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.

In this article, I'm mostly talking about what we expect to see at the Summer Game Fest livestream, which airs Friday, June 6 at 2 pm Pacific on YouTube, but we'll of course be covering all of the weekend's showcases, which includes our own PC Gaming Show on Sunday.

We'll also be on the ground in LA for Play Days, where we'll be previewing just-announced games, talking to developers, and producing videos in partnership with HP Omen, thanks to whom we've been able to bring along an ice cream truck—both to evoke the Omen Max 16's cooling capabilities and because ice cream is delicious.

All of our SGF coverage will be collected under the Summer Game Fest 2025 tag, and you can find all of our video coverage on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Back to the topic at hand: The Summer Game Fest main event, which will be streamed live from LA's YouTube Theater on Friday.

Not all of the trailers and announcements in the show will come from companies that paid to be in it, and some SGF partners may have trailers in adjacent streams rather than Keighley's, but the list of partnered companies is still the best way to guess at what we'll see. So, without further ado...

New developers with unrevealed games

SGF has a lot of partners this year, but I'll start with just two, which stand out to me as unknown quantities: new developers whose games we haven't seen yet.

• Raw Power Games: According to this Danish developer's website, it's making "a vast medieval sandbox set in Europe" and aims to deliver "an immersive medieval battle experience." The as-yet-untitled game is coming to PC first, and there are some notable designers involved, including a former lead designer on Cyberpunk 2077. There's a twist, though: The studio is really into generative AI.
• Soft Rains: This is a new studio headed by Joel Burgess, whose resume includes Bethesda Game Studios (Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3/4/76), Ubisoft Toronto (Watch Dogs Legion), and Capybara Games (Grindstone, Below). It's making a singleplayer sci-fi action game.

Big studios and publishers

The following Summer Game Fest partners are notable to me either because we can easily guess what big game they're showing, or because there are so many things they could show that we might get a surprise from them.

• 505 Games: Publisher of Wu Chang: Fallen Feathers, which we first saw in 2021.
• 2K Games: Mafia: The Old Country seems likely, and Borderlands 4 maybe.
• Bandai Namco: Its upcoming games include The Blood of the Dawnwalker, Little Nightmares 3, and Shadow Labyrinth.
• Capcom: Probably not Resident Evil 9 but you're welcome to cross your fingers.
• CD Projekt: Feels early for The Witcher 4, but it did just feature in a tech demo.
• Embark: Maker of The Finals and the upcoming Arc Raiders.
• IO Interactive: Revealed its 007 game at Sony's State of Play.
• Square Enix: Presumably not just involved to promote the Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy set.
• Techland: Announced Dying Light: The Beast last year, so expect to see that.
• Xbox: Microsoft has its own showcase on Sunday, but it might tease some games that it'll show in more detail there. There's tons it could be ready to show. To name a few: The Outer Worlds 2, Ninja Gaiden 4, Fable, State of Decay 3, Gears of War: E-Day, Clockwork Revolution.
• PlayStation: Aside from Death Stranding 2, Sony could show any of its upcoming PS5 exclusives, though it's already showed off lots at State of Play.
• Epic Games: Since Tim Sweeney's shop has a publishing wing these days, it could bring any number of things along, not just Fortnite news.
• Pearl Abyss: The maker of MMO Black Desert Online has a new action RPG called Crimson Desert on the way.
• Sega: Probably talkin' Switch 2, but could have surprise for us.
• Steam: Gabe's kingdom streams the various SGF shows and puts on a related sale event. Probably won't have any big announcement, but there could be something about SteamOS or the Steam Deck. Valve is also rumored to be making an all-in-one VR headset.

Even more big and small SGF partners

And finally, here are the rest of this year's Summer Game Fest partners and what they're known for or are likely to show up with. It's a long list:

• 1047 Games: The studio behind Splitgate 2.
• Amazon Games: Aside from its MMOs, it's got a game called King of Meat coming. No surprises rumored that I know of, but you never know.
• Annapurna Interactive: Lots of upcoming Annapurna games could show up.
• Atari: The old-timer is publishing new games again.
• Bellring Games: Making Mistfall Hunter, an "extraction RPG."
• Blumhouse Games: A fount of horror games
• Coffee Stain: Was recently part of some Embracer restructuring news.
• Devolver Digital: Doing its own event focused on a game called Ball X Pit.
• Dotemu: Known for reviving classic series, but just announced an original game
• Dreamhaven: Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime's new publisher.
• Enhance: Known for cool experimental games.
• Focus Entertainment: Just published RoadCraft.
• Frontier: Maker of Planet Coaster 2 and Elite Dangerous.
• Funcom: About to launch Dune Awakening.
• iam8bit Presents: Publisher of collector's editions and other merch.
• Kakao Games: Publisher behind MMOs Chrono Odyssey and ArchAge Chronicles.
• Kinetic Games: Creator of Phasmophobia.
• Kuro Games: The company behind Wuthering Waves.
• Level Infinite: Studio making upcoming extraction shooter Exoborne.
• Magic the Gathering: There's a new Final Fantasy set.
• Megabit: A publisher with several upcoming games.
• Meta Quest: VR headsets and games.
• Mundfish: Atomic Heart developer.
• NCSoft: Publisher of Guild Wars 2 and a number of other MMOs.
• Nekki: Promises "gun fu" in the upcoming Spine, which looks cool.
• Neowiz: Could be showing off the Lies of P DLC.
• Netmarble: Released a Game of Thrones game recently.
• Nexon: Vindictus: Defying Fate,is one of its upcoming games.
• Niantic: The Pokémon Go studio.
• Nintendo Switch 2: The new Switch launches June 5.
• Nuverse: Marvel Snap publisher.
• Playstack: Publisher of some excellent games, including Balatro.
• PlaySide: Its next game is Mouse: PI for Hire, an FPS in the style of 1930s cartoons.
• PM Studios: Has several upcoming games.
• Razer: Maker of the mouse I'm using.
• Supermassive Games: This'll be Directive 8020, which is out in October.
• Xsolla: This is a fintech company, so probably nothing exciting for us.
• Yacht Club Games: The Shovel Knight dev, whose next game is Mina The Hollower.

That's a hell of a lot of potential announcements and trailers, and doesn't include however many developers will be showing their games at SGF without sponsoring the event. For instance, we know to expect an "intense body horror" game called ILL (see a clip here).

We also know that beta access to Soulframe, the new game from the Warframe developer, will be given out via Twitch drops during the stream, so expect to hear about that. (Fun fact: It's not called Soulframe in China because there's a game developer who goes by the name Soulframe already.)

And finally, it wouldn't be a Summer Game Fest without Hideo Kojima. He'll be at the show, if there were any doubt. There's also a separate Death Stranding 2 stream on Sunday, which is hosted by Keighley. The bond grows even stronger.

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.

We reached out to the developer to see if he was willing to share any secrets or reveals about the game, but didn't hear anything back, so all we have to go on is what's available to the public. So, in short, it's a horror choose-your-own-adventure experience. One that has been brewing for a long time, although slowed by writer's block, according to a Bluesky post from last year.

Is there a Welcome To The Dark Place release date?

There's no firm release date yet for Welcome To The Dark Place, beyond the loose 'October' listed on the game's store page. Most likely, expect it sometime around Halloween, although given how long in development and already-delayed this game has been, that could easily slip further.

Welcome To The Dark Place might be the Lethal Company developer's longest project. There's some early alpha gameplay footage lurking around in the dark corners of the developer's YouTube channel from way back in 2019, giving us a glimpse at an early, entirely text-based version of the game.

Welcome To The Dark Place trailers

Judging by the gameplay footage (including the older 2019 alpha clips), Welcome To The Dark Place is a purely single-player experience. A stark choose-your-own-adventure style game of multiple dialogue choices in white against a stark black background, accompanied by unsettling music, sound effects and possibly the occasional low-fi cutscene.

Welcome To The Dark Place setting and features

What's the setting for Welcome To The Dark Place?

As for its setting, it seems to be a contemporary, if twisted Earth, but with strange technology. The early gameplay clips show the player experimenting with a strange flying mechanical dragon, and mention of a potentially threatening phenomenon known only as The Cloud. Sounds like there's plenty of mysteries to be unraveled here.

There's nothing to suggest this will be tied into the world of Lethal Company or any of his older games, although the worlds he tends to create are fragmented and nebulous enough to be a bit frayed at the edges, operating mostly on dream (or nightmare) logic. This also probably means it won't be shying away from intense situations, as the content description features mention of suicide, self-harm, deaths and 'grotesque situations'.

Zeekerss has been making horror games since childhood

It should also be noted that Lethal Company didn't come out of nowhere. Zeekerss has been making games (and primarily horror ones at that) since he was nine years old. Starting out with making SCP-inspired adventures for Roblox, before graduating to native PC releases as a teenager. Before Lethal Company, he released three games, all of which are genuinely worth checking out. Each feels like part of the puzzle that is Lethal Company, and might provide some clue as to how Welcome To The Dark Place will feel, look and sound:

It Steals (2020) is a tense, panicky maze horror game where each stage is patrolled by a different monster. Simple conceptually, but each enemy has enough quirks to its behavior (echoing the later Lethal Company) to make each segment a really distinct challenge. Dead Seater (2021) is a free, more traditional survival horror adventure, minus the opportunity to fight back. Once a monster becomes aware of your presence in this warren of claustrophobic corridors (made all the more suffocating with fixed camera angles), running is all you can do.

But before Lethal Company, there was The Upturned (2023), a great little horror-comedy adventure about a lost soul trying to find their hotel room in the afterlife through a series of sometimes scary (and frequently slapstick) misadventures via a malfunctioning elevator into the beyond. While this is a solely single-player experience, Lethal Company's slapstick roots clearly originate here.

So what does this all tell us? Well, Zeekerss is a one-man horror band with a penchant for situations that start out quiet, slowly build up tension and then release everything in a truly frenzied burst of energy. Whether we'll see that echoed in the game's prose and decisions is yet to be seen, although I'm expecting some strange vibes, given that the author himself feels like the game's ambient soundscapes hit the same notes as Sufjan Stevens' famously dour album Carrie And Lowell.

Lastly, on a personal note, I'm happy to see a small developer hit it big, only to act like it's no big deal and continue treating the medium as a personal creative outlet. While I'd love to have seen what a professional team under his leadership could do, I've got huge respect for this move, and can't wait to see what the Dark Place holds for us in Skeleton Appreciation Month.

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.

"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.

Time slows to a crawl and crystalises, as adrenaline and cortisol scream through my system. I make the choice then and there: Killing the boss is more important than reviving our Duchess. I push past her, Executor's Blade in hand. And then—

Another unfortunate evening approaches. Me and a friend push our luck killing a boss as the storm closes in. We have flasks, we'll be fine. Like children giddily fleeing the scene of a cookie jar, I watch as my health ticks down. My friend asks me if I have any flasks left. I say yes. I wait for the last second, only to remember that there's a goddamn animation when you drink. I keel over mid-sip.

Elsewhere in the neverending night: The run isn't going well, but it's still salvageable. We're rushing for a church to upgrade our flasks. I scrabble to scale up a cliff. Down below, a rock-flinging gravity miner decides my time has come. I make it halfway up the crag before I'm sniped out of goddamn nowhere and I plummet to the worms below. I lie in the muck below, deadly rain searing through the plates of my armour, snickering under my helmet as blood fills my mouth.

In what universe would I have predicted that an Elden Ring spinoff, of all games, would be so gut-bustingly funny—and so often, too?

For Super Limgrave!

Fellow writer Ted Litchfield coined a term last week that I can't get out of my head: "You got Nightreigned". It's used to describe the capricious and merciless way in which Elden Ring will flatten you into paste. It's also a sitcom catchphrase, it's a punchline. It's a perfect encapsulation of the Nightreign experience, and yet it could also be accompanied by a laugh-track and a slide whistle.

That's because Nightreign shares a huge amount of DNA with another game I've burst into fits of childish giggles at—Helldivers 2. A game that, by the admission of its devs, has a slapstick bent inspired heavily by the absolute shenanigans of a good D&D table.

Nightreign and Helldivers 2 are two extremely different comedy routines with the same final joke: At any point, at any time, a procedural set of circumstances can align to completely whomp you off the face of the earth with such immediate cruelty that the only thing you can do is laugh.

I'm fighting for Super Earth, and I try to dive away from an oncoming tank only to bonk my head and get shredded under its treads. I'm fighting for the Roundtable Hold, and I get poisoned three times trying to stumble around the same ruins. It's the same play being held in different theatres.

I'm frustrated more often at Nightreign, mind, for some of the obvious reasons. The soldiers of Super Earth are immediately replaceable, and it's not long before you get back in the action. Meanwhile, each venture in Nightreign is a half-hour investment—abject failure may be hilarious, but it stings.

Doom in Nightreign is also slower. In Helldivers 2, you can simply allow the reinforcement budget to run down if you aren't having fun—a bad start in Nightreign, however, can obliterate the rest of your run, forcing you to amble along to the Night 1 or 2 bosses and wait for your scheduled execution.

All things as they are meant to be

Despite this, I'm convinced there's a similar mirth to be found somewhere. Nightreign absolutely requires a deeper zen than its cousin—but while a souls game that's consistently funny is a novelty, one that asks you to change your mindset or die mad isn't new at all.

Every souls game I've ever played has demanded I shift my neurons around a bit. The OG Dark Souls taught me not to be afraid of a challenge. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice taught me that no problem was insurmountable as long as I stayed calm and remained analytic, the eye of the storm.

The thing Nightreign is working on right now is my patience for misfortune and, moreover, setbacks. I get flustered and frustrated at boss runbacks, but that's what Nightreign is—a repeated 30-minute boss runback on loop.

