PC Gamer (US Edition) May 2023

When Warframe originally launched back in March 2013, PC Gamer magazine had a then unreleased game called The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on its cover. Fast-forward a decade and PC gamers are not only still playing both these games but, amazingly, great new official content is still being made for them. And, for Warframe, its new The Duviri Paradox expansion is an incredibly fitting way to celebrate its 10-year anniversary. Indeed, now seems the best time ever to jump into the free-to-play online shooter, as our huge feature on page 32 excitingly shows. robert.jones@futurenet.com ROBERT JONES Twitter @rnicholasj This month Threatened the PC Gamer team with the noble art of karaoke if they failed to submit reviews on time. TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com…

CHRIS LIVINGSTON Twitter @screencuisine This month Soul-jacked a bemused crab to solve a puzzle in Tchia, while also evading spooky cloth zombies. SEAN MARTIN Twitter @RemainsToBeSean This month Fought mutated undead horrors in space daily, also he reviewed the Dead Space remake. TYLER WILDE Twitter @tyler_wilde This month Injected ’90s-style FMV cutscenes into his eyeballs in puzzle game Grand Inquisitor. JODY MACGREGOR Twitter @jodymacgregor This month Wore a set of pixelated 8-bit sunglasses while fighting a giant chicken in Lost Ark.…

There’s dedication, and then there’s dedication. And then sometimes, there’s a little bit too much dedication. An old-school Runescape player with the handle NC State (presumably not an official representative of the Raleigh-based university) finally sought his reward for grinding an infamous minigame, the Brimhaven obstacle course, for eight years. But without banking the rewards. Rough math estimates this grind would have taken upwards of 5,000 hours of game time with near-perfect play, and all in the same dungeon doing the same few things. NC State finally brought his journey home, turning in everything and gaining 178 million XP in Runescape’s suboptimal Agility skill in less than a minute. This was such a rapid influx that the game’s built-in experience per hour tracker couldn’t keep up: it tapped out at 2.147 billion…

HIGHS King John As Meta announced the closure of Echo VR, industry legend John Carmack got mad about games disappearing forever: “I believe in saving everything.” Deepest Rock Deep Rock Galactic is letting players experience the OG version. Stadia shutdown Google’s cloud gaming device is dead – but it refunded everyone. LOWS D& no D Wizards of the Coast has tried to screw companies making D&D things under the traditional open game licence. Uri Git A card was returned to the Pokémon game after Uri Gellar admitted “I was a fool” to sue Nintendo. The new blue The Day Before, has had a delay, a bad reveal, the dev blaming everyone.…

Dwarf Fortress sold almost half a million copies in under a month when it launched on Steam last December. Bubbly 2D farming/life sim Stardew Valley currently clears 30,000 concurrent users a day even at off-peak times. Carrion, a small Metroidvania where you play as a faceless monster trying to escape a secret facility, has garnered over 17,000 positive reviews. There are indie hits on Steam all the time, yet the classics they’re often inspired by—some of the best, most timeless games ever made—keep arriving on Steam to less fanfare than a new piece of Euro Truck Simulator DLC. The passage of time has made crystal clear just how truly great some of these ’80s and ’90s games are. No game in Taito’s Puzzle Bobble series has ever surpassed Puzzle Bobble 2X’s…

There are multiple ways to become a full-time game programmer, but Lukas Donkers essentially did it by… programming a game. A very successful one, for the Ludum Dare game jam: “We made a physics puzzle game […] we called it String Theory, because your only interaction was moving lines around.” This was something he made with fellow students during his computer science degree. It did very well in the jam, with plenty of positive feedback, so they went on to upload it to free game websites such as Kongregate and Armor Games. Within a few weeks it had been played over 100,000 times, with a huge amount of encouraging comments. “That’s why I always kind of put it at the top of my resume,” says Donkers. “Game companies do love seeing…