With a screenplay written by Simon Rich, and Challengers' Luca Guadagnino in talks to direct, filming for 'Artificial' could begin imminently (via The Hollywood Reporter). Though Guadagnino has yet to sign on the dotted line, the production is considering shooting across both San Francisco and Italy later this Summer.

Still, that leaves at least one big question unanswered: Namely, who will play Altman himself? While this has also yet to be confirmed, an assembly of actors including Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, and Yura Borisov are discussing various casting opportunities in the meantime.

For those unfamiliar with the big tech farce Artificial hopes to adapt, let me give you the whistlestop tour: In November of 2023, Sam Altman was ousted as the CEO of the company he co-founded, with a statement at the time saying, "The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI." Mira Murati replaced Altman, leading the company as an interim CEO until a more permanent replacement could be chosen, though this was short-lived.

Not even a week later Altman's return was secured following both internal and external pressure from Microsoft, a major investor in the AI firm. The board members that ousted Altman departed the company soon after. Altman himself was not forthcoming about the reasons behind his firing, though an investigation by Reuters cites AI safety concerns as one reason. It will be interesting to see how Artificial dramatises this, to say nothing else.

Though I'm the last person that could be described as a 'fan' of OpenAI, I'm nonetheless intrigued by Artificial—especially if Guadagnino does sign on to direct. Challengers was arguably the best movie I saw in 2024, offering an intense blend of tennis, techno, and, uhm, trysts, that I've been really annoying about in conversations with my fellow film buffs for the last six months.

When Diamond announced it would cease shipments during the Covid-19 pandemic in March of 2020, DC took it as an opportunity to jump ship, switching to Lunar Distribution and UCS Comic Distributors for its monthly releases and Penguin Random House for book-sized releases. One by one other publishers followed, including Marvel, until Diamond declared bankruptcy in January of 2025.

Udon was one of the last publishers to remain with Diamond (alongside Dynamite, which would rather like to retrieve half a million dollars it claims Diamond owes), but now Udon has declared it's found an alternative as well. Udon has halted all shipments to Diamond in favor of Lunar Distribution, with its Manga Classics imprint now being distributed by Simon & Schuster.

"With the current state of uncertainty and lack of communication from the new owners to both retailers as well as many publishers, we have to do what is best to serve our customers," Udon chief of operations Erik Ko said. "We realize this is a deep inconvenience for many retailers, but we're trying to do our best to serve our partners and fans, while minimizing risk and moving forward in an uncertain time."

This has affected the first issue of Udon's new series Mega Man Timelines, which has been pushed back a month to a June 25 release. Udon's future comics, manga, and art books will be distributed though Lunar, which presumably includes any more of the Capcom-licensed books it's famous for—like Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, and Final Fight—as well as its books based on games like Elden Ring and Persona.

A great start gave me just the confidence boost I needed to be brave today, and the guesses I made because of my good mood soon led me towards today's answer. I'm in no danger of setting a new record time, but I enjoyed working my way through that one. Make sure you use today's hint if you need to give yourself a lift.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, June 5

This is a fact, something already known. This could be information used to draw conclusions from, or to calculate something.

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is not a double letter in today's puzzle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you're new to the daily Wordle puzzle or you just want a refresher after taking a break, I'll share some quick tips to help you win. There's nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day.

• A mix of unique consonants and vowels makes for a solid opening word.
• A tactical second guess should let you narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• There may be a repeat letter in the answer.

You're not up against a timer, so you've got all the time in the world—well, until midnight—to find the winning word. If you're stuck, there's no shame in coming back to the puzzle later in the day and finishing it up when you've cleared your head.

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Another Wordle sorted. The answer to the June 5 (1447) Wordle is DATUM.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Keeping track of the last handful of Wordle answers can help to eliminate current possibilities. It's also handy for inspiring opening words or subsequent guesses if you're short on ideas for the day.

Here are the last 10 Wordle answers:

• June 4: CEASE
• June 3: ADMIN
• June 2: PREEN
• June 1: ROUGH
• May 31: HABIT
• May 30: IDIOM
• May 29: QUASH
• May 28: POLAR
• May 27: SPORT
• May 26: DRONE

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes every day and the aim is to figure out the correct five-letter word by entering guesses and eliminating or confirming individual letters.

Getting off to a good start with a strong word like ARISE—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good tactic. Once you hit Enter, the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.

With the announcement, Square Enix has published statements from the remaster's development leads, and the internet has responded in particular to comments from Yasumi Matsuno, writer and director of the 1997 original.

Matsuno outlined the economic and political context within which he wrote the Final Fantasy Tactics story—a Japan in which "many were robbed of hope" amid economic stagnation—and noted that "inequality and division are still deeply rooted in our society" today.

Here's Matsuno's full statement, which was posted to X:

Nearly 30 years ago, the collapse of Japan's bubble economy engulfed the nation's financial institutions in mountains of bad debt, triggering a wave of corporate bankruptcies, a sudden and extreme rise in unemployment rates, and stagnation of Japanese society as a whole. It was an era when many were robbed of hope, when dreams were measured by their price tag.

Against this historical backdrop, I crafted a story. It was the story of Ramza, a young man who fought tirelessly against the entrenched social class system. It was the story of Delita, who sought to take advantage of this confusion and despair to advance his own social position. It was a story of a peculiar destiny, in which friendship and betrayal intertwine.

And now, in 2025—a time when inequality and division are still deeply rooted in our society—I offer this story once again.

The will to resist is in your hands.

The Final Fantasy Tactics remaster is officially called Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. It'll be out September 30, and will include two versions of the game.

The "classic" version "stays true to the original in almost every aspect, but includes some handy features such as auto save," says Square Enix. Alternatively, the "enhanced" version adds voiced dialogue, an updated UI, and other new features and changes.

There is, unfortunately, no way to turn off the backdrop of inequality and division that shaped either version.

I almost didn't recognize Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement as a Bloodstained game, partly because it's been six whole years since the last one and partly because the aesthetic is all over the place. The past six years have also been full of Castlevania-likes that feature a lot of the same gothic imagery and it feels like every five minutes a new soulslike with evil knights and dragons shows up. But when the title finally appeared, it was clear that the OG, Koji Igarashi, was back with a new game.

I'm not entirely convinced on the look yet, however. The original Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night mixed visual styles too: there are 2D treasure chests plopped into 3D hallways as if they've been painted onto the scene. Damage numbers and items are the same way, but all the monsters and NPCs are rendered in full 3D. It's a weird style that doesn't really commit to a fully retro look or a fully modern look and instead sits uncomfortably somewhere in between.

The new game is going for a similar style, but leans even harder into having fully 3D models, except now they all have cel-shading—even the treasure chests. It looks slightly more cohesive until the moment a cutscene plays and it feels like you've been transported to 2010. Outside of the 2.5D levels, the character models are weirdly soft and lack details in a way that would fit right in with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It's not even ugly, it's just jarring compared to the rest of the game.

It certainly sticks out though, which I guess is expected for a game that is a prequel to the Bloodstained we got in 2019. I kind of admire not going for a full-on reboot and sticking to the style that was already established. I just think games like Blasphemous and even Hollow Knight feel more coherent and tied to the Castlevania lineage.

Maybe none of that will matter while you're busy playing with The Scarlet Engagement's dual protagonists. You won't pick one of the two characters at the beginning of the game or anything; you play as both of them at the same time. According to the PlayStation Blog, you will have direct control over either Leonard or Alexander and the other one will hop in to assist. The idea of having even more options for combat by figuring out how to combo attacks with both of them admittedly sounds pretty fun. If it is, I'll forgive it for whatever is going on with those cutscenes.

The Steam page is already up, but we won't be able to see how it all comes together until 2026.

"We should make Road 96 but with boats! Boat 96!" joked the developers at Digixart when planning their follow up to their excellent procedural road trip, Road 96. And their next game does indeed have a lot of boats—but it's also a pretty big departure from their previous game.

Instead of NPCs changing your adventure, this time other players will: in Tides of Tomorrow, you enter an asynchronous multiplayer world where the actions of another player can have an impact on your own story, and your actions may affect them, too.

In the post-apocalyptic waterworld of Tides of Tomorrow, you travel from island to island in the wake of other players. If a character you meet treats you with hostility, it might be because the last player they met did something awful to them, like steal something or shove them into the water. As a result, they won't be too happy to see you.

As you can see in the trailer above, revealed at Sony's State of Play today, other players can also help you out: in one scene, an earlier player thoughtfully left a knife for you in a room where you may wind up fighting for your life. Thanks, stranger!

In the PlayStation Blog, Adrien Poncet explains a bit more about how it works.

"When starting a game of Tides of Tomorrow, you must select a player to 'follow'. This player has played the game before you and can be a total stranger, someone from your friend list, or even a famous streamer," they say.

"Thanks to our 'asynchronous vision' system, you’ll see echoes of this player’s choices and actions, in the form of 'ghosts'. These visions help you avoid traps, solve puzzles, investigate what happened before, or simply adapt based on the other player’s actions."

If you discover you've been following some jerk around and everyone you meet is completely pissed at you for the things they've done, don't worry: you can start following someone else instead.

"There are lots of reasons to follow one player over another. Maybe you like their playstyle, want to discover their choices, or to benefit from the resources they left behind," Poncet says.

And don't forget, as you follow someone through the world, someone else is following you. So be nice. Or, don't! It's your choice. Tides of Tomorrow (Steam) launches in February 24, 2026.

I've been waiting more than 10 years since the botched Thief reboot for a new game in the series, and now that it's happening all I can think about is the old "careful what you wish for" adage. Because coming later in 2025 is Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow.

Thief VR is a "reimagined" take on the once-great stealth series, taking players back to the City, "a place of shadows, ruled by the tyrant Lord Ulysses Northcrest."

"You are Magpie, a cunning thief orphaned by Northcrest’s brutality and shaped by the streets, who steals as the only means to survive," the YouTube listing states. "That is until you uncover something greater: a legendary artifact holding a legacy from the past."

For those not familiar with the series, that artifact—assuming the trailer isn't a big ol' misdirect, and spoilers ahead for a 27-year-old videogame, by the way—is the artificial eye constructed by the Hammerites for Garrett, the hero of the first three Thief games. And Garrett himself seems to somehow be contained within, although that voice at the very end—"I thought I was dead"—doesn't sound exactly like him. More like a pretty good imitation.

In any event, here's what's on the table:

• Steal with precision - Pickpocket guards, pry open hidden compartments, and bypass locks with tactile VR interactions.
• Master the Shadows - Stick to the darkness, evade patrols, and outmaneuver enemies with real-time stealth mechanics.
• Precision and Skill - Master tools like the bow, blackjack, and water arrows with realistic haptic feedback
• Unravel a conspiracy in a city where shadows speak louder than words

All of that does sound like a Thief game, and it has the right look, if you count Deadly Shadows among them, which I sometimes do and sometimes do not depending on my mood. There's a decent chance that it could turn out to be a very solid VR experience. And as devoted as I am to Stephen Russell, if the Thief series is going to carry on, it probably is time for a new lead—or at least to start making moves in that direction.

None of which un-sours my mood. Superficial Thief trappings aside, the fact that this is trapped behind VR makes it essentially a non-entity. Which I don't mean as a slight toVR fans, but simply a reflection of the fact that VR exclusivity limits the potential market size to the point where it's almost irrelevant. It is, quite frankly, a space for spinoffs and throwaways, and maybe I'm being stubborn or cranky (or both, I am old, after all) but it genuinely rubs me the wrong way to see Thief, after such a long absence, end up in that pile.

Gloomwood creator Dillon Rogers may not feel quite so strongly about it, but he definitely has feelings.

(In my defense, I am at least consistent on this front: I was also pissed off when Ubisoft announced a new Splinter Cell game that turned out to be a VR thing back in 2020.)

Thief VR is being developed by Vertigo Games, whose previous releases include Metro Awakening and Arizona Sunshine, both of which are reasonably well regarded amongst the VR community, so that's a point in its favor too if you're into that sort of thing. It's set to arrive this year and is up for wishlisting now on Steam, Meta Quest, and PlayStation VR2.

Silent Hill f, which made quite an impression with a long-awaited reveal trailer back in March, dropped an even more disturbing trailer at today's State of Play showcase to reveal its release date of September 25.

The date was initially only confirmed for the PS5 version of the game, and Steam and the Epic Games Store still have it listed as merely "coming soon." But the trailer eventually popped up on the official Silent Hill YouTube channel with an across-the-board confirmation of the date.

The new trailer also feels like an escalation, for lack of a better term. The reveal trailer in March was grim and creepy, but today's video is a lot more... well, whatever the hell this is.

Or this.

Or, sure, this.

