Category: Equipment

I’ve always thought that Fractal Design had a particularly Nordic approach to its products, what with all the clean lines, soft curves and the use of wood and other high-end materials. That was PC cases, though. Now the Swedish-based company has made some bold moves into new markets entirely.

The Computex press event today wasn’t just about new PC cases, as many expected. To many oohs and aahs, Fractal revealed not only a fabric covered, “chimney” style case that wouldn’t look out of place in a posh hotel suite, but also a wireless headset and a gaming chair to go with.

That case though. Named simply “Mood”, its fabric outer body not only looks great, but feels it too. The entire outer casing slides upwards off the top (which one journalist managed in two minutes flat, despi…

As I was wrapping up an interview with FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki for PC Gamer’s Shadow of the Erdtree cover story, I knew I couldn’t walk out of the conference room we’d been sitting in for more than an hour without asking The Question. You know the one: it’s been front of mind for PC gamers during every single major livestream and gaming event since Sony started putting its games on Steam. Bloodborne on PC when? 

I was, obviously, not the first person to ask Miyazaki about returning to Bloodborne or making a sequel; just a few months ago he told IGN that FromSoftware doesn’t own the IP rights. “Unfortunately, and I’ve said this in other interviews, it’s not in my place to talk about Bloodborne specifically,” he answered at the time.

I trie…

Games usually get cheaper as they age, but in a rare reversal, beloved factory management game Factorio will get a price bump on January 26, going from $30 to $35.

“This is an adjustment to account for the level of inflation since the Steam release in 2016,” Factorio’s developer announced on Twitter today (spotted by Kotaku). We reviewed Factorio after it shed its early access label in 2020, awarding it a very positive 91%.

Factorio has never followed the pack when it comes to pricing: It’s also notable for a message on its Steam page which informs prospective players that the developer doesn’t intend to discount the game anytime soon. Back in 2016, the company explained that the no sales policy is “about respecting the players who have already purchased the game” by not rew…

The everlong battle between Microsoft and the European Commission gained a fresh page in its annals, as not only does the Commission believe the software giant has breached EU antitrust laws, but it also finds changes to how Microsoft distributes Teams to be “insufficient to address its concerns” and that “more changes to [its] conduct are necessary to restore competition.”

That’s according to a recent statement by the European Commission (EC), in which it reports its preliminary findings in an antitrust investigation into Microsoft and its cloud-based communication application, Teams. That all kicked off when Slack Technologies (now owned by Salesforce) lodged a complaint with the EC in 2020, in which it alleged that Microsoft had illegally tied Teams to its productivity software…

Farming game Immortal Life has just released from Early Access after a few years in development, bringing a unique spin to the genre of Harvest Moon, Rune Factory, and Stardew Valley. YiFeng Studio’s fam life game is based on a sect of martial artists who, finding their home school devastated, resolve to rebuild the misty valley into a place of learning and beauty.

It’s heavily based in the Chinese fantasy aesthetics of wuxia fiction and the idea of “cultivation,” or improving one’s powers and spirit in order to achieve martial arts mastery and immortality.

To that end you use your powers to become and ever-more-potent farmer, deploying magic to plant seeds, water then, and harvest with enchanted tools. You also fish, cook, and craft to cultivate your soul. You also make bet…

The prospect of playing as a ghoul has tempted players ever since we first set eyes on these decrepit, noseless creatures in the first Fallout. The series has had plenty of fantastic ghouls like Dean Domino and Raul Tejada in Fallout: New Vegas, John Hancok in Fallout 4, and the introduction of Chinese Remnant Spies in Fallout 3, who are ancient intelligence operatives that were marooned in the US when the bombs dropped. 

They’ve made for great antagonists and companions, but playing as one has always only been possible with mods. Until now, because the online series spinoff Fallout 76 is finally letting players become ghouls. 

Bethesda announced the intended changes during the Xbox showcase, but we got to see a sneak peek a bit earlier and discuss the change with …

Since launch, Diablo 4’s strongest builds have been fueled by the exceptional power of multiplying two damage stats together to get a really, really big number when you hit an enemy. In season 2, the math will work differently, resulting in lower damage numbers, but a wider range of possibilities for your build, Blizzard announced during its Campfire Chat stream today.

Look up any Diablo 4 build guide and you’ll be told to take every skill and item that increases your Critical Strike Damage and Vulnerable Damage. Both of these percentages—which could be as high as 150 or more—would multiply with each other and rocket your damage numbers up, letting some classes hit bosses for millions of points of damage.

