We know that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ next map is going to have snowy bits, and that we’re due to find out more about it this month. While you wait, feast your eyes on Nördheim, a Scandinavian fan concept for the new map that looks drop-dead gorgeous. You’d be able to break the ice manually with grenades or plain bullets, which could lead to a few icy baths. And because of that water temperature, players won’t be able to spend as much time submerged as they can on the game’s existing maps.

Viking RTS Northgard has just swept out of Early Access, adding a singleplayer campaign in the process. Think of the game as a bit like Age of Empires, only with more snow and four-winged dragons. It sold more than 600,000 copies in its year-long Early Access, and T.J. enjoyed his time with it last year when it was still just a Skirmish mode vs the AI, so it might be worth a look. The update that brings it out of Early Access is a big one, and that campaign mode is the main addition. If you are

Immortal: Unchained might only be in closed alpha, but the fundamentals, combat and level design, are boring and clumsy. I’m sorry butTo get it out of the way: yeah, it looks a lot like Dark Souls. The Souls-like, much as I wish it wasn’t , is a genre of its own now, and Immortal: Unchained is bringing guns to the show. Early into the alpha, it recalled Metroid Prime’s thrilling lock-on shooting (my favorite game ever) married to Dark Souls’ excellent lock-on melee (my other favorite game ever).

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ hacker problem is well documented, and developer Bluehole is constantly pushing updates to the game’s anti-cheat system in order to catch the worst offenders. Unfortunately, the latest update has resulted in some friendly fire, with scores of players claiming they’ve been banned without ever having cheated. The developer has confirmed that the update is “temporarily preventing some players from accessing our game”. PC players, we are aware of a detection logic rela

God-killing might sound like an ambitious notion for a standalone expansion, but with Death of the Outsider, Arkane Studios promised players the opportunity to do just that. Refining certain ideas, systems and mechanics present in Dishonored 2 enabled Billie Lurk’s revenge tale to be its own beast. The series’ long-standing director, Harvey Smith, had actually toyed with the idea since the first day of working on Dishonored 2. The plan for Death of the Outsider was to avoid those. “Returning pla

For those of us who use our PCs for more than just games (gross, I know), Microsoft is again tinkering with a much-requested feature in its newest Insider Preview build. ‘Sets’ were first introduced during a previous experimental build last year, but now they’re back, and apparently, even better than before. Sets basically bring tabs to many of Microsoft’s first-party Windows app – including File Explorer, Calendar, OneNote, Mail and more. In addition to the convenience of having two File Explor

Last year, I called food ‘the most powerful game design tool,’ and while Final Fantasy 15 doesn’t use food in a radical new way (it’s buffs), it does use it to express bonding and culture, two things food is great for. As I said in that article, “The act of cooking for someone else is full of existing meaning, and that intimacy isn’t necessarily lost in the translation to virtual food.” Also, it looks really good. “You know how even the simplest foods can taste really delicious when you’re out c

VIDEO: The PC Gamer Show, Episode 121 (also available on YouTube)Welcome back to The PC Gamer Show, our weekly livestreamed podcast. You can catch the show live on Wednesdays at 1 pm PDT on our Twitch channel, or after the fact at any of the links below. This week we’ll be talking about a handful of new games, including the PC version of Final Fantasy 15. Bo introduces us to a new Overwatch hero, James talks about the glut of new Far Cry 5 news and his impressions of the PC version, and then the

The PC release of Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana (which has not yet happened) has been an ugly affair. The situation was so far out of control that publisher NIS America put everything on hold indefinitely and brought in another developer to take over the job. The new guys appear to be working out, as NIS America president Takuro Yamashita told Greg’s RPG Heaven that the game is now slated to be out in April. But if nothing else, it’s nice to know NIS America isn’t just throwing in the towel and going

Golem is a side-scrolling puzzle-adventure game about a young girl and her shapeshifting golem friend, who set off to explore an ancient tower and reactivate the machines inside. It was announced last summer by developer Longbow Games, which today released a trailer providing the first look at how the game will actually play. Golem will feature ten levels set across a variety of environments, filled with puzzles that will require the unique abilities of both characters to solve. The trailer is l