Each Nightlord is going to take a few earnest tries to even start understanding. You're gonna get whacked horribly, terribly, unfairly, at random, because your teammate didn't stick around, because you tried to solo a boss, because your build sucks, because your parry timing was off—and every time that happens to you, you're gonna have to spend 10-30 minutes getting back to that point again.

But that element of slapstick—uncompromising, unexpected, and random misfortune—is also what takes the edge off. The solution to looking into the abyss, says Nightreign, is to point and laugh.

Gnoster is one of the six Nightreign bosses you unlock after beating Gladius for the first time. Then, you need to defeat three more Nightlords to unlock Night Aspect, the true final boss. Although Sentient Pest can be tough, at least it's not the Darkdrift Knight, so I recommend prioritising learning how to kill it to tick off another Nightlord.

It's also worth noting that the Sentient Pest can invade expeditions against other Nightlords, where they'll appear as an enemy stealing your runes via a plague of locusts. Dealing with this invasion is completely different from their dedicated boss, so I won't go over that here.

Elden Ring Nightreign Sentient Pest tips

To beat the bug duo, you need the right equipment. Of course, this includes taking the best rune farming route and keeping an eye out for legendary weapons that suit your build, but there are a few specifics to understand too:

1. Get a fire weapon or spells

Gnoster is weak to fire damage, which is no doubt music to your ears as it's generally the easiest affinity to come across. Use the map overlay to search locations marked with the fire symbol during a run, or simply use the Night of the Beast relic you got from defeating Gladius to get guaranteed fire on your starting weapon and upgrade it using smithing stones (and possibly the Shifting Earth: Crater event if it's active).

You can also get a specific buff on relics unique to Wylder that give his abilities fire damage, making him one of the stronger melee picks for this boss.

2. Prioritise poison resistance and magic damage negation

Gnoster deals two different damage types beyond pure physical: the scorpion and moth both spread poison clouds, but the moth also fires magic projectiles. Talismans, relics, and passive upgrades can give you poison resistance and magic damage negation, but don't overlook neutralising boluses. These cure poison, but also sneakily heal you and improve your resistances.

3. Level up and get flask upgrades

While Gnoster isn't the hardest boss, I recommend reaching level 12 before battling the bugs, simply because it can be quite a drawn-out fight and splitting up from your allies is a key strategy. Taking relics with increased rune acquisition will help with this, as will grabbing the buff from small trees surrounded by a golden glow. You should also max out your flask charges by visiting churches, so you've got as much healing as you can.

How to beat Gnoster, Wisdom of Night, in Elden Ring Nightreign

The Sentient Pest is perhaps the most unique boss in Nightreign, and it requires an equally unique approach to take it down. While most of the characters at the top of our Nightreign tier list will do good, I recommend the following for a good team composition:

• Ironeye: Ranged weapons are the only way to damage the moth when they're flying, and no one does this better than Ironeye. Add his Marking skill into the mix, which increases the damage your entire team deals to the target, and he's a must-pick against the Sentient Pest.
• Wylder: He's a mobile fighter who can keep up with the pace of the fight much more than other melee characters. His ultimate art also deals massive damage, including high stance damage. If you have his unique relics that add fire damage to his skills, even better.
• Duchess: Her Restage skill repeats recent damage against targets (including the affinity boost from using fire against Gnoster), easily adding bonus burst damage when you get an opening. Thanks to her high intelligence stat, Duchess is just as good with a staff as she is with daggers, so she works well against both bugs, and she has decent dex, so she can use a bow in a pinch.
• Raider: His slow, hard-hitting melee playstyle largely limits him to dealing with the scorpion (unless you find a great bow), but that's not an issue when he does it this well. High stagger damage and survivability mean he can go toe-to-toe with the scorpion while your ranged allies focus on the moth.

You'll generally want to have two ranged characters and one melee fighter (or hybrids like Duchess), and split your team in two. The ranged players take on the moth while the fighter keeps the scorpion busy until the bugs combine.

1. Watch out for these attacks

Since Gnoster is technically two bosses in one, there's quite a bit to keep track of depending on which one you're fighting. Once the shared health bar reaches around 60%, the bugs will combine into one and share some abilities:

2. Split up in phase one

Facing one boss is often hard enough, so don't even attempt to fight both the scorpion and the moth during phase one. One or two people should fight the moth, who takes the most damage, while another player should duke it out with the scorpion elsewhere in the arena. By keeping the bugs separate, you're keeping your allies safe from their attacks. Don't drop your guard, though, sometimes they'll change their target and randomly lash out, so always keep an eye on the boss you're not actively fighting.

3. Bring ranged damage

Don't repeat what happened on my first attempt, where I had a team full of melee characters swinging at the clouds. It's incredibly hard to beat Gnoster without at least one ranged damage dealer, in fact, the easiest way is to bring multiple. Sure, you could technically ignore the moth entirely during phase one and only damage the tanky scorpion, but this means you'll have to deal with both bosses attacking you. This inevitably leads to pure chaos and taking way more damage than you have to, plus it takes even longer because the scorpion is more resistant to damage.

4. Save ultimates for phase two

With the moth flying about and teleporting, and the scorpion burrowing or hardening its carapace, it's not always easy to land an ultimate ability, or follow up on any potential stagger. You're best off saving high HP and stagger damage ultimates like Wylder's Onslaught Stake or Ironeye's Single Shot until the bugs combine, where it's much easier to land both and capitalise on these key attacks.

If you're trying to complete all the Elden Ring Nightreign Remembrances for each character, then I'm sorry to say that you'll be required to beat Fulghor on at least one occasion. Ironeye, the best character in our Nightreign tier list, demands you kill Fulghor in Chapter 6, and right after you unlock Revenant, you'll be sent to kill Fulghor or Gladius again, the first of the Nightreign bosses. It shouldn't be a surprise when I recommend you kill Gladius again over challenging the Champion of Nightglow.

Elden Ring Nightreign Darkdrift Knight tips

As one of the hardest bosses, Fulghor demands that you start gearing up correctly immediately to have the best chance of beating him. Of course, this includes taking the best rune farming route and keeping an eye out for legendary weapons that suit your build, but there are a few specifics to understand too:

1. Get a lightning weapon or spells

Though the symbol looks annoyingly similar to holy damage, Fulghor is weak to lightning. Dealing enough lightning damage can stagger him and even interrupt when he's casting holy spells, so it's a game-changer in beating him. When you enter a run, use the map overlay to search locations marked with the lightning symbol, or use relics that give your starting weapon lightning damage and upgrade it using smithing stones (and the Shifting Earth: Crater event if it's active). You can also use relics that boost lightning damage to make your attacks even more effective.

When luck really isn't on your side, remember that you can also use lightning grease to temporarily coat your weapon. If you're taking this approach, bring two stacks of lightning grease to be safe.

2. Scarlet rot and poison damage save time

My biggest pet peeve with any boss fight is when they move around so much that you can't even attack them back, and that couldn't be more applicable to Fulghor, but there is a remedy. To avoid this fight taking a centaur-y, you can use damage-over-time ailments, scarlet rot or poison, to damage Fulghor when he's running around out of reach. Poison is easy enough to find, but scarlet rot is typically rarer, so I recommend completing the Shifting Earth: Rotted Woods event if it's active in your run.

3. Prioritise holy damage negation

Most of Fulghor's attacks, at least the most painful ones, deal holy damage. You probably already learned the hard way, but he hits like a truck, so anything you can do to take the edge off is worth getting. I recommend using relics with holy damage negation if you have them (check the Small Jar Bazaar in the Roundtable Hold if you don't) and keep your eyes peeled for the Haligdrake talisman during your expedition. Get both a suitable relic and the talisman, and you'll have around 25% holy damage negation.

4. Level up and get flask upgrades

I recommend getting as close to level 15 as you can before facing Fulghor, as each level gives you more health, stamina, and overall damage. Taking relics with increased rune acquisition will help with this, as will grabbing the buff from small trees surrounded by a golden glow. You should also max out your flask charges by visiting churches.

How to beat Fulghor, Champion of Nightglow, in Elden Ring Nightreign

Even if you interrupt key attacks, Fulghor rarely stops moving, making it hard to get into melee range. Characters with a range advantage or high mobility generally come out on top in this fight, though it's not a bad idea to bring a tank along too for a balanced team composition:

• Wylder: With his grappling hook, he's fast at repositioning and re-engaging with Fulghor after he moves. His ultimate art deals massive damage to both HP and stance, which could give you a clear window to go ham. It helps that Wylder's preferred weapon type is a greatsword, the perfect balance between speed and power.
• Ironeye: Master of the bow, he's able to deal consistent damage to Fulghor even when he's dashing around the arena. His Marking skill not only increases the damage your entire team deals to the target, but it can also be used as a dodge to survive virtually any attack.
• Duchess: Her Restage skill repeats recent damage against targets (including the affinity boost from using lightning against Fulghor), easily adding bonus burst damage when you get an opening. Her enhanced dodge also helps to avoid the Darkdrift Knight's many AoE attacks.
• Raider: While he's slow, especially with his love of colossal weapons, Raider is fantastic at staggering enemies, which is really useful against Fulghor. You'll need stamina-boosting talismans to make him more viable though, given all the running around.

Whatever you do, I'd generally advise against Revenant for Fulghor. His sweeping attacks wipe out her summons quickly, and most have a hard time keeping up with him anyhow. Plus, if you're building Revenant as a ranged spellcaster, you might as well play Recluse.

Nevertheless, it's time to put the Darkdrift Knight in the dirt, so here's how to beat Fulghor:

1. Watch out for these attacks

Fulghor has a handful of deadly attacks that either need to be dodged or interrupted to avoid an untimely death:

2. Don't get greedy

What makes Darkdrift Knight arguably more difficult than Night Aspect is the incredible precision you need to avoid his attacks. More so than most, you really need to wait for the right moment to strike, so don't expect to pull off more than a few hits before you need to return your focus to dodging.

3. Interrupt and stun frequently using lightning (especially melee)

It's worth reiterating that Fulghor is weak to lightning. Not only will you deal bonus damage, but you can also stagger and interrupt him during key attacks, like the holy spear slam. If everyone on your team has lightning damage, whether it's from your weapon, a spell, grease, or even a bomb, it makes the fight much more manageable. He's also far easier to stun with lightning melee weapons than, say, a bow, if you can get close enough to hit him.

4. Reviving skills and ultimates are invaluable

Unless you've completely mastered his attacks, you'll inevitably get hit and eventually die. Due to Fulghor's oppressive moveset, you generally won't have time to hit an ally to revive them if they've died more than once already. Wending Grace to self-revive, or saving ultimates to revive (like Guardian, Revenant, or even Ironeye), goes a long way to keeping your team in the fight.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's a sense of confidence in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. You can see it in the world design, feel it in the colorful cast of characters. 'Skyrim but you're also haunted by the ghost of King Arthur' is a concept that demands ambition.

But developer Questline is an untested studio, and fumbling the ball was always going to be a strong possibility. After dozens of hours, I’m happy to report that we have a genuinely fascinating open-world first-person RPG experience on our hands.

It's not without blemishes, though. Yes, Tainted Grail is sure of itself, but for every moment worth celebrating there's also a frustrating enemy encounter or a confusing UI feature to endure. The resulting game can be summed up in one word: inconsistent.

Setting the Round Table

Tainted Grail is a dark fantasy take on Arthurian legend set in the same world as the popular board game; in fact, it came to be thanks to the wild success of the 2018 Kickstarter campaign for the tabletop game.

Being a first-person open-world RPG, Tainted Grail invites comparisons to genre mainstays like The Elder Scrolls and Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and it unabashedly leans into those influences—it even opens with an Oblivion-style prison break.

You'll level up skills as you use them, rewarding whatever playstyle you happen to be rolling with at the time; I tended to favor a battlemage-style build with a magic spell in one hand and a sword in the other. Each cast grew my magic power, each swing made me stronger with one-handed weapons. I've always been a big fan of this system in the Elder Scrolls games, and it's used to good effect here.

There are traditional skill trees, too. More than 20 of them, in fact, offering more substantial upgrades to your abilities. I felt overwhelmed in the early game when deciding what playstyle to try out, but skill points are plentiful enough that I felt free to experiment.

A wyrd wide world

The world is also a lot of fun to explore. The realm of Avalon is divided into three different hub regions, each with their own storyline and biome. The environments are very pretty and loaded with points of interest to explore, like caves and abandoned villages. I found something useful—a new piece of armor, a new crafting recipe—almost everywhere I looked. There's very little filler space in the game's large maps.

During your journey, you'll make several forays into the "Wyrdrealm," an alternate dimension populated by spirits and otherworldly monsters. The design of this realm is filled with character, from huge statues of eldritch creatures to a skyline of crumbling towers. Trips here were always full of surprises and I often looked forward to the next mission that took me to the Wyrdrealm.

For me, though, Tainted Grail shines brightest with its characters. Every NPC has something worthwhile to contribute, and most of them offer side quests that add new wrinkles to the larger story. They can also be surprisingly funny: you'll help a nobleman fake his death to get out of a loveless marriage, uncover the lair of an undead chef chasing the next great meal, assist a woman who accidentally turned her husband into a pig, and more. That sense of humor extends to gear too, with a haunted chest piece that screams in agony as you take damage and a magic spell that can turn enemies into cheese.

The larger story is a lot of fun too. Awaken Realms and Questline have presented a unique take on the tale of King Arthur, steering it into dark fantasy territory. There are a lot of clever twists on familiar tropes, like the roles played by Arthur's closest confidants, including Galahad and Merlin.

Tainted Grail is ambitious and grand in scope, so it's surprising that it's as technically sound as it is. Games of this scale tend to come with a bunch of bugs and glitches, but I experienced very little during my 40-plus hours; the most glaring hiccup I encountered was a few dropped lines of dialogue. It's likely that the game's two years in early access on Steam played a large role in this technical feat.

