Month: September 2024

In Overwatch 2’s newest season, every hero shoots bigger bullets and it’s driving players mad as they watch clips of the most egregious examples.

It was hard to visualize just how much Blizzard had increased the size of weapon projectiles in Overwatch 2’s newest season until a bunch of people started firing at a Tracer bot in the game’s practice range. While some don’t seem to have changed much, others are so big now that you don’t have to aim even remotely close to the enemy’s character model to score a hit.

Heroes like Sojourn, Widowmaker, and Hanzo can shoot air and still hit headshots, which has some players jokingly (and sometimes not jokingly) claiming that aiming is optional.

As a regular Overwatch player since 2016, I can tell you that some heroes have always b…

Oblivion isn’t many people’s favourite Elder Scrolls game—that title usually goes to either its predecessor or successor—but it’s unquestionably the funniest. Yes, Morrowind had The Lusty Argonian Maid and Skyrim sent you to the Moon every time a giant took a swing at you, but Oblivion’s technology and acting combined in perfect alchemy to produce effortless comedy entirely without trying.

It’s so good, in fact, that clips of the game’s unintentional comic genius have gone viral on Twitter over the past few days, after a tweet from New Blood’s Dave Oshry called attention to an accidentally hilarious Vinesauce video (posted by another Twitter user, NotRollingTim) of the game’s Whodunit quest, in which the paranoid Neville absolutely annihilates Nels the Naughty with a b…

If you’ve ever thought to yourself that what the gently crackling quiet of Fallout: New Vegas really needs is the endless nattering of a credulous media personality, then I might have just the mod for you: The Joe Rogan Experience, in which the bafflingly popular presenter gives voice to eight sponsor messages and nine interviews with various high-profile characters.

Of course, it’s not actually Joe Rogan’s voice: The mod uses AI-powered voice synthesis to recreate Rogan in the game. The big giveaway is that it doesn’t really sound like him, particularly during the interview with Caesar in the first part of the trailer. Rogan has a distinctive voice, which I’ve grown passingly familiar with through UFC broadcasts and the occasional brief clip from his podcast that’s passed around …

Nacon has announced that Robocop: Rogue City, the future of law enforcement shooters, is its “best ever launch,” racking up more than 435,000 players and 2.7 million game sessions in its first two weeks of release.

“RoboCop: Rogue City has exceeded our expectations, and achieved a genuine feat as far as Nacon is concerned,” CEO Alan Falc said. “We are really proud to have been able to work with the studio Teyon on this game created by and for RoboCop die-hards. We would also like to thank MGM for the trust they placed in us throughout this collaboration, as well as all the players who have contributed to making this release such a great success.”

The PC version of Robocop: Rogue City holds a 75 aggregate score on Metacritic, which seems about right. We scored it 65% in our r…

I imagine all game developers get butterflies in their stomachs when they’re about to push their game live, but it’s not often a game previously given away for free suddenly starts asking for money. That was the deal indie studio Landfall made with players when it surprise-released Content Warning on April Fools’ day.

The Lethal Company-like horror game that challenges friends to record scary videos and go viral on SpöökTube would be free to claim for its first 24 hours, after which Landfall would start charging $8. Over six million copies of Content Warning were claimed during the free period, a response that Landfall CEO Wilhelm Nylund tells PC Gamer was “completely unlike anything” they’ve experienced.

Landfall has created its own holiday around making gag games…

When it comes to gaming mice, sometimes all you really need is something that’s fast, lightweight, and reliable. Sure, ultra-fast optical sensors and sky-high polling rates are nice to have but they really bump up the price and can seriously eat into the battery life.

That’s why the Logitech G305 Lightspeed is the best budget wireless mouse you can buy. And thanks to the Prime Day sales event, it’s even budget-ier, with a decent amount of dollars hacked off the price tag.

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

Although to be fair to other retailers, Amazon’s low price is exclusive to Prime members only, and the white and mint colored versions are $29.99—the same price that Ne…

Starfield‘s fast travel and loading screen-heavy approach to space exploration has become something of a thorny subject—PC Gamer’s own Morgan Park felt the sting of the game’s boundaries recently, with some players upset they’re getting something closer to Mass Effect than No Man’s Sky.

Pre-release, Todd Howard spoke with IGN about Bethesda’s decision to keep surface and space separate, explaining that “the on-surface is one reality, and then when you’re in space it’s another reality.” When it comes to zipping around in-game, unless you’re grav-jumping your ship isn’t fast enough to get much of anywhere. It’s mainly there for ship-to-ship interaction, dogfighting, and getting prank called.

Undeterred, games writer and streamer Alanah Pearce…

Nvidia’s 40-series graphics cards are beginning to make their way into decently-priced pre-built gaming PCs. By that I mean you can pick up this smartly spec’d RTX 4080 gaming PC for $2,550, which is still a lot of money, but is notably a lot less than the $3,000+ early-bird machines we were seeing all too much of at launch.

A high-end PC in 2023 is a big investment—if you want top performance you have to be prepared to pay for it. Luckily, there are some clever ways to shave some cash off the grand total for a pre-built machine without sacrificing performance. That’s what I like about this ABS Stratos PC over at Newegg, it’s not needlessly overkill.

