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 …

I’m told war never changes, but its popularity certainly fluctuates—and sometimes it spikes, if you can leverage the power of Walton Goggins. In an interview with Variety, Todd Howard said the Fallout games are enjoying a swell of player attention thanks to the Amazon TV series.

“Depending on the Fallout game, you’re looking at a 4-6x increase in daily players,” Howard said, “which is beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my 30 years of doing this.”

According to Variety, daily player counts for the Fallout games have been skyrocketing to over 5 million players since the premiere of the Amazon series in April. Fallout 76, in particular, is seeing a sharp player increase as millions of fresh vault dweller faces emerge to walk the country roads. While Howard says it…

There are some pretty strong Valheim vibes at the beginning of the trailer for Enshrouded, a new survival action RPG for 1-16 players coming to Steam early access later this year. An adventurer runs around in the woods wearing a pair of burlap pants, hunts with a wooden bow, chops down a tree, and cooks some meat over a campfire as night falls. Feels like a solid, if pretty traditional, opener for a survival game.

But things progress quickly, as we see fully armored characters using magic staves, throwable explosives, and swords and shields as they battle a bunch of creepy monsters including some intimidating, towering boss types. My attention gets fully grabbed when it moves on to fun traversal options, like a grappling hook used to swing through some ruins and a leathery wingsui…

Vermintide 2’s Versus mode was first announced in 2019, after which developers Fatshark went dark on it. After four years of the usual suspects harvesting upvotes by whining about the absence of Versus mode and how they’d been lied to, it was finally confirmed as still being in the works last year, with the announcement of a closed alpha test. That closed alpha is now complete, and has been followed by an open alpha anyone can join directly from the Vermintide 2 main menu.

In a developer blog about the results of the closed alpha, design director Joakim Setterberg discussed some of the things Fatshark took away from the test. For starters, it went well. As Setterberg said, “we got a ton of good feedback, the servers were fairly stable and we did not see any overly alarming crashes…