PC Gaming

CEO John Riccitiello sold 2,000 shares a week before Unity revealed its Runtime Fee

Starfield's New Game+ is full of bizarre sci-fi surprises, if you've got the patience to repeatedly beat the game.

There are plenty of weird sights in Starfield, from a zero-G casino to alien critters with exposed brains to Nicolas Cage's face in your flashlight beam. (To be fair, that last one was created by a modder.)

But some of the weirdest and most surprising stuff in Starfield is hidden pretty darn deep into the game. In fact, it's so deep you won't even find it until you've completed the main quest, and not just once but several times using Starfield New Game+.

NOTE: MAJOR SPOILERS* from here on out! Because to explain this I'm gonna have to talk quite a bit about Starfield's main quest and how New Game+ works.

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Renowned leaker billbil-kun found information suggesting that a PC release of Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition is very, very close.

Just a few days ago, the Singaporean game rating board revealed the imminent launch of Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition for PlayStation 5. This news held little surprise, however, given that it was a safe bet to assume Sony would bundle last year's Horizon Forbidden West with the Burning Shores DLC released a few months ago, just like they did for Horizon Zero Dawn and its The Frozen Wilds DLC.

Much more interesting is today's news broken by renowned leaker billbil-kun, who found out that Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition may also be released on PC at the same time, or very close anyway. According to the information gathered by billbil-kun, the game could launch on Steam and the Epic Games Store in the span of a month.

Hey all!

What type of PC content are you guys interested in seeing in here? Are you subscribed to other gaming communities?

I've been trying to help out the creator and post a mix of content, but am never really sure what people use it for. Here's a bit of what I've been trying:

• General PC games news
• hardware news & reviews
• Smaller/Lesser known game releases and reviews
• Industry news
• Trailers
• Bigger game updates

I skim through a ton of material every day and post a few highlights from the sources I think are most informative (so not always the original source).

A steampunk-themed side-scrolling shooter with a shotgun that’s also an umbrella, Gunbrella crams plenty of frenetic, brolly-based combat into its brief playtime

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Gunbrella is a classic 2D platform shooter in the style of a steampunk western. It’s like Deadwood crossed with Singin’ In The Rain, if Gene Kelly ever used his umbrella to blow holes through anyone who didn’t sufficiently praise his tap dancing. Some light exploration bits have you travelling by train from frontier towns to mining villages, much of them decorated with giant spinning cogs – so you know it’s steampunk – and populated by a small cast of quest-giving locals, pill-dispensing shopkeepers and monologuing villains.

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This realtime 4X makes great use of Dune’s furniture in crafting a compulsive, busy, and well-made strategy game, and its new campaign is a great addition. But the soul of Dune remains elusive, leaving its desert planet feeling barren in the wrong ways.

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This buffet of different resources is key to what makes Spice Wars interesting. You’ll go into each match or mission with a game plan. Which flavour of control do I fancy today? Generally, this means focusing your techs and bonuses on a couple of resources while trying not to cripple your economy in other areas. Done right, all those tiny flaps of a baby steamroller’s wings will cascade into some sort of steam-nado before long, allowing you to pancake your foes with the sheer power of multipliers. Now, certain houses favour specific plays, and some resources are easy to trade for, stripping the risk from negelecting them, but there’s otherwise a decent amount of freedom. Spice Wars’ AI isn’t an especially tricky opponent, but cascading jenga towers of choices do make for some satisfying plays, especially now tweaks have made a relatively barren mid-game feel much richer.

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With last week's Starfield launch slowly simmering down, Bethesda has started to cast its gaze forward, confirming a number of "community requested" features are on the way, including Nvidia DLSS support on PC, an FOV slider, and more.

As detailed in a post on social media, Bethesda is initially targeting a "few top issues" in a small hotfix out today, after which it'll be turning its attention to various community requested features, which will arrive in updates at a "regular interval".

Specifically, it's confirmed Nvidia DLSS Support on PC following its controversial partnership with AMD, as well as 32:9 ultrawide monitor support on the platform. Additionally, players can expect a range of quality of life improvements, including a field-of-view slider, an HDR calibration menu, plus brightness and contrast controls.
Digital Foundry reckoned the PC version of Starfield "still requires a lot of work".

"We're also working closely with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel on driver support," the studio adds, "and each update will include new stability and performance improvements."

Investigation into Nvidia GPU workloads reveals that Tensor cores are being hammered, just incredibly briefly.

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An intrepid Reddit poster, going under the handle Bluedot55, leveraged Nvidia's Nsight Systems GPU metric tools to drill down into the workloads running on various parts of an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU.

