PC Gamer

Have you met Valheim 1.0's mountainous menace, the Gammeltroll? If you've made your way to Valheim's final biome, the Deep North, you've probably seen and fought it already: the Gammeltroll is a 30-foot tall rock monster who pelts you with tree trunks from range and stomps you into paste if you get too close.Most interestingly, when you defeat the Gammeltroll, it doesn't fall down. Instead, it turns into a statue called a "Petrified Gammeltroll." You can chip away at its legs all you want, but e

Valve rolled out 18+ age verification for Australian Steam users yesterday, which was inevitable: both PlayStation and Xbox have already done so and it is, after all, illegal not to, with fines up to AU$50 million at stake. But unlike PlayStation and Xbox, which offer a small handful of ways to verify one's adulthood, Valve has only one: you must own a credit card.And no, your debit card won't work, or at least, mine doesn't. You'll need an actual credit card: a card that uses money you don't ha

The brands are at it again but this time I'm inclined to let it slide, because it's so nonsensical (which is a nice way of saying dumb) that I can't help but be charmed. Ikea, the Swedish furniture-and-stuff giant, has released a mod for Skyrim called Kallax Storageborn: A new companion who is also a shelf, who is also voiced by Matt Berry.If you think that sounds weird, it gets weirder, because this mod doesn't just add a companion, it includes an entirely new questline built around the charact

Playing Wardogs is a bit like playing Battlefield, except you have to buy every gun, magazine, helmet, and kevlar vest yourself. It's a milsim FPS that runs on a personal wallet—doing useful things for the team makes you money used to unlock permanent upgrades and temporary gear.Wardogs is designed in a way that lets you play any role you want and still be a profitable teammate. But especially early on, it can be tough to make enough cash to consistently fund unlocks, and the game doesn't spell

A new hotfix for The Blood of Dawnwalker rolled out today, and you'll be happy to know that this one improves the game's overall stability, fixes several progression blockers, fixes an issue with controllers that was causing frame rate drops, gets rid of the famous red pipe—more on that later—and keeps dead folks from talking so much.That last point, about the stiffs who won't shut up, doesn't figure as one of the update's highlights, which developer Rebel Wolves breaks down thusly:Improved the

Call of Duty has joined Microsoft's bid to reinvigorate interest in Xbox consoles, today announcing a Modern Warfare 4 gun skin that you can only see if you're playing on an Xbox.You read that right: The Inner Circuit blueprint is an M4 skin granted to those who pre-order Modern Warfare 4 on any platform, but the gun looks totally different on the Xbox version.LEFT: The Inner Circuit skin as it'll appear on PC, PlayStation, and Switch 2.Activision BlizzardRIGHT: The Xbox 25th Anniversary Inner C

If you're shopping around to get ready for the new school year and looking for a gaming laptop to cover a broad range of performance needs, you'll find plenty of hardware claiming it's for "gaming," but just what kind of gaming experience you'll get is still a huge question. Plenty of brands are happy to have you find out later that the type of gaming is limited to retro games or lightweight esports titles at low frame rates. ASUS’s ROG (Republic of Gamers) sub-brand knows better, delivering exp

FOV 90(Image credit: Future)Welcome to FOV 90, an FPS column from staff writer Morgan Park. Every other week, I cover topics relevant to first-person shooter enjoyers, spanning everything from multiplayer and singleplayer to the old and the new.Welcome back, FPS enjoyers, for a locally-networked edition of FOV 90.I turned 30 this past weekend, and when my fiancé asked me how I'd like to celebrate, I had exactly one idea: Use the occasion to convince my friends to haul their heavy PCs across town

Somehow, it's been 10 years since No Man's Sky launched on Steam, an infamously inauspicious occasion that over the space of that decade evolved from a cautionary tale about the excesses of hype to one of the best and most enduring exploration adventures you can play. And it's not done yet: Hello Games has now released No Man's Sky's 7.0 update, Cosmos , and it's another big one.Cosmos, as the name implies, is all about space. You might think that'd already be pretty well covered in a game like

It's not always interesting, but it's important to stay on top of operating system updates. However, if you're on Windows, you're definitely gonna want to prick up your ears for Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday.This might be Microsoft's biggest Patch Tuesday to date, addressing a whopping 974 security flaws found across both Windows 10 and Windows 11. Bleeping Computer offers a handy breakdown, reporting that 438 of these flaws were elevation of privilege vulnerabilities, 258 were remote

