After being delayed twice in the last year, the upcoming management game Prison Architect 2 has hit another bump. The original developer, Double Eleven, is leaving the project after failing to reach a commercial agreement with publisher Paradox Interactive. 

“After nine years together, Double Eleven is leaving Prison Architect. Double Eleven has been with us since the console port, led the development of the game on all platforms, and has been working on Prison Architect 2 over the last few years. With the sequel passing certification on all platforms, the contract was fulfilled. However, we could not find a commercial agreement that worked for both parties moving forward and mutually agreed to part ways,” the current Prison Architect 2 team at Paradox Interactive said in a s…

What beats rock? Paper, correct! What beats paper? Scissors, correct! And what beats scissors? Yep, that’s right: Running. Or rust. Or bureaucratic inertia. Or the crushing ennui of post-industrial modernity.

Don’t look at me. I don’t make the rules. I’m just reporting the findings of What Beats Rock, the latest asteroid to impact productivity in the PC Gamer company Slack. Sorry if you guys were looking forward to articles about videogames today. We’re busy.

What Beats Rock is simple: It’s a nearly blank webpage that invites you to answer the question of, well, what beats rock? You can write anything: Paper, sure, but also erosion, or time, or a positive mental attitude, and the website’s large language model underpinnings will take a second to process you…

In a new Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League developer update, Rocksteady says it’s “top priority” is fixing persistent login and server problems that continue to plague the game. But it’s not an easy fix, because it’s not just one problem.

Suicide Squad launched two weeks ago, on February 2, but some owners are still having problems logging into the servers, or maintaining their connections. That’s obviously a problem for a game built around online play. A patch went live on February 14 but it was focused primarily on bugs and balancing, not server issues.

“[We] know that some of our players are running into issues which are not addressed in this patch,” Rocksteady said in that patch announcement. “These include but are not limited to matchmaking issues, login issues, pe…

This month PC Gamer gets world-exclusive access to the vibrant new racing game from Billy Goat Entertainment, Parcel Corps. And, as can be seen from our authoritative cover feature, it looks set to deliver a cult classic. In addition, we have another fantastic feature this month in the form of the best non-traditional war games to play today on PC. So many war games task gamers with engaging in the violent acts of warfare, but these gripping experiences ask you to give peace a chance and slip into the shoes of medics, mine clearers, civilians, and more besides.

This issue is stuffed with top previews, too, including a thrilling first look at the exciting new action-adventure game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, as well as Divine Frequency, Avowed, Palworld, Realm of …

A recent Director’s Take on Overwatch 2 revealed that Blizzard is about to begin the hunt for console players using a mouse and keyboard. If you’re found with any “unapproved peripherals” like these, you’ll likely be punished in the worst way possible: being stuck with PC players. 

“Our goal is for Overwatch 2 to be a great experience no matter what platform you play on,” senior game producer Adam Massey and lead gameplay engineer Daniel Razza explain. “The game feels best when matches are close and competitive, and everyone plays on a level playing field.” And to achieve this the team has decided to go after those who plug in a mouse and keyboard to their console. 

The biggest problem lies in players who not only use a mouse and keyboard to play Overwatch 2 on a c…

guys_you_can_literally_take_this_thing_anywhere from r/SteamDeck

“Guys, you can literally take this thing anywhere,” says Reddit user Bythion as they float through the skies at ~2,500ft above the ground clutching onto a Steam Deck in one hand. Valve couldn’t ask for better PR for its handheld PC device than this.

The Steam Deck has impressed us with its mobility—I especially love it for air travel, it’s an excellent way to kill time while 30,000 feet up. But while Bythion is technically at a lower altitude, around 2,500 feet, admittedly their sky-high Deck experience (via PCGamesN) shows off the handheld PC’s portability in a whole new light. Plus they have to worry about dropping the thing, whereas I only had to worry abo…

One day after EA revealed a free Sims 4 update adding inclusive character creation options like hearing aids, glucose monitors, binders, and top surgery scars, the game has already been drafted into the culture wars. The Sims 4 came under fire from right wing pundits in the US, a country that has seen an aggressive anti-trans agenda pushed by conservatives in recent years.

