PC Gamer

Bethesda’s future releases will be added to Xbox Game Pass at launch. In a blog post announcing Microsoft’s latest acquisition, Xbox head Phil Spencer also confirmed an impressive coup for Xbox’s subscription service.Spencer says that “with the addition of Bethesda, Microsoft will grow from 15 to 23 creative studio teams and will be adding Bethesda’s iconic franchises to Xbox Game Pass. This includes Microsoft’s intent to bring Bethesda’s future games into Xbox Game Pass the same day they launch on Xbox or PC.” That’s been Microsoft’s approach for many of its first- and third-party titles for a while now, with the…

In 2003, between assassination plots, Hitman developer IO Interactive released Freedom Fighters, a squad-based shooter set in an alternate reality where the Soviet Union ended World War 2 by nuking Berlin and then proceeded to turn the world red. Though it was as well-received as Hitman, it never spawned a series and so far hasn’t received a digital re-release. That might be changing. A new rating appeared for Freedom Fighters on the PEGI website today. IO Interactive hasn’t mentioned the game in years, but ratings hounds clocked its arrival and shared it on Reddit and ResetEra. The rating is just for PC,…

The Dirt 5 release date is November 6, all the better to clash rather awkwardly with some of the year’s most anticipated games. Never mind though, because if you’re in the mood for an arcade-styled rally racer, it’s been a three year wait since the last mainline Dirt instalment. Gruelling.Dirt 5 isn’t getting a physical boxed copy in Australia, which isn’t super surprising nowadays. That leaves us at the mercy of digital retailers, and currently there’s a pretty obvious place you’ll want to buy it if getting the lowest price is your priority (for most of us, it is). There are…

Mexican indie studio Ogre Pixel put their “puzzle-filled life simulator” Lonesome Village on Kickstarter recently, hoping to hit a target of 420,000 pesos (which is just under $US20,000). They hit that target within 24 hours and have now almost doubled it, with 26 days still to go. In Lonesome Village you play a coyote who moves to the titular village, which you help rebuild while also heading outside the town to rescue kidnapped locals from a mysterious tower. You’ll have a house and garden to look after, fish to catch, animal people to befriend, and a Zelda-esque puzzle dungeon adventure on…

On an average day, about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that’s a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we’ve gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2020 games that are launching this year. Medieval DynastySteam‌ ‌page‌ ‌ Release:‌ ‌September 17 ‌ Developer:‌ ‌Render Cube‌ ‌ Price:‌ ‌$29.99‌…

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is remembered by many for its multiplayer spin-off Enemy Territory (which has its own fan-made revival called ET: Legacy), but its singleplayer campaign also gave us one of the best flamethrowers in videogames, a focus on the occult and spooky side of Wolfenstein, enemies who would raise alarms if you broke stealth, and Tesla-coil Frankenstein undead Nazis to shoot. A fan-made overhaul mod called RealRTCW aims to bring it back with various modern improvements and is coming to Steam on October 15.RealRTCW promises high-quality models, textures, and sounds as well as widescreen support. Weapons have been…

Epic Games v. Apple continues to be a spicy* lawsuit as the companies file briefs, complaints, declarations, motions, and memorandums back and forth in the ongoing anti-monopoly lawsuit over the iOS App Store. On September 16 Apple filed a response to Epic’s earlier filing requesting Fortnite be restored to iOS, saying that Fortnite can return to iOS as soon as Epic removes the in-app payment system that prompted the lawsuit. Notably, the latest Apple filing makes several arguments that Epic has felt compelled to refute. In their opposition brief, Apple writes that “Epic started a fire, and poured gasoline on it,…

Football Manager 2020 is free on the Epic Games store right now, and that has led to a huge surge in players for the nearly year-old game. Sports Interactive studio director Miles Jacobson has said that over 1 million new players have started playing Football Manager 2020 off of the Epic Games promotion. He compared the numbers favorably to the number who tried the game when it was free to play for two weeks on Steam in March of this year.  “We’ll have more people try out the game on @EpicGames in 36 hours than we had with our Steam…

Wingspan is one of the best board games of the past decade, and now it has a digital version. Just released on Steam, Wingspan’s new digital edition is a pretty impressive bit of work for a port between physical and digital. In Wingspan, players build out clever combinations of birds—all of which have unique powers—to make their collection of birds more valuable and effective than their competitors. The digital version has everything you’d want for that purpose: Birds, bird noises, forest noises, and gorgeous illustrations of birds—some of which are even animated in this version.Plus, you can click on your…

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.The first Dawn of War let me play with armies bigger than I could ever afford when I played Warhammer 40,000 on a ping-pong table with styrofoam hills on it. Every click-and-drag put battalions of troops and entire tank platoons under my command. Then Dawn of War 2 came along. On most maps, it gives you four small squads—one of which is just your commander. It takes some getting used to. Thing is, each of those squads is like a character in an RPG. They level up…

During the last Night City Wire we saw two new trailers for Cyberpunk 2077, one highlighting the city itself and the other detailing its main gangs. Both trailers are hefty downloads of information, some of it already mentioned in sources like the recent World of Cyberpunk 2077 book published by Dark Horse, some of it elaborating on things we’ve already seen.About 30 seconds into Postcards from Night City we get a glimpse of Johnny Silverhand at a food stand. He ‘s probably not really there, of course, since he’s just a manifestation of the digital Johnny inside the protagonist’s head….

