in the head and nick all your stuff. Whenever that happens—and it's happened to me more than I'd like to admit—the same questions run through my head (after the traditional wailing and gnashing of teeth). Was that always going to happen? Did I do something wrong? Should I have said something different? Behaved differently? Or should I have simply foregone any attempt at diplomacy and shot first?

I've often wondered if there's a way to get better at this. Not just to convince other players that I'm not a threat, but to make them not want to shoot me. Conveniently, I recently had the chance to speak to someone who knows a thing or two about resolving such situations, both in videogames and real life.

James 'Pigeon' Fielder is one of only two political scientists in the world who specialise in gaming. Or at least, if there are more than two, Fielder is yet to be made aware of them: "When I talk about my research with fellow political scientists they either look at me like I'm crazy or they go 'Oh, that sounds cool.'"

Political science is the study of governments, which in turns means it's the study of human behaviour at a large-scale, organised level. Areas of interest include policy development, power distribution, and most importantly for us, conflict resolution.

What relevance does this have to games? Fielder answers this himself: "It's almost like taking theories of political science and doing fruit fly experiments, like trying to understand human behaviour, specifically human political behaviour, inside of game worlds," he says. "In a space like EVE Online, we might see political phenomena develop in weeks, months, or years that in real life would take decades or centuries to express themselves."

How does one become a political scientist specialising in games? Well, it's not exactly a job with an established career path, but Fielder arrived at it through his career in the US military, where his lifelong love of TTRPGs resulted in an aptitude for designing wargames. "I was getting groomed to be promoted from specialist to sergeant, and to be promoted, I had to demonstrate that I could teach a class," he says. "So I decided to build a class on a task that integrated roleplaying game elements. Why it seemed like a good idea at the time, I can't recall. All I know is that everybody had a great time."

Fielder's commanding officers took notice: "Once you get that stink on you in the military, like 'Oh Fielder, can you build another exercise for us?' You build another exercise, and they would get bigger and bigger," he says. "To date, the biggest exercise I've ever designed was for 5,000 people that ran 168 hours."

Fielder eventually switched from the US Army to the US Air Force and was hired by the Air Force Academy to teach political science. "My degrees are in history and national security … but it was political science who hired me." During a lesson on social capital or "why do people trust each other" as Fielder puts it, one student asked a question—can people develop trust in online games the same way they do in person?

"Like a good scientist, I went 'Huh, I don't know. Let me look that up," Fielder says. "That's when I started learning why games are so effective at bringing people together."

To very briefly summarise why games are effective in this manner: while the scenarios games present are fictional, the feelings they produce in the people playing them are very real. Anyone who has rage-quit a game will understand this. But games are also capable of producing more complex emotions and imagined states of being.

With roleplaying games in particular, they encourage people to inhabit personalities and mental states other than their own. In the right circumstances, these feelings can help instil empathy or new perspectives in people. "A [prison] inmate, for example, might put on the character of a lawful good hero," Fielder posits. "Now, when I'm supposed to be stealing from people, or using violence or vandalism, I'm going to play a Paladin, and now I'm inculcating what it's like to be a lawful good Paladin. I get debriefed at the end of the game, and I go 'Oh, it actually felt good. It felt good to be playing that different person.'"

Fielder has applied these techniques in a military context, such as forecasting the outcome of elections in Afghanistan as he discussed in a 2023 TeDX talk. But since retiring from the military, he's also applied these techniques in a civilian context, running games and exercises for businesses, prisons, and other institutions.

What's especially interesting, though, is that the lessons learned from playing out scenarios in the real world can then feed back into games and game design. To take the latter first, alongside his political science work, Fielder is also an RPG designer and design consultant: "When I run games at conventions and I run one shots, if it's an invention that I've designed, I work to try to maximise the amount of agency players have," he says.

"Players want to feel like they're powerful and can do something cool, even if it's an unforgiving setting like Call of Cthulhu …. Where the lethality is high, players like to think that the decisions they make matter, and when they do, when the dice work against them and they can see the dice fall, they're more likely to accept it as fair."

Likewise, players can deploy techniques for deescalation and establishing trust used in the real world in games too, which is where we circle back to extraction shooters. Fielder starts by pointing out that the rules of the game must support cooperation to begin with. "If it's a game like the original iteration of PUBG, then that's impossible because you know that 'The only way to win is I have to kill everybody.'"

This might seem obvious. But it's also applicable on a sliding scale—the more explicit and involved the rules are for cooperation, the more likely players will use them. This is why you're more likely to see cooperation in Arc Raiders than Marathon. While Marathon has the capacity for cooperative play, this idea hasn't filtered through to the playerbase in the way it did with Arc Raiders, perhaps because of its faster TTK, or its friendly callout being less clear than Arc Raiders' 'Don't Shoot!'

But assuming that the rules apply and there's at least a base level of comprehension. "The best way—it's not foolproof—is to approach without visible weapons. If there's a way to have an emoticon where you can have your hands outstretched … and this comes from my military background, [it] demonstrates 'Look, my hands are empty, and it's very difficult for me to grab a weapon, even in a videogame.'"

In addition, Fielder says trust is established a lot faster if you have something to offer and offer it freely. "I don't expect anything in return except let's not fight," he says. "The more valuable that item is, the more receptive your audience will be." He concedes that there is a risk here. "If you offer something very valuable they [might] go, 'Oh, maybe he has more stuff.'"

Fielder has spent much of his life studying and using games as a method to resolve conflict. But there is one area of conflict where a solution still eludes him, and that's within the gaming community itself. "It actually hurts me when I see social differences in the gaming space, gatekeepers over racial differences, gender differences, or players [who] are angered with each other," he says.

"In reality, one of the best places to overcome differences with people is a game. You learn, you sit down to play, you work together to overcome an objective," Fielder continues. "Gaming should be the most inclusive space in the world. And why it's not always that case, I don't know."

Thus far, Funcom has focussed mainly on changes to its survival MMO Dune: Awakening, with the Norwegian studio reworking the entire game to function as both a solo experience and a PvE adventure. Now that overhaul is done, however, Funcom is now set on expanding players' adventures on Arrakis, having just announced a free expansion that adds a new and completely different map to explore.

Coming in December, the Blood and Ice DLC will let players depart the searing sands of Arrakis for the planet's frozen north, adding a new survival map called the Polar Sink that flips the game's central survival concept on its head. Rather than avoiding the heat, players will actively have to seek it out, while also developing new technologies to help them adapt to the extreme change in climate.

There's some variance within this environment too. The Polar Sink is composed of two different biomes, the tundra and the icecap. While the icecap is the more extreme of the two, both areas are closely guarded by "water shippers", wealthy traders who supply Arrakis' second most-valuable resource from the polar regions down to the deserts. Players' primary objective in the DLC will be breaking the water shippers' stranglehold on the ice, which they can then use to cool their base equipment back in the desert and speed up resource production.

Funcom says that the expansion adds "around 35 hours of new progression", which sounds pretty beefy for a free DLC. It also apparently "brings the focus back to ground-level survival" for veteran players, "traversal, temperature management and combat all playing important roles in your progression."

Blood and Ice will be released on December 1. Alongside the expansion, Funcom has also introduced a Cosmetics Store to Awakening, and is also working on several other heavily requested features. These include an offline single-player mode that's coming in November (the game can be played solo right now, but only with an Internet connection) and fully supported cross-play in January next year.

Funcom also says that Blood and Ice represents "another step in the ongoing development of Dune: Awakening" and that it will "continue expanding the game" through 2027. This falls in line with the studio's recent announcement that it was pivoting to exclusively support its existing games—which includes Conan Exiles alongside Dune: Awakening—and was laying off an unspecified number of employees as a result of that shift in strategy.

Id Software has tightened its relationship with fellow shooter specialists MachineGames according to studio co-director Marty Stratton, after Xbox laid off roughly half of the Doom developer's employees earlier this year.

Stratton was asked how the studio was doing following Xbox's massive job cuts at a recent press event for Doom: The Dark Ages' Revelations DLC (via IGN) and he was keen to assure everyone that things are hunky dory at the legendary FPS developer.

"We're doing great," Stratton explained. "Not to handwave the [layoffs] away … everybody knows we had about half of our studio exit as part of that. But there was a very deliberate effort to make sure that we were incredibly viable coming out of that across everything we do, across game development and [the] technology department."

As part of its response to those layoffs, id Software has apparently deepened its ties with MachineGames, developers of Wolfenstein: The New Order and, more recently, the excellent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

"We're working more closely with MachineGames than ever," Stratton said. "We've always had a very close partnership with them, but I think we're at the point with technology development that both teams are incredibly talented and have incredibly talented engineers and we're really on an amazing path that had started pre-[layoffs]. We'd kicked this off earlier this year. We're really excited about that. We're both really, really bullish on what we have ahead.

Stratton's comments have led to speculation that the two developers may be cooperating on Wolfenstein 3, which MachineGames is rumoured to be working on. Id Software has just concluded active development of Doom: The Dark Ages following the expansions' release, so this is possible. What's interesting to me, however, is how Stratton repeatedly references technology.

The id Software layoffs heavily impact the developer's Frankfurt arm, including numerous designers of the formidable id-tech engine. This led to fears that id-tech was being shelved. Microsoft contradicted this, though further reports left the question open. But Stratton's comments lead me to believe we might be seeing a tech alignment between the two developers as a result of those Frankfurt layoffs.

While id Software built Doom: The Dark Ages on id-tech 8, MachineGames used a modified version of id-tech 7, called Motor, for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The fact that Stratton references both teams' "incredibly talented engineers" suggests to me that id Software is folding MachineGames' engine programmers directly into id-tech's ongoing development, with both teams working on the engine concurrently going forward. Assuming that id tech hasn't been canned outright, this approach would make sense given the expertise id Software lost from its Frankfurt arm.

Sadly, the layoffs that affected id Software were far from the last at Xbox. After cutting 1600 jobs in the summer, Xbox initiated a second wave of layoffs in September that also saw Obsidian and Bethesda merge and put Activision in charge of Halo. Further Xbox layoffs are planned leading up to January 2027, while Microsoft more broadly has offered a "voluntary exit offer" to over a quarter of its workforce.

Final Fantasy 14 released a new typing minigame recently—you hop on over to the Gold Saucer, you rock up with a party of four, and you compete with each other to see how many waves you can defeat with the literal power of words. It's a fun little laugh, and as someone who types for a living, I spent a couple hours getting all of my rewards from it.

But not everyone has had as much fun as I—someone who has spent arguably too much of their life in front of a keyboard—am having. Typing speeds among MMO players vary greatly, despite it being the predominant form of communication. This became incredibly obvious to me when I sat down and tip-tapped my way through this mode.

Some players, I left in the dust—others I was level-pegging with, and some of them seemed blessed with divine powers of fingerwork (stop giggling) that left me agog. Also some people were just using bots, but hey, not everyone who's faster than me did. Which got me thinking—you, my fellow MMO players. How fast do you type?

If you're not familiar with your own speed, I invite you to go on your WPM tester of choice (there are plenty on Google) and pump some numbers.

For reference, most sites put the average keyboard typist at 40-60 WPM. I, a person, who does this for a living, average around 130-140 WPM on a site like Monkeytype, which doesn't require any capitalisation or many unfamiliar words. Putting the effort into proper punctuation and spelling on other tests slows me down to around 110-120 WPM (in both cases I'm pretty accurate, between 95-98%).

But then again, I grew up playing videogames on my PC (you might call me a PC Gamer) and MMOs were my jam, so I got a lot of practice; which is part of why I'm curious as to how you, dear reader, match up. Furthermore, do you reckon that your time in MMOs has made you better at typing and improved your grammar? Feel free to share your own experience with the wonderful English language in the comments down below.

Anthropic has updated Claude Opus 5.5 to "steer it away" from letting users clone other developers' games, after weeks of Steam being overrun with AI slop and outcries from the game development community.

In an update spotted by X user Chasm (via Game Developer) Anthropic added a new rule to Claude Code's "Rules". Listed under "tengu_heron_brook", the rule reads, "Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user's own designs and assets. Do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original."

The addition was later confirmed by Addy Osmani, a member of Anthropic's technical staff. In a response to Chasm's post, Osmani stated, "We added two sentences to Claude Code's prompt on Opus 5.5 to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy."