“The woke mind virus has infected not only our government institutions but our educational institutions and our entertainment institutions,” claimed conservative commentator Dave Rubin on Fox News. Rubin lamented that The Sims 4 did not have the same “educational value” as games he played in the ’90s like SimCity, claiming he learned a lot about urban planning from the latter game. Rubin concluded that this upda…

Ubisoft’s big open world Star Wars game launches this week, and you’re going to need a lore primer. For the Star Wars Outlaws launch time, that is, not the Wookieepedia. I’m sure we’re all consummate experts on galaxies far, far away but time zones take some serious apprenticeship to comprehend. I’m only half joking, because the Outlaws launch date is fragmented between early access versus main launch, PC versus console, and global region as well. Here’s how it all breaks down:

What is the Star Wars Outlaws release date?

The Star Wars Outlaws release date is Friday, August 30, 2024. You’ll see players who pre-ordered the game jumping in a few days prior for “early access,” as detailed below.

When is early access for Star Wars Outlaws?

<…

If you just can’t get enough Stardew Valley in your life, here’s a different way to indulge in its unrelenting life sim coziness: The Stardew Valley “Festival of Seasons” concert series, an international musical tour featuring a selection of music from the game performed by a chamber orchestra.

“Stardew Valley: Festival of Seasons is an intimate, immersive live concert featuring fresh arrangements of the most cherished songs from the game’s mesmerizing soundtrack,” the Festival of Seasons website says. “Curated by ConcernedApe, the concert program will take you on a musical journey through the four seasons of the valley, its unforgettable festivals, and its beloved villagers.”

The exact role that Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone played in putting this concert series togeth…

Former Rockstar North president Leslie Benzies first announced Everywhere back in early 2017, and then nailed down its nature with (barely) more clarity in 2022 as a “multi-world game experience that blurs the line between reality and the digital world.” Not exactly a metaverse, we opined at the time, but more of a “grown-up take on Roblox.”

Today, Benzies’ studio Build a Rocket Boy teased the first game to be set in the world of Everywhere, called MindsEye: “A high-octane, AAA, story-driven action-adventure game, set in a world of futuristic corporations, conspiracy theories, and sinister new technologies.”

Note that MindsEye and Everywhere are two distinct products, which is where the Roblox analogy comes in. Everywhere is a platform and hub: A Eurogamer preview describes …

Larian recently revealed some more of the stats it’s been sneakily gathering while we’re playing Baldur’s Gate 3. Among them, the revelation that 33% of Halsin romancers requested he boink them in bear form. Honestly, you people.

Just as shocking in its own way is finding out that 464 parties have earned themselves a golden D20 by making it to the end of Baldur’s Gate 3’s permadeath Honor Mode. This is the recently added difficulty option above Tactical that doesn’t allow reloading, and also beefs up boss fights by giving enemies that are already powerful extras like legendary actions they can use when it’s not even their turn. The remixed difficulty includes plenty of surprises, like the owlbear mother you face in act one being joined by an owlbear father to prov…

Last month at The Game Awards we finally got our first look at Sean Murray’s followup to No Man’s Sky—and it’s a huge one. In its next game, Light No Fire, Hello Games is trading infinite procedural planets for a single world, but that one open world is going to be the size of an actual planet.

That’s a big promise, and there’s plenty of healthy skepticism about Light No Fire. At the same time, there’s lots of genuine excitement (it’s already in the top 20 of Steam’s most wishlisted games) and no small amount of speculation about how the Earth-sized survival adventure will work. Apart from that one trailer we still don’t really know all that much about Light No Fire yet, except that it’s fantasy themed rather than science fiction: players will fly around the open world with …

There’s been whispers on the high seas about where World of Warcraft’s going after Dragonflight—with some theorists already loading up their cannons with hopes for a seafaring-themed expansion.

This was due to a few factors—several transmog sets seem to be hinting at an oceanic direction for WoW, such as the Waveborne Diplomat’s Regalia and the more recent Seafarer Pack. If this sounds a touch crackpot, Blizzard did do something similar before the announcement of Dragonflight with its Dragon Pack, which was released December 2021 before the expansion’s announcement in April 2022. 

There’ve also been some other in-game hints—the prevalence of pirate factions on the Forbidden Reach, as well as (courtesy of Youtube channel Taliesin & Evitel) an in-gam…

Having played a bunch of Theme Park back in the ’90s, I feel well-qualified to say that running a real life theme park would suck. It might be lucrative, but it would not be fun, because there’s a lot of vomit involved, and thrill seekers have a great propensity to whinge. But I feel like I could get used to the vomit and whinging if the theme park were more like the ones in Park Beyond, which are not anchored by the tyrannical laws of gravity. 

Originally set to release earlier this year, Park Beyond now has a firm release date: June 16. Ahead of that, there’s a closed beta running May 9 to May 19. You can register for the closed beta test here.

