Few things in gaming are more routine than a Call of Duty multiplayer beta, but this year's is actually a bit different. The Modern Warfare 4 beta kicking off on August 21 (for pre-orders only) will include the usual smattering of multiplayer modes, and in a series first, it'll also include a chunk of the campaign."Entrenched" is the campaign mission that'll be playable early, and Infinity Ward has published a...

Disconnects are an unpleasant fact of life in an MMO, and if you play WoW long enough you'll start to recognize the telltale signs indicating one of your adventurer colleagues has fallen afoul of a network hiccup: They might simply halt in place mid-combat. If they were moving when the connection dropped, their character might proceed to run directly into a wall, or get caught in a brief loop of...

It looks like another bad day for Roblox: The US Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism has launched an investigation into child safety on the platform, saying the company "appears to prioritize revenue and engagement metrics over the safety and well-being of our children."A letter (via Kotaku) sent to Roblox CEO David Baszucki by subcommittee chairman Josh Hawley and ranking member Dick Durbin says that while Roblox has...

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, a WB Games-published 2011 action RPG about a different fellowship that went the other way, recently reappeared on Steam in a polished-up Legacy Edition package. While the modernizations are getting a favorable reception—it's currently enjoying a Very Positive rating on Steam—its original launch 15 didn't earn much attention for something with "The Lord of the Rings" in the title.War in the...

PC gaming has always been an expensive hobby, but the memory supply crisis has driven up costs even more. It's not just RAM and SSDs seeing spiking prices either, with plenty of other components becoming increasingly costly. The fact that picking up an entire prebuilt gaming PC has been the most cost-effective way to secure a decent amount of memory for months now is just one sign of the times.Picking...

From the archives: This article originally ran in PC Gamer #326 (UK, January 2019).Something I miss when I play digital games is the tactile side of play. It’s why videogames and board games coexist in my life so beautifully. One allows for complexity beyond what a pen-and-paper can track, and the other offers tokens to hold, boards to construct, people to physically turn to as you play. Somewhere in the...

One of the special pleasures in any medieval game is getting to field a trebuchet. In an era where warfare was largely a contest of who can keep people swinging their unfriendliest sticks around the longest before they get hungry enough to leave, there's a sort of giddiness that comes with being the guy who's weaponized the higher art of applied physics to fling half-ton boulders better than any run-of-the-mill...

Nightdive's System Shock remake is great. PC Gamer immsim guy Joshua Wolens gave it an 80% review score, and we later chose it as the Best Remake of 2023 in our annual Game of the Year awards. Three years down the road, Nightdive is following it up with System Shock VR, a VR game being developed by Flat2VR Studios.This is, going by the Steam description, a straight VR translation of...

Are you someone who spends almost as much time creating your characters as you do playing them in an RPG? Love obsessing over the details of your avatar's facial features, browsing the menu of noses, eyes, ears, and facial hair for ages? Think you're good enough that you could make your character look so much like someone else that you could fool people?Good, because Legion Was Here is a game...

Marcus Lehto is known to some as the "father of Master Chief," and for good reason: He was the art director on Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, and its two direct sequels. The look of Halo is kind of his thing, in other words, and he has some issues with how the new Halo: Campaign Evolved looks—specifically, its halos.Halo: Campaign Evolved is a remake of Combat Evolved, all done up...