This week, a nice, negative one: when was the exact moment you fell out of love with a game? Phil Savage: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black FlagAfter around 11 hours, I quit not just Assassin’s Creed IV, but the entire Assassin’s Creed series. I’d played every game, even Assassin’s Creed III, and enjoyed them all (except Assassin’s Creed III). And after a gajillion tries that spanned weeks I finally admitted defeat and Dark Souls went straight into the bin. Today, I love Dark Souls as a whole, but stil

The PC Gamer Weekender is a mere week away on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 February, and we’re really excited about hosting you at the London Olympia once again. Come play Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Biomutant, Extinction, Phoenix Point, Frozen Synapse 2 and a ton of cool indie games. See the complete Developer Stage line-up here and the complete PC Gamer Stage line-up here. This year we’re proud to say this feature is back, with more great games from yesteryear. Again, if y

However, once gaming traffic leaves your home network and goes on the internet, it’s at the mercy of public network infrastructure and whatever routes ISPs choose. These are privately run services that consist of a series of servers specifically deployed across the country to route gaming traffic using the most efficient paths possible. OutfoxA more recent entry into the GPN segment is Outfox, which bills itself as an “Optimized gaming network.” For those that are having high ping issues to a ga

Audio contributes a great deal to file size, but it hasn’t been the primary contributor to the growth of game sizes in general. Like video, textures are increasing in resolution, except unlike video they aren’t fond of being compressed. Why would a game that takes place within NBA arenas be bigger than the entire world of The Witcher 3? We’ve established that textures have been the biggest contributor to the overall increase of game sizes, and as Hanish said, textures can’t be too heavily compre

VIDEO: A quick introduction to Battalion 1944’s old school style and competitive modes. Battalion 1944 is a throwback FPS, but not to the days of Quake and Doom. It’s a shooter built for those nostalgic for the early 2000s and simpler, more straightforward WW2 battles. Battalion 1944 is still working through some Early Access launch growing pains, but it’s already a refreshingly straightforward shooter for 2018. Above you can learn more about Battalion 1944 in our short commentary video.

Secret of Mana was originally released in Japan, as Seiken Densetsu 2, in 1993. It came to the Wii Virtual Console in Japan in 2008, and the Wii U Virtual Console in 2013, and then again in 2017 on the Super NES Classic Edition. A full 3D remake for PlayStation 4, Vita, and PC was announced last August, set for release on February 15, and now, as the big day looms, it’s on Steam with a $40/£30/€40 price tag and some system requirements. It will surely come as no surprise that you won’t need espe

THE HIGHSTom Senior: London callingWe’re hosting our annual London live event, The PC Gamer Weekender, next weekend. When I joined PC Gamer we had a magazine and a little website. Samuel Roberts: Gollop chamberWe’re incredibly lucky to host X-Com co-creator Julian Gollop’s words on PC Gamer, and this week’s Gollop Chamber column was one of my favourites so far. The embargo lifted on one this morning, so I can finally tell the world about another OK-looking farming simulator, Pure Farming 2018. I

Gleaner Heights is a Harvest Moon-inspired retro-styled farming sim developed entirely by one man, a very basic outline that sounds a lot like the indie mega-hit Stardew Valley. During the day you’ll grow crops, tend your animals, hunt, fish, cook, befriend the townsfolk, and perhaps even pursue romance. The game begins as you take your first steps toward a new life as a farmer in the charming little town of Gleaner Heights. “Discover the haunting past of Gleaner Heights, from its early days to

Scientists are still having a hard time explaining the Big Bang, so I imagine stopping it outright would be much harder. Nevertheless, that’s your goal in Genesis Noir, which developer Feral Cat Den describes as a poetic adventure game where, in order to save your love, you’ve got to stop the universe from expanding. Genesis Noir is a game about recognizing patterns and playing with things. You can sample its satisfying interactions in this cool interactive demo where you connect stars to form j

In Early Access action game McRogue, you’re a burly guy with a big red beard and you have enormous robot hands. You have a gun, too, but if you had giant robot hands you could punch robots with, would you ever use a gun? Giant robot hands pretty much insist on being used for punching (especially for punching robots), not gun-holding. Rather than just killing McRogue, they grafted two enormous robot hands onto his arms. What sort of scientific discovery could come from grafting enormous robot han

