A lovely long drive down big desert roads underneath infinite blue skies sounds just perfect for this, the most miserable, damp time of year. Watching the New Mexico trailer for American Truck Simulator makes me almost forget that it’s October. The blog post accompanying the trailer notes that the team are just adding the “finishing touches” to the DLC. Silly plane, roads are for trucks. Here’s an anecdote from Andy Kelly’s American Truck Simulator review to whet your appetite:“I panic, my heart

Any streamer worth his or her salt needs a good microphone. Our favorite pick, the Blue Yeti, makes regular mics that ship with headphones sound like junk. The Blue Yeti is a USB microphone featuring a tri-capsule array with three condenser capsules that can record in a variety of ways. Where the Blue Yeti really excels is its ability to pick up clean audio when positioned at arm’s length. Anyway, if you need a good microphone, go here to pounce on this deal.

Between today and November 1, residents of Final Fantasy 14’s Eorzea will be able to participate in spooky, Halloween-themed activities as the Continental Circus returns to celebrate another All Saints’ Wake. All Saints’ Wake is an in-game Halloween event where players will be able to earn a special outfit for their characters and hunt down a new range of All Saints’ Wake items. With that comes something even more bone chilling—an Ultimate difficulty Unending Coil of Bahamut. Square Enix wants t

The grievance is related to James Biddulph’s The Botanist —a lovely little game about growing plants as a home business. I thought it would be nice to create a plant-based team photo for the UK writers of PC Gamer so I ordered seeds for everyone’s name. That is how The Botanist started feeling like a personal attack on the future of print media. As an insurance plan I turn to Andy himself and demand three random words. Time for the random word approach!

With Destiny 2’s PC launch on the horizon—you can start preloading it now—Nvidia have put together a graphics and performance guide to let you know what you’ll need to consider if you’re hoping to play it at 60fps or more. Beyond those recommendations, Nvidia’s taken a look at each graphics setting, with side-by-side screenshot comparisons, the performance and visual impact. It’s a big list, and a reminder that Destiny 2 has plenty of graphics settings just waiting to be tweaked. If you took the

The first Mafia game has landed on GOG.com, after disappearing from Steam just over five years ago. Mafia was a favourite of mine at release, right when I was properly getting into PC gaming. Indeed, with SWAT 4, Full Throttle and now Mafia ticked off, we’re getting closer to having them all available again. A note on affiliates: some of our stories, like this one, include affiliate links to online stores. These online stores share a small amount of revenue with us if you buy something through o

Existential puzzle game The Talos Principle now has a VR edition, which you can slap on your face now. It contains the core game, rebuilt for VR, and also the four-part Road to Gehenna expansion. In The Talos Principle, you solve puzzles with lasers and blocks amid ancient Greek and Egyptian ruins and medieval castles while an omnipresent creator chats in your ear. So as well as being able to teleport in three different ways, the game supports full locomotion for those who don’t anticipate getti

GTA Online’s wacky races now include 15 new ‘Transform Races’ that manage to have a bit of something for everyone, from speeding through the skies in a jet to bouncing down a mountain on a bike, all in the same race. See, these races change your vehicle at set points, so one moment you might be jumping off a ramp in a supercar, but then you’re suddenly in a helicopter. The 15 races feature different vehicles and elaborate tracks, all of which you can check out here. If you click on the links in

Despite its critical success and millions of copies sold, Resident Evil 7 failed to meet Capcom’s sales target of 4 million by the end of the fiscal year in March. Seven months later, it’s finally met that target, according to the game’s official site, which now proudly displays a stamp announcing the milestone. Indeed, Resident Evil 7 is the fourth most successful game in the series, so far, which isn’t bad considering it’s was a massive departure from typical Resident Evil formula, and it foll

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 the closure of Visceral Games and the fate of the Star Wars project there, Activision’s troubling patent that mixes matchmaking and microtransactions, Tim’s orc bully torment, and wrap with our usual Twitch chat Q&A. Listen:Download the MP3 directlySubscribe on iTunesGrab th

Roguelike first-person shooter Strafe had perhaps the only good live-action trailers a game has ever had. As a roguelike, Strafe had procedurally generated levels (made from hand-crafted rooms), and permadeath. It’s just been a fun way to switch up the game and play with that. Then there’s some where we just play with the format of the game such as Strafe Abridged. Overall it’s raised the general user review score of the game, and we’ve been getting a lot of good feedback.

