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As a longtime Dwarf Fortress devotee, the last few years of DF development have felt like a wonder. For most of the procedural fantasy sim's history, there could be years between updates as development progress was subject to the circumstances affecting the Adams brothers' lives and attention.

Since joining with Kitfox Games for the Steam release and hiring on additional developers, however, Bay 12 Games is now expanding its simulation's scope at an unprecedented pace. It's even able to address bugs that have been tormenting players for 15 years.

In a YouTube video published yesterday, Dwarf Fortress co-creator Tarn Adams spoke about a DF update that landed at the very end of June to bring a change that, to any Dwarf Fort veteran, sounded like a miracle: Marksdwarves actually work now.

I'll give you a moment to catch your breath.

For almost half of my life, trying to get a dwarven militia to use ranged weaponry has been a futile, sisyphean endeavor. Long-standing peculiarities with interactions between military stockpiles and dwarven behavior meant getting your marksdwarves to train with their crossbows—let alone field them in actual combat—was like trying and failing to solve the logic of an arcane, inscrutable machine.

(Image credit: Bay12Games)

Often, the best I could hope for was getting my militia to loose a single barrage of bolts. Otherwise, I'd usually be left watching in dismay as my marksdwarves refused to fill their quivers and instead tried to bludgeon the oncoming goblin invaders with their ranged weapons.

The June update changes all that. As a prelude to an upcoming revision of Fortress mode sieges, Adams said archery has been overhauled, righting a decade and a half of marksdwarf wrongs.

"We changed archer behavior so that they'd better use fortifications that you set up to protect themselves," Adams said. "They will also run off and get ammo, keeping their distance from enemies even when they're out of bolts instead of leaping over walls and clubbing people with their crossbows. So that's an improvement."

Tarn has a talent for understatement.

(Image credit: Bay12 Games)

Ammo customization should now work properly, too, so you can designate cheaper wooden and bone bolts for crossbow training and save your valuable metal bolts for the sieges where they'll matter most. The game now models nocking arrows and loading bolts, too, and marksdwarves can now aim at specific body parts—all of which is affected by an individual dwarf's stats and skills.

With archery becoming yet another vector of Dwarf Fortress's increasing complexity, Adams said even he's caught himself underestimating how many factors influence a dwarf's ability to land a shot.

"Things like weather have always mattered for ranged weapons. When I was testing, I was reminded of this because my test was taking place in a snowstorm, and I was wondering why they were shooting so late," Adams said. "But it's because they couldn't see as far. Lots of little things matter."

(Image credit: Bay12Games)

The June update also brought new visuals for the game's Forgotten Beasts, adding procedural sprite variations for the primordial horrors with colors and decorations matching their randomized descriptions.

In addition to the looming siege rework, Dwarf Fortress's Lua scripting update is on the horizon. It's currently available for testing on DF's beta branch, where it's surfacing code governing the generation of random creatures and objects for modders to play with. As part of an ongoing process to convert more pieces of Dwarf Fortress into moddable scripting material, Adams says the Lua updates will "blossom into a modding renaissance."

Terrifying. Can't wait.

Dwarf Fortress is available now on Steam. The classic ASCII version is—as ever—free to download from the Bay 12 Games site.

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The Great Hobbit Run is a Lord of the Rings Online tradition based on a simple premise: What if, instead of adventures and experience and becoming the savior of Middle-earth, a bunch of newbies just showed up at Chez Bilbo and then booked it straight to Mount Doom? It sounds like a terrible idea, at least in the very serious in-fiction context of saving the world from enslavement to evil. But as a silly good time in a very long-in-the-tooth MMO, it actually seems pretty great.

Organized by Twitch streamer BurkeBlack, the Great Hobbit Run (via GamesRadar) is an express trek from Bilbo Baggins' house to the fiery heart of Mount Doom, specifically for level one hobbits. That's not a hard-and-fast rule: Pre-run conversation mentions the LOTRO tutorial putting players to level 5, and someone in the party is judged rather harshly for joining in at level 41.

Low-level characters are obviously more in the spirit of the thing, but nobody's going to put too much effort into enforcing any rules, in part because the mob of non-stop hobbits attracts no small amount of attention, and latecomers, as it goes.

"It usually happens," one person said near the start of the run. "You'll see a few people in chat like, 'Hey, 400 hobbits just ran by me. What's going on?'"

Perhaps predictably, the first two runs did not go well. In 2023, the group apparently met its demise in the dark depths of Moria, and in '24 the wheels came off in Rohan.

At least they met their end with noble dignity.

The Great Hobbit Run of 2024 finished, and got as far as Rohan before the fellowship fell apart, this is further than Moria last year. Next year more streamers, more community! To Mt Doom! pic.twitter.com/9fbvD0ttI8July 8, 2024

In 2025, though, after more than six hours of struggles, the humble hobbitses finally pulled it off. Mostly, anyway. It turns out that the interior of Mount Doom is dark and scary and a little confusing, and there was some debate about where exactly the whole thing was headed.

Eventually, amidst anguished cries of "You led us here!" (well, one cry, anyway), someone took the initiative and jumped into the lava. Shortly thereafter it was decided that the adventuring party was "Mount Doom adjacent," and that was close enough: A group photo was taken, and BurkeBlack shared some inspirational words:

"This is great. Three years in the running, here we are before Mount Doom. This is a nice juicy bit of lava. Just throw in the ring and there's gonna be more than enough, and Sauron can kiss my butt!"

Not exactly St. Crispin's Day, no, but it was sufficient for the moment—and then BurkeBlack and everyone else jumped into the lava, mission happily accomplished.

Well, almost accomplished.

After 3 years of attempts, the Hobbits finally made it to Mt Doom and threw ourselves into the lava! Thank you tobthe helpers and everyone that joined this year long, but saddly I forget the ring back at the shire so we'll try again next year! pic.twitter.com/SaKSDuYQ7iJuly 8, 2025

Someone in the stream said there is a way forward from this point, but they forgot what it is and apparently it's "very difficult." A new goal for 2026, perhaps. Until then, you can enjoy the entire epic adventure below.

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Hold up folks: games industry analyst Chris Zukowski has cracked it, and knows exactly what you're all like. Nothing but a bunch of hoardy hoarders! Yes I'm looking at YOU with your huge Steam library, bulked-out greedily during every big sale, and which you've only ever played half of (and that's being generous). The truth… is in there.

"The amazing thing about Steam and its player base is that they buy games they aren’t going to play," says Zukowski in a new post (first spotted by GR+). "More than likely the person buying your game is not going to play it."

I resemble that remark. Zukowski conjures up the spirit of Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, and specifically his remarks that the streaming platform isn't just competing with the likes of HBO, but also things like Fortnite and, in the extreme cases where you get hooked on a box set and it's past 1 am, sleep. In such a scenario, what chance does a poor little indie game have of snatching an hour?

Zukowski reckons that's just not the issue: "The reason Steam makes indies so much money compared to all the other platforms is that they have built up an audience that is full of super die-hard hobbyists… Basically, hobbyists buy stuff not because they actually want to consume it, but because they are collecting it."

This is illustrated by the so-called "pile of shame" from various hobbies: great stacks of Lego sets waiting to be built; a room crammed with Warhammer model kits; the Everest-like mounds of yarn that knitters call their "stash." Apparently the Japanese even have a word for those who buy books and pile them up knowing they won't read them: "tsundoku."

We make a brief stop by an older article from Simon Carless that analysed Steam collections and found the median player on there has 51.5% of their collection unplayed. The take-home message?

"Valve cracked the problem that Netflix was struggling with: how do you sell to people who have so much entertainment at their fingertips that they don’t have enough hours in the day to play and watch it all," says Zukowski. "Valve basically added infinite hours to a gamer’s day, it is a theoretical future day where gamers might someday spend hours playing your game (but let’s be honest, won’t).

"The reason game developers are willing to give Valve 30% of their revenue is because the Steam marketplace is packed with super gamers who throw money at games they have no intention of playing."

(Image credit: Valve)

While there's no denying Zukowski has a point, I would just slightly put the brakes on before applying this to Steam as a whole. Player habits are constantly changing, and so are players themselves. I'd definitely have fitted this description of Steam players years ago, and remain guilty as charged when it comes to the tsundoku label, but these days am much more careful about what I buy on Steam: purely because I've had that experience of blowing $40 in a Steam sale on a dozen games that I never played, multiple times. I agree that most of us are hoarders of some sort: I'm just not sure that behaviour persists across our lifetime on Steam. Anyway.

"Steam players get satisfaction out of finding a hidden gem and adding it to their collection," posits Zukowski, because "...hobbyists find satisfaction in collecting. Even if they know deep down that they will never actually play it." The fact that loads of people will buy a game but never play it is actually, drum roll please, a massive boon for developers.

"If Steam shoppers were rational and only bought games they were going to play, we would sell a lot fewer games," says Zukowski. "Half this industry would be gone.

