I grew up in a town with nearly no public transportation, so for most of my childhood I walked, skateboarded, and biked to get around, but freedom—true freedom—was only gained as a teenager when I got my first car. It was a hand-me-down from my grandfather, so it wasn't sporty or cool, but it was the only real escape from the drudgery of school, the oppression (real or imagined) of parents, and the growing panic that adulthood, which meant a job, the military, or more damn school, was waiting at the end of the summer.

Keep Driving is a turn-based road trip RPG that perfectly captures the freedom and possibilities of being young and having a beat-up old car, just enough money to fill it with gas and snacks, and only the vaguest of destinations in mind. Just like in real life, road trips in Keep Driving feel like a carefree summertime journey where you blast some tunes, eat junk food, and watch your troubles shrink in the rearview mirror—until that check engine light starts blinking, your tank is almost empty, and you realize there's something a bit odd about that hitchhiker you picked up.

Map quest

The game begins with the perfect excuse for a road trip: an old friend who lives all the way across the map has invited you to a music festival. With three months of summer stretching out before you, grab a few supplies from your house, open the map to pick a route, and start driving. Your car is your inventory: store useful stuff in the glove box, extra supplies in the trunk, and eventually people (and maybe the occasional dog) in the empty seats.

As you travel between any two map locations in Keep Driving, you encounter a handful of obstacles, called road events, that slow you down: mud puddles and potholes, traffic jams and biker gangs, and situations every driver has encountered at some point like "vague lanes" or a bug that flew in the window and can't find its way out. These road events are Keep Driving's version of turn-based combat, as each turn threatens to damage four different attributes: gasoline, cash, the car's durability, and your energy levels. To dispel them, you need to match the threats with pips on your skill cards or items in your glove box.

It's a simple combat system that's easy to grasp within a few tries, and while it never really gets any more complex, it requires a lot of preparation to survive. Most skill cards have only a few uses before they need to be replenished by sleeping in a town, and glove box items (like duct tape, which protects durability, and cigarettes, which prevents loss of energy) have limited uses before you'll need to buy more at gas stations and convenience stores.

If an event depletes you enough, by emptying your gas or totaling your engine, it doesn't mean the end of your run. You can call a tow truck (if you have the cash) to take you to the previous town, or spend energy walking to the closest gas station, or in the most dire of circumstances, do the unthinkable: call your parents and tell them you need help. I had to do it in one of my runs, and it brought back the shame of doing it (way more than once) in real life. Thankfully, Keep Driving spares you the actual lecture from Dad.

Need a lift?

And then there are the hitchhikers. As you cross the map you'll encounter solo travelers making their own way through the world: a punk rocker with a dog (who takes up an extra seat), a young woman in a wedding dress who left her groom at the altar, a burnout who lost his job and is estranged from his wife, a mechanic who will smoke all your cigarettes. None of them have names, just labels you might use to describe a stranger: The Kid, The Songwriter, The Punk. I assume they think of me as "The Driver."

At first hitchhikers feel like they're just a tool to employ in your road events, since each brings a unique skill card to the dashboard, but as you travel together they each slowly reveal more about themselves and their journeys through quick bits of text conversation. Drive with them long enough and they'll unlock new skills, and eventually reveal their own quest you can choose to pursue. The Punk wants to go to a club in a distant town, so can you drop him off there? The Bride wants to let loose and have some fun: got any weed? More importantly, as they start to feel like friends, or at least the kinds of temporary friends you made out of necessity when you were young and exploring the world.

Developer YCJY Games does an impressive job of developing characters who are, technically, just pixelated square portraits you lock into inventory slots. With minimal text, their stories and personalities come through, and by the end of the trip it's clear that we're all crammed into this car for the same reason: because we're all a little damaged, a little aimless, a little adrift.

I was genuinely sad to see some of my passengers climb out of the car once I'd completed their quests, and not just because it meant losing the extra skills I'd been relying on. (Except for one of them: I was happy to be rid of a kid I'd picked up because they kept having to stop to use the bathroom.)

These characters also introduce you to crime, of which there is an amusing amount in Keep Driving. I even picked up a guy in an orange prison jumpsuit who didn't really convince me he was innocent. Even him I wound up liking, though he's a pain to manage (no one will sit next to him) and his initial skill is one you have to pay $10 a pop for. Weirdly, it wasn't even him who was the biggest troublemaker: a hippie named "The Hurricane" kept wanting me to get high, had a skill that could only be used if I was driving while drunk, constantly filled my inventory slots with trash, and whose third level ability would let me shoplift from stores.

