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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hey, remember when SSDs didn't cost an arm and your least liked limb? I've been tracking SSD deals for some time now, so I definitely do—good times. Alas, that's a distant past thanks to the AI-induced memory supply crisis driving up SSD prices. That said, I have just found a far from terrible price on a nippy little 1 TB drive that's well worth sharing.

I've had my beady little eyes set on tracking down the best cheap SSD deals today for a wee while now, so trust me when I say you can do far worse than the drive I'm chatting about today. The 1 TB version of the Teamgroup MP44Q is not only speedy, but it's also down to the best price I've seen for it since June. Right now, you can pick up this SSD from Amazon for $167.

Boasting read and write speeds of 7000/5900 MB/s, this is a decently speedy PCIe 4.0 SSD. Whether you choose to use this as your rig's main SSD, storing your OS alongside a few games, or more as supplemental storage, this SSD won't leave you waiting around on file transfers.

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As Zak notes in his Teamgroup MP44Q review, though, this SSD's more game-specific performance is a little lacking. Specifically, the random 4K performance is a bit of a let-down, with Zak writing, "The MP44Q really struggles here, delivering just 70 MB/s on the read and 288 MB/s on the write, making it slower than even Lexar's latest NQ780 QLC drive as well. Compare that to the 107 and 308 MB/s from the SN5100, and there's almost no contest."

In short, this may not be the fastest drive for anyone wanting to play the latest and greatest with lots of swish textures and dense levels to load in. As for me and all of my indie darlings, though, that's not really a deal breaker. After all, I've already sunk over 40-hours into Dressmaker—what's 40-hours more on this reasonably priced SSD?

Speaking of that price point, it's also worth mentioning this is a QLC SSD. QLC doesn't have the best track record when it comes to write endurance, but this little guy offers a welcome surprise. Zak writes, "Teamgroup's got this clocked at 1000 TBW, which for a budget QLC drive is quite impressive. The default rating for most SSDs these days is 600 TBW for 1 TB, and practically all manufacturers abide by that, so it's nice to see an improvement here. Although you still get the same 5-year warranty anyway."

In this economy, I will definitely be poring over the fine print of that warranty policy. Otherwise, you can do a lot worse for the money.

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.

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."

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.

People buy gaming headsets for different reasons. Some simply want the most intense sound they can get, others look for a great microphone. Some look for something a tad understated so you can bring it out of the house.

Though its microphone is merely okay for its price point, the Asus ROG Pelta does almost everything else on the list, and it's light and comfortable enough that I've used it on hot days and barely worked up a sweat. If you fancy one for yourself, it's dropped down to $79 at Amazon, an over $50 saving.

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I gave the headset 84% in my review last year, and that was when it sold at $130. Down to just under $80, it's a great deal. First, its sound is good. It's distinct enough to make out footsteps in competitive shooters, and full enough to add weight to a heartfelt cutscene. Bass doesn't quite boom as you may want in a headset, but it's certainly present, and you won't be missing a bassline in a good mix.

As I said at the time, "Genesis Noir's jazzy, vibey soundtrack slickly oozes out of the Asus ROG Pelta, with both the squealing of smooth sax and the pitter-patter of jazz brushes coming through clear."

It's not heavy-duty or designed for audiophiles. It's got solid sound, but not thundering; this also works in its favour. At 309 grams, it's not massively heavy, and the earcups are super soft and made out of a breathable material. If you detach the microphone, I would happily wear this out of the house or on a bus. The only part that might distract is the ROG logo on the right earcup.

Speaking of earcups, controls are built into the left earcup and work perfectly fine. They're not super smart, but they're also not hard to find.

The Pelta is made better day to day by its 90-hour battery life (in Bluetooth mode with RGB off and mic muted). That is tons for pretty much any type of gamer, and more than enough to justify throwing these in a backpack when you're away on a long weekend. The microphone also performed fine, being clear enough for a call with friends, or even a quick meeting, but not strong enough to justify for the likes of a podcast.

The Asus ROG Pelta might not be the best in every regard, but it stands out in terms of comfort and feel. It's a super solid all-rounder, and a headset I used for pretty much the entirety of summer last year and never got tired of it. That's a pretty great feat in my book. My big ol' gaming headset book, that is.

Denis Dyack, known for his work on games including Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, says big game developers are "abusing early access" by using it as a marketing tool for highly polished games that are ready for full release anyway. That, Dyack believes, has shifted expectations for early access releases overall, and made life more difficult for indie developers who rely on the process to actually get their games finished and launched.