"Knowing Steam players are hoarders explains why you give [Valve] that 30%: you get access to a bunch of drunken sailors who spend money irresponsibly."

There are a lot of common sense observations Zukowski makes about this: developers can't really take advantage of such information, and ratios of played / not played aren't worth obsessing over. If a game is either popular or in some sort of bundle, it's also more likely to have higher numbers of owners who haven't played it. Zukowski also has a pet theory, which I find persuasive, that having a clear genre helps games do better on Steam: because people know that they like, for example, open world survival crafting games, and will buy yours even though they've got 20 more in their library to get through first.

Zukowski ends with a mea culpa, showing that he hasn't played 2/3rds of the games in his Steam library (you can check your own stats via SteamDB's calculator).

"It’s just important developers have a more realistic understanding of who their audience is," says Zukowski. "You should probably be more jaded. Not everyone who buys your game is a ravenous fan who will join your discord, do cosplay of your main character, and participate in art contests. Your game is just another brick in their tsundoku pile."

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Time Extension has a new interview with Tomohiro Nishikado, the designer known for his long career at Taito and in particular the creation of Space Invaders. The 1978 arcade game has a good case for being the single most famous videogame ever, and upon release became a craze and phenomenon (a popular urban legend claimed it caused a shortage of Japan's 100-yen coin), swiftly becoming the best-selling arcade game of all time and cultural icon.

Nishikado's career began at a Taito subsidiary working on early arcade games, which did have electronic elements but were also mechanical in construction: the first project he worked on, Sky Fighter, used mirrors to reflect model planes at the player and create the illusion of flight. It was a smash hit.

"Of course, the first wave of electronic video games also came from America, such as Pong from Atari," says Nishikado. "Due to my electronics background, I had a strong interest in these video games, so I brought a copy of Pong to the office, analyzed it, and tried to make something different from it. This was because I strongly believed in the potential of electronic video games for the future. Unfortunately, the sales team thought differently and didn't want to do any of these more modern electronic video games. Always saying that 'these things will never sell.' After figuring out how Pong worked, I made a soccer game."

Nishikado focused on soccer because the market was flooded with Pong clones, so having two 'players' on each side of the screen (a goalkeeper and a forward) and smaller goals differentiated it. "Following the soccer game, I did basketball," Nishikado recalls. "This had a basket at each end and added a more human-like character, rather than just a bar. I was later told that this was probably the first time in video game history that a human-shaped character had been used like that."

Over this 4-5 year period before Space Invaders, Nishikado worked on several titles in different styles: a driving game called Speed Race, multiplayer racing game Fisco 400, a first-person jet fighting game called Interceptor, and the 2D duelling game Western Gun. None of these were coded, but built using various electronics and integrated circuits soldered together.

"For Space Invaders, that was the first one to use code, and I wrote that in assembly," says Nishikado. "There was a CPU called 8080, and that CPU came with its own assembler. I studied it by myself and then wrote the game… I saw the very first software-programmed game in America, and I knew then that this would be the future of video games, and we need to catch up."

The benefits of the software approach were obvious, primarily that the same hardware could now be used to run different games. "As for how Space Invaders came about, the first reason was that the game Breakout by Atari, I was shocked by its simplicity," says Nishikado. "This was because back then, video games were all trying to look more authentic or realistic, but Breakout was very simple and abstract. That made me realize that the fun factor is the most important part of a game, and not necessarily its graphics.

"I felt that if you switched the blocks in Breakout into a character, it might be more fun. The other idea was, why not change Breakout into a shooting game? The most satisfying element of Breakout was deleting all the blocks. That feeling was what I wanted to recreate. That meant the basic concept of Space Invaders was to similarly clear the screen of enemies."

Nishikado toyed around with what the blocks should become, trying the usual tanks, airplanes, and even soldiers. The way the latter were animated made them look fun but Nishikado had "a sense that it wasn't right to have a game where you shoot people with guns. Around this time, Star Wars was about to be released, and that meant space or sci-fi elements could be used. That made me think of aliens, and that it would be okay to shoot aliens. They're not human after all."

The young creator took inspiration from HG Wells' The War of the Worlds, where the aliens are described as looking something like an octopus ("that's why you also have crabs and squids as aliens in the game"), and added a demo loop so players could see how the game played.

Space Invaders became one of the biggest smash hits in videogame history, but Nishikado was just bummed that hardware limitations meant he couldn't move the aliens faster. "I do feel proud to have contributed to the history of video games, but back in the 70s and 80s, I didn't feel that way."

In a move that seems bizarre, but was rather typical of some corporate cultures at the time, Nishikado's success saw him put to work on various versions of Space Invaders, before being moved off game development entirely to work on things like "robots for amusement facilities." In a real 'what if' moment for Taito he even "made a prototype for a new games console, but that was not approved by the sales team as they were purely focused on arcade games."

The Taito sales team, as it was back then, hovers in the background of Nishikado's recollections like a ghost: it clearly exerted great influence on what the company would allow the creatives to make.

"I think it's very important for creative people and developers to try and make something on their own, and then see if it's fun or not," says Nishikado. "The game development process in Taito eventually changed, and we, the game creators, were increasingly expected to listen to the sales team, which came up with new title concepts they thought it would sell. Then we started game development based on that.

"Personally, I don't think that is the correct approach. Creators should try to make a game on their own first, and then it should expand into a larger project. This is what I've felt throughout my whole career.

"The point is that it needs to be creatively led first, before the management gets involved. If you don't try to make something first, you will never know if it's fun or not. Younger people who want to make games should play really old games. They may not have good graphics, but there is something shining within them in a playable sense. There's definitely something to be learned from those games and also to inspire people to make something new. Forget about the graphics, focus on the core design. What makes it fun."

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I want to introduce y'all to an excellent low-pressure city builder that I've become smitten with, Dystopika, but first I need to get some stuff off my chest. Sorry (I am not sorry).

Among my many questionable opinions, one in particular tends to elicit the most ire from my colleagues: that cosy games are bollocks. I'm not coming for any specific game, but rather the weird meta-genre that's sprouted up over the last bunch of years.

There are plenty of games that have been slapped with the cosy moniker that I absolutely love—Stardew Valley, A Short Hike, Wilmot's Warehouse—but the label has also given us an endless cavalcade of pastel-coloured repetition smeared in toxic positivity.

(Image credit: Voids Within)

Even among the good 'uns, I'm not convinced cosy is the right descriptor. Stardew Valley, for instance, pulls you in all sorts of directions—you've gotta make new friends, buy gifts, solve mysteries, participate in festivals and competitions, delve into dungeons and murder slimes, and this is all while you're trying to run a farm, which is famously one of the most stressful and thankless jobs around.

You're just free to be creative.

The vibe and aesthetic might elicit cosiness, but schedule management and endless tasks sure don't. So: great game, wrong label.

Dystopika, though, seems to get it. Like Townscaper and Tiny Glade, it's an extremely chill, goal-free builder where you just make cool things with incredibly simple tools. There are no challenges, no demands placed on your time, no expectations at all. You're just free to be creative.

(Image credit: Voids Within)Cozy Corner

(Image credit: Adamgryu)

If you're constantly looking for a cosy game fix, I'd be remiss not to mention Cozy Corner (despite the objectionable American spelling), our cosy video series hosted by Kara—who is, you'll be pleased to know, a lot less jaded than I am.

Now, Townscaper and Tiny Glade are cute and bright—undeniably happy games. But cosy is not just a singular aesthetic, and Dystopika proves that. It's dark and gloomy, letting you craft megacities full of imposing monoliths, gaudy holograms and bad weather. But what's more cosy than being safely tucked away in your home when it's miserable outside?

I used to live in Dubai, and while the image that immediately conjures up is one of blue skies and gleaming towers, it's still a city surrounded by desert, and that means sandstorms. Now, sandstorms absolutely suck. But when you see huge buildings sprouting defiantly out of the orange gloom, promising sanctuary from the hostile environment, there's something strangely reassuring about it. It's cosy. And that's the kind of cosiness that Dystopika offers.

Dystopika recognises that cosy is broad and means different things to different people. A sweet, queer dating sim; a gentle, low-pressure puzzler; or a dystopian city builder. These all tick different boxes, but they're equally valid.

(Image credit: Voids Within)

There's not much to Dystopika, as it strips away all of the complexity inherent in city builders. You click through placeable buildings, filtering them by selecting a distinct district aesthetic, and then flesh out the city with props, like gargantuan walls, or motorways that weave between impossibly tall skyscrapers.

You can place some props on the buildings themselves, and you can raise or lower your towers, but there's a bit less flexibility than what's on offer in Tiny Glade, which lets you get more granular with your creativity.

But sometimes that's all you need. When I'm burned out, I don't want more tasks or fiddly activities. I just wanna make something very cool, very quickly, only engaging the tiniest part of my brain.