Following last month’s Awakening the Nightmare expansion, Microsoft and Creative Assembly continue to plug away at Halo Wars 2 support, with newly announced crossplay functionality confirmed today. This means you’ll be able to compete against Xbox One players – a concept the company is pretty fond of nowadays. “As an Xbox Play Anywhere title, players have the ability to enjoy Halo Wars 2 on their console or PC, but up until now that has not included cross-platform online play,” the update reads.

Ever since her complete rework went live last month, Mercy has been a hot topic of conversation in competitive Overwatch circles. As they suggest, a big part of her popularity is due to her 30-second resurrection ability that can be reset by using her new ultimate Valkyrie. Some professional Overwatch players seem to think so. “In her current state, she’s ridiculously broken and whoever has the better Mercy wins,” SPACE said. Apart from her 30-second Res, Mercy’s new ultimate Valkyrie has been s

Destiny 2 will be available for preload for the PC starting on 10/18. Install the client, fire it up, created or sign in to your account, and then select “Destiny 2” from the list of games on the left. The Install button should be live if you’ve already purchased Destiny 2; if you haven’t, you’ll have the option to do so instead. I have no idea what it could be aside from the full game preload, but I’ll let you know how it goes. Destiny 2 is set to go live at 10 am PT/1 pm ET on October 24.

Black Future ’88 is speaking my language. According to developer SuperScarySnakes, it’s a brutal and “extremely juicy” 2D cyberpunk action game with “explosion-based platforming” and a synth-fueled soundtrack. Black Future ’88 tasks you and, optionally, a buddy with climbing a tower and killing its owner—and doing it within 18 minutes to stop your heart from exploding. It’s a natural hook for its twitch-based action, not to mention catnip to speedrunners. I’m hungry for more, and look forward to

Now, with the knockout stage of the 2017 World Championships about to get underway, League of Legends has been given the same treatment. The song, Legends Never Die, is performed by Against the Current, an American pop band that’s apparently big on YouTube. The 2017 League of Legends World Championship knockout stage quarter-finals gets underway tomorrow with the following best-of-five matchups:October 19: Longzhu Gaming v. Samsung GalaxyOctober 20: SK telecom T1 v. Misfits GamingOctober 21: Roy

Lonely Mountains: Downhill is “a different kind of sports game,” according to two-man German developer Megagon Industries. More concerned with scenery than scoreboards, Lonely Mountains is mainly about riding a bike down a mountain by navigating a path of your own design. ‘Classic time trial mode’ is exactly what it sounds like, whereas ‘hard time trial mode’ penalizes you for crashing. ‘Challenge mode’ gives you specific challenges like landing long jumps or reaching certain locations, and ‘one

We’re still playing Divinity: Original Sin 2, and we’re still loving it—it even featured prominently in our preliminary GOTY discussions. Below are a few of our favorite anecdotes from our playthroughs of Divinity: Original Sin 2—times when we tried something, and whether it worked or didn’t, we wouldn’t change a thing. Believe it or not, this is actually the start of a quest chain in Original Sin 2. Divinity: Original Sin 2 creates some ridiculous stories. But here’s the thing about Divinity: O

The growing ubiquity of loot boxes continues to stoke outrage. Yes, it’s uncool that loot boxes have oozed into singleplayer games, and yet another of the major games of 2017. As Wes argued in our staff discussion last week, loot boxes threaten to homogenize the reward systems of dissimilar games into a samey, randomized mush. The real reason these loot boxes are repulsive is that they allow people to bypass the most fun part of Middle-earth: Shadow of War: cultivating rivalries. But even worse,

Electronic Arts closed the doors on Visceral Games yesterday, bringing to a close the studio whose (relatively) recent work includes Dante’s Inferno, Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel, Battlefield Hardline, and the Dead Space series. Following the announcement, Zach Wilson, who worked briefly at the studio as a designer on Hardline, took to Twitter to offer some thoughts about where it all went wrong. “I don’t know the exact marketing budget but they’re frequently close to the dev cost (I have hea