Month: October 2024

We’re seeing genuinely next-gen gaming PCs actually getting tangible discounts right now, and this RTX 4080 with $260 knocked off the standard price is looking like a great gaming PC deal today. It’s a good-looking, super-powerful rig that’s $2,300 at Newegg right now.

Of course the Nvidia RTX 4080 card—represented here by a Gigabyte Eagle OC version—is the main draw of this machine. While we may not have been bowled over by the value prospect of Nvidia’s second-tier Ada GPU as a drop-in upgrade for the DIY market, when it’s presented inside a prebuilt machine it’s a far more tantalising prospect.

That’s because its $1,200 sticker price is tough to swallow on its own. But when that makes up more than half the price of a full PC, and one that doesn’t stint on the …

Ashfall is a Fallout-inspired MMO set in a world left devastated by—of course—nuclear war. As one of the few survivors of that war, players are forced to leave the safety of their shelter and venture out into the wasteland in search of the Core of Creation, “the key to saving what remains of the world.” That’s pretty much a straight lift from Fallout 2, but Ashfall branches out from its post-nuclear roots into what Netease describes as an “Eastern-inspired wasteland.”

That game world looked potentially interesting when we first checked out Ashfall earlier this year, although it seemed somewhat inconsistent in spots—possibly because the game is being made for mobile devices as well as PC, but also (my own speculation here) because there’s just so much going on: Gi…

Now, I’ll admit my own password hygiene isn’t always the best, though I have graduated from the days when I used “xxxxxx” for a few non-critical accounts under the reverse psychology assumption that it’s so obviously insecure, nobody would bother trying it. Genius, I know. But even I realise a four-character password is a big no-no.

And yet that’s exactly what was used to protect an encrypted file that was critical to the fundamental integrity of the Secure Boot, a UEFI BIOS security layer designed to ensure that a device boots using only the software that is trusted by the PC maker itself.

Ars Technica reports that, “researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Int…

Intel introduced its first hybrid desktop CPU architecture with a mix of Performance and Efficient cores, known as Alder Lake, back in late 2021. AMD isn’t expected to offer its own hybrid CPU for consumers and gamers until Zen 6 arrives and so probably not until 2026.

However, AMD has engineered some new smaller cores roughly equivalent to Intel’s E-cores, known as Zen 4c, and they could be quite a bit more powerful than Intel’s.

Semianalysis has a deep dive on 4c and there are a few take-away highlights. First, AMD’s small cores are bigger. Intel fits roughly four Efficiency cores into the space of one Performance core. AMD’s Zen 4c cores are about half the size of full Zen 4 cores, as found in its latest Ryzen 7000 CPUs.

More broadly, Zen 4c seems to be functionally…

Watch On

Good ol’ Geoff Keighley is back with another festival of games in LA—a sort of expo of electronic entertainment, if you will—and 2024’s Summer Game Fest livestream airs this Friday.

What time does Summer Game Fest start?

Summer Game Fest 2024 is on Friday, June 7 at 2 pm Pacific. That’s 5 pm Eastern, 10 pm in the UK. Find your time zone here.

Where can I watch Summer Game Fest?

You can watch the show live on YouTube  (embedded above) or Twitch. 

Here are some of the appearances that have been teased in advance of this year’s Summer Game Fest:

• Something from Remedy
• The new Skate game
• A Monster Hunter Wilds trailer
• “Special Capcom announcements”
• Dun…
  

30 days ago, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive broke its all-time record for concurrent players like the boss it is. This iteration of the game is eleven years old, while Counter-Strike itself has been around since 1999. Barely one month on, CS:GO has just done it again: This weekend it reached a new peak of 1.4 million concurrent players.