In a patch alongside the beginning of the Season of Blood …

A VentureBeat report says former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah, who left BioWare along with general manager Casey Hudson in December 2020, has come back to work as a consultant on the upcoming Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. EA also told the site that as production on the next Dragon Age moves forward, the bulk of the Mass Effect development team will join in to help get it finished.

“Our studio is focused on creating the best Dragon Age: Dreadwolf while the core Mass Effect team continues their pre-production work,” BioWare general manager Gary McKay told the site. “We continue to iterate and polish Dreadwolf, focusing on the things that matter most to our fans. As we further connect this new experience with the series’ legacy Mark Darrah will join the team as a consulta…

Google is offering a new .zip web domain for users who want people to know they’re “fast, efficient, and ready to move.” It sounds mostly okay on paper, but due to the similarities between this domain and a popular zipped file format, there are concerns that this could become one of the easiest ways to dupe web-goers into downloading dodgy files.

You can see why there have been concerns about the new .zip top level domain (TLD). Say you’re looking to download the CPU-Z software, you’d expect to land on the CPUID website at the URL: www.cpuid.com/downloads/cpu-z/cpu-z.2.05-en.zip.

What Google’s new .zip TLD will allow for are links that look very similar but are incredibly dangerous dupes. For example, and this link goes nowhere but there’s still no need to try it: &nb…

One of the more unique and interesting deckbuilders to emerge in the last few years was Hellcard, a battler that put up to three characters against hordes of enemies coming from every direction—with nasty elites and bosses liberally sprinkled in for flavor. Developer Thing Trunk have now released the full game, with Hellcard exiting early access on February 1st.

Hellcard focuses on turn-based card combat of your party—up to three heroes in both singleplayer and co-op—against a horde of monsters. The two sides alternate between teams, with the heroes attempting to defeat enemies tactically based on their declared action for the next round.  Every playthrough is procedurally generated, in roguelite fashion. I’ve played several of these cooperative deckbuilders…

Following the EU’s approval last week, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation has given its blessing to the proposed union between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. The decision was reported by Seeking Alpha late last week, and confirmed by Activision Blizzard today in a statement sent to PC Gamer.

“We’re glad to see China join dozens of other major countries in welcoming more competition in the gaming industry,” wrote an Activision Blizzard spokesperson. “SAMR has unconditionally approved our merger with Microsoft, using facts and data to reach the correct conclusion. We are committed to the Chinese market, with many of our amazing players and employees based there, and we look forward to bringing them new choices and benefits as part of this deal.”

Last month,…

Update (July 14, 2023): Genshin Impact studio HoYoverse sent GamesRadar+ a statement which says that it has been paying Formosa, the recording studio responsible for paying the actors, on time, and that it supports the actors’ efforts to “claim their proper due” from that company. The full statement from HoYoverse reads:

“We truly regret to learn about the ongoing situation. Genshin Impact values and respects the work and effort of everyone involved, and we support our voice actors to claim their proper due. We have made payments to our recording studio on time, and we have immediately urged the studio to pay our voice actors. Meanwhile, we are also seeking alternative solutions. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.”

PC Gamer has contacted F…

Overwatch 2’s third season aims to address the biggest issues players have had since the game’s launch in October.

Apart from debuting the new Antarctica Control map, season 3 will finally make skins easier to earn for free, tweak how Competitive works, and feature three events with skins and other cosmetics to earn and buy on the shop.

Anyone that logs into the game next week will instantly unlock the first five free tiers of the battle pass, a head start toward earning credits (a returning currency from Overwatch 1) to buy epic and legendary skins from the first game.

Loverwatch, a text-based Overwatch dating sim, will launch on February 13. In it, you can choose to date either Mercy or Genji and interact with them via dialogue options. It has a secret ending to unlo…

Former US senator and vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, whose crusade against violent videogames in the early ’90s sparked the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board, has died at age 82.

A statement released by Lieberman’s family (via Politico) said Lieberman’s death was the result of “complications from a fall.”

Lieberman’s political career began in 1970 with his election to the Connecticut senate, a seat he held until 1980; he also served as the state’s attorney general from 1983 to ’89. He was elected to the US senate as a member of the Democratic Party in 1988.

In 1993, prompted by the rise of “realistic” violence and sexual content in games like Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, Lieberman joined with fellow senator Herb Kohl to hold hearings o…

Hot on the heels of AMD’s The Last of US bundle with Radeon graphics, Nvidia’s doing the same thing with the special Bite Back Edition of the upcoming release of Redfall, handing out the game for free with sales of its latest graphics cards and laptops.

