Key Note Gaming

If something seems to be going on, how likely are you to want to find out what it is? If your answer is 'not at all,' then I'm impressed by your coolheaded freedom from desire, but you may not be the best fit for PC Gamer's Associate Editor position. If, however, you love finding out what's going on, especially when it involves digging under the surface for answers, then you should feel strongly encouraged to apply for PC Gamer's open Associate Editor role . For this job, we're accepting applicants who live in the United States. The role can be based in our Atlanta or New York offices, or remote from certain states*, and is covered under the collective bargaining agreement between Future US and the Writers Guild of America East. You can find details on that contract here . We're looking for someone who's passionate about PC gaming and excited to contribute to all aspects of PC Gamer, which includes uncovering and sharing news and stories from ou

Announced back in May of last year, Sony and Discord  formed a partnership to bring the PlayStation and Discord ecosystems together. Today, we're finally seeing some movement in bringing Discord integration to Sony's consoles, or rather the other way around.  As of today, you can now link your PlayStation account to your Discord ID. This lets your friends or other server mutuals see when and what you're playing on PS5 or PS4. The service works like any others, such as Steam, Blizzard, Xbox , Spotify, etc. The setup is the same as well. Here's how Discord says to connect a PlayStation account: "To connect your Discord account to your PlayStation Network account, open up Discord and head into User Settings > Connections on either desktop or web. On mobile, go to User Settings > Connections." From there, you'll enter your login information for your PlayStation account. Pretty easy. It also notes that you can toggle whether anyone can see your PlayS

It's looking like an especially exciting year for Switch owners, as Nintendo's 2022 plans include a significant number of big exclusives — most notably The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 . If Switch has proven anything, it’s that a console is truly defined by what you can play on it, and with such a vast library of excellent games, choosing only 25 of the best Switch games has proven to be difficult. This list was assembled by the entire IGN content team — including our resident Nintendo experts, the NVC podcast crew — and represents what we think are the best games to enjoy on the Switch right now, whether you're picking one up for the first time or have been a platform enthusiast since day one. So without further ado, these are our picks for the 25 best Nintendo Switch games. More on the Best of Nintendo: Top 100 NES Games 25. Ring Fit Adventure Sure, exercising is good for you, but it’s got two pretty big drawbacks: one, it costs a lot of money to joi

Blizzard has implemented a new policy that tightens the restrictions on World of Warcraft boosting, in which players help each other clear content and obtain rare items and achievements in exchange for in-game gold. In a post on the game's forums, community manager Kaivax wrote, "As of today, we will now prohibit organizations who offer boosting, matchmaking, escrow, or other non-traditional services, including those offered for gold." According to Kaivax's post, Blizzard will issue warnings, account suspensions, and permanently close any accounts that are found to be a part of a boosting organization, which commonly operate across several servers via a consolidated Discord server. The new policy specifies that individual players or guilds of players will still be able to use in-game chat to buy or sell "in-game items or activities for in-game currency." This line in the announcement has led some to point out that the new policy won't eradicate boo

Totally Accurate Battlegrounds , the battle royale with beatboxing and punchable cheese, has reached the end of the road. Less than a year after going free to play, developer Landfall has announced that low player numbers mean it is "unlikely" the game will receive any further content updates. Released in 2018, Totally Accurate Battlegrounds was a parody tie in to Landfall's physics-based brawler Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, but it quickly grew beyond a mere gag. Helped by the fact that it was free for the first 100 hours of release, it put up a peak concurrent player count of more than 29,000 when it launched. Those numbers quickly tailed off, but spiked again in April 2021 when the game went free to play . It's also earned a "very positive" user rating on Steam across nearly 68,000 reviews—an enviable measure. Unfortunately, it appears that the joke is finally over. The downward trend on the player counts was much slower following the change to fr

(Image credit: Bungie) When the news broke that Sony was throwing a $3.6B bag at Bungie, in the middle of our weekly planning meeting I might add, my initial reaction was surprise followed by quite a bit of confusion. That feeling only grew as I read the statement and FAQ put out by Bungie. Both of these double down on the notion that Bungie will remain almost entirely independent, Destiny 2 will continue to be published on other platforms (PC, Xbox and—lol—Stadia) in perpetuity, and even that Bungie's future projects won't now become PlayStation exclusives.  The studio even goes so far as to ask (itself) that question explicitly. To which it answers: "No. We want the worlds we are creating to extend to anywhere people play games. We will continue to be self-published, creatively independent, and we will continue to drive one, unified Bungie community." Okay. Very good news if you're a current Xbox or PC player—or, indeed, an executive at Microsoft—b

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. 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. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. 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  2021 games  that are launching this year.  Zenith: The Last City Steam‌ ‌page ‌ ‌ Release:‌ January 28 Developer:‌ Ramen VR Launch price:‌ $27 ‌|‌ ‌£21.41 |‌ ‌‌AU$38.65 Zenith is a virtual reality MMO that appears to blend science fiction and fantasy trappings in equal measure. As one of two main classes you'll wield either magic or blades, but more exciting than combat, for me at least, is the heavy presence of wingsuits in the trailer above. The first-person affair is structured like you'd expect from an

