PC Gamer (US Edition) September 2021

Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Forged his white hot, overflowing rage into one historically bad tweet, then deleted it. In 2015, Games Workshop killed the Warhammer Fantasy setting, blowing up its world in one final campaign. So how, in 2021, does it still feel so alive? A huge part of that is the efforts of Creative Assembly, who decided to use the setting for one of the most exciting strategy series ever made. Now their grand trilogy comes to its final entry, and it feels bigger and more creative than ever. So, of course, we’re all over it—and we’ve got the feature to prove it. robin.valentine@futurenet.com TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com…

FRASER BROWN Twitter @FraserIBrown This month Fraser eats strategy and breathes Warhammer. He also poos RAM. Doctors are at a loss to explain it. MORGAN PARK Twitter @MorganRPark This month Checked out the game formerly known as Quarantine. No idea why they changed the name. RACHEL WATTS Twitter @rachel_wattts This month Learned about the threat to society posed by the ‘druid mafia’ in Tactical Breach Wizards. STEVEN MESSNER Twitter @stevenmessner This month Remember when everyone was obsessed with Lord of the Rings? Steven remembers.…

Dream is a hugely popular YouTuber and Minecraft speedrunner who has nearly 23 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.5 million followers on Twitter. His runs break records and make the Minecraft world speedrun leaderboard, to the astonishment of many viewers. But suspicions arose about their legitimacy and, in particular, there were accusations about tampering to get better luck. The controversy began in October 2020 when a speedrunner reported seeing higher RNG drops for key items in a run submitted by Dream earlier that month, which placed fifth on the world leaderboards. Various other runs then came into question because of the high drop rates of two key items—ender pearls and blaze rods—both of which are needed to finish as quickly as possible. Moderators at speedrun.com analyzed six of Dream’s streams, and…

HIGHS Phone phreaks The Epic vs Apple trial began with botched audio access, with kids able to enter and scream at the court. Appropriate? No. Funny? Yes. GPU hope Ethereum cryptocurrency will soon be based on storage instead of GPUs. Double bongcloud World chess champion Magnus Carlsen took part in an opening dubbed ‘the double bongcloud’. LOWS Calm down Paradox Interactive says the toxicity on its forums recently is driving its developers away. Chill out people. Burning bridges Blizzard continues to anger players with fees, the latest a $35 charge for WoW Classic players to ‘clone’ their avatars. The company then relented. Not-so elite Elite: Dangerous’ Odyssey expansion was a little bit of a fiasco, to the extent Frontier’s CEO apologized.…

Ask a Warhammer 40,000 fan which books to read, and they’ll recommend Dan Abnett’s. His stories of morally compromised Inquisitor detectives and soldiers bonding behind the razorwire are a great entry point, starring relatively ordinary characters rather than armored giants. He’s a perfect choice to join Fatshark as co-writer on Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, a co-op game that casts players as regular grunts investigating cult-related goings-on. “I love the universe as a whole, obviously,” Abnett says. “I’ve spent a lot of time there, so I love all the stuff to do with it. Obviously there are iconic elements like Space Marines that represent 40K in a nutshell, but I’ve always gravitated towards human characters because they seem to me to give the best place for a reader, or a player in this…

FIRST AND ONLY Book one in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series, which chronicle the lives of the “poor f****** infantry” of the Imperial Guard. It’s World War I in space. XENOS The Eisenhorn series, currently being adapted for TV, begins with this hardboiled crime story. There’s a cabal and a dark tome, and a lot of first-person narrating. HORUS RISING The Horus Heresy prequel saga may be set 10,000 years before other 40K books but are best saved for later. Go back here to see how it all went wrong. TITAN Comics are an influence so of course there are 40K comics too. Abnett’s Titan follows the pilot of an Imperial god-machine—like a mech having a goth phase.…