The previous record was 1.32 million in February 2023. The new record was reached on Saturday March 11 at 13:00 UTC, per SteamDB, and is 1,420,183 players at once. This type of sustained growth so far from the game’s release is remarkable and, while many have been theorising about why now, any answer eventually ends up back at the game’s rock -fundamentals. When Valorant came out I thought this might be the game to tempt me away from CS:GO. That …

In an interview at last week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the developers behind indie sensations Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon said that the deal some small developers have come to rely on for funding in recent years—like Epic Game Store exclusives and Xbox Game Pass—are no longer what they once were.

“I talked to at least five small teams, like 35 [members] and under, during GDC, and they’re like: Cuts, cuts, cuts, funding canceled, talks that were going on for a year, canceled,” said Casey Yano, the co-founder of Slay the Spire studio Mega Crit. “It sounds like it’s shit. We’re definitely very privileged to be able to self-fund. [Otherwise] I’d be very, very, very scared right now.”

Slay the Spire launched to slow sales in Steam early acc…

Hogwarts Legacy will have more than 100 sidequests, and it won’t just give players something different to do when they need a break. Narrative director Moira Squier told our colleagues at GamesRadar that the way players take on those sideline activities can have an impact on the main campaign.

“The main storyline is complicated and engaging, and involves a variety of different characters and viewpoints, but by giving the player choice moments throughout the game, we allow them to tell their own version of that epic story,” Squier said.

“Even the sidequests, of which there are over 100, allow the player to manipulate the main campaign by virtue of the experiences they’ve had. Interacting with someone in a sidequest will impact how you interact with them in the main storyline,…

I do not want to die in a bug-infested hellscape for nothing. If I’m going to get murdered over and over again in Helldivers 2, I better be getting a big stack of medals out of it. Such rewards haven’t exactly been pouring in, however, since one of the biggest sources, the daily personal orders, hasn’t been working. 

These daily challenges have been a bit iffy since launch for a lot of Helldivers, with countless reports of them not doling out medals upon completion, not updating, or simply not showing up at all. Another victim of the game’s massive population and resulting server issues. Late last month, however, they seemed to vanish for everyone. 

Daily personal orders are not the only way to get medals, of course, but they are one of the best ways to get a big s…

The team over at Arrowhead Games has been wildly busy with Helldivers 2—which is to be expected. After a meteoric rise in concurrent players that forced a raised cap to 700,000, the game’s playerbase has swelled to near-unmanageable levels which, as you might imagine, would keep a community manager very busy.

So busy in fact that Discord mistook said community manager for an automaton. At around 4 pm GMT February 21, Katherine Baskin (who is also the author of those charming Super Earth High Command dispatches you see on the game’s official Discord server) was locked out of her account due to “sending too many DMs too fast.”

“The Helldivers 2 server has over 400,000 people in it and I get [hundreds] of DMs a day about game support, moderation, etc,” Baskin wrote. “Can …

It’s that time again, folks. The Future Games Show is back, this time with its 2023 Spring Showcase, hosted by none other than Briana White and Cody Christian: Aerith and Cloud from Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

Clocking in at 85 minutes and showing off 45 games, the Future Games Show Spring Showcase will kick off tomorrow, March 23, at 3 pm PDT / 6 pm EDT / 10 pm GMT / 11 pm CET. You can watch it, well, pretty much anywhere that’s capable of displaying video. That means Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, GamesRadar, and (for the first time) TikTok. Remember to set a reminder on YouTube so you can catch it right from the start.

45 games is a heck of a lot, and many of them are set to be a surprise. But to give you a brief taste of what to expect, you can look for…

Final Fantasy 14—a game that itself received a complete 2.0 revamp—will get a 2.0 version of the preview benchmark tool for its upcoming expansion, Dawntrail. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Why? Well, FF14 is having a massive graphics overhaul for its 7.0 update. This isn’t just a few new shaders slapped onto an ailing engine, it’s a complete remodelling of the world’s characters (akin to World of Warcraft’s revamp during Warlords of Draenor) as well as various lighting systems.