(Image credit: Voids Within)

And I should add that this doesn't mean you can't put your stamp on a city. There's some prop customisation, for instance, letting you tweak the colours, text and size of a prop, and you can upload your own images, which is how my cockapoo became the mascot for the Tyrell Corporation.

This way, it feels like you're growing and nurturing a city, rather than just building it brick by brick.

Even with its limitations, Dystopika still has the power to get its hooks in you. I spent a wee while the other day creating a megacity that was really two cities: one filled with massive spires and twinkling lights, the other grotty and disheveled. And between them I built a sprawling wall, physically dividing the classes. With only the ability to place premade buildings and some custom props, I was still able to craft a simple story in my noggin.

There's also some light proc-gen at work, too, as smaller buildings sprout up around your monoliths, almost feeding on them. Just some little baby buildings. You'll start to see traffic appear, as well, flying between megastructures or using your serpentine motorways to get to the next heist or corpo meeting. This way, it feels like you're growing and nurturing a city, rather than just building it brick by brick.

(Image credit: Voids Within)

While it launched a year ago, developer Voids Within has continued to take good care of its community of relaxed architects and city planners. Last month saw the release of the Meditations update, introducing new districts, like the high-tech Labber's Row, lots of extra props, and an appropriately synthy new soundtrack from composer Sascha Dikiciyan.

There's a lot of joy to be had in quickly rustling up a city and just sitting back and watching it thrive to the sound of old-school Berlin electronic music. It's soothing and comforting—like you're flying back home and watching the twinkling city beneath you come into view.

It's also extremely cheap! You can grab it for less than £6/$7. You're absolutely gonna get your money's worth, even if you don't pour hours and hours into it. It's the kinda game you dip into for 20 minutes when you just need a breather. Pure, uncomplicated escapism.

I love it.

Best cozy games: Relaxed gamingBest anime games: Animation-inspiredBest JRPGs: Classics and beyondBest cyberpunk games: Techno futuresBest gacha games: Freemium fanatics

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Remember Steam Greenlight? That was the user-voting system Valve briefly implemented to judge whether or not it would let a game release on its platform, before it just gave up and decided it'd put up what-the-hell-ever if you tossed it a hundred bucks.

Greenlight wasn't long for this world, but one of its earliest success stories—one of the games that ginned up enough popularity with voters to guarantee itself a spot on the storefront—was Routine: moon-base horror filtered through the hazy, VHS-y lens of '70s sci-fi. It looked great, won over a bunch of Greenlight voters, got a 2017 release window (after an initial 2013 release window), then vanished off the face of the Earth.

Which was a shame. Then, out of nowhere in 2022, Routine was back. Re-revealed at Summer Game Fest, it looked as cool as ever and promised to wow us in the near future. Then it disappeared again.

Which was, um, which was a shame. But guess what? Routine is back! In a post on Steam, the three-dev team at Lunar Software said that a "huge undertaking" like this meant "it was important to keep our heads down and focus entirely on finishing." Thus, the radio silence.

But good news: "Routine is still very much in active development, and we are beginning to approach the finish line for the game," say the devs, who wisely note that "We’ve learned a lot from past experiences, one of those is not to commit to a release window before we’re absolutely sure we can hit it." So they're not saying when it's due, but are "confident that we’ll be able to share more news on that front soon."

We’re excited to share that Routine is still in active development and nearing the finish line.The incredible team at @LunarSoftware has been hard at work and just posted a new devlog update.Check it out and enjoy these fresh new Routine screenshots: https://t.co/r5BE1yuBzv pic.twitter.com/WQmL4zZg7nJuly 8, 2025

To which I can only say, with the best will in the world, that I'll believe it when I see it at this point. To tide us over on the news front, the devs showed off a couple new screenshots (yay) and announced that Mick Gordon left the project last year (boo).

"In July 2024 Mick made the difficult decision to leave the project because of conflicts in his schedule," says the studio. But fear not, "Mick created many outstanding audio assets that will be featured in the final game and provided invaluable audio direction for Routine," which will now be handled by a new—unnamed—audio designer and team.

God willing, this will be Routine's final resurrection before release, not just because I'd like to finally play it, but because any game that stays in development for 13 years has probably inflicted enough psychic wounds on its devs that not releasing it would disintegrate them all where they stand. And I don't want that to happen. They seem nice.

I am curious if the game will truly hit as hard as it might have back in 2012. Alien: Isolation kind of ate its aesthetic lunch in 2014, and I wonder if that might dull the impact a little. Still, I want to play it, and I want to never write another news post about it returning from the grave. So here's hoping the work that's left to do is pretty, uh, routine.

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With the Happy Ghast out in the wild now, Minecraft is working on its next drop for the year. Details about the contents of the drop are thin on the ground right now, but we have seen the first new mob - the Copper Golem. It's not quite the towering beast you'd expect, especially after we're so used to the Iron Golem, but according to its announcement there are multiple ways you can use these little guys' skills to your advantage.

Originally, the Copper Golem was one of the three mobs players could vote for at Minecon Live in 2021, but didn't win. Hence the delay in its release. But now, the mob has essentially been reimagined and will be joining the roster permanently when the third drop launches later this year. Here's what you need to know so you can prepare for its arrival.

When does the Copper Golem release in Minecraft?

There isn't a concrete release date for the Copper Golem drop yet, or even a name for the update, but we do know it will come in the Fall update this year. The last two drops, Spring to Life and Chase the Skies, both launched around the start of the season and in the middle of the month, so I'm hopeful that the Fall drop will be the same, potentially launching in mid-September or early October. However, if you can't wait, you can test out the Copper Golem by enabling previews/beta for Bedrock Edition. Full details on how to add these features to your game can be found on the official blog post announcing the Copper Golem.

What does the Copper Golem do in Minecraft?

(Image credit: Mojang )

Interestingly, the Copper Golem won't spawn on its own like its iron counterpart. Instead, similarly to the Snow Golem, it can only be summoned by players. To create one you need to place a carved pumpkin on top of a copper block, and the Golem will spawn alongside a copper chest. When you create your first Copper Golem, you'll unlock the crafting recipe for its coinciding copper chest too so you don't have to worry about creating new friends each time you need some extra storage.

A copper chest is essential to making the most of the Golem's abilities too. Once spawned, Golems will open the copper chests, pick up whatever they can carry, and sort the items into the chests in your base. If you're prone to your storage turning to chaos, then this new mob will be your gateway to keeping things neat and tidy.

This is particularly handy for anyone who tends to mine away from their base, since you can fill a copper chest with items you find along the way and have them transported back to your humble abode without having to keep traipsing back and forth. You'll keep your inventory clear and your stores organised, plus you'll have a little friend to accompany you along the way.

As a result of this mob being added, copper is also becoming an equipment tier. It sits between stone and iron, so it's not exactly the strongest, but it definitely helps if you find yourself in a pinch and need some armour or a weapon a bit stronger than stone to face any mobs with. If you're using a copper pickaxe, you'll still need to upgrade to iron before you can get your paws on any higher-grade materials. But, if you're planning on strip mining for a while, you won't have to worry about your tools breaking as quickly as stone would.

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World of Warcraft: The War Within is in its home stretch, as Blizzard starts prepping for the next step in its trio of announced expansions, Midnight. Arriving August 5, Ghosts of K'aresh will very, very likely be the last major content update before the expansion hits.

While the official blog doesn't state this, all signs point towards it. Blizzard's already stated it's doing slightly shorter, content-dense expansions, we know Midnight'll be getting revealed before the summer's over. This patch is also explicitly the end of The War Within's story—referred to directly as a climax.

Dragonflight was four seasons long, but it still had three raids and three major zones—with its fourth season being a rehash of content released throughout the expansion, a stopgap that keeps players getting new rewards while also giving the devs a breather.

Basically, unless Blizzard changes its entire game plan (and why would it, it's been working out fine so far, except for a couple hiccups) it's the last major one. If it isn't, I'll eat my four strength, four stam, leather belt. Mind, there'll still be pre-expansion events, story quests, and the like. As for now? We're going to the void, baby.

Or, well. A void-touched world—which is like the void's holiday home. K'aresh is the original homeworld of the Ethereals, before Dimensius rocked up and messed everything up for everyone. Some mad lads have had the bright idea to try and bring him back, so we'll have to stop them:

"With shadowy forces working toward bringing Dimensius back into the world, players will need to gather their allies in a bid to put a stop to him and his followers. You'll fight alongside Alleria Windrunner and her mentor Locus-Walker among others to end the clear and present danger he poses."

This'll also include a new hub from Shadowlands*,* of all places. Say what you want about Blizzard, I respect its determination to not simply toss out one of their worst-received expansions. Tazavesh, the Veiled Market is back, plucked from narrative obsolescence and plonked onto K'aresh.

