Equipment

The latest issue of venerable Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu includes an interview with Square Enix executive officer and NieR series producer Yosuke Saito (thanks Gematsu), in which he reveals they’re putting the band back together. Maybe. Possibly. Look, maybe he shouldn’t have said anything.

The exciting element of the news for NieR fans is the name-dropping, with Saito referencing both series director Yoko Taro and composer Keiichi Okabe. The following is a machine translation of Saito discussing this future project:

“I’ve been talking about wanting to do something with Yoko-san and Okabe-san for some time now. I’ll have something a bit more comprehensive to say in the not-too-distant future, so please stay tuned. It might be NieR, it might not be NieR [laughs].…

Nvidia really cannot keep a secret, can it? Yes, in a surprise to absolutely no-one, CES brings us the new GeForce RTX 40-series Super cards. The Ada Lovelace architecture refresh has been rumoured for a long while now, and here it is, either offering a little more performance for either the same sticker price, or in one particular case a fairly significant decrease.

The green team is launching three new Super cards, two of which are completely replacing their non-Super forebears and the third pushing the price down of its older Ada sibling. The first to launch this month is arguably the most interesting from a pure silicon standpoint—the RTX 4070 Super is the card getting the biggest GPU upgrade, which Nvidia is estimating will deliver up to 20% higher performance.

Fr…

A new report from IGN says the situation at Bungie following layoffs and reports of sinking Destiny 2 player numbers and revenues is even more dire than is widely known. Morale at the studio has reportedly plummeted amidst what is described by IGN’s sources as management indifference, and the report says Bungie could even be subject to a full Sony takeover if the upcoming Destiny 2 expansion The Final Shape fails to meet expectations.

The layoff of roughly 100 Bungie employees in October triggered outrage among Destiny 2’s players, who were particularly angry to see veteran employees including composers Michael Salvatori and Michael Sechrist, and well-known social media reps, put out of work. The situation was made worse by a ham-fisted public statement from CEO Pete Parsons, who …

This article was posted August 9, then updated August 12 to reflect clarifications from Blizzard. Click here to jump to the new information.

World of Warcraft: The War Within is ramping up to be massive for the MMO’s quality of life. Warbands, as a feature, make the game incredibly alt-friendly, letting players trade key currencies, “warbound” items, and giving them account-wide storage accessible from anywhere for a pretty nominal fee.

Transmog—that is, the game’s outfit system that lets you swap out the models of your equipped gear—also had a massive boost. Previously, you’d only unlock appearances for items your character could equip themselves. Now almost anything you pick up will drop into your collection.

It seemed these imp…

Old School RuneScape developer Jagex is trying to quell player discontent after a strongly negative reaction to comments about the proliferation of bot accounts seemingly made by the company’s new owner: CVC Capital Partners. 

CVC bought Jagex earlier this month for £900 million, a splashy acquisition that, naturally, caught the eye of the Financial Times. A source close to CVC told the paper that “bots are part of the RuneScape ecosystem, they just are,” and went on to say that the goal was “a sort of equilibrium of players and bots” in the game. “If a player is sufficiently committed to pay for three accounts, and have an account and two bots as part of its ecosystem, then so be it,” said the FT’s source.

Players took that as an indication that—so far as C…

First reported by Exputer, Sony has published a new controller patent that solves perhaps the greatest problem in gaming: “Controllers used for such purposes as gaming typically include materials that are relatively difficult to deform such as plastics.” When I snapped a plastic panel off my DualShock 3 in 2014 after dying to the Belfry Gargoyles in Dark Souls 2 for the 12th time, my issue absolutely was that my controller wasn’t “deformable” enough.

The solution, naturally, is “a controller that includes a sensor using an elastically deformable elastic member, and this sensor detects user’s contact with or deforming action of the elastic member and outputs an electric signal based on the detected contact or deforming action in question.”

Essentially, the patent seems to be …

Gather ye round, children, for it’s once again that most magical time of year: The Epic store freebies of the week are good enough to make it worth remembering your password⁠—did you use a special character this time like I asked?—and waiting for the launcher to update. That’s right, it’s the Fallout Classic Collection, which includes Fallouts 1, 2, and Tactics. Not included in the Fallout Classic Collection⁠—but no less free⁠—is Wild Card Football.

PC Gamer has a strong editorial history on ranking the Fallout games that hews mostly to the tastes of news writer Joshua Wolens’s freebie/deal posts, much like the one you’re reading right now. Josh is also absolutely correct, so here’s PC Gamer’s objective, immutable ranking of the Fallout se…

Improve every Wordle game with our general tips and guides, read a helpful clue for today’s puzzle if you’d just like a nudge in the right direction, or snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with the answer to the June 22 (733) game. However you want to win, we can help.