A researcher for Anthropic has left the AI company and said what many of us are probably already thinking about the company. Taking to X, Jacob Coxon's resignation tweet has now received over half a million likes in just a single day. He says, "I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."Coxon says both will "soon be superhuman

I'm still not sure what to make of Control Resonant. I liked Control quite a lot but as a shooter, and I feel very ambivalent about the new and very different ARPG-style gameplay in the sequel. Our Morgan Park seemed cautiously optimistic following his preview session in June, but it's such a fundamental shift in the underlying gameplay that for me, many questions remain.One question that doesn't remain any longer, though, is whether I—and you—will be able to run it. With Control Resonant now ju

The Wardogs release date fast approaches, following its super popular beta last weekend before it enters early access. As our own FPS aficionado Morgan Park notes, it's a "100-player milsim that's inspired by Arma but plays like Battlefield," and its formula of cash-earning, all-out warfare is definitely appealing to a cross-section of game-hungry shooter crowds. Here's when you can expect to play the game in your timezone.Wardogs release times for each regionThe Wardogs release date is Septembe

After months of complaining about Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film, the internet has finally broken him. In a recent interview with IGN, he admitted how naive he was to think that everyone would be excited, and apologised for not creating the specific vision that those who are unhappy with the film's direction have. Instead, Cregger relied on his own instincts as a renowned director and writer—the nerve. "I was naive," Cregger says. "I thought that fans of these games, like me, would be thrille

I don't envy the position of being a game developer—especially not an encounter designer in something as complicated as an MMO. You might have an idea of how a mechanic's gonna go, but there's just absolutely no way it survives contact with 40 motivated, mid-2000s era hardcore WoW players.Former game director at Blizzard Wyatt Cheng, whose delightful TikTok channel has been giving free wisdom and anecdotes for some time now, says that exact agony happened to him around 20 years ago with the rele

Ah yes, melty cables. We've been dealing with them ever since the RTX 4090 pushed the 16-pin 12VHPWR connector (now the 12V-2x6 connector) to its limits. Since then, we've heard of numerous cases of melting GPU connectors—check out Uniko's Hardware on X for many examples—and plenty of attempts at dealing with them.Now, some modders have said 'screw it' to the new 12V-2x6 design, instead modding an RTX 5090 to run on standard 8-pin connectors (via Wccftech). The modders at TecLab fitted three 8-p

There once was a time in which, if you were a fan of a videogame, you might get asked which of said games in the series you had played. Now, I'm not saying we need to bring this era back—it was an obnoxious period full of gatekeepers—but Sega president and COO Shuji Utsumi's recent words on the subject are a surprising sign of the times.Speaking to Nikkei Gaming (thanks, IGN), Utsumi explains that (via machine translation): "For example, the 'Yakuza' series has been doing exceptionally well in m

In news that will surprise very few, manufacturers are reportedly planning to raise their GPU prices in China again later this month. This could have a knock-on effect on global pricing for both Nvidia and AMD cards.Asus looks set to raise the price of its RTX 5070 cards by between 150 and 300 RMB (roughly between $22 and $45) in mainland China, according to Taiwanese outlet United Daily News. Gigabyte has reportedly already raised the price of its RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPU by 200 RMB ($30).AMD has i

Marvel Rivals' massive hero roster and regular character additions are some of its defining features. So it comes as a huge surprise that NetEase has decided to forgo tradition for the sake of focusing on improving its foundations. For the first time in eight seasons—that's 17 months—Marvel Rivals will just be getting one hero, Gorr the God Butcher, in a season. "We're locking our crosshairs on just Gorr the God Butcher," creative designer Guangyun Chen says in a dev diary. "In the first half of

Valheim 1.0 changed a ton about viking survival, but some things remain the same—like my tendency to repeatedly die to fall damage in the Mistlands. A new item helps traverse all those foggy marble mountains and steep drop-offs, but I didn't find it until I was ready to leave the biome. I'll save you from a similar fate with a quick explainer on how to get the Grappling Hook in Valheim.Where to find Hooks in ValheimThis Hidden Door looks like it was made for ants.Iron Gate StudioFound my Hooks i