Anyway, you get the idea—it's pretty gristly out there. Not to be missed! And now you know when you'll get to dive in. Silent Hill f will be available for PC on Steam, Epic, and the Microsoft Store.

Here he is: Young Bond.

Not to be confused with James Bond Jr., the Bond starring in Hitman developer IO Interactive's 007 First Light is "a young, resourceful, and sometimes reckless new recruit" who ended up in the royal navy after "a grand tour of every major boarding school in Britain." Wouldn't you know it—Bond's a bit of a rebel, "a bullet without a target," and MI6 is ready to aim him at something.

While today's reveal is mostly cutscenes, with just a few quick snippets of shooting and melee combat, I'm pretty sure that means we're going to be killing a whole lotta dudes.

Based on a line in the trailer, it sounds like the villain of 007 First Light will be a rogue agent, 009, "a master manipulator."

IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak said that "you'll experience James Bond as a young air crewman in the royal navy, before the tuxedos and the martinis, as he first steps into the world of espionage striving to earn his 00 status."

Apparently this version of Bond is 26 years old, and I have to say he's got an unfortunate case of iPhone face going on. 007 First Light isn't a period piece—it very much seems set in the modern day—but after decades of watching Bond films, I'm not sure I'm ready to be confronted with one who looks like he vapes or has opinions about Ethereum. With a 2026 release date and a contemporary setting, we're extrapolating that Bond was born in the year 2000, which makes my bones feel very brittle indeed.

The official press release includes a few more details, though it's all about what you'd expect.

First Light is "a third-person action-adventure game that blends IO Interactive’s signature stealth and action gameplay mechanics with the world of Bond and MI6" and will let players "choose how to utilize Bond’s unique set of skills in combat, relationships, as well as the latest in Q's technological gadgetry in his ascent to becoming 007."

But who's the smirky boy playing young Bond? IO Interactive hasn't said, but fans have suggested it may be Patrick Gibson, who starred as young Dexter in Dexter: Original Sin and certainly looks the part.

We'll see more of 007 First Light soon: IO Interactive is planning a gameplay reveal this summer.

It's almost hard to make out what's even happening in the trailer for Romeo is a Dead Man, a new action game from Suda 51's studio Grasshopper Manufacture, with all the gore covering the screen. The main guy's head explodes 20 seconds into the trailer and then he's turns into a cyborg who tears apart monsters in a shopping mall.

Yep, it's definitely another bizarre game from the developers behind No More Heroes and Lollipop Chainsaw.

Every clip of gameplay is bursting with bloody particle effects and absurd weaponry, like laser claws and a chainsaw sword. One weapon freezes an enemy solid and then breaks it apart into chunks. This is the kind of over-the-top gore games in the Xbox 360 era were sold on. The urban environments also give off a ton of Dead Rising vibes.

Romeo is a Dead Man also seems to be mixing in some anime and 16-bit videogame references, too—if it wasn't clear enough it's a Grasshopper game.

There's no sense of what's actually going on in the story other than the fact that Romeo is a cop who is turned into a killing machine and seems to be trying to save the world one explosive headshot at a time.

The trailer was shown at Sony's State of Play so there's no PC confirmation yet. Grasshopper games tend to launch on everything, though, so I doubt we'll be left out when it drops sometime in 2026.

In a post on the PlayStation Blog, Square Enix detailed the classic and enhanced versions of Final Fantasy Tactics arriving in The Ivalice Chronicles. Classic isn't a straight port of any older versions, but "stays true to the original in almost every aspect." It both looks and plays like the 1997 RPG, but instead uses the War of the Lions translation from its updated PSP era.

Enhanced adds an updated UI, fully voiced dialogue, graphical improvements, and "a number of other quality of life features." I'm eager to see what those mystery tweaks include, and the added Squire difficulty aimed at new players has me hopeful it'll deliver a version of Tactics that doesn't seem so impenetrable.

Final Fantasy Tactics made its Western debut in 1998, and is responsible for a whole generation of grid-obsessed RPG players still yapping about Yasumi Matsuno's passionate war drama and the world of Ivalice—myself included.

We've seen rumor after rumor spin up over the years, though more recent teases from folks like Final Fantasy 14's Naoki Yoshida and a retweet from Matsuno pointed all signs to yes, it's for real this time.

The new take on Final Fantasy Tactics will release September 30 on Steam.

If you're only familiar with FromSoft soulslike fare, Nioh adds a fair amount of complexity through weapon stances, randomized Diablo-esque loot, and specialization skill trees. In Nioh 3, there'll be yet another layer in the mix, as Tokugawa will be able to shift between samurai and ninja combat styles.

As the figure who closed Japan's Warring States period by consolidating power under his declared shogunate, Tokugawa—declaring himself with his original given name, Takechiyo, at the end of the trailer—is an interesting protagonist choice for the Nioh threequel. If you saw his fictionalized analogue, Toranaga, in FX's Shogun, you'll know that Tokugawa is often portrayed as a ruthless strategist, whose schemes often skew underhanded, if not outright treacherous.

By offering a ninja combat style, which unsurprisingly seems to focus more on sneaking and assassination-style strikes than toe-to-toe combat, Nioh 3 seems like it's acknowledging that Tokugawa's ascension as shogun wasn't exactly above board. You know how it is with conquering warlords.

Nioh's been pretty willing to do some creative storytelling with Japanese history in the past—splitting another Japanese unifier, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, into a pair of dual protagonists, for example—so I'm interested to see how Nioh 3 will extend Tokugawa's characterization beyond game mechanics.

Hopefully they won't make me wait until the end of the game to see his tanuki guardian spirit again, though. Little guy's adorable.

Nioh 3 will also be the first game in the series to get a PC release on day one, alongside the PS5 version. The release date is slated for "early 2026".

If you've played Tetris Effect but haven't experienced a Lumines, you've already had a strong primer for Lumines Arise. Expect falling blocks, surreal stage visuals, and an aetherial, accelerating, electronic soundtrack that'll sink you into a hypnotic mind-state where there's only you, blocks, and a ton of particle effects.

As the Steam page describes it, Lumines Arise will feature "over 30 stages of synesthetic sensory wonderlands, everything from lush jungles to buzzing Tokyo streets to more surreal experiences," including "the endless expanse of outer space."

There's also a new "Burst" mechanic, which appears to function a lot like Tetris Effect's "Zone" state. While clearing blocks, you'll build up a meter that you can spend to temporarily prevent a square from clearing, letting you build it as large as possible before the timer ends.

You can also make a customizable Lumines avatar from a variety of unlockable head shapes. I'm fond of the "egg floating in smiling square" option, myself.

Lumines Arise launches some time in 2025.

Five years ago, Capcom showed off what was at the time one of the very first "next-gen" games for the PlayStation 5: Pragmata, an action game seemingly starring an astronaut and a little girl. Three years ago, it not only wasn't out yet, but was apparently so far from complete that Capcom felt compelled to release another trailer to indicate it'd been delayed indefinitely.

Well, props to Capcom for sticking with it. Whatever went off track with Pragmata's development, it seems like it may now be sorted out. A trailer at today's State of Play declared Pragmata will be out in 2026 with a note at the end: "It's real xD."

Though the new trailer debuted during a PlayStation event, as expected from Capcom it's also confirmed for Steam. The developer calls it a "science fiction action adventure with its own unique hacking twist," which we see a bit of in the trailer. The little girl Diana, who's an android, rides on astronaut Hugh's shoulder and can hack robots in combat.

We still don't know much about Pragmata considering how long it's been in development, but presumably that'll change now that it has a firm(?) release date.

We love a medieval sandbox at PC Gamer: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 recently took home a 90% in our review, and we've been fans of the Mount & Blade games for ages. So, guessing that this unnamed game could be revealed during the Summer Game Fest livestream this Friday, I started looking into the company.

There's good news and bad news, depending on your feelings about generative AI.

With a bit of LinkedIn digging, I discovered some notable designers attached to this medieval RPG, including Andrzej Zawadzki, a lead designer on Cyberpunk 2077, Daniel Janitzek, senior combat designer for Lords of the Fallen 2, and Kristian Jespersen, who worked on the Hitman series at IO Interactive. The company's statement that it is "fully committed to delivering top-tier mod support" is promising, too.

My armchair investigation changed course when I noticed that one of Raw Power's founders is Rune Christensen, who co-founded crypto outfit MakerDAO and describes himself as "working in blockchain, AI and gaming."

I don't see any evidence that Raw Power's medieval RPG is a blockchain endeavor, but the studio is definitely a fan of that other controversial tech trend, generative AI.

In a 2022 profile of the studio, Raw Power CTO Caspar Strandbygaard told Danish paper Ingeniøren that the company was just "testing the waters" of AI-driven game development with its first game (the medieval sandbox RPG I expect to be announced at Summer Game Fest), but that it has much bigger plans for the technology.

At the time, Raw Power was using Midjourney AI to produce muddled concept images, but Strandbygaard predicted that within 10 years the studio's task would be "almost to make tools that will generate the game" rather than making the game itself.

"The gaming industry should be cutting-edge and a front-runner in [AI], but we haven't seen that in very many games," said Raw Power COO Jakob Rasmussen in the same 2022 profile. "We are not saying that we will necessarily use AI at the core of how we develop, but it is at the core of our vision. When the technology is ready—and perhaps a little sooner—we'll be willing to stick our necks out and put it into our game."

Today, the Raw Power website mentions AI in connection with Raw Power Tools, a "sister company" working to "bring the power of AI into the hands of game creators."

The studio also said in that 2022 interview that it planned to release its first game, which it described then as a singleplayer and multiplayer medieval RPG, in three years—which would be this year. Things may have changed, and I've asked the company if its comments back then reflect its current plans and focus and will update this article if I hear back.

Since the studio is a Summer Game Fest sponsor, it's pretty safe to assume we'll learn more this week. In a Facebook post in January, Raw Power said, "2025 is our year. We're building something big."

"The honest reason I don't have microtransactions/season pass/ads/100 DLCs/etc in Balatro isn't just about the ethics of those practices but because when I play other games that have those things it makes me want to put my computer in the dishwasher and set it to pots and pans," Balatro creator LocalThunk explained very vividly on Bluesky (via GamesRadar).

"Like I get why people add those things but you're shooting your UX in the foot if players are having their first impression and also being bombarded with a bunch of nonsense that isn't actually the game."

He's not wrong, and while you could argue that selling five million copies in a year makes it a little easier to reach the moral high ground, the fact is that Balatro was built this way from the start: You pay your dime, you get your game. It's certainly possible to incorporate MTX into games without overwhelming the UI or otherwise diminishing the experience, but the drive to monetize is so relentless that it rarely works out that way.

"There's like a 95% chance that if the game is FTP then the main menu UI is more complicated than the actual game UI," LocalThunk added in a reply post.

Separate from all this, LocalThunk also shared a bit of "pointless Balatro lore": A bus stop sign outside his apartment in his hometown of Regina, Saskatchewan, where he was living when he began work on Balatro, inspired the art for the "Ride the Bus" joker.

"Every time I see that joker it reminds me of my old apartment," LocalThunk wrote.

Regina was briefly known as "the city that rhymes with fun," but it quickly became apparent that any connection to "fun" was entirely unintentional. Despite that, LocalThunk remains a fan: "I love it there."

While the release date was known, having been announced in April (although there was apparently a bit of a mixup there—the Nintendo Switch 2 edition trailer that initially nailed down the date pegs it at June 5, but somewhere along the line it became June 4), but the actual launch was a very quiet affair. There's not even a notification on Steam—in fact, right now the page still lists chapters 3 and 4 as "coming soon." But there's no mistaking the enthusiasm of fans in the Deltarune subreddit.

Comment from r/Deltarune

And yes, the Steam charts: Deltarune currently holds three spots in Steam's top-ten best-selling list, an impressive accomplishment by any measure.

Well, it's been a long time coming. The first chapter of Deltarune debuted in 2018, and the second in 2021, and both were free. Creator Toby Fox said the subsequent chapters 3, 4, and 5 would not be free, however, but apparently Fox was in no great hurry to take anyone's money because they then proceeded to horse around for four years, occasionally reassuring the world at large that progress was being made but never actually delivering on that progress—until now.

Fox alluded to that long wait in a series of cryptic posts on Bluesky ahead of today's big update.

HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN. DAYS THAT FELT LIKE YEARS. YEARS THAT FELT LIKE DAYS. AND YET, NO MATTER HOW MUCH TIME PASSES, IT STILL TREMBLES. OUR BEAUTIFUL CONNECTION. I CAN FEEL IT QUICKENING NOW. HOW LUCKY WE ARE TO NEED EACH OTHER IN THIS WAY. SO THEN. WILL YOU PARTAKE ONCE MORE?"