While there, you'll also be able to do something called "phase diving"—taking a jaunt into a mirror dimension with a bunch of goodies in it. Goodies you'll need to upgrade your Reshii Wraps, an artefact cloak that'll be part of the patches' progression system.

Players will also be sprucing up the place a bit with eco-domes: "Help Ve'nari bring life back to K'aresh with her eco-domes. You'll help fill them with creatures that thrive within the ecosystem. You'll scour previously traveled zones to bring back animals to live within the eco-domes and aid them in adjusting to life on K'aresh."

It seems a little mean to go snag some perfectly happy animals and drop them into a reserve on hell (note: void) planet, but hey. Maybe they'll be rescues. Other than that, it's the usual suspects—a new delve, a new raid and dungeon (coming August 12), and more quests to wrap up The War Within's story. I'll be keen to see if Blizzard sticks the first landing in its ambitious triple backflip, and if not? Hey, player housing still looks pretty good.

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Like clockwork, Marvel Rivals' Season 3 comes around and throws a new OP hero into the cage fight of superhumans, gods, and (checks notes) man with gun. This time, the new arrival is Phoenix, and while she may not be as all-powerful as her comic counterpart, she'll still tear through your divers and Strategists.

Every new hero that gets added to Marvel Rivals is strong. The pattern tends to see NetEase add someone first and patch later, so I wasn't surprised to see Phoenix dominate most of the matches I got to play during early access.

Phoenix is a hitscan Duelist with impressive firepower and reactive mobility, a lethal combination. If you're able to hit headshots, then Phoenix will be able to cut through the obnoxious amount of healing that Strategists can dish out.

I was able to deal more damage than Strategists like Luna Snow, Cloak and Dagger, and Ultron could heal. It was more work than it should've been, but it was easier than trying to cut through the backline as Hela or Hawkeye.

One headshot and a body shot will kill Strategists and Duelists, but you can also whittle Vanguards down with her flaming passive, building burn up on a target and then exploding them when you land enough hits. But Phoenix's monster strength alone isn't what makes this character an unstoppable server admin.

(Image credit: NetEase)

Phoenix is strong because she is the complete package. Like Hela, she can deal a ton of damage and has the mobility of a fly that somehow manages to swerve every attack you send its way.

Her shift is a directional teleport, which I tend to use as a quick way to dodge an incoming lethal attack or just disorientate enemy players; it's a reaction that has been built by years of playing Moira in Overwatch 2. Phoenix may not travel very far with this teleport, but it tends to be enough to get out of danger, and even leaves behind a bomb.

Then there's her other ability, which sees her harness the power of the Phoenix and fly in any direction. This covers more ground than her teleport, and while she still stays visible to enemy players as long as you zigzag a bit or take an unconventional route, you'll also be able to escape from a coordinated attack scott-free.

But her movement isn't just useful for backing out of a fight. Many of Marvel Rivals' maps have a ton of verticality, or at least a spattering of perches that you can sit on and dish out damage from an unexpected off-angle. Phoenix can get to all of these.

(Image credit: NetEase)

In some of my matches, I ended up flanking, and was able to take out a couple of Strategists (and the odd Duelist) and retreat before the other team knew what hit them. It'll likely be this kind of scenario that'll make Phoenix so troublesome, especially with self-healing whenever she triggers Spark explosions.

If you want to stay extra safe and bombard the enemy team from behind your ranks, then you can do that as well. Phoenix seems quite adaptive, depending on how you want to play her. During another match, I simply stayed behind my Vanguards and threw damage at anyone who came close; they disintegrated before even reaching the objective.

But all of this isn't to say Phoenix is infallible. Before long, the enemy team caught onto my tactics and proceeded to focus their firepower on me. Now, this isn't a bad thing, especially if you're able to slither out of oncoming attacks and you have a team that can take advantage of the change in focus, but it did make it a lot trickier to keep consistent pressure on the enemy.

Phoenix will likely cause some mayhem for half a season, at least until a patch rolls through and nerfs her a little bit. But in a game full of broken and OP heroes, one more added to the mix won't likely make that much of a difference. Although I'll certainly enjoy her firepower until she's inevitably brought down to earth with the rest of the Duelists.

Marvel Rivals characters: The super-charged rosterMarvel Rivals tier list: Strongest superheroesBest Marvel Rivals crosshairs: The right reticlesMarvel Rivals codes: Grab new freebiesMarvel Rivals ranks: Dominate the competition

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I'm downright curious about Borderlands 4—having played most entrants in the series, it's been interesting to see it mostly capture a good narrative essence with Borderlands 2, then spend the rest of its library uh… not doing that. Which is why this sequel's been intriguing to me, given promises the game'll be cutting back on "toilet humor" and irreverent meme culture.

A recent story explainer in Beyond the Borderlands #2 looks like it's delivering on that promise. And while I went in skeptical, I can't help admitting that I'm kinda sold.

Now, obviously, writing is more than just having good ideas. There are plenty of stories out there with excellent concepts but terrible execution: But the ideas are still kinda important, and these aren't half-bad.

Borderlands 4 takes place on a prison planet named Kairos, after Elpis shows up in its atmosphere—the moon was previously teleported away in Borderlands 3's baffling ending, wherein Lilith randomly sacrifices herself before Girl on Fire by Alicia Keys plays. I wish I was joking.

Anyway, Kairos sucked before the moon got there and it sucks even more now. It's being ruled over by someone called the Timekeeper, who's implanted something called a "bolt" into everyone's neck, a remote killswitch that also lets him see through their eyes.

The video then goes on to describe a few factions—like the crash-landed Outbounders, the mining Augurs, and the temporarily embarrassed billionaires the Electi. Each zone has one of these factions, plus a Timekeeper general boss you'll have to kick over, too.

Dare I say it, this is all sounding… well, kinda cool? Borderlands 3's tedious streamer villain pair isn't a low bar to surmount, but if a DM came to me with this thing as a setting for their TTRPG campaign, I'd be excited to play around in it. Which, in my book, is a good sign.

The words of Lin Joyce, managing director of creative, give me some hope as well: "When we were approaching how to write the Timekeeper, we certainly looked back on all of our previous main villains and considered how we wanted to approach the Timekeeper differently."

Sam Winkler, narrative director, continues: "We wanted to go back to this sense of dread about the villain of our game … We wanted a villain who was a new type of character in the franchise who is ever present and not overstaying his welcome."

I'm reading into Winkler's words, here, but that certainly feels like a subtle dig at Handsome Jack, a halfway-decent villain that the series was never quite able to replicate.

Anyway—I've never played Borderlands games for their stories, but rather the same, ol' reliable, boilerplate-competent looter shooter fun. I had a great time with Borderlands 3, even with its outdated memes yapping in my ear. So if Borderlands 4 winds up having a semi-decent story? All the better.

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I've lived a thousand lives in GTA 5 roleplay. From robbing banks in the guise of a journalist, to singing The Proclaimers on a fake reality TV show, feasting on flesh as a vampire nightclub promoter, and trying (and failing) to clear a serial killer of murder while posing as a lawyer—I've seen it all.

I've played on servers that host 32 players, mirroring the official GTA Online base game blueprint, and I've nearly lost my mind in the roleplay scene's user-made 2,048-player spaces. Yes, the latter are as utterly chaotic as they sound.

With the GTA 6's console release date now peeking its head justabove the horizon (May 26 of next year on the off-chance you've been hiding out in a Chiliad cave), internet rumours regarding the next evolution of the crime sim's enduring online offshoot are gaining pace. The usual amount of salt should be pinched with each passing one—as you might expect, Rockstar has kept its lips sealed tighter than Franklin and Lamar's friendship—but the latest faint rumblings regarding prospective online server player counts have grabbed my attention.

According to a chap named Fravilys, a one-time editor on French fansite Rockstar Mag, a so-called "inside source" reckons the in-development GTA Online 2.0 is currently working with 64-player servers behind the scenes—double that of regular GTA Online as it exists today—with the goal being to push that number to 96.

As per Fravilys' latest Medium post: "According to an inside source, the upcoming multiplayer game, codenamed 'GTA6MP', is currently at an advanced stage, much more so than it was during the original GTA Online, which was developed between 2008 and 2013.

"One of the most significant advances would be the ability to perform free-roam multiplayer activities with players from different sessions, without ever having to leave your own environment or experience loading times.

"The next version of GTA Online is said to be aiming for a seamless and immersive gaming experience, with the ambition of reaching up to 96 simultaneous players per session. However, according to my latest information, this figure is currently limited to 64 players."

(Image credit: Rockstar)

Again, the veracity of those claims is a matter of debate, but if we were to assume Rockstar is indeed pushing for that 96-player number, I'd personally be delighted. A full GTA Online server at 32 players can still feel isolated depending on where on the Los Santos and Blaine County sprawl you're conducting your business at any given moment.