Park Beyond is a management sim, yes, but actually building the rides is what I’m most interested in. The idea is to…

Slay the Spire, the brilliant roguelike deckbuilder that first released in early access in 2017, is getting a sequel next year.

Slay the Spire 2 was announced with a teaser video, embedded above, at the Triple-I Initiative showcase today. It’s quite a glow up: A brief but sweet animated reintroduction to the Spire.

Near the end of the teaser, we see what I assume will be Slay the Spire 2’s three launch characters: The Ironclad and The Silent, and a new skeleton character. A screenshot on Slay the Spire 2’s just-launched Steam page reveals the skeleton to be The Necrobinder, “a wandering lich who seeks to bind the forgotten corpse.”

I’m a little sad not to see my boy The Defect, the first character I beat the original Slay the Spire with, but we don’t know for sure what…

The Dornier Do X was the biggest, heaviest, and most powerful flying boat in the world when it launched in 1929. It was also magnificent, weird, brashly ambitious, deeply flawed, and inevitably doomed—and, for those and unrelated reasons, my favorite plane of all time. We’ll never be able to fly in one in real life (they’re all long gone) but now we can get a sense of what it was like in Microsoft Flight Simulator, which just added the great flying boat as a new Local Legend.

The Do X was a massive beast, powered by 12 engines generating more than 7,200 horsepower. Even with all that juice propelling it, the sheer bulk of the plane meant that it generally flew low and slow, especially when carrying a full load of passengers. What it promised in place of haste was high-end lu…

The Invincible’s new trailer, shown at the PC Gaming Show, reveals the stakes in the sci-fi thriller. As you watch Yasna search for her lost crewmates, you see how humans may want to think twice before colonizing a planet. The trailer culminates in an ominous message: “Not everything everywhere is for us.” 

Wasn’t that a big film from last year? 

Sci-fi fans may recognize the title of the space game from Stanisław Lem’s novel, a story that explored themes of artificial intelligence and evolution on a distant planet. Developer Starward Industries has changed some of the main elements of the plot, but the team intends to throw you into the same thematic mix. Stranded on the planet Regis III and separated from the rest of her …

Stardew Valley’s 1.6 update was supposed to be a relatively small thing, intended primarily to make life easier for modders rather than approaching the size of the feature-packed 1.5 update that once seemed like it would be Stardew Valley’s send-off. 1.6 has grown significantly in scope since then, to include things like “a major new festival,” new late-game content, new items and crafting recipes, and support for eight-person multiplayer on Steam. But now creator Eric Barone has teased what is undoubtedly the most important part of the update, and it can be summed up in five words: “Hats on cats.”

“(And dogs.)”

The tease was delivered with Barone’s traditional Twitter simplicity: An image of two cats and two dogs, all festooned in various sorts of tasteful headgear. “Hats o…

The Fallout games have showcased several different chapters of the Brotherhood of Steel, and each one has been different in its own way. While described as being “a little fanatical” even in the isometric Fallout days, the Amazon show’s chapter seemed particularly heavy on the olde worlde religious overtones. According to a self-described “brainrot theory” suggested by OmegaSpartan256 on the Fallout subreddit, maybe there’s a good reason for that. What if the West Coast chapter of the Brotherhood seen in the show synthesized the beliefs of Caesar’s Legion?

As they put it, “Maximus? Titus? Thaddeus? Quintus? All names you’d hear assigned to Legion raised individuals.” In the games we’ve met members of the Brotherhood of Steel who have names with a little mythic resonance, like Jaco…

Earlier this week, Runescape developer Jagex announced upcoming pricing increases for Runescape membership costs. On September 27, 2024, the price of a membership subscription will increase from $12.49 USD per month to $13.99 USD per month. A premier 12 month subscription, which includes additional in-game bonuses for subscribing for an entire year at once, will increase in price from $79.99 USD annually to $99.48 USD annually.

Players currently subscribed on monthly or 6-month intervals will be able to continue paying their current “Grandfather Rate” for as long as they maintain their subscription. The Grandfather Rate is unavailable for players with annual premium memberships.

Jagex defended the price hike in its pricing change announcement, saying, “Membership pricing has…

There’s a new Samsung Odyssey G8 monitor in town. Yup, it’s OLED. Nope, it’s different from the Odyssey OLED G8 Samsung already sells. This one is a 32-inch 4K beast running at fully 240Hz.

Quite distinct, then, from the existing Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 34-inch ultrawide with 3,440 by 1,440 pixels or the Samsung Odyssey G8 non-OLED, which is, well, let’s not even worry about what that model is.