Osmani added that "original games, genre games, and games built from your own design are meant to keep working. We'll continue to iterate to ensure that we're striking the right balance. In the meantime, if Claude turns down something that's yours, send it my way."

Opus 5.5 has proved adept at reverse engineering code, causing all manner of disruption within the games industry. The effects range from rapid decompiling of old console games to the PS5 being jailbroken.

Anthropic's latest change arrives in the wake of multiple reports from game developers that their games and demos have been flagrantly copied with the aid of AI. This has led several studios to cancel planned public demos of their games for fear that the code in those demos will be reverse engineered and used to create AI clones.

This all occurred within the broader issue of Steam witnessing a massive influx of low-effort, vibe-coded games, many of which are heavy imitations or direct copies of existing titles. While low effort game clones are not a new issue within the games industry, the most recent Steam Next Fest saw the number of showcased demos double over the previous event, with AI assisted games accounting for most of that increase.

Valve itself has admitted that Steam has a problem with AI slop. But the company is reluctant to resolve the issue by simply banning AI coding tools. At Steam's Indie Connect event last week, Valve's Tom Giardino explained that Valve doesn't want "to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use."

As for what Valve does plan to do about the problem, Giardino didn't have a specific answer, only that "making Steam a smarter and more dynamic platform is the starting point of our philosophy." In the meantime, he suggested that developers make their games harder to copy, stating "you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality and creativity that stem from your own perspective."

While it's true that the games being cloned are often small and not especially complex, it's worth pointing out that many of the most important games released in the last few years are relatively simple designs. Games like Vampire Survivors, Balatro and Peak are all built upon elementary concepts. And yes, those games have spawned endless imitators. But it's one thing to riff on their ideas with your own design, quite another to lift their codebase wholesale.

The Outlast series has been providing horror fans with some of the most grotesque and outrageous scenes for 13 years, and to over 50 million players. The most surprising thing about all of that, though, isn't how it's able to keep players terrified, it's that no one else has tried to capitalise on its success.

Sure, there've been games which have had their fair share of gore involved, Resident Evil 7, Harvester, or Agony are just a few that come to mind. But none of them have either managed to top the gore seen in Outlast and also achieve its continued success.

I decided that no one else would be better to ask about this strange phenomenon than Red Barrels' co-founder Philippe Morin, but he seems just as confused as I am that Outlast hasn't had any imitators: "Honestly, I don't know. Sometimes I ask myself the same thing, but I'm glad that we're still different from other games because it can be so hard. There's thousands games coming out on Steam every year. So that's a lot of other games people can decide to spend time with."

But that doesn't mean the Red Barrels team doesn't get a scare every now and then. "Sometimes there's a game coming up, and we're like, 'alright, this one is probably gonna be the next Outlast'," Morin says. "But so far [nothing's come of them]. It's maybe a combination of different things. The fact that there is no combat or the gore [is lacking]."

My working theory as to why no one has attempted to ride the coattails of Outlast is simply because it's so hard to find the edge of what's acceptable in those kinds of games. Red Barrels has always managed to walk the razor thin line of outrageous horror while managing not to tip over into gratuity that's no longer fun to watch or be a part of. It's a hard task, and one that a mainstream game may not want to gamble with, or a newer studio may not get right the first time around.

Red Barrels has managed to find itself in an incredible circumstance of being experienced enough to truly understand how to push gore to its limits while also being a small enough studio that it doesn't need to break into a mainstream market.

"We're happy to be part of a niche and be successful within that niche," Morin adds. "We don't try to, or I should say, it's not part of our internal dialog that we need to make this more mass market or we need to reach a wider audience. Obviously, we want as many people as possible to play the game, but we don't want to let that dilute or become something that takes our focus away from what makes an Outlast game. If we ever decide that we need to be more mass market, then we'll just come up with a different IP or call it something else."

Edge magazine unleashed a whopper of a 16-page feature all about Grand Theft Auto 6 earlier this week. After poring over every paragraph multiple times, one thing really stuck out to me: It feels like Rockstar is pushing for a more realistic, grounded experience.

Those two words might sound like an absolute nightmare to some GTA aficionados. It's not like the series has never known how to be serious or gritty—see Grand Theft Auto 4—but it's always facilitated chaos with relative ease. Outlandish weapons, an easily gamed wanted system, NPCs that feel more like props to be mowed down than anything with a personality. If I wanted to hop in and wreak a little criminal havoc for a while, I wouldn't find much hardship in wriggling out of trouble as soon as I was bored.

But it sounds like creating that sort of pandaemonium in GTA 6 is no longer as free as it once was. Police will remember what you looked like, if you were working alone or alongside an accomplice, and any weapon you were carrying. It'll use that information to fight back against the anarchy you orchestrate. It's not just police presence, either. Edge describes chaos as a third participant—no longer just your own, but the way the world reacts to your behaviour: would-be vigilante NPCs stepping in, carjackings going wrong thanks to modern tracking technology.

And you know what? I'm completely here for it. Sure, we're perhaps losing a little bit of that all-out, sky-high criminal power fantasy. I'm probably not going to be able to pull a rocket launcher out of my invisible butt arsenal anymore—Edge notes that larger weaponry instead gets stored inside your car—and I wonder if the world is going to let me lob a hundred sticky bombs at a plane without consequence anymore. But when it's all in the name of a more detailed, more involved-feeling world? I honestly believe that a little bit of grounding is going to make it feel all the more satisfying.

Puzzling out how to gradually return to the shadows is that little extra bit of flavour I've been craving from the series. Even if it is something as simple as a wardrobe change, the modern-day equivalent of going and getting your car spray-painted mid-chase. But co-head Phil Hooker also describes things like jumping on a bus out of sight of any CCTV or witnesses—if police didn't see you get on the bus, there's no way of figuring out where you ended up once you're safely distanced from the scene (or scenes) of the crime.

And ultimately, I don't feel like a more detailed, realistic reaction to my crime sprees dulls their buzz. I don't think Rockstar is trying to stop people from playing the game the way they always have, but instead inviting more ways to let the chaos ripple out and a greater incentive to work strategically on reeling things back in. And while it might feel a little different initially—at least, I should hope it will with 13 years of technological advancement behind Rockstar since GTA 5—I'm confident that the level of depth these sorts of tweaks afford will have even the most hardcore pedestrian-mowers in our midst converted before long.

Valve recently admitted that it has a problem with AI slop games and clones flooding Steam—it doesn't know what to do about it just yet, but it at least acknowledges that it's an issue. Now we have Roblox, speaking from the other side of that coin in its Q3 2026 shareholder letter, in which it bragged that the July release of Build, its AI-powered "prompt-to-game creation tool," users have published more than 70,000 games.

"During the last three months, we have witnessed an inflection point in AI adoption and content generation in the gaming industry overall, and on Roblox in particular," the letter states. "AI-enabled game creation, automation in code generation and AI supported asset creation are leading to an explosion of content. The time it takes to go from an idea to a playable game is compressing dramatically, and so is the time it takes to adapt a game for new devices."

The "explosion of content" remark is what jumps out at me first and foremost. Is that really a good thing—content, in explosive quantities? That is essentially what Valve is facing on Steam that's widely considered a problem—an ever-growing mountain of content—yet in the world of Roblox, it's a feature, not a bug. And Roblox is not looking to stem the tide.

"We have been embracing AI to accelerate creation since the first release of Roblox Studio Assistant in December 2023," the letter continues. "Over the past month, more than 80% of the top 100 games on Roblox (ranked by hours engaged) used AI tools to accelerate creation, and the number of daily asset uploads to the Roblox cloud tripled month-over-month.

"Since Q2, time spent using AI tools (including Build, Studio Assistant, and external AI via MCP) tripled among our top creators, and those using our MCP server daily grew nearly 5x. In Q3, Break and Steal an Egg and Huss Valley were both created almost entirely with AI and both broke into the Roblox top 20 (ranked by concurrent players). Build is our new prompt-to-game creation tool. Since its alpha launch in New Zealand, Singapore, Serbia and Thailand, more than 500,000 users have used Build—and have published over 70,000 games."

Take a moment to think about that: Build launched in July, five months ago, which means we're looking at a rough average of 14,000 games per month. And that's with Build still not fully launched yet, so only a fairly small portion of the Roblox userbase has access to it. I can't help but wonder, with a certain sense of alarm, what will happen when the doors are opened to more populous parts of the world.

Roblox, however, says it is "uniquely positioned to capture this moment," which is seeing "traditional barriers to software and content creation" giving way to a focus on "distribution, audience aggregation, monetization, discovery, and safety."

To further capitalize on that, Roblox has kicked off two new initiatives: Roblox Everywhere, revealed in September as a way to make Roblox games playable outside of the Roblox platform, and the Universal Player, which is basically the reverse of that: "AI is used to seamlessly import any existing game into the Roblox cloud platform while transforming it to run multiplayer, on any device (at the upper edge of the device's performance capabilities), with instant join, instant UGC updates, local 3D, and access to Roblox services for discovery, safety, communication, and monetization."

That's interesting: Details are scant but the idea seems to be to make Roblox a platform for all game developers, akin to Steam, GOG, or the PlayStation Store, with minimal fuss or muss: Just make your game, then zippity-pow it through the AI machine, and suddenly you've got a full-on Roblox game and access to a massive audience that previously would've been much more of a headache to reach. And Roblox gets basically the same: Its goal "is to capture 10% of the global gaming market and an even greater share in the US."

"As content becomes abundant, attention and connection become scarce," the letter says, extolling the virtues of Roblox's platform. "What sets our distribution apart is that it runs on social connections: people come to Roblox to play with their friends, so every new game can reach players through an existing social graph, through friends inviting friends, and through social influencers, which we believe enables great content to find its ideal audience faster than on any other platform."

Maybe Roblox is right. Hell, maybe EA chief Andrew Wilson was right—maybe the future really is all about billions of people cranking out content while corporations fight over where to put it all. It's hard to argue that Roblox hasn't put up serious shareholder value so far, after all, and while Steam doesn't have shareholders it's still making bank, AI slop problem or no. Still, I can't say that making speed and quantity the key indicators of success really represents the kind of future for videogaming that I'd like.

After three years of invite-only playtests, Soulframe is opening its doors to everyone next week on November 6. If you've been waiting to see what the developers of Warframe are doing with a fantasy action RPG, you'll finally be able to jump in and see for yourself.

The transition to an open alpha will be followed by a massive transformation to the structure of the game later in November. Midrath, Soulframe's big open landmass, won't be the verdant, almost chill, place it used to be: The entire area will be corrupted and it's your job to bring it back to life. "You're going to enter a game that is much more unforgiving and harsh at first glance," creative director Geoff Crookes explained in a recent presentation attended by PC Gamer.

This update, Prelude 17 or Verse of the Veillands, is a huge shift for Soulframe, but an important one that will help new players acclimate to the world. Crookes said the goal is to improve the onboarding experience and to give players "much more ownership" over their decisions early on. It won't be fully finished yet, however, so what's in there today is just "the functional bones" of what will come in the final game.

Feedback from players who struggled to reach the point of the game where they could freely explore the open world convinced the team there needed to be a more direct intro. In Verse of the Veilands, the main quest will teach you how to stop the siphons draining the world of its color. Enemies and resources you encounter will change as each zone is restored and side activities, like fishing, will become available. You'll also be able to raise a wolf pup into a full-on mount.

"The system is also helping the worldbuilding," Crookes said. Pages and pages of new writing for each faction leader will be added and you'll start to hear them radio in and fill you in on the history of the world. The team said it wants them to have a more "integrated" role in your journey as you work to cleanse Midrath of the corruption.

A new Pact, Soulframe's equivalent of a class (or a Warframe), will be added, too. The name of it was still undecided during the presentation, but the developers described it as a "hunter, poacher-type Pact" related to the alien Ode race. Equipping it will let you tie enemies together with a sci-fi bola, pierce them with a cone of spikes, and send them flying away by attaching a giant balloon to them à la Metal Gear Solid 5.

The developers stressed that there's a lot packed into Verse of the Veilands, so much so that they were still tweaking things days before the presentation. Crookes and McGregor nervously expressed that it would "hopefully" be done in time for today, but it seems it won't quite make it in time. That said, the plan is for the update to be out before the end of the next month, so new players might want to wait until then.