So with chapters 3 and 4 now out the door, Deltarune now goes for $25/£21/|€24 on Steam—but you can still get the first two chapters for free, now in the form of the Deltarune demo.

One of the hot topics we hit were the nerfs incoming to multiple Prismatic subclasses in the version of the game I played. Specifically: Consecration, Stylish Executioner, Knockout and Feed the Void had all dropped to one Fragment slot, having previously had two or three. The result being that their buildcraft flexibility and base power would be brought down, with the argument being that those Aspects are so strong as to almost be auto-includes.

Suffice to say that when my interview made it to Reddit yesterday, despite Tyson's thoughtful answers about needing to avoid players feeling trapped into picking particular options, the community was, putting it politely, concerned. However, in one of the fastest turnarounds from outrage to official response, the Destiny 2 Team account took to r/DestinyTheGame today to announce that those nerfs would now either no longer be happening or have been watered down:

"This tuning pass reduced the number of Fragments that could be placed on various Aspects, as we've found the Prismatic subclasses have been a bit hot since release," the spokesperson wrote, understating the power of Prismatic admirably. "Certain Prismatic builds have increased damage output and survivability to a point where some challenges can feel trivial, and bringing everything else up to Prismatic's level wouldn't help to solve this issue in a healthy manner."

"While we're still planning an overall tuning pass for Prismatic for a future date, featuring buffs alongside other changes, we'll be changing our approach for The Edge of Fate a bit in response to your feedback. Aspects that were originally planned to be reduced to 1 fragment slot will remain at 2. We feel this is a good middle ground where some of the more potent Aspects are being tuned down, but not too much."

I really do think that's the right decision. Consecration and Feed the Void are so good that I don't think dropping them to one Fragment would have had the desired effect anyway, but—as I said in the interview—it would make those builds feel anemic in terms of player creatvity. So, panic over? Not quite. While the nerfs to the four aspects I listed have been watered down, Bungie's post also included some other Aspects which are being brought down in the balance pass.

Here's the complete list (which is still subject to change based on playtesting):

Titan

• Consecration 3 -> 2 (reverted from 1)
• Knockout remains at 2 (reverted from 1)

Hunter

• Stylish Executioner remains at 2 (reverted from 1)
• Ascension 3 -> 2
• Winter’s Shroud 3 -> 2

Warlock

• Feed the Void remains at 2 (reverted from 1)
• Hellion 3 -> 2
• Bleak Watcher 3 -> 2

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, people are still grumbling about why Bungie can't just buff all the lesser-used subclass Aspects, completely ignoring the concept of power creep, and the fact that the entire Prismatic class has been absolutely white hot in terms of power since it launched as one of the main selling points of last year's The Final Shape expansion.

That problem is not going to go away without a substantial subclass rework, but I stand by the idea that simply shaving off multiple Fragments from the most used Aspects was way too blunt of a solution. So, you're welcome, I guess?

The Witcher 4 will release in a very different world from The Witcher 3, and there are several high-profile examples of studios that don't seem to have kept pace with the times. Bioware's Dragon Age: Veilguard, for example, was a perfectly decent RPG, but the visuals aside it was almost like a game you could've been playing in 2015. But then there are those games that do feel like they're pushing the RPG forward, like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and perhaps most prominently Baldur's Gate 3. So where is CDPR and The Witcher 4 going to find itself?

"Bioware has changed for sure, but the industry has changed too," says CDPR co-CEO Adam Badowski. "We have a different strategy for our company. We definitely would like to continue keeping and truly understanding our core rules, how we develop our games, and of course, on top of that, we need to find new things, especially in gameplay, because there's not such a great progress when it comes to good stories.

"So here we feel very strongly at the same time, so many great things happened in gameplay [since The Witcher 3]. What are players' expectations here? And there are great games, great mechanics and plus UI [improvements]. So this is the idea for our development, and we are focusing on that, but at the same time we strongly believe in the core of what we are doing here."

Badowski goes on to say that he thinks one of CDPR's strengths is that, while The Witcher and Cyberpunk are very different worlds, at their heart are some pretty similar goals.

"So even if we have multiple games, it doesn't mean that we are focusing on one big thing, because our games are similar when it comes to the core aspects," says Badowski. "Of course, Cyberpunk is different from the Witcher, but different enough to feel that it's something maybe more for me, less for you. But I think the core, the pillars, how we make games stay the same and we continue. Maybe that's the difference, the difference between our strategy and Bioware's strategy these days."

To get down to brass tacks, then, what does CDPR see when it's looking at the likes of KCD2 and BG3?

"I love Kingdom Come because of the realism and the feeling, the sense of humor," says Badowski. Would he even say it's a little Witcher-y?

"Thank you," laughs Badowski, before going on to explain how some of the more simulation-y and systems-heavy aspects of KCD2 are the things CDPR watches with interest, because this is partly The Witcher 4's direction of travel.

"The Kingdom Come kind of simulation, it's great," says Badowski. "There's so many options, you can change the world, it's super great. And we would like to keep that, we'd like to follow this trend as well. So these are our next steps for sure, and it's kind of a similar challenge to what we have in The Witcher 3 because of the open world and storytelling here, freedom of choices. But at the same time, we would like to build very fleshy, very well-motivated characters. So it's kind of in contradiction from time-to-time. That's a great design challenge."

With Larian the influence is less direct. "In Larian's case it's turn-based so it's a different kind of game, and the way you interact with characters is totally different," says Bakowski. "We like to fully build the characters, understand the past and the future of the character motivation. That's why it takes so much time. [In BG3] there are great characters as well but sometimes your choices, because there's freedom of choices in Larian's work, it pushes you to use different tricks than ours. But I think we observe each other, and there are not that many games like that, so that's natural, yeah, and we see how players react, how fans react to those tactics."

It's a theme that joint CEO Michał Nowakowski echoes: Baldur's Gate 3 has clearly impressed an awful lot of people at CDPR, even if they're conscious that The Witcher is always going to be a different type of RPG.

"I think we're still more in the, you know, we're a big open world," says Nowakowski. "But a lot of what Baldur's Gate 3 showed was an inspiration, and to be honest there's no shame in that. I think everybody who launches games nowadays is looking back on what was done before, and is looking at what worked and what was great and how and if they can fit it into whatever they are doing.

"So for sure there was a lot of inspiration and what BG3 did, but I think we're still more sticking to what was The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, even if we don't want to just make another game like that, just with better graphics. We do want to innovate in terms of what's available in terms of gameplay and so on. I hope when the time comes, that's going to become clear for the fans as well."

If that's all sounding a little fuzzy, Nowakowski circles back to make it clear what CDPR is not doing:

"It's a bit of an unclear answer, but to make it more clear, we definitely are not going to make a game like Larian did," says Nowakowski. "That's the kind of game they can make. But a lot of stuff with how the characters can interact with the world and what it does was for sure some inspiration to us."

For as long as mankind has gazed up at the stars, it has been seized by a dream: to journey out there, into the void, to stand eye-to-eye with God, to slip the surly bonds of Earth, venture into space, and establish responsible local government.

No Man's Sky's latest in a frankly unbelievable line of updates is called Beacon, and it promises to let you become Overseer—or space mayor—of "up to four settlements, managing townships on the frontier of multiple worlds—each with their own set of citizens and challenges."

Your stellar towns are yours to muck with. You can construct and upgrade buildings, resolve disputes between citizens, hold festivals, and generally do what I've decided to call 'mayor stuff'. I've gotta be honest, I think Hello Games might have turned NMS into some kind of citybuilder/management game when we had our backs turned. At some point those guys are going to turn this game into a JRPG and then where will we be?

It's not all about your new mayordom, though. It's just mostly about that. On top of your new roles and responsibilities as planetary potentate, Beacon also marks the introduction of "robotic Autophage settlements." These towns have their own thing going on: a rough, robotic style that you can make your own if you take an Autophage town into your remit.

The good news is, your toil as mayor can pay off in the form of resources. Put those ungrateful citizens to work in the mines and reap the rewards, I say. The downside, though, is that they're all weak and feeble, and you'll need to defend them against incursions by miscreants. To do that, you can "hire a squadron of wingmen, who will now defend towns when they come under attack from roving pirates."

It all sounds pretty involved—the kind of thing most studios would put out as costly DLC rather than a free update—and I won't pretend I'm not tempted to leap back into No Man's Sky. It's about time someone brought some peace and stability to the galaxy; it might as well be me.

"This is exactly what we wanted to do in Unreal and have been talking about since the middle of Unreal Engine 4. Improving open-world development in Unreal is a very long conversation and you can go back to each and every release and see something in it that is guiding us towards even more excellence in open world development," says Wyeth Johnson, Epic's senior director of product strategy.

He then motions upwards vigorously to illustrate how much better the latest Unreal 5.6 engine is for open world game development. "We ramped up dramatically for this release and I think it shows," Johnson says, referring to the Witcher 4 demo that's been blowing everyone's mind, particularly because it's running on mere Sony PS5 hardware, not even the PS5 Pro.

Johnson also re-emphasized just how important performance is for Unreal Engine 5.6. "Our focus for 5.6 is almost exclusively performance," he says.

"Developers should be able to achieve incredible quality, and they get to define what that quality is, maybe it's the perfect pixel, or maybe it's incredible scale, or animation features or AI, or whatever the case may be," he says.

"Performance is not just what a player interacts with, it's also what a developer interacts with. And when the water level goes up and the time to achieve quality goes down, then you can be more expressive, you can be more playful, you can try to dream a little bit more than just worrying about all these systems holding you back. I would expect every developer who is trying to do something really original and creative in the Triple-A space, they're all going to be excited about this release, " Johnson says.

In other words, Unreal 5.6's performance optimizations should mean much higher quality visuals and gameplay on existing hardware.

Unreal 5.6 is also about making things easier for developers in the first place. "We need to bring the overall level of the engine down and keep the overhead as low as possible so that developers themselves can implement interesting behaviours and they can trust that those behaviours can go right in and players can experience them. Every developer who uses Unreal will benefit from what we showed today. That's the most fundamental take away," Johnson says.

As for CD Projekt Red, it seems like the transition from their own Red Engine to Unreal has been an unambiguous success. "We had a blast with Unreal," says Witcher 4 senior technical animator Julius Girbig.

"It's not like we lost things because of the transition. We're bringing our experience that we already have from Red Engine, all the Triple-A, open world with streaming, all that experience we're now bringing over to experts who have been building engines for years," he says of the collaboration with Epic.

"I'm a pretty surface-level animation artist, so I'm not actually digging into code that much," Girbig goes on to explain, "but I'm still able to run these hundreds of characters, create behaviours for them within the editor with this supportive UI, it just unlocks me as an artist.

"Now with this engine it suddenly unlocks me to create much bigger things and to think bigger. It's really awesome to be able to use things like the Nanite foliage to create these vast forests and whatever comes to your mind."

The end result is certainly impressive. Indeed, it's almost hard to believe that it's running on the Sony PS5, it looks that good. But Johnson confirms that it's all running on completely standard PS5 hardware.

"There are intrinsic things that the Playstation is amazing at, and we kind of show every single one of them in that technical demo," he says. Given the most spec of the PS5 compared to the latest PC hardware, that bodes well. Even AMD's new entry-level RDNA 4 GPU, the Radeon RX 9060 XT, blows the PS5 away for raw specs and especially ray tracing performance.

Speaking of which, Johnson confirms that the demo was indeed using Unreal's Lumen ray tracing engine in hardware mode. If it runs well on the PS5, it should fly on any relatively recent PC graphics card.

Overall, the upside of CD Projekt Red and Epic working together is that both sides of the collab' benefit, and that means better games for all of us to play. "There's no possible way that we could push in every direction to the apex level that developers like CD Projekt Red are capable of pushing," Johnson says.

"We don't have any heartburn if somebody wants to make a modification to Unreal for their specific use and in fact that's a wonderful success for us, because it means we gave them a nice place to plug in the thing that they needed that we didn't provide."

The only frustration in all this is that Witcher 4 only started development late last year and isn't due out for a few more years at the very earliest, and likewise other games that benefit from all of CD Projekt Red and Epic's latest learnings aren't exactly around the corner.

"On the dawn of the fifth day, 3.5 million Nightfarers took up arms against the Night in Elden Ring Nightreign," FromSoftware says in a social media post. "We are ever grateful for your passion."

3.5 million copies sold is undoubtedly a monumental shift but given how well Nightreign performed at launch the number is hardly surprising: 2 million people bought and played Nightreign in its first 24 hours. It also clocked in at over 300,000 concurrent players on its first day, according to SteamDB, and since then it's sat between 100,000 to 300,000 players consistently.

