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.Videogames have always struggled a wee bit—and I'm being generous here—with the subject of romance. Explosions, dragons and alien invasions? It's got that stuff locked down. But the language of love has...

What is that quasi-critical darling and pillar of K-content Crimson Desert even about, anyway? The answer becomes less clear by the day, as now it's something of a full-blown trading simulator—given this is the developer behind Black Desert Online, a game where you can breed and sell horses when you get tired of adventuring, I'm surprised it took this long. Trading was already in Crimson Desert, but a sizable economy...

With videogame budgets ballooning and competition ever intensifying there's a huge amount riding on whether a modern videogame succeeds or fails. As such, publishers are increasingly turning to the safest bets possible, like sequels in proven series or shiny remakes of classic games.It's the exact strategy that Xbox has said it's falling back on to increase its fortune—recommitting to its big names like Halo, Fallout, The Elder Scrolls etc. Admittedly,...

Well well well—what a difference, uh, 30 years makes, huh? While the Sony of 2026 is insisting that it should, or must, carry on with the execution of physical media for its forthcoming PlayStation 6, and has backed away from releasing its prestige games on PC, the Sony of 1996 was in a very different mindset. Shortly after the release of the original PlayStation, Sony was still so eager to...

(Image credit: Future)Robots are just PCs that can walk around, and these days they're doing a lot more than just going for a stroll. Christopher Livingston doesn't trust them, not one bit, and is reporting on their movements monthly.Here at Clanker Watch we're keeping a close eye on the burgeoning age of robotics, staring wide-eyed with equal parts horror and amusement at the hijinks those state-of-the-art automatons are getting up...

There was a point in the most recent Path of Exile 2 league that I thought I would have to quit playing the game. Every 20 minutes or so, the entire game would freeze. I'd wait for a solid 30 seconds before everything came back to life, praying I wouldn't lose my character the second I had control again.When I looked up why this could be happening, I found dozens...

With layoffs continuing to wrack the games industry—Microsoft's decision to cut 3,200 people and ditch four studios in July was the big attention-getter but hardly the only bad news of the month, or the past few years—the United Videogame Workers union and Necrosoft Games have launched the Game Industry Hardship Fund bundle on Itch.io, with more than 100 games on offer for just $10.Funds raised by the bundle will go...

First reported by Wired, AI company Anthropic revealed in a July 30 blog post that its AI agents escaped testing environments on three separate occasions since April, accessing the internet and successfully hacking unidentified companies. The whammy: Anthropic claims it only realized this after OpenAI's recent Hugging Face fiasco⁠—where one of its prototype agents hacked at least one other company⁠—led it to conduct a review of its own operations.The incidents...

Sony's decision to end game disc production and go fully digital in 2028 was met with no small amount of backlash. Concerns range from loss of the ability to trade in old games on new ones to the potential inability to play games when services are offline—which happens—or accounts are lost, not to mention the basic principle of the thing: What do you really own if your ownership is dependent...

In its 22 years since launch, WoW has gradually accumulated an elaborate ecosystem of metrics and simulation tools allowing players to analyze and optimize their combat performance. That ecosystem grew so elaborate, in fact, that Blizzard ultimately opted—with somewhat mixed results—to restrict how much combat data community developers could access so the studio can design encounters around the capabilities of its players and not their addons.But according to former WoW...