Take the CPU, for example. This machine comes with AMD’s excellent Ryzen 7 7700X, an eight-core/16-thread CPU w…

Start your week with a Wordle win. Keep on scrolling and you’ll soon find everything from general advice you can use every day to a helpful clue written just for today’s Wordle. If you want more, the answer to the February 19 (975) game is here if you need it, too.

The dreaded “one missing letter in a row after row of greens” reared its head again today and snatched my chances of securing an early win. Thankfully, this happened early enough that I was able to guess my way to today’s Wordle answer, I just wish I’d found it a few rows up the board. Hopefully tomorrow’s game will be less stressful.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, February 19

The answer today refers to the cost of something, usually how much money you’d expected…

With more than a little braggadocio, Valve has announced that it’s permanently banned over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts for cheating. In a post to the official Dota 2 blog yesterday, the company revealed that it had constructed a cunning trap to catch thousands of players that were using “third-party software” to “access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn’t visible during normal gameplay,” lending them an unfair advantage in-game.

It worked like this: Once it became aware of the exploit, Valve released a patch that created “a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits”. Valve says that every single one of the accounts banned yesterday had read from that secret data, giving the com…

YouTube Music contractors were informed mid-speech, during a publicly-recorded and broadcast meeting with the City Council of Austin, Texas that they’d just lost their jobs. 

“To be supported by the city of Austin, and also our allies in the labour community—[it] gives us the motivation to keep this fight going,” says Jack Benedict as he speaks to the council—though he trails off as he turns to his co-worker Katie Marie Marschner, approaching the podium. Composing herself, Marschner then says: “Not to interrupt but they just laid us all off.”

“As I was sat behind him, filming him, I got a text message from my co-worker letting them know that they had all just been laid off in our weekly team meeting,” says Marschner in a later video posted to the union’s Twi…

Ever wondered what it would be like to run around the maps of Armored Core 6 with your Elden Ring character? If not, why the heck not? I’m sure this modder who imported the AC6 maps into Elden Ring surely can’t be the only one interested in exploring them, sword drawn, and ready to fight mechs with magic.

Having posted the flythrough video on their YouTube account, there’s been quite a positive response to Dropoff’s idea to waltz around the Armored Core 6  maps with their Elden Ring character. Not least as it puts the maps into a human perspective, and manages to vindicate Redditors’ praise for the AC6 graphics.

You don’t usually get a chance to appreciate the detail when you’re speeding around in your mech going pew-pew.

Recently we wrote about Armored Core 6’s b…

Baldur’s Gate 3‘s next major patch is on its way—scheduled to release this week, according to Larian Studios’ director of publishing, Michael Douse. Announced in a Twitter post yesterday, Douse reassures players: “we caught the nasty bug causing slowdowns and the good news is: it’s fixed in Patch 5!”

For context, Patch 4 tackled a few things, adding colourblind filters, fixing storyline hiccups, and tweaking kiss scenes, leading to some adorable head-bumps with Karlach while leaving poor Astarion lovers feeling like they were about to be broken up with whenever they went in for a smooch. 

It also introduced a game-breaking bug that caused some massive slowdowns in Act 3, as highlighted in this thread from the game’s subreddit. “Companions do…

As we noted in our preview of Shadow of the Erdtree last week, the expansion’s new map is notably different from the Lands Between, which we explored in Elden Ring. It’s smaller, yes, but also denser with enemies, activities, and notable locations, and not quite so simple to navigate. You’ll find more cliffs, valleys, and bridges blocking off new areas you may have first thought you’d be able to gallop to. 

FromSoftware boss Hidetaka Miyazaki said that the team planned for this expansion to be big from the start, because they wanted players “to experience that sense of discovery, and that sense of wonder and exploration again,” and they needed a large scale map “to uphold and bolster that.”

But how did the more intricate design of the new world map come about? When we s…

We’ve all had that experience in XCOM where you’re so determined to get yourself out of an impossible situation that you just keep reloading your save and trying different approaches as your soldiers die over and over. Now imagine that instead of that just being an embarrassing memory, it’s the basis for a whole new approach to the genre. 

In Every Day We Fight, just shown off at the PC Gaming Show 2024, you take charge of a group of civilians caught in an alien invasion Groundhog Day. Thanks to some strange sci-fi tech tech, every time your untrained fighters die, they wake up back at the start of the day, ready to go again.

Battles are turn-based, but you’ll also be exploring in real time, and the time loop structure gives it a roguelike flavour. As you make your way …

You can spend a long time trying to nail down the exact parts required for a full custom loop build. In a way, that’s a part of it. You really come to appreciate the PC you’ve built by the end of the process, as it’s one you’ve created from the ground up. 

But if you’re less sentimental, you might just want someone else to put together a parts list for you. EZ PZ. That’s what EK does with its ‘Loop’ builds, and right now everything on its store is 24% off, which makes such a build that little bit more affordable.

Alright, affordable these builds ain’t, but every little helps when investing in something as expensive as a fully liquid-looped build. You’re looking at spending anything from $1,284 for the cheapest all-inclusive kit to around $2,628 for the so-called “Golden…