In a game where you can be pulled over by the cops and arrested, driving with a gun and a baggie of coke with an escaped convict in the passenger seat definitely turns a chill road trip into a white-knuckle affair.

As required for any memorable road trip, Keep Driving has an utterly kickass soundtrack. I'm not going to pretend I'm cool enough to have heard of Swedish indie bands like Westkust, Makthaverskan, Zimmer Grandioso, and Fucking Werewolf Asso, but they've got a new fan and their tracks will be part of my next real roadtrip. Even one of my hitchhikers, a musician whose guitar took up an annoying amount of room in my trunk for one of my trips, presented me with a CD of some of his songs when we finally parted ways.

There are more than a half-dozen endings in Keep Driving besides just getting to that concert and hanging with your buddy. (Yes, you can get arrested.) I've found several of them and I'll keep playing until I've collected them all, and then I'm going to play some more.

Keep Driving is the sort of game I should love on the Steam Deck, but unfortunately, some of the interactions like dragging items around are pretty fiddly and the smaller pixel art icons are hard to read on a smaller screen. Otherwise it'd be perfect for sinking back into the couch, getting high or drunk (or not, your choice, say no to peer pressure), letting the road take you where it will, and making some temporary friends you'll never forget.

It impressed me just how well Avowed managed to thread the needle on this challenge that seriously stumped Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a similarly actionized follow-up to a lore-dense, tactical RPG series. Obsidian didn't have to contend with a decade-long attrition of staff and a parent company with no understanding of the studio and IP it had invested in, but I think failing the balancing act of placating series fans while also creating new ones made for a final nail in The Veilguard's coffin, so it shocked me to see another studio stick the landing immediately after.

Strange lands

So much of Avowed sounds, on paper, like The Veilguard. It's an action pivot compared to prior games in the same setting. For the first time in the series, the previous game's choices can't be imported. In addition to the gameplay shift, Avowed is set in an unexplored corner of the world, with few returning characters.

But the difference is all in the execution. Across 16 years and four entries, Dragon Age never had a consistent identity, with each successive release overriding the previous one's art style, mechanics, and, in the case of Veilguard, tone. The look and feel of Pillars has evolved⁠—most notably with the injection of tropical pirate summer fun in Deadfire⁠—but it's always remained rooted in its unique combo of more grounded early modern historicity and colorful, almost psychedelic fantasy paperback spectacle.

Avowed also makes a cleaner break with Pillars of Eternity narratively, while simultaneously not invalidating the events of those games the way Veilguard did. It helps that Avowed doesn't push a half-measure accounting of previous player choice like Veilguard's Inquisitor customization. Avowed just opts for the tried and true RPG standby of "The exact events are shrouded in mystery…" while referencing characters and quests from previous games in clever, surprising ways. A real knockout for me was running into the parents of Pillars 1's intro companion who dies at the end of the tutorial (spoilers), the "Trask Ulgo special." I checked and, sure enough, Calisca mentioned her parents being in Avowed's setting of the Living Lands all the way back in 2015.

What's more, as Dragon Age went on, the weight of its story shifted entirely to its characters from its setting and politics, culminating in The Veilguard's pure focus on its party roster as avatars of their respective factions. Pillars had strong, memorable characters, but Obsidian's consistently been more of a setting and themes-first joint. A new game set in Eora was largely only beholden to those themes and that history, not the decade-plus personal sagas of Morrigan, Solas, and the Inquisitor which had subsumed Dragon Age's fictional politics.

Avowed is framed in a way that may have benefitted a new Dragon Age project: It's a follow-up to, but also a spinoff of, Pillars of Eternity. It's unclear if we'll ever see another mainline Pillars game, but Avowed doesn't inherently preclude the possibility. Each new Dragon Age game tacitly carried the message, "this is what Dragon Age is now," with an implication as the series went on that its more tactical, old-school roots were an aberration, and that the later games' shift to action was always the plan.

Inquisition and Veilguard were both "omni-games," the big, all-encompassing, world-saving story where you visit multiple nations in Thedas and see everything the setting had in store. They ironically made Dragon Age feel smaller than Origins or DA2's focused corners of the world. There's no room to hide something new and surprising in Dragon Age anymore, we've seen everything in its world at breakneck speed, with no time for any of it to soak in like those first two games had.

