David Vonderhaar, one of the most prominent and longest-tenured senior developers on Activision’s long-running Call of Duty series, has announced that after nearly 20 years at Treyarch, he is moving on to other things.

“Today I am sharing that I have left Activision and Treyarch after an incredible 18 years and 8 Call of Duty games,” Vonderhaar wrote in a LinkedIn post. “To my co-workers at Treyarch, I am immensely grateful for the time we invested working to improve our craft, never sitting on successes, and always wondering how to improve what we design and how we produce it.

“Thank you to the Call of Duty community for your passion and enthusiasm. That energy has often fueled our determination as a studio and individuals. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to i…

In what is perhaps the only situation which you should be excited about the phrase “a mountain of bugs,” Intercept Games has released the first big patch for Kerbal Space Program 2. The situation being, of course, that “a mountain of bugs” is prefaced with “fixed.”

Which they did! A lot of them, in fact. The 0.1.1.0 update contains a tooth-dropping 300 changes ranging from minor to major. The development team thanked the community for all the information, and even credited the community with 42 specific bugfixes that their bug reports directly helped to fix.

Among the most important fixes were a solve to how fuel flows, cutting processing load by a factor of three. Another fixed the RAPIER air-breathing/vacuum engine switching between its modes. There’s also a load of bugs w…

Like all Brits I wake up every day and give thanks for our monarchy, before making a cup of tea, nodding at my shrine to Princess Diana, and applying some Duchy-branded resin to the old upper lip. When my day is done the last act is to listen to the shipping forecast, awaiting the glorious moment when “God save the King” lulls me to sleep, perchance to dream of this sceptred isle.

Anyway: last year saw the coronation of the UK’s current monarch, King Charles III (for it is he). One of the many traditions the nation upholds (and frankly one of the less weird ones) is commissioning a top artist to paint the odd picture of them, and on Tuesday May 14 the first official portrait of Charles was unveiled by the king himself.

The painting is by Jonathan Yeo, who’s alongside Charles…

Of all the issues that afflict PC gamers, whether it’s a dodgy driver, excessive fan noise, a buggy game patch or OLED burn-in, I would not have put the photodegradation of a GPU backplate in the top 100 of potential issues. 

But apparently, it’s a thing. Two users on Reddit (via Videocardz) reported some photodegradation appearing on the backplates of different graphics cards. The discoloration closely matches the patterns you’d expect to see from an adjacent set of memory modules equipped with RGB lighting.

The speculation is that the RGB lighting in question reacted with the coatings used on the backplates of the cards. It doesn’t appear to affect a specific card, as the reports show the phenomena affecting MSI and Gigabyte cards (followed later by an Asus card). Rat…

If you were asked to get up on stage and play an unreleased game in front of a whole crowd, do you think you’d be able to keep your cool? A player by the name of Fireworks certainly did, etching his name into the series’ storied history.

Earlier this month, PlayStation Japan hosted a pre-release event. During which a player was selected (by raffle) to play through a never-seen-before mission from Armoured Core 6. A man from Shibuya (a special ward in Tokyo) was selected to get behind the pilot seat. Going by the name “Fireworks”, he revealed during a brief interview that he was an Armored Core vet and had played every game in the series prior.

Fireworks had been given a dire mission statement—one translated and summarised by Twitter user steelballrunner. He was given o…

The Thaumaturge, an isometric RPG about occultists summoning spirit beings in 1905 Warsaw, has been delayed into March—not because it needs more development time, but because February is just too damn crowded already.

Fool’s Theory, the studio making The Thaumaturge, has some fairly deep RPG roots. It’s headed up by former Witcher 2 and 3 quest designer Jakub Rokosz, served as a support studio for Baldur’s Gate 3, and is also developing the remake of CD Projekt’s first RPG The Witcher. Even so, it’s not an especially well-known studio, nor is The Thaumaturge a very high-profile game. That may have helped drive the decision to push the launch back.

“With February’s busy launch period, we’ve decided to move the release of the Thaumaturge to March 4th, 2024,” the st…

Like many small-studio projects before it, Radio the Universe is one of those strikingly gorgeous, long-in-development independent games you catch tantalizing glimpses of on Twitter or Reddit and just need to know more about. The top-down, almost Hyper Light Drifter-adjacent adventure was at one point slated for a 2020 release while, as reported by Destructoid and, uh, us, the game has been in the works in some form since at least 2012. But after this long wait it’s finally playable by the general public for the first time thanks to a Steam Next Fest demo.

And it rules! Radio the Universe nails the fundamentals of this sort of top-down, 2D Soulslike⁠—your sword swings have this weighty feel and satisfying arc with a meaty crunch on hitting enemies, and the com…

Whatever the Baldur’s Gate 3 modders have been drinking, I’d like a double. They’ve given us mods that make your entire party scrabble around on all fours, add an entire roguelike mode, and commit a war crime against Astarion’s hair follicles. And they haven’t slowed down yet.

The latest round of uploads to Nexus Mods include a couple of highlights. The first is for the Shadowheart Nation, giving the cleric of variable goddesses an improved imp-summoning ability. Referencing a running gag from the actual-play video where some of the Baldur’s Gate 3 voice actors played their characters in a game of D&D (since canonized in the game’s epilogue), Shadowheart was first given the ability to summon an adorable imp named Bing Bong in a mod released last year. It’s now been tweaked by …

You might be wondering how Starfield’s outpost system compares to Fallout 4’s settlements. Are Starfield’s player-made bases better than Fallout 4’s, or worse? Did Bethesda improve on the system, or does it not quite stack up?

I could think of no one better to ask than the player who essentially reinvented Fallout 4’s settlement system, modder King Gath. He’s the creator of the outstanding Sim Settlements and Sim Settlements 2 mods, which are so good they should be part of the Fallout 4 base game. 

Via email, King Gath was nice enough to explain what he likes about Starfield’s outpost system, what he thinks could be improved, and what’s missing altogether. He’s quick to point out that he’s not an expert on Starfield’s outpost systems yet: “I’ve got …