Key Note Gaming

Sid Meier, the creator of the Civilization franchise, says that video game companies could lose their audiences if they continue to heavily focus on different kinds of monetization tactics such as microtransactions and NFTs. In an interview with BBC , Meier explained, "People can assume that a game is going to be fun and what it needs for success are more cinematics or monetization or whatever - but if the core just is not there with good gameplay, then it won't work." The point is that games need to be fun, first and foremost. Gameplay is critical in order to keep players happy and engaged with the product. Over the years, games have shifted business models and now some rely on microtransactions as well as in-app purchases. Recently, some companies, such as Ubisoft , have embraced NFTs as a new way to make more money despite strong backlash from the gaming community. Meier said that figuring out gameplay is relatively cheap and doesn't require as many cooks in...

Microsoft's recent bid to acquire Activision Blizzard was huge news: a $68.7 billion shift for the games industry that's come on top of a string of other acquisitions, including Bethesda just last year. Sony has likewise been looking to bulk up its first party studios and acquired Bungie for $3.6 billion. While Sony and Microsoft continue to expand their domains, the PC remains an open middle ground where both publish their games. And so far, at least, the billions of dollars being thrown around to buy up studios hasn't enticed Valve, the biggest name in PC gaming, into doing the same.  "You know, consolidations a lot of times can be motivated by strange reasons," Valve president Gabe Newell said in a recent interview where we talked about the Steam Deck , the metaverse , and Steam's fraught history with Bitcoin .  "I've sat in boardrooms where people have talked about making decisions about an acquisition because they could fire a bunch of what ...

Platform: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PC Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment Developer: Santa Monica Studio Release: April 20, 2018 ( PlayStation 5 , PlayStation 4 ), January 14, 2022 ( PC ) Rating: Mature I spent 24 hours playing on Valve's new handheld, the Steam Deck, and tested 23 popular games to see how they run out-of-the-box on the portable gaming PC. To my surprise, several unverified titles run great on Steam Deck, while unfortunately, some iconic PC games run poorly. We tested top games like Ark: Survival Evolved, Cyberpunk 2077, DOTA 2, DOOM Eternal, Halo Infinite, Lost Ark, Skyrim Anniversary Edition, Rust, and Valheim. Check out the video below to see the results:  Click here to watch embedded media Games I Tested On Steam Deck: Apex Legends Ark Survival Evolved Cyberpunk 2077 Dark Souls Remastered Dishonored 2 DOTA 2 DOOM Eternal Fights in Tight Spaces Final Fantasy V God of War Halo Infinite Left 4 Dead 2 Loop Hero L...

With Elden Ring finally out in the wild, eager players are undoubtedly combing every inch of FromSoftware's new fantasy world to find the influences of writer George R. R. Martin. Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones series, was famously brought onto Elden Ring to write the backstory for the in-game universe. But in a new interview with New Yorker , game director Hidetaka Miyazaki revealed that he placed a few key restrictions on what Martin could do. According to Miyazaki, Martin primarily wrote snippets of text about the world's history, its characters, and mythology, including the destruction of the Elden Ring and the subsequent scattering of shards. While this was something we learned previously , Miyazaki further clarified why this was the case. “In our games, the story must always serve the player experience,” Miyazaki said. “If [Martin] had written the game’s story, I would have worried that we might have to drift from that. I wanted him to be able to write fre...

Shadow Warrior 3 doesn’t beat around the bush. In an era where games feel like they keep trying to be bigger, this one is happy not to draw itself out with lengthy dialogue or exposition-filled cutscenes. Instead, it throws you into the action right away and rarely lets a moment of ease set in from there. And while that focus on fun is refreshing, Shadow Warrior 3 is almost completely unremarkable in its execution, being about as straightforward as an FPS can get. It might not offer many new ideas, and its protagonist may be unbearable to listen to, but sometimes solid movement and satisfying weapons is all you really need. Picking up a good while after Shadow Warrior 2 , a massive dragon is wreaking havoc across Earth and it’s up to our returning hero, Lo Wang, to destroy the lizard. For Shadow Warrior, world-ending stakes like these aren’t anything new, but it didn’t take long for me to stop paying too much attention to Shadow Warrior 3’s story. Once you start playing it you might...

