Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is just over two weeks away, and I can’t wait. “Fans tend to skew towards the more hardcore cases and they tend to be fairly resistant to change,” he said at Reboot Development 2018 this week. “The genre can go in a number of different directions…I’m also contributing to the problem. Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 are very traditional role playing games.” “The traditionalists probably get angry about this stuff, but Bethesda’s RPGs are very different from isometric

“Arcade is dead,” Housemarque said in January following poor sales of its latest arcade shooter Nex Machina (which was a very, very good game). The developer showed off a quick teaser for its next project, a multiplayer game called Stormdivers, during Reboot Develop 2018 today. The video gave little away, but an interview with Eurogamer after the presentation filled in the blanks. “You can compare it to a lot of the multiplayer experiences you have now,” said head of publishing Mikael Haveri, wh

Impish dungeon manager War for the Overworld—think a modern-day version of Dungeon Keeper and you’re not far off—has just released its final expansion, which adds a seven-level, skirmish-style campaign, two game modes and three new dungeon Underlords, each with their own powers and signature minions. In The Under Games, you compete with other Underlords in a tournament featuring a variety of scenarios. The expansion also adds a cartload of new spells, potions, defenses, and map structures, inclu

Wintry Early Access battle royale game Darwin Project went free to play yesterday in an effort to boost player numbers and cut down the time it takes to queue for a round. “To bring in new players and maintain a level of activity that ensures players are able to get the most of out Darwin Project, we’ve decided to make it more accessible by removing the price tag.” They’ll get two legendary sets, three legendary axes, three legendary bows, a full jumpsuit collection and five fan gifts. Davreau a

I’m still writing on Psychonauts 2, I’m hard at work getting all those cutscenes and levels writing done. We’re picking games that really stand out to us, or speak to us, and need what we have to offer. Would you be open to taking on Lucasarts adventure games that could do with similar treatment, even if they’re not games you worked on? The games industry dwells too much in the over serious, the grim hero of action games and hyper-macho things. Those things are not well-treated in mainstream gam

We asked the PC Gamer writers this question: do FPS games still need a singleplayer campaign? As you might expect, there was a wide range of responses, and it’s worth saying that all of us love good singleplayer games no matter what. Andy Kelly: NoIn this soulless, transient age of ‘games as a service’, big mainstream shooters definitely don’t need singleplayer campaigns. I would love the singleplayer FPS campaign to be relevant and interesting again. Without doing the boring “well, it depends o

THE HIGHSAndy Chalk: SeriouslyI’ve been a fan of Serious Sam since day one, and I was tickled pink when Serious Sam 3: BFE finally carried Croteam to the (relative) big time in 2011. It’s a surreal time when nearly a thousand players from all over the globe fly to the home of CCP’s main headquarters to drink, talk, and celebrate EVE Online. Because, despite what you may have heard, EVE Online is actually home to some of the nicest, most inclusive people I know. Tom Senior: Survey saysI have enjo

After a few days crafting daggers, axes, shields and polearms for the townsfolk, you’ll memorize the recipes in My Little Blacksmith Shop and set up a systematic production line in which no time is wasted. My Little Blacksmith Shop encourages you to step away from the forge by placing points of interest around its small town, but they’re mostly uninviting. I’ve always enjoyed shop sims like Recettear, and if you give My Little Blacksmith Shop the time, it will scratch that same itch. The small d

Ashland University of Ohio, the home of the Eagles, has announced that it will include Fortnite Battle Royale in its collegiate esports program, set to begin competition in the fall of 2018. The school said that its esports team “will be the first known collegiate esports program in the country” to add Fortnite to its roster. Ashland launched its collegiate esports program in February, when it announced Buchanan’s hiring. Other games offered in Ashland’s esports program include League of Legends

After a stay in early access on Itch , Aura of Worlds will enter Steam Early Access on Tuesday, April 24, developer Cognitive Forge announced today. Cognitive Forge says they’ve made significant additions since Aura of Worlds’ Itch debut. The Steam Early Access build sports three types of procedurally generated worlds made from eight environmental themes, as well as 70 different enemies. You’ve got grappling hooks, most importantly, but also cloaking items, hackable turrets, portable light bridg