"I think this is probably one of the biggest, most violent changes we've made to the structure of the game in a long while," lead designer Scott McGregor said. "Paired with open Preludes is nerve-wracking and we hope players and the feedback stays positive."

The final (final_vfinal_finalfinal.exe) version of everything in Verse of the Veilands will be shown during a stream later today on the Soulframe Twitch channel.

I've made peace with our 2026 list and accepted that a few of my most anticipated releases may wind up on our new PC games 2027 calendar instead. That's good news for me—legend has it I cannot be slain by my enemies until I've played Gen Atlas, Blight, and The Expanse RPG. Oddly specific win conditions, I know.

My picks remain dateless, much like Grand Theft Auto 6 on PC, but other 2027 release dates are starting to trickle in with Fable, Exodus, and Final Fantasy 7 Revelation among the early headliners. Here's hoping your favorites get penciled in soon, too. Until then, here's our new PC games 2027 calendar.

New PC games to watch in 2027

January

February

March

April

May

New PC games with a 2027 release window

More new PC games for 2027 and beyond

Yesterday, the world received the sad news that legendary stage and screen actor Patrick Stewart had died at the age of 86 following a "brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia." His passing has triggered an internet-wide celebration of his life—particularly from Star Trek fans honoring his tenure as The Next Generation's Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

While countless social media posts have already been penned in Stewart's memory, a subset of Trekkies are grieving together in the shared virtual spaces of Star Trek Online, the modest MMO that's still keeping the lights on 16 years after its 2010 launch. With orbital starship flotillas and starbase torchlight vigils, STO's humble playerbase is turning out to mourn one of its most beloved figures—just as it had done earlier this week for the death of Walter Koenig.

Recalling the faint memories of having made my own STO account in prior years, I logged in to join in that mourning myself—at which point I discovered that I'd never finished the tutorial questline, and that the intervening years' updates to the new player experience had broken my character's ability to progress. But after an hour of building a fresh, new cadet-turned-captain and getting my space legs by scanning radiation clouds and blowing up a collection of Borg shapes, I was free to head Earthward to participate in players' impromptu memorial gatherings.

Once I arrived in the Sol system, it didn't take much looking. I was welcomed into Earth orbit by an assembly of player-captained Galaxy-class exploration cruisers, the same class of starship as the USS Enterprise-D that Picard captained in The Next Generation. The vessels arranged in Stewart's honor included names like the USS Remembrance, the USS ForEverPicard, the USS Champion—and the USS Purple Enterprize, which was like The Enterprise, except purple.

After surveying the fleet, I beamed aboard the Earth Spacedock, the in-game faction hub for Federation players. There, ringed around a large Starfleet seal, was a gathering of players all holding aloft torches—an emote the game provides for honoring "absent friends." It was just one of a number of concurrent player memorials happening across the Spacedock's map instances, seven of which were either full or near capacity when I was online.

It was a touching scene, even if one of my fellow mourners was a tiny Ferengi lad named "Shmunguss" and—in true MMO fashion—an argument about atheism broke out in the zone chat. But the tension was diffused by one player offering a farewell wish that "may the Force be with you, Gandalf." Close enough.

From the Spacedock, I headed planetside to the Starfleet Academy grounds, where multiple instances were likewise packed with players commemorating Stewart's passing. In my instance, the torchlight vigil was even more solemn than the one taking place in orbit. One user—named Picard, and customized to match—had volunteered as a sort of body-vessel for the player base's collective grief.

At rank 63, the character evidently hadn't been made with this purpose in mind. But they stood still and silent before a crowd of sorrowful Star Trek fans. Many were content with holding their torches; some—like one player dressed like a Napoleonic admiral—saluted. Others shared Picard quotes, or scraps of Shakespearean soliloquies. One character, a Vulcan, diligently progressed through every available emote that could serve as an expression of anguish.

Judging from the untranslated text that accompanied his emotes, he was a Vulcan who hailed from Germany.

Between the Galaxy-class cruisers massed in orbit, the Spacedock tributes, and the Academy vigils, the hundreds of users gathering to offer their farewells represents a substantial portion of the 1,500 or so STO players online on Steam at time of writing. Star Trek Online might not be topping charts in 2026, but it can offer its players a place to come together and mourn the man who brought their captain to life. For an MMO at its age, maybe that's the sort of thing that matters most.

In a new interview with VGC, FPS legend John Romero revealed how things were going at Romero Games, the studio he leads alongside his wife, veteran designer Brenda Romero. After its unannounced shooter project was canceled by Xbox last year, Romero Games managed to secure a new publisher, but there's a catch: The team is now only a tenth the size it was while funded by Xbox. Romero says they've rescoped to use the material they already had on a smaller, more focused game.

There are three different Phantom Blade Zero endings; one bad, one slightly less bad, and one True Ending which lets you face the final boss, granting the "Final Battle" ending and "With Heart and Blood" achievement. But to get this perfect ending, besides following the main quest, you have to complete a variety of side activities.

The cut-off for completion seems quite generous—though Inanis implies there's a point of no return just as you enter the Mirage Estate, I completed some of these steps later and I was fine. Here's what you need to do

1. Complete the Secrets at the Heart of the Lake quest

You first get this quest when you discover one of Firefly's Memory Flowers in the Village of Lu, but the main steps are:

• Defeat the four scarecrow acolytes to get their masks.
  • The first is Acolyte Yanru in the Village of Lu.
  • The second is Acolyte Lei Ting in Pangzhen—you can get to her once you acquire the Flaming Mane Phantom Edge on the west side of the town and then burn the barrier near the Pond of Fading Song bell to access her location.
  • The third is Acolyte Guhe in Meigu Lake on the east village dock island.
  • The fourth is Acolyte Hansui in the Crimson Manor—entering requires a load of other quest progress. You'll need to fix the Illusory Pipa, complete Whence the Weeping, plus the Mandate Encampment area, so this stage is definitely the longest (all the details you need are in the linked Crimson Manor guide).

• Enter the Phantom Illusionist's realm via the mirror in northwest Meigu Lake.
  • You'll need the four Acolyte masks to enter.
  • Fight through the area to defeat the final boss, which will summon a puppet statue.

• Insert the Yin and Yang eyes into the puppet and end the ritual.
  • You get both of these in the course of opening the Crimson Manor: one from the hanging puppet who gives you the tongue to unlock it, and the second from the Puppet Scavenger boss in the manor.
  • This will teleport you to the ritual. Kill all the puppet monks to end it and complete the quest.

2. Complete the five Long Pillars in the Bloodline Awakening quest

There are five Long Pillar challenges battling the Gold-Masked One that you need to complete to get the True Ending, plus these are good as the later ones give you Soul Tempering materials for some of the game's best weapons:

• The first Long Pillar is in Weeping Creek Valley. Use the Hunt's Scythes to grab the key on top of the Sha-Chi tower and unlock the area containing it.
• The second Long Pillar is in the Crimson Forest, just off the main path after Stone Fist Iron Fever's arena, near the start of the Mirrorwood.
• The third Long Pillar is in east Meigu Lake on an island.
• The fourth Long Pillar is in the Phantom Illusionist's realm which you need the Acolyte masks to enter, so I suggest doing this as you pass through completing the Secrets at the Heart of the Lake quest.
• The fifth Long Pillar is in the Mirage Estate. This is the second-to-last area in the game. You can access the pillar close to the Willow Pavillion, where you'll find a path you can grapple to with the Hunt's Scythes if you backtrack a little.

3. Complete all of Quickhand's Requests

Though I haven't seen this requirement mentioned elsewhere, I'm pretty certain you have to complete the Quickhand's Request quests for the True Ending, which involve finding treasures throughout each region and delivering them to the thief.

This is all covered in the linked guide with videos showing the locations, plus this quest gets you two otherwise inaccessible Phantom Edges, Flying Dagger and Goldblaze, so is worth completing anyway.

So what does the True Ending get you?

If you've done everything above, Inanis should tell you right before you emerge onto the peak of Mount Soulrend (after the Mirage Estate) that there's nothing more she can do to prepare you. I assume, if you haven't completed everything necessary, she gives you a point of no return warning that you still have unfinished business.

The True Ending sees you fight Leng Tu, Meng Hua (the lady), and Zuo Shang, but the other endings don't let you fight Zuo Shang's second form, so you get an extra boss fight this way. If you've done all of the above, you'll also get:

• The Hunt outfit
• The Kindred outfit
• The Blizzard outfit
• The Legacy outfit
• The Radiant Heart story item

After this, you can choose to start New Game+ by speaking to Inanis and pick to tweak difficulty as well if you want. You'll carry over your weapons and Phantom Edges, too.

We previewed A New Beginning, a Daedalic point-and-click adventure about saving the world from environmental catastrophe, all the way back in 2011, and it seemed promising: "Neither preachy nor educational," despite its ecological angle, but "pure sci-fi, involving a clash between one magic power-source that nukes the Earth, and a race to get it replaced with another magic one that turns simple algae into the ultimate fuel." A good bit of time-travel, too. That's always fun.

That promise paid off in the final release—not one of Daedalic's most memorable games, but a solid point-and-clicker from a studio that was at the time beginning to establish itself as one of the masters of the genre. And all of this is relevant to you because A New Beginning: Final Cut is now free on GOG.

I'm not sure why it's free, exactly: The giveaway isn't explicitly connected to GOG's currently-underway 18^th Anniversary Sale (which is worth checking out in its own right, as always there are some very cheap deals to be had), nor is A New Beginning what I'd call a Halloween-themed game—although the prospect of ecological collapse driven by climate change that humanity seems studiously determined to ignore is pretty horrifying, come to think of it.

But on the other hand, who cares, because it's free: Just hit the giveaway link on GOG's front page and it's yours. You've got until November 2 to make the grab.

Fallout 4's overworld was always missing something that the other 3D wastelands in the series offered me: a sense of bleakness and danger. There are areas of the map, like the Glowing Sea, that managed to dial up the oppression. But the unforgiving horror mod Whispering Hills makes the whole region eerie and mysterious. And I honestly love that.

My playthrough started the same way as vanilla Fallout 4, with a tableau of mid-Century suburban domestic bliss interrupted by a tense run to Vault 111. But from there, I almost started to think my hard drive was haunted. The post-nuclear world has been reimagined with constant, dense fog and occasional torrential rain that limit your view distance to only a handful of yards.

It reminded me of how Morrowind used its limited view distance to make Vvardenfell feel much bigger than it was, even if at the time it was also a technical necessity. Part of the problem with the Commonwealth overworld in unmodded Fallout 4 is that it's relatively flat and mostly green, so a lot of it feels very same-y. You can look off into the distance and not see anything so dramatic as the Nevada mountains or Washington DC's monuments. But when so much of the surrounding area is obscured, these gentle, rolling hills are suddenly quite effective at making my spine tingle.

The basic premise of Whispering Hills is similar to the base game. Your son Shaun was taken, and you have to find him. But this time, it sounds like he's been abducted by some kind of cult. I immediately ran into a mysterious man whose daughter had also been taken with a tip to go to the town of Whispering Hills to investigate. The locale itself is modeled on Centralia, PA, which was used as a reference for the live action Silent Hill movie and also happens to fit in quite well with the rural New England aesthetic of Fallout 4.

You won't be able to simply walk there, however. The first quest sends you to the Dunwich Borers dungeon, which is the site of one of the most memorable horror quests from the base game. And along the way, I could already tell something was very wrong. New enemies taken from and inspired by horror games and internet creepypastas show up alongside the usual raiders and mutants. Particularly upsetting was a towering Sirenhead who seemed to be broadcasting the distressed calls of a child Shaun searching for his mommy and daddy to lure me in.

Fair warning that this is a very tough mod to survive in starting as a fresh character. The enemies hit very hard, and some of them can soak a lot of damage, too. Sirenhead even managed to shrug off a mini nuke and send me running for the hills. I didn't bother to go progress the main quest long enough to get power armor, but I'd recommend at least levelling up a little bit in the open world before taking on Whispering Hills itself.