A cursory glance at FiveM's active servers right now shows a number of maps hosting 200, 300, 700 and 800 players, with a few of the aforementioned 2,048-player spaces on the list. At the time of writing, the most populated server is occupied by just over 650 players.

Having sampled pretty much everything FiveM's slant on Grand Theft Auto roleplay has to offer over the last several years, I'm a firm believer that 100 players is the sweet spot. It is, of course, worth noting that GTA 6's online offshoot will unfold inside an entirely different playground, but throwing in hundreds, even thousands of players into the same space will quickly become unhinged in any event.

In light of Rockstar's official acquisition of FiveM a couple of years back, you can bet your boots enterprising players will still strive to stuff as many freewheeling virtual criminals into the same killbox as possible nevertheless, however it seems all but certain Rockstar will aim for something a wee bit more measured on its official servers. Measured, but hopefully greater than what we're used to. And if that's the case, I'll all but certainly live a thousand more lives in this new-age interpretation of Vice City whenever it lands on PC.

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Summer's here, and you know what that means: swimsuit skins, swimsuit skins everywhere. And this year, Marvel Rivals is coming out swinging with five new skins, all of which look amazing and are just as scandalous as you'd expect from NetEase.

"The legendary Marvel Swimsuit Special returns on July 9 in 'Marvel Swimsuit Special: Friends, Foes & Rivals' #1 at your local comic shop," executive producer Danny Koo announces on social media. "This issue will spotlight designs for new costumes coming soon to Marvel Rivals this summer."

The legendary Marvel Swimsuit Special returns on July 9 in 'Marvel Swimsuit Special: Friends, Foes & Rivals' #1 at your local comic shop!This issue will spotlight designs for new costumes coming soon to Marvel Rivals this summer. Check it out! #MarvelRivals pic.twitter.com/ndtS9Lc9cvJuly 7, 2025

As part of this announcement, Koo also shared some designs of swimsuit skins for Punisher, Psylocke, Luna Snow, Loki, and Thor. While NetEase is definitely not beating the gooner allegations, even I will admit that these skins are pretty cool.

Psylocke's costume is my favourite, mostly thanks to the pretty colours, but Punisher's super soaker-themed gun colour palette, Thor's bag full of Loki and Hela plushies, and Loki's alligator with sunglasses are also top contenders.

But the feature that is clearly drawing the most attention from fans is, without a doubt, Punisher's skull codpiece. "I can't believe they really did the skull Speedo for Punisher," one player says. While others point out that this is actually a reference from one of the old Marvel Swimsuit Specials: "Keeping history alive!"

Unfortunately, there are no further details about where these costumes will land, whether they'll be rewards for an event, or just appear in the shop. I'm hoping that at least one of these skins will be free to earn for players. It'll likely be one with less detail, like Thor or Luna Snow, while the more extravagant skins will likely end up in the shop and cost anywhere from £20-£15, although I'm crossing my fingers for a small miracle and them being even cheaper.

There's also the possibility of even more swimsuit skins gracing Marvel Rivals' screen in the upcoming months, and while it may be greedy of me to ask for this, all I want is another Jeff the Land Shark summer skin. But instead of dressing him in flowers and a funky hat, I think he needs to have a rubber ring, you know, to help him stay afloat. Thank you, I will not be taking further questions.

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When I booted up the Marvel Rivals preview build for Season 3 for the first time, I was, of course, dying to try out Phoenix right away. New heroes are always the stars of the show, and that's no different here. However, after hours of hands-on with the anticipated update, including the Season 3 patch notes that bring some much-needed balancing changes, I've actually been appreciating the mundane tweaks much more: an overhauled challenge system and new end-of-match interface, most of all.

With seasons being crushed down into a two-month affair from Season 3 onwards, cutting down the time you have to complete a battle pass by a third, I was worried the battle pass grind would get worse. After all, the more time you have to dedicate to playing one live service game, the less time you have for any competition. Thankfully, my worst fears didn't come true this time, and there have been some pretty sweet changes to accommodate this faster pace. I'll probably continue to play every day, but that's not the point...

Firstly, daily missions are no more. They've been snapped out of existence, and their Chrono Tokens have been redistributed to other weekly missions and challenges. Similar to changes made in Season 2, this tweak relieves a bit of the pressure to play every day in order to keep up. I have a life outside of playing Marvel Rivals, including a full-time job, so it's nice not to have to worry about efficiently grinding Chrono Tokens. And before you say that battle passes don't expire in Marvel Rivals, I know, but I doubt most have time to complete a new battle pass alongside finishing off a previous one, especially with two-month seasons going forward.

(Image credit: NetEase)

With the removal of dailies, weekly missions have been upgraded across the board. Not only is each one worth more now, but unfinished weekly missions now roll over week-to-week, and can be completed until the mid-season refresh. Unfortunately, yes, these don't stack all the way up through the entire season like Overwatch 2 does, but a maximum of four weeks of challenges rolling over is still significantly better than none if you miss a few weeks.

My favourite change is actually the new (and removed) mission types, so it all feels like less of a slog to complete. New missions have been added, like one tasking you with completing three matches where you spend at least 50% of the game as a specific class, such as Duelists hero. Yes, any hero of the given class; NetEase has finally wiped those god-awful challenges to play as specific heroes out of existence.

You don't have to cross-reference tasks to figure out which hero you should play to tick off multiple in one go or play someone you don't want to anymore. Hallelujah. It's much easier to quietly chip away at challenges naturally, and it makes for an experience more focused on playing for the fun of it, rather than completing an arbitrary task.

(Image credit: NetEase)

All these great changes come together in a lovely new end-of-match overview screen (and a slightly modified main menu for better challenge tracking). At the end of a game, you can see at a glance how much progress you made towards hero proficiency, the new accessory points system, any active events, and battle pass challenges. It's quick, it's simple, and it's clean, which is something Marvel Rivals' user interface often lacks in favour of style.

Marvel Rivals characters: The super-charged rosterMarvel Rivals tier list: Strongest superheroesBest Marvel Rivals crosshairs: The right reticlesMarvel Rivals codes: Grab new freebiesMarvel Rivals ranks: Dominate the competition

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The Amber Mutation was added to Grow a Garden as part of the Prehistoric Update, but rather than relying on weather or the time of day like the other mutations, this one's a little bit harder to get ahold of for your plants. It won't randomly happen, but luckily there are a few ways you can go about getting it for your farm.

These ways don't come cheap though. You'll need to make some serious sacrifices if you want this mutation, but the x10 multiplier on any crops is a surefire way to massively increase your profits. So, there are some pros to committing to unlocking this odd perk at least. Here's what you need to do.

How to get the Amber Mutation in Grow a Garden

The two ways you can get the Amber Mutation are by either using a Mutation Spray Amber or by hatching a Raptor from a Dinosaur Egg and having it roam your yard.

The Mutation Spray is by far the more convenient way of essentially "unlocking" the mutation, since you just need to fork out Sheckles. But instead of visiting the gear shop and waiting for it to pop up in stock, you need to visit the middle of the garden and go to the crafting station next to the Prehistoric Quest stand. Here, you'll need the following materials to craft a Mutation Spray Amber:

1 x Cleaning Spray1 x Dinosaur Egg1,000,000 x Sheckles

If you don't want to commit to crafting, then getting a Raptor pet is your best option. These can be hatched from Dinosaur Eggs, but you need to exchange your current pets for the chance to get one. When you've got an egg, there's a 25% chance of hatching a Raptor over any other dinosaur, so at least luck's somewhat on your side. Once it's roaming your yard, there's a 2.5% chance that a fruit will get the Amber Mutation after you've harvested it thanks to its Clever Claws trait. What was that about luck being on your side?

When your crops have the Amber Mutation, they'll be encased in a dark yellow shell. It won't just apply to the skin of a fruit like the Moonlit Mutation, it will look like some serious Jurassic Park stuff if you're lucky. Collect your harvest, visit the shop to sell, and you'll be rolling in Sheckles in no time.

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As technology moves forward there will always be laws, frantically running behind them desperate to keep up. The problem is technology moves fast. Really fast. Especially compared to lawmakers. It's why we see countless of uncertain law cases around fields in tech especially when it comes to things like the internet and AI. It's also why the UK is needing to rethink its laws around sabotage when it comes to the undersea cables that connect most of this tech.

According to The Register, the UK government is concerned over the current legislations when it comes to things like cybercrime and attacks on the underwater cable by other powers. It went so far as to publish a Strategic Defence Review earlier this year, which sets out a bill that will hopefully help cover the issues.

The move comes after what appears to be an increase in sabotage attempts in recent times. Just this year, Sweden has run into multiple ships it believes were possibly sabotaging the undersea cables and 12 incidents occurring between 2021 and 2025 are also under investigation with 8 of the vessels involved having links to China or Russia.