During its Developer Day event today, Microsoft announced a new installer format for packaging apps called MSIX. It’s essentially a brand new type of container, and what’s neat about this one is that it supports all types of Windows applications, including Universal Windows Program (UWP) apps and classic Win32 programs. MSIX could conceivably get Win32 programs into the Windows Store without having them become UWP apps, and hopefully points at a long-needed rework of the Windows Store to make it

Developers are pumping games onto Steam at an astonishing rate, making it harder than ever for individual games to stand out from the crowd. That’s a “significant” benefit of direct sales, he says, but not the biggest. Maybe Steam is something I’d do a year from now when I’ve put out a tonne of content and everyone’s happy. “We wanted to go down the direct sales route… we talked to a bunch of studios that did their own direct sales setup, but it was pretty intimidating. He sees itch.io as a “com

Bombslinger is a Spaghetti Western “action-maze” game unabashedly inspired by Bomberman. It can be played solo or in local co-op with up to three friends (or bots), and it’s launching out of Steam Early Access on April 11. It’s currently $12, and developer Mode4 says they’re planning to increase the price once it officially releases. You are the titular Bombslinger, a former bandit on a quest to avenge his wife’s murder by taking down the gang he once led. To do so, you’ll have to explode your w

US President Donald Trump will meet with representatives of the videogame industry tomorrow to discuss matters of violence in videogames, and their impact on incidents of real-world violence such as school shootings. One group that apparently will not be taking part, however, is the International Game Developers Association. 1/ Let’s be blunt on video games and gun violence-we will not be used as a scapegoat. Some studies have connected violent games with heightened aggression, but don’t answer

Meet Peekingboo Streamer Peekingboo in a rare shot that doesn’t include his legs, via Twitter. “We thought it would be funny to hook up a NES emulator and see if we could play Super Mario Bros. 3 [with the dance pad.] We thought it would be funny to hook up a NES emulator and see if we could play Super Mario Bros. 3. Perhaps someday he will clean out the catalog, but until then he keeps a running list of the difficulty of each game he’s beaten . The easiest, unsurprisingly, were Pokemon Yellow a

Self-titled “roguevania” game Dead Cells recently received its sixth major update, the Hand of the King, adding a new level and boss along with a bevy of balance changes. According to developer Motion Twin, the Hand of the King will be the last major update before Dead Cells leaves Early Access. Motion Twin clarified that while the Hand of the King is the final boss of the campaign, it will not be the last boss to be added to Dead Cells. The new boss and level are made all the more harrowing by

HP has slashed $100 off the price of its Omen desktop, and by using a coupon code, you can save a couple hundred bucks more. The end result is a configuration with an AMD Ryzen 7 1600 processor and GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card for $1,012 and change. Scroll down to the GPU section and select the GeForce GTX 1080 8GB option, which bumps the price to $1,250. Add the rig to your cart, then use coupon code 25BMSM2018 at checkout to drop the price to $1,012. If you go that route, the tally after usi

I don’t feel like I have a lot of personal baggage or hangups, and I generally consider myself (or at least present myself) as being laid back and relaxed. The description reads: “This mod alters the ‘Broadcaster’ which requires all sims on the lot to wave goodbye to all other sims who are leaving the lot.” The mod makes it so only Sims within a certain small radius will have to wave goodbye when another Sim leaves a gathering. But first you have to announce that you’re leaving (while wondering

Police in Iceland have arrested 11 people suspected of stealing 600 computers used to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the Associated Press reports. The hardware, which has not yet been recovered, is worth an estimated $2 million. While the hardware is obviously worth a large sum at nearly $2 million, the culprits were probably more motivated by the profit they could turn by mining various cryptocurrencies. Iceland is home to cheap energy due to its geothermal and hydroelectric power pla

For example, back in January there was a report that DRAM prices might actually (finally!) Now, however, there is talk of DRAM pricing heading north by as much as 10 percent. According to “industry sources” that Digitimes spoke with, there is rising demand for DRAM chips by smartphone manufacturers and especially datacenters. All combined, the market could see a 30 percent uptick in the number of memory chips produced. Analysts at Goldman Sachs also believe that DRAM pricing will continue to ris