The Redfall Bite Back Edition of the hotly anticipated co-op vampire shooter is normally $99 of your earth dollars. Along with a Steam copy of the game, which unlocks on launch day, May 2, you get a bunch of other goodies and DLC.

That includes a Redfall Hero Pass with two future heroes, Laser Beam Multi-Weapon Skin, Tactical Knife Stake Weapon Attachment and a bundle of four outfits.

The offer is limited to buyers of Nvidia’s currently available RTX desktop GPUs, so that’s the RTX 4070 Ti, the 4080 and the 4090. On the…

There’s good news and bad news for fans of Arcane, the League of Legends animated show that knocked our socks off in 2021. The good news is that Arcane season 2, which was confirmed last year, now has a release window. The bad news, I’m sorry to say, is that it’s more than a year away.

Netflix announced today as part of its Geeked Week event that Arcane season 2 will be out in November 2024. A specific date wasn’t revealed, but we did get this teaser, which—okay, it’s not much.

Still, while this isn’t the most exhaustive update of all time, the return of Arcane is definitely something to look forward to. “The curse of videogame movies and TV spin-offs being shit is well and truly broken,” we declared in our review of the show’s first season, “and Netflix’s Arcane has d…

Mac Walters amassed an enviable list of credits during his nearly 20-year career at BioWare on games including Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, eventually rising to lead writer of Mass Effect 2 and 3 and creative director on Mass Effect: Andromeda. He then stepped into the role of production director on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, before leaving the studio in January 2023. In a new interview with MinnMax, Walters talked about his reasons for leaving, saying he was prompted to do so in part by the success of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.

The Mass Effect Legendary Edition is a remaster of all three Mass Effect games and nearly all the DLC (only Pinnacle Station is missing, because the source code was lost), effectively transforming the sprawling trilogy into a single, massive …

Google’s Stadia is due to close on 18 January and, in its final weeks, those that enjoyed the service are mourning its demise. It has to be said that, whatever mistakes Google may have made with Stadia, the way the company has handled the wind-down is exemplary (for consumers, anyway). No doubt it helps to have all the money in the world behind you, but the way the company has pro-actively refunded its backers and prepared its controller for future bluetooth use can only be applauded.

The last couple of days of service have brought a somewhat sentimental surprise from the Stadia service: Google has released the first game Stadia was ever used for, an internally developed version of Snake called Worm Game. This solo and multiplayer title was “used to tes…

Here’s a collaboration no-one saw coming: Steven Spielberg’s 1975 horror classic Jaws is coming to Roblox, the hugely successful creation platform beloved by a predominately young audience. But then I probably saw Jaws when I was about eight years old (obsessed with sharks), so I can talk. 

The experience, to use Roblox’s terminology, has been developed by Orange Comet / Gcraft in collaboration with Universal and is called Jaws: Infested Waters (as first reported by Bloody Disgusting). I hadn’t heard of Orange Comet so looked up the studio’s past work and… well, if you want to buy an NFT of Anthony Hopkins’ face, they’ve got you covered. Its past dalliance with fads aside, however, this Jaws adaptation actually looks pretty neat, and seems t…

It’s been a hard July for Apex Legends.

We reported last week how players were resorting to review bombing to vent their frustrations with the Apex Legends’ new monetization scheme, which boils down to “Now there are two battle passes and you can’t pay for either of them with in-game currency.” Today, that bombing campaign continues unabated, with the free-to-play shooter racking up almost 30,000 negative Steam reviews in the last week alone.

The recent Steam review rating for Apex Legends currently sits at an uncomfortable “Overwhelmingly Negative.” While the overall rating remains a respectable “Mostly Positive,” only 15% of the reviews from the last 30 days have been favorable. And the rate of review bombing hasn’t slowed much either: At time of writing, players ha…

I’ve never seen an episode of Peaky Blinders, the Netflix series about a gang of Birmingham criminals set at the tail end of World War I. Hell, until I looked it up just now I assumed the name was some obscure rhyming slang, but it turns out they were named for their fashionable peaked flat caps. To get to the point, three years ago Peaky Blinders was turned into a top-down heist puzzle game in the vein of Commandos or Shadow Tactics called Peaky Tactics: Mastermind and now you can get it for free.

That’s surprising, because Peaky Blinders: Mastermind was delisted from Steam on December 30 of last year, presumably because the license expired. It’s still not available to buy on PC, though it is also one of the current free games you get with an Amazon Prime subscription as well as …

Over 25 years after the first Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver launched, Crystal Dynamics has announced a remaster package collecting the first and second games in the series. The HD ports are the work of Aspyr, the studio responsible for the well-received remasters of the first three Tomb Raider games. The package was unveiled at Sony’s State of Play yesterday, but they’ve now been confirmed for PC.

