Some games are played, and others are lived in. Players return to them like a hometown where every crack in the pavement is familiar. For a whole generation, that place is still Vvardenfell, with its...

The best way to hide a monster is to not hide it at all. That goes double when every other bloodsucker in the area glows like a busted lantern, while one lone vampire strolls around...

Patch notes are usually read like a contract: whatever is listed is what changed. But sometimes the most interesting changes never make the list, and players learn about a combat overhaul not from the studio...

Developers behind Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering have announced they're unionizing under United Wizards of the Coast – CWA. Workers are asking Wizards of the Coast to voluntarily recognize the organization. Among their...

Nearly every modern open-world RPG runs on the same panic. The world is burning, dragons are in the sky, Oblivion gates are opening right now, and somehow the player spends the evening picking flowers for...

Rockstar Games shared details about the Grand Theft Auto 6 radio stations and released promo material that gives players an early taste of the in-game airwaves. Alongside the announcement, the studio dropped three new screenshots,...

A 150-year-old wych elm from Northern Ireland that has grown almost completely sideways has been named the UK's Tree of the Year for 2026 by the Woodland Trust. The tree stands in the seaside town...

For more than a decade, Steam sales trained players into a simple reflex: see a red price tag, hit "buy," and figure out when to play later. Lately the script has flipped, and the flex...

Game anniversaries usually come up when the countdown is measured in months. But sometimes all a title has is a codename and a line in quarterly reports. Then the anniversary feels more like a wake,...

A leak from a major game usually promises talk about mechanics, physics, and map size. In practice, attention drifts to exactly where developers would least like it to go. Instead of discussing shootouts and car...

Avengers: Endgame co-director Joe Russo has heaped praise on Spider-Man star Tom Holland. The comments came in a CBR interview about the box office success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, where Russo said the actor...

A Starfield fan has released a long-awaited update to a mod that removes one of the most annoying features of the Bethesda game. Players can now enter and leave the atmosphere of any planet without...

Nostalgia is the best retoucher there is. Old games look far better in memory than they ever did, and the brain happily fills in details that were never there. The reverse happens too: a game...

Nostalgia has a way of rewriting spec sheets after the fact. A hulking monitor the weight of a small dog, one that hummed, flickered, and ate half the desk, somehow becomes the "optimal gaming setup"...

Historical strategy games are used to complaints about inaccuracies: wrong coat of arms, wrong dynasty, wrong border. But accusing a game of showing reality better than a modern atlas is a different level entirely. Especially...

A good RPG companion watches your back, carries your loot, and stays out of the way of your sword. Serana from Skyrim watches your back too, just in her own way: mid-fight, with half a...

Gamer SAPianoman490 showed off the result of a year of work: two retro PCs built from scratch, each tuned for its own era. Shortcuts for almost 130 games released between 1996 and 2008 fit across...

Procedural generation is basically an endless dice roll. Most of the time it lands on another barren rock with a few bushes and a lonely terminal somewhere past the horizon. Every so often, though, the...

Computer graphics age too fast. Effects that dropped jaws in the 2000s now often look like a PlayStation 2 cutscene. But one monster seems to have dodged the clock, and it's the fire demon crawling...

Procedural generation loves throwing out surprises that no scriptwriter would come up with. Sometimes it's a rare anomaly or a lucky neighbor, and sometimes it's pure chaos, like a planet of savages with stone axes...