Journey to Hell

After fighting my way through the usual bandits in Dunwich Borers and unsealing that foreboding chained door, I started to realize just how deep this descent was going to go. The feral ghouls from the vanilla version are replaced by Eyeless Ones with hooks for hands who are completely blind, but don't care at all about the light sources that serve as a boon in the vanilla quest. And upon reaching what would have been the end of the dungeon in an unmodded world, I was presented with another red door, and a notice that all of my items would be taken away if I entered it.

Things get absolutely terrifying and surreal from here. You can keep your levels and perks, but you don't gain any XP for killing enemies past the point of no return, and are given only rags and an automatic pistol with a limited amount of ammo to defend yourself. It's not even nearly enough to kill all the enemies down here, so stealth and running become essential. VATS is also disabled from here on out, with a scrawled note somewhat comedically explaining that the whole game mechanic was part of some kind of mass delusion.

The lighting and sound design in these segments are very effective at selling the idea that we're not in Massachusetts anymore, with grisly tableaus of hanged cadavers and creepy radio broadcasts insisting you turn around only to see… nothing. The enemies are quite a bit tougher, too. At level four, some of them could kill me in only two hits, with the likes of mumblers and Silent Hill's horrible nurses joining the cast.

Throughout, themes of parenthood are laid on thick. You might see a rocking cradle in an inaccessible area behind grimy prison bars. Some of the enemies make distorted crying sounds. I haven't finished the mod's five chapters yet, but knowing how Silent Hill games tend to play out, it definitely seems like we're not going to find Shaun as an older man leading a science institute.

And at the deepest part of this charnel house, down a rusty set of stairs, you discover Shaun's rattle. And that's when he shows up. Pyramid Head in all his unholy glory will pursue you as you backtrack through the level to escape. I found this section to be particularly punishing, to the point that it's almost not that fun, at least at low level. But if you manage to make it out, the town of Whispering Hills and its unfolding story are your reward.

Pyramid Head doesn't just stick to the modded areas. Once you have the rattle in hand, he can randomly appear even if you return to the Commonwealth. The only way to get him to stop pursuing you is to return the rattle to where you found it in the depths of Hell. And unsurprisingly, he doesn't seem to care much about any kind of laser beam or nuclear weapon you might throw at him. I could at least see Sirenhead's health going down, slowly. Our polyhedral buddy simply seems immune to all damage, leaving escape as the only recourse.

Overall, I love what Whispering Hills does to the default overworld. I do think some of the linear Hell segments are actually too hard to be scary. The problem is, dying over and over sort of inoculates you to the illusion horror games seek to create, and simply hoping I have enough AP to sprint past enemies I can't kill without too many of them hitting me feels random and isn't especially compelling.

But if you're looking for a spooky Halloween experience that turns a familiar game world into something deeply cursed and wrong, simply exploring the Commonwealth with Whispering Hills' diabolical changes is worth your time.

I like to manifest Halloween year-round, what with my favourite pastimes being horror games, movies, and books—oh, and Dressmaker currently. So when Halloween actually falls upon me I like to make it something special—crack out the real horrifying stuff that'll hit even harder. One series that's always on my list is Outlast thanks to its next-level gore and perfect scares, plus if I want to drag my friends into a shared nightmare there's The Outlast Trials for all to enjoy.

"Halloween has always been—even going back to the first Outlast—one of our biggest months, and it definitely kickstarts the biggest part of the year, which is October, November, and the holidays," Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin tells me. "Those are usually the best months of the year in terms of sales. We don't control what other studios do, obviously, but we act as if Halloween is ours."

This year Red Barrels decided to celebrate the spooky season with a huge sale to encourage new players to enter the Sinyala Facility and give The Outlast Trials a try over the spookiest month of the year. And it worked, way beyond what they'd hoped for: The game's concurrent player count on Steam ended up capping out at 147,955 players, a hugely impressive feat for a horror game that's over three years.

"We knew with that 90% sale we'd get a lot of new players, but we didn't expect that many," Morin says. "That first week of October was pretty insane. Every day I was waking up checking the numbers, thinking okay, that's probably going to be the top, and then it's gonna start to go down, but every day it kept going higher and higher.

"Obviously after the sale it trickled down a little bit, but hopefully it's gonna stabilise at a much higher level than what we had before. But yeah, it's pretty satisfying to see that after being out for more than three years, the game still finds a new audience. And it's very satisfying to watch all these people play the game and suffer."

That they will. The Outlast Trials is still the scariest multiplayer horror game there is. Usually adding other players to a horror game will dampen the experience, whether that be because it becomes simply too funny to jump at or things just aren't as scary when you have your friends by your side. And while I've certainly laughed in The Outlast Trials it's usually a frantic nervous laugh that's triggered when I see some naked goliath barrelling towards an unsuspecting teammate.

But experiencing collective trauma with your friends isn't the only reason to play The Outlast Trials over Halloween: there's also a new event. The whole gist of The Outlast Trials is that you and your mates are stuck in a Murkoff testing facility, the Sinyala Facility, where everyone is forced to undergo weird and painful experiments. The goal, naturally, is escape, which is usually impossible—but right now, in this new event, it's actually attainable.

"There's the escape going on," Morin explains. "So for the first time in like a year, I think, there is a way to escape the facility—we made a communal event. People had to help out our character Amelia make the escape happen, and that's happened. I think on Sunday night they completed the task, and so since Sunday night, players have been able to escape. So now's the time because it's not going to last forever. Murkoff is always watching."

In the world of wireless gaming headsets, there's one spec that draws me in like a moth to a flame: battery life. Particularly 100-hour+ battery life. Wireless cans have come a long way in the last decade, but plugging them in all the time is an annoyance. If I can get away with multiple days without messing around with a cable, I usually will.

Which brings me to the Edifier G5 Max. Or the Edifier Hecate G5 Max, if you believe the writing on the box. It's got an astonishing "are you really sure" battery life spec of 305-hours, which meant I had to give it a look.

And now I've got one in my hands, I can confirm the battery life is impressive. Only the original HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless comes close. But the G5 Max, for its $150/$160 price tag, isn't quite the full ticket in other departments.

For one, it comes with a remarkably boxy default sound profile, so you'll want to do some EQ tweaking in the software to sweeten it up. That's usually no big deal—except the EQ presets are as blunt as a hammer, so you'll need to play around with the sliders yourself if you want to get the most out of it. The 53 mm composite drivers are actually fairly decent once they've been fiddled with, but this is a set that massively benefits from some user assistance.

And for two, it doesn't have "$150 gaming headset" characteristics. This is a very light set of cans, coming in at just 305 grams. Light is good, but shiny, tippy-tappy ear cup plastics are not. It also looks a bit like a Power Ranger's codpiece, which will probably split the room.

The clamping force is also very light, to the point where it wants to slip around on my head, and the earpads feel a touch baggy. It's comfy, sure—but I do have reservations as to how long it will last.

$150 is premium pricing. Does this look, feel, and sound like a premium gaming headset? No, not really. Oh, and the multiple microphones are below par, too. The G5 Max has some good things going for it, but for this sort of cash? I think it lands a little wide of the mark.

Edifier G5 Max features

The Edifier G5 Max is a wireless gaming headset that tips the scales at just 305 grams. That's all the more impressive when combined with the battery life, which maxes out at a stated 305-hours. I have no idea why those specs line up the way they do, but it's a pleasing symmetry at the very least.

In terms of drivers, we're looking at a pair of 53 mm composite, titanium-coated units with a frequency response of 20,000 - 40,000 Hz. Connectivity options come in the form of a 2.4 GHz wireless dongle (with a nifty little switchable USB Type-C or Type-A plug design), a USB Type-C connection proper, and Bluetooth 6.0.

Add THX Spatial Audio+ support and up to 96 kHz/24-bit wired playback, along with support for the LHDC 5.0 codec for Bluetooth low-latency connectivity, and you've got a pretty fully-featured specs sheet. Microphones come in the form of a removable boom mic and two built-in units nestled deep within the internals.

Edifier G5 Max ergonomics

Let's start with the good. The G5's headband is remarkably thick and squidgey, which feels very pleasant atop my head. The ear cup armature is solid metal, and has a slightly industrial feel to it that suggests it might last.

It's also very light, which means wearing the G5 Max for long periods is no issue at all. That being said, the earpads do give me pause for thought. They're a touch baggy, and while the material covering them is very soft and comfortable, it does seem a little fragile.

The clamping force is also very light. On the one hand, this is good for comfort. On the other, this headset has slipped from my dome more than once while moving around. Differing head sizes will end up with differing experiences here, but the G5 is light-touch enough to make itself an annoyance on occasion.

The controls are a bit tinny, too. Combined with the clattering plastics used on the outside of the ear cups, this makes the whole endeavour feel a little cheap when you're adjusting it. And let's face it, at $150, this headset really isn't. Cheap, I mean.

Still, it's very comfortable when you're in a standard gaming position in front of your PC. Despite the Bluetooth 6.0 connection, though, I'm not sure I'd risk the whole affair slipping from my head while I was outside.

Edifier G5 Max sound

If you simply plug in and go with the Edifier G5 Max, prepare yourself for a very boxy sound profile. While that might be advantageous in certain competitive gaming situations, it's not particularly nice to listen to for everyday usage.

You can tweak the EQ of this set within the Edifier Hecate app. Unfortunately, the audio presets it comes with are seriously heavy-handed. There are a handful of options for specific games (most of which boost the upper mids and treble to ear-aching levels while eschewing bass almost entirely), while the "bass" music preset itself lives up to its name:

Holy hell, Batman, this looks like a 12-year-old's first headset EQ. Switching between all of the different options, I couldn't find one that worked well with the 53 mm drivers to create a balanced sound. Luckily, a little home tweaking can improve the sound profile considerably.

Basic stuff. A little bass boost from neutral, a small 200-300 Hz dip, a little push at the top end to sweeten up the treble. These 53 mm drivers need some work to sound their best, which is unfortunate.

I would imagine that most gamers buying a $150 headset would expect it to sound lovely straight from the box, or at least be able to tweak it towards something halfway-pleasant without fiddling with the EQ beyond the given presets.

What the drivers are good at, though, is detail. Multiplayer shooter fans will appreciate their footstep-reproducing ways, and the positioning is very good, particularly with the spatial audio setting engaged. For everything else, though, be prepared to break out the toolbox to warm them up.

As for the microphone(s), they're also disappointing. The built-in units are dedicated to the Bluetooth connection and sound like every other internal set I've ever tested—hollow, but good enough to use in a pinch. Plug in the boom mic, though, and you get… well, it doesn't improve things much.

Below: An audio test of the G5 Max boom microphone, software settings at default/off.

That's a pretty dull-sounding capsule if you ask me. You can adjust the microphone EQ independently, but the other software settings are very blunt instruments in their own right. Under microphone settings, you get Mic Volume, Voice Clarity, and Volume Levelling options, none of which do much to get around the characteristics of the capsule itself.

Below: The G5 Max boom microphone, all software settings at 50%/on.

At low settings, the noise-reduction assistance does little to clean up the audio. Turn it up, and digital wash becomes apparent very early on, while the clarity settings add a fair amount of extra sibilance, while also removing a lot of depth.

I've heard much better audio quality from much cheaper sets. The sound in general is below average, which isn't a great look for any headset with a $100+ price tag.

Edifier G5 Max aesthetics

The G5 Max looks good in photos, but in person it's a bit polarising. The octagonal earcups strike me as a slightly childish design choice, sitting at odds with the large, studio headphone-like headband. The RGB is pleasingly subtle, though, having been reduced to a "H" logo on each earcup.

The boom mic tip also gets the angular treatment, but it's rather large. You'll probably stop noticing it eventually, but I keep catching it out of the corner of my eye. Being as sizable as it is, I think Edifier may as well have gone the whole hog and wrapped it in a foam pop filter.

Anyway, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I personally prefer my $150 headsets to look a little more refined (or, dare I say, a little more grown up) than this.

Edifier G5 Max battery life

Ah, now we're on to the G5 Max's party trick. 305-hours of battery life is very impressive on paper, and in practice, it's a seriously handy thing to have. I've been testing the G5 Max for the past three weeks and I've yet to show it a power cable.

