A nice new Z270 chipset motherboard will support all the modern components, and if you don’t want to spend too much money, you can get an MSI Z270 Krait Gaming on Newegg for $130 today. Despite the fairly cheap price, the Krait Gaming still has plenty of features. It also has X-Boost technbology which will optimize your SSD, and the motherboard has support for Optane too. As for connections, you get 3x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, and 3x PCIe 3.0 x1. If you’re into the aesthetics of a motherboard, it’s g

On New Year’s Eve 2016, game designer Hideaki Itsuno tweeted this to his followers:Happy New Year! Thank you.December 31, 2016Almost immediately, rumours and speculation tied to a new Devil May Cry or Dragon’s Dogma game swept the interwebs—both series of which Itsuno has served as director—with many eyeing last week’s E3 conference as the prime stage for an announcement. “Sorry to not announce anything at E3,” said Itsuno. I’ve never gotten into the Dragon’s Dogma series myself, however I’d bit

Today, Jon digs in to Planet Coaster’s challenge mode. While I happily played through all Planet Coaster’s career mode scenarios, a few months on I can’t recall any standout moments. I’ve chosen the desert setting, which generally requires Western-themed attractions, and my first challenge is to reach a Park Balance Bonus of 20. Another notification pops up: “Many guests need the toilet”. Sitting back satisfied, I’m just about to save and exit when it happens again: “Many guests are thirsty”.

Atari is “back in the hardware” business, so says the company’s Frederic Chesnais, and is currently working on the so-called ‘Ataribox’—a retro-styled console said to be powered by PC technology. In conversation with VentureBeat, the CEO described the prospective hardware as being “years in the making”, which could suggest the Ataribox has been in development since the once formidable outfit filed for bankruptcy back in 2013. Information is still thin on the ground at the moment, however the fol

It was always inevitable that Rise of the Tomb Raider would get a follow-up, and almost as inevitable that it’d be called “Shadow of the Tomb Raider” (games with “shadow” in the title are popular, you see). So it’s hardly a surprise that a new leak can be added to those which seem to confirm that Shadow of the Tomb Raider is in development. The first emerged in October, when someone noticed a fellow commuter flicking through Shadow of the Tomb Raider marketing guff on a laptop. The bottom sectio

The protests are in full swing over Take-Two Interactive’s shutdown of popular singleplayer modding tool OpenIV. Meanwhile, over 45,000 people have now signed a petition to save OpenIV on change.org. The machinima, made in GTA 5 and using OpenIV, depicts agents wearing Rockstar windbreakers and Take-Two Interactive badges serving a cease and desist order. Other characters who have been imported into GTA 5 as mods are shown being killed or imprisoned. The video ends by directing viewers to sign t

While the first instalment didn’t exactly set the world ablaze, I’m really looking forward to The Crew 2. I love driving very fast in video games, and flying very fast is quite nice too. Just look at the gif:That’s just a small moment from this The Crew 2 video, which serves up nearly ten minutes of footage from the game. There’s a very impressive looking boat race through cave networks. The video is focused on the game’s triathlon mode, which sets players along routes requiring all three vehicl

Free-to-play brawler Killer Instinct will no longer be a Windows Store exclusive soon, with the announcement that it’ll hit Steam later this year. That’s good news for anyone with an aversion to the Windows Store, and probably bodes well for the health of the game, pointing as it does to a possible increase in its player pool. The news was announced at CEO 2017 in Florida, and then later confirmed on Twitter. How the game will be presented on Steam is unclear, though most likely there will be a

Now that E3 is open to the public, I was curious whether reality could ever live up to expectations. I ask him if being able to play games before they’re released is the best part about E3. Liz, who wants to learnFor people like Darren, being able to play games before they’re released is a huge benefit to E3. With E3 opening to the public this year, it’s opened the debate for what purpose the show really serves. “It’s that media and developer environment that I’ve always seen since I was a kid,”

In case you missed it at E3, Rebellion’s Strange Brigade is a co-op focused shooter set in a pulp 1930s world where supernatural monsters are very real, and they’re coming to get you. We were shown a brief glimpse of the game at E3, but here’s a longer video, complete with developer commentary. As you can see, between the shooting you’ll be doing a bit of light puzzle-solving, and you’ll spend some time at workbenches, upgrading your kit. During battle, you’ll be able to take advantage of traps