Out of Nightreign's 3.5 million players, just 7.5% of players have managed to defeat all of the Nightlords. You might think that percentage would be higher, given the sheer number of people playing the game, but this is a FromSoft game and defeating all eight bosses is no easy task—some of the big bosses are relatively easy to overcome, like Maris, Fathom of Night, but most of the Nightlords are excruciatingly difficult.

Out of Nightreign's 3.5 million players, just 7.5% have managed to defeat all of the Nightlords. Now this is no easy task—some of the big bosses are relatively easy to overcome, like Maris, Fathom of Night, but most of the Nightlords are excruciatingly difficult.

Only 70% of players have bested the first boss, Gladius, Beast of Night, which is an expedition that you need to complete in order to unlock all the other Nightlords that Nightreign has to offer. So as always, it's important not to underestimate just how difficult beating FromSoft bosses can be for us mere mortals. Not everyone can be like Nightreign's game director who managed to solo all the Nightlords without the use of relics.

But I'm sure that as time goes on and more players arrive, and as existing players get their heads around all the final bosses, the success rate will slowly tick up. Either that or FromSoft will release an update which nerfs all the Nightlords making the whole ordeal slightly easier.

It's the very latter that Blizzard is taking aim at, and while PCG contributor Heather Newman interviewed game director Ion Hazzikostas about the changes, it seems the studio's encountered enough resistance to extend an olive branch to the addon community directly.

As spotted by WoWHead, World of Warcraft developers spoke with the WoWUIDev Discord about their intentions for reductions to the utility of the game's API when it comes to combat—in simpler terms, what the game tells you upfront and in real-time.

"Reading through your feedback so far it is clear that there's a lot of confusion about the timing, goals and nature of these changes," the statement begins, before reassuring players Blizzard'll be "giving many months of advance notice before we flip the switch.

"We want to allow addon devs as much time as possible to test the changes, report issues and provide feedback. We will be announcing the landing place for these changes well ahead of time and taking steps to maximize the amount of hands-on feedback from addon developers before the changes go live."

What follows are a lot of similar promises we've heard before—that Blizzard's aiming for the "least amount of collateral damage possible", and that it'll be aiming "to minimize the impact on accessibility addons … Functionality in this space which is no longer possible after these changes are things we will aim to incorporate into our base game."

I don't envy Blizzard's 20-year arms race with addon creators, but I'll repeat what I said back in May—the best way to stop modders is to let your alternatives win out. WoW's historically lagged far behind in the UI department. Heck, it wasn't even until Dragonflight that the default WoW UI was customisable without addons.

Even then, Blizzard is keen to insist that they aren't just doing it for the sweatiest of sweats:

"While it is true that Mythic raiding has become increasingly reliant on addons, that is not the primary goal of this project. We are embarking on this project with the aim of leveling the playing field and making the game more approachable for all players.

"Currently, addons are able to analyze and 'solve' combat and coordination mechanics perfectly, and faster than would be possible for an unassisted human player. While many players will naturally seek out any advantage, this also means that players who don't use these addons are at a huge disadvantage."

This isn't an unreasonable assessment of the situation—but Blizzard has made targeted changes to the API before via "private auras", which help obfuscate the most encounter-simplifying info for players. I feel like Blizzard's committing to a much higher degree of shutdown than it strictly needs to.

I'm not particularly taken by the argument Blizzard makes here that "Many players end up feeling excluded from competitive content unless they install, set up, and maintain a number of addons. This is a significant barrier to entry, and we have heard growing feedback over the years from players who resent feeling like they need addons to play the game properly."

As a long-time MMO player, I do find it a little annoying to have to download a bunch of addons—but that's because I'm not that interested in competitive content. I broadly agree with the statement that needing addons to play a game properly isn't healthy, but I'll say it again: Simply offer better homegrown options, and you solve that issue.

"This project is about doing everything we can to shrink that gap, by building up the baseline functionality of the default UI, while also reining in the 'optimal problem-solving' capabilities of the addon API. We will also be making substantial changes to how we design our combat and encounters to accompany these addon changes. Removing the ability for addons to 'solve' most encounter mechanics means that we can also take a different approach to the design of our encounters going forward. The same goes for certain class mechanics.

"If everything goes to plan, WoW will remain challenging, but the nature of that challenge will be less about managing subtleties of class mechanics and more about collaborating with allies and interacting with encounters."

Maybe this is just perspective—perspective, I might say, obtained under the yoke of a developer team that hasn't shown a shining understanding of how its illicit mods actually work—but in FF14, forbidden UI mods haven't stopped people using them anyway. In fact, World First raids have been scuffed by cheaters three times in a row. You can practically set your watch to the time between a world first accolade and one of its team members being busted.

I dunno, man. Maybe Blizzard is simply going to be more competent about it, but I have this eerie sense it's putting a ton on its plate without thinking the consequences through. Here's hoping I'm wrong—or that a middle ground is reached between scorched earth and new boundaries.

This was down to Radiant AI, which Bethesda has continued to use in all of its RPGs since. And when it came to figuring out how to evolve the system for Skyrim, it all started with a sketch on a napkin.

"The Radiant AI system was developed from a napkin drawing that Todd [Howard] gave us," says Bruce Nesmith, Skyrim's lead designer. Bethesda understandably doesn't want to give away too much about its secret sauce, but Howard and Bethesda have given Nesmith, who left the company in 2021, approval to talk about Radiant AI and its development. "So it's actually a napkin story. You don't hear many of those in real life, but this is a real one."

Howard started by drawing a hero in the centre of the napkin, "and then he drew various little icons to represent things like houses and monsters and whatnot around it and drew a line to them. And he said, 'The player interacts with these things, but they don't interact back with them. That was Morrowind. For Oblivion, we started having them interact with each other a little bit. But now for Skyrim, we want the world to point back to the player as well as interact with itself. So how can you do that?'"

Nesmith sat down with senior designer Kurt Kuhlmann and tried to figure out how to make this work. It was "very freeing", Nesmith recalls. "We went off on our own, and we came back with proposals. Probably some of the most creative moments I've had in the videogame industry, to be honest. And the idea was to be able to have events and objects in the world that the player interacts with and that the code is watching."

One of the early examples they showed Howard connected NPCs, quests and players together. "So you kill a person, and the game knows that NPC has relationships to other NPCs. That's data that we attach to the player. And this is all in the editor. You can see it all. And so it spins up a quest that picks one of the relatives who comes back and tries to kill you. So it created a quest to do that. And Todd really liked that idea."

But Howard wanted to see how this could be employed in a scenario that didn't involve killing. "It's at the heart of all these games," says Nesmith. "They were developed largely by men for the first 30 years. And our more violent tendencies come out in that." It was time for a change.

So he went back and came up with a list of around 30 different actions that the programming could potentially monitor. "Things like, you pick up an item, you steal an item, you change a location, all these other actions that could be taken. We said, 'OK, here's our list.' And Todd said, 'Now that I like, there's all kinds of good stuff in there'."

This led to "large amounts of data" being attached to objects, which was new for Bethesda. "An NPC actor would know the location it belonged to; the location would know the actors that belonged to it. It would know the objects. And we had an event system where, when something happens, it goes through a list of potential quests that could get spun up, that all have conditions on them. If the conditions are met, a quest is spun up. If no conditions are met, no quest is spun up."

It could create interesting conflicts, as different NPCs each had a reason to try to get their hands on a specific object, and the system would draw the closest NPCs to the object, who the player could then encounter, beginning a quest.

This "felt very unique to us", says Nesmith. "The world sees the player. Think of how many games you play where the world doesn't see the player. You kill that monster over there, and the rest of the world doesn't know. You solve this person's problem over here, and the rest of the world is not paying attention."

Nesmith is talking about more meaningful reactions, not simply someone reacting to you killing a dragon by saying, "Oh, I heard you killed the dragon," though Skyrim does have that, too. Rather, his vision for the system was one that could conjure new quests out of your interactions with the world.

"You feel like you're actually part of something that's living and breathing, and like what you do makes a difference. The world sees you. And I'm not going to sit here and say that Bethesda was the first game company to do that, because I don't know that for a fact, but we were one of the early ones. And we were definitely one of the biggest, that got the most notoriety and attention for it."

Of the list of 30 possible actions that the programming could monitor, "virtually all of them" made it into Skyrim. "Most of them made it in, and we didn't actually add very many [afterwards] either, because Kurt and I both have programming backgrounds, so we had a pretty good sense for what would be good and what would not be good for the programming side of it."

The wackiest version of Radiant AI, the version that's present in Oblivion, is the one that's always going to stick with me the most—it was weird and janky and hit me at a formative time. But that doesn't make Skyrim's version any less impressive. Even now, well over a decade later, it's striking how it manages to craft a seemingly infinite number of bespoke quests and adventures every time you cluelessly wander into a dank cave or saunter through a new village.

So thanks, Todd, for doodling on a napkin.

If you've ever looked at that old graphics card sitting at the back of the shelf and thought, man, I wish that thing took up four PCIe slots and could dress up as a CPU, the good news is all you need is a 3D printer and a screwdriver.

As YouTuber TrashBench shows us (via a now-removed Reddit post), with just such tools, you can put a CPU cooler on a GPU instead of its normal cooling setup and actually improve your thermals.

TrashBench unscrews the shroud and cooler and first attempts to affix the Cooler Master heatsink and fan to the GPU with zip ties, but this "looked dumb, ran hot, and nearly rattled itself apart."

The graphics card in question was a GTX 960 (what a card!), and in 3DMark Fire Strike it reached 40 °C with the default cooler and shroud. After being stripped of this default setup and zip tie jerry-rigged with a CPU cooler, it hit 50 °C, so not a great result.

So, the tech YouTuber used a 3D printer to make a "proper bracket", ie, one that fits the screw holes already there in the PCB, and used it to screw in and mount the CPU cooler on top, with thermal paste betwixt the two, of course. The result was 28 °C, a resounding success.

This solution isn't very practical, of course, if you have, well, just about anything below the GPU. The cooler shoots down to the bottom of the motherboard.

I suppose it might fit in a case, but good luck working with anything on the motherboard below the graphics card.

Still, it's a little surprising how simple it is to pull off something like this these days—3D printers really have done the DIY world a service. And if you don't have one of those but do happen to have some zip ties (and if you don't mind worse thermal performance), you can always try that method.

The zip tie cooler idea is new to me, but my colleague Andy said he and his step-brother used to do the very same thing with graphics cards of times of yore. Why not? It half makes me tempted to dig the ol' GTX 1070 out of the cupboard.

CloudFest is a cloud infrastructure conference that saw folks from all over the globe descend on Europa-Park in Rust, Germany earlier this year, and once again brought a little known underground sport to a wider audience: Server tossing.

Conference attendees of all ability levels and genders were welcome to apply to toss servers—the only necessary qualification requested was the "desire to throw a server really %&#*ing far."

The World Server Throwing Championship has been enjoyed by a spectating crowd at CloudFest for a couple of years now—and applications are already open for the US-based server tossing event coming up in November. The sport itself has a long and largely made-up history, but its most likely origin story can be traced back more than a decade to some disgruntled sys admins in Holland.

The first edition of the tournament as we know it today took place in 2011, giving rise to a compound word that makes me wish I spoke a little more Dutch: 'Serverwerpen'.

Archival footage of that 2011 competition looks almost quaint now, but compared to the sizzle reel for 2025's championship, there is one thing that stands out to me: namely, how close the crowd is on all sides in the footage from the more recent events. I'm sure spinning, shotput-style windups are disallowed to minimise the risk of a server toss that goes offpiste, but the lack of eye protection gear does still make me wince at every throw.

Thankfully, it appears most competitors and attendees come out of the event in far better shape than any of the servers. Competitors have two attempts to lob a server as far as they can, with the qualifying throws from 2025's event not just seeing some impressive air but record-breaking distances too.

According to this recap of the 2025 event, Linda Splitt placed first in the women's division by hurling a server a distance of 11.10 metres—an honour she also lists on her LinkedIn profile. In the men's division however, there was a major upset as Thom van Hal placed first with a throw of 13.18 metres, wrestling the previous record from Bartosz “The Beast” Wojciak who won last year.

Now I don't know about you, but I'm definitely not an IT professional immersed in the world of cloud infrastructure—nor am I especially gifted in the strength department. All the same, I'm still adding 'lob a server' to my career bucket list.

But don't despair. Well, not entirely. For the editor-in-chief of our sister website, Tom's Hardware, has come up with a browser extension that gets rid of AI overviews from Google search results. Give it up for Avram Piltch and his Bye Bye, Google AI extension.

To quote the man himself, Avram says Google, "decided to push AI overviews and AI mode onto search users, regardless of the damage it causes to the user experience or the harm it may inflict on publishers and the entire open web."