That's a massive bonus for anyone looking for convenience. It's such a long battery life, I'd imagine it will come as a genuine surprise when it eventually begs for some wall juice. I still haven't got there yet, despite leaving the headset on overnight a few times to see if I could make it meaningfully drop.

And I still can't work out how Edifier has managed to make a headset so light, while still equipping it with such a substantial battery. That's something akin to a headset magic trick. Top marks in this department, at the very least.

Edifier G5 Max software

Edifier's Hecate software is perhaps a little basic when it comes to the UI, but there are plenty of features to play with. There's a parametric EQ, a separate bass boost setting, volume levelling, THX Spatial Audio+ switching—even a separate EQ for the mic. You can also tweak the RGB, adjust the power off settings, switch connection modes, and flip between user profiles for your various adjustments.

I just wish that it was a bit more plug and play. All the options are here to improve some of the G5 Max's lesser qualities, but the aforementioned sound presets are so ham-fisted, you'll want to familiarise yourself with all these toggles and sliders pretty early on.

The app is easy enough to use, but be prepared to lean on it to get the most out of this headset. And it did lock itself in an update loop on first install. That might just be a me thing, but it's worth pointing out that it can feel a touch… rough and ready when it comes to stability. YMMV, is what I'm saying.

Edifier G5 Max value

A $150 MSRP aims this headset squarely at one of the biggest hitters in the space, the Razer BlackShark V3. It's our top best gaming headset pick—and in all honesty, I don't think there's much competition between the two.

The Razer has a more refined chassis design and much better audio straight from the box, and although its microphone is perhaps one of the weaker points of the whole package, it still sounds better than the one you'll find on the G5 Max. You "only" get 70-hour battery life, but I'd still say that's plenty.

It's even lighter, too, at 270 g. And should you wish to go (much) cheaper, there's always the PowerA LucidSound LS500 to consider. Again, it's lighter, and again, you only get 70-hour battery life. But listening to the microphone clips back to back, and looking at the LS500's recipe of capable 50 mm drivers and a comfy chassis design (not to mention more grown-up looks), I know where I'd be saving my cash.

If battery life really is your biggest concern, then I'd point you straight at the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless. It's also got a weak microphone, but it's a remarkably solid, comfy, and great-sounding set that can often be found with large discounts. It's down to $109 at the time of publishing this review. Oh and the battery life stat? 300 hours.

I was expecting more from the Edifier G5 Max. The battery life is impressive, but I think you can do much better elsewhere for less cash. Ultimately, I'd say this set is a good reminder that, when shopping for your next pair of wireless cans, you shouldn't press the buy button because of one feature alone.

More and more, AI appears to be the reason we can't have nice things on the internet. Beyond generative models gobbling up my own and my fellow creatives' work in a bid to produce abysmally average output, AI data centres are also devouring all of the available memory. This drives up prices and makes DRAM supply for us PC gamers pretty scarce. CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman argues this is truly for the best.

Appearing on a recent episode of the Cheeky Pint podcast, Altman argued, "From a global allocation perspective, actually it’s quite terrible to have everyone have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and be used 5% of the time."

Yes, that is steam escaping from my ears. But before I go full screaming tea kettle, let's take a beat. Altman is talking less about PC gamers specifically here, and more about solo AI bros craving compute power and "local inference".

He's bemoaning an inefficiency within the AI industry rather than taking aim at us pesky gamers. He goes on to add, "You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow everyone's... Many people's intuition is the opposite of that."

It still feels a bit rich for Altman to complain about the memory scarcity OpenAI and ChatGPT helped create. I could also keyboard warrior my way through several paragraphs about how resource hungry the data centres he's arguing should enjoy DRAM priority are, not to mention how the rapid AI infrastructure build out has caused many of big tech's greener energy goals to fall by the wayside—but I'll spare you. Our planet's environmental predicament doesn't begin or end with Sam Altman or OpenAI, after all.

Instead, I'm choosing to extract a grim sense of satisfaction from the AI snake eating its own tail. For one thing, Google's AI features appear to be cannibalising ad revenue from search. For another, Amazon's big data centre build out has made free cash flow negative, and for just one more thing, investors haven't been overjoyed with the recent performance of many AI stocks, leading to a big sell-off earlier this month.

The bubble may not have burst yet, but the aforementioned snake is looking a little green around the scales.

According to Bloomberg's sources, EA saw a new Battlefront game as a less risky investment than Mass Effect Universe. This final factor joined a host of well-discussed reasons for BioWare's unfortunate demise: Andromeda's critical reception, Anthem's live service failure, Veilguard's sales struggle (pretty good game though), friction between the studio and EA since the very beginning, and, of course, EA's recent Saudi-Kushner-Private Equity acquisition.

One other added wrinkle: BioWare apparently lost its main ally at the top of the EA org chart. Entertainment and Central Development exec Laura Miele, who historically advocated for BioWare, was "sidelined" according to Bloomberg. EA sports execs David Tinson and Cam Weber were promoted instead. The age of nerds has ended, now begins the long night of the jock.

Overall, this new information doesn't radically reframe BioWare's overall story at EA, one of slow decline and mismanagement, or how most observers will interpret it through a culture war lens⁠. Was BioWare too woke? Not woke enough? For the love of god keep it out of our comments section. But now we know why the knife was finally driven home, for what it's worth.

And I guess we can anticipate a new Battlefront game some time at the tail end of the 2030s. Woohoo. For more on the closure of BioWare, PCG lead SEO editor Lauren Morton spoke to 16 developers who were inspired to join the industry because of the studio about what BioWare meant to them.

Last week, I asked PC Gamer readers to nominate the scariest PC games they could think of. I collected the top 16 submissions from that comment section (with some editorial discretion) and randomly seeded the bracket below.

After three rounds of voting, we're down to the final two games: Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Alien: Isolation.

To get here, Alien: Isolation beat SOMA, Darkwood, and Silent Hill 2, all by a decent margin. Amnesia: The Dark Decent was also a powerhouse, plowing through the acronym division—S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and F.E.A.R.—before facing off against one of its own, Amnesia: The Bunker. That was a closer race.

I know some of us at PCG consider The Bunker to be the scariest of the Amnesias, but the game that started it all is both more influential and a scary-ass game in its own right, and a strong competitor going into this final round.

Scroll down to cast your vote. Voting will be open until 9 am Pacific on Saturday, after which the winner will be crowned.

The bracket

The final poll

I may rob casinos, steal cars, and occasionally drive on the sidewalk, but I'm not a monster, and I don't want the civilians in Grand Theft Auto 6 to think I am. Well thanks to the souped-up morality system there will be a bit of space for some redemption.

Rob Nelson, Rockstar North's co-studio head and head of development went into greater detail about what GTA 6's "Criminal Profile" involves during an interview for Edge magazine and how players will have some authority about how the world will react to them.

The Criminal Profile will track your actions as Lucia and Jason on a scale from "Professional" to "Irredeemable", represented by angel and devil icons. It's not necessarily encouraging you all to be saints who disengage with any form of violence and follow road traffic laws to a tee, but you have to be mindful of how much violence you doll out.

Fights don't need to always end in death, a professional criminal may incapacitate their opponent instead of putting a bullet between their eyes or perhaps try to get information or whatever they want from them via less violent means, at least at first. You may try to intimidate or perhaps bribe your way to the best ending. Rockstar has confirmed that your Criminal Profile will affect how the story pans out and so it's certainly something to keep an eye on, if you're gunning for a specific storyline that is.

We've already learned a bit about the Criminal Profile before thanks to an IGN preview in which Nelson also explained how the decision to include such a responsive system stemmed from the fact that the devs didn't want player characters to become too powerful.

"There isn't a right or wrong way to play this game, but consistent actions may have an impact in terms of how the world reacts to you and how the narrative plays out," Nelson says. He also explained how small acts of kindness can redeem you. So, if you see some litter lying around, put it in the bin and if you have a free moment perhaps go to the local park and feed the birds.

Yes, Grand Theft Auto is a videogame series where you drive fast cars and occasionally mow down the odd pedestrian here and there. I like that. It's nice. I am looking forward to also doing that in Grand Theft Auto 6. But the thing I'm really excited to do? Hop on a bus, baby.

Out of all 16(!!) pages from Edge magazine's newest megafeature on Rockstar's upcoming meteor, a teeny-tiny paragraph about Leonida's public transportation system is the one that's got me feeling all giddy. Similarly to Red Dead Redemption 2, the game will feature a fully functioning train system, as well as a bunch of bus routes to help you get around Leonida the old-fashioned way.

And, according to head of development Phil Hooker, they're systems that he has extensively tested to ensure their reliability. "I'm obsessed with making sure they always turn up," he told Edge. "So, anywhere in the middle of playing, I'll just go: right, we're going to get the bus to where we're going. I've memorised all of the routes."

I kind of love it, I can't lie. It really feels like Rockstar is paring down the criminal power fantasy a tiny bit and offering more grounded, realistic ways to exist in its world. Which might make some hardcore pedestrian-mowers a little furrow-browed, but it seems as though the developer is trying to create various levels at which people can engage with the chaos and zaniness the series has typically offered.

As much as I'm also a member of the crime spree brigade, something like a public transportation system is one of those details that's going to make Leonida feel alive in a way we've not really seen from the series before. It feels fitting for a story like Jason and Lucia's, too—it seems like they don't quite want the all-out criminal fame of previous protagonists, and allowing them to engage with more practical methods of getting around feels like the perfect way to play into that.

It's not just a cutesy way to roleplay an everyday commuter, either. Hooker also highlights making use of the buses and trains as a way to evade the watchful gaze of the police. "If they don't see you get on, and then you get out of the 'wanted' area, why would they search the bus unless they see you get onto it?"

More than anything, Edge's feature now has me desperate to go buy a beer, a pack of smokes, and jump onto a bus to watch the world go by. Though the only place I think Hooker is wrong is that he's been rigorously ensuring everything turns up on time—I dunno how things work in Florida, but the true realistic experience would be to have no buses turn up for ages until two or three arrive bumper-to-bumper. That's the true public transportation experience, after all.

A Korea Herald report says the opening cinematic of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will be edited to remove video clips of a real-world disaster in South Korea that left 160 people dead.

The Seoul Halloween crowd crush occurred in October 2022 during Halloween celebrations in the city's Itaewon neighborhood, when a crowd surge in the narrow streets and alleys resulted in 160 deaths and left nearly 200 more injured. The opening cinematic of Modern Warfare 4 uses footage from that disaster to portray the immediate aftermath of a fictional North Korean invasion of South Korea, the basis of the game's story.

Activision said the use of the video was not meant to "reference or trivialize" the actual event, but merely "to establish the game's fictional narrative." A statement released by families of victims reported by the BBC, however, said "using such an event as material for a game made for entertainment is in itself highly inappropriate and senseless," and added that if Activision "has even a minimum of courtesy and empathy towards the victims, it should take corrective action without delay."

That's now set to happen, as Activision has released a statement saying it will remove the footage from the game and apologized for using it. "We offer our deepest condolences and sincere apologies to the bereaved families, victims and everyone who has been deeply hurt or distressed by this incident." the publisher said.

However, there will be some delay before that happens: The Modern Warfare 4 opening cinematic will be changed in an update set to roll out on November 12.

Intel seems pretty confident about its next generation of desktop chips. The company's top brass just got off the phone with shareholders to discuss how much money it made last quarter (TL;DR: not enough) but more interestingly noted a few tidbits to keep us gamers on the hook for a forthcoming announcement about Nova Lake at CES 2027.

First off, yes, CES 2027 is when we're reportedly going to hear more about Nova Lake. That takes place at the start of January. I feel we'd usually hear something ahead of the Christmas break—a vanguard of high-performance chips—but I guess the memory crisis and a sales slump saw to that.

"Nova Lake, our first Intel 18A-P client product, is tracking ahead of schedule, with design wins expected to be twice those of Panther Lake at launch," Lip-Bu Tan said (transcript via Seeking Alpha). "We look forward to sharing more at CES in January."

That's another of the disclosures: Intel will be using the 18A-P node for at least parts of Nova Lake. That should be a step-up for desktop chips: existing Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake chips are built using the 18A node, but they're only on mobile, while existing Arrow Lake chips, such as the Core Ultra 9 285K, are built using TSMC's N3B node.