Fans of the vanishing, jet-setting scamps from the Where’s Wally/Waldo series will want to check out Hidden Folks: a game of seeking out tiny, hard-to-find targets in giant, beautifully animated scenes. The game came out in February, and now it’s just been embiggened with a free update that adds a new area chock-full of wee cartoon people. The update adds eight new languages, more character animations, and other bits, but the main attraction is the new Factory environment, which consists of “19,

‘Force Hax’, a subscription-based cheat and mod menu for GTA Online, is one such tool—or at least it was. Force Hax has closed after being contacted by Take-Two. We will be donating our proceeds to charity and we apologize for any and all problems Force Hax services have cause to the Grand Theft Auto Online community.” I don’t expect a petition to appear in support of bringing back the Force Hax griefing tools, considering how much misery it no doubt caused the non-cheating players of GTA Online

As the Blizzard blog post explains, “Challenge Rifts are a weekly static version of a previously completed Greater Rift. To create a Challenge Rift, we pull a Greater Rift run directly from a player’s account. Enemies, pylons, and the dungeons you encounter will all be exactly as they appeared when the original player completed their run. The Challenge Rifts will rotate every Monday, so, when you put it all together, they sound a bit like Spelunky’s Daily Challenge Mode, only weekly and with a t

We can see more of the duelling action game (that will now feature other weapons than just swords) in a new, nearly 20-minute video out of E3, which you’ll find below. It’s the PS4 version of Nidhogg 2, but the game is also coming to PC, and I don’t imagine it will look or play any differently there. In the footage, we can see a few of those new weapons in action, including a handy ranged option in the form of the bow. Nidhogg 2 wiill be out sometime this Summer, and while you probably won’t nee

Gone is the Left 4 Dead inspiration, instead Hunt: Showdown is like if Evolve, Stalker, and Resident Evil 7 had a big, demonic baby. Trust us, Hunt: Showdown promises to be one survival game actually worth caring about. Hunt: Showdown punishes death by permanently erasing some of your progress, making death a seriously scary consequence of combat. Hunt: Showdown is as much a survival game as it isn’t. But I actually think Hunt: Showdown should use Early Access.

Even if the first PC Monster Hunter game were to target 30 fps on low or mid-range PC hardware, that doesn’t necessarily rule out 60 fps or better performance on PC. That said, we haven’t confirmed any hard details about the PC version of Monster Hunter: World, except that it will be releasing after the console versions. Yesterday, producer Ryozo Tsujimoto and director Yuya Tokuda relayed to PC Gamer (through a translator who combined their answers) that the Monster Hunter: World PC version will

In fact, Tom called it “the PC Monster Hunter game we’ve all been waiting for” in his January hands-on. So when an actual Monster Hunter game was announced at E3, the potential for awkwardness was clear. But the developers of Dauntless are taking it in stride: Executive producer Jesse Houston told Polygon that he’s “super excited” about Monster Hunter: World, and not at all worried about being crowded out. It’s also possible that Dauntless and Monster Hunter: World won’t conflict as much as it m

Every week, we look back at our highs and lows in PC gaming for the last seven days. For the first time since E3 began in ’95, PC gaming had a banner above the entryway, pointing attendees to E3’s first formal, declared space for PC gaming on the show floor. Shaun Prescott: LawBreakers looks awesome and it’s coming out soonIt was a great E3 for first-person shooters, but then, what E3 isn’t? For all that E3 2017 lacked in bracing surprises, it made up for with soon-to-release games about shootin

In the rapid-fire barrage of game trailers and announcements that came out of Microsoft’s pre-E3 press event, one blew past us entirely: Halo Wars 2: Awakening the Nightmare, an expansion to the Halo-based RTS that puts players in charged of the Banished as they come up against the Flood. Alongside the Banished campaign, Awakening the Nightmare will add a new co-op mode called Terminus Firefight, in which up to three players must defend their bases and Forerunner terminus nodes against hordes of

Obsidian Entertainment shared a first look at its upcoming fantasy RPG Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire gameplay with IGN earlier this week at E3, showing off the new open-world map, random encounters, improved graphics technology, and of course the combat. “Because this is a sequel we’re trying to up the ante and make things a little more grand in scale,” Sawyer says in the video. Sawyer said that a lot of “traditional players” don’t like level scaling, but others prefer games that automatically