He also points out that Google is rolling out AI Overviews to ever more territories and countries and fears that Google may eventually want to replace all organic search results with AI Overviews . His solution is the aforementioned Bye, Bye Google AI, which works in Chrome or Edge or any desktop browser that supports Chrome extensions. He's currently working on Firefox and Safari versions.

"The extension allows you to hide the AI Overview section from all of your queries and goes a step further, allowing you to hide other areas of the Google SERP that you may not want, such as the videos section, text ads, or 'People Also Ask,'" Avram says.

The latest 1.5 version now supports 19 languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin (Trad + Simplified), Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, Hindi, Thai, Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian, Dutch, Danish and Portuguese. You can also now hide the AI Mode tab, not just AI Overviews.

Avram also explains the other ways to kill the AI Overview, such as adding "-noai" to your search string. But if you want to permanently kill AI Overviews—or at least for as long as this extension works and Google is serving up any organic results at all—then Bye, Bye Google AI feels like a no brainer of an extension.

Of course, you could just use another search engine, like DuckDuckGo. Moreover, the seemingly falling quality of Google's organic results isn't fixed by this extension. But if you just want to remove a little AI slop from your daily interneting, then this could be the tool for you.

All videogames use the environment to guide players through them—though, Tost admits, it wasn't always that way. In fact, CDPR simply stumbled into a lot of solid industry practices when making The Witcher 3.

"Level design may not have been as sophisticated as it is now. And I think the same is true for most disciplines in the industry," Tost explains. "In The Witcher 3, we didn't do too much of that, actually. The level design team was still being built, [it] was really fresh, and in some ways it took us the entirety of production to get to a point where we would do (what I would nowadays consider) more traditional level design.

"As such, we didn't emphasise guidance as strongly—we did at some point add these white decals for 'hey, climb here', but I think when it comes to overall guidance in the world, it was a relatively small element, right?"

Instead, Tost says that the design teams simply followed their noses and wound up on a lot of decisions that would later become industry practice. "We did a lot of things—and maybe it's luck—but intuitively correct … Nowadays, we're much more sophisticated with that, I think."

A good example of CDPR finally nailing down the specifics, Tost argues, is Phantom Liberty: "I think there we have all the bells and whistles of what level designers here do. We use compositional line work in our levels, to make things look particularly impressive, but also to guide the eye to certain elements … In the Witcher 3, we would use a lot of composition, but it was mostly to get the most impressive image, without the real purpose [behind it]."

When it comes to something as straightforwardly obvious as yellow paint, though, Tost says that " We've always thought about our games as being still quite accessible to a wider audience, so we're not afraid of adding elements that'll also guide players more directly, whether it's NPCs shouting out and saying 'look at this thing', or the Witcher sense in the Witcher 3."

However, "In the best of cases, [the player] doesn't understand or feel like they're being guided in any way." When it comes to what Tost jokes as "being in a 'yellow room'," he reckons they're "one of the many tools that developers can use. But they're one of the tools they can use, right?

"I believe that if you properly weaponise the entire arsenal of your toolkit of guidance as a level designer, then you can subdue each individual element and make it more subtle. And in that case, you get closer to the situation of the player not noticing the guidance. The strings carefully pulling them along. That is, for me, the sweet spot.

"I think the problem is not necessarily with the yellow paint, but it's so known and used right now that people see through the smoke and mirrors there. That 'oh, I am being guided'. But there's more subtle ways of doing it."

It's a little funny to hear an argument that basically boils down to 'you need to trick your kids into eating their veggies', but it is right. Assassin's Creed Shadows, which has plenty of colour-coded climables, tried to go without. But because Ubisoft had to put in all the foliage and pretty bells and whistles that players expected, they simply kept running into walls or missing climbable routes entirely.

So, a little direction is vital. Tost still thinks it ought to be subtle. Or at least diegetic—I'm not sure I'd consider The Witcher 3's Arkham-style detective vision to not have any sort of influence on the artstyle. A great example, Tost mentions, is Uncharted and its occasional uses of flags waving in the wind:

"It fits gently into the environment, as opposed to, I dunno—someone went into this specific spot and painted a yellow line, because at that point it's not necessarily believable."

The charging pad, Razer explains, delivers "continuous wireless charging directly through the mouse mat, eliminating the need for charging cables or docks entirely." This, of course, means you won't have to do anything to charge your mouse at all, provided you keep it on the HyperFlux pad.

Not just any mouse, though—it has to be one that can fit Razer's charging puck into the bottom. It's the same charging puck slot that some Razer mice can use with the Dock Pro, so you get the same mouse compatibility as with that dock: Basilisk V3 Pro 35K, Basilisk V3 Pro, Cobra Pro, and Naga V2 Pro.

I've been using the HyperFlux V2 with a Basilisk V3 Pro 35K for the past few days and have been really enjoying my time with it. I've got the hard pad version (there's a cloth one, too), and the first thing that jumps out to me is actually nothing to do with the wireless charging.

It's just how much I've missed using a hard pad because boy is this thing smooth. I sent a quick video to my colleagues of me gently nudging my mouse across it and the general consensus was that it's a little like a puck on an air hockey table. If that slipperiness isn't your jam, of course you can go for the cloth version.

Razer HyperFlux V2 vs Logitech G PowerPlay 2

I also spent a lot of time with the new Logitech G PowerPlay 2 charging mouse pad and scored that one a low 40% primarily because it's expensive, has just a flimsy cloth pad on top of the charging station, and most importantly doesn't include a wireless receiver (you have to plug in a separate dongle to connect your mouse to your PC).

I'm happy to say that the Razer HyperFlux V2 does have a wireless receiver built-in, so you won't need to plug in the mouse pad and the mouse, just the pad which the mouse connects to. Razer claims "seamless auto-pairing" for the HyperFlux V2, and this seemed to bear out. I just slotted the puck into the mouse and slapped it on top of the pad and it connected and worked.

This Razer pad also looks and feels premium in a way the new Logitech one doesn't. It's solid, has a nice bezel to the edges, is practically immovable when placed, and its receiver station zone at the top (whatever you want to call it) is in that iPhone camera island cut-out kind of style which looks rather nice, as does its LED which hints towards low/medium/high battery life.

Just like the PowerPlay 2, though, it might not be big enough for low sensitivity players. And unlike the PowerPlay 2, the mouse pad is attached, which presumably means no replacements. Although I don't see anywhere to actually get a replacement PowerPlay 2 cloth pad, either.

I'm excited that we have some actual competition in this charging mouse pad space. What doesn't make me quite so excited is the price tag. We're looking at $120 for this thing, which is more than the PowerPlay 2. One of my main criticisms of the PowerPlay V2 was its price, and although that was in part in comparison to its predecessor, the fact is that even in a vacuum $120 is still a lot for a mouse pad, charging or no charging.

I've yet to figure out exactly what I think of that irksome price tag, but I'll be mulling things over as I formulate my full review of the HyperFlux V2.

Razer has done a charging mouse pad before, but that was in the form of a Mamba HyperFlux combo, with both mouse and mouse pad. That tended to go for about $200-$250, and given the Mamba mouse alone went for close to $100, the price for this charging station doesn't seem to have shifted much.

Still, as I said, you are getting a very premium mouse pad here in terms of both looks and feel. And you're getting a built-in wireless receiver so you only have to plug in the mouse pad and not a dongle for the mouse, too. From a subjective perspective, I know that I get excited each morning when I remember I'll soon be using this Razer HyperFlux, and I didn't feel anything like that towards the PowerPlay 2.

For that experience, though, you're spending $20 on top of what you'd spend on the PowerPlay 2 that I reckon costs too much. And you're limited to just a few Razer mice, and not its best ones, at that. It's certainly new competition, but not the ideal competition I'd hoped for. Mixed feelings, here.

Of course, he's not wrong. Allison said that as a lead-in to talk about all the features that were due to trickle into the Epic Games Store in the near future: stuff like preloading, gifting, and game-independent voice and text chat. You know, stuff that Steam has had for years. Oh, and as for clunkiness: "We're also putting great focus on ongoing launcher improvements that will make the store feel great to use."

These are all good and correct things to be implementing and working on, of course, but the EGS is seven years old at this point, and it's still scrambling to achieve basic parity with Steam. If the grand visions Allison announced on stage at Unreal Fest come to pass, the EGS won't be more attractive than Steam, it just won't be quite as unattractive, relatively. It doesn't sound like a proposition that will win many people over.

Still, Epic's forays into digital distribution are working out for some people: game studios. Epic says it's paid out over $2 billion to devs and publishers, all while giving the likes of you and me a bajillion free games I will probably never remember to actually play. Still, it's good to know they're there.

Hey, good for Epic. As much as I don't use the Epic launcher, I do think the company—whatever its reason—does a lot of things on its business-side I wish Steam would adopt. EGS' 12% cut on revenue from its store is a lot less galling than the meaty 30% Valve takes at base, and its various schemes to tempt devs and publishers—like its recently announced 0% fee for all games until they make $1 million in revenue—would be great to see on PC gaming's most popular storefront.

But none of these things are going to tempt players, I think, and nor will just bringing the EGS up to parity with Steam. I have to admit, Epic's biggest hurdle to getting me using its store has little to do with functionality or player-treat schemes. It's the simple fact that I have 1,400 games on Steam and little desire to suddenly start up a whole new, separate shelf. I don't know how Epic can ever overcome that, but it's probably not with preloading.

Yep, Demis Hassabis has been speaking at the SXSW London festival (via the Guardian) about all things AI. And apart from predicting the arrival of AGI or artificial general intelligence within five to 10 years, Hassabis revealed Google's plans for clearing the world's email backlog.

"I would love to get rid of my email. I would pay thousands of dollars per month to get rid of that," Hassabis said. More specifically, he said Google was planning, "something that would just understand what are the bread-and-butter emails, and answer in your style—and maybe make some of the easier decisions."

Such a technology raises all kinds of immediate questions. Such as, why not pay a human thousands of dollars per month to manage that for you. Like an executive assistant maybe? And exactly what kind of email will it answer? Will it actually save you much time if in practice you need to know it's answered for you and what exactly it said?

I mean, if your Gmail bot replies, "sure, I'm on it" or "thanks, understood," well, you'd need to be actually on it or have understood it, right? Likewise, do you trust any AI with your personal communications?

Slightly more dystopianly (if that's a word, and it ought to be, I sense we're going to need it, though it might need another 'n' or perhaps an extra 'l'), it also raises the prospect of bots spiralling off into endless back-and-forth comms.

After all, if you are a Gmail user who emails another Gmail user, you'd presumably have situations where you fire off an email, their Gmail bot replies, following which your Gmail bot decides to weigh in and they're off to the races, chatting away.

Somewhat ironically, Hassabis also said AI could be used to protect you from attention-grabbing AI algorithms. The idea is that an AI assistant might give you, "more time and maybe protect your attention from other algorithms trying to gain your attention. I think we can actually use AI in service of the individual."

So, that's Google's bots protecting you from the attention-grabbing efforts of other companies' bots. What a time to be alive that will be. Of course, we could just cut out the toxic attention grabbing nonsense in the first place.

Sorry, silly idea. Without the toxic algorithms, Google couldn't sell you a bot to protect you from its competitors, while those competitors presumably sell you another bot to protect you from Google's algorithms. This, people, is the future. And it's beautiful. Kinda.

The Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5090 Stealth Ice is a graphics card with a standard power connector—none of this back-connect motherboard malarkey—but said connector is hidden around the back of the card. The 12V-2x6 connector plugs into the PCB right behind the heat fins, as you can see from a cut-out on the backplate. This would presumably be more cumbersome (if not impossible) if it were using a smattering of standard 8-pin connectors.

This graphics card is part of the company's Project Stealth, which is primarily a back connector project that moves headers/connectors around to the rear of the motherboard just like MSI's back-connect design.

Unlike Asus's BTF design (the graphics cards for which are now starting to become compatible with non-BTF motherboards too), Gigabyte's Stealth motherboards don't deliver GPU power through the motherboard. This new Stealth GPU should therefore make for a good pairing with its Stealth lineup, because in lieu of this it sneaks the power cable towards pass-throughs to keep it hidden.

One benefit of this is that it won't require the purchase of an entirely new motherboard to keep those cables hidden. It's a great option for those who are looking to upgrade their GPU but already have a standard motherboard or a back-connect one that doesn't do motherboard GPU power delivery.

Gigabyte explains: "This new graphics card inherits the minimalist philosophy of Project Stealth by adopting a hidden power connector design, allowing seamless cable routing and a cleaner build layout. Tailored for enthusiasts who prioritize aesthetic refinement and efficient assembly, the card offers both cutting-edge performance and a streamlined look that elevates any gaming setup."

Apart from this stealthy addition, the graphics card design looks similar to the standard Gigabyte RTX 5090 Aorus Ice, which is a blocky all-white affair.