Japanese tennis pro (and big time Overwatch fan) Naomi Osaka is officially joining the Fortnite Icon Series, alongside other celebrities and athletes like Lebron James. Epic is celebrating the addition with two new skins, new cosmetic items, and a new tournament dubbed the "Naomi Osaka Cup." Osaka's rise to fame started in 2013, when she went pro representing her native country of Japan and earning various newcomer awards. In 2018, she beat the legendary Serena Williams in the US Open final, and later won the Australian Open, which cemented her place as the number one tennis player, a first for any Asian. Below, we've got a guide to all you need to know. When does Naomi Osaka release in Fortnite Osaka (and all her additional cosmetics) will officially join the Fortnite ranks on March 3 at 7 PM ET. You'll be able to purchase the outfit in the item shop. Naomi Osaka skins and cosmetic items (Image credit: Epic Games) Naomi Osaka comes with two new ou...

Destiny 2: The Witch Queen is outstanding, possibly the best shooter campaign of the year . But it's not without its problems, one of the big ones right now being the extreme rarity of a particular type of reward drop that's required to craft new weapons. The issue is rooted in the Wellspring, a new six-player activity added to Destiny 2 in The Witch Queen expansion that has an unusual daily rotation that drops one of four rewards based on the day and the boss. The reward for defeating Golmag, Warden of the Spring on day one, for instance, is the Come to Pass auto rifle. (Image credit: Bungie) The problem is that two Deepsight Resonance versions of Come to Pass are required in order to unlock the crafting pattern, but the Deepsight variants are hardly dropping at all. To complicate matters further—a shock, I know—receiving a Deepsight Resonance weapon from Wellspring is only part of this particular problem. You also need to hope that the Deepsight Resonance has a pa...

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  2022 games  that are launching this year.  Who's Lila? Steam‌ ‌page ‌ ‌ Release:‌ February 24 Developer:‌ Garage Heathen Launch price:‌ $9.59 ‌|‌ ‌£7.43 |‌ ‌‌AU$13.56 Who's Lila? is a "reverse-detective adventure" where, instead of choosing dialogue options, you manipulate facial expressions, which are then studied by a neural network and interpreted accordingly. Tanya Kennedy has gone missing, and the last person known to have seen her is protagonist William. It's William's expressions yo...

The fact that publisher Konami doesn't really care about Silent Hill or its legacy is basically a meme at this point, the series seemingly relegated to perpetual limbo in the form of DLC for unrelated multiplayer games . The publisher has now let its ownership of the silenthill.com domain name lapse long enough for someone else to buy it, an example of how little Konami cares so pointed that if a satirist came up with it you'd think it was a little on-the-nose. This isn't even the first time Konami forgot to renew its registration. In December of 2019, silenthill.com was spotted on sale for $9,835 , but nobody was quick enough to grab it before Konami. This time, some cashed-up troll got in there and now if you type silent hill dot com into your web browser of choice, you'll end up on a page showing a tweet from Masahiro Ito that says, "I wish I hadn't designed fxxkin Pyramid Head." That's a real tweet , by the way. Ito was art director on Silent H...

At least two users on Reddit have reported that they received Steam Decks hand-delivered by Valve's head honcho himself, Gabe Newell, complete with his signature on the included case. User SeattleRainPidgeons, posting in r/Steam , claims to have seen Newell and a camera crew making a delivery to their neighbor's house. They greeted him, at which point he asked how many people lived in their house and then gave them signed Decks despite not having preorder reservations. I am happy for them, but also extremely jealous. Another user by the curious name of bitfidler0 posted their account in the r/SteamDeck community, but had slightly worse luck. They were out all day with friends on a ski trip, and their wife accepted the delivery without really knowing who Newell was. This is what you get for planning outdoor leisure activities with your friends. On the plus side, bitfidler0 claims they did not have to pay for their preorder, and that they received a higher-spec version than t...

Survive the Lands Between with these Elden Ring guides (Image credit: FromSoftware) Elden Ring guide : Conquer the Lands Between Elden Ring bosses : How to beat them Elden Ring dungeons : How to defeat them Elden Ring paintings : Solutions and locations Elden Ring map fragments : Reveal the world Elden Ring had severe stuttering issues at launch on PC, some of which have since been alleviated, though performance problems still persist. FromSoftware has called for patience as the studio irons out some of the game's more egregious issues, but if you're lucky enough to own a Steam Deck, Valve itself is on the case. Valve programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais confirmed on Twitter today that the company is working on fixes for Elden Ring's heavy stutter on Steam Deck. "The graphics team has been hard at work on optimizing Elden Ring for Steam Deck," Griffais wrote. "Fixes for heavy stutter during background streaming of assets will be availab...