Sword in the groan

There's a lot to like about Tainted Grail, but Questline's ambition runs ahead of its execution in myriad small ways: little quirks here and there that don't amount to much individually, but, taken together, lessen the immersion and lead to some frustration and monotony.

My biggest complaint here is with some of the worldbuilding. I don't want to disparage the work of any voice actors, but it feels like many of them weren't briefed on some important bits of lore. For example, Cuanacht, the name of the second region of the game, is pronounced at least four different ways. This is true for a handful of other proper nouns, too, like "Dal Riata," and "Osbryht," and it makes the world feel less cohesive. (This could have been a way to differentiate between cultures, but I didn't notice any in-game reasons for the different pronunciations.)

Some more variety in enemy design would have been welcome as well. You can only kill so many bandits with the same face before it becomes rote, and the liberal use of palette-swapped monsters makes the world of Avalon feel smaller than it is. The upside is that boss encounters feel novel and unique, such as a Davy Jones-type squid pirate, or a deer spirit that can clone itself. With boss designs like that, it's a shame the intervening chaff feels so repetitive.

There are some design decisions that I'm not too keen on. Being limited to only four weapon loadouts was a bit disappointing, and having to menu my way back to the weapons screen got tedious every time I wanted to experiment with something new. By and large, though, the first-person combat feels smooth—sword swings have weighty impact and spells explode in showers of sparks and ice. However, there are a couple difficulty spikes that caught me off guard. There were times when I'd breeze through most of a dungeon's monsters, taking them out with just a couple spell casts, only to come up against a boss that may as well have been a brick wall for all the damage I did. This didn't happen often but it was discouraging when it did.

Exploring the world's dungeons and caves offers worthwhile rewards, but the design of these places is often disorienting. Pathways twist and turn, crossing over themselves in maze-like tunnels. I got lost more than a few times in these labyrinths, and the lack of a minimap was very much noticed. Confusingly, you can't seem to be able to access the full world map inside dungeons either.

There's a lot to like about Tainted Grail, and the good outweighs the bad by a fair margin. In a genre largely dominated by Bethesda and Obsidian, it's good to see a new developer making its mark, and Questline is punching above its weight.

It would probably be a lot to ask that you become the most active municipal volunteer in the troubled local community, restore the divinity of their god, and embark on a quest to rejuvenate the world after a devastating apocalyptic event. Well, you clearly don't have what it takes to be an Earth Dancer.

Kaguya, one of the two possible protagonists of Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, does have what it takes. Never has there been a more concerned citizen, a more selfless activist, or a more ambitious amateur farmer. She gets knocked out of the heavens after a violent battle with a mysterious figure on a black dragon; she gets thrust into tales of Celestial Collapse and Blight and meets the god of spring; she takes out a hoe and starts planting turnips. She also does some adventuring, romances some people, builds a house or two, learns to cook, and does her best to save the world. We love a Renaissance woman.

Most of Guardians of Azuma is a fairly straightforward action RPG. Kaguya has multiple choices of melee weapons, a bow, and sacred artifacts given to her by the gods, which do elemental damage. Weapons can be upgraded or enhanced, and later on she can acquire talismans to aid her in combat. This implies a diversity to combat that doesn't materialize—I never encountered a fight in the game that I couldn't brute force with my sword, whatever sacred artifact I was feeling at the time, and an inventory full of cheese omelets.

Most battles won't need strategizing, though enemies do have weaknesses and bosses can be stunned as well as just hacked at. I wasn't particularly bothered with the shallowness of combat—it's fun to spin in circles with my Fan Of Death and hear my party members chatter at the monsters we encounter, and it doesn't distract from the parts of the game that are more engaging. Let the friends I've recruited go slice up oni for me: I've gotta float around with a parasol to find frog statues for a local child.

The polar opposite of combat is the game's farm sim/village developer/landscape architect aspects, which can be as simple or as complicated as your heart desires. My urban planning style ended up being "function over form," which means I've got four bustling, productive villages that look like they were zoned by an over-caffeinated squirrel. Players with more of an eye for aesthetics will have fun messing with decorations, of which there are plenty to find within the world, and the development mechanics are easy to use (though there's some frustrating friction at the beginning, when crafting basic terrain tiles requires an annoying amount of menu navigation).

Once you can start recruiting villagers they'll be assigned to work in your absence, which means Kaguya only has to make a few decisions in her role as Literally Everyone's Mayor before the money starts rolling in, leaving her free to wander around and fight or flirt or make more onigiri.

There's a lot going on in this game. Kaguya's got to explore, fight monsters, and discover what her amnesiac protagonist deal is, but she's also got to build up these villages, do some farming, socialize, cook approximately a hundred thousand recipes, revive the divinity of some gods, and go to bed before midnight. At first it's unwieldy, these systems bordering on excessive in what is actually not a huge game world. Kaguya spends a ton of time retracing her steps as she slowly unravels the truth about what's going on with Azuma. Early on, that's a weird juxtaposition: why do I have so much I can do and so little to do it with?

Time and progression pay off extremely well to combat that imbalance. The social mechanics reward long investments with different characters, and it takes a while to wade out of the shallower aspects of their personal quests. The villages you're developing are irregularly stocked with dev zones and existing infrastructure, so some have easy early rewards whereas others get a boost at later levels. And the story simply gets more interesting later in the game. The first 10 or so hours are almost off-puttingly busy, but as the game progresses, the feeling of busyness turns into a feeling of comfortable denseness.

It is satisfying and occasionally heartwarming to see characters I met in Spring Village settling down to eat a meal in Autumn Village, or to know that I'll be able to fulfill a request of a villager in Summer Village because my barn in Winter Village is producing the eggs I need for the recipe. Because so much is automated, it escapes the player-centric god-king-of-all-I-survey trap it could have easily fallen into; Kaguya's role, both narratively and mechanically, is just to get the ball rolling, to bring life back to something so it can continue living. Build a house, plant a field, and there will be people to till it, to water and harvest, to fish and mine and log and tend to animals and run shops.

It's one instance of the game's throughline: That the point of helping someone, or healing something, is so they can stand on their own.

The social system is the other standout. It's regrettably frontloaded with some of the weakest writing and least interesting characters, but once you unlock more villages the roster of characters you can befriend is varied and charming, with some personal quests that go in really delightful directions (I have lost hours of my life to chasing around mischievous shapeshifters, advertising local businesses, and making gamers be social.)

Because personal quest progression is tied to the calendar, and because there's no limit to how many characters you can interact with in a day, it fits in well between main quest progress, exploration, and village development. I thoroughly enjoyed when I'd be wandering around only to spot someone I'd been talking to in the distance and sprint after them to go grab a bite to eat together.

Out of all the characters you can meet in Rune Factory, the best ones by far are the gods you awaken throughout the story. Without spoilers (because there are some legitimately fun reveals in their roster) the fact that the gods have both main story relevance and sidequest social relevance means they have the most time to develop, even the ones you don't meet until later in the game.

Kaguya often takes a step back in these parts of the story, and the quirks, neuroses, fears, and desires of the gods get to take center stage. This is excellent, since they resemble less a pantheon of powerful deities and more an impromptu reunion of bickering siblings that have been ignoring each other's texts, complete with blithe nicknames, established alliances, and a handful of held grudges. They're just as invested as Kaguya in restoring their divinity and investigating the cause of the Celestial Collapse, but also some of them are socially anxious or easily distracted or owe someone some money, so they'll need a hand here or there.

Those are the two levels the game operates on: help save the world, or help a buddy out. At the beginning Kaguya is a stranger, literally crash-landed in the shrine of Spring Village, with no memory of her place in the world. Rune Factory feels like a stranger to itself at this point, with all of the moving parts present but watching each other warily, not sure how to work together yet. As Kaguya settles into herself, as she engages with her environment, helps the village and the villagers, and starts her divine journey, the game matches her.

On the macro level she collects the allies and information needed to figure out what's going on with the Celestial Collapse and how to fix it. On the micro level, she collects the resources and knowledge needed to figure out how to cook honey toast for a demanding pastry chef. She might be an Earth Dancer for the gods, to bring them back to life and guide them towards the rejuvenation of the world, but in every other aspect she's just a person trying to help out where she can.

I'd almost forgotten the feeling. For a few minutes, the early glimpse of Witcher 4 felt like the E3 conference reveals of my youth.

It wasn't the graphics tech itself that excited me. I won't deny that I was impressed by CDPR's advancements in simulated horse meat—horse realism is about the only form of videogame realism I'm invested in. Otherwise, I think the drive for graphical realism is a doomed pursuit, contributing to ever-increasing budgets that provoke ever-increasing layoffs when publishers don't see suitably infinite profits.

On a technical level, The Witcher 4 looks prettier, as big budget open world games inevitably do. Starfield's graphics tech was better than Skyrim's. Assassin's Creed Shadows has more polygons than Valhalla. But what's the value of fidelity independent of art direction? If an open world's character isn't getting the same investment as its graphics tech, how interesting can it be?

Considering how little of them I've been compelled to play over the last decade, the answer—for me—seems like "not terribly."

That's why, as CDPR sent Ciri through the Kovirian woodland, the first thing that sent me into sicko mode wasn't the individual pine needles of Nanite foliage or the speed of asset streaming. It was this nasty little signpost.

Look at that thing. What a charming little piece of culture. Where CDPR would've been well within its rights to slap down a generic wooden pole with signs pointing at nearby landmarks, it took the opportunity to start using shapes, colors, and materials to begin establishing a regional texture for Kovir.

And as Ciri rides into the port town of Valdrest? Man. That's a place.

Videogame fantasy is often imagined as a generic pastiche of dingy ideas of medieval society. Valdrest is colorful, and more importantly, it feels regional: wooden beams of market pavilions are painted in striking cerulean with rusty red accents. Those same colors alternate on the boards of nearby homes. They're echoed in the geometric designs of the pottery on sale in trader stalls.

Headwear and armor feels distinctly Slavic—though there are noticeable distinctions between what's worn by human troops walking the streets and a handful of armored dwarves lingering in the marketplace. There are characters with visible disabilities. There are noticeable differences in class and station.

And yes, it looks good. The textures are lovely. The lighting evokes that combination of warmth and chill of a sunny winter day. When CDPR packs the town square with NPC circusgoers, it's impressive that the PS5 running the tech demo doesn't lurch with the effort. I'm looking at the fidelity meters and they're all reading high. Technology is happening.

Ten years from now, though, I'm not going to remember how crowded the square is. But I might remember the variety of garb the villagers are wearing. I might remember the poor bastard in the sackcloth hood who only has time to glance over at the performers while he carts an ale keg, or how I tried to decide whether the longer cut of a dwarf onlooker's tunic was unique in the crowd. I might remember how CDPR seemed invested in Valdrest feeling like a place with its own context and character.

As a comparison, I checked back in on Starfield's first gameplay reveal from 2022 to see how much had stuck with me, figuring that it'd be useful to contrast CDPR's showing with the work of another of the industry's open world watermarks. All I could remember from the first look at Starfield was a bit of gun gameplay on a barren alien planet. While revisiting the video, I was surprised to find I'd forgotten that Bethesda had shown gameplay of the capital city of New Atlantis. And Akila City. And whatever the name of that planet was with the drugs they make from space fish.

Through that rewatch, the reasons became clear. The locations shown all shared a washed out, low-saturation color palette. They were intercut with shots of industrial hallways that—if you squint—would fit right at home in a Fallout vault. The NPCs dressed in, interacted with, and prepared to pilot clothes, objects, and vessels that all skewed towards a nonspecific "space stuff" aesthetic. (They called it "NASA-punk" but the "punk" part is pretty debatable.)

As someone who destroyed my first year at college with too many hundreds of hours of Skyrim, it would have been unthinkable to a younger me that I'd end up thinking of a Bethesda game as forgettable. But Starfield felt like a symptom of an industry that, even with all the production budget it could muster, was forgetting how to make an open world with its own identity.

It's nice to see it can remember.

"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.

June isn't quite as busy when compared to the beginning of 2025, and that's fine enough since so many of us still have May's late Elden Ring Nightreign launch to contend with. Mercifully, there are only a couple of games launching around Summer Game Fest showcase days, like Deltarune and Rune Factory.

But we've still got quite a few big PC games to watch in June, and the nature of several survival-crafting ordeals plus a few RPGs guarantees they'll be lengthy ones. I'm sure this list will grow much more chaotic with any Summer Game Fest surprises, but I've highlighted what I'm eyeing for now.

June's big PC release dates

June events and sales

• The PlayStation: State of Play kicks things off with a 40-minute showcase on June 4
• Summer Game Fest continues the spirit of E3 with its main showcase on June 6. There are a few highlighted here, but we've got a rolling SGF showcase schedule that includes where to watch everything.
• The Latin American Games Showcase airs on June 7, highlighting games from the LATAM region and Latin Americans around the world.
• The Future Game Show returns on June 7 with Critical Role's Laura Bailey and Matthew Mercer as hosts
• The Xbox Games Showcase takes place on June 8, and The Outer Worlds 2 Direct follows up immediately after
• Our very own PC Gaming Show returns on June 8—tune in to watch our hosts assemble 'The Rig'
• Black Voices in Gaming hosts its showcase on June 9, highlighting Black developers and artists worldwide
• Steam Next Fest begins on June 9 and runs through June 16, followed by the Steam Summer Sale beginning on June 26

More games releasing in June 2025

• June 5 — Deltarune Chapters 3&4 - Undertale's parallel story continues (Steam)
• June 5 — Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma - More than farming (Steam)
• June 10 — MindsEye - A tale of big tech and government corruption (Steam)
• June 11— Stellar Blade - A Nier-like action RPG (Steam)
• June 13 — Five Nights At Freddy's: Secret of the Mimic (Steam)
• June 16 — Gex Trilogy - A sassy lizard collection from the '90s (Steam)
• June 17 — FBC: Firebreak - Remedy's 3-person co-op shooter (Steam)
• June 17 — Date Everything! - A "sandbox" dating sim (Steam)
• June 17 — Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond - The CCG's sequel (Steam)
• June 19 — Broken Arrow - Real-time modern warfare tactics game (Steam)
• June 20 — BitCraft Online - Massive, single-world fantasy MMO (Steam)
• June 20 — Gold Gold Adventure Gold - A city builder fueled by greed (Steam)
• June 26 — Persona 5: The Phantom X - P5's mobile spin-off (Steam)
• June ?? — Cast n Chill - Gone fishin', plus there's a dog (Steam)
• June ?? — Hell Clock - Dark fantasy Diablo-style ARPG (Steam)

Unlike Konami's efforts on Silent Hill 2's remake, which expanded on the original game, Delta is set to be a faithful remake of the original, with no new story elements or major deviations from the original's design. The changes from Snake Eater instead bring controlling Snake more in line with the modernised control scheme of Metal Gear Solid 5.