We're seeing plenty of focus on cable management and other similar build and design improvements in PC hardware land this year, which is nice to see. I was quite impressed with Lian Li's Rotation PSU that was shown at Computex last month, for instance, which allows for more control over where you route your power supply cables.

Gigabyte's Stealth GPU design is just one amongst many moves in the direction of clean-looking builds, and I'm certainly here for it.

"Did they seriously add bundle ads to the weapon select menu," JustTh4tOneGuy says in a Reddit post (via IGN). "It's bad enough that this game already raised Blackcell's cost and hasn't fixed any bugs at all that actually affect the majority of players. This clearly was the implementation that mattered."

Did they seriously add bundle ads to the weapon selection menu? from r/blackops6

Other players pointed out that the ads wouldn't even be that bad if they were in a free-to-play game like Warzone, but Black Ops 6 is a premium title which still goes for $40. "It really feels like one of those free cell phone games from a tiny studio begging you for money at every turn," one player says. "Pathetic for a full-price, standalone game from a huge developer."

The ads have since been taken down. "A UI feature test that surfaced select store content in the Loadout menus was published in the Season 04 update in error," Activision says in a social media post. "This feature has now been removed from the live game." While Activision claims that this was just a test that wasn't meant to see the light of day, I'm sure the uproar from fans sped up its removal.

Even if this was an honest mistake, the fact that Activision was running a test like this clearly means that ads are a feature that it feels is worth trying out and that it's at least being talked about.

But this is far from the first time Call of Duty has fallen into a monetisation controversy. Earlier this year Activision released a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover which cost a whopping $90. A price that was too high for even the most dedicated fans to pay: "Call of Duty's gross greed strikes again… despicable."

Then there were the $28 Squid Game skins which not only missed the entire point of the show but were also just too expensive considering how many different outfits were up for grabs.

So it's hardly surprising that Activision would be thinking about new ways to boost its income and advertise even more ways for its players to spend their cash in Call of Duty, but just because it's predictable doesn't mean it's any less gross.

If you thought wireless power delivery was handy for charging phones but not terribly practical for much else, prepare to have your mind blown. One of our favourite YouTube channels, DIY Perks, has just dropped a new video showcasing a new fully 3D wireless power delivery technology that looks, well, revolutionary.

Imagine a desktop that can power just about anything wirelessly. There's no need to align anything carefully with a charging pad. You don't even need to be resting on the surface, the power can be transmitted to devices positioned a foot or more above the desk surface. That's exactly what DIY Perk's truly wireless power desk is capable of.

The basic principles here are similar to existing wireless charging pads as typically used with smartphones. Those use a coil to generate a magnetic field that flips in polarity thousands of times a second.

If you place another coil nearby, an electric current is induced. The problem is that the secondary coil has to be positioned very close and be quite precisely aligned.

But this new 3D wireless power system can cover a very large area defined by the perimeter of a single length of wire. The 3D wireless power hardware in the video is provided by Etherdyne Technologies and a full evaluation kit as used by DIY Perks is available through their website, though the cost isn't clear.

The kit is claimed to be both FCC and CE certified and can deliver up to 100 W of power. The evaluation unit is composed of a control box, power supply, plus the field-generating wire and has been designed to be embedded within a desktop measuring around two feet by four feet.

The wire generates a magnetic field in the same way as a charging pad but flips polarity much more rapidly, millions of times per second. The technology also relies on being precisely tuned to resonate at this frequency.

The result is a "dome" of 3D wireless power above the desk surface. Exactly how far above the desk the power can be transmitted isn't stated, but going by the DIY Perks video, the power dome extends well over a foot above the desk surface, at minimum.

For this demo, DIY Perks built a PC based on a super-slim Frameworks laptop mainboard into the underneath of desk surface. Up top, there's everything from a keyboard and mouse, Bluetooth speakers, a microphone and even a monitor, all powered wirelessly.

The monitor also runs via a wireless HDMI video interface, enabling a truly wireless solution with a totally cable-free screen that can be slid around the surface. DIY Perks' final flourish is a wirelessly heated coffee mug that keeps fluids at a constant 70 degrees C. Nice.

At this point you may be wondering why you haven't heard of all this before and what the catch must be. Well, the first downside is power efficiency. DIY Perks doesn't go into great detail on this subject, but points out that the system isn't 100% efficient and consumes 10 W at idle.

Our understanding is that overall efficiency is probably in the 70 to 80% region at best. Then again, if you're powering it all with renewables like solar, some losses arguably aren't the end of the world. Overall power delivery is another obvious limitation. That 100 W figure, we believe, is a total for all devices being powered.

For sure, the largest power receiver coil in the kit delivers just 7 W. For a desktop solution like this, the main power draw is the PC itself which can run on wired power. DIY Perks says it has used a pair of receivers, so presumably that's two times 7 W.

For sure, it's not a large display and probably isn't very bright. A typical PC monitor probably isn't compatible with the evaluation kit as currently specced—and you can forget about a power-hungry OLED panel.

But then this is early days for 3D wireless power and more, well, powerful solutions may be possible. As for other concerns around safety, interference with other devices, health implications and so on, well, that's outside our expertise. But as a tech demo this is all very impressive.

Heck, just having what you might call a perpetual wireless keyboard and mouse would be nice, let alone a truly wireless monitor and a cup of coffee that never, ever gets cold.

You earn relics through expeditions, you don't even have to beat the Nightlord to get a few after you finish, but if you do, you get more. These are then sorted into three colours, red, blue, and yellow. Depending on what slots you have, you can then assign yourself three relics before your next expedition. There are some truly powerful relics in Nightreign which can grant you great bonuses and buffs—and with great power comes great responsibility.

Especially for Reddit user OFurthestBenO who took a look at what the game had given them, and said screw it, "After 55 hours of gameplay, the game decided 'you shall main Wylder Spooderman' … It's not perfect, but my god I feel like I can just use the grapple hook the entire game."

Saying that this Wylder build buffs his minor skill, the grappling hook, is an understatement. The first relic grants a character skill cooldown reduction +2, with follow-up attacks possible when using a character skill (a greatsword passive). The second relic fills Wylder's art gauge when an ability is activated, and grants a further skill cooldown reduction +2, while the final relic gives Wylder one additional character skill use and, you guessed it, another character skill cooldown reduction +2. That's a lot of grappling hooks.

"I can use my skill every four seconds, and thanks to the +1 character skill it can stack up even easier," OFurthestBenO adds. "It truly feels like I never run out of skill usage." Wylder's grappling hook is one of the more useful character skills, granting him both mobility and a way to get close and far away from enemies at a moment's notice, while also dealing a good chunk of damage.

After 55 hours of gameplay, the game decided "you shall main W̶y̶l̶d̶e̶r̶ Spooderman" from r/Nightreign

This is most useful for taking on bosses, especially when fighting all of Nightreigns' Nightlords, all of which can scamper around their massive arena way too quickly. I've seen Wylders hunt down Adel and Gnoster like it was child's play, meanwhile, I'm sprinting as fast as my little legs can bear.

It takes a while to get there, given you're at the mercy of RNG, but it's great to see other players developing specialised builds. Through relics, I've managed to turn my Revenant into a certified support main. I use the Night of the Fathom relic, which you get from defeating Maris, Fathom of Night, which grants me increased maximum HP, the ability for flasks to also heal allies, and items to confer effects to all nearby allies to help deliver constant healing to my teammates.

Then I have the Grand Burning Scene, which can damage boost my summons and allies when ulting, as well as having the Polished Tranquil Scene which grants ultimate art gauge +2 to turn my ultimate into a team rez/damage boost skill. Finally, this last relic also gives me max FP when the Sorcerer's Rise mechanism is released, meaning I can use my Finger Seal to heal myself even more. It's not New York's iconic webhead, but it gets the job done.

Sadly there's no way to control what kind of relics you get after an expedition, they're random. It's because of this that I didn't start getting relics that suited my chosen Nightfarer until recently, but sometimes you just have to make do with what you have. And while Wylder might be called the 'vanilla' choice for Elden Ring Nightreign, this build just looks too good to pass up.

Operating systems that are about to become an unsupported vintage aside, the real story from the May edition of Steam's hardware and software survey is that there's been a slight uptick in folks moving to Linux—by about 0.42%.

Okay, so it's hardly like there's been a massive exodus from Windows as the end of 10 approaches, but the fact that 2.69% of Steam users are running a Linux OS is worth drilling down into.

For one thing, SteamOS itself is Linux-based. For another, SteamOS is gradually rolling out compatibility for handhelds beyond the Steam Deck, such as the Lenovo Go S and other AMD devices, potentially explaining some of this increase.

Steam has even added a compatibility rating for third-party devices to its store pages, at least suggesting a long-term commitment to bringing SteamOS to a wide selection of devices.

On the hardware team, our Jacob recently got SteamOS running on his Legion Go S and hasn't looked back. However, as he notes in his feature, we've enjoyed less success getting SteamOS to run on other devices with similar internals, like the Framework 13 Strix Point laptop.

While still doable, it hasn't been all that functional in Dave's recent experience. Dave has, however, managed to get a SteamOS laptop up and running using the Framework's older 7840U mainboard.

Though 2.69% is a bit of a high as far as OS share goes, I'm not going to pretend this is Linux's tipping point. Besides the fact that Windows still enjoys a whopping 95.45% total share of the OS pie in Steam's May survey, Valve's ultimate ambitions for SteamOS aren't really about replacing Windows.

Still, if you've got a third-party handheld gaming PC, you can try your own hand at installing SteamOS using Steam's own handy guide. Alternatively, you could attempt to install Windows on your Steam Deck, though our Dave would likely judge you for it.

It's worth noting that the Steam survey is a little, let's just say, all over the place. It's a good tool for a general idea of trends, but view the results with a pinch of salt. For example, I doubt there's been a sudden wave of new, dual-core CPUs coming online in the past month, but lo and behold, Steam registers a 0.12% uptick.

Linux usage around the 2% mark does at least appear to be a fairly reliable stat month-to-month: Linux usage was at 2.27% in April, slightly down on the 2.33% noted in March, but broadly above the 1.55% of users registered in February.

However, combat director Junya Ishizaki wants you to believe in yourself, especially in the face of a capricious game that mostly hates and wants to murder you. That's per an interview with CNET, wherein Ishizaki says:

"I can hopefully give you reassurance to know that I have beaten all of the game's bosses. I've seen everything it has to offer, both in multiplayer and as a solo player. So I want you and players to know that this is very possible, and I want you to have the confidence to give it a try yourself."

Phew, alright. Well, you'd hope that the combat director of Nightreign is good at the combat, given he's directing it and all. Even though solo is a momentous challenge, it tracks he'd be able to pull off some lone ranger runs. At the very least, he's making use of the game's relic systems to do so, right?

"Yes. And without relics." Aw, man.

Bless Ishizaki—he's trying to be motivational here—but I've never heard a more polite, perspective-shifting clarion call to git gud since Bandai Namco tweeted out "this is a suggestion to level up your Scadutree Blessing" in the early days of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.

It's certainly possible if you're absolutely cracked at soulslikes, mind. It's not exactly sans-relics, but someone's already beaten the game solo without levelling up once—and every single time I've thought a FromSoftware game was a bit spicy, some kung-fu master's rocked up to Twitch armed with only a controller and a level of patience and focus forged in the mountains of some far-flung monastery and done a no-hit run before I can blink.

Mark my words, Ishizaki won't be the first person to depress you with his accomplishments. Here's my prediction: Not only is Ishizaki right, we're about two months maximum from someone doing a full Nightreign solo level one run, blindfolded, armed with only a dance pad and a saxophone, no-hit, while underwater with their hands tied. It'll happen.

That eerily ominous machine translated quote, brought to you by Taiwan Economic Daily (via Wccftech), comes from Wei Zhejia (C. C. Wei), CEO and chairman of TSMC. It comes off the back of of Wei pointing out that both GPUs and ASICs are made at TSMC, implying that whatever kind of AI data centre compute you need, TSMC has you covered.

And it's true, TSMC does produce most of the compute for AI data centres, with Nvidia's various Hopper and Blackwell chips being the most obvious ones and the ones that AI companies seem to be lining up for.

Yesterday we covered how TSMC said at this TSMC shareholder meeting that "AI demand has always been very strong and it's consistently outpacing supply" despite US tariffs. The company did say that tariffs have an impact, though.

With a new $100 billion planned investment in the US and an Arizona fab capacity that's already apparently sold out through 2027, it doesn't look like TSMC has much to worry about on the international trade war front, either.

I suppose that with production based both in Taiwan and in the US, it's not too ridiculous to assume that "they will all come to us in the end."