"They can put up a polished product and rake in cash," Dyack told GamesIndustry. "It's a marketing beat for them. So, that leaves players often expecting a near-perfect game that, in our opinion, defeats the purpose of early access, which is a collaborative development process based on player feedback.

"AAA publishers are abusing early access, skewing player expectations in such a way that it heavily disadvantages smaller independent developers."

Dyack said games like Subnautica 2 and Path of Exile are "drastically changing the landscape and players' expectations," which in turn has led to "significant barriers to entry" for less polished games like Dyack's current project, Deadhaus Sonata, which is now in early access on Steam.

Ethan McKinnon, who joined Deadhaus Sonata developer Apocalypse Studios as creative director after the game's rough early access launch earlier this year, added that "players naturally compare everything in the same marketplace, so smaller teams are being held to a much higher standard than they were in the past."

Interestingly, Subnautica 2 creative director Anthony Gallegos seemed to agree with at least part of Dyack's proposition, saying in the same report that early access is "not a few edge-case games participating anymore."

"Early access could mean a game like ours doing long-term open development, or it could be a game three months from a 1.0 release that's effectively doing a paid beta soft launch and using the Early Access term as a way to soften player expectations," Gallegos said. The result, he continued, is a "more diverse and confusing landscape."

I think that point is more salient here than any perceived 'abuse' by big publishers: It's tough to set meaningful broad expectations for "early access" when it's such a loosely defined term in the first place. But even though I'm not entirely convinced by Dyack's argument, he and McKinnon do have sensible advice for developers looking at early access launches: Ensure the game runs well, pay attention to Steam reviews, and connect with influencers who can get it in front of eyeballs.

Dyack admitted that Apocalypse Studios missed those points with the early access release of Deadhaus Sonata earlier this year. "We failed to prioritize the basics right from the get-go," Dyack said. "Also, we didn't handle Unreal Engine properly at the time and didn't do a good job explaining what made our game cool and different. In a lot of ways, we were too focused on what made our game so different and unique that it took our attention away from making sure we got the basics done right."

McKinnon put it more simply: "Developers need to treat early access like a real launch, because players do."

In this week's 'what the memory crisis is doing to people' news, a YouTuber has recently bought 32 GB of DDR5 laptop memory online and successfully converted it into memory for their desktop. Overall, it cost them just $175 ($120 for the memory and $55 for extra components). That's a bit of a bargain, as 32 GB DDR5 dual-channel memory is fetching upwards of $500 on Newegg right now.

Blighted Agent took to their YouTube channel to share the process, where they purchased two SO-DIMM sticks of 16 GB DDR5 memory on Facebook Marketplace (presumably salvaged from a dead laptop). From here, they put a stick on a preheater, then removed the BIOS chip, the SPD chip and all eight of its memory chips.

Buying new DDR5 DIMM PCBs and heatsinks off AliExpress, they cleaned the factory unleaded solder on the laptop memory, then soldered them onto the new PCBs. It's an impressive feat that requires reballing the memory chips with a stencil, a very precise procedure.

Blighted Agent says, "You want a thin layer of flux, not too much or not too little. If you do too little, the balls might not reflow properly. If you do too much, they might bridge and cause problems".

Effectively, those solder balls connect the memory chip circuitry to the circuitry on the board, so mistakes would require redoing the entire process. From here, everything that was taken off the original SO-DIMM sticks is then put onto the new boards, tested via the desktop BIOS, before getting a heatsink.

Blighted Agent reports this memory kit has a 7800 MT/s frequency at CL38 when overclocked, making it a decent bit of kit and likely to cost a pretty penny as a standard RAM kit today. It reportedly tested stable for an hour and a half. They also say it worked fine without any blue screens in normal use.

Though Blighted Agent makes it look easy, technical knowledge is needed to actually convert the memory, so it's hard to recommend doing it at home unless you are willing to buy the gear and teach yourself, but this points to a decent alternate path while the memory crisis continues to gut pricing.

One could feasibly convert memory from laptops and give it back to users for a technical fee, and still pay less than it would cost you to get the standard desktop memory. And right now, we're all looking for ways to get memory as cheap as possible.

Here's hoping AI companies don't try to buy up all the laptop memory to do the same thing.

I don't mean to be contrarian (which is rare for me), but I've been generally unfazed by the hype for Grand Theft Auto 6. It's not that I don't think it'll be good—I'm actually damn near certain it will—it's just that none of what Rockstar has focused on so far in its marketing speaks to me all that much.