Dragon Age 2's unique story structure and tangential connection to Origins always made it feel like a great spinoff instead of a sequel⁠—ironic, considering it was the only one to get a number⁠—and a fourth entry in the series really would have benefitted from a similarly lower-stakes, more focused framing. It sounded like The Veilguard's original incarnation, codenamed "Joplin," was attempting to do just that prior to its cancellation by EA in favor of live service efforts like Anthem.

Hardcore to the mega

Even with the star of CRPGs rising once more thanks to the stunning successes of Disco Elysium and Baldur's Gate 3, the one-two punch at the peak of our Top 100 Games list, Pillars of Eternity has always lacked the same capacity to "break containment" to my eye. I love these games, but in addition to quietly having one of the highest skill ceilings in the entire genre⁠—Josh Sawyer's insanely demanding "The Ultimate" challenge is my favorite example of that⁠—they have a correspondingly high skill floor, even more so than crusty classics like the OG Fallouts and Baldur's Gates.

The Bethesda-style first person RPG is one with a ton of everyman and hardcore sicko appeal, and pitching a Pillars spin-off in that vein was an inspired move to get more players interested and invested in this genuinely special fantasy setting. Avowed hits you with capital-L Lore from the jump, but in a similar way to Disco Elysium, Dragon Age: Origins, or any given Elder Scrolls entry: You can almost sink into it like a warm bath, actively engaging or just filtering it out as "generalized fantasy bullshit" at your leisure, the quality of its quest and character writing more than enough to carry the day. The response among PC Gamer's non-Pillars heads who have been playing Avowed has been a positive, healthy interest in its world and characters.

It doesn't hurt that this is also a genuinely excellent action RPG. Among first person RPGs, games like Deus Ex or Dark Messiah still reign supreme in my heart thanks to their open-ended simulations, but I don't think anything in the subgenre can touch Avowed when it comes to polished, well-balanced mechanics and feel⁠—when the fighting starts, it's less a sim, and more a high quality, very game-y action experience like Mass Effect 2 or The Witcher 3.

I hope to see Pillars of Eternity 3 and Avowed 2 some day, and Obsidian's understanding of its audience and fictional worlds, coupled with a commitment to staying within its means to put out more consistent releases that don't each have to be a mega-hit, makes both of those games a real possibility moving forward.

As ever with Humble Bundles, what you get is down to what you pay. Spend $45 (£36) and you'll get the full 53-item set, meaning a bunch of Pathfinder Kingmaker PDFs, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and a physical Pathfinder Kingmaker Bestiary hardback book. For $35 (£28) you get the same stuff minus the physical book. $30 (£24) nets you the ebooks without the game, while the $15 (£12) and $5 (£4) tiers net you a diminishing number of ebooks.

Whether or not it's worth it is dependent entirely on how much use you'll get out of many volumes of Pathfinder books. Grabbing the bundle just for Kingmaker would be daft: the game's been on sale for prices as low as $3 in the past, and is actually currently available for a paltry $4 on IndieGala if it's all you're looking for.

But if you're a pen 'n' paper sicko, it could be well worth it. Pathfinder Kingmaker—the TTRPG, I mean—is all about players building a kingdom from scratch, and dealing with all the administrative and political headaches that inevitably causes.

As for the game, well, back when we took a look at it at launch, Andy Kelly wasn't wowed by the game in his Pathfinder: Kingmaker review, and it's definitely been overshadowed by its sequel, Wrath of the Righteous. But it underwent a comeback over the next few years, adding in stuff like a turn-based mode and free DLC. Quoth our own Jody Macgregor in 2021: "Replaying Kingmaker today is quite a different experience than it was in 2018.

"Turn-based combat means area-of-effect spells actually hit the enemies you want, and your characters don't charge into battle directly over traps that have already been discovered. It's easier to manage your kingdom thanks to crisis points that can be spent to improve the odds of dealing with disasters, while the build points you need for construction and research projects can be bought right there in the kingdom management menu rather than by exiting it, then physically leaving your throne room to find the one merchant in your settlement who sells them." Sounds a lot less tedious to me.

The Dark Queen of Mortholme sees you take the role of the fearsome eponymous boss, and wait around for some little nobody covered in rags to fight you again and again. Fighting this upstart for the first time in my boss room took as much effort as stepping on an ant, I only had to use one move on him, and the so-called Hero fell with no resistance. But as I headed back to my throne, I could hear the patter of footsteps approach my door once again: He was back.

