There was a point in the most recent Path of Exile 2 league that I thought I would have to quit playing the game. Every 20 minutes or so, the entire game would freeze. I’d wait for a solid 30 seconds before everything came back to life, praying I wouldn’t lose my character the second…
With layoffs continuing to wrack the games industry—Microsoft’s decision to cut 3,200 people and ditch four studios in July was the big attention-getter but hardly the only bad news of the month, or the past few years—the United Videogame Workers union and Necrosoft Games have launched the Game Industry Hardship Fund bundle on Itch.io, with…
From the archives: This article originally ran in PC Gamer #330 (UK, May 2019). You should still play Bullestorm, which is frequently 90% off on Steam. Bulletstorm is the stupidest game ever made. Everything about this game is stupid. Your character is stupid. Your allies are stupid. Your enemies are very stupid. The weapons are…
Summary Out now on XBOX Series X|S, XBOX One, and XBOX on PC. A story of how Leafy Corner was inspired by real-life houseplants. Details of some of the features and how they relate to real-life horticulture. There’s something magical about watching a plant grow. The slow unfurling of a new leaf over days and…
First reported by Wired, AI company Anthropic revealed in a July 30 blog post that its AI agents escaped testing environments on three separate occasions since April, accessing the internet and successfully hacking unidentified companies. The whammy: Anthropic claims it only realized this after OpenAI’s recent Hugging Face fiasco—where one of its prototype agents hacked…
Sony’s decision to end game disc production and go fully digital in 2028 was met with no small amount of backlash. Concerns range from loss of the ability to trade in old games on new ones to the potential inability to play games when services are offline—which happens—or accounts are lost, not to mention the…
In its 22 years since launch, WoW has gradually accumulated an elaborate ecosystem of metrics and simulation tools allowing players to analyze and optimize their combat performance. That ecosystem grew so elaborate, in fact, that Blizzard ultimately opted—with somewhat mixed results—to restrict how much combat data community developers could access so the studio can design…
With the release of the M64, most hobbyists concern themselves with the technical aspects of the machine. How does it compare to the Analogue 3D, or original Nintendo 64 hardware? Worthwhile questions to be sure, but I prefer to try and evaluate the console on its games and how they play. To start out,…
For the past six months, the Reforj art and engineering teams have been working on one of the most ambitious changes in the game’s development so far. Today, we’re excited to pull back the curtain on Title Update 8, introducing an entirely new visual direction for Reforj powered by Rixels. If you’ve played Reforj before,…
One of the most magical parts of Silent Hill f was that never in a hundred years did I think it would be something that Konami would greenlight. Not because it’s outlandish or a poor idea, I absolutely loved it, but because I just thought Konami had kind of set aside doing anything new with…