There’s also a new Samsung Odyssey OLED G6, which is distinct from existing Samsung Odyssey G6 models. Oh, and upgrades for the Samsung Odyssey OLED G9, which should keep you on your toes, since there are another two entirely separate Samsung Odyssey G9 monitors.

The full model names of each respective screen are the Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 G80SD, the Samsung Odyssey OLED G6 G60…

Good news, my friends: Starfield players have entirely abandoned human morality in their quest to invent the most effective methods of XP grinding possible, turning the game’s rambling planetary plains into a kind of Victorian safari hunt. I’m discomfited, disturbed, and would quite like to unlock the manipulation ability, so might give this a try myself.

Over on Reddit, players have identified two excellent spots for XP farming from Starfield’s many, many planets. The first is Schrodinger III, pointed out by Canatee on Reddit, where you can travel to obtain scads of XP if you’re not particularly keen on animals.

PSA: Schrodinger III is made of XP from r/Starfield

I mean, hey, it works. At around 500 XP a pop, it’s…

According to a post on Weibo (via WCCFTech) by someone reportedly affiliated with Lenovo China, AMD is not going to be providing any Windows 10 drivers for its new chips, starting with the upcoming Strix Point APUs. That will effectively cut AMD processor support for the popular old operating system around a year before Microsoft itself ends Windows 10 life support.

“Win10 enthusiasts please note that starting from Strix Point, AMD will not provide Win10 drivers,” reads the post, finishing with a sad panda emoji. 

Just to paint a picture of the number of “Win10 enthusiasts” out there, it’s estimated that Windows 10 currently has a global market share of around 69% in terms of desktop operating systems, with Windows 11 dropping down to around 27%.

These Strix Point…

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty may be getting all the buzz right now for being excellent and starring Idris Elba, the only guy cooler than Keanu Reeves—but I’m actually more excited about Cyberpunk’s giganto 2.0 update. Cyberpunk 2.0 releases on September 21, several days before Phantom Liberty, with a huge list of changes and additions. The 2.0 patch adds vehicle combat, reworks the skill trees and player progression, cyberware, and police AI, and so much more it’s practically a new game even before Phantom Liberty gets bolted on.

We know Cyberpunk 2077 patch 2.0 goes live on September 21, but CD Projekt Red hasn’t said exactly when it’s pressing the button. Thanks to a community manager, though, we know roughly when it should be dropping. Here’s when we expect it…

Oleksandr Zinchenko is a Ukrainian footballer that currently plays for Arsenal in the English Premier League and the Ukrainian national side. The full-back and midfielder is still only 27 years old but has already had a storied career, winning the Premier League four times with previous club Manchester City alongside the FA cup and another four EFL Cups. And as well as being a world-class footballer with the world at his feet, Zinchenko loves a bit of Counter-Strike.

In 2023 Zinchenko founded esports organisation PassionUA alongside former NA’VI coach Mykhailo Blaghin (who won the 2017 PGL Major with Gambit). The goal is to assemble a Counter-Strike team consisting of young Ukrainian players that can compete at the top, and shortly after its founding the focus switched to Counter-…

It took a whole lot longer than anyone expected (or reasonably thought possible), but the first Payday 3 patch is finally here. Developer Starbreeze says the update makes “a massive amount of fixes to make your heisting a smoother experience,” and that the instability issues players have been dealing with since the game launched in September are finally fixed.

It’s been a long, rough road getting here. Payday 3’s launch was a catastrophe: Players strongly disliked the game’s progression system, and worse, its demand for an online connection even for solo play meant that matchmaking woes were a big headache even for people who wanted to play by themselves. A presumed fix didn’t pan out, and a more comprehensive update planned for early October was delayed multiple times as Starbree…

When AMD announced the Ryzen 9000-series CPUs at Computex, one particular little nugget caught my attention. The 8-core Ryzen 7 9700X was given a very respectable 65W TDP. That’s well below the 105W and 120W TDPs of the Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 7 7800X3D respectively. 

A new rumor suggests AMD might have jumped the gun on that, at least when it comes to gaming performance. AMD’s Senior Technical Marketing Manager of Consumer Processors Donny Woligroski confirmed the 9700X won’t have the grunt to beat out the 7800X3D in gaming, even if it’s stronger in non-gaming workloads.

According to information given to Wccftech, AMD is considering a very late 9700X spec change by giving it a 120W TDP instead of the previously announced 65W. That’s not exactly a welcome change, but if…

Back in January 2021, at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Razer unveiled Project Hazel, a “surgical N95 respirator” with—of course—RGB lighting. There was just one problem: The Zephyr, as it came to be known, wasn’t actually N95 rated at all, and that little oversight is going to cost the company more than $1.1 million.

