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Geralt of Rivia is a well-known card game aficionado, and not just for Gwent. It turns out the famed witcher is also a big fan of Balatro—so big that he’s now actually in the game.

Geralt and a couple of familiar friends have joined Balatro in the game’s first ever “Collaboration Pack,” a crossover that adds optional face card backs from not just The Witcher 3, but also Dave the Diver, Vampire Survivors, and Among Us. The card cosmetics can be unlocked through a new “deck settings” menu that enables players to customize their decks with new cards.

“It was surreal having these conversations,” Balatro developer Localthunk said. “Some of the biggest names in gaming praising my little project and wanting to collaborate—absolutely wild. I’m glad we made…

Epic has been giving away games on the Epic Games Store since it launched at the end of 2018, enticing Steam users to install its launcher with freebies as big as Grand Theft Auto 5 and Civilization 6. More than 580 million free games were claimed just last year.

Giving away half-a-billion game copies a year, even when paying a small fraction of each copy’s list price, is not cheap. Thanks to documents that came out during Epic’s legal fight with Apple, we learned that the company spent $11.6 million on free games in just the first nine months of the program. Epic has been giving away games for six years now.

However, responding to a question about Epic’s free game strategy on a call with press earlier this week, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that it’s been a “very economical”…

Hollywood megastar and extremely intense individual Nicolas Cage is coming to Dead by Daylight. Up until now the game has regularly added famous movie killers and various characters from other games, but I think this is the first time it’s added a real person. The announcement comes with a short trailer which gives a look at his in-game character model. Which looks a lot like Nicolas Cage.

“There is nothing more powerful than imagination,” Cage solemnly intones over the trailer. “We can shape the fabric of reality, transforming everything you may think you know.” That could hint at Cage’s character bringing some sort of new element to the game, or it may just be a spooky line and Cage is a survivor skin. Then again, if there were a Hollywood superstar that I bet could probably mur…

City builder fans have a lot of reasons to be happy these days—we’re in a real boom at the moment, with lots of exciting-looking city builders planned for this year including the recently announced Cities: Skylines 2.

Just look at what’s coming this week: there are three (potentially four, really) new city builders coming to Steam just on Wednesday, April 5. That’s a lot of builders crammed into the same day! And they all have different styles and represent different takes on the city building genre, from survival to puzzle to strategy and tower-defense.

For my money the most interesting city builder entering early access on April 5 is TerraScape from Bitfall Studios. It has a sort of Dorfromantic look and feel to it, with e…

Naoki Yoshida seems determined not to have a repeat of Endwalker’s launch woes. Its release in 2021 was a real lightning-in-a-bottle moment: The pandemic was still causing full-blown lockdowns, World of Warcraft players were heading to Eorzea in droves, and the expansion was wrapping up a decade-long story. It was a game suffering from success, causing servers to buckle and the game to be pulled from sale for six weeks as things stabilised.

Admittedly, that can cause a little bit of concern when we’re right on the cusp of another expansion launch. But after sitting down and talking with Yoshida, he’s confident that things won’t be the same this time. “Previously, the situation was that just physically we didn’t have the servers. But now we’ve acquired a sufficient amount of server…

Nvidia’s keynote speech at Computex 2024 contained nothing about its next generation of GeForce graphics cards. So, for the time being, we’re left to browse through the usual sources of leaks and rumours to build a picture of what’s coming. The latest of which suggests that the RTX 5090 will be using a 512-bit wide memory bus, but the rest will be the same as in the current RTX 40-series.

The source of said rumour is Kopite7kimi on X, who has a pretty good reputation for making accurate predictions and statements about future developments in GPUs. In a recent post, the leaker set down the memory configurations for the five Blackwell GPU variants expected to be launched later this year (though some of them may not be announced until 2025).

First up is the GB202, which will un…

Synced, the free-to-play co-op shooter released by Tencent’s Level Infinite publishing brand, is closing in September, just a year after its launch in September 2023.

An open beta for Synced ran from December 2022 into January 2023, after which it effectively went away until the 1.0 release in September of last year. Two seasons followed, but the launch of the second season in March—entitled Cyber Safari—was the last update on Steam prior to the closure announcement. The Synced Twitter feed has been silent since then as well.

“Thanks so much for playing Synced and being a valued member of its community, but we regret to inform you that the game will be retired this September,” Level Infinite said in the legally-precise shutdown update. “Synced will be terminated …

After a strange spike in Call of Duty cheaters, Activision is going all-in on account bans, first targeting Warzone cheaters and boosters and now going after Modern Warfare 3, both ranked and non-ranked, to rake up an impressive 65,000 account bans in the last week. 

“Team Ricochet has accelerated cheat vendor enforcements resulting in over 65,000 account bans across Ranked Play and non-Ranked modes in Warzone and MW3 this week,” the Call of Duty update Twitter account says. “The team will continue to monitor and issue enforcements to anyone cheating or boosting in all game modes.” 

Activision has been pretty vocal about combatting cheaters in the last couple of weeks. Starting off with a ban wave targeting Warzone, the studio promised that Ricochet (its anti-cheat…

The Den of Wolves trailer at The Game Awards first announces that we’re looking at a new game from from the creator of Payday: The Heist and Payday 2, but then goes on to show something that has very little resemblance to a bank robbery: a pair of men growling at each other in a sci-fi dungeon that could’ve appeared in Cyberpunk 2077. So, what the heck is this game?