Today’s answer was one of those words that looks incredibly obvious all the way down the board now I’ve cleared it, but at the time I found myself shuffling yellow letters around for far too long. Even so—a frustrating win’s still a win, no matter how you find the Wordle answer.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Thursday, June 22

Today’s answer is one of the five senses, specifically the one associated with flavour. You could also use this word to describe someone with…

“Whatever you can do, we beg you!” a dude in a snowy field petting a dead horse entreats me before looking directly into my eyes. “Will you save us?” a child actor in the middle of some burning ruins asks me, again with really intense eye contact (Lilith later shows up at the town in the trailer so I think the kid’s gonezo). After a welcome reprieve of a rogue shooting arrows and doing rogue-y things, we’re back to uncomfortable eye contact: “Will you make them suffer?” a man chained to a dungeon wall demands to know. Bro, I’m still full from lunch and kind of want to lie down.

In the vaunted tradition of big budget games, Blizzard commissioned Nomadland and Marvel’s Eternals director Chloe Zhao to make a live action trailer for the imminent release of Diablo 4, and it’s fine, I g…

One of the benefits of being (at least nominally) in charge of the good ship PC Gamer—there are still a few—is that I get to write about whatever I want. Mostly that means Destiny 2 and Hearthstone, but today it also means the Dune 2 movie, which has released its first trailer. Frankly, I was surprised no other members of the team beat me to it, but judging by the “sorry I just can’t take Timothee Chalamet seriously” and “didn’t all the interesting characters die” messages in Slack, it appears I’ve surrounded myself with heathens who don’t care about the second part of Denis Villeneuve’s icy rendition of one of the all-time pillars of the sci-fi canon.

Anyway: The trailer. There’s sand. There’s Zendaya and my semi-namesake Timmy Chalamet gazing at each other mournfully…

Workers from just about every industry in the US are celebrating a landmark announcement by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that, unless stopped, will ban non-compete clauses in around four months.

A non-compete is, in essence, a clause that dictates whether a worker can find employment (or create a product) that directly competes with their employer—even if they aren’t working for them anymore. Typically, these will last around six months to a year after the end of employment, but they can last longer. 

“Today, the Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule to promote competition by banning noncompetes nationwide, protecting the fundamental freedom of workers to change jobs, increasing innovation, and fostering new business formation,” reads an announcement …

Check out our helpful Wordle tips below, or scroll on down for a link to our guide, if you’d like to learn how to polish up your daily guesses. Need a little more help? You’ve got it. There’s a clue for today’s Wordle on this very page, and the answer for the November 1 (865) puzzle is only a click away.

I was certain my next guess was going to be a winner three times today, although the first two of those turned out to be wrong in different ways. That was a fun game, though it felt like I was following a trail of letter-shaped breadcrumbs to the answer, even if it did end up longer than I would have liked it to be.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, November 1

Technically, today’s answer can refer to any sort of sound, altho…

Here’s my toxic trait: I get annoyed when games aren’t on Steam. Not for any principled reason, not because I love my Steam Deck (though I do), and not even because Steam—per our own ranking of the PC’s many launchers—is the best client of the bunch. I just don’t like my collection being scattered all over various clients. It feels like having all your games on one shelf in your living room but being compelled, by some mysterious force, to occasionally go and put some of them on a different shelf upstairs. It’s not right, it’s unnatural, and I shan’t have it.

Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, right, I mention this because Dead Island 2—last year’s underwhelming zombie-basher that’s been hitherto Epic-only—is making the inevitable jump to Steam on Apri…

Update: 02/10/2023: Subsequent to publication, the ban on St4ck’s account has been lifted. 

Valve has banned a prominent and somewhat controversial Counter-Strike skin trader, St4ck, whose account boasts one of the most high-value inventories you’ll ever see: by some estimates it is the third most-valuable CS skin haul out there. Pricing stuff in CS is always a bit of a guessing game, because when we’re talking about rare items you’re relying on middlemen and third party vendors for valuations, but PriceEmpire values St4ck’s inventory at $1.45 million and lists items including a Souvenir Factory New AWP Dragon Lore ($400K), five Katowice 2014 foil stickers ($90K apiece), and a metric ton of guns and knives that go for bet…

World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm expansion was… divisive. In the case of the Barrens, it was literally divisive—cleaving the once-beloved levelling zone in two. A landslide of other changes to old world content meant that, while The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King were pretty well-received, Cataclysm is the red-headed stepchild of Warcraft’s earlier history—and that’s to say nothing of its endgame content and patch cycle.

But, according to an interview by PCGamesN with executive producer Holly Longdale, the prospect of going back to Cataclysm isn’t as unpopular as you might think. “Much like many players, [we] were like ‘Oh, God, are they gonna do Cataclysm?’ And we were like ‘why don’t we just ask?’ … Then we got the surve…

With the launch of Remnant 2’s first DLC, The Awakened King, Gunfire Games has partnered with Gearbox Publishing and Elgato to choose five lucky travellers, who’ll receive a bundle of prizes via a giveaway on the PC Gamer forums. 

I’ve recently had a blast playing through Remnant 2’s DLC, so I can highly recommend entering for the code alone. The Awakened King adds a whole new adventure through the world of Losomn—new areas, bosses, items, weapons, and a new Ritualist archetype.

Thanks to Gunfire Games, Elgato, and Gearbox Publishing, you’ll be able to enter a giveaway for a chance of winning a prize. Well, three prizes, actually: A Remnant 2-branded Elgato Stream Deck with a custom faceplate design, a Remnant 2 Ultimate edition key (which gives you access to The …