Hidetaka Miyazaki, creator of the Souls series and Elden Ring, gave an interview to The New Yorker covering his inspirations, artistic goals, and some ruminations on his meteoric rise through the games industry in the past decade. Miyazaki was candid about his own mechanical skill with games, expressing "I've never been a very skilled player, I die a lot." He went on to explain, "If death is to be more than a mark of failure, how do I give it meaning? How do I make death enjoyable?" Miyazaki was adamant in the interview that his games' difficulty is a core part of their nature, but he wasn't dismissive of the criticisms of players turned off by their design, offering that he does "feel apologetic toward anyone who feels there's just too much to overcome" in his games, but that he just wants "as many players as possible to experience the joy that comes from overcoming hardship." I was fascinated by the feature's exploratio...

According to SteamDB , the top five best-selling games on Steam last week were Elden Ring, Elden Ring, Elden Ring Deluxe Edition, Destiny 2: The Witch Queen Deluxe Edition, and Elden Ring. Just outside the very top, the Witch Queen's standard edition came in hot at number six, leaving just two games eating up the top six spots. I don't think anyone expected FromSoftware's hotly anticipated open world RPG or the latest instalment of Bungie's popular looter-shooter to sell poorly by any means, but it's a bit absurd to see them sweep all the top-selling spots. What is it that differentiates each entry? Aside from deluxe vs. standard editions, which account for one duplicate entry apiece for each game, the top spot for Elden Ring actually went to the game's Japanese version, which outsold other localizations. As for the difference between Elden Ring on entries two and five on the list, my best guess is that the lower one accounts for the last of people's pre...

YouTuber and streamer PrestigeIsKey, aka Ryan B., is a big fan of The Game Awards, and watches the ceremony every year. He thought it would be cool to own a replica Game Award, something he could put on the shelf Gamer Tat all streamers are required to have behind them in videos by law. So he looked on a few sites including eBay, and was surprised to find not a replica, but an actual Game Award award listed for $500. The seller's other listings included car parts and key fobs, so Ryan was admittedly a little suspicious. They said the award, "Came from one of our liquidation sources, other than that we don't have any other information on the origin of this item." Ryan ended up taking a gamble, paying $375 plus shipping. When the award arrived it turned out to be legit: it was the 2018 Award for Best Independent Game, won by Celeste . Ryan got in touch with Celeste's developers via operations manager Heidy Motta to ask "did the trophy itself get given away ...

The final Final Fantasy to receive the pixel remaster treatment, Final Fantasy 6 was released on February 23. Many things remain as they were in the original game, including the fact you can suplex a train (which wasn't a sure thing, as a tweet from two weeks before launch showed a version in which the Phantom Train didn't flip over ). One thing that has changed is the famous opera scene, which received a visual overhaul, with the 2D characters in front of 3D backgrounds à la Octopath Traveler , and vocals in seven languages. In a recent promotional video (thanks to RPGSite for the translation), original composer Nobuo Uematsu explains that he suggested the idea of adding vocals to Square Enix "half-jokingly", not expecting it to actually happen. "I thought it would be impossible or difficult," he said. On hearing this suggestion, the remaster's producer then went to Yoshinori Kitase, the original's co-director, to ask what to do. As Kitase expl...

Nintendo has made the decision to not have any Super Smash Bros. game be part of EVO 2022, the world's largest fighting game tournament that is now owned by Sony, for the first time since 2007. EVO shared a letter announcing the news on Twitter ahead of the EVO 2022 announcement show on March 8 at 5pm PTT/8pm ET. pic.twitter.com/7YEX1ZgG4W — EVO (@EVO) February 26, 2022 "Please join us March 8 at 5pm PST on twitch.tv/evo for the EVO 2022 announcement show," EVO wrote. "While we're thankful for all the amazing games joining us later this year in Las Vegas, we want to let you know in advance that Super Smash Bros. will not be making a return appearance. "Since 2007, we've seen historic Super Smash Bros. moments created at EVO's events. We are saddened that Nintendo has chosen not to continue that legacy with us this year. In the future, we hope to once again celebrate the Super Smash Bros. community alongside them." Nintendo's choic...