Bluedot55 ran both DLSS and third party scalers on an Nvidia RTX 4090 and measured Tensor core utilisation. Looking at average Tensor core usage, the figures under DLSS were extremely low, less than 1%.

Initial investigations suggested even the peak utilisation registered in the 4-9% range, implying that while the Tensor cores were being used, they probably weren't actually essential. However, increasing the polling rate revealed that peak utilisation is in fact in excess of 90%, but only for brief periods measured in microseconds.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, the upcoming cRPG set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe developed by Owlcat Games, now has a release date, as revealed in the new trailer that you can watch above. That date is December 7, 2023. The trailer also reveals that the game is being released on more than just PC and Mac: it'll also hit the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S that same day.

The turn-based cRPG will be another big release in what has been a massive year for RPGs, capping off a year in which the genre has added Starfield, Baldur's Gate 3, Sea of Stars, Final Fantasy 16, and Diablo 4 (among others) to its ranks. The new trailer also introduces Marazhai, the last of your 10 available companions who Owlcat describes as "one of the Drukhari, a xenos race famous for elevating pain to a whole new level and draining life and power from it."

No Man's Sky has had a great month, coincidentally around the launch of the other big space adventure of the day.

No Man's Sky has been one of the best examples of a video redemption story, and developer Hello Games never stopped expanding the game with new content, and more features. Just recently, the procedural space adventure celebrated its seventh anniversary with the Echoes update, and it doesn't look like there's an end in sight to this support.

But do these updates bring back players? The answer is an emphatic yes! Hello Games founder, Sean Murray, recently revealed that No Man's Sky is having "its biggest month in the last few years." Interestingly, this is happening across all platforms where No Man's Sky is available - so PC, consoles, Mac, and even VR.

Lies of P manages to be a solid soulslike with its interesting setting and combat mechanics, despite not attempting to bring any innovation to the formula

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Despite having been released over eight years ago, FromSoftware's Bloodborne continues to be among the most popular action role-playing games ever made, thanks to its unique atmosphere and gameplay mechanics. So far, a few soulslike games tried to replicate this formula with little success, such as Spiders' Steelrising, but with Lies of P, NEOWIZ proved that it is indeed possible to create a solid action RPG in the same vein as FromSoftware's legendary title, although the lack of innovation does impact the experience a bit, even with the many tweaks made to the formula.

UPDATE 11.45pm: As fury among developers continues to mount following Unity's dramatic changes to its Unity Engine business model, the company has taken to social media to "provide clarifying answers to the top questions" being asked.

"Yes, this is a price increase and it will only affect a small subset of current Unity Editor users," the company insisted in its statement. "Today, a large majority of Unity Editor users are currently not paying anything and will not be affected by this change. The Unity Runtime fee will not impact the majority of our developers.

"The developers who will be impacted are generally those who have successful games and are generating revenue way above the thresholds we outlined in our blog. This means that developers who are still building their business and growing the audience of their games will not pay a fee. The program was designed specifically this way to ensure developers could find success before the install fee takes effect."

Unity has also clarified the changes are "not retroactive or perpetual", noting it will only "charge once for a new install" made after 1st January 2024. However, while it won't be charging for previously made installs, fees do indeed apply to all games currently on the market, meaning should any existing player of an older game that exceeds Unity's various thresholds decide to re-install it after 1st January, a charge will still be made.

Radeon RX 7800 XT vs. GeForce RTX 4070, 45 Game Benchmark @ 1080p, 1440p & 4K - today we're going much more in depth with a 45 game sample

Check out the new release date trailer for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, the upcoming isometric cRPG from Owlcat Games set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe that will be released on December 7, 2023 for PC – and now also confirmed for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Mac.

Someone's been waiting in the wings.

The next Sims game currently goes under the name Project Rene rather than The Sims 5, but that aside, we know a growing amount about EA Maxis' next social simulation. During today's latest Behind The Sims community update, they shared more, including the news that the next entry in the series would be free-to-play and without energy mechanics or a subscription.

Valve launched Steam on September 12, 2003, and we're super proud and incredibly grateful for what we've been able to do in the 20 years since. Steam's success is a direct result of the players and developers around the world who use it.

We thought it would be fun to look back at the top releases on Steam each year (many of which are on sale as part of this celebration, including all Valve titles!) and added some fun facts for both Steam and pop culture in general (in art or text form, or both). But, like, give us the same leeway you might with an aging grandparent: the dates and facts below are as correct as our collectively aging memories will allow.

Unity has announced dramatic changes to its Unity Engine business model which will see its introduce a monthly fee per game install beginning on 1st January next year - a move that has already send shockwaves across the development community.