Until recently the original versions of these games were available on Steam; they’ve since been removed, presumably to be replaced by their modernised versions. The trailer below shows what to expect: both games still look very much like late ’90s 3D action games, though they’ll enjoy sharper textures, smoother framerates, and upgraded models and visual effects.

Additions will incl…

Yesterday, Helldivers 2 players were presented with the simple yet daunting task of killing 2 billion Terminids as part of the newest Major Order. Some soldiers voiced concern over getting the task done within a week, but it seems as if they had nothing to worry about. 

The notification went through this morning that this monumental task is done and tidied away with more than enough time to spare, as 2 billion bugs were killed in just over 12 hours. While a few people still differ in opinion on whether this Major Order was actually difficult, considering how many people consistently play Helldivers 2, the achievement has still come as a surprise to some. 

“I just got a notification saying the major order was already completed,” one player says in a Reddit post. “I …

The Hyte Thicc Q60 is not only the thickest AIO cooler I’ve ever seen, its also the product that wins my “most obvious name across the whole of Computex” prize. Seriously, though, this thing is humungous and I just cannot get enough of that name.

“Basically it’s an extra thick liquid cooler,” a spokesperson needlessly explained. And he wasn’t kidding. “The radiators are twice the thickness of a typical radiator.” With a 52mm thick radiator, it’s almost half as thick as it is long. That’s with two 32mm thick FT12 fans as opposed to the typical 25mm.

Altogether we’re looking at 228x120x52mm, and the whole thing links up as part of the new range of Powered by Nexus modular components with brains, meaning it chains up to the rest of your cooling system with the Nexus Portal cont…

If a high refresh rate gaming laptop is what you desire, I’ve found a deal well worth casting your eyes across. It’s this Acer Predator Helios Neo 16—and while the 240 Hz display is definitely the headline feature, the rest of the specs are pretty impressive for its $1,450 asking price at Best Buy.

A very fast panel can make all the difference for competitive multiplayer gaming, as the faster you can see your opponents, the better chance you have of making yourself look like a hero rather than, I don’t know, me, a multiplayer zero. Speedy displays are plentiful these days, but a 240 Hz IPS unit in a gaming laptop under $1,500 is a bit of a boon.

Still, while it’s all very well having a super-speedy screen, if your components can’t feed it pixels fast enough then it’s a…

Steam appears to have been cracking down on rule violations recently, particularly towards users who attempt to bypass regional restrictions by the use of VPNs and Steam code and gift reseller sites. 

The immense popularity of Helldivers 2—in combination with a large number of users attempting to subvert pre-existing restrictions on Sony game activation in Russia and Belarus—appears to have kicked off a wave of bans, with an estimated 20,000 Steam accounts facing the wrath of Valve in response.

Russian and Belarusian Steam accounts were no longer able to activate games developed by Sony as of February this year, mirroring a pre-existing 2022 ban on PlayStation sales in Russia as a response to the Ukraine war. Still, that doesn’t appear to have stopped many f…

World of Warcraft: Dragonflight won’t be getting a fourth raid—which is something we’ve known for a while, as per an interview with game director Ion Hazzikostas. It will however still receive a fourth season with Fated Raids, alongside a recycled tier list the community can vote on as Blizzard revealed yesterday.

“We’re going to try something new,” reads the post. “We’re preparing a remixed set of gear for each specialization. To determine what that means for each class and spec, we’re asking you to vote for your favorite class look and your favorite specialization set bonuses from the first three Seasons of Dragonflight.” 

This means that Season 4’s armour sets will look like a bowl of glowy pick ‘n’ mix. Just taking a cursory look at the three…

Ready Player One is a story about desperate people seeking escape from a collapsing society within the confines of a predatory digital world run by ultra-rich oligarchs who will do anything, including committing mass murder, in order to protect their positions of wealth and power. And now a company called Futureverse is teaming up with Warner Bros Discovery and author Ernest Cline to bring that particular Torment Nexus to life with the creation of the Readyverse, which aims to “to bring the promise of the open metaverse depicted in Cline’s Ready Player One novel and the blockbuster film adaptation into a tangible reality.”