The benchmark uses this graphical revamp, so it’s the first time players have been able to see their transformed Warriors of Light. And while community outrage over some model updates does seem a touch over-the-top, I do think FF14 attaches you to your player…

Looks like autumn’s cosy vibes are coming early—and here I’ve been, a summer-avoidant gamer goblin wishing away the sun. Titled Whimsy & Wonder: A Cosy Games collection, the Humble Bundle’s latest entry is composed of some of PC Gamer’s previous cosy faves. 

Proceeds will go to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Legal Defense Fund, and the bundle’s sold over 6,700 copies at the time of writing.

Find a blanket to wrap up warm in and sink into a land of crunchy leaves and pumpkin spice. No, seriously, entering this level of cosy vibes without the proper safety equipment can be dangerous. You’ve been warned.

Cat Cafe Manager

I’ve never had the opportunity to go to a cat cafe, and I am violently jealous of those who have. I fully plan …

It won’t actually hit the markets for another couple of years, but Intel’s forthcoming Lunar Lake CPU architecture has made an early appearance in the SiSoft Sandra database. The entry has all kinds of confusing information and while it only covers the numbers from just one benchmark, they’re actually quite promising.

Intel’s roadmaps for its CPU architectures can get rather confusing at times, especially since the various designs don’t get used in every segment. For example, we’re currently on Raptor Lake and will be for the next generation of Core processors. After that, it’ll be Meteor Lake, which is bringing in a whole new way of putting chips together for Intel.

However, Meteor Lake won’t really be used for desktop CPUs, in that you won’t be able to go out and buy one t…

GeForce Now is a great way to game on a handheld gaming PC, such as a Steam Deck. You can play games that aren’t available on that Linux-powered handheld. For example, Destiny 2. And usually you’ll save heaps of battery by streaming rather than playing locally. What’s not been so great is trying to install GeForce Now as something akin to an easy-to-use app. It’s traditionally required a good deal of tweaking, and I’ve long wished for a GeForce Now app on Steam Deck. Thankfully, Nvidia is now going to do the brunt of that fiddling with the settings for you.

New GeForce Now installation files are now available for Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Legion Go, and the MSI Claw. These include a script that will effectively install Google Chrome, the web browser of choice for running GeForce Now, …

I’ve never seen an episode of Peaky Blinders, the Netflix series about a gang of Birmingham criminals set at the tail end of World War I. Hell, until I looked it up just now I assumed the name was some obscure rhyming slang, but it turns out they were named for their fashionable peaked flat caps. To get to the point, three years ago Peaky Blinders was turned into a top-down heist puzzle game in the vein of Commandos or Shadow Tactics called Peaky Tactics: Mastermind and now you can get it for free.

That’s surprising, because Peaky Blinders: Mastermind was delisted from Steam on December 30 of last year, presumably because the license expired. It’s still not available to buy on PC, though it is also one of the current free games you get with an Amazon Prime subscription as well as …

Hideki Kamiya, formerly of Capcom and PlatinumGames, is now out in the world as a civilian. The legendary director is responsible for some of the best action games ever made, in particular Bayonetta, but following his departure from Platinum earlier this year (a company he co-founded) it doesn’t seem like he’s going to be involved much in games anymore. 

Hopefully I’m wrong, but at the moment Kamiya seems content to make YouTube videos showing off his ludicrous car and talking about his love of aquariums. In the latest he addresses some audience questions about his games and, when asked about Bayonetta, the violins really start playing.

“I worked on Bayonetta 1, 2, 3 and Origins,” Kamiya said. “I’ve talked about this in various interviews: that the Bayonetta series woul…

In a rare act of restraint, it took me an entire four days to watch the eight episodes of Netflix’s new Castlevania series, Castlevania: Nocturne. It really was worth savoring: season after season Powerhouse Animation Studios has upped its game, and it’s been nearly two-and-a-half years since the final season of the show’s original run concluded. That was a lot of waiting, but it sounds like the wait for more Nocturne will be shorter. 

Today Netflix returned Nocturne has been greenlit for season 2, and the team even had a teaser trailer ready to go. 