Warcraft 3 was one of those games I desperately wanted to play as a teenager, after years spent replaying Warcraft 2’s campaigns and messing around in its map editor. I guess the same holds true for Warcraft 2, but Warcraft 3 had far greater narrative ambitions. And hoo boy, those 3D graphics don’t hold up quite as well as the simpler, cleaner 2D art of Warcraft 2. World of Warcraft was only two years away, and you can tell the studio was shifting that way as you play Warcraft 3 today. Replaying

Mynxee has just had her first encounter with EVE Online’s most nefarious players: pirates. EVE Online also has a large transgender community, as far as I could tell. It was a good time to be a woman and a pirate, Mynxee says. They were adults, they had kids and jobs, they just couldn’t devote that much time to EVE Online. MynxeeWhen she returned nearly three and a half years later, she hung up her rogue cloak and started doing some serious good for EVE Online.

Hollow Knight’s long-awaited Lifeblood update is now available, developer Team Cherry announced today. If you purchased the game through Steam or GOG Galaxy, it will automatically update. DRM-free GOG and Humble buyers will need to download an updated version from their respective storefronts. Lifeblood’s headlining addition is a new boss, but an existing boss has also been “seriously upgraded.” A medley of smaller fixes and extras are also included, most of which help catch the PC version up to

German game house Daedalic Entertainment is holding a Steam sale, with prices reduced by as much as 90 percent. Point-and-click adventure fans should probably give it a look—that’s what Daedalic is known for—but as the saying goes, that’s not all. Shadow Tactics, which we scored 92/100 in our 2017 review, is half price ($20/£17.50/€20), as is the more recent and also very good The Pillars of the Earth ($15/£13.50/€15). A few that I would recommend:There are also some good deals on big bundles, i

With the sudden news of Ben Brode’s departure from Blizzard , today feels like a good time for me to repromote this profile charting his unstoppable rise, from January this year. As our writer Luke Winkie noted at the time, these days every major developer wants its own Ben Brode. Brode has always been prepared to front up for what he believed in and explain the team’s thinking. Our feature also describes how Brode only wanted to do the management thing on his terms, which meant being completely

The Binding of Isaac creator Edmund McMillen first teased The Legend of Bum-bo in March 2016 as a “turn-based puzzle RPG thingy that’s randomly generated,” and this January confirmed it had been delayed to the second half 2018. Today, McMillen and co-creator James Id revealed the first trailer for Bum-bo in a Tumblr post outlining the gist of the game. The Legend of Bum-bo features a papercraft aesthetic, but its general vibe is reminiscent of The Binding of Isaac. McMillen says these similariti

Through the Ages is perhaps the most beloved board game in this genre. I remembered playing the board game fondly, if through a haze of sleepless convention thought, and gave it a shot. Each turn in Through the Ages, you must develop your civilization with a limited handful of actions. Through the Ages uses these limited choices and opportunities to focus on grand sweeping movements in society, rather than a hex-by-hex view. Each game forces you to deal with what opportunities chance serves you—

Horizon Lunar Colony is one of Overwatch’s most-hated maps. For starters, it’s an Assault (two capture point) map, the gametype that “everyone hates” due to the incredibly close defenders’ spawn location. It looks like Blizzard has taken notice, as a map rework is currently underway, dramatically changing the potential attack and defense avenues surrounding each point. Here’s a video flying through the updated map on the current Overwatch PTR:Interestingly, these changes weren’t actually intende

I’m still iffy on Agony. But it would be easy enough to say basically the same thing about, for instance, Amnesia—”Oh, you’re touring some guy’s mansion, how bad could that be? My hope is that Agony will deliver in the same way: unexpectedly, brilliantly awful. Unsurprisingly, Developer Madmind Studio recently announced that it had to tone down some of Agony’s content to avoid an AO (Adults Only) rating, which would have prevented its release on console. Those of us on PC will be able to enjoy t

Australia’s High Court has upheld a ruling against Valve in a lawsuit filed against it in 2014 by Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission over the lack of a refund policy on Steam. The ACCC won the suit in 2016, and came out on top again a year later when Valve’s first appeal was dismissed. Valve implemented a refund policy in 2015, but the suit was filed in relation to the years prior to that. In December 2017, Valve applied for special leave to appeal the prior Full Federal Court denia