These attacks would come under the Submarine Telegraph Act of 1885. Under the act, attackers can receive fines of up to £1,000 which was bumped up from 100 in £1982. Though this still, as the Ministry of Defence parliamentary under-secretary Luke Pollard told the National Security Strategy "does seem somewhat out of step with the modern-day risk."

With more infrastructure than ever before relying on these cables, these attacks are clearly becoming more of a concern, and while the UK government seems aware of that, fixing it is less straightforward. It's not about finding what the punishment would be, but also defining what constitutes an attack or as Pollard dubbed them "gray zone threats".

"It is legitimate to have a question about at what point is someone at war, because on a simple article five of the NATO Treaty basis, if Russia were to roll tanks into the Baltic states, it would be reasonable for the Atlantic council then to take a position that that is an attack on one as an attack on all, [but] where there are cyberattacks and potential threats to undersea infrastructure, the moment where you might move from peace to conflict might be less certain, and because of that, we've identified that as an area where it is prudent to undertake more work, both in terms of how the UK would respond, to how do we update our activities around our reserve forces and other aspects."

It will likely be a while before we see the direction the UK government plans to take over these modern war crimes, but given all the important work submarine communications cables do it seems valid they would need more protection. Without them countries can lose their connection to the world, and especially in war times this could mean life or death for many who live there. Plus, just think how mad you'd be losing the game because Russia sabotaged your ping.

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Romero Games, whose in-development shooter was cancelled last week in the wake of (but not necessarily as a result of, more on that later) the major layoffs at Microsoft, has issued a statement on social media clarifying that it is not closed down, and that "we are doing everything in our power to ensure that it does not come to that."

Romero Games said on July 3 that funding for its project, a new FPS announced in 2022, had been cancelled, "along with several other unannounced projects at other studios." The publisher went unnamed but given the bloodbath that had occurred at Microsoft the day before—9,000 people laid off, multiple games cancelled, one studio closed outright—the culprit seemed obvious.

The fate of Romero Games itself was also left unclear. The funding cancellation alluded to layoffs but made no specific mention of any cuts; multiple employees said they'd been laid off, however, and some said the entire team had been let go, effectively shuttering the studio.

But that's apparently not the case, and there may even be some hope for the still-unnamed game to make a comeback. In a message shared to social media, Romero Games confirmed that funding for the game was pulled and it was cancelled as a result, but clarified that it is not closed.

"Any suggestion otherwise is factually incorrect," Romero Games wrote. "Indeed, we were in the studio today to discuss next steps with the team."

The studio also said it's been contacted by several publishers about getting the game "across the finish line" and that it is now "evaluating those opportunities," suggesting that the game is not really cancelled but more just in a state of no-money limbo.

Update (July 7, 2025)

— @romerogames.bsky.social (@romerogames.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-07T22:23:04.141Z

Reports of Romero Games' closure may have been premature, but it was also understandable: More than one former employee said on social media that everyone had been let go, and the entire studio had been closed; one actually reposted a message claiming that Romero Games was up for sale. It's all been muddled, but very bad no matter how you slice it, as reflected in the comment that "we now have to reassess the entire staffing of our studio."

Employee comments on which publisher was responsible for pulling the funding seem more reliable: Romero Games said "confidentiality agreements" prevent it from naming names, but it'd be a hell of a coincidence if some other major publisher cut it off at the very same time as Microsoft's most recent massacre. (The remark that "some may infer it from public information" is also pretty finger-on-nose.)

As for who might step in to save the day, that remains a mystery for the moment. It's not terribly surprising that someone wants to step in: After all, 'John and Brenda Romero want money to finish a new shooter they've already been working on for three years' should be a pretty easy sell for anyone with sufficiently deep pockets. Hopefully we'll have news on that, and good news for the studio's staff, soon.

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Have you ever been so excited for your new PC you put all the components you have together before everything already arrives? I know I have, but one PC builder has really taken this pre-build excitement to the extreme with this mini desktop PC built around the motherboard collab between Framework and AMD's Strix Halo line.

TheJiral has been posting their build-in-progress to SFF Network, where it was spotted by VideoCardz. While not finished, it's a striking little PC with a high contrast black and white vented case that will hopefully wick away heat from this soon-to-be fanless build. This Strix Halo system is built to feature the Framework desktop mainboard with the middle of the line Ryzen powered AI Max+ 395 with 64GB of DDR5 RAM which go for $1,299 USD.

The really interesting thing about these boards is the integrated graphics card they come with. The Radeon 8060S is looking to be a beast as far as integrated graphics go with AMD using it to forgo dedicated GPUs in laptops like its new ROG Flow Z13. Early tests say this could card could deliver console level gaming performance, and may even rival GPUs like the RTX 4060.

The only problem with that is it's not currently available. Checking out the Framework website these mobos are set to ship in Q3 of this year, which is anytime from now until September. Rumours imply these boards could be in limited supply, so hopefully TheJiral won't be waiting too long to complete this slick Storm Trooper aesthetic PC.

But with excitement this palpable, most of the build is already complete. This includes a completely custom cooling solution which could be the make or break for this rig. TheJiral used the Framework 3D model and technical drawings to help design everything to fit, but it'll have to wait for that motherboard to arrive before we can find out.

"Will the thermal concept work out? Only one way to find out." Explains TheJiral "Theoretically, the heatsink should be capable of dissipating 140W when I manage to get it up to 60°C, which of course necessitates that the APU is running very hot. I would hope it will work also under load without too much thermal throttling but that is what I shall find out."

Looking at it we see a fairly hefty chunk of metal applied to the inside of the case, complete with what look like metal pipes bent perfectly to fit. If it doesn't end up working, at least it looks about as clean and as tight as something like this possibly could. The duotone of the copper and silver metals even does a lovely job of mirroring the black and white of the outer case.

TheJiral also admits this fun tinkering project isn't exactly the most logical way to build a PC. It's not the most efficient, nor the most cost effective, but it does look like a fun project that could result in a gorgeous little desktop machine. It's got me excited not only to see how this build ends up working when Framework's motherboard arrives, but also to see what other creations the brand's new collaboration will deliver.

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Some of the newest and most powerful AI supercomputers in the world have just been brought in to serve as part of CoreWeave's cloud AI service. According to Tom's Hardware, racks packed with Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs built on the GB300 NVL72 platform have been deployed at the company in conjunction with Switch, its data center host.

The rollout is a partnership between CoreWeave and Dell, the latter having delivered the integrated racks just last week. The racks are said to be a densely packed configuration of 72 Blackwell Ultra cards, all of which is prebuilt and tested by Dell before delivery so they require the minimum amount of setup on site. Given CoreWeave has already deployed the cluster, it seems like everything went to plan.

Still, I'd have been worried as there are a lot of parts to these racks. Not only are you looking at the Blackwell Ultra cards – which end up equating to 36 Arm-based 72-core Grace CPUs, and 36 BlueField DPUs per rack – but there's also the excessive amounts of liquid cooling to keep up with that power generation. That's up to about 1,400W per GPU to keep cool, without having to worry about any leaks on top of that. "It reflects the trust our customers and partners continue to place in our expertise. By seamlessly engineering the compute, the network and the storage under one roof and fine-tuning with integration and deployment services, we help our customers move at unprecedented speed and scale." reads a statement from Dell

"It is the continued innovation and speed that only we can execute that is allowing us to empower incredibly cool customers and accelerate work with partners like CoreWeave, Nvidia and many others."

CoreWeave is looking to bolster its cloud AI services with this set up which could deliver around 50% higher performance over the previous architecture. Per rack these new configs can put out 1.1 ExaFLOPS of dense FP4 inference and 0.36 ExaFLOPS of FP8 training performance.

The aim is to be able to train large language models faster and more effectively as well as help with the reasoning abilities of AI, and how they interface. The new Blackwell Ultra powered racks should also run about twice as fast for scale-out connections reaching speeds up to 14.4 GB/s.

More racks mean more power, so CoreWeave can always upscale to get even greater flops. But given these racks are arriving just seven-months after the GB200 were deployed, the question here doesn't feel like it's about power, it's about longevity. Having to upgrade from Blackwell to the Blackwell Ultra line this early must surely put some pain on CoreWeave's pockets, and how long until Blackwell Ultra Super Extreme replaces these?

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After a year of agonizing over passing sales and jealous gazes at better setups, I finally did it. I bought a fancy OLED of my own, and I love it. Specifically, I went with the 34-inch Alienware QD-OLED (AW3423DWF). It's certainly bigger and more than I need (you can find it for $650 on Amazon right now), but the slightly glossy display and color contrast look great. I'm also quite fond of the—oh my god, there goes the pixel refresh warning again.

Right, so I'm fond of the low-effort way my games look so vibrant when I'm playing Barbies in any given photo mode, but the automatic pixel refresh warning is going to kill me. I'm not the world's best and brightest when it comes to gaming monitor tech (that's why they don't put me on the hardware team), but I'm usually savvy enough to figure out what I need when it's upgrade time. My understanding of pixel refresh was that I turn the monitor off and then turn it right back on. That's like 30 seconds, max.

