Friskhet

For one Starfield modder, every short animation of your ship landing and departing from planets that you’re forced to watch is time you could’ve spent actually playing the game. So, they cut out every transitional space travel scene to please all the players who are tired of seeing them every time you want to travel somewhere new.

Ship Skip is a mod that makes Starfield’s space travel a little more honest. It deletes the short animations where you see your ship dock, undock, land, or takeoff and skips right to the loading screen. It effectively transforms Starfield into the “series of loading screens” experience that people jokingly described it as when they found out you can’t actually land your ship manually.

It works as intended for both the Steam and Windows Store versio…

Clickers, idlers, and the like exist for a reason: That reason is many of us want to do two things at a time. We want to stimulate more than one bit of our brain. I’m sure that by now you know at least one person, or are that person, who combines in some way watching shows, listening to podcasts, reading social media, and videogames at once.

This is an urge as old as the first person who was like “we should put a radio in this car.”

Enter The Evergloom Team, who’re now showing off their second game: Deskape, stylized dEskape, is purpose-built to fit along a band at the bottom of your screen. Crashed on an alien world, your job is to build up infrastructure so you can escape while defending yourself from attacks by an alien hive. It’s explicitly designed as a base-building ga…

Remember the whole GameStop stonks thing from a couple years ago? It’s kind of complicated and kind of stupid, and frankly I don’t think anyone is entirely sure exactly what happened, but the bottom line is that a guy on Reddit started talking about GameStop stocks, then Elon Musk tweeted about it, then everyone went nuts, and then—for a brief while—profit. The whole thing had a certain Wolf of Wall Street vibe to it (except that the wolf in this case was Roaring Kitty) and sure enough, work to bring the tale to film was soon underway.

Today Sony Pictures Entertainment unveiled the first trailer for its contribution to that cinematic effort: A flick called Dumb Money, “the insane true story of everyday people who flipped the script on Wall Street and got rich by turnin…

It’s been a long haul for The Outlast Trials, the four-player horror game from Montreal studio Red Barrels. It was announced in 2019 as a co-op twist on the hit Outlast horror games, and while a planned 2022 release didn’t happen, we did learn that PC Gamer news writer Joshua Wolens has a friend he wants to “subject to ethically unsound scientific experiments for progress and profit”—his words, not mine—so at least we didn’t go away empty-handed, right?

Anyway, following a closed beta test in October 2022 that attracted nearly one million sign-ups, Red Barrels announced today that The Outlast Trials will finally launch into early access on May 18.

“The Closed Beta was just a taste of what’s to come in The Outlast Trials,” Red Barrels co-founder Philip…

My main job in Final Fantasy 14 is the ninja. It has a satisfying rotation. I like that I can occasionally dip into ranged combat. I like that I’m slightly faster than everyone. I like that I get a little bunny on my head when I mess up. It’s good fun.

I will, however, always be sad that the job turns from a swashbuckling rogue to a discount Naruto expy at level 30. What bums me out even more is that modders have been fixing a lot of these problems, but I can’t use or recommend them. The latest mod I must observe sadly through the looking glass is Laoqian’s “Gunner” animation replacement, which replaces all of Ninja’s animations with cyberpunk mayhem.

This mod is absolutely rad. The ninja’s daggers are swapped for dual pistols, its regular melee combos cleverly turned into g…

You can see it coming a million light years away: A game developer announces something that its players are obviously going to be infuriated by, and then a week or two later posts a black jpg with white text that says, one way or another, ‘Oops! Our bad.’

So it has gone for Apex Legends, which today reversed the most unpopular aspect of the new battle pass structure it announced two weeks ago.

The changes were controversial for a couple reasons. The first complaint was that Apex will now get two smaller battle passes per season instead of one, effectively doubling the cost of each season’s premium tiers. That isn’t changing. The second complaint—the bit that is being reversed—was that premium battle pass tracks were no longer going to be obtainable with Apex Coin…

Improve every Wordle game with our general tips and guides, read a helpful clue for today’s puzzle if you’d just like a nudge in the right direction, or snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with the answer to the June 22 (733) game. However you want to win, we can help.