Wei reportedly admits that the company did face overcapacity in the recent past, but "this time we are more careful and thorough than before." This seems to be in part because TSMC is getting forecasts and info from chip-scale packaging manufacturers (CSPs) as "they are also worried that we are not prepared enough."

It must be difficult to predict demand in such a new and booming market as AI, but if any company can be sure to do well—other than Nvidia, of course—it does seem to be TSMC.

Let's just hope we see some of that sweet chip revenue trickle down into the laps of we humble gamers in the form of some derivative gaming chips and GPUs. Hey, I'm not above scooping up the scraps, are you?

The House of Lords has just denied the UK government's fourth attempt to pass a bill to let it scrape whatever data it likes, and the counter to that is merely a push for transparency over which data is scraped.

The point of this counter from the House of Lords is to allow copyright holders the means to license or protect their information from what effectively amounts to stealing. Those invested in the growth of AI are, predictably, not a fan of paying artists for their work.

Sir Nick Clegg, the former president of global affairs at Meta, and previous deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, said the House of Lords' wish would "Kill the AI industry in this country", according to the BBC.

The Data (Use and Access) Bill, as suggested by the UK government, argues that AI developers should have access to all the content they like without any consideration towards those who create the data, unless those creators specifically opt out of data collection.

Baroness Beeban Kidron, a member of the House of Lords, has argued that the "state sanctioned theft" of data would be "throwing UK designers, artists, authors, musicians, media and nascent AI companies under the bus".

The most recent amendment to the AI bill argues, "The regulations must require specified business data to be published by the trader or the data holder so as to provide copyright owners with information regarding the text and data used in the pre-training, training, fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation in the AI model, or any other data input to the AI model."

According to the BBC, the standstill between the House of Lords and the British government is "uncharted territory" with neither budging on their stance on AI and the arts. Personally, I find the push for AI companies to scrape data unless specifically told otherwise rather telling.

Many artists will not be aware of their rights around AI and will not opt out purely because they haven't been adequately informed. Artists being asked to opt in feels more equitable, but from my conversation with artists, I have a feeling very few would choose to do so. The British government is likely looking to get as much as data as possible to these AI companies, artists be damned.

Similarly, it has been suggested many times that untraining data from AI models is impossible, which means that once the data is scraped, there's no going back anyways. The change for better transparency won through a vote of 242 to 116.

The bill has now been pushed back to the House of Commons, where it could be further discussed this week. This means a fifth push for the bill is likely on the cards.

The argument used by the UK government is similar to that recently used by OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT. In March, OpenAI appealed to the US government, stating that if it doesn't let OpenAI scrap copyrighted content, America would lose to China.

Just months before that, OpenAI complained that DeepSeek, a Chinese AI model, stole data from it, which was data OpenAI scraped from others in the first place.

Recently, President Donald Trump introduced the One Big Beautiful Bill act (or OBBB), which attempts to mandate that states could not regulate AI for a decade, among other things, like increased tax cuts and further support for Border Patrol and ICE.

The AI section of this bill has seen criticism from even large Trump supporters, like Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, for how wide-reaching it is.

The Phasmophobia movie will be produced by two studios with experience in horror and videogame adaptations: Blumhouse (M3GAN, Five Nights at Freddy's) and Atomic Monster (The Conjuring, Mortal Kombat). While I'm sure they could make a movie about some dopes investigating haunted houses and getting strangled by ghosts without paying for the rights to Phasmophobia, it's good name recognition sure to appeal to anyone who has fond memories of waving crucifixes and thermometers around a child's bedroom in the dark. Fun times.

"We never could've imagined the incredible heights this game would reach when it launched five years ago," said Daniel Knight, lead developer of Phasmophobia, "and we're so thankful to our amazing community for the lasting impact Phasmophobia has had in the gaming space and beyond. Working with Blumhouse and Atomic Monster marks an incredible new chapter for the game, and we can't wait to share more as the project develops."

Phasmophobia is still in early access with a major update called Chronicle due on June 24. It's adding a sound recorder, expanding the media section of the journal with extra things to capture for a perfect investigation, and more.

But the first exciting thing we need to address on these headsets are the colours. Without even needing a collab, the Arctis Nova 3 line of headsets come in black, white (eh,) aqua (oooh), and lavender (aaaaah). They haven't skimped on the colour either, with each headset featuring an allover paintjob, including the recessed SteelSeries logo on the side, and even the detachable microphone.

Aside from the colour offerings, these headsets sport custom Neodymium Magnetic Drivers drivers, with up to 40 hours of battery life. They work with both Bluetooth and a USB-C dongle for high-speed 2.4GHz wireless, and you can quickly swap between wired devices. Plus there's optimised fast charging that boasts 90 minutes of play time after only a 15 minute charge. All packed into, what looks like a fairly comfortable set that weighs only 260g. This actually seems like a great deal in a headset that's only a little over $100 USD.

But according to SteelSeries, it's not just the hardware but the software that makes this headset worth buying. It pairs with the new Arctis App, which is free on both the Google Play and Apple App stores. This app lets you do a little more than the usual array of sound control and customisation, which is always helpful in a gaming headset so you can use your phone rather than having to pause the game. It also has over 200 presets for various games and playstyles.

It seems like overkill, but in a headset where money is being saved being able to dial in the sound this way means you can push the hardware available much further. It's still almost certainly overkill, but I'd be keen to see how much they can elevate this new Arctis to maybe even something like the Arctis 7, or 5X.

These headsets should be up on the SteelSeries website now, retailing for $199 AUD, $119.99 USD, or €109.99. If these specs and hardware can push this midranged headset into the upper levels then that's a huge win for SteelSeries, and for the consumer. Just think, you can use the money you've saved on your headset for more important things, like the same headset in the other cool colour.

Wait, done already? Really? Thanks for that quick win, second row, but now what am I supposed to do with my free time? Still, definitely better than yesterday's performance. If you like the idea of winning in two and don't want to risk it, make sure you take a look at the help we've got for you below, OK?

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, June 4

This word brings things to a halt. A full stop. If something was happening before, it's not now.

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today's puzzle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Playing Wordle well is like achieving a small victory every day—who doesn't like a well-earned winning streak in a game you enjoy? If you're new to the daily word game, or just want a refresher, I'm going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success:

• You want a balanced mix of unique consonants and vowels in your opening word.
• A solid second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• The answer could contain letters more than once.

There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by the end of the day. If you're struggling to find the answer or a tactical word for your next guess, there's no harm in coming back to it later on.

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

You've just won. The answer to the June 4 (1446) Wordle is CEASE.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Knowing previous Wordle solutions can be helpful in eliminating current possibilities. It's unlikely a word will be repeated and you can find inspiration for guesses or starting words that may be eluding you.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• June 3: ADMIN
• June 2: PREEN
• June 1: ROUGH
• May 31: HABIT
• May 30: IDIOM
• May 29: QUASH
• May 28: POLAR
• May 27: SPORT
• May 26: DRONE
• May 25: GRIFT

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and it's your job to work out which five-letter word is hiding by eliminating or confirming the letters it contains.

Starting with a strong word like LEASH—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good place to start. Once you hit Enter, the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second go should compliment the starting word, using another "good" guess to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.

With any new game release, there's always the question of hardware. And given how much of a ray tracing demon Control was for its time, I was a little worried about how demanding FBC might end up. There's not much reason to get excited for a game that my machine can't even run. Well, thankfully, Remedy recently announced the required specs over on BlueSky, and this is looking like a game that will still run, even on a fairly dated rig.

So not only is FBC: Firebreak looking to respect my time, it might respect my wallet as well.

To run at 1080p 60 with quality upscaling, you only need a Nvidia GTX 1070, or an AMD RX 5600 XT. This needs to be paired with at least an Intel i5-700k or an AMD Ryzen 5 1600X, as well as 16GB of RAM. You'll also need 30 GB of SSD storage to store and run the game from. Really, that's some super minimal stuff. While it'll only run the game on low settings, I'm impressed it would do it at all, so props to Remedy for giving some of us still rocking the older hardware a chance.

Naturally, the recommended specs are a fair bit more demanding than the minimum. These will let you run the game on medium settings at 1440p 60 FPS with quality-based upscaling. For this, you'll be needing a much more recent GPU, with at least an Nvidia RTX 3060 or an AMD RX 6600 XT, giving you at least an extra 2 VRAM over those minimum specs. It's recommended to pair these with at least an Intel i5-8500 or AMD's Ryzen 5 2600 CPU and still have at least 16 GB of RAM.

To step that upscaling up to 4k performance levels, Remedy recommends upgrading that GPU. An RTX 3070 or RX 6800 XT can level this gaming experience up to High presets. If nothing else, this tier demonstrates just how far a GPU upgrade can really go to helping you enjoy this game built for chaotic joy.

If you want the high-definition Ray Tracing experience of your lives, then Remedy's High Ray Tracing tier is probably what you're after. These settings deliver a 4k 60 FPS experience with performance upscaling like before, as well as High ray tracing enabled. Hold your breath, mind, as Remedy recommends you're packing an RTX 4080 or RX 9070 XT before attempting these settings. Your CPU also needs an upgrade, with an i7-8700k or 5 3600 specified. The good news is that your 16 GB of RAM should still be enough, so you can save some cash there at least.

And look, I'm not going to lie. Control looks amazing on rigs that can do it justice, and I'm betting FBC: Firebreak will too. All those fire infected hiss-like creatures will no doubt look incredible reflecting off the shiny walls of the oldest house offices, but they don't have to. I'm excited to be able to play this game with more friends than I initially expected, even if their weird pink blobs of goo don't look as good as mine.

Former chief legal officer Riley Graebner, who joined Build a Rocket Boy in 2022 and also served as chief operating officer until April 2024, announced his departure from the studio in a message posted to LinkedIn.

"After three and a half years my time at BARB has come to a close," Graebner wrote. "I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished. During that time we more than doubled the size of the company to over 450 employees. We launched multiple products worldwide. We built the legal team and legal ops infrastructure from the ground up, working to systemize and automate.

"I’m beyond excited for what’s next—but currently operating in stealth mode for a while longer. Stay tuned."

CFO Paul Bland didn't make any sort of public declaration about leaving BARB, but updated his LinkedIn profile to indicate that he'd parted ways with the company in June. Somewhat oddly, he seems to have subsequently changed his LinkedIn page: The Paul Bland page on the site (which I successfully visited earlier today) is gone, but the account itself remains available, at a different URL, under the name Paul B. I have no idea what to make of that, but it's weird.

The whole thing is weird, really. Executives come and go, it's true, but losing two C-suiters, effectively at the same time, and literally a week before the launch of the big thing you've been working on for years—well, it's not a very good look, is it?

There's no indication that anything untoward is going on behind the scenes, but even so their departures have caused an understandable ripple amongst some of the MindsEye community. As one person put it in the MindsEye Discord, "Two major players inside the company just resigned. That's concerning!" I'm inclined to agree.

Similar sentiments can be seen on the MindsEye subreddit, where people are already somewhat less than enthusiastic about the game due primarily to a relative dearth of information about it. Back when the metaverse was still a thing, MindsEye was billed as an experience taking place within the Everywhere platform, which has been kicking around—equally ill-explained—since 2016. But I know even less about Everywhere than I do about MindsEye at this point, and it seems to have fallen off the radar: The Everywhere website, for instance, now redirects to a MindsEye site—which is just a trailer and purchase links.

"They’ve done such an incredibly poor job explaining this game I still have no clue what it even is," redditor Greatnes wrote. "It’s just buzzwords and features with nothing linking them or explaining them. I’ve never had this issue with a game before with not even knowing what it is. Game is out in 13 days and they don’t seem interested in actually showing it off beyond carefully scripted gameplay trailers that don’t explain anything."

(MindsEye is, for the record, "a narrative driven, single-player action-adventure thriller" with an estimated 15-hour campaign—it looks a bit like GTA, but don't expect anything on that scale.)

The departures of Build a Rocket Boy's CFO and CLO come less than a week after the company's co-CEO Mark Gerhard caused a stir by claiming publicly that the negative reactions to MindsEye were part of a "concerted effort to trash the game and the studio" ahead of its release, being financed by an unnamed entity. That was not great either, and also very weird.

MindsEye is set to launch on June 10. I've reached out to Build a Rocket Boy for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

"After careful consideration, we've decided to pause work on Zanaris indefinitely," Jagex announced today. "We're committed to delivering the best possible Old School RuneScape experience. With a renewed focus and continued support from our incredible team, we're excited to keep making OSRS even better for everyone.

"We understand that feelings around the project were mixed, and many of the concerns raised were fair. The truth is, there are other areas of the core Old School experience that deserve more attention right now. While Zanaris was ambitious and innovative, it wouldn't have met expectations until much later in development. Rather than stretch our focus, we want to prioritise the things that matter most to you today."

