PC Gamer

Isn’t it great that the RTS genre is properly back on PC? Gaming on PC in the ’90s, I was consistently blown away by the RTS genre, which with games like Command & Conquer, StarCraft, and Age of Empires among many more, really helped define PC gaming. So when the RTS fell out of fashion in the late 2000s, PC gaming arguably lost a piece of its soul. So the fact that the RTS genre is back and, in Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin, is bigger and more epic than ever before, is truly brilliant news for PC gamers the world over. ROBERT JONES Twitter @rnicholasj Commanded the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race army to crush heretical console gamer hordes. The PC Gamer team ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine…

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT During a PC Gamer designer roundtable, Cyberpunk 2077 quest director Pawel Sasko and other RPG veterans discussed the “staggering” complexity of triple-A games. The PCG article titled ‘The cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet’ caused “a commotion” at CD Projekt Red, said Sasko: “Everyone, after reading this article, said, ‘We mostly agree, actually, with the thesis. At least when it comes to triple-A, we are just running at a fucking wall, I think, and we’re gonna crash on that wall really soon.’” Many RPG players assumed that as CDPR had done such a fantastic job with The Witcher 3, it should be able to do the same with Cyberpunk. But Cyberpunk’s more immersive first-person presentation ended up making it a…

HIGHS Granny fever Hunt: Showdown added an elderly woman to its roster, and fans are going ga-ga to be in the granny gang. Past words Google is to roll out passkey tech – a replacement for passwords . Cheat this Activision’s Ricochet anti-cheat system is now tormenting Call of Duty cheaters. LOWS Watt? Cryptocurrency mining in the US sucked down more energy than every computer in the entire country last year. Redfail Arkane’s vamp-’em-up arrived to disappointing review scores. This is fine Geoffrey Hinton, ‘the Godfather of Deep Learning’, has resigned from Google.…

Rebellion can take many forms. Sometimes it’s standing up to the evil empire that’s working to destroy your way of life, setting you up for a journey of discovery. Sometimes it’s in smaller acts – like The Spy realising that if you write even a veiled reference to a specific movie franchise in the intro for your column, you might be able to claim your Disney+ subscription as a business expense. Sometimes rebellion is finally breaking the silence about a corporate decision you disagreed with. That was the move taken by one Michael Barclay, current lead designer at Naughty Dog and a former junior designer at Free Radical. “I feel like it’s been long enough now to come out and say Star Wars Battlefront III was gonna be legit incredible,”…

Special Report PCG INVESTIGATES A dust-capped Alienware Aurora whirrs underneath my desk. It arrived with turquoise accents, onyx plates and an array of parts pre-assembled by the boutique manufacturer. I’ve never constructed my own machine by hand. For many years, I did the majority of my gaming on a laptop, which was packed with so much tech that it felt like hauling a cement block around in my backpack. But in 2020, I decided to take a formal jump into the hobby. The Aurora is a no-doubts-about-it gaming PC. At last, I had finally seen the way, the truth, and the light. So why did I still feel like a bit of a fraud? Because I knew that the purest distillation of PC gaming – its Platonic Ideal –…

Today, Michael Hüll is a senior level designer at MachineGames. He cut his level designing teeth elsewhere however, with multiplayer maps. When he was playing GoldenEye with his friends back in the days of the N64, he never suspected that he’d eventually be designing levels played by others with their friends. The ability to play with others in the same virtual environment was always attractive to him. “I guess my first love in games was Duke Nukem 3D”, he says, “because [while] it was not fully 3D, it was still awesome that you can play with your friends and you know, in those kinds of environments, just go around killing each other.” Some time helping out in an internet cafe sparked an interest in games like these, an interest that…