Today’s answer was one of those words that looks incredibly obvious all the way down the board now I’ve cleared it, but at the time I found myself shuffling yellow letters around for far too long. Even so—a frustrating win’s still a win, no matter how you find the Wordle answer.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Thursday, June 22

Today’s answer is one of the five senses, specifically the one associated with flavour. You could also use this word to describe someone with…

If you really think about it, the letter L is just the letter I with another letter I lying down in front of it. What’s a T? Maybe two letter Ls that have been welded together after being turned upside down? A V is just an I that’s leaning over and has been welded together at the bottom with another leaning I, so an X… that’s either two Is crossing each other, or maybe two Vs, one flipped upside down and welded together at the pointy bits. Maybe?

That’s the concept in puzzle game Word Factori. You have a small factory that can produce the letter I, and using only that letter you have to create words like OX, CAT, and IVY, and then eventually tougher constructions like DOCTOR, VOXEL, and AXOLOTL.

How do you do it with just an I? Well, by running a production line of Is…

Give your daily Wordle game a little nudge in the right direction with today’s helpful clue, or go straight for the win—it’s entirely your choice. However you want to approach the September 16 (819) Wordle, we’ve got it covered.

I had a fantastic start today, with the first letter locked in and two yellows left over to guide the way. What more could I have asked for, other than to not make an obvious mistake on my third go and have to spend an extra line correcting it? Ah, heck. At least I got today’s Wordle answer in the end.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, September 16

You’ll need to think of heavenly beings to solve today’s Wordle. These creatures are often depicted with halos and feathery wings, although the more biblica…

Pokeverse, an unofficial, fan-run Pokémon event in the Philippines, has been a disaster of such catastrophic proportions for some attendees that it’s being mentioned in the same breath as the ill-fated DashCon—which produced a picture of a lonely ball pit so infamous as to be instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with con culture.

As revealed in an extensive thread by attendee BintuRita on Twitter, Pokéverse was allegedly plagued by a swathe of issues so vast that I’m going to have to be selective in what I include here. Let’s start with the prices.

As Rita explains, Pokéverse tickets cost P6000, or around $100, for a single day. Three-day tickets, meanwhile, cost P19500 ($331). Even with the inclusion of various unofficial Pokémon tat, …

Intel has announced Meteor Lake, its new generation of mobile chip and the first to use tiles—that’s Intel’s nickname for its 3D packaged chiplets, by the way. What caught my attention with Meteor Lake, and no doubt any PC gamer looking at the chip, is its large graphics tile. Powered by Intel Arc, replete with eight Xe-cores, and using a new(ish) architecture dubbed Xe-LPG, it looks like a step in the right direction for integrated graphics performance.

In its maximum eight-core configuration, Meteor Lake offers the equivalent of 128 EUs—32 more than Raptor Lake’s largest Iris Xe iGPU. It’s not only bigger, Intel says it’s been architected to run at a higher max clock frequency with a lower minimum voltage, too. There’s even eight Ray Tracing Units stuffed into the Me…

The story of Boggles first came to my attention several weeks ago, after a tweet containing some clips of his material went semi-viral and Twitch slapped the young Australian with a 30-day ban. The videos are fake incidents of him pretending to stick forks in toasters then being electrocuted, the joke being he kept doing it to more and more toasters over time.

“We’ve reviewed your content (video) and we’re concerned about you,” says Twitch’s email to the streamer. “If you’re currently struggling or feeling unsafe, please reach out for help, talk to someone you trust, contact your doctor or go to a local hospital.”

It goes on to say that Boggles’ content has been removed because “suicidal or self-harm content is not allowed on Twitch.” The email directs the recipient to a men…

Qualcomm has just taken the wraps off its new Snapdragon X range of laptop PC chips, giving us the full details of its first flush of ARM-based CPUs and a new lower-end model, too. The NEW Snapdragon X Plus processors will sit alongside the higher-spec X Elite chips, bringing the ARM architecture to the traditionally x86 dominated Windows desktop.

And, honestly, the new Qualcomm chips are the single piece of PC technology I’m most excited about seeing this year. With the promise that standard Windows games will “just work” with the Snapdragon X series, and the expectation that we are looking at performance levels around the already impressive AMD RDNA 3-based Radeon 780M built into the best of the red team’s laptop chips and the best handheld gaming PCs around, there’s some real p…

More than a month after it launched to—let’s just put it out there—spectacular failure, Redfall’s first major patch is live. The update makes a wide range of changes and bug fixes, and the developers say more is coming, but one of the most anticipated fixes—the 60 fps “performance mode” for console players—is still missing in action.