“SEASON 2 of Castlevania: Nocturne is OFFICIALLY IN PRODUCTION!!!” co-director Samuel Deats wrote on Friday. “Those are ACTUAL Storyboards, Layouts, and Animation for Season 2. 😁 …. Sorry to keep you waiting.…

After a whole 48 hours of mourning for Hearthstone’s doomed Mercenaries mode, it’s now time move on in the form of a new mini-set coming to Standard next week. I’m delighted to say that Naxx will once again soon be out. Yes, the next slimline expansion is called Return to Naxxramas and it drops on February 14, because card games are for the lovers.

The set contains 38 cards, four of which are Legendary minions, and we can exclusively reveal one of the coolest, most flavourful of those below.

Yep, your boy Rivendare is back, and he’s brought his equally dead friends.   Rivendare, Warrider is a neutral minion with 6/6 stats that costs 6 Mana. His text reads: “Deathrattle: Shuffle the other 3 Horsemen into your deck.” But what do they do, you impatiently trill.…

Every week for the past few months the developers at Paradox Tinto have been posting developer diaries and in-progress map screenshots from the game that everyone knows is Europa Universalis 5, but which for now they’re just calling Project Caesar.

This week was a big one, as yesterday’s Tinto  Maps post was the grand heart of early modern Europe: The Holy Roman Empire. Historical strategy fans long knew that this would be an immense undertaking at the level of fidelity which EU5 intends… but I don’t think anyone truly saw this coming.

The shockingly detailed detailed map shows just how absurd a patchwork of principalities, prince-electors, prince-bishoprics, free cities, prelates, archbishop-electors, and imperial peasant republics the incredibly complex Holy Roman E…

Stylish and gorgeous, Songs of Silence has been teasing us with a story-focused approach to 4X strategy for most of the year, but now we’ve had another look as part of the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted. The team at Chimera Entertainment showed off Songs’ three factions—the Firstborn, Starborn, and Crusade—in combat, with units ranging from warriors mounted on flaming rams to giant three legged cauldrons and a menagerie of other fantastic creatures duking it out. 

The mix of turn-based strategy in managing your territory and moving about and handling your troops through the real time battles is as gorgeous as the rest of Songs, and with inspirations like “our all-time favorites, such as Ogre Battle, Kohan, and Warlords,” according to creative…

It seems Lies of P’s chilling take on the tale of Pinocchio isn’t finished yet. A Neowiz job listing discovered by Okami Games has revealed that DLC “is planned for production.”

I was iffy on Lies of P at first. The idea of “Pinocchio, but soulslike” was undeniably intriguing, but sometimes an overt embrace of weirdness can mask, well, less-than-stellar gameplay. But the closer it got, the better it looked, and in the end it lived up to the hype: It’s not without flaws, but as we said in our 74% review, “Somehow, Lies of P pulls off its gritty Pinocchio retelling, managing the impossibility of incorporating elements from both the folktale and the 1940 film without feeling, y’know, absurd.”

Bit of a spoiler here, but Lies of P also lays a very clear foundation for future stor…

Intel’s taken inspiration from Apple’s M1 and M2 chips with a new Meteor Lake chip that includes LPDDR5X inside the chip package. The neatly compact processor has been teased with two Samsung memory packages loaded onto it—a bid to improve performance and reduce a device’s overall footprint.

The chip, as noted by Tom’s Hardware, includes 16GB LPDDR5X-7500 memory from Samsung, bearing a close resemblance to how Apple has configured its latest ARM M2 chips. You can tell it’s a Meteor Lake chip by the many tiles combined to make it up, which uses Intel’s Foveros tech. Though as far as we know this architecture will only be used for mobile applications, such as laptops, for the time being.

