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Civilization 7's latest update arrives on Monday. Firaxis revealed the bulk of the update's additions earlier this month, including the "most-requested addition" of letting players guide a single Civ across the entirety of its campaign. But Firaxis kept one last surprise in reserve, having just revealed that the update will add military wunderkind Alexander the Great to the base game for free.As you'd probably expect from one of the ancient world's most renowned generals, Alexander's playstyle

I consider it my sworn duty to keep you informed of games that channel the energy of noughties fantasy swashbuckling sim Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and there are a surprising number of upcoming projects that borrow from the game with the best boot in the business. There's Alkahest, which has caught my eye on multiple occasions with its incredibly slick trailers (perhaps too slick, at points), and there's also Fatekeeper, which is a bit heavier on its feet than Alkahest, but nonetheless tak

I guess we can call Forza Horizon 6 letting players go to Japan and race against a mech a success then. The incarnation of Forza Horizon with kei trucks and indestructible cherry blossom trees in it is available four days early for people who buy the premium edition, and they have turned up in droves. It hit a peak of 178,009 players on Steam alone according to SteamDB, which puts it well ahead of Forza Horizon 5, the previous entry peaking at 81,096 players on Steam four-and-a-half years ago.Ra

Magic's mini-sets called Secret Lairs, which are usually short-run reprints of old cards with new art aimed at collectors, have really been leaning into the joke over the last couple of years. The cards starring Dwight from The Office were a perfect example, and the upcoming Secret Lair called Cats are the Best seems like another, including as it does 15 Garfield cards to slide into your Commander decks to the bafflement of your friends.The cards come in three "drops" of five, with the first bas

Chet Faliszek opens the above video by explaining, "This is not saying that something's happening, not trying to allude to anything. I'm going to talk about some stuff from like 10-plus years ago. I'm not trying to say anything. OK?" Because if you were a writer on Half-Life 2's episodes (as well as the Left 4 Dead games, the Portal games, other Valve projects, etc.) the internet will interpret anything you say as a confirmation that Half-Life 3 is in the works and will be announced at whatever

Out with the old, in with the new—Forza Horizon 6 has hit the scene, but a different open world online racer is getting scrubbed from digital storefronts just three years after its initial release. Lego 2K Drive, an open-world kart racer where you can build your own vehicles, announced on its Steam page (via IGN) that the game will no longer be available for purchase starting May 19.If you already own the game or snag it before its exit, you can still use its multiplayer features until May 31 of

Ever since a study theorized that around 87 percent of videogames are not playable without finding a physical copy or nabbing a digital one via piracy or an archive, I stopped feigning shock when a game gets delisted. Games with licensed characters or music have an especially rough time staying on digital storefronts: Star Trek: Resurgence and 29 Disney games have been vaporized since the year began. If you've been worried that Mixtape, the narrative adventure game which launched earlier this mo

Final Fantasy 14 isn't the only Final Fantasy-related MMO. Its ancient ancestor, Final Fantasy 11, which released all the way back in 2002 before World of Warcraft reshaped the landscape for massively multiplayer games, is still trucking along. It's not exactly bustling next to the likes of FF14, Guild Wars 2, and WoW, but it occasionally attracts so much activity its dusty old servers buckle.It seems like Square Enix wants to bring the game, if one small step at a time, into the current decade

Steam Controllers are the new hotness in hardware, but actually getting your hands on one is easier said than done. Before it launched, Valve said it had "knobs" at the ready to get pads in hands as soon as possible, but the controllers sold out in barely a day, leaving plenty of folks waiting in line for a restock. I think we are finally seeing the fruit of Valve's knobs, though: according to players on social media, reservation emails are coming through."ITS HAPPENING EVERYONE, STAY CALM!" rea

