PC Gamer (US Edition) October 2021

No genre ever really dies these days—it just takes a break while it waits for a comeback. It happened for isometric RPGs and point-and-click adventures, and it’s about to happen for the RTS. Who better to lead the charge than Relic? Company of Heroes 3 might be its most exciting game yet—an explosive sequel that had our strategy buff Fraser genuinely the most thrilled I’ve ever seen him be about a game. Read our huge cover feature, and get the same look in your eye he has. robin.valentine@futurenet.com ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Continued to know absolutely nothing about World War II history. Did they have drones then? TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com…

FRASER BROWN Twitter @FraserIBrown This month Cracked a smile for the first time since I’ve known him. All it took was a bit of devastating warfare. CHRIS LIVINGSTON Twitter @screencuisine This month Figured out how to play as King Kong in GTA V, and made 300 fewer monkey puns than I would have. SARAH JAMES Twitter @vision_burn This month Joined the team as our new guides writer! She knows where all the little things you can’t find are. RACHEL WATTS Twitter @rachel_wattts This month Discovered how much ghosts have to teach us in Phantom Abyss. Get the ouija board out.…

One woman’s habit of never deleting files may have made her a legend in the Minecraft archival scene, after it was discovered she was still holding onto an ultra-rare piece of the game’s history. In 2010, Minecraft was still in alpha, updating on an almost weekly basis as the game found its feet. One of these builds, Alpha 1.1.1, added fishing rods and ducking, but also came with a nasty bug that crashed the game with a gray screen. A mere 3.25 hours later, that issue would be remedied by Alpha 1.1.2. Between its brief lifespan and buggy release, the previous patch was all but forgotten. Not so by Minecraft’s archival scene though. Blocky historians have spent years trying to account for every part of Minecraft’s development history, and Alpha 1.1.1…

Luna’s Twitter thread explained that, for Minecraft archival group Omniarchive, 1.1.1 was treated as a kind of holy grail. Miraculous, then, that one of their number happened to stumble upon a tweet she made in 2010 that simply read “oooooohhhhhhh Minecraft update!”. The timestamp on that tweet lined up exactly within the period the elusive patch would have been available. The first person to DM Luna about the tweet was met with silence (she writes that she may have “just having a bad day”). But months later, a second notification prompted her to plug in an old USB hard drive and give it a look. Lo and behold, there were several Minecraft builds, one of which matched the time of release for 1.1.1. A little digging in the files later, and…

HIGHS Team Fortress 2 An update put a cap on the bot issue, leading to a huge spike in players. Halo modding The Master Chief Collection’s latest update brought back a host of modding tools from the first game’s original 2003 port. Dark Souls: Nightfall A fan-made ‘sequel’ to From Software’s dead hard RPG is coming this December with remixed levels. LOWS Oculus Rift Facebook’s attempts to cram ads into VR games led to such massive backlash that its test developer backed out of the trial. Far Cry: Goldeneye After three years, Ubisoft took down one fan’s ambitious remake of GoldenEye 007 within Far Cry 5. Dogmeat River, the dog who provided the face and motions for Fallout 4’s Dogmeat, passed away in June.…

Shirley Curry, the ‘Skyrim Grandma’, became a YouTube celebrity in her 80s. Wit and a welcoming tone earned the videos where she explores Skyrim thousands of devoted followers. She’s not the only grandma gamer on YouTube, though. She’s one-quarter of the Grand Dames, four women who meet virtually once a month to record a livestream tea party. They have their own merch, including branded teacups, and a following who see their age not as a novelty but a feature. They bring a huge amount of life experience to their videos, and aren’t afraid to speak their minds. “The Grand Dames started last year at PAX Online, the very first online PAX, and the title of our PAX panel was Tea With Grandma Gamers: Grandmas Talk Shit About Games,” explains Dame Jessa,…