The piece contains spoilers for activities in Fort Deadlight. Early in Pillars of Eternity II, the Watcher has the first of many pirate encounters in the Deadfire Archipelago. You can fight your way to him, but there are smarter and more fun ways to complete the quest. “We had a few high-level goals for Fort Deadlight,” says Salgado. Brick by brickAnother of Salgado’s goals for Fort Deadlight was making it a visually striking environment, and for it to draw you into the fantasy of the game’s exo

Darksiders 3 will be out in November, we learned last month, and will feature some head-scratching environmental puzzles. “How it works is, basically, the closer you get to the fantasy elements of the game, the more fantastic the puzzle elements become,” explains Pearl above. As a mage, Fury relies on her whip and magic to restore the balance between good and evil. The expansive Darksiders 3 game world is presented as an open-ended, living, free-form planet Earth that is dilapidated by war and d

They don’t, obviously, but PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ long-awaited bullet penetration system now targets forearms. A Steam Community post further explains: “The result will be different depending on whether the forearm is blocking more vulnerable body parts. When a bullet penetrates a forearm and strikes a more vulnerable body part behind it, the greater damage will be applied. If a bullet penetrates the forearm, but no vulnerable body part is behind it, only the forearm damage will be appli

When you see a planet in Elite Dangerous, you could be forgiven for thinking it was just a big sphere with a texture wrapped around it. Passing comets and rogue planets are also thrown into the mix, to disrupt the orbits and create fledgling planets and moons. To help model the Milky Way accurately, Ross consulted scientific research papers. Elite Dangerous is based on our Milky Way and I personally feel that to push far into the implausible detracts from the wonder and connection this brings. T

Lords of the Fallen 2 is still in development, but now a new studio is involved. That new outfit is a New York-based developer called Defiant Studios, and it’s rebuilding the game from scratch. That’s according to managing director David Grijns, who tells Eurogamer Lords of the Fallen 2 remains an ARPG in the same Dark Souls-inspired mould of its forerunner, but is “a reset” and a “fresh start”. Read Eurogamer’s chat with David Grijns and Defiant Studios co-founder Roland Lesterlin in full here.

Originally scheduled for release in 2016, Pixel Ripped 1989 has finally launched on Steam today. If you were paying attention to VR games three or four years ago, footage of its quirky premise may stir some memories. One scene has a Gameboy toting schoolkid trying to play her handheld while escaping the notice of her teacher. Here’s what the studio writes:”Pixel Ripped 1989 is a wacky multi-dimensional homage to the early days of gaming. The launch trailer is below, and serves to demonstrate the

While its Early Access period provided an open-ended survival experience in the frosty Canadian wilderness, The Long Dark was always getting a story-oriented mode as well. Dubbed Wintermute, the first two episodes of the five episode series are already out, and studio Hinterland has announced today that the third episode will release this December. Episode three will follow Dr. Astrid Greenwood, providing a different perspective of events that occurred in the previous two episodes. There’s an ov

If you’re an attentive Quake Champions fan, you may have noticed that videos released over the past few months have featured music that’s not featured in the game. Today, Bethesda finally revealed the secret: Andrew Hulshult, the “sweet metal Viking” behind the music heard in Brutal Doom and Dusk, is creating a new soundtrack for the game. “This update will be a top to bottom, in-game music preview,” community manager Joshua Boyle wrote. “Everything from the menu idle music to each map’s theme m

A player has created a tribute to Hello Games founder Sean Murray in No Man’s Sky by carefully arranging construction tiles on a planet’s surface. The tribute is pretty big, as you can see from the images above and below, so if you happen to be flying over a planet and spot Murray’s face looking back up at you, you’re not crazy. “I got an image of Sean, removed the color, resized it to 37 x 50 pixels, posterized it to 4 levels, then used the resulting image as a guide and counted carefully. Time

First things first: For the entry-level fee of $1, the Humble Bundlers will hook you up with Grid 2, Sega Bass Fishing, and Eastside Hockey Manager, which now includes league and player data from the hockey hotbed United Kingdom. And if you happen to play Star Trek Online, you’ll also be awarded a Humble Trekkie Pack, “including Phoenix Lock Boxes, Mercenary Uniform, XP Boost, and Bridge Officer.” The default charity for the Humble Sports Bundle is Access Sport, a UK-based charity that works to

The law enforcement management sim/adventure This Is the Police 2 went live today on Steam. Putting This Is the Police 2 out early, apparently, is a way to balance the cosmic scales. He also admitted that he wasn’t sure whether or not they were actually going to go through with it until yesterday. The corruption-driven narrative of the first game is bolstered by the addition of an XCOM-flavored layer of tactical combat. Read our review (which also went live today) to find out.