What is Metal Gear Solid Delta's release date?

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is set to release on August 28, 2025. However, because we can't let things be simple anymore, Konami is also joining in on the "pay more to play a bit earlier" train. Those who buy the Digital Deluxe edition of the game will get access to it two days earlier, on August 26, 2025.

Currently the game is only scheduled for release on Steam (and consoles), but given Konami released the Silent Hill 2 remake on both Epic Games and GOG seven months after Steam, there's a chance Delta could arrive on those down the line.

Metal Gear Solid Delta costs $70 / £70 (yes, that isn't a great deal for the UK), with the Digital Deluxe version costing $80 / £80. The Digital Deluxe edition comes with two days early access and the Sneaking DLC Pack, which comes with a bunch of cosmetic items for Snake, including some outfits from Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker.

Metal Gear Solid Delta trailers and gameplay footage

Metal Gear Solid Delta has had a few trailers at this point, the latest of which is a greatest hits of some of the game's most memorable moments and characters (and thus has some spoilers). It has some gameplay moments in there, but a lot of it is cutscenes, with all the members of The Cobra Unit getting an introduction.

If you're after some more gameplay, the trailer shown at the Xbox Showcase 2024 features some edited gameplay sections. Meanwhile, Konami showed some live-feed gameplay of the game's opening at TGS 2024.

Metal Gear Solid Delta gameplay and features

Metal Gear Solid Delta is largely a visual recreation of Metal Gear Solid 3, but with some modernized touches. Moving Naked Snake is now more in line with Venom Snake's (yes, that's a different guy) controls in Metal Gear Solid 5. One of the most notable enhancements is the ability to crouch walk—something that was introduced into the series with Metal Gear Solid 4 and later implemented into the Nintendo 3DS port of Snake Eater.

For those of you who are really feeling nostalgic, there's a 'Legacy' mode that puts the game into the fixed camera angle of older Metal Gears.

However, Delta does still stick to some of the elements that were necessary with the hardware limitations of the PS2. For example, the game is still segmented into different areas with loading screens between them, as opposed to being a seamless open world. That isn't to say there aren't any quality-of-life changes. Metal Gear Solid Delta will allow you to pull up your camo menu in-game and change camouflage, as opposed to having to pause the game and open a full-screen menu every time you reach a new surface.

Another interesting tidbit is with the Survival Viewer. In the original game, Snake would get injuries that you would need to cure with the likes of bandages, ointment, and splints in the survival viewer. This time around, the system will actually show Snake's injuries on his character model, with him collecting bruises and cuts.

Metal Gear Solid Delta is also set to bring back the Snake vs. Monkey mode, which features Snake having to hunt down the monkeys from Sony's Ape Escape series. The Xbox version of the game is getting some kind of Bomberman crossover due to Sony not playing nice, but there's a good chance we'll see that come to PC too.

Can you eat a snake?

Look at the name of the video game; of course you can eat a snake, it'd be flagrant false advertising otherwise. The opening theme song even references Snake's bizarre dietary habits with the iconic line "someday you'll feed on a tree frog."

Metal Gear Solid Delta story and characters

Metal Gear Solid Delta is a strict remake of Metal Gear Solid 3. Unlike the Silent Hill 2 remake, which added new changes to the story with extra endings and new locales, Delta looks to be wholly faithful to the original. The game serves as a prequel for the Metal Gear Solid series and is currently the earliest game in the timeline.

You play as Naked Snake (not Solid Snake, that's also a different guy) in 1964 during the peak of the Cold War. You get sent into the USSR in a bid to rescue a scientist who has created a superweapon that could have devastating consequences if put into the wrong hands.

The game is based around telling the story of how Big Boss became that character players would see in the later (well, released earlier, but you get me) Metal Gear games. A younger version of Revolver Ocelot steals the show and is one of the only characters returning from the previous Metal Gear games aside from one who is an "oh, these two were the same dude by the way" reveal in MGS4 (there's also a descendant of the character who craps his pants in MGS1… who also has chronic IBS).

Despite the lack of returning faces, Snake Eater features arguably the strongest supporting cast in the series. Eva is a sleeper agent and one of Snake's only allies throughout the story, who is both fantastic in the undercover role with the enemy faction while also exposing just how socially inept Snake is when he completely misses 90% of her attempts at flirting.

Meanwhile, Volgin is a ruthless villain that has all the pomp of Metal Gear Rising's Senator Armstrong years beforehand.

The villain faction this time around is The Cobra Unit, who are a group of World War 2 heroes who represent the emotions they bring into battle. These include a guy who shoots bees at you, a spaceman, a ghost, and a 100+ year old sniper. Finally, there's Snake's mentor, The Boss. I won't give much away about her, but she is literally the most important character in Metal Gear Solid's 50+ year timeline and one of the greatest characters ever created by Hideo Kojima.

Will the song still be in there?

Not only is Snake Eater back for the Snake Eater remake, but it's also been remade along with a new opening movie, with vocalist Cynthia Harrell still sounding incredible over 20 years later.

Metal Gear Solid Delta recommended specs

Metal Gear Solid Delta's recommended specs are available on the game's Steam store page. At a minimum, you'll get away with an RTX 2060 Super and i5-8600. While the recommended settings want you to have a RTX 3080 and i7-8700K. So, while not as monstrously demanding as some games, you'll still want a decent rig. Oh and an SSD is recommended too.

MGS Delta minimum specs

• OS: Windows® 10, Windows® 11 (64-bit OS required)
• Processor: Intel i5-8600 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: RTX 2060 Super (8GB)
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 100 GB available space

MGS Delta recommended specs

• OS: Windows® 10, Windows® 11 (64-bit OS required)
• Processor: Intel i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: RTX 3080
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 100 GB available space

I loved the original Death Stranding, but the sequel looks even more promising—an already ridiculous game made even sillier with giant ships, guitar-wielding cyborgs, and a ventriloquist dummy version of Turkish director Fatih Akin. Plus, for those who took issue with the original’s walking focus and (relative) lack of action, Death Stranding 2 looks to be way more action-packed.

What is Death Stranding 2's release date?

Death Stranding 2 will be released on June 26, 2025, for the PlayStation 5, with players who shell out for the deluxe edition getting it earlier on June 24, 2025. Death Stranding 2 costs $70 / £70 on PS5, with the Deluxe Edition bumping that up to $80 / £80.

But that’s the non-canon release date as far as we're concerned here on PC Gamer. So when can we play it?

Unfortunately as of right now Death Stranding 2 doesn’t have a release date on PC. In fact, it isn’t even confirmed for PC yet.

When is Death Stranding 2 coming to PC?

Kojima Productions and Sony aren't talking about a PC release right now, but that's not unusual. If it’s anything like the first game, we won’t be waiting too long for Death Stranding 2 on PC.

Death Stranding released on PS4 on November 8, 2019, with the PC release arriving eight months later on July 14, 2020 (with the Director’s Cut coming six months after the PS5 release). So if there’s a similar exclusivity window this time around, then we can expect Death Stranding 2 to hit PC around February 2026.

Kojima Productions now owns the IP, so it's possible we could be in for an even shorter wait this time around. Or a longer one, depending on the publishing deal it made with Sony—we're really just speculating, at this point.

On the bright side, Sony games are generally cheaper when they eventually come to PC, with Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (which was also $70 / £70 on PS5) selling for $60 / £50.

Death Stranding 2 trailers

Death Stranding 2’s latest major trailer premiered at SXSW earlier this year and was further proof that Hideo Kojima is unmatched as the best trailer guy in the biz. This 10-minute epic shows off random vignettes of characters speaking dialogue that makes zero sense without context. Meanwhile, it shows off gameplay of Sam walking about and getting in scraps against some genuinely breathtaking environments.

Not only is this trailer far more action packed than you’d expect from Death Stranding, but it also focuses heavily on the Solid Snake lookalike Neil, who seems to have a whole lot of stuff going on in his life.

Plus we get a look at even more of the game’s supporting cast including the President, played by none other than Metal Gear Rising’s Senator Armstrong actor Alastair Duncan (best known for the Scottish detective show Taggart… oh, and Mimir from God of War, I guess.)

Death Stranding 2 gameplay and features

As in the first game, Death Stranding 2 will have you walking about a post-apocalyptic world, delivering parcels, and dealing with the freaks and goo monsters you encounter along the way. This time around Sam Porter Bridges will be visiting other parts of the world, with the Australian outback and Mexico becoming part of the big network. While some have dubbed the game a ‘walking simulator’ (I mean, it literally is, but grow up), Death Stranding 2’s traversal seems to have been given a big boost thanks to these new locales, with the likes of sandstorms and earthquakes occurring in the world.

Meanwhile, combat—which took a back seat in the original game—has been given a far higher priority. Kojima described this as an intentional decision this time, saying, "the sequel balances the stick and the rope.” Which boils down to rope equals help, stick equals bonk (he based the saying on Kobo Abe's novella Rope, which had an excerpt opening the original game).

There’s also set to be way more stealth this time, with Kojima claiming Death Stranding 2 has so much tactical espionage action that even his own staff 'worried it was getting a little Metal Gear-ish.' As someone who has had to contend with his favourite series of all time being dead for the last 10 years, with only a remake to nourish me, this detail means the world to me.

Death Stranding 2 story and characters

Despite the six-year wait and massive global pandemic we’ve contended with in the time since, Death Stranding 2 picks up 11 months after the original game ended. Sam is apparently living a peaceful life, as AI has automated the delivery process for the most part, but Fragile returns and gives him the classic ‘I gotta pull you out of retirement for one last job, kid’—to connect Mexico to the Chiral Network.

The cast is composed of new and returning characters; Sam, Fragile, and Baby Lou all return alongside the original game’s villain Higgs who is now a weird-looking cyborg. Meanwhile, a cast of new faces like a mysterious young woman named Tomorrow, who seems to have some connection to Higgs and the power to control the goop; Tarman, who has the likeness of Mad Max director George Miller and an adorable tar cat; and Dollman—a sentient ventriloquist dummy. There’s also a cyborg samurai, which is totally different from a cyborg ninja, it ISN’T Metal Gear, we swear.

Most interesting is the character of Neil, who featured heavily in one of the most recent trailers for the game. Neil—played by Italian actor Luca Marinelli—seems to be taking on a similar role as Mads Mikkelsen’s Cliff from the first game… oh and the dude looks exactly like Solid Snake. Like, it’s not even subtle. Kojima even said five years ago that the actor would be “the spitting image of Solid Snake” if he wore a bandana. He’s hung up on his ex, and I can’t wait to see more of it.

I'm sad to report that there’s no sign of Die-Hardman.

Will Death Stranding have DLC?

Kojima Productions is currently selling a digital deluxe edition with new cosmetics and early item unlocks (because who doesn’t love when they make the game easier for you because you paid more?).

The original game did have the Director’s Cut expansion alongside its PS5 release, but with no PS6 release imminent, it’s hard to say whether Death Stranding 2 will repeat that approach.

Will Death Stranding 2 have more naked Norman Reedus?

I don’t know, man, probably.

Is Die-Hardman’s real name actually John McClane?

Yes. This has nothing to do with the sequel; I just wanted to remind everyone because it’s hilarious.

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)

Slay the Spire 2 early access, release date, and platforms

Slay the Spire 2 is set to enter early access on PC, Mac, and Linux in 2025. There isn’t an exact release date set yet. At the very least we can rule out anytime in December, as Mega Crit’s Casey Yano claims the month “kinda sucks for releasing games.” Though that really just sounds like a ploy to get me to spend time with my loved ones during the holidays instead of refining my Necrobinder build…

The first Slay the Spire game spent almost a year and a half in early access before its 1.0 version dropped in 2019. We don't know how long Slay the Spire 2 will be in early access for. As it’s a sequel, it’d make sense that Slay the Spire 2 wouldn’t need as much tweaking pre-launch. “It’s just the same game but bigger and better, how long could that even take?”, you might ask. Well, it’s more complicated than that.

The knowledge devs gained from Slay the Spire’s lengthy early access period should help reduce growing pains for the sequel. However, we’ve already seen some pretty major changes to Slay the Spire's design that’ll probably benefit from continual re-balancing. What’s more, the game’s development moved to the Godot Engine after Unity’s runtime fee debacle; it really wouldn’t be all that surprising to see that migration to a new engine result in extra work for the developers.

So, when can I play Slay the Spire 2 on my PlayStation / Switch 2 / Samsung smart fridge?

Slay the Spire is one of those rare games I feel compelled to own on every platform. The active modding community makes Slay the Spire on PC one of the best choices but it’s a nice perk to be able to enjoy a run or two no matter what device you’re on.

Unfortunately for folks like me, there’s no word yet on when Slay the Spire 2 will come to consoles like Xbox X|S, PlayStation 5, Switch 2, nor do we know if Slay the Spire 2 will hit iOS or Android. Judging on the release schedule of the previous game, Slay the Spire 2 will likely have ports on all major consoles within a year of its 1.0 release.