Anyway, throw those equanimous sentiments out the window, because an anecdote from Edge magazine's new mondo-feature on GTA 6 has convinced me this game is actually an immersive sim, and now I'm bouncing off the walls in anticipation. Chatting about his experience actually playing the game, Rockstar head of development Phil Hooker told a story about the time he deployed a bit of unorthodox crowd control to prepare a store for a heist.

"Recently I was robbing a store that was full of people," said Hooker. "I wanted to get rid of them, because they'd be witnesses who would cause me trouble." What did he do? Well, in GTAs of yore, your options would have been pretty limited, but GTA 6's dovetailing systems gave our man an opportunity. "I basically started picking fights with them, provoking them and then immediately defusing it.

"I didn't actually get them into a fight—I'd just go: 'Ah, sorry, leave it'. Then they would leave the store, so that would clear them out and I could rob it more cleanly." It's one of the things Hooker says he, and Rockstar generally, focuses on in testing: "meeting new NPCs, for example, trying different ways in which to interact with them, trying to find ways to combine the features in ways we maybe haven't thought about."

Forgive me, but is that not the most immersive sim stuff you've ever heard? A sandbox crammed with systems that can collide—or be manipulated—in ways the developers themselves never even expected, to the delight and satisfaction of a creative player? I say it is, and it's quite honestly made me more excited for Rockstar's quadrillion-dollar baby than any glossy trailer. Put it in my hands, please, and then let me use those hands to pick up a crate that turns translucent when I do it.

Rumor has it that GTA 6 will come to PC relatively quickly after the console launch, though Rockstar typically puts at least seven months between console and PC launches.

Who said those big AI companies have to get all the gear? If you had a cool $60 million hanging around yesterday, you could have picked up an AI supercomputer for yourself, complete with thousands of Nvidia A100 GPUs and AMD EPYC CPUs split over 300 racks. And if you went cheap, you could even get shipping for free.

Core 4 Solutions, a company that sells IT parts to companies like Amazon, Lucasfilm, Microsoft, Meta and even the US Department of Justice, listed the 300-rack cluster on its page this week (via Tom's Hardware).

That listing says each rack includes four compute nodes, complete with eight Nvidia A100 40 GB GPUs, eight Nvidia Connect network interface cards, and two AMD EPYC 64-core CPUs. Each rack also comes with 1 TB of DDR4 memory and three 1U management nodes, complete with two EPYC CPUs. As pointed out by Tom's Hardware, this equates to 9,600 GPUs and 4200 CPUs.

The Nvidia A100 GPU is a now-discontinued enterprise-level GPU built on the Ampere architecture, and it's specifically designed for AI use cases and data analytics. You are getting 6912 CUDA cores per GPU (A little more than the RTX 5070 has), though it's not something one would use for gaming.

The $59.7 million listing ended today, October 28, but it's not clear if the 300 racks were actually sold. If you happen to live in the United States, you could even get the racks sent free shipping if you chose the FedEx Ground or FedEx Home Delivery options. What a bargain.

Core 4 Solutions is selling some servers on its website, but the most expensive of these only fetches $87K. The 300 racks on eBay are almost 700 times more expensive.

Impressively, the $59.7 million rack cluster has a whopping 1.4 petabytes of memory, which is enough for just under 90,000 relatively impressive gaming rigs (assuming 16 GB is enough).

So, if you're wondering why your RAM is so costly, you can thank AI servers (and AI companies, by extension) for sucking up all that sweet, sweet memory. It really puts into perspective just how much AI companies are spending on all their gear—and each other.

The Backrooms left me with more questions than answers, which to be fair is exactly what I wanted from it. But, while I enjoy sustaining the mystique of this odd liminal space, I would like to see a bit more of what Parsons has to offer of his take on the backrooms—so yes, I would like a sequel.

It's still touch and go whether Parsons will even revisit The Backrooms on the silver screen, but if he did there are a couple of things he'd apparently do differently:

"I consider it, me advancing and doubling down on the strengths that I think are more universally recognised about the core idea," Parsons says in an interview with The Kyle Buchanan Show. "Rather than doubling down on the things or points where it didn't feel like it accurately spoke to the cultural core of Backrooms in the first film—[there are] a few little places here and there, that I would personally go out of my way to poke at a little bit."

Instead of approaching a sequel in the traditional sense of a linear continuation of the story, Parsons may try something different , like "an expanding image rather than a line". A sequel would simply serve to add more flavour to the universe like "a different branch on the tree" instead of strictly following the same story and characters from the first movie. It seems that Parsons wishes to add more life to his version of the backrooms in this way, so the viewer can decide how much they wish to watch and "when to stop".

