To put it mildly, people don’t seem to like the League of Legends client. So it’s welcome news that Riot Games has announced a ‘Client Cleanup Campaign’, which is just a slightly over-formal way of saying that they’re going to fix it. The campaign appears to be pretty thorough, with Riot’s announcement admitting that the client “is not in great shape”. But neither of these things are bugs per se, but there’s method in Riot’s madness. If you’d like to read the very thorough post for yourself, her

The Division 2: Warlords of New York was supposed to go live on March 3. But for some reason, it went live on PC today, a day early—at least for all of PC Gamer’s non-Australian staff. After the update went live, numerous PC players began reporting some serious issues, including an inability to interact with community leader NPCs and Echo errors on login. Further backend improvements to prevent ECHO errors to occur for players. The status of Echo errors can be tracked in this Division 2 forum th

We got a nice look at some new Half-Life: Alyx gameplay videos today, showing combat, puzzles, gravity gloves, upgradable guns, and more from the upcoming VR-only Half-Life 2 prequel. And at one point in the first video, a fun bit of interaction occurs: Alyx uses her gravity gloves to snatch a yellow hard hat from a nearby crate and plop it onto her head. But it’s not just whimsy—it looks like that hard hat can literally save your neck. IGN posted a video of some hands-on Half-Life: Alyx gamepla

The Halo: Combat Evolved portion of the five-game Halo: The Master Chief Collection—which comes in the form of 2011’s ‘Anniversary’ remake—recently concluded a couple weeks of beta testing, and going by the February wrap-up at the Halo Waypoint website, it was a very productive event. That’s not to say Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary is ready to load and fire on Steam, necessarily, but a new trailer released today could be taken as a hint that, maybe, it might possibly be coming soon. The video

It’s a great time to buy a gaming laptop, with new sales seemingly popping up every week. The Asus Zephyrus M GU502GU gaming laptop is now on sale at B&H Photo for $1,299, a savings of $500 from the original MSRP. It’s just 0.74 inches thick (18.9mm), making it about as portable as 15-inch gaming laptops can get. We haven’t had the chance to review this gaming laptop ourselves, but our friends at TechRadar did give it 4/5 stars. “For people who are looking for a laptop that also doubles up as a

Last week, GDC was postponed amid growing concerns about the coronavirus, Covid-19. It’s one of a large number of events to have been pushed back or cancelled in the last month. The ESA, which organises E3, is also keeping an eye on the situation, but at the moment it’s moving ahead as planned. Given what we know at this time, we are moving ahead full speed with E3 2020 planning. An incomplete list of participating companies was posted in February, so keep an eye out for updates in the coming mo

The wrinkly, green 50-year-old star of The Mandalorian is finally a playable character in Star Wars Battlefront 2, sort of. Baby Yoda replaces BB-8, one of Battlefront 2’s newest additions. They’re around the same size, and Baby Yoda potters around in a pod with a spherical bottom, so they’re already pretty close. I like to think I’m above falling for Disney’s Force persuasion powers, but I love Baby Yoda and will die to protect him. The movies imply nobody in Star Wars knows how to shoot a gun,

Trackmania, Ubisoft’s hectic racing series, is coming back for another lap. The next addition to the series is a remake of 2006’s Trackmania Nations, a free-to-play spin-off that was fuelled by in-game adverts. The original is still available on Steam, but the remake will apparently include new features, like the seasonal campaign and extra custom track options. This time around, Trackmania Nations’ creator has been upgraded with new physical surfaces, as well as blocks that can modify car behav

According to creative director Raphael van Lierop, Nvidia added The Long Dark to its service without asking the developer for permission. Nvidia didn’t ask for our permission to put the game on the platform so we asked them to remove it. Van Lierop agreed with digital entertainment lawyer Pete Lewin, who noted that it “kills the ability to commercialise ports for new platforms (partic mobile) or to negotiate exclusivity deals.” In both Hinterland and Activision’s cases, the main issue seems to b

Khajiit lore in the Elder Scrolls games is varied and colourful, but has almost always been relegated to tomes and dialogue from cat-like merchants. Although the Khajiit homeland did appear in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, it didn’t show up again in a proper Elder Scrolls game until an expansion to The Elder Scrolls Online in 2019. Riverhold is full of Khajiit that lore-buffs will recognise, though they can’t possibly compare with the renditions from Bethesda’s own creations in The Elder Scrolls Onl