Slay the Spire 2 trailers

Our first official glimpse of Slay the Spire 2 came early last year in the form of its reveal trailer. The Merchant, the Ironclad, and the Silent made appearances, all looking suitably dramatic and battle-ready. Though we also got our first look at the Necrobinder, who really puts the ‘slay’ in Slay the Spire with just the most ridiculously sassy entrance.

Revealed as part of The Game Awards in December 2024, Slay the Spire 2’s gameplay trailer proved that the sequel would largely follow their established formula for greatness. One major change is the lineup of playable characters. The Necrobinder and ‘??????’ are introduced, but it seems like the Defect and the Watcher won’t join them.

A frame at around 1:10 shows what looks like the Defect, except their face appears embedded in vines, corroded, and swarmed by tiny flies. So, I’m not exactly holding onto the hope I’ll be able to take on the spire with my favourite automaton, at least initially.

Revealed as part of The Game Awards in December 2024, Slay the Spire 2’s gameplay trailer proved that the sequel would largely follow their established formula for greatness. One major change is the lineup of playable characters. The Necrobinder and ‘??????’ are introduced, but it seems like the Defect and the Watcher won’t join them.

A frame at around 1:10 shows what looks like the Defect, except their face appears embedded in vines, corroded, and swarmed by tiny flies. So, I’m not exactly holding onto the hope I’ll be able to take on the spire with my favourite automaton, at least initially.

Slay the Spire 2 story and characters

Slay the Spire 2 sees players return to a malevolent, living tower known as the Spire 1,000 years after the events of the first game. Once again you’ll have to fight through a procedurally-generated map of monsters using your ever-growing deck of cards.

Both the Silent and the Ironclad will appear as playable characters again, albeit with some updates to their powers, skills, and attacks. Alongside them we’ll have two new characters to choose from.

One of the new characters in Slay the Spire 2 is the Necrobinder. We haven’t received too clear a picture of this lich’s playstyle yet beyond the skeletal hand, Osty, that fights alongside her. Osty boasts its own health total and deals damage to enemies separately to the Necrobinder’s attacks. With only 35 base health, the Necrobinder could certainly use the support.

The fourth player character— known only as ‘??????’— is a mysterious customer with a regal air and uhh… no face. We really don’t know much about this character yet (we don’t even know their proper name) but their appearance has inspired some interesting theories already.

The diamond motif of this character’s design is reminiscent of the Transient monster from Slay the Spire’s third act. This could hint at them sporting a similar fighting style to the Transient: heavy hitting but limited to a set number of turns per encounter.

Wait… is the Merchant’s mat finally for sale?

I’m sure you’re familiar with the Merchant, the shopkeeper that supplies you with cards, potions, and relics throughout your run. He’s a bit of a fan favorite, afterall. While this industrious dude is willing to part with most things for the right price, he goes through great effort to remind you that you cannot, under any circumstances, buy his mat.

The Merchant is set to return in Slay the Spire 2, but it seems like he’s hard-up for gold after a thousand years without any adventurers to tout his wares to. Why else would he remove the ‘NOT FOR SALE’ tag on his beloved rug? The Merchant’s mat has always been forbidden fruit for Slay the Spire players but if taking it from him means he has to sit his blue butt on the dungeon floor, that just might be too cold-blooded for me.

Slay the Spire 2 gameplay

Slay the Spire 2 won’t deviate too sharply from the gameplay of the original because you know, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, Mega Crit’s monthly ‘Neowsletter’ has been delivering drips and drops of key changes that’ll appear in the sequel. Here are some new mechanics we know about so far:

Afflictions

Slay the Spire 2’s devs have turned up the sadism-o-meter by allowing enemies to afflict your cards with negative effects. For example, one type of Affliction makes it so that you lose one energy everytime you play the affected card. Yep, I can already tell this is going to hurt.

Quests

When you first pick up a Quest card, it’s an unplayable card that clogs up your deck like a Curse and Status. Don’t rush to get rid of it, though. Once you fulfil a particular task outlined on by the card, your hard work will be rewarded.

Enchantments

Enchantments are new ways to modify cards in your deck. Each one is a kind of ‘monkey’s paw’ deal that will help you in one way in exchange for hurting you in another. An example we’ve seen so far is Corrupted, which makes an attack deal 50% more damage but costs you 3 HP each time.

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.

As the last of the Nightreign bosses, Heolstor is one of the coolest baddies FromSoftware has made yet. When you win, you'll be treated to—surprise!—an incredibly vague and confusing final cutscene, which I won't explain here because of spoilers. No, it's not because I didn't understand it either. You'll also unlock new Nightreign skins—the incredible Dark Souls outfits—so it's worth the pain.

If you want the full story, then you'll need to complete the Elden Ring Nightreign Remembrances for each character, which also requires you beat Night Aspect multiple times for alternate endings. You better get studying…

Elden Ring Nightreign Night Aspect tips

He may be the final boss, but your work starts as soon as you enter the expedition, all the same, and boy, do you have your work cut out for you. As always, take the best rune farming route and hunt for legendary weapons to get more powerful, but keep an eye out for the following specific things to prepare for Heolstor in the Night Lord expedition:

1. Get a holy weapon or spells

While Heolstor is incredibly tanky, look on the bright side, at least he's weak to holy damage. In my experience, holy is one of the most common damage types, second only to fire. Keep in mind that you can also get a starting armament that deals holy using the right relic, so check if you have one. You won't be able to upgrade it to the highest quality without the Shifting Earth: Crater event, but it's still a good failsafe, and you can grab a Smithing Stone 1 and 2 to buff it most of the way.

2. Scarlet rot works too

Scarlet rot damage is also strong against Heolstor, though it's much harder to come by. While you can find a few by looking in the usual spots, you're much more likely to get a scarlet rot weapon from the Shifting Earth: Rotting Woods event. The event is easy enough to complete—head to the marked fort then to another marker in the woods to collect the item—but you can't guarantee the event will be active in your run. Nevertheless, with Heolstor oddly being resistant to the likes of poison, bleed, and frostbite, scarlet rot is your best bet.

3. Stock up on damage negation and affinity resistance

Heolstor packs one hell of a punch, so resistance to physical and magical attacks goes a long way in staying alive. During his final phase, Heolstor also gains powers from other Nightlords, so he can deal other damage types like Equilibrious Beast Libra's madness, Gaping Jaw Adel's lightning, or Darkdrift Knight Fulghor's holy damage. You can't predict what affinity damage type he'll gain, so it's best to take physical reduction for his basic attacks, though any affinity bonuses from relics are a nice extra just in case.

4. Level up and get flask upgrades

As one of the biggest challenges in Nightreign, I recommend getting as close to level 15 as possible to give you the best odds. Taking relics with increased rune acquisition will help with this. Plus, fighting Heolstor is very much a war of attrition, so you should max out your flask charges by visiting churches.

How to beat Heolstor, the Nightlord, in Elden Ring Nightreign

While a boss like Maris in the Augur expedition demands a ranged playstyle thanks to their rapid movements, Heolstor is significantly slower but demands precision. Naturally, you'll need to adapt your approach and team composition to handle this:

• Raider: His high stagger damage and ability to go toe-to-toe with Heolstor give your whole team some breathing room.
• Duchess: Her Restage skill not only repeats recent damage against targets (including the affinity boost from using holy against Heolstor), but can also reapply status ailments like scarlet rot if you have it. Her enhanced dodge can also help keep you safe from Heolstor's sweeping attacks and AoEs.
• Wylder: This incredibly versatile fighter can zip in and out of combat with his grappling hook, which I found to be very helpful for avoiding much of Heolstor's attacks and quickly re-engaging, plus he has a damage-dealing ultimate art.
• Guardian: The bird-man doesn't get many opportunities to shine, but Heolstor is one of them—provided you have his unique relics. His ability to tank damage, provide defensive buffs, and even heal nearby allies pulls through in this slower, more methodical fight where conserving flasks is so important.
• Ironeye: The archer isn't quite as strong against Heolstor as he is against virtually every other boss, but I'd still recommend him—though don't have multiple in your party. Given there's only one holy bow available, you're heavily reliant on luck if you're not using a relic that gives your starting armament holy damage. Nevertheless, dealing consistent damage while your allies duke it out at close range is powerful, and Ironeye's team-wide damage boost (which also makes him invincible for a short moment) is very useful.

With your team assembled, it's time to enter the ring with the Night Aspect, which is where the real challenge begins. Here's how to beat Heolstor:

1. Watch out for these attacks

Heolstor is slow by Nightreign standards, but he packs a punch and swaps targets rather erratically, making him a very hard boss to fight. He also has three phases and can borrow the affinity attacks of other Nightlords, so you've got a lot to keep track of.

Outside of a few key attacks, Heolstor generally attacks with slow, heavy sword swings, dashes, and bashes, which you'll need to dodge like any other attack (either towards it or to the side, depending on his direction of attack). Otherwise, here's what you need to look out for:

• Sword slashes: Heolstor's standard attack is a long combo with his sword. Some attacks come out fast while others are slow, and he can dash quite far with each swing. The end of this combo also tends to see him swap targets. While he's doing this combo, time your dodges and look for any openings to get an attack or two in. This is pretty much all he'll do in phase one (when he's called The Shape of Night), but the attack type also changes between phases: in phase two, Heolstor deals magic damage and creates waves with each strike. In particular, watch out for when he plunges his sword into the ground at the end of a combo, as this creates an AoE that hits even if you're behind him. While in phase three, he'll swap swords again and create fissures of different elements.
• Teleport: Heolstor can quickly teleport between targets, so if you see him phase, it's wise to regain some stamina and prepare to dodge as he might be gunning for you.
• Shadow shots: During his second phase, Heolstor will plunge the arena into darkness and begin charging homing projectiles. They sound scary, but they're easy enough to dodge by rolling forwards or to the side if you're kiting. You can also flinch him out of this with an ultimate art or by applying enough holy damage.
• Fissures: In his final phase, Heolstor tears open the sky, causing him to swap swords to one that creates exploding fissures of whatever elemental buff he received (like holy or lightning). Like the other Nightlords with these attacks, you'll need to run or dodge to avoid these rifts before they explode.
• Slam: While Heolstor creates fissures during his standard combos, it's even worse after his slam attack (which he'll first do when he tears the sky to enter his third phase). When you see Heolstor briefly hover in the air and charge an attack, he's about to slam the ground, damaging nearby players and creating tons of fissures. Your best bet is to backup and dodge just as he hits the ground to avoid the damage.

2. Don't waste resources in phase one

The Night Aspect boss fight actually begins with a quick scrap against The Shape of Night before it turns into Heolstor, the Nightlord. While The Shape of Night still packs a punch, it only uses Heolstor's basic attack combo, which is easy enough to avoid. Save all your flasks, resources, and ultimates for phases two and three, when the fighting gets serious.

3. Heolstor is surprisingly easy to interrupt

One of Heolstor's most annoying traits is his near-constant attacks that keep you on the back foot, even though they have slow wind-ups. However, Raider's innate high stagger and ultimate abilities like Wylder's Onslaught Stake and Ironeye's Single Shot can stun him surprisingly fast. This gives you a brief window to get in a few attacks uncontested. Duchess' Restage ability comes in clutch here for stronger burst damage, especially if used right after stunning Heolstor with ultimates. Remember that applying enough holy damage can also stagger the boss.

4. Reviving skills and ultimates are invaluable

Another problem with Heolstor's aggression is that it's almost impossible to revive a downed ally by whacking them once they've gone beyond one bar. It simply takes too long and eats into your stamina, which you'll need to run and dodge too. Make smart use of ultimates like Revenant, Ironeye, Wylder, Guardian, or Duchess to quickly revive downed allies and get them back in the fight.

Then I remember I'm not going to get to keep it. In fact, I'll only have it for the next 10 minutes. It's a disappointing realisation that, rather than this dramatic descent into the volcano becoming a memory or an accomplishment (like defeating a hard boss in Elden Ring), if I want to forge another legendary weapon I have to run this event again, and again, and again.

Elden Ring Nightreign has a problem with repetition. After you've played the game for a while, you start to realise that every run is just waiting for the stars to align; for RNG to favour you with the right map composition, the right passives, and the right landmarks so you can acquire a weapon that targets a Nightlord's weakness. And while that's happening, you do the same things over and over—you acquire flasks from churches, bum rush as many bosses as you can, grab smithing stones—as many have joked, it really is the longest boss run-up in FromSoftware history.

Both RNG and repetition are key parts of the roguelike genre, but I feel like the hallmark of a good roguelike is that it's generally possible to create a winning build if you're smart with what you grab, and that's simply not the case in Nightreign. After a while, you'll come to know the few passives and affixes that favour your Nightfarer and you'll grab them every run if you can. In Nightreign, there's very little middle ground; you're either thriving, or making do with unsuitable garbage.

Admittedly, you can prepare for a Nightlord's weakness with the relics you equip at the start of an expedition, but acquiring them is also down to RNG, and their ability to mitigate a run's randomisation is limited. I feel like the most damning indictment of the Nightlord weakness system is beating the final boss and getting a relic that lets you change affinity simply by swapping weapons. "You beat the game! Now you don't have to engage with this annoying system anymore."

Thanks I guess, but why was it in the game to begin with if all it does is hobble inventive buildcrafting?

I can't help but imagine a version of Nightreign where randomisation isn't the be-all and end-all, where we actually get to extract and keep some of our loot, and so prepare more thoroughly for harder expeditions while taking on the risk of losing gear. The key word here is "extract", as in, I genuinely think Nightreign should have had more extraction elements in the vein of Dark and Darker's PvE mode. The rags to riches extraction shooter journey of dropping in with nothing and returning with powerful gear would have fit Nightreign perfectly.