Unity - the engine behind countless acclaimed games including Tunic, Cuphead, Hollow Knight, Citizen Sleeper, RimWorld, Outer Wilds, Fall Guys, Ori and the Blind Forest, and Cities: Skylines - was previously licensed to developers using a royalty free model built around subscriptions tiers. Anyone whose revenue or funding was less than $100,000 over the course of the year (or who didn't want access to features such as the ability to remove the Unity splash screen) could stick to the free Unity Personal license, while a Unity Plus subscription was required up to $200,000 in revenue, and a Unity Pro or above subscription was needed for more.

Today, NVIDIA released a new Game Ready driver (version 537.34) for its GeForce graphics cards to deliver pre-release optimization for NetherRealm's hotly anticipated fighting game Mortal Kombat 1 and NEOWIZ's Soulslike game Lies of P.

Both games are set to launch on September 19th and will support NVIDIA DLSS 2 (Super Resolution). According to NVIDIA's RTX 40 Series benchmarks, Lies of P can achieve up to 1.9X higher frame rates at 4K resolution and max settings with DLSS set to Performance Mode.

NVIDIA also said it is pushing an over-the-air (OTA) update that enables Resizable Bar in Starfield for up to 5% performance benefits for RTX 40 GPUs. We had recommended manually enabling ReBar in our Starfield tweaking guide, and it's nice to have it officially confirmed by NVIDIA. The OTA update will be released to all users of this driver as well as the previous one (537.17).

Nvidia News Page

In this episode of New Gameplay Today, Blake Hester and I show you a glimpse of a different kind of cooking game, Nour: Play With Your Food. Rather than tasking players with cooking a proper dish, developer Terrifying Jellyfish presents a playspace of ingredients, tools like blowtorches and meat tenderizers, and a suite of odd abilities that change gravity, freeze food, and make your culinary ingredients dance — all in the name of playfulness. While levels contain hidden experiences you can unlock by specific interactions, there's hardly a central goal in Nour. Similar to Townscaper, this joyful release is more akin to a toy than a game, and it's so much fun.

YouTube Video

Fortnite Battle Royale’s v26.10 update is now live in-game and it brings with it some returning My Hero Academia items, three new heroes, and a new Shoto Todoroki-inspired item. Alongside Todoroki, Eijiro Kirishima and Mina Ashido are in the Item Shop available for purchase.

Bilkins' Folly popped up on my radar, err, sea charts, earlier this year when developer Webbysoft and Publisher Armor Games Studios announced the PC-only title was actually going to launch on PlayStation and Switch now as well. I watched the console announcement trailer and knew I needed to check this game out – old-school adventure gameplay, a fun and whimsical pixel art style, and pirates, of course. It’s been months since that announcement, but I’ve finally played a few hours of Bilkins' Folly, and that small taste indicates a jolly adventure is on the way when the game releases next month on October 2.

My time with Bilkins' Folly starts hours into the game’s story, so I’ll keep details vague. But I control Percy, a makeshift pirate, and his pup companion, Drayton, who not only loves a good pet but also helps me find treasures buried in the ground and more.

I think it's safe to say that Pharaoh has the most campaign mechanics we have ever seen in this series to date. It's almost dizzying to come to grips with it all, though thankfully, they were introduced to me a little bit at a time. Where to even start? As I took control of Ramesses – not yet known by his royal title Ramesses III, as I had not taken the throne yet – the first thing I noticed was that inhabited locations on the map have been split up into three different levels. We have the major and minor settlements comprising a region that you're used to. But around each of these are slots for outposts, which are sort of like an extra set of building slots, except that they all exist at a distinct physical location that can be quite far from the settlement they're supporting.

But we weren’t just impressed at the audacity of someone going through all the trouble of gathering that many potatoes. Digital Foundry’s John Linneman called the clip “mind-blowing” because all of the potatoes “have physics.” But what does it mean for something to “have physics”? Why is everyone fussing so much about a pile of 20,000 tumbling potatoes in a game about being a cool space explorer?

We spoke to a number of game developers to get their insight on what’s really going on in the potato clip, why more games don’t let players do this kind of thing, and whether or not 20,000 tumbling potatoes really is as impressive as it seems.

A zero-pressure dungeon roguelike that offers some familiar comfort even if it doesn't take full advantage of its Saturday morning cartoon schtick.

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These characters look the part when it comes to the He-Man-inspired pastiche, but otherwise they don't have the same colour when it comes to in-game voice lines or end-of-episode dialogue. Like I say, the focus of the marketing seems to be "relive your childhood!" but the game's moving parts are all focused on making a dungeon-running co-op roguelike that conforms to player expectations. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it just means that you quickly forget about the theme and get to pulverizing skellingtons, incinerating bosses, and hoovering up gold.