“We’re grateful to see that millions of you have explored the quaint but dangerous open world of Redfall,” Arkane said. “Building a play space this large has been humbling to say the least. We recognize that we still have work to do, and we plan to address as much as we can, as quickly as we can.

“Today’s release is only our first patch and introduces a lot of incremental fixes that will improve Redfall. Once …

Microsoft has made a new offer, one that president Brad Smith describes as a “substantially different transaction”, in its effort to get its proposed $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard over the finish line with the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority. The CMA had previously blocked the deal on grounds that included concerns about the nascent cloud gaming market, and the restructured deal will see all cloud rights to Activision Blizzard games signed over to Ubisoft for the next 15 years.

The CMA says it will review the new offer, but cautioned “this is not a green light.” It is to deliver a decision by October 18. This comes after the EU Commission has approved the deal, joining many other global regulatory bodies, and following the US Federal Trade Commi…

John Romero, famous for his work on Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein and, ah, Daikatana, is finally getting the recognition he deserves. Not for his hair, which remains inexplicably snubbed by awards committees across the globe, but for his entire career up to this point. At the annual Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA) in March, Romero will take home the Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on “iconic and genre defining first-person shooters” over the years. We are still making plenty of Doom clones, after all.

Romero isn’t the only one being honoured. The judges will also give a posthumous “special award” to Mabel Addis, regarded as the first female game designer, who died in 2004. Addis worked as lead designer on The Sumerian Game in 1964, using her knowledge of ancient h…

Turns out that while we weren’t looking the sapient beavers that will succeed us as the dominant life form on this planet have developed functional wood-and-steel robots. These are, of course, designed to accomplish menial tasks so their furry, flat-tailed masters can more easily relax in hot mud baths and ponder whatever philosophies beavers ponder.

I am of course talking about the beavers of Timberborn, a city-building game where these clever creatures use their mastery of water to make the climatically-devastated planet we left them with into a beautiful-green paradise. Their vertically-stacked cities and tower dams, not to mention clever constructions, are extremely cool.

The latest update has remade the beavers’ storage system into something a bit easier to manage, and …

Denuvo is everyone’s least favourite anti-piracy software. The DRM, which comes as a sneaky passenger alongside games like Payday 3, Far Cry, and—inexplicably—Ghostwire: Tokyo, has been accused of causing performance issues (not without reason) in the games it comes with, and is generally regarded as an unwelcome guest pretty much wherever it’s used.

So perhaps we should take heart, because although Tekken 8’s EULA currently says the game will use Denuvo’s anti-tampering tech, game director Katsuhiro Harada has come out and denied that’s the case, in the strongest possible terms. In a response to a now-deleted tweet from a fan, Harada said the current Tekken 8 EULA is “probably simply a copy/paste of Tekken 7 or something,” although he’s not certain of that, and that h…

As someone with an occasionally dodgy internet connection, videogames that require an internet connection even for solo play is a regular source of frustration. So I was very happy to hear that BioWare’s upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard will not require an internet connection to play, nor will it offer any sort of microtransactions.

The previous Dragon Age game, Inquisition, used a website called Dragon Age Keep for players to configure the world state they wanted—essentially a way to carry over the decisions you made in the previous Dragon Age games (and their consequences) without uploading old saves. In a recent interview with IGN, game director Corinne Busche said The Veilguard will not make use of Dragon Age Keep, but will instead have a built-in system that provides …

Buildcrafting in Destiny 2 can be a complicated beast, especially after this year’s big rework of the game’s subclasses. While you can go a long way just equipping an exotic armour piece that compliments your chosen subclass element, the real depth is in fleshing out your setup with armour mods. That Coldsnap grenade that the abilities submenu says is on a two minute cooldown? Equip the Osmiomancy Gloves on Shadebinder, along with the Glacial Harvest aspect and a basic Charged with Light mod setup using Firepower, Elemental Charge and Elemental Shards, and you’ll literally never run out of frosty ‘nades.

The problem with that depth, at least up to now, is that it required you to actually own the mods needed for the best version of each build. If, like me, you’ve been play…

Win the Wordle of the day in an instant: just click your way straight to today’s answer. Or win today’s Wordle at your own pace instead, using our fantastic selection of tips or our clue for the May 5 (1051) game to guide you. Whatever your style, we’ve got it covered.