Parsons also hints at the fact that there may be other characters, either new or from his YouTube series, that "are still lying in wait" and will probably make an appearance "in the near future". But this may all be in the form of a YouTube video instead of a full-blown movie as we also know Parsons is working on a project exclusively for YouTube at this moment.

Ultimately, though, this is all just theories and abstract ideas, as Parsons doesn't confirm if a sequel is even in the works "because I like being subversive, and the excitement comes from not sharing—so I can't say."

Malaysian customs have shared this week that $12.11 million worth of AI chips were discovered during an inspection. A total of 30 server units, each featuring cutting edge AI chips, were seized from Kuala Lumpur ​International Airport on October 15.

The servers originated from and were to be exported to two different, undisclosed Asian countries, according to Reuters. This should have required a trade permit, though the airport's customs director Aspalila Ag Tuah explained this week, "The ‌servers ⁠were falsely declared as electronic components... and shipped through Malaysia to ensure there would be no restrictions imposed while being exported to the next destination."

A Malaysian firm facilitating the movement of the servers has been called upon to assist in the investigation, though local authorities suspect this goes beyond them. This latest smuggling attempt is thought to be connected to at least five other similar cases involving nearly $25 million worth of chips in total.

The most recent of these cases saw $13 million worth of chips seized by Malaysian customs back in June—these were also falsely declared as "computer components." Aspalila said that all of these smuggling attempts are suspected to have been carried out by the same syndicate though, as the investigation is still ongoing, they did not share further information.

To briefly recap, the US has restricted the export of AI chips to a number of global destinations since at least the Biden administration. That's translated to pressure for Malaysia to stop banned AI chips potentially entering China by monitoring 'every shipment that comes to Malaysia when it involves Nvidia chips'.

Simply put, if certain chips can't be directly exported to China, then smugglers will take a more circuitous route with pit stops throughout Asia. For instance last year, Singaporean authorities arrested three men for a separate smuggling attempt, and earlier this year Taiwanese authorities detained an Nvidia employee for another alleged smuggling attempt. The US is also concerned that China might have a top-spec chipmaking machine despite export restrictions, but the machine maker ASML denies it.

With big tech still betting big on AI, often to the tune of even more multi-billion dollar investments, it's unsurprising the hardware is in demand worldwide. In fact, more than $100,000,000 worth of AI data centre freight has been reportedly stolen within the US alone since June. So long as data centre demand remains high, criminal activity may be likely to follow.

AI data centers are springing up across the US at an unprecedented rate, and with them comes a number of problems. Aside from the noise, disruption, and environmental concerns, the vast infrastructure projects also require the transport of millions of dollars worth of equipment—and opportunistic thieves are cashing in.

An NBC News report details two audacious data center equipment heists, both involving literal examples of highway robbery. A shipment carrying $13 million worth of server equipment travelling on a section of interstate through the Mojave Desert had its security escort rammed by a separate vehicle, forcing it to stop. The trailer carrying the equipment was later found at a truck yard in California, minus its valuable load.

"The accident was not an accident," says Gerado Pachucha, an ex-member of the LA Country Sheriff's Department cargo criminal apprehension team. "The bad guys wanted that load, so they intentionally took out the escorts."

A second incident, also involving a collision with a security vehicle, led to the loss of another trailer carrying an estimated $10 million worth of server rack components. NBC reports that, according to industry leaders, consultants, and investigators it's spoken to regarding the heists, thieves are estimated to have stolen more than $100 million worth of data center freight since June of this year.

Keith Lewis, head of operations of a cargo theft tracking team at Verisk CargoNet, says "It’s like stealing pure gold bars."

"We’ve seen some of these thefts go up into 30-plus million dollars for one particular shipment. It’s so much easier to steal this than to rob a bank."

Aside from the server racks themselves, data centers also require a vast amount of copper wires, fiber optic cables, RAM modules, storage drives, and various other high-value components that need to be transported to their destination by conventional means.

"Things that are precursors for the AI data centers: copper, server racks and RAM. Those are the things that are the precursors to build one, so that’s what we’re seeing the big increase in," says Lewis. "It’s the dollar value that’s getting the attention because the product they’re stealing costs so much more."

And despite the addition of security escorts, it seems some criminals are willing to go to increasingly sophisticated lengths to obtain such high-value items.

