The latest stories from PC Gamer, with full credit to the original publisher.
Although my mental conception of time is convinced it came out perhaps three weeks ago, Nightdive's System Shock remake is three years old. The game released in 2023 after a long and winding road through development, consisting of various course corrections and reboots. All in all, it was eight years between the game's announcement—originally as a remaster—and players getting their hands on it.Whi
Though I do wear glasses and I'm intrigued by the idea of techie wearables on paper, I'm far from all-in on AR glasses. Still, depending on how Qualcomm's fresh chip geared towards augmented and virtual reality headgear is implemented, I can see myself changing my mind.Qualcomm has just revealed the Snapdragon Reality Elite, a SoC it pitches as enabling "longer-lasting, sleeker, and cooler devices
I recently had the chance to test two different Melgeek keyboards at the same time. They are the space-themed Centauri 80 and the black and gold Real 81. Though they're made by the same company, they couldn't be more different in approach. The Centauri 80 is heavy, flashy, with a built-in OLED screen, and it costs $360. The Real 81, on the other hand, is more practical at $140, or at least as prac
According to one PC peripheral YouTuber, some of the best gaming mice on the market that use the latest sensors aren't sticking at the DPI they're set to (via MouseCast). At least, not when moved at a very slow speed.An X user noted the problem a couple of years ago, pointing out the problematic feature in the firmware for some popular mouse sensors: the PixArt PAW3395, PAW3950, and PAW3399. Desig
At its State of Unreal event in Chicago, Epic Games officially unveiled Unreal Engine 5.8, and one of its key new features is Lumen Lite: a scalability setting that targets the use of ray-traced global illumination for the Nintendo Switch 2, with the goal of 60 fps. As the feature also works for PCs, I thought I'd dive in and check out just what the fuss is all about. Or if indeed any fuss ought t
After a standard spell in beta, the latest iteration of SteamOS—Valve's Arch-based Linux distro for use on Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame—has hit the big three-eight. Or, well, three-point-eight. SteamOS 3.8 is out, is what I'm saying, and if you turn your face to the wind and inhale, you can detect the first notes of upcoming hardware.Specifically, the Steam Machine, for which SteamOS
In the UK, the Online Safety Act now requires that websites verify the age of its users through checks often carried out by third-party vendors. Personally, I'm trying to avoid handing over either scans of my government ID or face as long as possible and, so far that's resulted in me being locked out of my Bluesky DM's. Though not ideal, it's easily remedied by hopping onto a VPN—though future res
That we're in something of a crisis when it comes to PC storage and memory prices isn't news. But the pricing and specifications of SanDisk's new gamer-focused SSDs for PC and console are still pretty shocking.The dubious fun kicks off with the SanDisk Optimus GX 7100X. It's a PCIe Gen 4 M.2 drive rated up to 7,250 MB/s for reads and 6,900 MB/s for writes. And it has a list price of $800 for the 2
I've said it before and I'll say it again: cutscenes are the worst. There I am, sitting down to play a game, ready to tap some keys and wiggle some thumbsticks and click my mouse—when suddenly the game I'm playing decides it's actually a movie and all I can do for the next few minutes is watch.You might think I'm too fidgety, too impatient, or that I simply don't have the attention span to sit the
It may sound impossible, but the wait for Grand Theft Auto 6 is almost over. After a couple of delays, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has reassured fans that GTA 6 will release on November 19 this year, and now we have the pre-order date to prove it. Rockstar just randomly—hold on a second, let me check what moon phase we're in—yup, randomly announced that pre-orders for GTA 6 will start
Gabe Newell, yacht enthusiast and the founder of one of the biggest videogame storefronts and developers on the planet, has just bought a big stonking house with his seemingly bottomless well of "I own Steam" money. The news comes courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, which reveals that Newell has bought a property in Manalapan, Florida, for $70.8 million from Cindy and Ron McMackin. The home's pre
The FCC has just made public some exhibits for the left Steam Frame controller (via SadlyItsBradley). We've known the FCC ID 2AES4-1013 refers to the left controller for the upcoming Valve VR headset for a while, but we now have iFixit-style teardown pictures of it, courtesy of Valve itself.Things could presumably still change, but the main takeaway is that it looks like the controller could actua