Concerns about the Zephyr’s supposed National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) rating surfaced a year after it was first announced, when specimens began appearing in public. Tech YouTuber Naomi Wu called out the lack of NIOSH certification, and our own hardware honcho Dave James noted in his appraisal of the device that, while it granted him a certain Bane-style drip, it is “not a medical grade mask designed to be worn in a hospita…

Skyrim mods are their own universe at this point. There’s modding, and then there’s Creation Engine modding. Even in the wake of full multiplayer mods and ChatGPT-powered companions, we at PC Gamer can’t help but love the smaller, hyper specific changes some modders make, like Kabu’s Really Gourd Plant Replacer.

“Assortment of high poly mesh and texture replacers for gourds using 3d-scanned real gourds,” the author writes. “Finally a sorely-needed full overhaul of the gourd plant!” The attention to detail here really is staggering. There’s a single harvestable “gourd” item in the base game, but Kabu has taken the liberty of diversifying the gourd population, with instances of delicata squash, butternut squash, elongated pumpkin, and zucchini all behaving mechanically iden…

“Why is Cate Blanchett in the Borderlands movie?” is a very fair question to ask. The Australian actor has won numerous awards including two Oscars, four Golden Globes, four BAFTAs, and three SAG awards, and she can surely pick and choose her roles as she pleases. So, why Borderlands—a film that, with all due respect, doesn’t look like it’s going to put any new trophies on her shelf?

As it turns out, it’s kind of a two-part answer. First, the “crazy asks” and “things I could never conceive of” are what she gravitates toward these days, she said in a recent interview with Empire (via Kotaku), which I guess is reasonable. Liam Neeson is another Academy Award-nominated actor who’s earned acclaim for films including Schindler’s List, Michael Collins, and Kinsey, and he made a mo…

The fact that we’re in iffy economic times and demand for all manner of capitalist consumables is down is not news. But the specific fact of lower silicon wafer prices of late is novel. And it immediately has us hoping for cheaper actual chips.

The news comes from Taiwanese media outlet UDN (via HardwareLUXX) and relates specifically to the blank or raw silicon wafers from which chips are etched using advanced lithography processes.

Reportedly, prices of six and eight-inch wafers are down for the first time in three years, while 12-wafers are holding steady but expected also to fall shortly. It’s the larger 12-inch wafers that are used for the most advanced processes at the most important foundry of all, TSMC, and also by Intel.

Higher wafer prices have been part or th…

Redfall ranks as one of the biggest disappointments of the year so far. So disappointing, in fact, that PCG’s Tyler Colp scored it 44% and deployed the potent phrase “I’m having a miserable time” fewer than 20 words into his Redfall review. But bad games don’t fall from the sky; more often than not, they’re the culmination of a long chain of wrong decisions, limited resources, and plain old bad luck. 

Between playtests, mock reviews, and simple experience, devs often know when their games are falling short of expectations, and a new report from Bloomberg has revealed that Arkane Austin was no different. In fact, according to the article, many of the studio’s devs nursed a sly hope that Microsoft would straight-up cancel the project after it bought ZeniMax in 2020.

Bloom…

Just a week after releasing an impressive “first slice” playable build, work on Portal 64, a fan-made effort to bring Valve’s beloved Portal to the 1996 Nintendo console, has been halted. Developer James Lambert said he was asked by Valve to take the project down, because it “depends on Nintendo’s proprietary libraries.”

Lambert has been working on the Nintendo 64 version of Portal since at least early 2022, when he posted a video of the first “graphics test on real Nintendo 64 hardware.” He also warned, however, that if he decided to move forward with the project, “I would pretty much have to rebuild the entire game from scratch.” 

And then he went ahead and did just that, to impressive effect: This is Portal on the Nintendo 64, which frankly I would not have …

The sequel to The Forest, the game that put the Survival in Survival Horror will still release on February 23rd, 2023, but it won’t be the finished game, says developer Endnight Games. Sons of the Forest will instead release into Early Access—not because the developers prefer it that way, but to avoid another major release date delay.

“It’s been a long journey since we first started ‘Sons of The Forest’ development and it’s grown into the biggest most complex game we have ever made,” said Endnight Games in a statement. “There is still so much more we want to add; items, new mechanics, gameplay balance and more. We didn’t want to delay again so have instead decided to involve the community in the continued development of this project and keep our…