January 2021

Silent Hill obsessives are used to being disappointed by now, so here’s the latest announcement related to the classic horror series that isn’t a new game or even a remake of the classics: Silent Hill will feature in an upcoming DLC for multiplayer party game Dark Deception: Monsters & Mortals, which should be out in February. In case you’ve never heard of it, Monsters & Mortals casts players as teams, usually one of regular people collecting shards in a horrifying location before escaping out a portal, and the other as monsters hunting them. Those monsters include animatronic Murder Monkeys and…

Obviously release hasn’t stopped the vast and sprawling beauty of Factorio from growing, and the 1.1 patch just now out is packed with polish that makes the game simpler than ever to play. Among the updates are a feature to flip blueprints, a long-desired fantasy of Factorio fans. You can just… flip em. It’s lovely. We’ve also got neat stuff like smart-building for conveyor belts, multithreading for conveyors, a brand-new interface for trains, and slick control tricks for Spidertron robots. When Factorio released last year developers Wube software said they wanted to complete the game’s feature set so that they…

This Week in PC Gaming is also available on YouTube. Welcome to This Week in PC Gaming, a show where we take a look at the new games, updates, events, and more coming at you over the next week, every week. Expect a new episode every Sunday morning and expect it to tell you something you didn’t know or already forgot about. Catch the new episode every Sunday here on PCGamer.com or subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notified when a new episode goes live. This Week in PC Gaming – January 31 to February 6February 4 Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood…

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories. One of my favorite journeys ever undertaken in a game was when I climbed the ranks of the Thieves Guild in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. It was a slow but steady transformation from crude pickpocket to master thief through a series of increasingly lengthy, more elaborate missions. I loved being a thief in Oblivion. It let me do my two favorite things: Avoid a lot of combat and spy on NPCs. The final mission culminated in the ultimate test: Sneaking into the Imperial Palace…

A 50-second teaser video was posted across Total War: Warhammer social media late yesterday, and the speculation engines have begun revving up to speed. It shows a wizard of the Celestial College—the Empire’s astrologers, who manipulate a wind of magic called Azyr—watching as a comet flies across the night sky. The comet then becomes the head of a constellation called Grungi’s Baldric, “Revered by soldiers, dwarfs, and dimwits aplenty,” the wizard sneers. And that’s it. It’s a more enigmatic trailer than we’re used to getting, especially compared to the bombastic announcements each DLC for Warhammer 2 has received. That might…

True to their promise from last year, the developers of Plague Inc have released a free DLC for owners of the original game about finding a cure to a global pandemic, rather than being one. “Created with the help of world health experts from all over the world including the WHO, CEPI and GOARN, Plague Inc: The Cure is an engaging and timely simulation of a global disease response,” say Ndemic Creations in the game’s description. It’s full of brand new game mechanics over the base Plague Inc scenarios, and they’re pretty neat. Players do work like hunting the disease…

As pointed out by Mark Brown in his latest Game Maker’s Toolkit video, Warner Bros. Interactive have applied for a patent on the nemesis system used in Shadow of Mordor and its sequel, Shadow of War—the system that personalizes orc NPCs in response to actions players take against them. Specifically, it’s a patent for “Nemesis characters, nemesis forts, social vendettas and followers in computer games”. Brown compares it to the patented floating arrow that told players where to go in Crazy Taxi, which was part of the lawsuit Sega filed against Fox Interactive in 2003, after The Simpsons: Road Rage…

An alpha Black Lotus, the most infamous Magic: The Gathering card ever produced, was sold at auction  on eBay for $511,100. Organized by trading card investment firm PWCC, it’s the first single Magic CCG card to sell for over half a million dollars at open auction. Other collectible card game cards may have sold for more, usually unique single-printing cards, but if they did there’s no public record of it. Past Alpha Black Lotus cards have gone for as much as $250k. To top it off, the case is signed by now-deceased Magic artist Christopher Rush, who painted the art…

A misspent childhood nuking all of the lemmings in Lemmings will give you a taste for videogame explosions that can last a lifetime, and before you know it you’re watching compilations of nukes going off in Garry’s Mod. Or maybe you prefer the big booms of oil barrels in Divinity: Original Sin, or the way basically everything can explode in Avalanche Studios’ games. Maybe you’re so jaded that only seeing a whole dang star go nova again and again in Outer Wilds can do it for you now. What game has the best explosions? Here are our answers, plus a few…

Survival game Rust is getting delivery via drone in the coming patch, due to release February 4th. Rust producer Alistair McFarlane posted a video to Twitter of the drones in action as they leave a central drone station and fly to nearby  vending machines to retrieve purchases. “The terminals will only be accessible within safezone(s) – can not be player crafted,” he said when explaining how it works. Drone delivery! – currently planned for Feb 4th Patch. pic.twitter.com/SUZKyw5TSgJanuary 30, 2021 Rust’s vending machines are made and stocked by players, and this seems like an effort to let newer players pick…