Back in July of last year, Dungeons & Dragons livestream megafranchise Critical Role announced that it'd be working with AdHoc to make its very own video game based in Exandria—having already partnered with the company in the past to bring the very solid superhero management sim, Dispatch, to life.It's a gambit I always knew would be coming down the pipeline, given how tremendously and immediately
Occasionally in hardware and technology reporting, I'm left to wonder if everyone else is in on a joke I'm not privy to. Today is one of those days. Snap, the company behind the instant messaging app Snapchat, has just unveiled its own augmented reality glasses. Called Specs, the frames are pitched partially as an alternative to looking down at your phone screen all day, and a pair will set you ba
Valve's Steam Hardware survey is no stranger to data anomalies. And yet it remains an undeniable source of interest and intrigue if you're into PC hardware. So, here's the latest twist. AMD's Radeon 9070 XT is subject to an implausibly big upgrade in terms of its user numbers in the latest survey for May, suggesting that there's been a change in the way the 9070 XT's data is collected or tagged.In
Courtesy of the RAMpocalypse, companies are raising prices for their memory-loaded products left, right, and centre. Apple products, however, had previously remained mostly (though not completely) untouched. No longer, though, as the company CEO Tim Cook tells the Wall Street Journal."Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable. We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being
Final Fantasy 14 will give you a dog (among other rewards) for paying your taxes—if you're in Japan, that is. There's really nothing else I can say that isn't funnier than the truth of the situation, though I'm not pointing and laughing at Square here. It's a genuinely sweet incentive to have players contributing to other municipalities.As reported by Famitsu, Square is partnering with the Shibuya
This month, PC Gamer gets world-exclusive access to Planet Zoo 2, the ridiculously ambitious and impressive new management sim from Frontier Developments. For our huge, authoritative cover feature, PC Gamer travelled to Frontier Developments' Cambridge headquarters, got up close and personal with the game for multiple hours, and then interviewed seven key devs about all aspects of the game. The re
There are tons of new activities in Dave the Diver: In the Jungle, from turn-based jungle combat against spiders and snakes to hunting game birds in the woods with a rifle. But one activity had me more excited than all the rest combined: fishing.Weird to say it, but after catching hundreds of fish in Dave the Diver, Dave can finally do some fishing—not with a harpoon or net gun or an underwater sh
Need to KnowWhat is it? DLC for Dave the Diver where you open a new restaurant.Expect to pay: $10/£8.49Developer: MintrocketPublisher: MintrocketReviewed on: Intel i7 9700K, RTX 4070 Ti, 16GB RAMMultiplayer: NoSteam Deck: VerifiedVR: NoOh, there's some new DLC for Dave the Diver where you do more spearfishing and restaurant management, but this time it takes place in a little village where you can
Xbox is flailing again. Major studio closures loom, the AI boom continues to erode the affordability of console hardware components, no one seems to want those consoles anyway and, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella—a fierce advocate of the AI industry crippling the rest of consumer tech—the corp isn't making enough money from its first-party games. All this, despite Microsoft having a marke
If you ask me to name what genre of games I tend to gravitate towards the most, I'll tell you it's a good ol' fashioned, narrative-driven RPG. But if you were to look at my Steam history, I can see how you would assume it's anything and everything under the survival crafting tag. More quizzes!(Image credit: Future)Want to keep testing your knowledge of gaming trivia? We've got loads more PC Gamer
Normally a game leaving early access would be cause for celebration, but I daresay that's not the case for Prologue: Go Wayback! It left early access on Steam today, but it's also doing so in an unfinished state with no plans for further development.The open world survival game from PlayerUnknown Productions launched into early access in 2025, but less than a year later announced it was halting de
Epic announced several upcoming Fortnite collabs earlier today, including one with Vampire Survivors. But a few hours after the presentation, Vampire Survivors developer Poncle left a Reddit comment suggesting that the partnership might not happen after all.While the post is brief, Poncle seems to be reacting to a recent video which demonstrates how Epic artists use generative AI to assist with th
!['[It] is going to change a lot about how games are made': Epic merges Unreal Engine 5 with Unreal Engine for Fortnite to give game devs around the world Unreal Engine 6](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/w8LJ6ZcQ5oGa6kMkT8VBzY-1280-80.jpg)
It's been six years since Epic first launched Unreal Engine 5, and at its State of Unreal event in Chicago today (head to 1h 40 mins in the above video) and in a separate blog post, we got our first look at what the next major release will offer to games, film, TV, and more industries. And it turns out that the biggest direction for the changes in the new engine came from Fortnite and UEFN.If you'