FrankerZFrankerZ is a global Twitch chat emote generally used as a way to communicate sarcasm. FrankerZ is based on Frankie, the dog of Twitch staffer Ernest Le and family member Dennis Le. Earlier today, Ernest and Dennis both confirmed that Frankie has died at age eight. They posted tributes to the pup on Twitter and Instagram respectively:Heard from my fam that our boy FrankerZ passed away this morning. Dennis Le A photo posted by @itsdennisle on Jul 31, 2018 at 10:04am PDTThe popularity of t

If you’re in the market for a new mouse, today’s Newegg Flash sale is for you. Right now, you can get the Razer DeathAdder Chroma mouse for just $38. The DeathAdder Chroma is equipped with rubber side grips, a 10,000 DPI optical sensor, and Razer Synapse support. The RGB lighting underneath the logo and mouse wheel can be fully customized. You can buy the mouse from Newegg.

Thermaltake sells plenty of excellent PC cases, like the affordable Core V1 that is used in so many small form-factor PCs (including my own system). Right now you can get the Core G21, a great mid-tower case with two tempered glass side panels, for just $29.99 after a $25 mail-in rebate. The Core G21 has dual 4mm tempered glass panels, with the back panel being darker than the front window. It also has a full-length PSU cover, two USB 3.0 ports on the top I/O panel, and modular drive brackets. T

A new trailer for the Lovecraft-inspired horror-mystery game The Sinking City shows off a little bit of gameplay, but it’s really all about setting the mood—a creepy feat it accomplishes by relating the story of the worst shave that any man has ever taken. That man, Charles W. Reed, is a private investigator in the 1920s who, upon realizing that he’s slowly but surely going insane, decides that the thing to do is head to the town of Oakmont, Massachusetts, a formerly flourishing trade center tha

Are you looking to upgrade your 1080p monitor to something fast and with a higher resolution? Acer’s Predator XB271HU might be what you’re looking for, and it’s on sale for $579.99 on Newegg. The Predator XB271HU is a 27-inch display with a 2560×1440 resolution and native 144Hz refresh rate. It also supports G-Sync and is built around an IPS panel, so it’s not lacking for amenities. In fact, it’s basically the equivalent of the Asus PG279Q, the best gaming monitor.

Donut County is a story-based physics puzzle game about raccoon and a hole in the ground that steals people’s trash, and based on that description alone you can probably tell whether or not it’s something you want to play. The Steam page explains what Donut County is all about, sort of: “Raccoons have taken over Donut County with remote-controlled trash-stealing holes. “When BK falls into one of his own holes, he’s confronted by his best friend Mira and the residents of Donut County, who are all

OpenSC2K, an open source version of the classic SimCity 2000 that was released earlier this year, has been taken offline following a DMCA takedown request filed by Electronic Arts. The request, posted to GitHub, points out the rather obvious problem that while OpenSC2K might be open source, SimCity 2000 and its assets are most definitely not. “Assets from the game SimCity 2000 are being infringed upon,” the takedown states. SimCity 2000 isn’t one of EA’s “frontline” games but five bucks is five

Great moments in PC gaming are short, bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories. DOS game discs Thanks to the Internet Archive and Jason Scott’s Textfiles, you can still find ISOs of discs like these online: 101 Games1000 DOS and Windows games100 Games and MoreBefore the internet, games were hard to come by. But with the dawn of the CD came a whole new world of gaming goodness. The joy of discovery was better than most of the actual games, but it was a joy nevertheless. How

Our favorite budget SSD is the Crucial MX500 500GB, and we like our choice even more when it’s on sale, as is the case right now. Over at Amazon, you can bring one home for just $99.99 today. In the realm of 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, the MX500 is right up there in terms of performance. It packs 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory (256Gb per package), is rated to deliver up to 560MB of sequential read and 510MB of sequential write performance, and is backed by a 5-year/360TBW warranty. Some online stores