“The future has arrived even more quickly than I imagined,” Cline said. “With Readyverse Studios, we have the opportunity to leverage the revolutionary te…

If there’s one thing that differentiates regular PC users from mechanical keyboard fans, it’s a discussion about lube. Y’see, we at PC Gamer have become converts to the benefits of lubed switches in our precious keebs, and we’re not the only ones. A good dose of the slippy stuff used to be something you had to do yourself, but now pre-lubed switches have become something we’re increasingly used to seeing in modern high-end boards. 

If you’re a keyboard connoisseur, a good dose of lube is fast becoming something expected—rather than a luxury extra—as it can lead to a silky smooth action. Yep, it’s 2024 folks, and keyboard nerds are the cool kids now. Your time has come.

Wooting has been lubing its switches for some time, but now it’s posted a tweet confirming…

Buying a new gaming PC today can be a bit of a minefield given the price of new graphics cards and the fact that almost everything is more expensive. But there are still ways to get cheap gaming PC deals if you’re willing to be a little creative, and exercise those screwdriver muscles.

Honestly, it’s not that creative, I’m just recommending pairing a cheap base PC with an affordable graphics card and combining the two to make one excellent, affordable gaming rig. Easy.

Of course that does necessitate getting the side off your new machine and installing a new component yourself. Thankfully, jamming a new GPU into your rig is one of the most straightforward upgrades you can do, and the most effective as a PC gamer, too.

It’s well worth learning how to do it, any…

Creating technology for the purpose of helping people with disabilities is a noble goal and one where strides seem to be being made to make the world a more accessible place for all. However, Honda reckons its UNI-ONE Segway-like device isn’t just for people with mobility issues, as the company has released a video showing someone having a whale of a time in one equipped with a VR headset.

In an interesting example of repurposing functional technology for entertainment purposes, the UNI-ONE, Honda’s self-balancing mobility solution first demonstrated in 2023, has been pitched as a “brand new multimodal experience that takes extended reality technologies to the next level” with the addition of VR (via Gizmodo). The company will be showing off the device at SXSW, inviting attendees …

I don’t really vibe with the whole Razer lifestyle thing, and I don’t especially care about whether my PC lights up the room in fluorescence. Heck, I don’t even like the silly names or the snake logo, and we all know that Razer stuff comes with a Razer premium on the price. And yet every penny I’ve spent on PC gaming accessories in at least the last five years—keyboards, mice, headset, mics—has gone to Razer’s coffers.

The reason is as simple as it gets: ergonomics, performance, and reliability. I think it all started when I bought a relatively cheap Razer mouse, which must have been a DeathAdder, as a hold-over while I chewed on what to splash the real money on. I ended up loving the feel and using that mouse for years, before eventually upgrading to a Basilisk.

A few days ago, Heart Machine released an world overview trailer for their upcoming roguelike, Hyper Light Breaker. It’s a serene minute and a half of Breath of the Wild-style exploration—complete with a familiar-looking hangglider—and stylish action combat. What’s sticking with me, however, is how good it’s all looking, especially for an “open world game where you never return to the same world twice”.

The original Hyper Light Drifter, released over seven years ago, had a keen eye for detail and atmosphere. It led you through a gorgeous pixelated post-apocalypse, one that was both beautiful and bleak, full of vibrancy and ruin. Everyone I know who has played Hyper Light Drifter has been marked by its aesthetics in some way, its art and soundscape sticking in …

What is it about the Modern Warfare games producing the most cursed-looking movement glitches, lately? There was the horrifying “G walk” in MW2, which looked like your character was breaking out an all fours to tear into someone’s jugular, and this ‘Superman’ glitch from the same year that made you look like a Hunter from Left 4 Dead.

Now Modern Warfare 3 continues this unholy tradition by letting players wriggle across the ground at top speeds. Before I get into how this is happening, here’s a clip of it in action, courtesy of vvinta_ (Winter) on Twitter, who becomes an actual snake on a plane as she slithers towards her enemy:

According to this rundown by YouTuber Rehtycs, you can ‘snake’ by first turning on automatic sprint in your movement settings. Then, head into advan…

When I was writing about pirate games you should play instead of Skull and Bones, I had to give a nod to Blackwake, even though it didn’t quite make the cut. The multiplayer naval FPS   left early access back in 2020, after making a bit of a splash initially on YouTube thanks to its emergent mayhem. Think of it as a more aggressive, less cartoonish Sea of Thieves, where the focus is on blowing up ships and fighting their crews. Sadly, the player count dwindled soon after, and it stopped receiving updates before the year was out. 

Possibly in response to Skull and Bones’ launch, someone from the now defunct studio is attempting to inject new life into the game, specifically by making it free to keep. Hop onto Steam and you can download it right now without spending a…