PC Gamer (US Edition) July 2022

ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Punched a tree. I didn’t want wood or anything, I was just angry at nature. I love world building in games. There’s something magical about the way writers, artists, and designers come together to create their own new reality – a place you can step into and peel back layers of stories and ideas as you play. So naturally the idea of a survival game that crafts a BioWare-like fantasy world appeals to me. Nightingale has the potential to offer proper fantastical escapism with friends—Valheim, but stuffed with lore. Find out more by traveling to the mystical realm of PC Gamer issue 358… robin.valentine@futurenet.com TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com…

CHRIS LIVINGSTON Twitter @screencuisine This month Spent a day with the creators of Nightingale, and just came back with loads of stuff about hats. IMOGEN MELLOR Twitter @ImoMellor This month Got to make her own superpower in Superfuse. She chose electrocuting people real good. WES FENLON Twitter @wesleyfenlon This month Claimed Star Trek was better when it was about diplomacy rather than explosions. Nerd. RICH STANTON Twitter @RichJStanton This month Had to email CD Projekt RED to ask them the difference between a cat and a lynx.…

CD Projekt has announced that a new Witcher game is in development “kicking off a new saga for the franchise”. While the details are scarce at this stage, the most immediately noticeable part of the announcement is that—after basically building the studio on it—CD Projekt is leaving behind its latest iteration of REDengine, the tech behind Cyberpunk 2077, and moving to Unreal Engine 5. Ever since the Witcher 3’s final DLC, players have been ravenous to find out what’s next: But Cyberpunk 2077 put that on the back-burner for many years, and that game’s story looms large here. The simple version is that, while this was always coming at some point, CDPR’s reputation took a battering over Cyberpunk’s release while the Witcher TV series brought the series to new heights of…

HIGHS Epic gesture Epic donated two weeks of Fortnite profits to help Ukraine. Elden running Speedrunners have well and truly hit the Lands Between and the record is now 18 minutes to complete it. Colossal comeback Ken and Roberta Williams, Sierra Online founders, are working together again after 20 years on a remake of Colossal Cave Adventure. Twitch Pro-no! Twitch trialled a feature called Boost Train except it got hijacked, became the Porn Train, and is on hiatus. COD fish COD streamer Kenji was accused of cheating: he disputed it by sharing clips that… showed wallhacks. PS wow! Sony is re-jigging its PlayStation Plus service tiers, which matters to PC gamers because accessing PS Now is going to double in price. LOWS…

Larian Studios always goes all-in. After nearly bankrupting itself to make Divinity: Original Sin in 2015, Larian tripled in size to pull off an ambitious sequel, growing to 150 developers. With one of the best RPGs of the decade under its belt, Larian then set out to make Baldur’s Gate III. A year in pre-production let them make a call on how much work this even more ambitious game would take. “We thought we had it all figured out. We even estimated how big we’d have to become,” said Larian founder Swen Vincke. They were wrong. “I never expected us to be 400 people to make Baldur’s Gate III,” Vincke told me. “Nobody expected it. But it’s literally what we needed to do it.” Appropriately for an RPG studio that was deeply…

Since Baldur’s Gate III’s announcement in 2019, Larian has made an art of the disaster demo. It usually happens like this: During an onstage presentation, creative director Swen Vincke deviates from the ‘golden path’—a pre-approved route through the game, tested and made bug-free for demonstration purposes. He clicks on something he shouldn’t, and that thing breaks, in front of a large crowd. “If our developers are in the audience, they’re losing their minds,” says Larian’s director of publishing, Michael Douse. “But everyone on my team and the audience are laughing their asses off. Even our first showing of the game at PAX was an absolute shitshow. It’s so antithetical to what a presentation should be, but it is funny. Funny is such an important word.” Comedy is Larian’s secret weapon in holding…