PC Gaming
Last week I sat down with Studio Wildcard co-founders Jeremy Stieglitz and Jesse Rapczak, mostly to grill them about Vin Diesel but also to talk about what’s happening with Ark: Survival Ascended these days. I was surprised when Stieglitz started talking not about dinosaurs but pirates, bringing up another game Studio Wildcard had developed: Atlas….
Monster Hunter Stories 3 has dozens of Monsties to collect, but the rarest monsters can only be obtained through mutations. They’re by no means necessary to complete the story, but you’ll have a much easier time with them in your party because of their boosted stats and improved genes. Mutations are a part of Monster…
The single most controversial change in Overwatch 2 (now Overwatch) was its shift to having five players on each team instead of six. Dropping one player dramatically changed the way the hero shooter worked, driving off many players who fell in love with the 6v6 format in the original game. “This was one of the…
Much of the current videogame landscape can be traced back to systems and design decisions either first conceived or formalized in World of Warcraft. From the universal RPGification of game mechanics to live service gameplay loops to incremental gearscore advancement, videogames as we know them look like they do in large part because of WoW….
When it comes to matchmaking, Marathon covers the basics: You can go solo and play against only other solos, or fill in a group of three to face other squads. But the community has been vocal about the desire for a duos mode since the sever slam in February, and now Bungie’s ready to give…
Tim Sweeney, the CEO and co-founder of Epic Games, is not short of a quarter or two: depending on which estimate you go with, he’s worth anywhere between $5 billion and $9 billion. And it turns out that Sweeney has been using some of his cash to one admirable end: buying up swathes of forest…
Nvidia’s DLSS has been a boon for those of us who hang on to old GPUs for longer than game developers want to support them, but a problem with AI upscaling is that its inferences subtly alter the look of games. With DLSS 5, Nvidia has dropped the subtlety and made overwriting the original graphics…
Eugene Jarvis hasn’t made a game in around a decade, and is enjoying a well-deserved retirement, but in the 1980s especially this guy made the most brilliant and brutally tough arcade games around. Defender, Robotron: 2084, NARC, Smash TV—all very different, all excellent, and every single one will kick your ass and gobble quarters like…
Eugene Jarvis hasn’t made a game in around a decade, and is enjoying a well-deserved retirement, but in the 1980s especially this guy made the most brilliant and brutally tough arcade games around. Defender, Robotron: 2084, NARC, Smash TV—all very different, all excellent, and every single one will kick your ass and gobble quarters like…
Last week, former Blizzard vice president and game designer Jeff Kaplan made his first public appearance since leaving the World of Warcraft and Overwatch developer in 2021, revealing his independent game studio, Kintsugiyama, and its upcoming frontier survival game, The Legend of California. Days later, Kaplan continued that momentum with a casual 10-hour stream of…