Wrong. It is six to eight minutes, and I first discovered that when I reflexively reached under my monitor to accept its annoying pixel refresh request mid-Final Fantasy XIV raid. Since it was my first time seeing the pop-up (it appears after four hours of use) and it was in my way, I frantically agreed without reading the full warning, hoping I could quickly return to aid my raid group.

The "six to eight minutes" wait registered as I gave it the clear to shut off. The fight was only 10 minutes long, but it took hours of practice to clear the first half. My surprise OLED warning got me just as we saw the boss set up for the final stretch. You can stop it, but a second warning added more time to the ordeal I didn't have. The screen went black and the whole fight went sideways.

So I'd killed my raid group in the most embarrassing way possible and learned pixel refresh does not mean flipping it on and off. You don't have 30 seconds to spare of doing nothing in an FFXIV raid anyway, but that's more salvageable than sitting idly in a corner while my monitor gets its shit together. I'd like to say I know better now having researched the debatable risks of OLED burn-in, but I'm far too anxious to ignore it.

What if I wind up with the outline of my FFXIV HUD burned into the screen forever? Or worse yet, what if the ghost of one of my cringey Wallpaper Engine backgrounds lingers until I upgrade?

Much ado about nothing

(Image credit: Future)

Before anyone gets huffy: Logically, I understand I don't have to drop everything I'm doing to tend to the demands of my incredibly needy monitor, and a refresh warning every four hours probably isn't a big deal to normal people. A "not right now, sweetie" isn't the end of the world. But since I paid almost $800 for a shiny new ultrawide, my knee-jerk anxiety holds me hostage. I don't buy new monitors often enough to shrug off something like burn-in. If it starts demanding bedtime stories, I'll show up with a blanket and a book.

I also say all of this knowing I'm not the ideal user for these displays—I probably need a good threatening sometimes. I work from home, open a lot of static documents, and will spend hours in a game's character creator. I'm also known to drop a "brb" in the group chat and meander away for the afternoon, leaving my PC chugging and unattended. All things not part of the ideal OLED care routine. I recently realized I can turn the warning off, but then what if I ruin the damn thing by forgetting to do it myself?

Like most online discussions, there's a mix of believable cautionary tales out there alongside exaggerated horror stories claiming burn-in will one day come for us all.

It won't. Even under the worst circumstances OLED tech is on the up and up, and most newer screens won't wind up haunted by static pictures that overstayed their welcome. But that 15-month test was just that one monitor (not mine), and you don't have to look far to find folks going through burn-in. I'm self-aware enough to know this is a mountain out of a molehill for me, but I've also spent enough time searching "how to prevent OLED burn-in" to know I'm not the only one in shambles over it.

Perhaps it's a fear borne from karma. The only time I've actually witnessed burn-in was years ago, when I teased a friend suffering from it. A friend who, when I saw the Overwatch UI burned into the bottom corners of her screen, I asked: "Hey, is that the Overwatch UI burned into the bottom corners of your screen?" And then I laughed at her a lot for playing so much Mercy.

But now the joke is on me. I have one of the nicest monitors a PC gamer can hope for and I'm too anxious to fully enjoy it.

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Those pounding footsteps you hear approaching from the distance? That's Giants Software, makers of Farming Simulator 25. They're finally catching up with the rest of us.

Ask any virtual farmer what they like to do when they're not planting seeds or harvesting crops, and the answer is inevitably: "fishing." From Stardew Valley to Valheim and everything in between, there's a cardinal rule when it comes to videogames: if you can plant a crop, you can catch a fish. That's exactly how games should be.

(Note: there is a sole holdout who does not subscribe to this philosophy, PC Gamer's own Lauren Morton, who loves farming but hates fishing. But she's not here today so how is she gonna stop me from writing this? She can't! Ha ha ha ha.)

So at long last, Farming Simulator 25 is getting a fishing expansion, called Highlands Fishing. And since Farming Simulator gonna Farming Simulator, you will not be shocked to learn you won't just be catching fish, you'll be growing them from scratch on your farm. It's called aquaculture (apparently).

In a presentation leading up to Farm Con 25, the devs from Giants laid out the broad strokes of the expansion (starting at about 9:00 into this video). On a new map inspired by Scotland, you'll be able to build a farm complete with large tanks for raising baby fish en masse. Feed 'em with truckloads of whatever the hell it is fish eat, watch 'em grow, then transport them to the docks, load them into a boat, and release them into the ocean where they'll grow even larger.

As for catching those fish you probably spent a couple million dollars raising, there's two ways to do it: by boat, as you would in a commercial fishing operation, or with a rod and reel, if you want to relax and vibe with the Scottish scenery. That's the part I'm looking forward to.

It's not just fish in the expansion: there are also highland cattle. And onions. But c'mon, you think onions are gonna get me worked up? We're all here for the fish (except for Lauren).

Speaking of which, it's a little odd that neither the video nor the expansion's Steam page actually show anyone, y'know… fishing? That would seem like something you'd include in the lead up to your fishing expansion. There's a bit of artwork showing a guy casting a fishing line off a bridge, but I'm curious to see how it really works in-game.

Farming Simulator's Highlands Fishing expansion is coming in November. It costs $30, or $25 if you preorder.

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I'm always very skeptical of attempts to tie particular themes in literature and film to some sort of ineffable national character. Surely nations are too strange, large and varied to be reduced to something quintessential and eternal. Surely they're too much changeable beasts of history to possess any attribute that can endure and speak across centuries and millennia. Surely you can't just say 'series X is like this because people from Y are like this'.

Except Edgerunners. Edgerunners is sad because Polish people are sad. QED.

Don't take my word for it. Take the word of series writer (and franchise creative director at CD Projekt Red) Bartosz Sztybor (via Eurogamer). Sztybor recently took to the stage at the LA Anime Expo—the same one Cyberpunk: Edgerunners' second season got announced at—to answer for his crimes. Namely, making all of us very morose with how the first season shook out.

"We are a company from Poland," said Sztybor. "I'm from Poland and people in Poland are sad. They are born sad, they die sad, so I just wanted to make the whole world sad." Both relatable and admirable.

Also, just in case it's not clear, that's a joke, and Sztybor does delve a bit into his serious justification for making us sad—one that I reckon applies not just to Edgerunner but to pretty much any series (games included) the studio has worked on. "Human stories are important for CD Projekt Red," said Sztybor, "we always want to write stories that are character-driven." And then, the unspoken part presumably goes, do horrible things to those characters to upset you.

THE SADNESS! pic.twitter.com/PUothyE3OyJuly 5, 2025

It's a classic in the CDPR box o' tricks, going right back to poor little Alvin in The Witcher 1, and boy if it doesn't always seem to pay off for the studio. Did you go into Edgerunners, or Cyberpunk 2077 itself, expecting a happy outcome for anyone involved? I didn't. Was I devastated when the happy outcome I didn't expect didn't happen? You bet.

"When people are sad, then I'm a bit happy," says Sztybor. I suspect Edgerunners 2 will make him happier than ever.

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Activision has pulled a specific PC version of Call of Duty: WW2 just days after release, following reports that the game suffers from a remote code execution (RCE) exploit. This affects the so-called "Xbox PC" version of COD: WW2 that was just released on PC Game Pass: the game remains available on Steam and through Battle.net, though perhaps now is not the time to try it out.

RCE exploits are not about in-game cheats or hacks: rather they allow attackers to run nefarious code on a user or organisation's machines via the game software. Online security firm Invicti defines an RCE as "a vulnerability that lets a malicious hacker execute arbitrary code in the programming language in which the developer wrote that application. The term remote means that the attacker can do that from a location other than the system running the application." They're also sometimes called "code injection" attacks.

The upshot is that these are among the nastiest cyber-attacks out there, and several sources have offered evidence they're happening. Streamer Wrioh posted this clip to X, in which their game of WW2 freezes, dialogue boxes pop up, and then their desktop wallpaper is changed to show a man's face. User @LasagneManne claims to have been given the opportunity to buy this exploit and shares a screen showing the software's various options as well as RCE, including more 'traditional' cheats like kicking players and enabling God Mode.

Perhaps most reliable is VX-Underground, a white hat group that regularly posts about malware (as well as an incredible volume of cat pictures) and says "someone is trolling gamers with Notepad pop ups, PC shutdowns, and gay pornography."

Gamers are going ballisticCall of Duty WWII, available on Xbox PC Game Pass, contains an unpatched RCE exploitSomeone is trolling gamers with Notepad pop ups, PC shutdowns, and gay pornography pic.twitter.com/FLNzRbLt1sJuly 3, 2025

VX-Underground admin "Smelly" then goes on to provide a detailed explanation of what they think is "probably" happening in Wrioh's clip (because they're analysing it purely from the video without logs etcetera). The TL;DR is that "the concern in this particular case is that this means an attacker is capable of deploying information stealer malware, a RAT (remote administration tool), or ransomware. Thankfully, it appears this attacker is primarily interested in memeing and fucking with people."