We’ve known for a little while that Hanzo, Overwatch’s archer-sniper and butt of many jokes, is due for a rework. The main thing expected to change is his Scatter Arrow, which can often one-shot enemies and thus feel unfair to play against. The first idea replaced Scatter Arrow with Piercing Arrow, a shot with extremely fast projectile speed that would pierce through enemies and barriers. Another group of ideas reworked Scatter Arrow in a number of ways. “This was pretty interesting when paired

The Sunbeam, a cargo ship passing through the system, picked up the Aurora’s distress beacon and was coming to investigate. Jutting out of the island, an alien tower reached almost a kilometer into the sky. To my left, the alien tower continued to groan. Seconds passed, and I watched the alien tower with rapidly growing horror. As the Sunbeam finally came close enough that I could make out the shape of its hull, the alien tower began glowing green.

Such is the bleak world of In Other Waters, a “unique exploration game” about a xenobiologist and an AI exploring an alien ocean. It’s currently on Kickstarter, with lead developer Gareth Damian Martin asking for $30,647 to fund the project. In Other Waters stars Ellery Vas, a marine researcher who moonlights as a diving instructor to make ends meet. Martin says In Other Waters was largely inspired by Metroid Prime, Ecco: Tides of Time and Sunless Sea, and it shows. Incidentally, lead Sunless Se

I roleplayed a normal human farmer in the free farming mode, but didn’t come away with a very good idea of what Pure Farming 2018 is other than a competent farming simulator. I do it because this rice planting machine is nothing like I’ve ever seen, and I didn’t know how to farm rice before. Here’s me, a normal human farmer, taking a break from harvesting fresh coffee beans. I realize I call myself a normal human farmer and that it is a lie. At least Pure Farming 2018 is capable of letting me li

Activision earned $7 billion in net revenues in 2017, which is an awfully impressive number, although maybe not all that surprising surprising given the games in its stable: Overwatch, Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, and a few others you may have heard of. But what’s really interesting (or potentially terrifying, depending on your perspective) is that more than half of that amount—over $4 billion—comes from in-game purchases. The bulk of that amount is delivered via King and its Candy Crush game

Here’s something you didn’t expect to learn today: Them’s Fightin’ Herd’s, the 2D fighting game inspired by the cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, is due out this month. After raising nearly $600,000 on Indiegogo in October 2015, it will finally release on February 22, according to developer Mane6. Them’s Fightin’ Herds is exactly what it looks like: a fighting game where all the characters are four-legged animals, many of them ponies. “Humble Bundle has provided us with the funding ne

Employers typically frown upon using company resources for personal gain, and some scientists at a nuclear weapons facility in Russia are finding that out the hard way. Apparently the scientists used a supercomputer at the facility to mine cryptocurrency, and were subsequently arrested, BBC reports. “There has been an unsanctioned attempt to use computer facilities for private purposes including so-called mining,” Tatyana Zalesskaya, head of the Russian Federal Nuclear Centre told Interfax news

But sometimes, all you really need to sell a game is a good gif. That’s exactly how I discovered Descenders, the sophomore release from a tiny Dutch studio called RageSquid. #Descenders https://t.co/Q4MFUyzs4F pic.twitter.com/Gonhu0RgsEFebruary 3, 2018Right out of the gate, Descenders just plain feels good. I’m optimistic that Descenders will grow into a meatier game, and in the meantime, it’s a great way to kill a few hours in a super fun sandbox. I expect Descenders’ fate will largely be conti

Dedicated servers will roll out to Ubisoft’s hack-and-slash brawler For Honor on February 19, just over a year after its initial launch, and four days after the start of the game’s fifth season, Age of Wolves. They’ll only be available for the PC version of the game at first, but will come to consoles “soon after.” The coming of dedicated servers was first announced in July 2017, but Ubisoft moved slowly with implementation “to ensure a smooth transition” to the new infrastructure. “Changing the

Pretty soon AMD will release updated versions of its Ryzen processors with integrated Vega graphics. Regardless, Asus is preparing for the launch with a whole bunch of BIOS updates. In addition, an updated graphics driver— available from the Asus support website—pushes the integrated AMD Radeon graphics to new performance heights for best-ever visual and gaming experiences with AMD Ryzen 2000 series APUs,” Asus says. The upcoming Ryzen 2000 series combine four Zen-based CPU cores with Radeon Veg