The FBI issued a warning in April of this year regarding "cyber-enabled strategic cargo theft," in which an online heist method is detailed. This involves spoofing broker's email addresses to gain access to cargo systems and bidding on loads, which are then said to be "cross-docked" or "transloaded" to complicit drivers, who then move the cargo to a separate location for resale.

However, while the two hit-and-run style thefts detailed above are seen as isolated incidents (in terms of their methods) for now, the experts NBC has spoken to view them as a potential escalation of violent tactics more commonly seen in other countries—and it's not just data center equipment that's at risk.

Scott Cornell, chair of the Transported Asset Protection Association, Americas, says: "These are extremely high-level organized rings that are operating from a dozen different countries, targeting freight in the United States supply chain. These are not unsophisticated crews just pulling off theft."

"They’re planned. They’re plotted. They’re strategic. They’re playing chess in the supply chain," says Cornell.

Meanwhile, states such as Arizona, California, Tennessee, and Illinois have established specialised cargo theft task forces to deal with the issue. Private security escort companies are seeing increasing demand from data center logistics providers, while a new bill to combat wider organized retail crime is currently being debated by US congress.

Where the money goes, I guess it's no surprise that organised crime will follow. And given the value of some of the data center freight now making its way across the US, it seems that opportunistic criminals have a new high-value target to consider.

EA took the axe to BioWare last week after a long, slow death partially born of mandates to either work on live service games that didn't work (Anthem) or pivot from live service games in messy, chaotic development cycles (Veilguard). A report from Vertical Slice now also claims that its employee morale is at an all-time low.

Speaking to the site's Chris Kerr, choosing to remain anonymous, sources state that "Morale has been terrible. The line we kept hearing is 'do less, better' but it just felt like we were doing the same amount with less people."

It doesn't help that "upper management was very excited about Claude and the possibilities of [generative] AI, much to the chagrin of my team." It's not entirely shocking that generative AI is exciting the executive class—and, to give credit where it's perhaps undue, there are places in which the use of AI could, if applied conservatively, save on busywork.

But in an utterly brutal industry environment, none of these employees seem keen on the idea that management might replace them with AI while not understanding their jobs: "The message from every single manager I've heard is 'this is the future, you have to get onboard'," writes one source, while another adds: "They won't tell you these tools are a mandate, but they'll make it impossible or very difficult for you to do your job without [them]."

Another source in the article claims that there is a sense that "EA executives cannot fail, only be failed. They've been fortunate that [EA Sports FC] sells and makes so much money that it can finance their bad bets."

That is a pervasive feeling—one does have to wonder why the axe falls first on the employees rather than, say, executive-level pay or bonuses, some of which could fund the yearly salaries of dozens of employees handily. Take Battlefield 6, for instance, which laid off several developers and then paid EA's CEO $38 million for the game's success.

To further put it in perspective, Andrew Wilson's yearly pay was worth roughly 305 median salaries at the publisher's studios in 2025.

To return to BioWare for a moment, the report also paints an ugly picture of the mismanagement of that studio. Predictably, the constant cajoling to try and get it to make a live service masterpiece.

"A lot of money got wasted going down these roads that didn't lead anywhere," says one source, while another writes: "There was never a desire to take risks. Never a desire to do anything interesting. It was just 'here is what these 14 UXR [User Experience Research] studies are saying, so we've got to do it this way."

Like the cherry on top of a terrible sundae, Vertical Slice's reporting ends with an eminently quotable summation of the entire fiasco: "That the recent email about the organisation changes [sounded like] it was written by a robot best sums up EA. A cold dead place that's slowly decaying as leadership pilfers every last cent, leaving the rest of us to worry about how we feed our families."

Phantom Blade Zero, the highly anticipated wuxia action RPG, is finally out in the world, and if you're planning on playing it on an Nvidia graphics card, maybe consider skipping the latest Nvidia driver update. Yes, that's the opposite of developer S-Game's pre-launch advice.

Today, the Phantom Blade Zero devs took to the Steam page with a post titled "Reason and Madness" recounting the history of the dev team, previous works, and how Phantom Blade Zero came to be. This is followed up with three announcements: a recommendation to download the 5 GB day one patch, encouragement to try the game on handhelds and lower-end/mid-range PCs, and, finally, advice not to use the latest Nvidia driver, 621.01.

It says, "Based on our testing, version 617.42 currently offers the best experience in Phantom Blade Zero. If you’ve installed a driver newer than 617.42, we recommend rolling back to 617.42 and choosing the clean installation option. Please stay on this version until Nvidia releases its next driver update, which we expect to arrive soon."