You could say Intel was copying Apple’s homework, but it is fair to say this sort of…

After burning out on approximately 17 billion indie roguelikes between the years of 2011 and 2018, I swore to myself that I’d never be swayed again by a procedurally generated dungeon crawler that I’ll never finish. I’m breaking that rule for Sulfur, an upcoming FPS featured in today’s PC Gaming Show that’s incorporating the best parts of extraction games like Hunt: Showdown and Dark and Darker into a singleplayer roguelite. Watch the trailer above.

To be fair, I’d probably play more roguelites these days if they looked this cool. I’m smitten with Sulfur’s flat-shaded environments and enemies that look like they crawled out of a 2010s Cartoon Network show. You could almost mistake it for one of those colloquially-coined “cozy games” that appear by the dozens on Steam, but Sulfur’s…

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree earned an immediate reputation for its punishing difficulty, to the point that it suffered a brief barrage of negative reviews from players who thought its boss fights were excessively brutal. The DLC’s final boss, as you might expect, is particularly nasty—so nasty that it took legendary boss-deleter Let Me Solo Her three hours of attempts. Seems like all the fuss might be a little unnecessary, though, because over the weekend, Elden Ring streamer Ainrun killed Erdtree’s last boss with a single hit.

There will be spoilers for Shadow of the Erdtree’s final boss ahead, considering—well, you saw the headline.

Before you get your hopes up about walking through that last fog gate and one-shotting the bo…

One weird demo out of the whole Steam Next Fest has charmed me, and for reasons I rarely get charmed by: It’s delightfully janky, strange, referential, and crude. Apocalypse Party is certainly chasing the roguelike action trend, but it’s so off-beat and willing to let you craft absurd combos to slaughter fantasy zombies and monsters that I ended up charmed instead of repulsed.

There’s not really a plot here. You’re some kind of interdimensional mercenary plucked by an angelic capybara from the brink of death to rescue a fantasy kingdom by defeating three demons. There’s no coherent aesthetic though. Weapons you find are as likely to be an assault rifle or machine gun as throwing knives or lightning spear or magic, returning throwing shield. Characters are like, a Hong Kong cop, a …

Remember Gundam Evolution, the free-to-play multiplayer shooter from Bandai Namco that launched with fanfare in September last year? Well stop remembering it. It’s going away forever on November 29, barely a year after it released, because it can apparently no longer “provide a service that satisfies [its] players”. Throw another body on the pile; they’re dropping like flies out here.

“We want to express our gratitude to everyone who has played the game and supported us to this point,” said executive producer Kazuya Maruyama in a news update on Steam, “At the same time, we would like to sincerely apologize to our fans and players.” Maruyama doesn’t go into why Gundam Evolution is getting switched off, but a quick glance at its SteamDB page suggests that it’s struggled to …

Six weeks after GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin was removed from Steam due to a letter from Nintendo claiming it “violates Nintendo’s intellectual property rights,” the emulator’s developers have issued a detailed response on the Dolphin blog. The response, with input from legal counsel, announces that the Dolphin team will not be re-attempting to launch the emulator on Steam. “We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam,” the post states. “Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it … given Nintendo’s long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve’s requirement for us to get approval from Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible.”

That announcement is just a brief portion of the pos…

Earlier this week, Palworld developer Pocketpair found itself in the crosshairs of a Nintendo patent lawsuit, making it the latest target in an infamous history of Nintendo legal action. Nintendo hasn’t yet clarified the specifics of its lawsuit claims, but analysts and legal experts have already been offering their takes on how strong its case might be.

Serkan Toto, CEO of Japanese game industry consultant Kantan Games, told GamesRadar that “Nintendo is going into this lawsuit thinking that they’re going to win. And I fear, looking at the track record, it’s highly likely that they win.” Having explored Nintendo’s litigation history, I don’t know if I’m qualified to speak to its odds—but I’m pretty confident it won’t be pulling any punches.

Writing in the US, it’s di…

27 inches, 170Hz refresh, a quality IPS panel and 1440p native resolution. What more do you need from a gaming monitor? In a word, nothing, especially when you can have all that for just $189.