I’m seething right now. At myself. A whole row wasted on a ridiculous spelling mistake. In my defence, I had a great idea, got excited, and rushed to try it out. I do wish I’d been more careful though—I’d have loved to find today’s Wordle answer earlier than I eventually did.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, May 5

Today’s answer is the name of a transferable image—a more durable sort of sticker These designs can be applied to ceramics, cars, glass&h…

Find some Wordle inspiration with today’s clue—it’s waiting for you just below. You’ll also find a wide range of tips and guides down there too, as well as the Wordle answer to the May 28 (708) puzzle if you need a win without the worry.

The first consonant I revealed today seemed to cause more problems than it solved, the sort of letter that felt wrong wherever I tried to make it fit. Thanks to this fuzzy guesswork, I ended up almost right after too many slightly panicked guesses and scraped by just before the end. Thank goodness I found today’s Wordle answer just in time. 

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Sunday, May 28

Today’s answer’s a rather tight-fisted word. You’d use this when cutting corners or holding back time…

Known Nvidia leaker kopite7kimi—who originally revealed the name of the company’s next GPU architecture a few years ago—says Nvidia’s next-gen data center GB100 Blackwell series graphics cards will have a similar core count as Ada Lovelace chips but will have “significant changes in its unit structure.”

An earlier tweet (via Hardware Info) indicates that the GB100 GPUs will use a chiplet-based multi-chip module (MCM) instead of the current monolithic designs.

MCM is an advanced packaging technique that splits GPU components across separate dies. The leaker doesn’t tell us what the configuration will look like—such as whether it will contain multiple GPU compute dies, or just separated memory dies alongside a single GPU core—nor does it sugges…

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are some of the largest chips made, and in just over a decade, the most powerful graphics processors have gone from comprising a few billion transistors to over 100. But even those figures will be tiny compared to what lies ahead in the future, according to TSMC, and it’s explained how it plans to continue making them ever bigger. Billions? Uh uh—how about a cool one trillion transistors?

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the largest manufacturer of graphics processing units in the world. AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Tesla, and others are all developing ever larger and more powerful chips. With the likes of Nvidia’s recent Blackwell B200, we’re already ready past the 100 billion transistor mark and GPUs of the fut…

Throughout 2023, Microsoft routinely issued updates for Windows 11 each month, fixing security problems, adding new features, and borking a few things along the way. But as the latest figures from Statcounter show, Windows 10 users just weren’t interested in the newer operating system whatsoever and it remains the OS of choice for two-thirds of all Windows PCs.

As reported by The Register, Microsoft struggled to significantly improve the uptake of Windows 11 last year. At the start of 2023, its worldwide market share was just 17% and while the final quarter saw that figure rise to 26%, it’s still well short of Windows 10’s dominance (67%).

Windows 7 was officially retired in 2023, hence why its share went from 11% to 3.4% over the past 12 months. This is probably why Windows…

Back in September last year, Ubisoft promised that it would only start making moves with NFTs when it had “something that gives you a real benefit”. Well, I guess it thinks it’s found it. The company has teamed up with a firm called Integrated Reality Labs (IRL, get it?) to produce a range of Assassin’s Creed-themed “Smart Collectibles,” little acrylic cubes with Assassin’s Creed guys in them that are tied to NFTs. Are you excited? I’m excited.

Spotted by VGC, the NFTs attached to the cubes will be stored on the Polygon blockchain (no relation to our esteemed competitor Polygon.com, which is probably less-than-thrilled by the shared branding), and you’ll be able to play with them using a downloadable app. 

It works like this: At some point in the (presumably near) futur…

I think it fair to say that Crystal Dynamics should now be viewed as the savior of the Tomb Raider franchise. Picking up development after Eidos dropped development duties following the nadir of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, it rebooted the series not once but twice, leaving Lara in the position she is today—a relevant hero who’s had some cracking adventures as of late and is reportedly getting more soon, too.

View Tomb Raider: Underworld on GOG

The most recent trilogy of Tomb Raider games was great (culminating in 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider), but the trilogy of releases that Crystal Dynamics released before that (Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld), showed plenty of quality, too, and especially the last release, Tomb Raider: Underworld.

In a perplexing performance at yesterday’s New York Times DealBook Summit, Twitter owner Elon Musk told advertisers dropping the platform to “go fuck yourself”. In fact, he did so three times, and took a specific swipe at Disney CEO Bob Iger before going on to say that the departure of major advertisers like Apple, Disney, and Warner Bros. is “going to kill the company.”