This pretender kept coming back no matter how many times I crushed his tiny soul or spilt his blood across my throne room, and each time he'd become a little stronger. Soon Hero learnt that he could avoid my dash by jumping over me, or that if he dodged my pentagram spell at the last second, it couldn't damage him, meaning that I had to start switching up attacks and try out new ways to corner him. It was bloody annoying going up against some chump who was allowed infinite retries to kill me, and not at all fair.

After one particularly close fight, Hero even asked me whether I'd think it best to change, learn new moves, or at least try to become better in some way. My answer was quite stubborn, and I stayed firm in my belief that I was the pinnacle of all evil, the greatest warrior to ever live, and far too stuck in my ways to try out any new tricks now. So the fighting continued, and even though I beat Hero, I did cut it a little close at times.

It wasn't until I was whittled down to my last quarter of health that I decided a bit of change may be a good idea and showed off my final form, an eldritch beast that let out a hideous screech that killed Hero instantly.

Unfortunately, even that attack didn't work for long. Eventually, Hero returned with a new golden glowing shield which could repel my screams, and before long he had all my tricks figured out and was at last able to kill me. But I put up a pretty good fight before all of that.

Despite the aggravating premise, The Dark Queen of Mortholme was a neat inversion of the usual, and between the increasingly demoralising fights lay a smartly told story that was a nice surprise for such a short game. I was just expecting to fight for as long as I could, but I didn't count on coming to terms with how to dig yourself out of a rut when you're going nowhere or learning how to accept one's own mortality.

The story only progresses during the short conversations between the evil Queen and Hero before a fight commences. At first the Queen looks down on Hero, but by the end of the whole ordeal, I think she sort of warms to his persistence and admires his can-do attitude, even if I found it a little irritating. Even so, it was a wholesome way to frame the story of a Hero fighting and eventually winning against the world's greatest evil.

The Dark Queen of Mortholme, is a 20 minute game that explores the capacity for change as well as a slightly unconventional relationship, it's fun, cool to look at, and just the right amount of frustrating. It's also irrevocably changed the way I look at boss battles from here on out. I feel as if I need to hobble back to Morgott's final resting place in Elden Ring just to apologise for how annoying I must have been trouncing up those stairs time after time, donned in his half-brothers armour, the strongest sword I could find, a mimic tear, and Melina to help me out—that wasn't fair or very nice of me at all, I'm sorry.

As a way to get more people to watch, there are three codes that appear during the stream that you can redeem for Stellar Jade. This time it looks like the new faces will be quantum harmony character, Tribbie, and imaginary destruction character, Mydei. It also looks like we're getting reruns for Luocha and Topaz, so there are a whole lot of potential characters you can grab.

As usual I'll include the codes below as they go live during the stream and further down the page you'll find details about how to redeem them if you haven't done so before. You'll want to claim these fairly fast since livestream codes usually expire within a day or so.

Honkai: Star Rail codes—All current livestream Stellar Jade

• 7A324EYX6SHT - 100 Stellar Jade and 50,000 credits
• 4A2KLEHFPBGF - 100 Stellar Jade and five Traveler's Guide
• DB22LWYXPSY3 - 100 Stellar Jade and four Refined Aether

How to redeem Honkai: Star Rail codes

Before you can redeem your codes you'll first have to unlock the mailbox by finishing the "A Moment of Peace" Trailblaze mission. Once that's done, you'll have two options. Either you can do it through the game:

• Launch the game
• Enter the phone menu
• Click the three dots next to your avatar portrait
• Select the redemption code option
• Input a code and choose redeem
• Claim your rewards from your mailbox

Or you can do it online:

• Open the Honkai: Star Rail redemption site
• Enter your details and select your server
• Put a code into the box
• Grab your rewards from the in-game mailbox

Obsidian's 100-year plan isn't—and I hope this isn't too disappointing—a decade-by-decade breakdown of future projects that ends somewhere around Fallout: Old Vegas (I'm assuming that pre-apocalyptic settings are popular in 2103). It's more of a thought exercise, but Morgan and Britch said that they genuinely want Obsidian to continue beyond their lifespans. "Are we serious? … Yes," said Morgan. And why not? Nintendo was founded in 1889.

One of the pillars of the plan is staying "lean and invested," meaning small enough that none of Obsidian's employees feel like a cog in a machine. Morgan and Britch said that in recent years they'd been considering opening multiple international offices, but in the end decided to partner with existing studios rather than risk weakening Obsidian's culture by getting too big.

Leanness can also refer to Obsidian's games: It doesn't aim for unprecedented scale or the most advanced graphics, and before it greenlights a game, Britch says the studio spends a lot of time determining how much to invest in the project with the assumption that it will be a "mild success," not a smash hit.