At the very least, it would've made its Shifting Earth events far less pointless. Currently completing them rewards you with temporary buffs that mostly never fit the Nightlord you're actually fighting, with the exception of The Crater and Noklateo. In extraction Nightreign, they could have rewarded something more powerful that you take away with you. It would've made them feel significant and occasional, and less like a pointless area of the map you simply avoid most of the time.

Extraction games also let you choose what challenges you tackle, and so too, your level of reward. Imagine a Nightreign where, rather than rinsing the map for bosses every single run, there were different activities requiring different levels of preparedness. You could choose how deep to go and work towards tackling harder events over multiple runs.

Maybe the game could even let you earn the ability to extract before the Nightlord boss, giving you a bit more freedom if you wanted to focus on a Shifting Earth event instead.

One of the best things about Elden Ring for me is starting a new character—the excitement of hopping into the Lands Between as a Wretch, seeing what items drop, and deciding what build I'm going for. There's definitely a version of Nightreign that could've existed where every expedition was a microcosm of that experience. In a run-based game like this, the extraction formula would've been the perfect way to facilitate it, starting with nothing and building from the ground up based on what you find.

Extracting gear would also have helped us have a bit more say in buildcrafting outside of catering to Nightlord weaknesses or being beholden to each expedition's RNG—something that would be balanced by losing said equipment if you failed. Nightreign could've even had PvP in some form, considering the game already has Nightfarer invaders who drop their gear if you kill them.

The only caveat is that I think Nightreign would have to be harder for extraction to work, with other challenging objectives to work towards besides Nightlords. The boss weakness system would also have to be scrapped (so you couldn't stockpile weapons with their weakness), but honestly, I think that system really emphasises the issue with the game's randomisation and is terrible from a roguelike buildcrafting perspective.

I do enjoy Nightreign, in spite of its identity crisis, but the most frustrating thing as a From fan is that it feels like its position as a side-job multiplayer experiment vs. a mainline game has negatively impacted its development. It's so close to being a significantly better game than it is, but scope is the only answer I can find as to why it isn't.

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?

Just over a year after the release of its debut game Tales of Kenzera: Zau, Surgent Studios has unveiled its next project, and I don't know what I expected but it definitely wasn't this. Dead Take is a first-person psychological horror game the studio says "will peel back the entertainment industry’s glittering facade to expose its darkest secrets."

Dead Take puts players in the shoes of an actor in search of their friend, who was last seen at a "dark, opulent mansion," apparently the site of a glamorous party held by a powerful executive—but that's now gone oddly quiet. You'll solve "object-based puzzles" as you make your way from the mansion's gate to the theater deep inside, discovering and splicing together video clips along the way to discover the truth of what happened within the now-silent walls.

Shades of The 7^th Guest, perhaps, but Dead Take's more grounded promise of "a haunting singleplayer story shaped by real experiences in the entertainment industry" has the potential to be an even grimmer journey into awfulness.

"Discover a side of the entertainment industry only discussed in whispers, full of cruelty and sordid gossip, memories of roles gone wrong, unsettling audition tapes and shadowy figures with the power to make or break your career," the Steam page says.

"Make your way through opulent and meticulously hand-crafted 3D rooms, full of tools and props inspired by real-world film sets, accompanied by composer Ross Tregenza's chilling original score."

(Tregenza's previous credits, by the way, include Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Cyberpunk 2077, Deathloop, Helldivers 2, and Deathsprint 66, so that seems pretty solid.)

Surgent said Dead Take will feature "an impressive lineup of actors" who will be announced in the coming weeks.

"We're being secretive for a reason," Surgent Studios founder and CEO Abubakar Salim said. "The subject matter of this game is delicate, and it hits close to home. When it comes out, and it won't be long until it does, I want players to think, 'I can't believe they actually did this'."

Dead Take is also notable for another reason: It was actually first revealed in January, without a title, as the first partnership for Palworld developer Pocketpair's new publishing arm. Salim said at the time that his studio's new game "will be short and weird, and we think players will be interested in what we have to say."

Dead Take is expected to be out later in 2025, and is up for wishlisting now on Steam.

The Elder Scrolls Online just had a huge patch drop yesterday—titled Seasons of the Worm Cult, this new update marks the start of a few key changes to the MMO, alongside a nice helping of content for current or returning players to sink their newly subclassed mitts into.

Subclassing, which I had a look at earlier this year, is by far the biggest shake-up the game's getting—unlocked once you get any character to level 50, this feature'll let you mix and match "skill lines" from various classes to your heart's content. Well, kinda—there are a few limitations.

Firstly, you need to keep at least one skill line from your "main" class—the one you started the character with. Secondly, you can't pick more than one skill line from a single class that isn't yours. Lastly, they take a little longer to level up and cost more skill points to grab abilities from.

Other than that, it's a cool and madcap new way to build out your character—and it's free for all players at the point of entry. While I'm sure flavours of the month will roll in and out, for those who don't care much about sweaty optimisation, it's a huge boost to players' ability to diversify their build.

The update also throws open the doors to the island of Solstice, where the next chapter of its more seasonal story structure'll be taking place. Solstice is a sun-baked, mediterranean-style island currently split in two by The Writhing Wall, a barrier of souls that the playerbase'll be kicking down as the story advances.

In terms of how this place looks, it's a blend of Altmer and Argonian culture—necromantic Altmer exiles came, booted the Argonians out, they had a war about it, and now they're (mostly) chill with each other.

What seems interesting, as I digitally attend a presentation by zone lead Jason Barnes and systems designer Carrie Day, is the team's dedication to making carry-over choices from the game's base storyline (which Seasons of the Worm Cult is returning to after a decade) matter. "It's a way for us to honour the legacy of our long-term players," Barnes states, deeply enthused about the prospect of putting a little more RPG back in the game's MMO.

Barnes also says during a Q&A session that—alongside some other quality of life features coming to ESO promised earlier in the year—the team's looking into letting players adjust the game's difficulty in some way: "There are ongoing plans for that, it's in the works," Barnes explains, though the team isn't "ready to talk about it yet." Still, he adds that "it is something we're looking at, and there's people working on it."

I haven't picked up ESO in a little while, but I'm experienced enough with MMOs to know that difficulty discourse is a constant and enduring challenge—when a game's survival depends on appealing to the most people possible, providing a set of challenges that caters to everybody is downright unfathomable.

Slide too far in one direction, and you get a game that bores its longtime fans to tears. Slide too far in the other, and, well, you get Wildstar. I'll be keen to see how The Elder Scrolls Online tackles the eternal question—or, from what it sounds like, lets players make that choice for themselves.

A couple of weeks ago I visited Bungie HQ in Bellevue, Washington to play a build of The Edge of Fate, Destiny 2's first major expansion since the conclusion of the series' 10 year 'Light & Dark' story.

It marks the beginning of a new ongoing storyline—called the Fate saga. But while future expansions will contribute to this overarching narrative, they won't be as closely tied together as the releases of the past few years. Bungie appears to be enjoying this newfound freedom—as you might expect given we're about seven months out from a Star Wars-themed expansion. The studio wants to use this shift as an opportunity to dive into more weird, esoteric sci-fi concepts that bubble under the surface of the series' lore—the concepts that first attracted me to Destiny over a third of my life ago.

The Edge of Fate begins the way most expansions do, with a mysterious call to a new world, and a cinematic mission that introduces you to a new alien environment. Kepler is a distant planet in our solar system and the staging ground for all of the weird shit going down in The Edge of Fate. The Nine, the ever-mysterious, never-explained, god-like entities that have been looming in the background for years in Destiny, are causing a commotion there.

As usual, the Guardians find themselves on a new world because of a mysterious message, and are greeted by slightly upgraded versions of their old foes. The Fallen have a new jetpack enemy that adds some real vertically to fights where they appear, and can even swoop down to boop you around with their boosters. The Vex have a new unit of swarming drones which, like the Husks from the Dread faction, force you to be cautious and accurate when taking them down as killing the lead drone will trigger the remaining ones to fly at you and explode.

But with the Edge of Fate and Kepler, there's also a bizarre third party: Lodi. This nerd with black Ray-Bans and a handgun is here looking for answers of his own. But he doesn't talk like a normal Destiny character who lives in a world where science has truly morphed into magic. Instead he talks like... us. This creates a really interesting dynamic between the player, the Guardians, and Lodi. He's a fish out of water in their world, but feels more relatable to us normal humans than any other character in the Destiny franchise.

Don't worry too much about a normal guy with glasses bringing boring reality into the series, as there are also what appear to be L Trains embedded into the flora of Kepler, which act as portals that take you into missions. As far as space-weirdness and setup, The Edge of Fate is still classic Destiny.

As you explore Kepler, both in the first mission and beyond, it becomes less "classic Destiny," and much more Metroid Prime with fusion rifles. From the goopy, insect-like flora and fauna on the planet, to the synthy soundtrack, to the damn Morph Ball. "We're not trying to hide the inspiration," said Tyson Green, game director. It's a love letter, and that love shines through as I roll around the feet of stomping Vex Wyverns to Super Bomb some nearby confluxes, disabling their shields. The trick Bungie plays here is that the second you pop out of the lighting ball—called Matterspark—you're suddenly back to good-ol'-reliable FPS Destiny.

Prime location

This creates a kind of flow state between the Destiny that you know and the Destiny that only exists on Kepler. And as soon as you've mastered turning into an orb to solve a puzzle mid-combat, Bungie adds another tool to the arsenal. Now, not only am I able to interact with a special item in the environment that transforms me into the Matterspark, I'm able to spawn a cannon in certain areas that acts as a makeshift portal gun. Eventually I'm able to huff some weird spores and gain the power to telekinetically move environmental pieces around in order to make bridges or ramps—like Tony Hawk cosplaying as Magneto.

These new abilities have been created in service to environmental puzzles that require increasing thought and timing to solve. But it's the way Bungie has layered these new tools on top of one another that really delights me.

In classic metroidvania style, the Matterspark ability takes a backseat as soon as I get the teleporter cannon, with a few puzzles designed to make sure I'm thinking with portals. But, slowly, Bungie starts to reintroduce Matterspark into my kit. Now, instead of just using the cannon to teleport to a new area, I'm teleporting to an area that I can't leave—that is until I transform into the Matterspark and roll through a tiny hole too big for my Guardian to fit through.

All of these abilities come together very nicely in my favorite mission from the expansion. Without getting into spoilers, it required me to restart a big generator on Kepler. But to do that, I needed to head into some nearby side rooms to fix multiple pieces of the machine, which required completing increasingly complex puzzles.

In one of the final areas, before circling back to the big fight in front of the main generator, I had to complete what I counted as a 13-step puzzle in order to spawn the final boss. While the puzzle as a whole wasn't particularly confusing or difficult, it was exciting. It got me to think about my environment differently. It took me someplace new and asked me to solve something that didn't feel like a Destiny puzzle at all.

Bungie does a nice job mixing this new gameplay flow up as well. Sometimes I was solving a puzzle in an empty room with time to think. Other times I was just blasting through environments with nary a puzzle to solve. And, most of the time, I was doing both at once, killing some enemies before diving into Matterspark to charge up a generator before popping out and shotgunning a Fallen Captain.

Fact of the Matterspark

In the section I played, I was impressed with how engaged I was regardless of whether I was focusing on a puzzle, combat, or both. Bungie could obviously get that mix wrong in other parts of the campaign I haven't seen, but I was never more than a few seconds away from shooting something by the time I was all puzzled out.

Bungie has never failed to offer this best-in-class gunplay with Destiny 2—it's why those of us still here have stuck around. But after 10 years, the game around that gunplay feels stale. Even missions that I loved back in The Witch Queen, though high quality, couldn't exactly be described as innovative. But with the addition of Matterspark and the other Kepler-exclusive abilities, Bungie's developers have managed to add something that feels new—despite being borrowed from other games I love—without sacrificing the core of Destiny's DNA.

These abilities do create an interesting kind of struggle within me—one that I'm still not sure I've settled weeks after my play session. The Kepler abilities are very cool and make the planet feel unique, but there's a sadness that comes with not being able to play with them the moment you step onto an older destination.

On one hand, keeping them unique to Kepler ensures that the destination and experience of Edge of Fate feels special and unique forever. Matterspark is inherently tied to Kepler in a way that Grapple isn't tied to Neomuna, and that's actually quite interesting. It's easy to imagine a world, several expansions from now, where loading into different Strikes feels dramatically different because each planet has its own, cute mechanics that make it special.

On the other hand, Destiny is a massive game, and most of my time in Destiny 2's Year of Prophecy won't be spent on Kepler. Thankfully, Green told me that the studio will be continuing to build off of the Guardian's power sets in the future (although he wasn't specific about when Prismatic, for example, will be seeing an upgrade).

But would I be more excited overall if part of The Edge of Fate was a class ability override that let me turn into the Morph Ball? I'm not certain. It's a balance Bungie is going to have to get right, otherwise these bespoke locations could risk making the rest of the game feel stale by comparison. For now, it really helps set Kepler apart from other expansion destinations, and I think I'm going to end up loving that.

Even though I've only played a few hours of The Edge of Fate's campaign, I find myself suddenly excited for future expansions like Renegades. I'm even starting to develop faith that a Star Wars-themed expansion might be more than just driving across a Tattoine-at-home planet on a Sparrow while Drifter knowingly asks me over the radio if I know that a Parsec is a unit of measurement, not time.

Part of that hope comes from the The Edge of Fate campaign, but it's also because of the sheer number of changes coming to the rest of the Destiny 2 "hobby," as Bungie's developers like to call it.

Rip and tier

Those systemic changes are extensive, but the result is that Destiny 2's loot chase is going to be more of a grind than it has been in years past. But before you shut this page with a scoff, let me add that Bungie's intention is to make that grind more worthwhile and deterministic than ever before. More chase, but better rewards to show for it—which brings us to the tier system.