When Valve first showed off the Steam Deck, elaborate and top 100 games worthy Factorio was right there. That makes sense: The Steam Deck runs Linux, Factorio has a native Linux build. There's no messing around then, it works great and a low graphical requirements mean it should have pretty good battery time. But anyone who has played Factorio can tell you it's a hotkey-heavy, mouse-heavy game with a lot of clicking and finesse mouse usage. That means you'd have to do a lot of remapping and profile construction to make it work super smooth on a Steam Deck. Developers Wube Software are aware of the problem, and in a recent dev blog outlined some work they've been doing to get Factorio going with controllers. "We are experimenting with bringing proper controller support to Factorio; this will not only benefit the Steam Deck but also those who want to play the game more casually with a controller. Work on the expansion is still the top priority for the team, and...

THE PCG Q&A Find all previous editions of the PCG Q&A here . Some highlights: - What dealbreakers make you give up on games? - Which Nintendo game do you wish was on PC? - What game have you spent the most hours in? This is particularly relevant in Soulsborne games, where the choice between being quick and nimble or a lummox with a greatclub is identity-defining. Plenty of other games break builds down into these two archetypal choices, however, and STR and DEX remain two of the first stats in basically every RPG that has them. What's your preference, quick and dodgy and probably good with ranged weapons, or slow and hefty and able to hit like a truck? Strength or Dexterity? Here are our answers, plus some from our  forum . Robin Valentine, Print Editor: I always love the idea of going dexterity-based in RPGs. I like dodging more than blocking, and there's just something cool about the image of being an agile duelist rather than a lumbering brute. Plus li...

Graphics card manufacturer Nvidia has been the victim of a ransomware attack in the past few days, according to reporting from Bloomberg . Nvidia released a public statement about the attack on Friday, acknowledging it happened but not going into detail about the extent of the hack. Nvidia's statement clarified: "We are still working to evaluate the nature and scope of the event and don’t have any additional information to share at this time." Bloomberg's source at Nvidia characterized the hack as relatively minor, and denied it had any connection to the recent outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine. There have been concerns that Russia would pursue cyber warfare measures on western countries in retaliation for sanctions against Russia and aid on behalf of Ukraine. Reporting from The Telegraph and PC Gamer's sister site, Tom's Hardware , does paint a more serious picture of the attack's extent. Nvidia's email system and developer tools have al...

The Witcher 3 has some phenomenal fantasy environments, including one of our favorite cities in PC gaming , Novigrad. The third-person camera does a good job of zooming in and letting you absorb all the detail of those lavish interiors, but sometimes you just want the intimacy and immersion a first-person camera could provide. We reported on a previous mod that added a first-person camera to the Witcher 3 back in 2016, but the download page and video demonstration of that project both seem to have been taken down. Luckily, crthdr over on NexusMods has released their own first-person mod, and it goes even farther than that initial 2016 project. Gervant First Person makes the entire game playable from the first-person perspective—even the combat. Now, I'm not entirely sold on tackling The Witcher 3's most difficult fights from first-person, but that provides a helpful transition into one of my favorite features of the mod: a mappable toggle for on-the-fly switching betwee...

From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random obscure games back into the light. Today, a Russian-born shooter that dares to beg the question, "Wait? AntiKiller? Isn't that a healer? Doesn't sound very badass." There's a specific reason for this game to be here, though you'll have to wait a teeny-tiny bit longer to find out what it is. As for what the game itself is, your guess is as good as mine. It's based on a movie, and has been translated into English—more or less—but in a way that means you don't have much of a chance of following what's going on. Luckily, its barks are worse than its bite. Quite literally. Here's the intro that's meant to establish everything for us. OK. Not knowing the movie's story, I've done my best to figure this out. AntiKiller is the story of Bruce Willis' balder brother, who stumbles across a sinister plan to combine Don Corleone and...

It was a big moment for PC gaming when Microsoft stopped releasing its games exclusively through the Microsoft Store and started putting them on Steam. It wasn't every Microsoft game at first, but now it's gone that direction—just three days ago Bethesda announced it was dropping its own launcher and releasing everything on Steam going forward. But Microsoft also has Game Pass, a subscription service that's grown to millions of subscribers across Windows and Xbox, and those games notably still run out of its own app, not Steam. When I spoke to Valve president Gabe Newell about the Steam Deck last week, I asked him if Valve is interested in its own subscription service, or whether we could see Game Pass games on Steam in the future. "I don't think it's something that we think we need to do ourselves, building a subscription service at this time," Newell said. "But for their customers it's clearly a popular option, and we'd be more than happ...