(Image credit: seancode)Beautiful Castle Death Machine is an Ancient-Japan-themed fan remake of the game Palamedes, which as we all know—*opens Wikipedia*—is a Taito puzzle game where you have to throw and match dice citation needed. To prevent this grim fate, you can throw your own dice upwards, which will clear any similarly sided dice they make contact with. Turns out I’d misunderstood the rules, and ignored the ‘make’ button, which you can use to remove entire lines of dice from the board. I

You won’t have to wait long to play Riot Games’ take on a hardcore shooter, because “Project A,” aka Valorant, is planned to release this summer. “If we have a very successful beta, maybe earlier in the summer. Though parts of Valorant definitely seem derivative of other games, Riot is banking on winning over fans thanks to under-the-hood server performance and air-tight anticheat. Read his big feature on the design of Valorant here, which focuses in on how Riot designed its combat, netcode and

Valorant, Riot Games’ new competitive free-to-play FPS, wants to go toe-to-toe with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Here’s everything we know so far about Valorant, Riot Games’ new FPS. Riot hasn’t officially confirmed a release date for Valorant, but it’s planning to release it in the summer of 2020. Riot has confirmed that Valorant will have a beta but hasn’t committed to a specific date. For a full breakdown of each character and their abilities, check out our extensive Valorant characters

While plenty of Fallout players have suggested over the years that future games in the series could do with an option for co-op multiplayer, the addition of player-vs-player combat in Fallout 76 was not met with enthusiasm. Although not much about Fallout 76 was. There’s some folks who do, don’t get me wrong, but I think it’s a smaller percentage of our player base than we thought,” Hines said. Hines went on to explain that the Wastelanders expansion coming to Fallout 76 in April is only the sta

Since 2003 the infamous photo of a Counter-Strike player duct-taped into a cocoon—hanging from the ceiling but still scoring frags or whatever we called them back in the day—has been going around the internet. In 2017 a Kotaku article told the story of the LAN game where it happened, unearthing the identity of the duct-taped gamer himself: Drew Purvis. But apparently there’s more to the story left to be told, because as the trailer above shows, there’s an entire documentary about this duct-taped

On an average day, about a dozen new games are released on Steam. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we’ve gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the new games of 2020. At first glance the game looks stylistically similar to Wasteland 2, but don’t be fooled: the environments here seem pretty varied, and puzzl

The 14th entry in Koei’s long-running strategy series, Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIV, is now available in English on Steam. The series is known for its expansive depiction of the period in Chinese history covered by the classic novel, and covered last year by Total War: Three Kingdoms . The game is an expansive military strategy title, focusing on maneuvering large armies over a huge hex map of China. The RTK strategy series is notably divisive, even among its own fanbase, as 14 separate ite

On this day, when I wanted those, I stumbled across Mainframe Defenders. It’s a tactical strategy game that has you command teams of four robotic soldiers to outmaneuver and defeat enemies in objective-based missions. I was at first turned off by the game’s harsh, black-and-green presentation, but the slick in-game animations quickly turned that around for me. One’s job was to heal and mop up wounded enemies quickly. If that sounds fun, you can get Mainframe Defenders on Steam and on Itch.io for

It is well known that Destiny 2 contains a large number of the following: Guns, aliens, wizards, alien wizards, alien wizard guns, explosions, gibberish science-fantasy words, moons. But did you also know it contains large-mouth bass? I’ll be honest, I did not know this. That’s where Creatures of Destiny: A Nature Documentary comes in. YouTube channel Kimber Prime has come up with a fun tour of the little things you can find in Destiny 2, made after the style of famous nature documentarian Sir D

This weekend at PAX East Bethesda showed off about 17 minutes of Fallout 76 Wastelanders, the free expansion adding NPCs to their multiplayer RPG. Members of the team were on hand to talk along with the footage, noting that NPCs are being incorporated into the main story quests. Along with the silent protagonist and the way the camera zooms in during conversations it feels a lot more like Fallout 3 or New Vegas than Fallout 4, which is an interesting choice. The expansion comes out on April 7, w