It’s a long and slightly convoluted story so let’s start at the beginning: at the weekend, influential video game discussion board NeoGAF went offline. This followed sexual assault allegations leveled at its owner, Tyler Malka (aka ‘Evilore’), though the outage seemed to follow the walkout of the board’s moderators. What followed were days of silence, with no comment by Malka and no sign the board would ever return. The Malka statement is here, and flatly refutes all allegations made against him

The new Battle.net social features, which were announced earlier this month, including Blizzard Groups, user profiles and avatar, and the ability to appear offline, are now live. To encourage people to give it a look, Blizzard is giving out free a Hearthstone Classic card pack to everyone who logs into the new Gifts page prior to December 31. To give a gift, pop over to the Battle.net shop, choose the item you want to send, and then instead of clicking “Buy Now,” select “Gift.” From there, you’l

Lots of games let you explore a world, but where most focus on the reward waiting at the finish line, Aer is all about the journey. Which is great, because those would only get in the way of its world, a gorgeous sandbox where everywhere is a destination. Auk and her people inhabit a world of floating islands, remnants of the continents shattered by the calamitous ‘Great Divide,’ which the old gods barely managed to stop. Its islands and temples are brightly colored and vividly lit, and even at

In the Indie GIF Showcase, we dig up the best-looking new and upcoming indie games and explore what makes them special. You probably wouldn’t think “acrobat,” but thankfully developers like Ben Allen are here to push the envelope with games like Super Skelemania, a 2D platformer with a focus on exploration that happens to star an acrobatic skeleton. It feels inherently absurd to see a skeleton flip gaily through the air, but Super Skelemania’s smooth animations do a good job selling it. It’s ano

I haven’t the heart to tell my friend what happened to her Bomber Crew character. But this is just one of the many malfunctions and mistakes I’ve suffered through in Bomber Crew. Though many of my first missions have been a bit of a mess, Bomber Crew has scaled its difficulty gradually. I have a theory that, like cooking, the secret of a successful Bomber Crew mission is timing. I’m going to keep testing this theory because, somehow, Bomber Crew has made me a glutton for punishment.

Pity poor Battleborn, a good game that did some interesting things with the hero shooter genre, that got stomped into the ground for its troubles. “Prior to these changes, low damage skills became relatively more powerful as players leveled up when compared to high damage skills and attacks. These changes are intended to normalize those relationships so that as players level up, strength relationships are preserved,” Gearbox explained in the patch notes. As final farewells go, it’s an understate

Assassin’s Creed: Origins, the game with the $60,000 headphones (and by the way, I still haven’t received a reply to my inquiry about getting a review set), comes out on October 27, which is just four days away. What the game is all about has already been pretty well established, and the title is a pretty big spoiler in that regard too. But maybe you need a quick catch-up, or maybe you just want to spend a couple of minutes watching a guy cinematically disembowel a bunch of other guys. Either wa

The first person action-adventure Tartarus sounds a little bit like Under Siege in space. You play as Cooper, the cook aboard the mining ship Tartarus, where things have gone seriously wrong. Security protocols are engaged, everything’s locked down, and the ship’s orbit over Neptune is slowly decaying. That’s reflected in the launch trailer, which features all sorts of Alien-esque corridors and rooms, and not a whole lot else. If that doesn’t put you off straight away, then you can learn more ab

Twitch introduced loot boxes (aka Twitch Crates) back when it started selling games in April as bonuses for spending $5 or more on games or in-game items. Yeah, websites have loot boxes, too. Today, Twitch started offering something a little different: Halloween-themed Twitch Crates that you get every time you Cheer a streamer with 250 or more Bits. The Halloween Twitch Crates are available until noon Pacific on November 3rd, and contain temporary zombie emotes that will work until the end of th

Plains of Eidolon, Warframe’s 22nd major update, dprd more than give the free-to-play shooter an open-world shot in the arm. The Plains of Eidolon is entirely unlike any area in Warframe. You can’t do much of anything on the Plains of Eidolon without the currency known as Ostron Standing. You can’t do much of anything on the Plains of Eidolon without the currency known as Ostron Standing. Ostron Standing and how to get itThe Ostron are the people of Cetus, the settlement around which Plains of E