As implied by the Payday connection, Den of Wolves is a four-player co-op game from 10 Chambers, the Stockholm-based studio co-founded by Payday 1 and 2 designer Ulf Andersson. But it’s Andersson’s vision for, like, Payday 5. Rather than present-day burglaries, Den of Wolves takes place in 2097 in a city run by unregulated corporations who’ve secured their global stock exchange against AI-powered hackers by somehow us…

In the Total War: Warhammer games, some of your armies have procedurally generated lords with randomized names and perks, while others are led by Legendary Lords, bespoke characters often drawn from the setting’s history. At first the only heroes you could have roaming the land solo or embedded in those armies were randomized ones, leaving characters from the fiction who weren’t really generals absent excluding the occasional text event or temporary summoning.

Since then, a handful of Legendary Heroes have made their way into the games, most notably Felix and Gotrek from the popular series of books, but also the wood elf mage-queen Ariel, Venerable Lord Kroak on the lizardmen side, and several others. That trend is set to continue in Total War: Warhammer 3, according to Creative A…

There’s a clue for today’s Wordle just a little further down this page if you need some help with the July 7 (1114) puzzle—it won’t give the game away, but it should help you get your guesses back on track. And if you need something that’s more to the point, scroll yourself down to today’s answer. Either way, enjoy your Wordle.

I knew today’s winning word was in reach as soon as my second guess had finished turning over. Just put that yellow there, carefully consider the options, and… that’s Sunday’s Wordle won. Don’t worry if it’s not coming together as quickly for you today—that’s what our clue is for.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, July 7

Although often misspelt as the sort of ball-firing device you’d …

Personally I quite like Age of Empires, Warcraft, and Stronghold games. I also like dinosaurs. So, naturally, I like the concept behind Dinolords, a recently announced fusion of medieval city-builder and action RPG with RTS combat and also, you know, dinosaurs. Set to release into Early Access in the first few months of 2025, Dinolords is developed by new studio Northplay and published by the publishing arm of Ghost Ship Games, the developer behind Deep Rock Galactic.

You’ll control a single hero character whose job is to establish a settlement, attract villagers, and have them take over gathering resources. You’ll then train specialists, establish infrastructure, and expand your town with an army to defend against the enemy’s conventional and dinosaur-using troops. You’ll also, o…

We reported on AMD’s latest graphics driver dump yesterday. AMD detailed a pretty exhaustive list of benefits and performance improvements with Adrenalin Edition Driver 23.2.1. Conspicuously missing were any claims of huge ray-tracing performance boosts of up to 40%.

Reportedly, however, that’s exactly what some owners of AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs are experiencing. But there’s a catch. Thus far, it seems the really big boosts in performance relate to synthetic tests of ray-tracing performance.

By way of example, one Twitter user claimed a performance uplift from 27.84 fps to 38.17 fps in 3DMark’s DirectX Ray tracing feature set benchmark running on an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. Another poster saw performance in the same benchmark increase from 31.51 fps to 42.58 fps on an R…

Honestly, it’s one of the best jobs in the world. I know I’m probably biased, but the chance to spend your days testing the latest PC gaming hardware and then getting to write about it for a dedicated audience of millions of like-minded enthusiasts… well, it was always a dream of mine.

And if that sounds like a career you’d want to pursue, then we want to hear from you. We’re recruiting for a new member of the dedicated PC Gamer Hardware team as a remote role within the US. That’s right, you get to stay at home. Or the coffee shop. Or, y’know, anywhere you can setup a test rig and benchmark hardware all day long.

You’ll be able to work to deadlines, and will be tackling news, attend events, write reviews, features, opinion pieces, buying guides, and cover deals. So I’m loo…

There’s a hint for today’s Wordle waiting just below if you’d like a helping hand with your daily game, as well as a selection of general tips designed to improve every guess you make, too. Need something a little more direct? I’ve got it covered. The answer to the October 2 (835) Wordle is never more than a quick click away.

I do love it when I get to kick off my Wordle week with a quick game, everything falling into the right places before I’ve even had a chance to rush off down all the wrong rabbit holes with far too many wasted guesses. With a bit of luck I’ll be able to say the same tomorrow—fingers crossed.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, October 2

Thinking of cheerful celebrations and happy feelings will help yo…

A Skyrim modder with the handle Jonx0r recently uploaded a proof-of concept mockup of Dark Souls 3’s starting area in the cutting edge Unreal Engine 5, presenting FromSoftware’s 2016 classic in a literal new light. The modder explained that they pursued this project as a way of learning the ins and outs of Epic’s new engine.

Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 middleware has some beefy graphical might backing it up, and like Unreal Engines 3 and 4 before it, looks poised to take over the games industry with developers like CD Projekt and Bioware jumping ship from in-house tech to adopt the new engine for future projects. We got a tantalizing first glimpse of its potential with the Matrix Awakens demo released alongside the 2021 Game Awards and finally brought to PC last April.

Unreal Eng…

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to PC Gamer that Halo’s franchise director, Frank O’Connor, has left Microsoft, telling us, “We thank Frank for his numerous contributions to the Halo franchise and wish him well going forward.” O’Connor’s departure was first reported over the weekend by Windows Central, who noticed that his LinkedIn had been updated to show him leaving Microsoft for a new role at an unspecified company.

O’Connor began working on Halo at Bungie in 2004, where he wrote the “Bungie Weekly Update,” a predecessor to the still-running Destiny bulletin “This Week at Bungie.” O’Connor left the company for Microsoft proper in 2008, after the release of Halo 3, where he held the senior role of franchise creative director, overseeing 343 Industries as well as other studios…