VX-Underground also notes that the desktop background "is changed to show a prominent lawyer who Activision hired to prosecute video game cheaters."

Activision hasn't directly addressed the reports of the RCE exploit, saying only that the 2017 shooter has been "brought offline" while it investigates "an issue."

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Last week, Krafton gutted the leadership level of Subnautica studio Unknown Worlds, and in a notably robust press release said that studio needed "renewed energy and leadership" to deliver the long-awaited Subnautica 2. The fan reaction was generally speaking one of total dismay, so much so that Unknown Worlds released an open letter over the weekend asking for patience, and trying to reassure fans that key team members were still in place.

Now, Unknown Worlds co-founder and designer/director of Subnautica, Charlie Cleveland, has taken it upon himself to share with the game's fans what happened behind-the-scenes: and reassure them about the state of Subnautica 2.

Cleveland's post is titled "What is a Wave but a Thousand Drops?" It begins by recalling the halcyon days of youth, when he and his high school friends in Burlington, Vermont, would spend the summers trying and failing to make games: until 1996, "when just two of us worked through the fall and got our first game playable: an underwater (!) Star Control II clone called Aquarium Fighter [...] I instantly became hooked. Hooked on making games. Hooked on making not-fun-things (but with potential), fun."

Cleveland reflects on how much the industry has changed over nearly three decades, and the "brutal" realities of making money in the current era. He says he started Unknown Worlds "without realizing it" by creating the Half-Life mod Natural Selection.

Way before it was more common, the 'studio' operated a remote model and the unusual business practice of "ask[ing] the community to send me $20 bills in the mail so I could keep working on the game, and you did. $18k was a tough salary to live off of, but I made it work and loved every moment of it. Like a design hook, but I was hooked on design. So hooked that I spent 10 years making the sequel."

Cleveland says none of this would've happened without co-founder Max McGuire, and Natural Selection 2 "made just enough money to get Subnautica into a stripped-down early access, which allowed us to find the fun… the community helped guide us forward until we found something we all loved. Something we loved to make and something that millions loved to play. There's no way it would've been as successful if we had waited until v1.0 before releasing it to the public."

But it wasn't all plain sailing, with Cleveland saying "one of our games failed because we thought we knew better" than the process they'd followed with Subnautica. I think he's referring to 2022's Moonbreaker here, which he directed, and "fewer people played that game than even that humble Half-Life mod [...] it really wounded me and I needed time to heal. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never get over that one."

(Image credit: Unknown Worlds)

Then we get to Subnautica 2. "Many of the folks that started the journey with us nearly 20 years ago have worked hard on Subnautica 2, and they're joined by some incredible new talent who were drawn to the studio by their love of the games and their passion for the way we've made them," says Cleveland. "We know (and love) that the expectations for this sequel are high. But the team has poured their hearts into the game and their dedication really shows.

"So you can see why for Max, Ted, myself, the Unknown Worlds team, and for our community, the events of this week have been quite a shock. We know that the game is ready for early access release and we know you’re ready to play it. And while we thought this was going to be our decision to make, at least for now, that decision is in Krafton’s hands. And after all these years, to find that I’m no longer able to work at the company I started stings."

As noted above, Krafton's press release announcing the departures was unusually forthright, and it certainly didn't seem like any love was lost. Cleveland doesn't outright say it, but the news being "quite a shock" certainly suggests that the trio were pushed rather than jumping: and it's especially weird that he regards Subnautica 2 as "ready" for release (it was scheduled for a 2025 release, though it's unclear if it will release this year).

You'd think the guy who created and directed Subnautica would have a good sense of where the sequel was. I've asked Krafton for comment on Cleveland's statement, and on Subnautica 2's release date situation, and will update with any response.

"I want you to know that whatever happens to the founders, to the team and to the game, our priority is, and has always been, to make the best damned game we can for the best community in the world," ends Cleveland. "With your Gorge plushies and your hand-drawn fish fan-art, and yes, your hard-earned dollars, you've supported us in every way, in every season, cold and warm, since Half-Life modding was even a thing.

"And I also want you to know that this is not where the story ends."

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I'm sure I'm not the only person who watched Squid Game and naively thought to themselves "yeah, I could probably do that one" about any of the challenges. From the comfort of my own couch, practically anything seems possible. Jumping over a skipping rope with a broken ankle? Done. Carving out a shape from dalgona? I've got a steady hand. Sometimes I've really convinced myself that I probably could walk away with all the money.

But obviously if you actually put me into the position of a player, I would be utterly useless. I get sweaty hands the second a bit of pressure is put on me. The slightest threat and I'd probably crumble to my knees and, more than likely, cry. So, it's a good job I'll never actually find myself in Squid Game, but thanks to the amount of people who have recreated the experience for me in Roblox, I can at least give it a good go.

There's an overwhelming amount of Squid Game spin-offs circulating on Roblox at the moment, taking you through each of the show's games individually, or even keeping you hostage for the entire thing and offering an in-game cash prize if you find yourself victorious after its randomised minigames. I expected them to be quickly cobbled together off the back of the popularity of the series, but I was met with detailed recreations of the show and minigames which actually stressed me out a bit.

The experience I joined, Squid Game X, threw me into a lobby with a crowd of other players and assigned me a number before briskly sending me into my first game, Red Light Green Light. All of a sudden I felt that pang of fear. My palms started to get a bit clammy, my heart beat a bit faster. I know it's literally just a game, and a game in Roblox of all things, but when you're standing in front of that horrible doll singing its song and the sound of gunshots echoes through your headset, it does get you a little bit tense. Everybody wants to win the game they're playing, but whether I was having a physical reaction to the competition or a reaction to the fear, I couldn't tell you.

The biggest knife to the back came from my fellow players though. In one of the more challenging minigames, Mingle, you're tasked with getting into different rooms with a certain number of players within a time limit. If you don't you'll get shot and eliminated on the spot. It's one of the more stressful games since you have to really rely on other players, but fortunately I soon partnered up with someone else and stuck with them. We sparked up a conversation while we camped in our little room, talking about the show, and devising a plan to help each other through the rest of the games. To my surprise, we successfully made it to the final challenge, the Squid Game.

Only one player can make it out of this game and win the money, and I was face to face with my new best friend when we spawned in. We weren't the only two players, so I expected them to turn to the others and push them out of the grid first—which was my first mistake. After wishing them good luck, the countdown began. I was facing the other players and ready to push, when all of a sudden my so-called friend rushed towards me and immediately shoved me out of the ring. There was no apology, no explanation as to why, they were just playing the game after all.

I was immediately eliminated and sent back to the lobby, pleasantly humbled and completely reassured I would never make it through Squid Game. Which was the whole point of playing in the first place, I guess. I just wish I at least had a friend request to soften the blow slightly.

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Despite being a game about a troop of adorable climbers being subjected to a variety of poisons, lethal weather conditions, and deadly falls, Peak is impressively delightful. If you think your wobbly little scouts aren't exposed to a sufficient amount of woe, however, let me suggest the work of modder BSMG_Steven, who's created a way to dynamically inject some existential horror for you and your comrades to confront on your climbs.

Over the weekend, BSMG_Steven released Everest, a mod that populates each day's island with the corpses of entirely real players whose scouts met their entirely real in-game ends. As its Thunderstore description explains, any time a player using the mod dies, the location of their death is saved to a server. As you play, the mod will populate the island with skeletons where other players have died.

In other words, the mod provides Peak with its own version of a Dark Souls bloodstain, but without the recorded playback that lets you watch exactly how someone managed to dodge roll sideways off a cliff's edge. Or maybe the skeletons left by resurrected WoW corpses are a better comparison: You might not know how exactly someone shuffled off this mortal coil, but you can be pretty sure it wasn't good.

In Peak, however, you can safely assume gravity did it. It's usually the gravity. At least until the lava shows up.

As BSMG_Steven writes on Thunderstore, Everest "creates a shared experience of failure and discovery," which is maybe the nicest way anyone's ever described a bunch of nameless skeletons. Still, it's apparently an experience that plenty of Peak players are happy to share: According to a tweet from the modder on X, over 3,000 Everest users generated more than 10,000 skeletons while climbing yesterday's island.

I made a silly mod for @AggroCrabGames's PEAK that fills your game with the skeletons of those who came (and died) before you. Yesterday's island saw 10,000+ skeletons from over 3,000 different players!Download link in the replies. pic.twitter.com/TeDFNXbjMDJuly 7, 2025

A stunning achievement in mortality.

Everest is available to download on Thunderstore, and Peak is playable now on Steam.

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