PC Gaming
Dungeon Master (Image credit: Future) Welcome to Dungeon Master, PC Gamer’s regular RPG column. This week, junior cadet RPG correspondent Ted Litchfield is taking over for Fraser while he shanks a goblin for a studded leather jerkin, iron shortsword, and four gold pieces. The ongoing Neverwinter Nights mod campaign, Swordflight, feels like the CRPG equivalent…
Microsoft has spent the past few years laying off thousands of workers from its collection of game studios, which ballooned under former Xbox CEO Phil Spencer. Now it’s set to cut more jobs and close more studios as part of new CEO Asha Sharma’s “Xbox reset.” That years-long Xbox cost-cutting campaign has led to more…
Weird Weekend Weird 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…
Stellaris is one of those games I’ve never played, but I’m delightfully confounded by it from afar, as occasionally one of my friends will send me a message about how her robotic gestalt consciousness is doing. And here I was thinking this was about annexing provinces, or whatever! If you’d like to be confounded up…
Claude Guillemot, one of the five Guillemot brothers who co-founded French publisher Ubisoft, has died in a plane crash. Reported by Oest-France (via Kotaku), a Cessna 421 light aircraft crashed in the French commune of La Baule-Escoublac, within the Northwestern department of Loire-Atlantique, on Friday afternoon. According to reports from Loire-Atlantique’s SDIS 44 fire and…
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of my life watching Grand Theft Auto machinima over the last decade. And while I can certainly appreciate the amount of editing and effort that goes into each video’s production—I don’t always think of that toil when gawping at the finished article. According to filmmaker Jordy Veenstra, however, that polished…
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. Inside…
Ultima is one of PC gaming’s most important cultural touchstones, with Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriot’s roleplaying series blazing trails across numerous genres. The mainline CRPGs received critical acclaim for their rich, dynamic worlds, while spinoffs like Ultima Underworld and Ultima Online were key texts in the evolution of immersive sims and MMOs. Ultima’s influence still…
James Bentley, hardware writer (Image credit: Future) This week I’ve been: Enjoying and bearing the British summertime in equal measure, whilst playing too many deck builders (Here’s looking at you, 2 fights in 2 tight spaces and Moonsigil Atlas). There’s part of me that feels like I’ve somewhat fallen for the sunk cost fallacy of…
Since large-language models like ChatGPT can generate natural language responses that appear human-like in tone, this has led to considerable discussion over whether LLMs might themselves be sentient. At present, there are far more reasons to conclude that AIs are not and will never be conscious. But the idea persists regardless. This is partly because…