18A-P promises "9% higher performance at iso power or more than 18% lower power at iso performance."

Yet what really piques my interest is this comment from David Zinsner:

"As we go into next year, we'll have Nova Lake. And I think the important aspect of Nova Lake is we've had a bit of a hole in our portfolio for high-end desktop, and Nova Lake filled in that gap. So I would expect us to do pretty well on a mix basis because we should see better traction on the high-end desktop as well."

High-end desktop, or HEDT, is not something that Intel has explicitly offered for a long time. We're going back to Cascade Lake-X in 2019, and even those were kinda poorly received for being a bit 'meh'. Now, I'm not sure this from Zinsner amounts to a promise of an entire lineup of HEDT chips beyond the usual gaming chips, as the Core X-series once was, or is more a way to say, 'hey, we've got fast cores and lots of them in Nova Lake'.

Either way, it sounds like a good thing, especially as AMD currently has the high-end market pretty much wrapped up with its X3D chips. Arrow Lake didn't meet expectations, and Intel has been lagging behind in terms of gaming performance for a while.

We know Intel has an answer to 3D V-Cache on the way with Nova Lake: the so-called Big Last Level Cache (BLLC). Rumours suggest we can expect a core- and cache-happy Core Ultra 9 4970K BFC to lead the charge here.

Zinsner seems to think these chips will reverse the current trend of Intel ceding market share to AMD: "We do feel like we go into the year as a market share gainer with our Nova Lake portfolio."

Time will tell, but these all sound like good reasons to stay tuned for CES in the new year. The Las Vegas show runs from January 6 to January 9.

The memory crisis is biting hard and prices are still worsening for memory and storage, which means Intel is having a tougher time selling computer chips to the likes of you and me. CEO Tan said in the company's latest earnings call that "the next few quarters will be challenging for the PC market." So, rather than sit on Panther Lake chips it can't sell, the company says it's looking to shift some of that 18A capacity to data center chips instead.

Answering a question about whether the company would be reallocating wafers to data center chips in Intel's earnings call (transcript via Seeking Alpha), CFO David Zinsner replied: "The answer is yes. What we're taking offline to put Intel 3 into Oregon is 18A wafers, which we're generally going to build Panther Lake products. So we see the opportunity with some of that capacity freed up to go produce more data center wafers."

There are two consumer chip families on the 18A node right now: Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake. For corporate customers, it's Clearwater Forest.

While Panther Lake has just successfully ramped onto 18A, it's the more recent budget offerings of Wildcat Lake that are reportedly selling strongest.

"While the next few quarters will be challenging for the PC market, our roadmap continues to strengthen and our long-term outlook remains positive," Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said. "We have successfully ramped Panther Lake on Intel 18A and demand for the Wildcat Lake is outstripping supply."

Zinsner later says something similar: "Wildcat Lake, our cost-optimized Intel 18A client CPU increased units by approximately 70% sequentially and is sold out."

So, the people want cheap chips. No surprises there. Zinsner is keen to point out that supply shortages are not just about where the wafers go in Intel's fabs, as the company is "also constrained on the substrate side."

Intel suggests that 2027 may not be pretty either. The internal CCPG group that covers gaming chips is said to likely decline "greater than 20% sequentially", due to companies reducing inventories and orders for the new year.

That tracks with many of the warnings we've heard from research firms and companies close to memory supply: we may still be suffering throughout 2027, possibly until 2030. This crisis catches up with everyone eventually: customers feel it at the checkout, so they buy less stuff, which leads retailers to put in fewer orders, as do suppliers, finally landing at Intel's door before continuing onwards to its downstream suppliers.

Intel's share price is down 23% in after-hours trading.

It's always fascinating to see a niche aspect of the internet break containment and make its way into the centre of our collective cultural consciousness. It happened with cottagecore, putting "maxxing" at the end of any word, and it happened with the backrooms, largely thanks to the astronomical success of Kane Parsons' Backrooms film.

It didn't take long for brands to jump on the bandwagon and make parodies of Parsons' film. McDonald's dropped its beloved Grimace into the unending maze, Ikea posted themed horror-shorts, hell, even the sponge brand Scrub Daddy posted a backrooms clip. Other than this all being proof that we do indeed live inside a simulation, it's indicative of just how successful this movie was.

Parsons' version of the backrooms has become almost "minor cultural shorthand" for all things liminal right now, he said in an interview with Kyle Buchanan.

"South Park just did a backrooms episode," Parsons adds. "And you can see already how the version of the backrooms that was presented in the film is overriding and altering the version of the backrooms that existed before this film."

But the hope is that it won't always be like this. Parsons has stressed how his film is just an adaptation of the backrooms; it's not canon, because nothing in the backrooms is.

"It's not meant to be any one thing, it's not meant to conform," Parsons says. "It's meant to become blurrier in your head over time and just be an abstract thing that sits with you. If you never watch it again, in 20 years it'll just be a vague cultural [moment]."

This nuanced understanding of not only what the backrooms is, but also how to treat it, was ultimately the driving force behind why the film was so great.

"It's an idea and a project that exists in empty space," Parsons says. "I love going into detail… like what type of nails are they using inside the wall, where do they source the timber from… but I think you've got to be really careful and deliberate when walking the line and not getting to a place where it's like all someone's dream… I don't think people enjoy that."

Ultimately, the best part of the backrooms, as with SCP, is that it cannot be contained. It's a story that belongs to everyone: "You can't harness the backrooms in an IP, it's just going to dissolve over time and who knows where that goes."

World of Warcraft: Forever is "realmless", which has a couple of advantages for oceanic (OCE) players—who so often get the short end of the stick when it comes to MMORPGs. Blizzard has servers in Australia, so OCE players can enjoy not having terrible ping, but due to the smaller playerbase they share a lot of overlap with the North American server architecture.

Which produces a unique problem: As it stands, OCE players are stuck in perpetual night. See, Forever has a 24 hour day/night cycle, so if you play during the evening and your timezone's matched to the server, the sun will set in Azeroth roughly at the time it would outside your window. But since OCE players are very much not local to North America… the curse of endless night persists.

As explained here on the WoW forums: "Because our servers share North American clock cycles, playing after work means the game is locked in pitch black. Log on at 7 pm? Midnight. Saturday afternoon? Dark. Unless you ruin your sleep schedule to play at 4 am, you practically never see the sun in Kalimdor."

A solution, however, was offered by the game's developers in an official podcast on the WoW channel—since Australia does actually have local server architecture, lead software engineer Ana Resendez says that "we could have an Australia timezone in those, but what happens if you're playing and suddenly you get an invite from [a North American player], then all of a sudden you go from night to day within like a couple of seconds? It's something we talked about."

Which is a little immersion-breaking, for sure, but likely preferable to being stuck in eternal night—especially given how gosh-darn pretty Forever's lighting changes are. There are a ton of lovely sunsets that'd be a shame to miss. Senior game designer Josh Greenfield, however, straight-up asks if Australian players would be happy for the chance to get some virtual vitamin D every once in a while:

"How would you feel about that, Australian players? Is that a thing you'd be okay with? Would you be okay with your day/night suddenly changing abruptly? … Getting feedback on that honestly would be helpful."

It's a teeny-tiny sample size, but at least on the r/wowforever subreddit, OCE players are all in favour: "In Retail," writes the author of one thread, "to make ourselves day time we are constantly having potions or toys to shift the sky for us anyway, it's something a lot of us are accustomed to … the shift would only happen when joining a dungeon.

"The gameplay in WoW Forever is a lot slower, you are not joining and leaving groups, getting kicked for your score or your gear level, you spend a significant time in that group so you're not going to be always changing the day and night."

However, as some players note, maybe the problems with the day/night cycle being 24 hours to begin with. Some suggest it exists on a 20-hour cycle, instead—which would gradually shift the time of sunset around so that players with more rigid schedules could experience Forever's different lighting states for themselves.

Which, personally, sounds like the best bet. While I do think it's neat if a game world matches my real-world state—it's always fun to get cosy—I'd rather have variety than consistency, especially when Forever's lighting is such an upgrade.

Maybe I've been too harsh on those mandatory cybersecurity training courses that my company keeps reminding me to do. What looks to be the largest ever cryptocurrency heist may have started with an engineer's compromised laptop, and the attacker got away with more than a couple coins: $6.3 billion in stolen cryptocurrency.

The victim is Binance, by far the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. The hacker made off with tremendous sums of a range of cryptocurrencies, including ethereum, bitcoin, solana, and XRP. The total sums amount to around $6.3 billion worth.

Binance says it has worked with blockchain partners to freeze roughly $3 billion worth of that, leaving $3.3 billion still unaccounted for.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao took to X to suggest that he feels all user funds would be fully covered. Zhao is no longer running Binance following a four-month stint in prison for violating anti-money-laundering laws. He was later pardoned by president Donald Trump. Binance has since confirmed that, yes, it will cover all losses.

"Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop," the company says on X, "which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions."

Binance says it's still figuring out what actually happened here, though experts are already chiming in with what might have gone down.

"The attackers didn't break the encryption or steal the private keys. They took over the system that tells the keys what to sign," Jayant Dave from Check Point tells BBC News.

Also speaking to BBC News, Emily Taylor, co-founder of the Global Signal Exchange, said the hack was conducted "on a speed and scale we've never seen."

Blockchain intelligence firm TRM says that the theft may have come down to misuse of what's known as a hot wallet, "a wallet connected to the internet that an exchange uses to process customer withdrawals". Early reports suggested someone had phished the authorisations required to access one of Binance's main Ethereum hot wallets, but later reports of further thefts from other cryptocurrency wallets with different chains, keys, and signing schemes suggest the attacker may have had deeper access to Binance.

"The most likely explanation is that the attacker gained the ability to make Binance's hot wallet signing system sign transactions of its choosing across chains," TRM says.

"In this incident, a single actor obtained valid signatures for wallets on ten chains within hours."

So whodunit? TRM points a finger at North Korean hacking group TraderTraitor, a state-sponsored group said to be behind the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in February, 2025.

Binance says it is working with law enforcement to confirm the identity of the hackers. It hasn't given any official indication as to their identity as of yet.

There are sure to be a few reckonings for the cryptocurrency market out of this. Firstly, how could a single compromised laptop issue $6.3 billion worth of dodgy signatures? Secondly, if cryptocurrency is so decentralised, how come a few key players freeze billions in assets when required? Thirdly, how many large-scale heists have to take place before trust in the system falls through the floor?

Anyone tells you that love cannot be measured. That it's a feeling deeper than any other emotion which has bound humanity together since the dawn of time and therefore cannot be quantified is lying to you. You absolutely can measure it, and I'd go as far as saying you can even rank people on it, which is exactly what Grand Theft Auto 6 is setting out to do.

The recent mega piece by Edge has revealed that GTA 6 players will be able to measure Jason and Lucia's closeness in a four-point scale which we're coining as the boyfriend-o-meter.

It's confirmed that you can switch between characters in GTA 6 so you'll likely have to show up for your other half no matter who you're playing as. Activities like taking long romantic walks on the beach, working out at the gym together, and driving around so your other half can doomscroll will all work towards boosting your score.

The relationship between Lucia and Jason certainly seems to be more involved than we first thought, but that's not to say it will take centre stage or be overly important. Your actions will have narrative consequences but only within a narrow scope of possibilities.

But that probably still won't help to calm the growing discourse of people who seem to think that playing GTA 6 is essentially cheating on your partner. I personally think that this is just a psyop propagated by people who don't like having fun, and that no real sensible person would see roleplaying a healthy relationship in a videogame as cheating on your significant other. Especially as you play as both characters; it's essentially just playing make-believe with a couple of dolls, but I digress.

Who knows, though? Weirder things have been known to happen on the internet, so maybe there is an army of people angry at the notion of their significant other getting one videogame character to kiss another one.

I will, however, be relationshipping to the max. This is a competition which I plan to win and in the process of doing so show all of Leonida just how capable and fearsome my skills are at cultivating a healthy and strong relationship.

Reddit will become a "logged-in only experience," and the company plans to move fast, beginning testing soon in regions outside the US before flipping the switch globally.

The popular community website—home to a great many official and unofficial gaming message boards—lost one million search engine referrals per week on average in October, CEO Steve Huffman said on an investor call today.

