Dungeon Master(Image credit: Future)Welcome to Dungeon Master, PC Gamer's regular RPG column, where Online Editor Fraser Brown delves into PC gaming's most beloved and enduring genre. Grab a seat in our badly-lit tavern and please ignore the goblin puke.I have occasionally been accused of cynicism. And by occasionally, I mean every damn day of my life. For this week's Dungeon Master column, however, I am choosing the path of optimism....

Terminally Online(Image credit: Future)This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.One prevailing bit of industry wisdom about MMOs is the idea that they're a little grey in the beard—and...

PC games have been foisting tricky decisions on players since back in 1985 when Ultima 4 made us navigate a moral compass with eight different spokes to prove we were Britannia's best boy. But the Big Decision Era really kicked off in 2003 when Knights of the Old Republic made us pick between the light side and the dark, and every videogame was stuffed with choices people could fill their...

Bethesda's gone and done it again. It's reconfirmed that Fallout 5 is in development even though it's still years away from Reclamation Day. As we once knew about the next Elder Scrolls' place in the development pipes relative to Starfield, Fallout 5 will launch after TES6, and this time we've not even got a logo on a mysterious unidentified bit of scenery to obsess over.I can't gloss over how Bethesda...

Two months after the release of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, the followup to its stunning detective RPG Disco Elysium, Studio ZA/UM says the game hasn't sold as well as needed, and as a result it's laying off employees."While Zero Parades: For Dead Spies was released to critical acclaim, its commercial performance has not enabled us to sustain a studio of our current size," ZA/UM wrote in a message shared...

Remember Hytale? The sandbox RPG blew up big when it launched into early access back in January, making so much in preorders that it secured funding for two more years of development. It was a real triumph because the game had been canceled by Riot after nearly 10 years in development, but was saved from the jaws of death by its creator, Simon Collins-Laflamme, who bought the rights to the...

Programmer Christopher Green has had a long career in the games industry, with a development history that included Amiga's Flight Simulators, Ultima Underworld, and Magic: The Gathering Online before ultimately working at and retiring from Valve—twice. Green had previously made a six-year attempt at retirement starting in 2017, but returned to Valve for another go in 2023.Earlier this week, Green announced on his blog that he's once again had the...

The living room PC is a certified thing now, and not just for those of us with extra long HDMI cables. The Steam Machine is "out" for the dozens of people who've picked up the $1,000 cube, but before that, folks were already making their own living room machines that run SteamOS.Anyone can make a Steam Machine, which is exactly how Valve likes it. That's one reason it priced its...

It took nine months, but Battlefield 6 is about to get its most requested feature. Naval warfare returns to the series on July 21 with the introduction of Tsuru Reef—BF6's new biggest map—a pair of boats, and more guns.Perhaps more interesting is what's coming in phase 2 of Season 4 on August 18: OG Battlefield map Wake Island gets a modern update, complete with its aircraft carrier spawn points and...

It's always interested me what people will accept as a playable frame rate for their games. It's almost an intrinsic part of being a PC gamer, because most of us have had to live with compromise for our entire gaming lives. If you're Scrooge McDuck, swimming through piles of cash and can drop five grand on a gaming PC, sure, you don't have to worry about digging around in the...