The term we use at PC Gamer is Chronic Reload Syndrome—the weird, compulsive tic so many of us develop in any game with guns and bullets. Diagnosing Chronic Reload Syndrome”The thoughts of dying in an FPS game just because you were missing a few bullets can feel overwhelming. I do feel that if every prominent FPS developer got together and imposed a communal moratorium on the infinite clip, we’d be cured of Chronic Reload Syndrome in a matter of months. I love my Chronic Reload. Honestly though,

“The only way we can create these super immersive narrative experiences is if we can solely focus on the single-player,” Tordsson Björk said at Gamescom, which actually took place in August. “Having a multiplayer component in this work process would just dilute it all. MachineGames considers its Wolfenstein games to be action adventures rather than shooters, “because we feel there’s so much more to them than just shooting,” he added. We’re definitely pushing the limits, but at the same time cont

Electronic Arts is putting a good chunk of effort into promoting the campaign side of Star Wars Battlefront 2. “We thought that around 5-7, maybe 8 hours is probably a good amount of time,” producer David Robillard told Press Start. “We wanted to stay very driven towards the Star Wars fantasy that the players are going to experience and not have it be drawn out.” Five hours is definitely on the shorter side of things, but is that really a knock against the game? Despite EA’s emphasis on the inte

Every Monday, Build of the week highlights a unique rig from the web’s most dedicated PC building communities. It’s-a me, the man that writes about strange computers once a week to pay for food and rent. There’s a new Mario this week, which I’m sure the PC crowd will emulate within a few weeks after release and follow up with a slurry of troubling Mario mods for every fetish. What better way to acknowledge Mario’s return than with a computer in the shape of an old Nintendo. To acknowledge Bigten

Such is the case with Intel’s Z170 chipset, and specifically the Asus ROG Maximus VIII Hero/Whetsone that is available at Newegg for $100 after a $50 mail-in-rebate. The Z170 chipset is now two generations old, with Intel recently introducing its Z370 chipset for Coffee Lake. Like the Z270, there is no upgrade path to Coffee Lake on a Z170, though it does support Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs. Compared to Z270, the Z170 offers four fewer PCIe 3.0 lanes (20 total) and does not support Intel’s Optane

Newegg and ASI Corp both received kickbacks from Moneual for going along with what amounts to a Ponzi scheme, the lawsuit alleges. LAT reports that Moneual was able to obtain more than $3 billion in loans from 10 South Korean banks through falsified purchase orders. Now two years later the banks are targeting Newegg. The banks claim Newegg and ASI were both privy to the scheme, as Moneual’s invoices showed prices for PCs that were 300 times their actual value. The four banks have asked for a jur

At long last, Destiny 2 is set to release on PC tomorrow at precisely 10 am PT/1 pm ET, and you can preload the game ahead of time. You can also prep your PC by downloading Nvidia’s latest ‘Game Ready’ 388.00 WHQL driver release (assuming you’re running a GeForce GPU), which is optimized for Destiny 2. As will all Game Ready drivers, Nvidia is promising the best gaming performance for specific games, in this case Destiny 2 and Assassin’s Creed Origins, the latter of which arrives this Friday, Oc

Destiny 2 is finally coming to PC tomorrow, and development partners Bungie and Vicarious Visions are keen to stay flexible in the face of the new audience. The teams have built tools that will allow them to tune PC and console builds differently should the need arise. David Shaw, Bungie”That whole ‘one design build’ that I mentioned this morning is really the goal,” added Bungie PC project lead David Shaw. If all goes to plan the PC will receive the same balance updates as the consoles, and at

I took a trip to Bungie last week to go hands-on with the PC version of Destiny 2. Our stablemates GamesRadar+ captured a juicy slice of footage showing D2 running at 60 frames per second at 4K resolution. This footage was captured on a machine with a GTX 1080Ti, an Intel Core i7-7700K 4.2Ghz and 16GB of RAM. Look out for our review in progress tomorrow when Destiny 2 goes live. Look out for our review in progress tomorrow.

Once that’s out, the plan is for the PC and console versions of Destiny 2 to run absolutely in sync. Speaking to PC Gamer at a preview event last week Bungie’s PC lead David Shaw said “with the raid you don’t want the raid to be open on day one because it’s like ‘how fast can I get there’. Beyond that, once we get through that window of intentional staggering of content, when DLC 1 comes out, when DLC 2 comes out, all of those will be day and date with PC.” The main thing is that PC and console