PC Gamer (US Edition) March 2023

ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Fought epic editing battles with hundreds of spelling errors on screen at once. Sometimes you want a game to test your brain—with strategic warfare, or tricky puzzles, or the ins and outs of managing an entire city. But let’s be honest with ourselves—sometimes you just want to blow up a bunch of aliens with an enormous gun. Thank the PC gaming gods, then, that Space Marine has returned. Combining third-person power fantasy and fantastic horde tech with the grand scale of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, this sequel looks worthy of the affection so many still hold for its cult classic predecessor—find out more in our huge, angry, power-armored feature. robin.valentine@futurenet.com TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com…

RICH STANTON Twitter @RichJStanton This month Had to explain to us what’s surprising about the Call of Duty games selling a lot of copies. WES FENLON Twitter @wesleyfenlon This month Checked out the big new The Witcher 3 update. Bathtub Geralt looks better than ever! CHRIS LIVINGSTON Twitter @screencuisine This month Found mods so good they’ll get you playing Mass Effect yet again. LAUREN MORTON Twitter @ComradeCupcake_ This month Returned to the first The Witcher—she likes to do the opposite of whatever Wes does.…

Call of Duty’s now been part of the gaming scenery for two decades, and ever since the original Modern Warfare (2007) took it into the stratosphere, it has become a regular blockbuster release. That cadence matters, and the sheer size of the series has meant that CoD has become a focal point for Microsoft’s proposed $65 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. There were two years between the first two games: ever since, it’s had a yearly entry like clockwork. No other shooter releases like this, but that reliability became a huge factor in CoD’s growth. Over the last decade especially it has come to inspire fierce loyalty among its huge fanbase before, in 2020, Warzone offered a free-to-play CoD and saw huge success. This year’s mainline entry was Modern Warfare II, as…

HIGHS Word up The first ever public voted Oxford word of the year is ‘goblin mode’. Heavy stuff The Team Fortress 2 community has been begging for more support, Valve finally released an update improving its creator tools. Epic upgrade A recent Fortnite update moved it onto developer Epic’s Unreal Engine 5.1 toolset, and it looks ace. Dream on In 2021, streamer Dream was exposed as a Minecraft cheat by MinecrAvenger. Now they’ve been exposed as a cheat too. Sneaking suit An all-black suit for CoD Warzone rose up the Steam best-seller list due to its camoflaging properties. Great PARP Miles Morales’ emotional story beats will no longer be interrupted with airhorn, after a bugfix. Shame. LOWS…

Ayear after CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 2, the studio followed with the Enhanced Edition, an enormous update with the patch notes to prove it. A 102 item changelog detailed everything from corrected item descriptions to “fixed reverb in sewers in Chapter 3”, on top of a lengthy list of more substantial additions: new quests, cinematics and ending sequences. A fledgling CD Projekt had done the same thing with the first Witcher in 2008, and though I can’t find it online, I swear I once pored over a multi-page PDF describing every change made to that first adventure. I don’t know if any developer is more committed to documenting the minutia of changes to a massive game (other than Bay12 Games with Dwarf Fortress, which is in a league…

“MUCH OF THIEF’S AMBIENCE WAS MADE UP OF FOUR-SECOND, LOOPING DRONES” The term ‘looking glass’ readily brings to mind warped fantasy worlds: Alice in Wonderland, twisted smiles and a sense of not quite knowing what you’re getting into. As a company splash screen, it felt a fitting intro to Thief—with its Tweedledum guards and servants of the Trickster, minions of chaos and nature who communicated in a kind of rhyming babyspeak (“Call the dark! Call the black! Bringsie forth I call it back!”). Thief’s first level certainly takes you down a rabbit hole of sorts: first into the sewers, to surface within the grounds of a manor, then down a well, to finally emerge among the rat poison and beer barrels of Lord Bafford’s basement. Yet take a look at the logo…