All new gear now drops as part of a tiered loot system—rated one to five—with higher tier weapons offering not only upgraded perks, but raw stat increases over their lower-tier cousins. Higher tier armor will also guarantee a better stat band, meaning that getting a higher tier piece of loot will almost always indicate that it's an improvement on what you have—at least mathematically.

However, playing with some of these tier 5 items, I wasn't really able to feel that difference during my admittedly limited playtime. I still need a bit of convincing that these items are actually going to be noticeably different from the other gear, at least beyond the fashion incentive—tier 5 weapons come with a special blue glow and nice looking on-kill effect.

Longtime Guardians have a lot of great weapons that they've accumulated over the years. Just speaking personally, I'm still lugging around my crafted Commemoration—despite the heavy nerf to Reconstruction—and it's going to take something astounding to make me put it down. Sure, Bungie can "incentivize" players by asking them to use weapons with the "NEW" tag on them for a bit of a damage boost in essentially all activities (similar to the overcharge system in current D2), but any new gun will do that, not just their T5 versions.

While I am skeptical here, I have faith that these high tier weapons won't just be the second coming of Adepts, weapons that are significantly more painful to grind for in Destiny 2 with nearly no major benefits (and typically an uglier base shader, I must say). That's because of the aforementioned mathematical, statistical benefits that come from wielding T5 gear. Tier 5 weapons will have better reload, better range, better everything, just because they're tier 5.

That kind of statistical improvement is especially hard to feel in a preview environment where you're not using your own setup that you're used to at home, and jumping forward and backward in time every few hours. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the first time I put my hands on a tier 5 at home and compared the stats on a tier 4 of the same roll, that I would be able to feel a meaningful difference. But it's something I'll be keeping a serious eye on at launch.

One aspect of tier 5s that is definitely an improvement over Adepts is the acquisition method. Getting these high tier items isn't like getting holofoils in Rite of the Nine or Into the Light. More than just luck, higher tier items come by increasing your average power level and ascending the different difficulty tiers—far more similar to Diablo 4 than to the current leveling system in Destiny 2. Plus, tier 5s have three enhanced perks and multiple enhanced barrels and magazines to choose from, making the likelihood that you actually get the roll you want much higher.

As you complete more and more difficult activities, you'll get better rewards dropping at higher Power levels, which, in turn, allow you to fish for better loot by completing even more difficult activities. All of this happens via what Bungie is calling the Portal, which is essentially a hopper where you can select any relevant activity in the game—easily jumping into a matchmade playlist or fully customizing the difficulty to increase your score and, therefore, your reward.

With all these new tiers of rewards, it's easy to imagine that grinding for that perfect version of an armor piece or a tier 5 weapon with all the perks you want on it, will be harder than ever. But as a tradeoff for adding more grind, Bungie has made it easier to actually get what you want.

Certain playlists and missions have guaranteed rewards that rotate daily. If The Whisper is offering you a guaranteed drop of the incredible new rocket pulse rifle, you can do it over, and over, and over again until you get your god roll. This is especially good considering that armor is now something you'll want to grind for, as it comes with a stat archetype and set bonuses—which give unique effects while wearing two pieces or four pieces of a set, meaning you can mix and match two set bonuses while also using an exotic. Getting the gear and rolls you want has never been easier, but you have to put in the work to be powerful enough to grind for a tier 5 weapon in the first place.

I imagine more casual Destiny fans will be happy enough with tier 3 or tier 4 loot, but there's also a real danger that the community will deem anything below tier 5 as trash, much as in the same way Diablo plays won't be caught dead using anything below Ancestral gear a week into a new season.

As someone who is absolutely sick of a lot of the older Strikes and activities in the game, the Portal feels like a meaningful way to revive stagnant missions and make them fun again. Destiny has long suffered from a small pool of repeatable activities that have gotten very boring for veterans, while all of the newer, fresher seasonal offerings are removed at the end of each year.

Thinking with Portal

The Portal not only comes with a ton of new modifiers to spruce up some of that old stuff, but it's designed to rotate new things in and out more frequently—and don't worry, Bungie assured me that they're moving away from content that rotates out forever. The Whisper is an incredible mission that I love dearly, and I've wished I had more reasons to run it now that my Whisper of the Worm is fully kitted out. Now, not only do I have a reason to run it for new and relevant gear, by the time I get sick of it, it'll hopefully get swapped out for something I haven't played in a long time. Sure I don't like a mission like Kell's Fall nearly as much, but it'll still be nice to have something fresh to play while The Whisper takes a back seat for a bit.

As someone who has really enjoyed the ride for the last decade, I have to admit that some things I saw—mostly the new tiered items—left me a bit worried. But I recognize that fear in myself as a fear of change. On paper, the changes excite me, but it's going to be months—potentially not until March of next year, when the mid-season update for Renegades hits—before players truly grasp just how different the game has become, which changes have helped, and which may be misguided.

All of these changes, even the ones I am unsure if I'll like, seem aimed at improving the game for the long haul. The loop of Destiny is fundamentally different, and that does freak me out. But the game's current loop is, in a way, nonexistent. Destiny 2 has been all about checklists for a long time: Get the god roll of a gun I barely care about, check it off my list, throw it in the Vault, never take it out again. I've obviously enjoyed doing that quite a bit over the years, but there is a certain "what is it all even for" that has nagged at every Destiny player I know over the last several expansions. Bungie is finally giving us a sense of progression that isn't just "thank Christ I finished enough bounties to compete in Grandmaster Nightfalls this season".

I am beyond certain that there will be things in The Edge of Fate's overhaul that I do not like six months from now, and changes to the game that I will wish would go back to the way they were. With so many changes, it would be almost impossible for Bungie to get it 100% right on the first try. But I'm just happy it's changing in a big, meaningful way for the first time in years. Good or bad, Destiny 2 will, at the very least, feel new again when The Edge of Fate launches on July 15.

At a preview event at Bungie HQ in Bellevue, Washington, I was able to play with six of the expansion’s new exotics—one of which, New Land Beyond, is technically already in the game if you're willing to splash out on the Year of Prophecy's ultimate edition. There were three armor exotics—one for each class—and three exotic weapons in the dev build, but I wouldn't be surprised if a couple remain under wraps, including the reward from the new raid.

But let’s work with what we know. Below, I detail the six new exotics I tested, including the most busted exotic primary I've ever equipped.

Third Iteration (Scout rifle)

• Tri-Planar Mass Driver: Fires a spread of Void energy projectiles. Aiming down sights narrows the spread.

Third Iteration is a void scout rifle that comes from the season pass. It fires at 200 RPM, uses primary ammo, and fires a spread of void energy projectiles that narrow when you aim down sites. Let's also be clear: it absolutely bangs right now. To the point that almost everyone in the testing room was excitedly discussing how broken it is.

This is by far the standout exotic from The Edge of Fate expansion. It’s the most wildly overpowered primary exotic we’ve seen in the game in years, potentially ever. It hits all the exotic boxes: it’s strange, it’s unique, and it’s extremely powerful.

So, a little more about how it works: when you fire Third Iteration, it shoots multiple shots in an extremely accurate spread. Imagine the Cerberus+1 auto rifle shot, but capable of dealing full damage at the range of a scout rifle. However, when you aim down the sight for a brief period, the shots consolidate into a single, high-impact, sniper-like round. This shot then marks the target, causing them to take increased damage from Third Iteration. Oh, and when you defeat a marked target, you turn invisible and gain truesight (i.e. wallhacks). The way this works in practice is that you mark a big enemy with the consolidated shot, and then blast it with your long-range, shotgun-like shot.

In the build I played, this absolutely shredded through enemies and bosses—even on the legendary difficulty of the campaign. It was killing orange bar enemies in two shots or less during higher difficulty campaign missions. Incredibly, according to the devs on hand, the scout has already nerfed at least twice. Conversations are ongoing as to whether it can ship as hot as it currently is, but the devs seemed delighted with our reaction, so fingers crossed.

It’s also going to slot very nicely into some key builds, making the Gyrfalcon Hunter invisibility loop very easy to kickstart. But even without building into void or having any synergy with the rest of my build, it was my go-to exotic for my entire play session at Bungie.

Graviton Spike (Hand cannon)

• Temporal Manipulation: Press reload to swap between fast-firing Arc mode or slow-firing Stasis mode.

Graviton Spike is a craftable exotic hand cannon in The Edge of Fate that seems like it’ll come from a quest. This weapon extends the dual darkness/light weapon idea first introduced with the Conditional Finality raid exotic from Root of Nightmares.

It uses primary ammo, sits in the energy slot, and it says it fires at 150 RPM. However, you can change the fire rate by taking advantage of its exotic perk, Temporal Manipulation, which lets you swap between a fast-firing arc mode or slow-firing stasis mode. Final blows and precision hits overcharge the opposing mode to enable additional effects.

This weapon is great for if you’re looking to charge Transcendence for your Prismatic subclass, or take advantage of some elemental verbs and modifiers. But the real benefit comes when you rapidly swap between the two modes after getting headshots.

Precision hits with one elemental type charges the other. When you swap to the charged element, you’ll get more benefits for landing precision hits. The charged stasis version of the gun creates stasis crystals and a coldsnap seeker that freezes enemies. The charged arc version causes bolts of lightning to strike targets.

This thing offers a really active playstyle which was a ton of fun to play with. How long it’ll take to get the fully upgraded version of Graviton Spike, and what it's potential upgrades entail, is the big question. If it's anything like previous mission exotics, it'll take at least a few runs to earn all the catalysts and intrinsics.

New Land Beyond (Sniper rifle)

• The Master: Scoring precision hits increases this weapon's damage until the wielder's defeat. Massively increases ammo reserves.

New Land Beyond is already in Destiny 2—at least if you buy the digital deluxe edition of The Year of Prophecy—so it hardly feels necessary to put it on this list. But it is technically a new exotic coming in The Edge of Fate.

This updated version of an original Destiny exotic is a special ammo sniper rifle that sits in the kinetic slot. It fires at 72 RPM and only uses iron sights, making it a little unwieldy to use (although the Snapshot perk has helped it feel less clunky). NLB's main exotic perk is The Master, which means scoring precision hits increases its damage until the wielder’s defeat. It also massively increases ammo reserves.

The cool and useful thing about New Land Beyond is that the damage buff remains intact until you die. That means even if you store it and swap to a primary, you can pull it back out and fire off an extremely powerful shot into a boss or major enemy. It’s also getting a catalyst once the expansion hits, which causes new rounds to load into the magazine when you have high stacks of the damage buff. Hilariously, New Land Beyond's perk can stack up to 100, although the damage buff doesn't scale much beyond 20 stacks.

Moirai (Hunter chest)

• Webcatcher: Threaded Spike can bounce to Tangles, detonating them and returning immediately. Tangles detonated by Threaded Spike are rewoven and retrieved by it. Catches without a Tangle refund extra melee energy,

Moirai is a new Hunter chest in The Edge of Fate, and it’s all about Tangles and strand. Your Threaded Spike—the strand melee—can now target Tangles in the arena. When it hits one, your Threaded Spike detonates the Tangle and will spawn a new Tangle in your hands if you catch it.

On its face, this one seems a little uninteresting, but when you pair it with the Whirling Maelstrom aspect, which causes your Tangles to basically grow hands and fist-fight people, this exotic gets very exciting indeed. Not only does the first Tangle you hit with your spike become a maelstrom, you can then throw the second Tangle to create another maelstrom.

All of that being said, this definitely seems like the most fiddly of the three exotics. I’m certain that some Hunter main out there will find an absolutely wild way to use it, but it’s going to take a bit more work to get it into a build than the other exotic armor pieces for the expansion.

Eunoia (Warlock gauntlets)

• Consul's Pitch: Hellion projectiles deal increased damage the further they travel, eventually fracturing into scorching shrapnel.

Eunoia are some new Warlock arms which enhance Hellion; the little Solar buddy added in The Final Shape. Whenever the Hellion fires while you have these on, its primary shot explodes part-way to the target, creating a blanket spread of fire and scorching anything in the area.

This isn’t the flashiest exotic in this expansion, but it’s a ton of fun to use. Hellion was already an excellent choice for managing large crowds of enemies—something you’ll find in most activities in Destiny 2 these days. With Eunoia, it gets much better at clearing large groups, allowing you to focus on beefier targets while everything else explodes around you.

Melas Panoplia (Titan gauntlets)

• Forge Master: Collecting a Firesprite or rapid Solar final blows make you a Forge Master, allowing you to recall your Throwing Hammer. After impacting a target, recall your hammer at full intensity to perform a Perfect Recall, causing an explosion of forge slag. Perfect Recalls and collecting Firesprites extend your time as Forge Master.

Melas Panoplia is the exotic armor piece of the expansion, and has one of the most widely-requested exotic effects in all of Destiny 2. These gauntlets enable you to throw your solar Titan’s hammer and then hit melee again to return it back to you, Thor-style. It looks, feels, and sounds just as good as you’d hope, with the Titan stretching out their hand in eager anticipation of the hammer’s return.

However, it’s a little more complicated than just throwing the hammer and pressing the button again to bring it back. Instead, you need to get multiple solar kills to get a special Forge Master buff. When you next throw your hammer, you’ll get a short timer indicating how long you can throw and recall it—which you can do unlimited times, assuming the buff hasn’t run out.

What makes this so fun is that it also comes with a timing mini-game. If you wait a moment for the hammer to flash and make a sound after it hits a target, then hit the recall button at the perfect time, the hammer will cause a massive explosion around itself before it returns to your hands. This explosion looks flashy, but it also seems quite strong. It’s difficult to tell how effective it’ll be in true endgame content, but I was able to wipe out much beefier enemies than I expected with the explosion, and even deal pretty considerable damage to legendary campaign bosses with just my hammer throw.

This is one of the best exotics in years. It’s exactly what I’ve always wanted as a Titan main, but somehow even better than I imagined.

