PC Gamer (US Edition) December 2021

It’s not often we get to put a console on the cover. OK, technically it’s more of a handheld PC, but it feels like it could be a huge step forward for this hobby of ours… or a costly stumble. We’ve broken down everything you need to know, informed by a hands-on at Valve’s offices, a chat with the developers, a full run through the technical specs, and a dash of expert opinion. I just hope that in a world where you can play your entire Steam library on the bus, you’ll still find time to read a magazine… robin.valentine@futurenet.com ROBINVA LENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Held all sorts of things in his hands without Valve’s assistance. TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com…

WES FENLON Twitter @wesleyfenlon This month Actually held the Deck in his grubby little hands. Er, sorry, his anti-bac washed little hands. DAVE JAMES Twitter @Not_the_GK This month Added his hardware know-how to the feature with a bunch of words I don’t understand. MORGAN PARK Twitter @MorganRPark This month Between CoD and Hell Let Loose, spent more time in WWII than is strictly healthy. RACHEL WATTS Twitter @rachel_wattts This month Kept telling us how much she loves dinosaurs. (That’s what she calls anyone over 30.)…

Digital Extremes’ Warframe is a live service game which makes money largely through cosmetics, and the developer embraces community content. In 2015 it started a competition called TennoGen, where artists can submit cosmetic designs for inclusion in the game. If the work makes it, the artist gets a 30% cut. It can result in a life-changing amount of money. Lendel Fajardo (LED2012 online) is one such creator who has spent six years working on Warframe creations. Fajardo’s first submission was rejected, which only made him more determined. “I started reading and watching tutorials on the processes in making 3D assets,” Fajardo says. “I kept trying, but I couldn’t seem to handle how to properly design helmets and full skins so I focused more on Syandanas [capes].” I WAS EARNING TEN TIMES, SOMETIMES EVEN…

HIGHS Epic Spend Epic’s spent $500 million on the Epic Store so far, and doesn’t expect it to turn a profit till 2027. EA Does Good (Really) EA made an Accessibility First Patent Pledge so other developers are free to copy them. A Grande Old Time Fortnite saw players enjoying an Ariana Grande concert. So that’s nice. LOWS Stranger Deals Dead by Daylight’s Stranger Things crossover will be removed from the game in November. Cyberfunk CDPR continues to doggedly patch Cyberpunk 2077, but patch 1.3 faced a backlash at the lack of changes. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds: Battlegrounds PUBG has now been officially renamed as PUBG: Battlegrounds.…

After long getting by with the ported mobile versions of the early Final Fantasy games, at last Square Enix announced it would treat PC players to proper remasters. When we finally got a look at the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters though, the reactions quickly got chaotic. What fans focused on in the first trailer wasn’t the refreshed pixel art or newly arranged classic songs, but the tragically condensed sans-serif font that left awkward amounts of blank space in menus and text boxes. It was indeed difficult to ignore. A dozen font-replacement mods were online just days after launch. How does such a small (but clearly vital) decision go wrong? And who actually chooses the fonts that games use? “It really depends on the game and the team,” says John Ricciardi, co-founder…

Have you ever fallen down a ‘wiki-hole’? Or played Six Degrees of Wikipedia, finding the shortest hyperlink path from, say, Denzel Washington to the page for Boring, Oregon? The truth is, we’d gamified online encyclopaedias long before writer Joannes Truyens got to them. “There’s an immediate literacy there,” he says. “Wikipedia as a medium lends itself to non-linear storytelling.” The goal of Truyens’ game, Neurocracy, is to solve a murder by digging through a near-future version of the site—bouncing between pages, unpicking the revision history as events unfold, and finding the human drama hidden between the lines of dry, matter-of-fact prose. The tagline of the fictional Omnipedia is ‘building your world’; Truyens’ own touchpoint for worldbuilding was Deus Ex. “I soaked up all the attention to detail in its depiction of a grounded…