I've heard rumours. Whispers of an underground rave for the ages, deep within the bowels of one of GTA Online's myriad entertainment venues, away from the prying eyes of the LSPD. The question is: where?As a child of the '90s, I was a touch too young for the techno scene that swept the UK in the early stretch of the same decade, where community-led DIY club nights saw revellers packed into hatchback cars like sardines, windows down and ears pricked, following the rhythmic beats of a bass drum re

Terminally Online(Image credit: Future)This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.I'm thinking about Final Fantasy 14: Evercold's keynotes, and something in them's been rattling around in the back of my skull—during them, Hikaru Tamaki (who wa

Weird WeekendWeird Weekend is our regular Saturday feature where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.When I first walked into the mime's house in Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Souls, I hadn't intended to destroy it. In fact, the pros

More quizzes!(Image credit: Larian Studios, PC Gamer)Want to keep testing your knowledge of gaming trivia? We've got loads more PC Gamer quizzes, on everything from healthbars to weird currencies to absurd patch notes.Well, you all seemed to take last week's pixelated nightmare of a quiz in your stride—lots of high marks all round! So I thought I'd better ramp things up a bit for this week's quiz. I take these things personally, you see. Yes, I'm still addicted to pixelating, but this time I've

MercurySteam, the developer behind Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and the Switch exclusive Metroid Dread, has announced layoffs in the same week its latest game Blades of Fire launches on Steam."There's no easy way to share this kind of news, but today we must communicate that MercurySteam has initiated a workforce adjustment process," the studio wrote in a LinkedIn post (via GamesIndustry) adding that, "while this is something common within the production cycles of our industry, it is nonetheless

As someone who has been a die-hard adherent of Firefox for going on 20 years. I was shocked to discover that less than 3% of Internet users surf the web using Mozilla's open-source web-browser. Sure, Firefox can feel like it's held together with masking tape at times. But it's still superior to Edge while also being generally less cursed than Chrome, especially when it comes to things like privacy and not installing stealth AI models on your PC.Since learning that statistic, I've been concerned

You don't need to be a music fan to have a vampire weekend this week, as toothy survival game V Rising is free on Steam for the next few days. Developer Stunlock Studios has announced that the game will be freely available until Monday, with a deep discount on the full version if you find yourself thirsting for more by the end of it.If you're unfamiliar with V Rising, it's one of the better "survival game, but" experiences to have released in the last few years. It takes the familiar loop of exp

The character system used in Fallout is famously based upon its roleplaying system called SPECIAL. But this wasn't always the case. In fact, for most of the original game's development, Fallout's mechanics were based upon a licensed, table-top roleplaying system called GURPS, which, yes, sounds more like a digestive tract disorder than a TTRPG ruleset.Anyway, the Generic Universal Roleplaying System was at the heart of Fallout from its conception in 1994 all the way to early 1997, when GURPS' cr

Final Fantasy 14 has sent my unintimidating, run-of-the-mill-looking cat girl on all manner of world-saving missions. She's squared up with a dying god on the moon, fist fought an alien super weapon, and even confronted the literal embodiment of nihilism at the ends of the universe. My girl has been through a lot, but the MMO is pretty good at making me feel like there's no challenge I can't rise to meet. Well, that is until you give her a fishing rod. For a cat person, my little Warrior of Ligh

Japanese fans of the mega-franchise Love Live!, which spans anime, manga, live performances, and games, recently spotted that the domain for the official fan club of Aqours expired and is now up at auction. Top bid? 97.14 billion yen, or $615 million dollars to you, sir.There are various iterations of Love Live!, all of them being either Jpop groups or solo idols, but Aquors is arguably the most wide-ranging and successful, with over a decade's worth of games, several anime seasons, and live per

The Overwatch gang has finally arrived in Fortnite, and you know what that means. That's right, we're talking about Tracer's butt again. Fans are convinced that Tracer's backside got buffed in her Fortnite incarnation, and you know, I think they might be right.Some quick history, for those who either weren't around 10 years ago, or are fortunate enough to have memory-holed the whole thing: One of the big controversies in the early days of Overwatch (and this is going to sound incredibly stupid,