I'm thrilled by the announcement of Guild Wars 3, but there's a little voice in my head that keeps whispering "you know you won't have time for a new MMO." It's a fear that ArenaNet seems keenly aware of as it begins to set expectations for the sequel, which plans to begin beta testing in 2027.In a blog post this week, ArenaNet laid out several things that it believes are the "core philosophy" of
A week removed from Summer Game Fest, one of the demos I can't stop thinking about is Onimusha: Way of the Sword. The behind-closed-doors demo was different from the one that's available on Steam—it took place slightly later in the game and showed off one of the game's "open areas" within Kyoto.Several things stand out in Onimusha: The art, the methodical movement, the sword-wielding zombies, but
Rockstar has suffered a legal defeat as the ongoing dispute surrounding its October 2025 firing of 31 union members proceeds toward final trial. In a preliminary hearing, a UK employment tribunal has ruled against the studio, which sought to narrow the scope of its upcoming trial by seeking to have accusations of blacklisting struck from the case being brought against it.By upholding the Independe
It is a "time of both crisis and opportunity" for the games industry, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in his concluding remarks at today's Unreal Fest address, where the Unreal Engine and Fortnite maker demonstrated new features coming to its development tools.The kids are playing more games than ever and Fortnite is growing again, Sweeney said, but "a huge number of the new releases of major game
It's probably fair to say that Unreal Engine is probably the most comprehensive tool around for creating games, animations, and video effects. And, with the launch of UE 5.8, it's becoming even more extensive and even a little bit more AI-friendly. Whether you're just an Unreal Engine hobbyist like me, or a full-time game developer, you can download version 5.8 right now via the Epic Games Launche
Whether you're coding or simply looking for an important file on your desktop, a single typo can create an outsized amount of frustration. Thankfully, Microsoft is working on a number of improvements for Search within Windows 11, including the ability to see through your typos.The Insider Experimental Preview Build 26300.8687 for Windows 11 that dropped last week introduced the 'more forgiving' ve
I'm feeling a little sheepish because I spent a decade in higher education studying philosophy and have also spent a lot of time online over the years, and yet I had never heard of the philosophy game, or more aptly, the Wikipedia philosophy phenomenon. I'll let the Wiki page explain it:"The Wikipedia philosophy phenomenon, sometimes called the 'Philosophy Game', is the tendency that English Wikip
I've always loved starting a new Stellaris campaign. There's a special magic for me surrounding those initial years, as you explore the systems surrounding your home planet, discover anomalies, and just generally see the shape of the galaxy around you. Maybe your fleets run into a mysterious alien species, an abandoned mega structure, or a black hole that starts whispering to you.For me, it's the
Processors seem to be one product category, along with displays, where there are glimmers of hope for us gamers amidst the RAMpocalypse. From an Nvidia chip with good gaming performance to new handheld chips from Intel and even the promise of some Intel-Nvidia collab chips that could also be great for handhelds, there are definitely things to be excited about. And now we can add chips made on Inte
When it comes to desktop wallpaper, I often go with an illustration by Finnish artist Heikala. Making your own wallpaper, not unlike conjuring the visual arts, is a skill. As such, it's no wonder that many go looking for pre-made backdrops on Steam Workshop—though cybersecurity firm and anti-virus creator Kaspersky warns this has become yet one more avenue to be leveraged by bad actors.Security re
It's a hard life, being an orc—you wake up, you smash puny creatures, you go to bed. But your warlord's mad at you. Why? Because you got a little too in the zone and broke all the things you were there to steal. That's a big problem, especially if you're trying to do things like agriculture or society—in the interest of smashing, obviously.Don't Kill Them All makes this the main thrust—or club, wh
I am 41 years old tomorrow, and for most of my life I've had a game of Civilization in rotation. The first Civ arrived in 1991, popularising the nascent 4X genre and quickly becoming a PC gaming icon. But Civ could have looked very different. Instead of a slow, deliberate turn-based game, it was almost Age of Empires. Back in 2017, I interviewed every Civilization lead designer for a magazine feat