A couple of weeks ago I travelled to Bungie's Bellevue, Washington studio to play The Edge of Fate and speak with some of the most senior developers on the team. You can read our hands-on impressions, and check out six of the new exotic items coming in the expansion—one of which has already had to be nerfed twice. Below you'll find the entirety of my conversation with Tyson Green, Destiny 2's game director, and Robbie Stevens, assistant game director.

We touched on a wide range of topics, from why Green hates having to be 'the fun police', to the lack of vault space going into a major loot system shake up, Super Metroid as a major influence of The Edge of Fate and even whether we'll ever get akimbo weapons.

Tim Clark, PC Gamer: Edge of Fate brings a raft of big systemic and quality of life changes. Do you think that's going to be enough in a world where you're looking to bring people back post-Final Shape, and where player concurrency is lower than I'm sure you'd like it?

Tyson Green: We've seen that when we have a release that is a compelling mix of campaign and story, but also [has] free systemic changes… then players take them together as a full product. The best example of this was Witch Queen, which was a great release, and came along with a set of free subclass updates—void 3.0—and players really embraced those as a cohesive product, even though void 3.0 was free to all players.

So we think that making the core game of Destiny stronger is a tide that raises all boats. It makes for a better expansion experience, and a better free experience. So I think that's there's strength in the model that we're trying to move into now.

But without any major addition to the existing subclasses or a new damage element, don't you worry that the buildcrafting side of things may stagnate?

Tyson Green: One of the big changes in Edge of Fate for people who are into buildcrafting is the armor set bonuses. They are very punchy, almost exotic-level, build enablers. My favorite one that I was playing with recently is the set bonus that makes your kinetic weapons break shields more easily, and then does disruptive explosions when you either break a shield or take down a powerful combatant.

I was like: 'Oh my god, I need to figure out which kinetic weapon do I want to use to get into this space?' So we're going to be able to explore more and more with new armor sets, and really make them an active part of your build in ways that [armor] hasn't been to date, because [legendary gear] lacked that element of build craft contribution. They've also suffered because of the way the stats used to work.

Robbie Stevens: So much of the core foundation is changing with stats on armor. The buildcraft space is expanding in a way that is going to provide a bunch of different opportunities, and [these stats] do directly affect abilities, as well.

We've got to provide more opportunity to make the actual loot chase of armor and weapons feel better, and make it more fun with the gear tiering systems. As with changes like the 3.0 subclasses, we know that in the future we're going to do updates. It's just that this first go around is a larger change to more of the game.

Can you tell me what you might be prioritizing in terms of future changes? The Darkness subclass each only having one super ability seems like an obvious gap to fill.

Green: Yeah, the dark subclasses having a smaller selection of gameplans is definitely something that's on the team's radar. As far as prioritization goes, a thing that we're looking at in upcoming releases is a lot of streamlining and usability—like, getting more of the subclass content into players' hands in a systemic, sustainable fashion. But we're never going to be done with the subclasses. We don't stop development on them. We look at them as opportunities arise and as the team has the ability to add to them.

An obvious question, given you're bringing in entirely new types of weapons and armor, is why we're not getting any extra vault space? It seems like such an obvious pressure point. I know that Bungie has said changes are coming in a future expansion, but could we not have had 100 slots as a Band Aid?

Green: This is one where we understand the pressure. It's this development problem that we haven't been able to shake with Destiny. That storage space may be cheap on the server, but it's not cheap on the client, and that's unfortunately the problem that we run into.

So we have to figure out a solution for this. And we're working on this one because we know that adding a bunch of armor sets, and tiers of weapons, into the game is going to create a lot more keepsakes—things that people want available for their build crafting options in the future. So we're definitely aware of this one, and we're working on solutions.

You've mentioned the desire to streamline the experience of playing Destiny 2 with the addition of The Portal, but I find that goal slightly incongruous with being able to customise those activities with 100 modifiers.

Green: I mean, we definitely share that concern. If you look at a screenshot of the challenge customization screen right now, you can actually hear your brain melt.

It's like that meme of someone explaining a card game.

Green: Yeah, I just want to play, right? The way that you're actually going to experience that on day one of Edge of Fate is that the game's going to bring you in and give you quickplay options.

Stevens: There are actually a couple of tutorials and training modes that we added… [The Portal] is such a big change from what we're doing now, right? Today, if you want to get some of the better loot, you always have to step into Expert or Pinnacle stuff. We're not saying we're making it really easy to get this loot. We're saying you have to put in the time and effort to get to the point where you can earn some of this stuff. And if you want to be the most efficient at earning the best stuff, and earning it all the time, you're going to have to be taking on a higher level of challenge constantly.

Do people really want that degree of challenge customizability? You've swung at this a few times before, like with Nightfall scoring, and it's never stuck. Why do you think this version is the one?

Green: Well, the interesting thing about the Nightfall challenge card that I actually had a hand in driving that. We just totally underestimated how good our players are. They basically just bowled that thing over! It was barely a speed bump, and then we weren't in a position to [update] it, because it only affected one tiny slice of our content, and it wasn't even paid off with good rewards.

So, this time around, we're really saying: 'Hey, you can go pretty deep and pretty far with this customization if you want.' The challenges themselves are actual gameplay challenges. It's not just grabbing the damage number dials and turning it up.

Stevens: [The challenges] will change the behavior of an enemy, or it'll change how you might use some of your abilities, right? It's things that you can actually react to and understand—that has been a goal for us.

Green: The gear tiering system actually gives us that depth of pursuit in a broad range of activities. On the development side, we very often had this problem of wanting to add a cool challenge, which everyone was excited about, but… what's the reward going to be? If we don't have a good enough reward, we'll cut the challenge. But now we can say: 'I want to do really hard solo ops.' Cool, there's gear for that. There are rewards that are worth earning.

So grab the dial, crank it up, and see how hard you can make it. Then there's something there to reward you for having risen to the challenge.

I had assumed that the new World Tier system would apply across the whole game, I think because I play a lot of Diablo 4, and when you move up in difficulty the whole game and the rewards lift up with you. Whereas with Edge of Fate, it's much more discrete. For the casual player, isn't that going to be confusing?

Stevens: The thing is to make sure the lines are as clear as possible when we talk about this: World Tiers apply specifically to the Edge of Fate expansion and the Kepler destination.

We wanted to make sure that, from an expansion experience, this is something you can jump into. If you're a casual player, a new player, or returning to the game, we want this to be an immediately digestible experience. You're going to play through the campaign, the core story, on Brave or Legendary [difficulty] out of the gate. Then, once you complete that, if you want to go deeper into the post-game, and the gear pursuit, that's where the higher tiers of difficulty unlock within Kepler itself, with the Fabled and Mythic difficulties. Those then start to apply more to the power chase at that point.

Brave and Legendary are going to have fixed power, so that you can play through the story at your own pace.

Can you explain how to regularly get the tier four and five gear?

Stevens: Sure. That's going to be tied directly to where you are on the power progression band. When you go back to Kepler, that is going to be a place you can do it too.

Green: The Portal, those core game activities—Solo Ops, Fireteam Ops, Pinnacle Ops— those all have a pretty consistent execution of how challenge works and how you escalate tiers and apply modifiers. Obviously we'd love it if Crucible could work the same way, but clearly it can't, because players won't submit to having Bane [modfiers] put on them. [laughs]

What we're trying to do with expansions is to say: expansions are their own experience, their own formula. And what works well for one formula—like a Metroidvania-inspired release like Edge of Fate—might not work so well for a different formula. So we're not trying to systemically bind the expansions. We're trying to let the expansions pursue a formula that internally makes sense to them, and hopefully is intuitive.

That's making a lot of work for yourselves if you plan to reconstitute the game on an expansion-by-expansion basis, though.

Green: But in a very interesting way, it actually reduces the work. Because if there's one thing that's harder than trying to make a cog work, it's trying to make two cogs work together and be novel every time. By giving the team that is building the expansion some time and some space in which to actually innovate and try different formulas, I think we're actually giving them the ease of being able to build those things—to solve the problems that they are trying to solve in that release.

In the build we were playing, some of the most powerful Aspects have had the number of Fragments they grant reduced to one. Specifically: Consecration, Feed the Void, Stylish Executioner and Knockout. I get that those have been dominant to the point of feeling like auto-includes, but historically whenever an Aspect has only had one Fragment it feels anemic in terms of build crafting. What's your take on that?

Green: Yeah, I mean, it's always a push and pull with balance. In PvE, I tend to be pretty liberal about things being overpowered. Where I get on board with substantial changes to power is when players feel like they're being compelled to use a particular option. With Fragment slots, unfortunately it's a very binary thing where you either have one or you have two, and that's a huge delta between those alternatives. Ideally, you'd grab the damage numbers and dial them differently, but sometimes we do a big swing in our balancing to assess what the impact is. Does it correct the behavior that we were seeing in-game, and if so did it create a new worst behavior? Sometimes we walk those back. We've walked decisions back in the past where we haven't been happy with the result.

It might be unfair, but I can already hear people complaining about Bungie being the fun police. I guess Consecration has been broken for a long time, and tweaking the numbers hasn't changed that.

Stevens: We're also changing how stats work in general, to not just focus on how the subclass ability atoms work, but how health and resilience behaviours work too. That's why these systemic changes are so important.

Green: On the fun police thing, I deeply sympathize and understand, because the mission statement for Destiny is for it to be a joyous expression of power. Like, it's fun to be powerful, but it's also not fun to be a warlock who has to run Well every single time in high-end content because it's too good.

I'm a Warlock main, born to Nova, forced to Well.

Green: Yeah! The thing that we try to do is to move those things around. I want players to feel powerful. I don't want them to feel that they have to do a specific thing all the time to feel powerful. I'd rather move those things around, even if sometimes they're like: 'But I really like the thing!"

We're our own worst enemies too, because we'll always choose the path of least resistance. The stated goal with Kepler and Edge of Fate is to take inspiration from the Metroidvania genre. Given how close things like the Matterspark ball ability are to Super Metroid itself, after the controversy around Marathon, do you worry about being seen to lean too heavily on a particular influence?

Green: Are we worried about whether it's too close to Metroid? Yeah, I mean, I'm worried that people are gonna get the wrong message. But it's coming from a place of love. We grew up playing these games and we love the reference, we love the homage. But we had to do our own version of it. We had to do our own execution of it, and it had to be a quality execution for us to include it in the game.

Matterspark plays into your arc kit. It has the Amplified effect on it. It's about engaging and fighting enemies in a way that is pretty novel and different, and I'm very happy with it. I think it's a fun thing that people get to play with. It's not the thing that we're trying to hang our hat on. It's part of a bigger effort to create an experience on Kepler that's unique to that destination.

Everyone seems to love the idea of akimbo weapons thanks to the mobile game Destiny: Rising's closed beta trailer. Can we get that in Destiny 2?

Green: Not anytime soon.

Is there any temptation to include a tier of rarity above exotic? A bit like Diablo 4 has Mythic Uniques for its aspirational grind.

Green: The temptation exists. You see it manifested in the form of things like holofoil weapons. We're very wary of people feeling like exotics are the new legendaries.

I remember when Season of the Forge was announced, and it was going to have these mysterious Black Armory weapons. I was so excited. Maybe for a higher tier you'd have to give up your exotic weapon and armor slot to equip just one Black weapon.

Green: Oh my god, this space is so tantalizing as a system designer!

So why not do it?

Stevens: I think the unsatisfying answer, but I think it's true, is choosing to do that means there's a lot of other things we're not doing that also could make the game feel awesome.

People would lose their shit, though. It's been 10 years of having exotics.

Green: Sure, yeah. Super exotics! Someday there might be room for that. But how do you do that without exotics just feeling like the new legendaries. I don't wan't gold to be the new purple. That's important to me.

Final one: Can we have the Speaker's class items back from D1. Almost everything else has come back except for those amazing Hunter cloaks.

Green: This is good feedback for the rewards team… I thought that we brought those back?!

Stevens: I did too!

Green: I'll investigate.

Bring those Hunter cloaks back next time the game is having a bad day on Reddit and I promise people will lose their minds. Not so much the Warlock bonds and Titan marks…

Green: I gently poke fun at Warlocks on a regular basis about the 'bond of disappointment'. If you knew the back story behind that, oh my goodness…

[Sadly, that's where we ran out of time—but as a Warlock main I promise to investigate further. Some questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity. The Edge of Fate launches on 15 July.]

Don't get me wrong, I like penguins as much as the next guy, but I figured there had to be something more at play here. It didn't take long to confirm, because the Steam page says Penguin Colony is a "narrative adventure game based on HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness."

The Steam listing includes features like "waddling, sliding and swimming"—lovely! It says you'll be able to "freely explore the Antarctic ice and the caverns beneath in non-linear order"—delightful! And, let's see here, you'll also "discover horrors buried under the ice and the dark history of the continent time forgot."

Oh. Oh no.

You might be wondering: Is "At the Mountains of Madness" a short story that's written from a penguin's perspective? And I can confirm that it isn't. It's about a doomed arctic expedition led by a Dr William Dyer of Miskatonic University, which gets a little complicated after a few minds and bodies are obliterated by the magnitude of unfathomable cosmic forces.

Helpfully, Origame Digital explains the penguin angle: "Our narrator is part of an expedition which has gone horribly wrong. Having been called by the old ones, his brain no longer experiences time linearly. Past, present and future have become one for him. The only thing who can hear his cry for help is you, a penguin awoken by a flare in the distance."

Now, I won't go into detail, but "At the Mountain of Madness" does feature some penguin content. I'll just say I'm interested to see what Penguin Colony's "different abilities and challenges" its unlockable penguins will possess. I'm sure it'll be fine.

Penguin Colony doesn't have a release date, but Origame Digital says it'll release a trailer and demo "in the coming months."