PC Gamer

Good art generally requires risk-taking and good business is generally risk-averse—sucks for you if you're trying to make a big budget videogame based on one of the most popular movie series ever made in a relatively niche game genre, but them's the breaks. Unless you're Bit Reactor, of course, then you're doing just that. Founder Greg Foertsch told PC Gamer associate editor Ted Litchfield in a recent interview that he has Lucasfilm and Respawn to thank."Looking at some of the things going on in

If you've played an RPG before, I'm sure you're familiar with the associated plot clichés: golden boy protagonist takes on a death-defying quest, and along the road picks up several total strangers who become his best friends in record time (bonus points if one or a few of them fall in love with the player character). Star Wars Zero Company bears some resemblance to BioWare's classics, but this is where narrative director Aaron Contreras hopes the two diverge.Contreras said as much in a recent i

The elevator pitch behind Robot Cache is simple: what if there was a digital storefront like Steam, but you could sell games to other users once you had finished playing them? Oh, and it was all powered by the blockchain. Sorry to spoil the ending, but it didn't end up making much of a splash since it launched in 2018—and now a Reddit thread from user kallreven alleges that it's gone for good."Thank you sincerely for joining us on this journey," reads the screenshot of an email purportedly from

Critical HitWelcome to Critical Hit (formerly known as Soundtrack Sunday), where I celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle.I love Neverwinter Nights. I would count myself among the top 100, maybe even top 50 fans in the world of this joint BioWare-Obsidian, Forgotten Realms and D&D-based CRPG series. While not super obscure⁠—we're not talking Brigand: Oaxaca or The Sum: Nous Aurons⁠—NwN 1 and 2 aren't RPG A-listers. The

AI is coming to take my job, so I'd better start looking for a new one. Luckily, there are a ton of job simulators on Steam, and I'm going to play as many as I can until I find my next career. This week's job: PBA Pro Bowling 2026, a bowling sim about bowling.As a new bowler on the amateur circuit, my first day isn't going well. I'm trying to learn how to hook the ball—to roll it in a curving pattern so it hits the pins at an angle—and it turns out there's quite a lot to it. You even have to con

Umamusume: Pretty Derby took the internet by storm after its global launch in June last year, kicking off a whole new Western fanbase for the anime racing horse girl genre..I was amongst the crowd that got swept up in its surprisingly in-depth career mode, training my beloved Oguri Cap trained as hard as I possibly could. She never quite took home gold, but the sheer enthusiasm from everyone else playing kept me going despite my losses.Character SelectWelcome to Character Select, a weekly column

Disk CleanupWelcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend column delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"Tarn Adams cannot recall exactly when he first got into gaming, describing his formative computer years as "a haze of learning BASIC". "I remember there was MS-DOS, but we also had a TRS-80, and I remember the little demon game,

Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer(Image credit: Future)Last week: I was trying to make a dent in Crimson Desert.This week: I'm still trying.What is Crimson Desert? Genuinely, that's not rhetorical. After 150 hours galavanting across the continent of Pywel—though, in truth, mostly the first region of Hernand—I still find myself struggling to frame the game in my mind. Despite its colossal size and seemingly endless array of systems, Crimson Desert isn't an MMO. But neither is it an RPG, which its

Nick Evanson, Hardware writer(Image credit: Future)This month I have been: mostly testing Intel's new Arrow Lake Refresh chips, but I've also been checking out Nvidia's new Dynamic Multi Frame Generation. I've been despondently staring at DRAM prices in the vain hope that I'll stumble across an affordable 64 GB kit to update my video editing rig.As with any new piece of PC technology, months of leaks and rumours ensured that Intel's launch of its Core Ultra 200S processors wasn't especially surp

Five years ago, Strixhaven: School of Mages showed us Magic: The Gathering's original take on the wizard school genre, which covers everything from Discworld's Unseen University to A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin—though obviously Harry Potter is the elephant in the room.Back then, Wizards of the Coast hadn't gone all-in on the crossovers. Now we've had everything from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set to a limited run featuring Dwight from The Office. It was reasonable to wonder, after W