Elden Ring game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has elaborated on just how much the team at From Software has changed and twisted George R.R. Martin's worldbuilding, which formed the overarching mythos for Elden Ring. That myth formed the basis of the world, but Martin's characters existed before the "Shattering" of the eponymous Elden Ring. "So it was more up to us to interpret this and say, ‘how did they become such inhuman monsters? And how did the mad taint of the shattered shards of the Elden Ring and its power affect them?’ So that was our job to take these grand heroes and sort of misshape them and distort them into something they were not,” game director Hidetaka Miyazaki told Game Informer . "And I think if we get a chance to show Martin and if he gets a chance to see the game and see these characters, I think he might be a bit shocked. When he wrote them, he was really envisioning something a little bit more human, a little bit more traditional human

We finally got a full trailer for Paramount+'s upcoming Halo TV series, and it really seems to be taking a page or two from the Mandalorian with its bleak desert exteriors, Pablo Schreiber's performance as a faceless-yet-charismatic future fighting gun man, and the seeming set-up of a Lone Wolf and Cub-style friendship between the Chief and a human rebel played by Yerin Ha. It looks like the series is focusing on the Chief's battles with the Covenant prior to the events of the first game, and it'll be interesting to see how closely it follows established series lore versus breaking off and telling its own story with the setting. The trailer begins with the Chief fighting human rebels like the ones sketched out in the series' backstory and novels, but the war with the Covenant seems to be a well-established conflict as in the games. Captain Keyes has been cast in the series with actor Danny Sapani filling the role, so you could see the initial events of Halo: Comb

A fan-driven revival of Star Wars Galaxies has been going strong for seven months, and enters 2022 with big plans to expand, revamp, and even add original content to the 2003 cult hit MMO.  Star Wars Galaxies Restoration III has seen lots of server infrastructure upgrades and bugfixes since it released last May. There are some 11,421 accounts, having created 12,207 characters—a far cry from the MMO at its prime, but pretty impressive work. Star Wars Galaxies is infamous for implementing one of the first primarily player-driven economies in MMOs, and the Restoration 3 team has focused on that by integrating former reward items and mechanics into the crafting system, among other changes to the MMO's systems. Around here, we consider Star Wars Galaxies to be an MMO that almost changed the world. They've got a plan to implement more content from the original game in the future, including the Jedi class, and have community progression goals to unlock new content and server-wide

As previously announced , a new trailer for Paramount’s Halo TV series premiered today, giving us an even better look at the much-anticipated adaptation and a premier date.  The show starts from the beginning, with Dr. Halsey (played by Natascha McElhon) selling the UNSC on Master Chief’s exceptional combat prowess but, most importantly, his ability to be controlled. But when Chief encounters an ancient artifact, he uncovers a plot that may require him to act independently in a manner that may rub his superiors the wrong way.  The new trailer provides the first looks at the Covenant, specifically Elites, who look pretty accurate in the brief clips of them battling Master Chief. We also get a glimpse of the show’s more human-toned (and slightly unsettling) Cortana, who is still voiced by Jen Taylor. The biggest adjustment will be getting used to Chief’s new voice, with actor Pablo Schreiber bringing him to life.  Lastly, we found out that Halo premieres exclusively on Paramount + o

Microsoft and Asobo Studio have detailed some exciting changes coming to Microsoft Flight Simulator over the course of 2022 in a development update and attending Q&A on YouTube. Perhaps most notable was their further elaboration on plans to officially bring helicopters to the game by the end of the year. Modders have implemented helicopters previously , but Microsoft Flight Simulator's impressive reproduction of the physics behind manned flight actually makes it difficult to get helicopters working in the game. The simulation was developed with planes in mind, and the modders of the Hype Performance Group's helicopter pack used a brute-force approach in the current framework. For their official implementation, Asobo will be first testing a more granular air simulation on some upcoming planes, before putting out their officially-sanctioned helicopters. Asobo's roadmap for 2022 (Image credit: Asobo Studio) Much of the body of the Q&A was devoted to Micr

Welcome to  This Week in PC Gaming , a show where we take a look at the new games, updates, and more coming at you over the next week, every week, until the end of time. Or until I grow bored and decide to leave gaming to live on a farm to raise chickens or some nonsense. This week, we're rewinding time in Life is Strange Remastered, attempting to build a conflict-free world in The Hundred Year Kingdom and avoiding contracting a deadly virus while trying to pull humanity out of the Dark Ages in Dying Light 2 Stay Human. So nothing like real life, then! from PCGamer latest https://ift.tt/SN9kyJjQC via IFTTT

Sid Meier's Civilization turned 30 years old in 2021, which might make your bones hurt (it sure hurt mine). Every main entry in the series has had a new designer at the helm, starting with Sid himself all the way back in 1991, and we were fortunate enough to talk to four of them: Soren Johnson, who worked on Civilization 3 and headed up Civilization 4, Jon Shafer, who took the lead on Civilization 5, Ed Beach, the lead designer on Civilization 6, and Anton Strenger, who was in the driver's seat for Civ 6's Rise and Fall and New Frontier DLCs – and while we couldn't get a word out of him about it, seems like the heir apparent to take over for Civilization 7, whenever that might happen. With its first-ever very direct competitor – Amplitude's Humankind – released last year, Civilization is in a position it's never been in before. Johnson and Shafer have each made their own, independent games recently that shake up the Civ formula with Old World and At the Gates