The culprit, of course, was AI. A Google search that once might have led someone to a 14-year-old Reddit thread containing the answer to a rare household cleaning problem is now likely to present that answer in an AI summary, no click required.

"Google has really shifted in their relationship with the rest of the internet," Huffman said during a Q&A.

The CEO emphasized, however, that most of Reddit's revenue (over 80%) comes from logged-in and app users, and said that the company will focus on establishing the site as "a direct daily habit" that doesn't rely on search traffic.

Efforts cited in that direction include algorithmic feeds, improved app design and performance, AI-powered moderation tools, and "new experiences like games and visual podcasts," the latter referring to, I believe, a feature that uses generative AI to turn posts into videos.

The switch to a logged-in only experience will also help "protect access to Reddit's extremely valuable corpus of data," Huffman said.

Reddit currently has AI training arrangements with OpenAI and Google. In the Q&A portion of the call, Huffman said that Reddit has nothing to announce about those deals, but that it is in "active discussions" and that its leadership will "do what makes sense and is in the best interest for Reddit strategically and economically."

Although it reported 53% year-over-year revenue growth in its 2026 third-quarter results, as well as 16% growth in weekly active users, Reddit's share price dropped today due to a lower-than-expected forecast for the next quarter.

Crimson Desert's Charting the Unknown has arrived, but rather than a focused story expansion, it's more about adding other elements to the existing world.

This includes endgame challenges, new housing options, a romance system, plus a sailing ship and ocean questline about exploring Pywel's treacherous coast and islands. Each feature has different unlock requirements, so here are the exact details for each.

Shipbuilding and exploring the ocean

• You can unlock the ability to buy or build your first ship after "Expanding the Camp" in "Gathered Will" during the "Grounds of the Sunrise" Greymane faction quest.
• The quest to build your first ship will unlock, and progressing this questline will lead to the new ocean story.
• You can upgrade to a medium or large ship for 1.2 million or 6 million camp funds respectively, or build either, which will cost less funds, but more materials.

Garden of Trials and new story quests

You need to complete the main story to unlock the new Garden of Trials combat challenges. Once finished:

1. Visit the Axiom Archive in the abyss, where you first met Alustin near the start of the game.
2. Turn right before the building's staircase and door to find a corridor into the new annex.

There are also new story quests for Kliff, Oongka, and Damiane, which start after the main story is complete in Pailune and Demeniss, respectively, including new combat encounters in the world.

Romances

Kliff, Oongka, and Damiane can each now romance specific NPCs:

• You can check via an NPC's interaction menu to see whether romance is possible.
• After you reach 100 trust, select the "seduce" option, then once likeability is full, you can "propose".
• The four witches have new faction quests that let you build trust and likeability with them as romance options.
• Characters you marry can follow you or reside at your house, and you can also divorce any NPC after marrying.

New housing and management

There is a new upgraded housing mode in the expansion, plus facilities you can now manage:

• Unlock the Greymane Camp on Howling Hill and complete Luke's request in "Grounds of the Sunrise" to unlock new housing options.
• Acquiring the Howling Hill camp will also unlock a number of "facility" icons around the map, which show what strongholds can be rented and used as new management facilities.
• You'll need to liberate the region and complete its faction-related quest before you can access a facility.

It's been almost 15 years since BioWare co-founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka announced their retirements from the videogame industry, and they've been resolute about staying out of it ever since: Muzyka continues to head up the ThresholdImpact investment firm he founded in 2012 and holds multiple roles at the University of Alberta, while Zeschuk owns Blind Enthusiasm Brewing Company, also based in Alberta, where he works with a small handful of other BioWare veterans.

But Zeschuk stepped back into the videogame spotlight, briefly, following last week's closure of BioWare by parent company Electronic Arts, telling 80lv that he got the news hours after it happened because he was on a fishing trip, and by the time he flew home a couple days later, he'd "already shelved it away."

"I wasn't there to share in the moment, which in some ways was nice because I was able to kind of just take my time with it," Zeschuk said. "I’m not saying it doesn't hurt and doesn't suck. And I think it's kind of sad. It's actually, in some ways, saddest for the city of Edmonton, where we're from, because we were kind of this beacon of hope and excitement and possibility. We showed you could do something really special in a place that was not known for doing things like that."

Zeschuk said he had his own "emotional moment" about BioWare years ago, when he left the company; his real concern now is for the people at the studio who now find themselves out of work: "Anyone getting put into the job hunt is a sort of terrifying endeavor and super sad."

He also said he has no regrets about the EA acquisition, saying it offered "stability" as the studio continued to grow and that "we saw there'd be value in being part of something bigger rather than going our own way and taking all the risks." At the same time, he had a feeling when EA was acquired by Saudi Arabia's PIF that it probably wouldn't go well for BioWare, because it doesn't fit into the guns-and-sports model: "BioWare makes these kind of unusual games that take a long time and they're complicated and so it's easier just to pump out sports games every year and that's a better business model in some ways."

Zeschuk was also critical of the idea, seen in the recent wave of studio mergers and AI-powered cutbacks, "that you can just kind of recreate great games with random people and AI. It doesn't work," Zeschuk said.

"The other harsh reality of almost all these companies, the people that go down the business track never really come from the development track. Because none of these people have ever made a game, like, never really sat and made one, like, from start to finish, even a small thing, they just don't know how it works."

Zeschuk does know how it works, and he was clear that he's not interested in going back. "For me it was time to go, and I kind of walked out of the games business without any intention of ever returning. I'm happy being a consumer and playing games," he said. "I have my opinions on how to make stuff, but as enticing as it would be, it's just not [worth] the personal struggle and cost and effort required to make a great game. Having gone through the crucible of game development, I'm not going back in there."

Patrick Stewart, the classically-trained actor who gained worldwide fame in the 1980s as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation and later as Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men film series, has died. A message posted on Stewart's official X account said his passing came "following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia."

Stewart joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, and took his first television role a year later on the long-running British series Coronation Street. He debuted on Broadway in 1971, and subsequently appeared in several feature films.

But it was his tenure as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation that propelled him to international fame. Where his predecessor, Captain James T. Kirk, was a notorious ladies' man of action and fisticuffs, Picard brought a decidedly more intellectual and thoughtful bent to the big chair that ultimately proved one of the show's most enduring characteristics.

Once or twice, the show even allowed him to stretch his Shakespearean legs:

At the same time, there was never any question that Picard could kick whatever ass was necessary whenever it was called for, and he carried that demeanor over to his portrayal of Professor X: A kind, patient father figure of immeasurable power, whose leadership was paramount despite his gentle nature.

He also famously kicked ass in Excalibur:

And Dune:

Stewart also accrued a number of videogame credits over the years in various Star Trek and X-Men games but others as well: He narrated Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos, portrayed Khelben Arunsen in Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone, and maybe most famously gave his deep, sonorous voice to Uriel Septim VII in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion.

In addition to his acting accomplishments, Stewart was unwavering in his support of the LGBTQ+ community, and supported numerous humanitarian causes including Amnesty International, animal charities, and campaigns against bullying and domestic violence. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010, becoming Sir Patrick, which he described as "an unlooked-for honour."

William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on the original Star Trek series, shared a heartfelt message of condolence on X, calling Stewart "a friend, a colleague, and a magnificent actor."

Ian McKellan, Stewart's longtime friend both on and off the screen, paid his own heartfelt tribute, saying Stewart was "a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love."

"He has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter, and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all," the announcement reads. "We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace."

Sir Patrick Stewart was 86.

After 23 mainline games, there are far more Call of Duty maps than anyone can reasonably remember. That's why I'm impressed it took just one screenshot for several fans (with back pain, presumably) to clock that an upcoming Modern Warfare 4 map is actually a remake of a map that's over 20 years old.

Backstab, the new 6v6 map arriving on November 6, is a dead ringer for Burgundy, first seen in Call of Duty 2 way back in 2005. That means Backstab is older than the teenagers currently playing Call of Duty—do with that information what you will.

A number of people noticed this around the same time, but I'll credit Reddit user wizward64 for providing helpful visuals.

Apologies to the reader typing "This was a classic, show some respect!", but there's no way I would've noticed the resemblance on my own. I played Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360 when it was new, but not all that much multiplayer. I really like the look of the original Burgundy, though: The desaturated green grass and beige brickwork of the French countryside still looks so clean and attractive 21 years later. I'm also now wondering if my favorite Day of Defeat: Source map (Donner) snuck in some of these CoD 2 assets, or if all WW2 shooters of this era were riffing on the same Saving Private Ryan scenes.

The layouts are near 1:1, which is neat, though the theming is clearly altered. Burgundy was a WW2 map in France (duh) and Backstab appears to take place in either Russia or North Korea (I think I see Cyrillic script on those signs, so leaning toward the former). Backstab is also snowy, so maybe this town will exist in the eventual Russian chunk of the Hajin DMZ map.

Burgundy was a pretty small map for Call of Duty 2, and I expect it'll feel even smaller at Modern Warfare 4's quicker pace. The map's signature feature was a pair of two-story buildings that overlooked the central courtyard from opposite sides of the battlefield. High windows with usable machine gun emplacements made these buildings important for map control, but those windows will presumably become regular sniper nests in Backstab.

Call of Duty is famous for recycling old maps, but a deep dive into the vault like this feels different from the usual. This isn't Infinity Ward remaking a popular map to please expectant fans like we see with yearly iterations of Nuketown and Shipment, but instead pulling a relatively unknown goodie and refreshing it for a new audience.

The OG Call of Duty studio has apparently been doing this for a while and I didn't notice: As commenters point out in that same Reddit thread, the Modern Warfare 2 (2022) map Taraq was a remake of CoD 1's Neuville and Modern Warfare 2019 map Suldal Harbor was a remake of CoD 1's Harbor. Hey, those maps were pretty good.

PUBG, the battle royale that lets you wear a frying pan on your ass to keep it from getting shot off, is being made into a live action series for Netflix.

Narrative isn't really PUBG's strong point, but this one might be interesting for one big reason: Donald Glover is set to write, direct, and executive produce the series, and will also star in it. Stephen Glover, Donald's brother and frequent collaborator, is also attached to the project as writer and executive producer.

Glover has won numerous awards over the years for writing, acting, and music (under his stage name Childish Gambino), to the point that "list of awards and nominations received by Donald Glover" has its own remarkably lengthy Wikipedia page. Highlights include two Primetime Emmy awards, two Golden Globes, five Grammy Awards, two Peabody Awards, and five Writers Guild of America Awards.

The upside of PUBG not having a strong pre-existing story like, say, Halo or Fallout is that it affords creators the opportunity to do their own thing, and as I said, that could be very interesting indeed with Glover at the helm. His 2018 music video for This Is America, built around themes of racism and gun violence in the US, was critically acclaimed and won multiple awards, but also attracted considerable controversy over its violent content. More recently, his Mr. & Mrs. Smith series on Amazon Prime, which premiered in 2024, drew 16 Primetime Emmy nominations for its first season, including "Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series" for Glover himself.

No other details about the upcoming PUBG show on Netflix were announced, but even so, I'm definitely curious about this one and looking forward to learning more.

Bungie shocked the world (or at least, it shocked the world's Destiny fans) when it un-canceled Destiny 2 in September, saying the game "is foundational to Bungie’s future" and promising to restore vaulted content and "return Destiny to its original promise." In a community update shared today, the studio revealed more about that process, and one standout point is that it sure sounds like the original Destiny is finally coming to PC.

The update begins with a broad overview of what led up to the unvaulting announcement and what's happened since, a broad roadmap that breaks down into three sections—First Pass, Stretch Goals, and stuff that's probably not going to happen "for technical and/or strategic reasons"—and a progress bar:

It's worth noting up front that while things have been happening fairly quickly so far, the actual Great Unvaultening is still a long way off. The pre-production process is now underway and expected to run until January or February of 2027, and "from that point we expect full production will be about 12 months to fully complete the porting process," Bungie head of product Josh Deane said. That puts it in early 2028—assuming things go according to plan.