Game Ready Driver 621.01 launched on Wednesday, October 21, and, in addition to providing some bug fixes, it is intended to better support DLSS and RTX in games like Phantom Blade Zero, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, and NBA 2K27.

The Phantom Blade Zero team does not elaborate on how the previous drivers are better than the current one, but the recommendation implies it's significant enough to negatively impact your experience.

Luckily, it's very easy to roll back Nvidia drivers in the Nvidia App. Simply boot it up, click on 'Drivers', then scroll down to whatever previous driver you want to roll back to, click the three dots on the side, and then click to install.

If you don't want to install the Nvidia app, you can roll back drivers by opening up the Device Manager, clicking on "Display Adapters", then right-clicking on your GPU, hitting "Properties", navigating to the "Driver" tab and then rolling back drivers there.

We don't yet have a timeline on when Nvidia's next driver is due to be released, but S-Game seems to think it will be soon, so you can always hold out for that if you won't be playing the game in the near future.

Galax has come out in defence of its continued existence for the second time this year, following a report that incorrectly claimed the graphics card brand was closing down its factory.

In a report by El Chapuzas Informatico, citing industry sources, Palit was claimed to be closing the Galax factory. This is said to be occurring at the same time as a major reorganisation of the Galax and KFA2 brands.

Galax, a subsidiary brand of Palit, has expressly denied this claim. In, the company says its business operations are "continuing as normal".

"Galax continues to operate as usual," a statement under both Palit and Galax letterheads, published on the Galax website, says. "No manufacturing facilities have been shut down, and Galax products remain available through our sales channels in both domestic and international markets.

That bit about internal reorganising of the Galax and KFA2 brands has some truth to it. We know that from Palit's previous statement on a rumoured Galax closure. Yep, Galax has been rumoured for chop before, and not too long ago. It last happened in April, 2026.

Back then, it was speculated that Galax was shuttering and Palit was taking over. Palit said no, Galax is still operating and we've already taken over (Palit has owned Galax since before it was officially called Galax, buying the company then named Galaxy in 2008); however, Palit did note at the time that it was integrating management of the brand, alongside KFA2 and HOF, under Palit's HQ.

So, the reports of Galax's death are greatly exaggerated, but the ones about putting it under new centralised management are closer to the mark. Importantly, the brand's cards are still on the shelves, including the brand-new Galax RTX 5080 HOF Extreme encrusted with Swarovski crystals.

Why is bleed always so strong? I guess the entire concept of dealing damage, but also building a status bar on an enemy that deals even more damage when it reaches full, is a bit OP as ideas go. Anyone who's played Elden Ring for any length of time has likely experienced Reduvia and Rivers of Blood, most likely when Nerijus invaded and wiped out their health bar in the starting area.

Well, Phantom Blade Zero also has an extremely strong bleed weapon early in the game: Jagged Steel, which you get from the first boss you face (who also happens to be called Jagged Steel). During this boss fight, you'll experience the joys of bleed first hand while trying to block him, but this sword is well worth it:

• Its central weapon mechanic is Blood Blade, a stackable buff that increases bleed buildup and damage.
• At Level 5, it gets a special attack against guard-broken enemies which grants a Blood Blade stack.
• At Level 10 it gets more bleed buildup.
• At Level 15, you can charge a slash to build stacks of Blood Blade before unleashing them.
• At Level 20, it gets even more bleed buildup.

And this isn't mentioning its powered-up left trigger combo which unleashes a flurry of slashes that rapidly apply bleed buildup, basically a guaranteed bleed proc every time. A significant portion of Phantom Blade Zero's bosses are humans who are all susceptible to bleed, making it very strong early in the game.

But if you're thinking: surely it's not effective against all enemies? You'd be right. There are Puppets, Golden Bodies, and Phantom Bodies which bleed doesn't work on. Or at least it doesn't until you grab the Livingwood Talisman in the Village of Lu in a chest near the Smuggler's Tunnel, an accessory that makes bleed work on all of the above at 50% effectiveness.

You can also polish this accessory to improve that to 70%, so now you have a very powerful bleed weapon that can apply it to every enemy and boss in the game at almost full effectiveness. I'm about 30 hours in as I write this and even though I've experimented with various weapons, and have some dual-swords in my second slot, I'm still using Jagged Steel. It's just really damn strong, especially in terms of its offensive skills.

So, if you're looking for a weapon to make the early game easier in Phantom Blade Zero, invest in Jagged Steel—you won't regret it.