NYT journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin had asked Musk if the billionaire was on an “apology tour” for recent controversies—like Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic tweet and a Media Matters report showing that Twitter was placing ads next to pro-Nazi content—that has driven many companies to pause advertising on the site entirely. Musk appeared to take the question personally, announcing “I hope they stop …

Helldivers 2’s latest Warbond is now here—and the future’s looking electric, baby. Everything in this kit is centred around zapping the enemies of democracy into a fine mist with lashes of lightning. Stun grenades, laser pistols, and a plasma shotgun. Liberty’s never smelled so sweet, or quite so much like burned hair.

One hilarious consequence of the new gear, however, comes with the EX-03 Prototype 3 and its cousins, the EX-00 and the EX-16, which offer a staggering 95% resistance to arc damage. As it currently stands, arc damage is only something you’ll ever experience from teammates—namely, teammates using the Arc Thrower.

The Arc Thrower is a powerful weapon, but it’s also a workplace hazard. It’s strong, just maybe a little too strong—its cha…

Pls help. We in the PC Gamer hardware den can’t agree on which of the gaming PC deals we spotted today is best. At Newegg, it’s $1,200 (save $500) for the Acer Predator Orion 3000, $1,650 (save $250) for the Skytech Eclipse Lite, or $930 (save $170) for the ABS Cyclone Aqua.

Just considering the deal prices, the Predator Orion 3000 has a bigger discount, of course—we’re talking a 29% off vs 13% off for the more expensive rigs. And the Orion is certainly a great deal in its own right. For just $1,200 you’re getting a veritable high-end setup featuring an RTX 4070, an Intel Core i7 13700F, and DDR5 RAM. Acer’s even throwing in a mouse and keyboard.

A natural choice, right? But, hear me out, $450 extra might well be worth it for the Eclipse Lite, primarily because it’s ju…

The man once known as “the king of crypto”, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been found guilty of fraud and money laundering in New York after less than five hours of jury deliberations. The month-long trial saw former colleagues, friends, and even Mr Bankman-Fried’s former partner testify against the crypto mogul, who was arrested last year in the Bahamas following the collapse of his trading firm FTX, which had a domino effect across the crypto space.

Bankman-Fried will be sentenced on March 28 next year, and faces decades in jail. The jury found him guilty of lying to investors and lenders about the state of FTX’s finances (the firm collapsed with an $8 billion black hole in the accounts) over seven counts of fraud and money laundering, all of which Bankman-Fried had pleaded not g…

The yet-to-be-named BioShock 4 is currently under development at Cloud Chamber, a studio with multiple locations established by publisher 2K specifically to work on the series. It would be too far of a stretch to call it the successor to Irrational, the Seattle studio led by Ken Levine that developed Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite, but Cloud Chamber does boast plenty of series veterans that have been involved from the start, including the game’s design director Jonathan Pelling and a creative director with the best name in the industry: Hoagy de la Plante. 

Cloud Chamber has now posted several dozen new job openings (first spotted by VGC) and says it “is currently recruiting like mad for game developers in two amazing locations” in San Francisco and Montr…

After quietly removing references to crossplay—or “Kross-Play” as it’s been dubbed—from its Steam page earlier this month, NetherRealm Studios has confirmed that Mortal Kombat 1 will be launching without the feature.

In a Twitter post, the Mortal Kombat 1 account revealed: “Launch is just around the corner and we can’t wait for everyone to sink their teeth into #MK1. Regarding Kross-Play, it will not be available at launch, but know we are hard at work implementing the feature into the game and it will be koming post launch.”

The inclusion of cross-play in Mortal Kombat 1 has been a bit of a confusing one, to say the least. A tweet from Wario64 back in May shows that an FAQ on the game’s website stated that NetherRealm planned to add crossplay and cross-progressi…

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the big, world-changing isometric party-based RPG that everyone’s still talking about, but I’ve always felt that Pillars of Eternity is the game that really first started turning that engine over. The OG Infinity Engine vibes were strong, but it stood well on its own merits too: We called it “a deep, rich, and wonderfully written RPG that lives up to the towering legacy of the games that inspired it” in our 92% review. 

That was in 2015, mind, nearly a full decade ago, which is why it comes as a little bit of a surprise that developer Obsidian has released a brand new patch for the game that’s now available in the Pillars of Eternity beta branch on Steam.

The patch doesn’t add any new content but it does fix a large number of bugs and gameplay issues.…