Deane then touched on what comes after that, referencing his comment in September that Bungie is "not done with Destiny." With caveats that "some things are subject to change in success or failure," he said that Bungie is "marching forward with a phased plan for Destiny’s future that celebrates our legacy and propels us into a new, far green country." To that end, he cited three "anchors" for players to watch for:

Destiny 2 “Celebration’’ [Expect a new February Progress bar]

• We believe we need to have a celebration in Destiny 2, beyond Monument of Triumph, for the community that provides new updates for you all to enjoy. More details to come!

Destiny ‘Legacy’ [Expect a new February Progress bar]

• Our epic journey started over a decade ago, and the whole experience needs to be served to you all where you play today. Expect more information when we come back to you all early next year.

Redacted [TBD]

• Launch Ventrilo Message: ‘We’re back’

The second point is the one that caught our interest. Destiny 2 was (and, some PC Gamer folks would argue, still is) huge on PC, but the original game never came our way: More than a decade after it launched, it remains exclusive to consoles.

Proclaiming that "the whole experience needs to be served to you all where you play today" pretty strongly suggests to me that's going to change, and that's a big deal: Destiny 2's Final Shape expansion brought an end to the 10-year Light and Darkness saga in 2024, but a lot of us never got to experience how it actually started, and I'd bet that having the opportunity to do so would bring a lot of lapsed players (myself included) back to see what's cooking.

Deane concluded by saying that this is a major undertaking and not one that will be finished quickly. "It’s important to know that this is a true reset moment for Bungie, Marathon, and Destiny. We also know time isn’t our friend; we’re playing from behind with the cards we have and I’m sure we’ll have to take more punches and make some hard decisions along the way," he said.

"Knowing we are early in incubating our future and actively working on projects to bridge us to that new home, don’t expect us to make a Destiny announcement at the TGA’s this year, or to randomly drop a logo that sets the world on fire right away.

"We get there when we get there."

For a lot of people, the appeal of horror is being surprised and disturbed by something they've never seen before. In recent years, I've sourced this rare feeling from movies like Obsession, where the gender dynamics of that story made it feel a bit dangerous, or Speak No Evil, which has one of the most shocking and nihilistic endings that I can recall. I even find that freshness in a modern classic like Pearl, which isn't really scary, but contrasts a technicolour old Hollywood style with a singularly unsettling Mia Goth performance to great effect.

Fear of the unknown is more valuable to me as a viewer than seeing a really good version of something I've experienced before. In games, it's largely the same—I crave new places and themes above all else. It's why Silent Hill: Townfall, Mouthwashing, Dredge, Silent Hill f, and Still Wakes The Deep all succeeded for me. They're all set in locations or timeframes I've never seen anywhere else in games. I step into those worlds not knowing exactly what I'm going to find, and come out the other side feeling exhilarated in a profoundly nasty way. That's horror, baby.

From this decade, however, nothing in the horror genre has upended my expectations like MyHouse.wad. Everyone who plays this Doom 2 map seems to have the same experience: they know there's something weird about this mod set in a seemingly normal suburban home, but they spiral once they start playing it and realise how many secrets are impossibly embedded within its walls. They then become obsessed with trying to understand exactly how the house works. I consider it a modern horror classic because it's able to take players on this ride.

If you missed its release in 2023, the 'backstory' behind MyHouse.wad is that its creator had recently lost an important friend. Among his friend's belongings was a floppy disc containing an incomplete Doom map recreation of his parents' house. Since they both shared an interest in Doom mapping back in the '00s, the creator decided to honour his friend's memory by finishing his work. Except, of course, this story is all fiction, and the Doom map in question turns out to be a hellish labyrinth disguised as a lovely home. Its real creator? Still officially unknown.

On the first run through MyHouse.wad, it does indeed look like a normal suburban house, albeit one filled with Doom monsters. After killing the patrolling enemies, you exit the house, look in from the outside, and realise it's somehow filled with monsters again. You go inside to gun them down and learn the house has subtly changed: new doors appear, leading to rooms that weren't there before and architecturally impossible spaces. Key visual details have been altered. Crucially, too, the sound design begins messing with your head, resetting and then distorting Doom 2's classic Running From Evil music, or playing the Discord notification sound as a jump scare. No matter where you go, too, the general shape of the environment somehow still looks exactly like the house…

The unsettling details of the spaces you're exploring just pile up—MyHouse.wad is relentlessly tense, and punctuated by a series of 'WTF' moments that keep you wondering what evil thing you've downloaded. There's no question that the choice of a simple family home as the backdrop contributes to how disturbing it is.

Bless this mess

The first thing that very online people will tell you about this mod is that it's inspired by House of Leaves, an experimental novel by Mark Z. Danielewski (which has also been cited as an influence on Remedy's Alan Wake and Control). The mod shares the premise of a house that's larger on the inside than it seems from the outside, with the interior undergoing constant bizarre changes. There are several direct references to specific details from the book.

But while reading House of Leaves these days feels like work—I got the distinct impression I'd have appreciated its experimental structure and overwrought style much more if I'd read it at 21, rather than my late 30s—MyHouse.wad is just as mischievous as it is scary.

I feel its anonymous creator chuckling darkly at me as I see the house refill with monsters, or when I shoot a horrible giant fish guarding a swimming pool and see it explode into tinier evil fish that are much harder to kill. The creator is definitely laughing at me as I fight an evil version of Shrek outside a nursery. While the story of the mod gestures at darker themes, it's almost like the creator is playing a series of pranks on you, subverting your expectations of Doom as they go (illustrated by John Romero himself streaming it multiple times and frequently stopping to admire its tricks).

My relationship with MyHouse.wad is similar to how I felt about Kojima Productions' PT. It's not something I necessarily play for its mechanics—even though it's still Doom, of course. You're more focused on unpicking the 'how did they do that?' factor of its impossible architecture, the nightmarish logic of how the different areas link together or why its more novel monsters are even there. It's one giant mystery with a load of little mysteries buried inside it.

Another thing it has in common with PT is how scant details are on its creation, which feeds into the overall legend surrounding it. As mentioned, we still don't officially know who made MyHouse.wad—the creepypasta-style files in the mod's Google Drive folder don't give anything away. Its credited creator is Steven Nelson, AKA Veddge, but that's just a pseudonym. Veddge's Doomworld account was active until 2006, at which point they took a hiatus until they started posting again in 2022. That too feeds into the wad's myth. Veddge has not posted once since the mod was released in 2023, either.

I'm almost too vain to accept the idea that someone could create something this good then disappear into the wilderness without taking credit for it. But this confidential origin story is a key part of MyHouse.wad's creative identity. Anyone with a search engine and a spare hour can piece together who the creator almost certainly is (and in-game credits shed light on who else contributed to the project), but I wouldn't give that much thought. The intention behind the mod's creation is to blur fiction and reality in this way that enhances the experience. Let the mystery be.

House secrets

Replaying it now, what is staggering about MyHouse.wad is that it's packed with the kind of moments or clever twists that would become iconic if they featured in full games. People still talk about Psycho Mantis reading your PlayStation memory card in Metal Gear Solid almost three decades later. But this mod has maybe four or five moments that evoked a similar 'no way…' response from me as a player, all happening inside this single map.

The rub is, finding your way to those moments is not for the faint of heart—MyHouse.wad is deliberately obtuse and tough to figure out. But what you're doing in the map is fundamentally the same thing you do in all Doom maps: shooting monsters and looking for items or interactive parts of the environment to forward your progress. It's just that you're being asked to do so in an impossible, ever-changing space that never allows you to be comfortable.

I keep encouraging my normie friends to get over the hump of MyHouse.wad being a mod so they can discover its magic for themselves, but no one in my life has played it so far. Despite its continued popularity as a topic on YouTube, MyHouse.wad's reach is still limited to anyone who can be bothered to mod Doom 2 on PC, a process that takes all of two minutes.

If the same idea was packaged up into an indie game that took place inside a fake retro FPS wrapping (like No Players Online), maybe it would find a slightly different audience, but seeing something this inventive running in ancient Doom with a few bells and whistles is undoubtedly its special sauce. This house, as a feat of level design inside a decades-old game, is that fresh element I crave from all the horror I love.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and one of AI's most important people, was reportedly targeted by a data centre executive working as a spy for the Chinese government, a new report suggests.

According to the New York Times, citing undisclosed sources that were briefed on the matter, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, was being watched by US agencies due to suspicion of involvement in data centre chip smuggling from Singapore. During that surveillance, the officials are said to have determined that Alice Huang was acting as an intelligence asset.

Moreover, those officials are also said to have determined that Alice Huang had a close relationship with Jensen Huang (no relation). The NYT suggests that officials were concerned that Alice Huang may have been able to extract information from this relationship that would be useful to the Chinese state—what with Nvidia being pivotal to America's AI efforts.

It's said that Jensen Huang had, at the time, not been briefed on the threat of foreign intelligence services. It was later implied Nvidia was not briefed on Alice Huang, either. The Nvidia CEO has a close relationship with US president Donald Trump, and has travelled with the US president to China and was more recently called by the president while on stage at an AI event.

The US has approved the sale of some AI chips to China, though they are not the cutting-edge Blackwell chips that US firms have access to—providing they pay a pretty penny, anyways. China had been blocking some of these chips on its side, but recent reports suggest older Nvidia H200 cards are reaching China in small amounts.

As it stands, the White House, CIA, and NSA have all declined to comment to the NYT. Who knew what, and when, is still up in the air. Even Alice Huang's status with the data centre company that was under scrutiny for chip smuggling, Megaspeed, is not currently clear.

Nvidia has also pushed back on a few of the claims made in the NYT report. The company says that claims Megaspeed had any involvement in chip smuggling were debunked last year in a statement to CNBC.

"The diversion allegations against this regional cloud were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year,” says spokesperson John Rizzo.

Rizzo also pushed back on Huang's relationship with Alice Huang being anything exceptional to the NYT.

“Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.”

He also added that Nvidia believes the US government would have made it known had there been any threat to American industry, and that Megaspeed would have received "ordinary business information" and not trade secrets; "zero information relevant to national security."

Even during a good financial year, a big tech investor is seemingly never satisfied. Case in point, while Google Search grew by 12% year-over-year and made $63.3 billion this past quarter, parent company Alphabet's share price took a pretty spectacular tumble.

Despite making an amount of money the mere thought of which sucks the air right out of my lungs, Search's revenue this quarter was actually below Wall Street's expectations. As a result, Alphabet's shares are down 13% and $500 billion has been wiped from its market value (via The Financial Times).

The share price is continuing to fluctuate and, according to CNBC, it could be the worst post-earnings call decline ever. This follows $1 trillion worth of air escaping from the AI party balloon earlier this month, due to anxious investors widely selling off stock. So, how did Alphabet get its ABC's so wrong? Long story short, Google's own AI features may be eating into its Search revenue.

This is despite Search apparently seeing the fastest year-over-year query growth rate in half a decade. During Alphabet's most recent earnings call, Google's senior vice president and chief business officer Philipp Schindler was asked to explain this 'disconnect'.

"It's worth noting that the strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact because of the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode," Schindler says. "To be clear, we feel very good about our trajectory here. Our ad experiments have shown promising results, and we're now scaling ads within both AI Overviews and AI Mode to more users and more queries, including, as I mentioned, international markets and multiturn ads in the US."

In other words, yes, AI Mode is eating Search's lunch but Google is hoping to scale up its kitchen production in order to keep both of its babies fed. Or something like that—the metaphor got away from me in the middle there.

Anyway, these financial results only serve to add fuel to the fire of investor fear that Google Search is getting singed by the likes of ChatGPT. I mean, compare and contrast the amount of ads you see on the first page of Google results against what you typically see from an LLM chatbot. As Google tells it, more ads are likely coming to AI Overviews and AI Mode in the near future to remedy its 'disconnect.'

On top of what investors are seeing as financial underperformance, Google is also knee deep in negative cash flow. Initial projections suggested this wouldn't venture into the red beyond $3.5 billion, but Google was actually looking at minus $9.1 billion at the end of September. This is apparently only the second quarter in which Google has reported negative cash flow since it went public back in 2004.

Having spent $51.3 billion on AI in the last quarter alone, such a plunge is perhaps unsurprising. The company intends to spend even more in the future, having apparently committed itself to data centre and related purchases in excess of $1 trillion—despite investors growing increasingly anxious about whether a return on AI investment will ever fully materialise.