“Rise and shine, Mr. Freeman,” begins what is perhaps the most famous game intro of its era. Now, modders are going to use Half-Life: Alyx’s tools to recreate Half-life 2’s opening as a VR experience. It’s not a bad idea, because Point Insertion has very little actual gameplay other than walking and looking at neat stuff. Unless you count picking up cans, which I’m sure is going to be thrilling in VR.Point Insertion is the first level of Half-Life 2, a narrative and atmospheric game opening that, for its era, is a lot of impressive game work. It was the…

The Elder Scrolls Online’s next expansion takes players to a familiar place: The city of Markarth, in Skyrim. It’s a location very familiar to Elder Scrolls fans, as Markarth featured prominently in Skyrim, the singleplayer predecessor to Elder Scrolls Online. The ESO implementation is pretty familiar looking, though it’s controlled by the wild men of The Reach and covered in banners, mammoth tusks, and red paint.This year’s storyline for ESO is called Dark Heart of Skyrim, the story of a war of vampires and werewolves, and the Markarth update storyline ties directly into it: A confrontation between the players and…

From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random obscure games back into the light. This week, sex may sell… but can it cure appendicitis? And can it ever hope to take over from Google as your search engine of choice?Biing’s intro begins in the year 2156, with mankind facing extinction at the hands of an intergalactic evil in a time of dread. As civilians scream and run in terror, a fleet of battlecraft called X37-2-in-1 Strike Ships close in on their goal… EARTH. The evil Athros, Ruler of the Universe appears…

I cannot stress this enough: Surgeon Simulator 2 is not a surgery game. The first game was goofy and weird—you were expected to navigate an intense night of open-heart surgery with a clumsy set of keybindings and mouse clicks—but even at its ridiculous heights, the anonymous doctor was still cracking ribs and replacing livers under the supposed guise of a medical institution. In the sequel, though, you will encounter those same challenges in radically different contexts. It completely obliterate the Surgeon Simulator’s foundational pitch, and instead filters the franchise through the lens of madcap physics games like Goat Simulator and…

Beyond Good and Evil 2 hasn’t yet been “in development” for as long as Duke Nukem Forever was, but it’s getting there. Our earliest “it’s still happening” post went up in 2012—already several years after it was announced—and our most recent was in February 2020. It’s an unusual situation, and it got a little more unusual today: BG&E creator Michel Ansel, who’s headed up work on the sequel for as long as it’s been going on, announced on Instagram today that he’s leaving the game industry to work in an animal sanctuary.”After more than 30 years, I’ve decided to stop working…

I didn’t think EVE Online could translate into a good mobile game. It’s the most complicated and dense MMO I’ve ever played, and its user interface can get so unruly that at some point any dedicated player has probably spent an hour just configuring it. EVE Online is a bafflingly complex game, which is why it ends up creating some of the coolest stories in PC gaming. It’s hard to imagine that experience squished to fit on a phone.But that’s exactly what EVE Echoes does. It’s an entirely separate game from the PC MMO—accounts and progress aren’t shared—co-developed by NetEase….

Hunter Trials are an optional part of Horizon: Zero Dawn, but they’re arguably the most important side quest in the game, as completing them unlocks Horizon’s best weapons. They also serve as a more advanced tutorial of how the game’s mechanics work in a controlled environment, and since they can be repeated, the harder ones are a good place to grab some quick XP. Actually completing them is fairly easy, as they have a 20 minute time limit. To get the highest reward though (Blazing Suns), you’ll need to complete them much faster; sometimes under a minute. There are 15 trials…

I did not realize this, but there are a lot of pirate-themed games on Steam. I discovered this little piece of trivia because tomorrow, September 19, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and that means—you guessed it—it’s time for a Steam sale.Some of the games in the sale are straight-ahead pirate games, which others are more of a stretch: Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, for instance, is a party-based fantasy RPG from Obsidian, but you’re exploring islands aboard a big saililng ship, and so it’s in. (It’s also half price.) The Tropico games are also in there, as are…

The big news out of today’s Cyberpunk 2077 online showcase was the reveal of the PC system requirements. If you haven’t seen them yet, you’ll be happy (and maybe surprised) to hear that they’re really quite light. An SSD is recommended (although at this point you should have one in your rig anyway, they really do make a huge difference) but otherwise, a middle-of-the-road gaming system should be able to handle it quite nicely.But that’s not all that happened. CD Projekt also dropped a couple of new trailers showcasing Night City, the sprawling urban nightmare that will serve as home…