When the Nvidia CEO isn't busy basking in the adoration of fans at Computex Taiwan, it seems he might spend his time considering how to shift social norms. In what direction, you ask? Why, using AI more, of course.That's what he told the Associated Press when the interviewer asked whether AI itself concerns people or "the absence of social structures to adapt to something happening so fast."Jensen
I always thought history was boring as a kid. Nuts to the past, I want cool tech, body mods, and lightspeed travel! But maybe I would have felt differently if I had a game like The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales back then. What better way is there to appreciate the past than violently cutting down a million monsters in a ye olde fantasy Philadelphia?Need to knowWhat is it? Time-traveli
Forza Horizon 6's latest patch released yesterday and with came a whole host of changes. But the ones that initially caught my eye were those concerning the AI drivatars, as they may go some way to curbing the rage of the infamous Bowie Knife99. Under the subheading of 'AI' are the updates: "improvements to difficulty balancing" and "fixed an issue with drivatar race start behaviour". We're yet to
As a console interloper hailing from the PlayStation side of the tracks, I have a soft spot for controller rumble and haptics. It would appear I'm in good company, as a wild Sony patent exploring a fresh avenue for tactile feedback right there in your gamepad has just been published.The patent in question concerns reactive buttons that can both soften and harden (via Cheat Happens). In theory, thi
Perhaps the most shocking part of Microsoft's incoming rash of suspected layoffs and studio closures is Ninja Theory—a studio which had announced a Senua game at the Xbox showcase barely a week prior. At the time it seemed either a misalignment of strategy, the result of someone high-up not crossing their Ts or dotting their Is.Turns out, that might've actually been the plan. According to an anony
If you're on a budget, now is really not the time to upgrade your gaming rig's storage. The memory supply crisis is driving up the price of SSDs, meaning many will have to make do with what they've already got for as long as possible. Even older games can still have large file sizes, especially if they're enjoying a fresh lick of path-traced lighting. Thankfully though, RTX Remix 1.5 may make jugg
RPG rulebooks sometimes open with an "example of play" where players with whitebread names like Arthur and Samantha go through a scripted scene and probably some combat to give you an idea what roleplaying is like. Tabletop roleplaying games are a weird hobby, and back in the day if you didn't have an existing group to join and were just going off the rulebooks like me, the only way to learn what
Steam Next Fest is back and bigger than ever, but I'm not so sure that's a good thing as I struggle to sift through its thousands of demos in search of my next second-screen idler. If anything, I kind of hate the current structure: we've gone from browsing a bespoke, quality selection of gems to navigating the world's busiest Costco where every aisle has a dozen free samples to shove in your mouth
Idols of Ash looks like another of the droves of low-poly first-person horror games oozing from the 21st century collective consciousness, but it's actually more of a climbing game. I meet the nameless protagonist at the mouth of a mysterious, fathomless pit. For some reason it's my objective to reach the bottom of it.At first I start to drop down from one platform or outcrop to the next like I wo
Destiny 2's final content update threw so much into the shooter that something was bound to break, and break it did. An upcoming patch will fix a "near infinite damage" bug introduced by the Monument of Triumph update, but the developers at Bungie have decided to drag their feet on the fix to let more players have a taste of godlike power."While we're planning a fix (next week likely), we think th
Back in January, I wrote about From the Top, a roguelike designed for those of us who had experienced the unparalleled childhood thrill of detonating your older brother's Beyblade with an imported Japanese Driger V2 that your parents had given you earlier that day on Christmas morning of 2003. (Many such cases.) From the Top was a promising omen: a sign that a subgenre precision-targeted at a spec
A new version of World of Warcraft was just discovered and it's called "World of Warcraft Camelot". Instead of some kind of Arthurian spin-off, however, the dataminer who found it theorizes that it's just a codename for an enhanced version of World of Warcraft Classic.Dubbed "WoW Classic Plus" by hopeful players over the years, this hypothetical version of the MMO would branch off from the origina
It's time to abandon your old flowerbeds and plant something fresh—one of Roblox's most popular games officially has a sequel in Grow a Garden 2. The new Roblox experience is a lot like the original, but with a few quality-of-life tweaks and added threats as other players can now steal your hard-earned seedlings. That means you'll need more resources than ever to stay safe from player heists, so w