Crimson Desert has gotten frequent and hefty updates since its blockbuster release, and today has brought yet another payload of changes. You can read all about it on developer Pearl Abyss's website, but let me skip to the good stuff: you can hide your helmet now.The highly requested feature is delightfully granular, too. In settings under "Language & Gameplay," you can choose whether your equipped headgear shows in cutscenes, all the time, only in combat, or not at all. Warhammer miniatures hav

Our first glimpse of Alex Garland's upcoming Elden Ring movie might be in a TikTok video shot by a lucky fan in the UK. Not only is it unmistakably a near-exact recreation of the ruined churches from the game, there's evidence that it's being built in a popular filming location.Throxtv, an Elden Ring fan and Twitch streamer, posted a short video on Friday of a ruined stone building with a statue of a woman that looks exactly like the churches of Marika found throughout The Lands Between. The ope

Longtime FromSoftware dataminer Lance McDonald has unveiled his latest discovery from deep in the bowels of Elden Ring, a WIP base game cutscene featuring DLC antagonist Miquella the Kind, who remains one of the most enigmatic characters in any FromSoft game.The cut scene (cut cutscene?) shows Miquella planting a sapling Haligtree⁠—the endgame dungeon where you fight Malenia⁠—then watering it with his own blood. It takes place in a modified version of Malenia's boss room, further solidifying its

Generative AI has wormed its way into all sorts of high-profile games, but plenty of developers have taken a hard stance against the tech. Digital Extremes has just joined the chorus of anti-AI game developers, with community director Megan Everett telling GameSpot she's "very passionate about not having any of that shit.""We are a very non-AI company and it is all humans making Warframe and Soulframe," she said. "I literally don't even want to open any type of timeline and look at art because I

I don't envy any showrunners currently working on a videogame adaptation, which have been the new hotness since Fallout and The Last of Us hit the big time. On one side, you've got the general TV audience who may be skeptical of what videogames can bring to the table, and on the other, you've got hordes of fans with an axe to grind for anyone who mucks up a take on that thing they love a little too much. In other words, the Mass Effect show was always gonna have an uphill battle—and a new report

Some mods are utterly transformative: Tweaks to the baseline experience that feel like they were always there, or standalone campaigns worthy of their own retail release. I'm not talking about either of those today. I'm talking about Fallout: New Vegas for the PS3.Last October, Nexus user Pope74220⁠—presumably not the actual Bishop of Rome and Vicar of Christ⁠—uploaded the original Fallout 3 mod: A perfect Gamebryo engine facsimile of New Vegas' "Greatest Hits" Ultimate Edition box for Sony's Pl

Jess Kinghorn, hardware writer(Image credit: Future)This week I've been: Checking out free experiences like indie horror Sato Killing Time Chat.exe and cyberpunk match-three narrative game D14L-ogue.Before joining the hardware team here, I spent a significant chunk of my early career writing for Official PlayStation Magazine UK—and not even I am excited for the next Sony console. When I pre-ordered my PS5 back in 2020, I never once considered I was actually getting a good deal at the time. For c

I played MindsEye, and it's bad. Developer Build a Rocket Boy says the game has come a long way since its launch last year, and while it might be less worse, it's still not good. Yet I recently spent a couple weeks playing it from start to finish, and despite everything—despite it being bad in so many different ways that I can't possibly remember them all—I somehow had a really good time with it. This might take a while, so bear with me.I knew something was up the moment I stepped into Redrock C

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.Final Fantasy 14 is so very nearly clear of the issues myself—and our fellow FF14 aficionado Mollie Taylor—have been yapping about for years, with its latest pat

Weird WeekendWeird Weekend is our regular Saturday column 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.Halo: Combat Evolved may have finally ended PC gaming's reign as the de-facto FPS platform, but it was by no means the first shooter to