Yup, the Acer Nitro XV272U has been given the Amazon Prime Day treatment and as someone who reviews these things for a living, I can tell you it’s an absolute steal. In fact, the only problem is that Nvidia has recently decided that 1440p GPUs start at $599 in the RTX 4070.

• We’re curating all the best Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.

The $399 RTX 4060 Ti is pitched as a 1080p GPU. And with just 8GB of VRAM running over a measly 128-bit bus, that’s pretty much correct. Luckily, you can currently grab an AMD …

Prepare yourselves for a 24-core laptop processor. Over at CES 2023, Intel has revealed its next-generation mobile chips based on the Raptor Lake architecture. Among them, its new high-performance 55W parts named the HX-series. 

The tippy top of the HX-series is the Core i9 13980HX, a 24-core, 5.6GHz mobile part that looks to be even more overkill than the last.

This Core i9 is basically ripped right out of a Raptor Lake desktop processor. It’s been resocketed with the laptop-friendly BGA socket (and a bloody massive footprint versus the slimmer U-series) yet otherwise the specs scream desktop-grade processor. It offers 24 cores in total, that’s eight Performance-cores (P-cores) and 16 Efficient-cores (E-cores), and puts it on a level-footing with the Core i9 1…

I rarely do this, but I’m just going to open up by saying that this article contains major spoilers for Hades 2’s early access. We’re talking (current) end-game stuff. It’s also genuinely the funniest thing I’ve seen out of a Supergiant game period.

As previously mentioned in the game’s FAQ, Hades 2 has about as much content as the first game does already—including a final boss fight with the titan of time himself, Chronos. See, he went ahead and punted the entire royal family of the underworld out of their house and home, hence why protagonist Melinoë has it out for him.

You, the player, might also develop a vendetta against him—not just because he’s hard (he is, I’ve already died to the blighter a couple of times)—but because of one …

In addition to Fortnite’s transition to its fifth chapter, Epic has revealed a collaboration with Lego to introduce a new Lego-themed survival crafting mode⁠ for the long-running battle royale—including minifig versions of many pre-existing skins⁠—coming December 7.

Details are sparse on what Lego Fortnite actually entails⁠—the Lego website describes it like a separate game, but my guess is that it will be covered by the Fortnite launcher. You can view the minifig versions of skins in-game already, but they are not usable in Fortnite’s battle royale mode. The Lego FAQ advises to expect more details with the game’s launch on December 7, and it describes Lego Fortnite as “the ultimate survival crafting adventure.”

The special Lego Fortnite s…

Stardew Valley’s 1.6 update is now live, releasing yesterday after Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone had enough time to wake up and make a cup of coffee—very funny, Barone. After waiting beside my PC all day for any signs of life, I immediately updated and jumped into 1.6 to start a brand new farm (and try to romance Sebastian all over again), and it looks like I wasn’t the only one. 

Stardew Valley broke a new record yesterday as it beat its own player count on Steam, reaching a whopping 146,159, meaning it’s currently the seventh most-played game wedged between Helldivers 2 and GTA 5. Previously, the record for player count in Stardew Valley was 94,879 back in January 2021, around the same time that patch 1.5.4 was released.  

This is not bad going for a game that…

Back in 2019, Magic: The Gathering Arena left beta testing at the same time as Throne of Eldraine launched, a set devoted to fairytales and Arthurian legends. (The trailer, featuring a gingerbread love story, is still one of the most memorable Magic trailers ever made.) Four years later, Wizards of the Coast is about to return to that setting with Wilds of Eldraine, which finds the land bereft of rulers and cursed to suffer under a magical slumber. It’s all a bit Grimm.

Fitting the theme, one of the main focuses of Wilds of Eldraine is enchantment, in both new and returning cards. One that’s returning is Parallel Lives from Innistrad, which doubles the number of tokens you get whenever an effect creates them. Since another theme of Wilds of Eldraine is cards that hand out food tok…