While community servers aren't going to happen, at least not anytime soon, Jagex said the work done on Zanaris prior to the pause will "directly benefit" OSRS in the future in a number of ways. As written in its announcement post:

• Faster, More Creative Events & Content Ideas: The Zanaris team had lots of new gameplay ideas and incredible concepts for events and features. Rather than shelving these, we’ll explore how we can introduce some of these innovations through carefully curated temporary worlds. This means we can give you fresh experiences without impacting the OSRS core you love.
• Improved Server Infrastructure: We’ll be using the cloud server technology developed for Zanaris to enhance our existing game worlds. This means greater reliability during peak periods.
• Wider Region Support: We're exploring options to bring an improved service to underserved regions outside our core world locations (UK, US, Germany, Australia).
• More Engaging Customisation: Zanaris brought us many customisation options that can now be introduced to main OSRS worlds or special event servers. These improvements will allow us to create more exciting time limited events and experimental content for you to enjoy.
• Strengthening the Roadmap: Members of the Zanaris team will be actively contributing to key initiatives on the OSRS roadmap, helping to enhance major content and support the game's long-term development.

Jagex also said that while Zanaris is paused, it's still pursuing the underlying idea behind it—"to empower you to explore unique, experimental content"—through expanded Community Events.

"These would be special, time limited events similar to how DMM [Deadman Mode] and Leagues operate to safely explore and enjoy entirely new types of gameplay and concepts. This could even be a space where you can trial new content before it potentially makes its way into the main game via the usual polling system. You'll play a crucial role in these experiments as it's your feedback that will help us shape the future of OSRS."

A Jagex spokesperson confirmed with PC Gamer that the pause of Zanaris is unrelated to the layoffs Jagex publicized today. OSRS senior community manager Ayiza also said on Reddit that the decision to stop development was made prior to the layoffs.

The layoffs were first reported last week by former Hi-Rez designer ThorDG, whose message on X was quickly shared to the Smite subreddit, where Smite executive producer Alex Cantatore weighed in to confirm "a handful of layoffs in senior management positions" last week.

"Stew [Hi-Rez president Stewart Chisam] is transitioning away from Hi-Rez as part of this," Cantatore wrote. "Travis [executive producer Travis Brown] and Radar [lead producer Tony Jones] were also affected, as well as two folks in senior management on the Rally Here side of the business. I am very sad to be losing all of them.

"Essentially, the board's rationale was that the company had a lot of senior management in relation to our current size. This does not affect our core mission, or any other people working directly on Smite 2. We will continue to focus our efforts on improving the core game and new player experience, while adding more Gods at our current one-per-two-weeks pace."

In a separate post on LinkedIn, Chisam confirmed that he's leaving Hi-Rez, writing that his departure "has been discussed for a long time [with Hi-Rez CEO Erez Goren], but the timing was finally right."

"The last few years have been difficult for Hi-Rez, and for the industry," Chisam wrote. "Certainly not everything has worked out as we hoped, but I think we also have left a unique footprint on the industry—and tried to carve out a space as a mid-size cross-platform games-as-a-service pioneer, relentlessly fighting against giants. The team that remains is absolutely incredible and I know they will enjoy success. The effort and passion they have for the players and for the Smite IP is unmatched."

Jones also confirmed on LinkedIn that he's leaving Hi-Rez "as part of some recent restructuring."

The past couple years, as Chisam said, have not been very good to Hi-Rez. The studio announced Smite 2 in January 2024 with a promise to support both the original game and the sequel, but the wheels came off that plan before the end of the year: In October 2024, Hi-Rez laid off an unspecified number of employees and closed two other games in order to "concentrate our efforts entirely on Smite 2, outside of small teams supporting light updates for Paladins and Smite 1." Earlier this year, Hi-Rez confirmed the end of development of major updates for Smite 1, Paladins, and Rogue Company.

Dune: Awakening is only available on Steam, with a five-day "head start" (advanced access) period beginning on June 5 for players who purchased the deluxe and ultimate editions, and a June 10 release for people who bought the base edition. Throw in a preloading period for players who prepurchased Dune: Awakening, and that's a whole lot of dates and times to sort out. That's why I'm here.

Below you'll find out when you can preload Dune: Awakening on Steam, and the date and time you'll finally be able to play it.

When is the Dune: Awakening release time?

Dune: Awakening pre-load: Wednesday, June 4
Dune: Awakening "head start" (advanced access) launch: Thursday, June 5
Dune: Awakening full launch: Tuesday, June 10

Dune: Awakening early access (head start) release times on Thursday, June 5:

• 7:00 am PDT, June 5 (Los Angeles)
• 10:00 am EDT, June 5 (New York)
• 3:00 pm BST, June 5 (UK)
• 4:00 pm CEST, June 5 (Germany)
• 10:00 pm CST, June 5 (China)

Dune: Awakening full launch times on Tuesday, June 10:

• 7:00 am PDT, June 10 (Los Angeles)
• 10:00 am EDT, June 10 (New York)
• 3:00 pm BST, June 10 (UK)
• 4:00 pm CEST, June 10 (Germany)
• 10:00 pm CST, June 10 (China)

Dune: Awakening pre-loading times (all editions) on Wednesday, June 4:

• 7:00 am PDT, June 4 (Los Angeles)
• 10:00 am EDT, June 4 (New York)
• 3:00 pm BST, June 4 (UK)
• 4:00 pm CEST, June 4 (Germany)
• 10:00 pm CST, June 4 (China)

The layoffs first came to light on the RuneScape subreddit, where users noticed that a number of moderators had seemingly disappeared. RuneScape Mod Hooli commented on the thread to say that there had indeed been a restructuring at Jagex, which included job cuts.

Hooli said the majority of the layoffs were "from non-game dev and non-player facing areas," and that the studio's plans for RuneScape remained unchanged: "Our Roadmap won't change because of these job reductions, and we'll continue the great path we’ve been on with our content."

Jagex confirmed the layoffs in a statement provided to PC Gamer.

"As part of our strategy to build the best experiences for players and grow the RuneScape community, we have proposed changes to our operational structure," a Jagex spokesperson said. "These adjustments are designed to reduce complexity, increase agility, and ensure we are fully focused on the areas that matter most—our games, our players, and our future.

"The vast majority of proposed role reductions are within non-game development and non-player-facing functions, such as operations and administrative support. Our intention is to protect and strengthen the teams directly responsible for delivering value to players. We recognize that any change of this nature is difficult, and we are committed to supporting all impacted employees throughout the transition."

Jagex declined to say how many people will be put out of work as a result of the cuts, but noted that the majority of the cuts will not impact "frontline development or player-facing teams."

The game industry has been plagued by layoffs over the past few years, and despite hopes that 2025 might be the year we all finally say enough, that has so far not been the case. Last week alone saw layoffs at Playtonic, People Can Fly, and Electronic Arts, which closed Cliffhanger Games outright after cancelling the Black Panther game it had in development; previous cuts have also been made at Ubisoft, Cyan Worlds, Mighty Yell, Eidos Montreal, and engine maker Unity.

There are currently 21,500 people playing Russian Fishing 4, and nine days ago it hit its all-time peak of 25,352 players. Bear in mind it's also available directly from the developer, so Steam's only a portion of the playerbase, and we're talking about one very popular fishing game.

The obvious question is why, and one straightforward and boring answer is that, with some very big caveats, Russian Fishing 4 is a pretty great fishing simulation. I downloaded it on Steam this morning and played through the tutorial before going for a spot of proper fishing, and the game has a lovely peaceful atmosphere, relatively straightforward mechanics, and for the most part looks great.

One especially nice touch is that, while you're fishing away, other players' catches pop up in realtime in the lower left of the screen. This does inspire some angling envy, but it's a nice distraction while you're waiting for a bite.

I have to say that I did only seem to catch carp and roaches, but that may just be because I'm fishing at a low level. And here comes the big caveat, and one of the reasons Russian Fishing 4 and its community is quite interesting: this is one of those free-to-play games that seriously tries to nickel-and-dime you.

The pace of progression here is monotonously slow, and the grind is absolutely brutal. You sell the fish you catch to (eventually) afford better equipment to catch bigger fish, and level up at a snail's pace (which is annoying because you can't visit certain spots in the game to fish unless you're a particular level). The actual fishing is fun: the gameplay loop built around it is why "free-to-play" makes so many players groan.

But naturally help is at hand. Russian Fishing 4 is monetised by a Premium membership tier, which basically makes the game work properly. Among other things, Premium grants a 100% bonus to experience with every fish caught, increases the chance of your crafting and fishing skills improving, and unlocks a bunch of other basic functionality that makes the game much more pleasant to play.

Appropriately enough, there's a catch. Premium membership is pretty expensive: three days of it will set you back $3.50, while a month is $15. I was also amazed that the options kept getting larger and larger. 90 days for $40? OK. 360 days for $130? You do you.

But then you see the "lifetime subscription" and Russian Fishing 4 just straight-up asks for $2,000. Two grand! I wonder if it'll carry over to Russian Fishing 5 (answer: nyet).

This side of Russian Fishing 4 is why, despite being a good fishing sim and clearly attracting a lot of would-be anglers, the Steam reviews sit firmly on "mixed" and there's two through-lines to nearly all the negative ones. They're either about the ponderous grind and overbearing monetisation, or they're from Chinese players.

I don't know why, but recently Chinese players seem to have taken against Russian Fishing 4 in a big way. The reasons that their reviews give are slightly mixed, but it's a cocktail of being banned for cheating (erroneously, they claim), an apparent lack of fish, and that old favourite, "greedy devs."

"To this day I don't understand what the cheating programme is, and he never explained it when I consulted the official, he was very arrogant," writes Mage (via machine translation). "If you want to play this game, please keep your computer like a newborn, do not try any uncommon programmes. This is the first time in my gaming career that I have been banned, thank you for all the nagging."

"I thought it was interesting at first, but now I think this game is a complete waste of my time," says QMX (via machine translation). "Are there any fish in this lake? I stand there all day and never catch any fish. The missions are disgusting and pure torture."

Finally,, I had to include this review from a Russian comrade, because it just made me wonder what on Earth happened while they were playing:

"After this shit," says Sanyapyts, "friends become bastards."

Russian Fishing 4 is an odd contemporary phenomenon. There's no doubt it's a good game, and many of the positive reviews reckon it's the best fishing sim on the market even with the monetisation. But that monetisation is so poorly implemented from the player perspective that it does seem to ultimately turn people off, and make them resent the game: it's really notable how many of the negative reviews have several hundred hours on record.

Not that this is likely to bother the developers too much: Russian Fishing 4 is clearly a big success and, even seven years after release, it is continuing to attract and hold the attention of a huge audience. I probably won't return to it—more of a Get Bass man—but there are plenty who do. And hey, if the monetisation bothers you that much? Just check down the side of the couch for a spare two grand.

When I approach a videogame, all I'm looking for is one thing: the ability to construct a small hamlet. This is why I still, in stray moments, catch myself reflecting with a wistful sigh on my time rebuilding Monteriggioni in Assassin's Creed 2 or that one village you build in Breath of the Wild. This is it; this is what it's all about, man.

So my eyes quite naturally bulged out of my head when I saw what looks alarmingly like someone rebuilding a village in the trailer for upcoming tactical RPG Never's End, coming from a gaggle of devs whose previous work includes stuff like Destiny, Triangle Strategy, Octopath Traveller, Enter the Gungeon, and Gang Beasts.

If you're one of the apparently innumerable people who never got over Final Fantasy Tactics (fair play, really), you might want to keep an eye on this one. You're taking turns, you're moving on a grid, you're customising the make-up of your party, and then you're pitting little chibi people against skeletons and ghouls in a winner-takes-all battle to the death.

The gimmick here looks to be that your little guys can mix and match the forces of nature to do unpleasant things to their foes. As a "reincarnated, immortal warrior forged from living metal, able to harness the elements and bend them to your will" you can do things like shuffle heat about the map to create gusts of wind and knock enemies about, drain heat to freeze them, create water currents, and reshape terrain using your command of stone. Which I guess falls under the rubric of 'Earth,' so fine, I'll let you have this one, Never's End.

I'm into it. The possibilities that come from permanently altering the make-up of a map by mucking about with the elements put me in mind of Larian games at their wackiest and most chaotic.

Plus, there's that hamlet building. "Upgrade towns, temples, and other locations to build businesses, establish trade routes, and recruit new companions to your cause," reads the blurb, and I'm afraid that lights up all the lizard regions of my brain like a solar flare. I simply love doing logistics, and even better if by doing logistics I can progressively make a village look cooler. This is why I was put on this Earth, and it's why I'll be checking out Never's End on Steam when it hits in the… near future?