They didn't call out any examples themselves, but the duo was clearly setting themselves apart from companies that pour enormous budgets into long and turbulent development cycles and then announce that the resulting game underperformed because it didn't immediately sell tens of millions of copies. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the most recent high-profile example of an expensive RPG that didn't meet its owner's sales expectations, and EA cut jobs at BioWare after the miss.

(Big bets do sometimes pay off, though: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind as a recent example, though I can't say exactly how its scale and budget compares to Avowed's, and Cyberpunk 2077's launch troubles notwithstanding, CD Projekt continues to make a case for RPGs that take a long time and a lot of money to make.)

Obsidian has also laid off staff at times in the past, and has been in a precarious position at least once, but has appeared stable since Microsoft acquired it in 2018. That hasn't been the case for Microsoft's more recent acquisitions, which have been hammered with layoffs and studio closures from their new Xbox bosses.

The difference there can't be attributed to some secret sauce of Obsidian's—it's a much smaller company than Activision Blizzard or Bethesda, which Microsoft clearly had different plans for—but the studio's strong showing at a time when much of the industry seems to be reenacting Homer's jump over Springfield Gorge does lend credibility to the idea that Obsidian has sustainability ideas worth listening to.

Obsidian has released three games in the 2020s so far: survival game Grounded (we reviewed it positively), narrative adventure game Pentiment (we reviewed it positively), and now Avowed (another good one). Some studios don't even announce a new game in that amount of time.

Among other things not mentioned here, Morgan and Britch's plan includes building institutional knowledge by aiming for "the lowest turnover rate in the industry" and continuing to release the kinds of games they're known for (player freedom, worldbuilding, all of that) at a consistent pace, "not rushed, but often."

Britch described his vision for Obsidian as a 1973 VW bus with a trunk full of tools and a manual that's being continuously annotated, and summed up the plan by saying that Obsidian is more or less going to keep doing what it's been doing, "not trying to grow aggressively, expand our team size, or make super profitable games." It's aiming for somewhat profitable games, then, made well and at a consistent pace.

Stealth is even less fleshed-out in Avowed than it is in The Elder Scrolls or 3D Fallouts, and I never found it feasible to quietly pick guys off from afar like in those games. It's always nice to start a fight with extra sneak attack damage, but overall, an Avowed ranger build feels a bit like an Infiltrator from Mass Effect or a Nightstalker from Destiny, using an on-command invisibility power to get out of a hairy situation or line up extra damage.

Thankfully, the guns in Avowed feel amazing, and better still when dual wielding two pistols together. A low-level ranger ability makes time dilate when you charge up a power attack, and I get into this flow state with my flintlocks, charging up my next shot as the other pistol reloads, blasting away in slo-mo with my ammo never running out like some kind of early modern Chow Yun-fat. Even before finding any cool unique weapons or unlocking some of the crazier active abilities, being able to adopt this playstyle in a fantasy RPG made my heart sing.

I was worried that this would wind up getting boring, that I'd just be clicking on enemies' heads before they could ever touch me while also missing out on Avowed's more out-there abilities, but neither turned out to be true. Enemies in Avowed are surprisingly good at tracking you as you move, with melee attacks that close gaps and magnetize to you when, in other games, your foe would just be eating air as you slowly backpedal away. With no shield and minimal health and armor (gotta pump it all into damage), I felt like I was playing a movement FPS, dodging enemies and projectiles left and right to line up shots with my badass rad guns. This Skyrimmy RPG is hiding a great boomer shooter if you want to play it that way.

Meanwhile, Avowed's fantastic unique weapons make up for missing out on its spells. Melee jock types start with flaming swords and only go up from there, while my faithful companion through the entire game has been a lightning pistol with a chance of spawning chain lightning on each kill. For a while, I was rocking dual pistols in one weapon slot with an arquebus in the other, taking advantage of a perk that auto-reloads holstered weapons to swap between them instead of waiting for reloads. I've since swapped my long gun for a bow that shoots out a weaker (but still deadly) chain lightning on every power attack, more than making up for my prior lack of AOE damage with spammed bolts ping-ponging between mobs, staggering them over and over as they try to get a word in edgewise.

I am also now joined by my new best friend, a spirit bear summoned through a late-game ranger tree ability. Summons in games can go one of two ways, but thankfully my ursine attendant is an absolute unit. If it's possible to take him down before his timer runs out, I haven't seen it happen, and he does beastly damage to boot.

So Avowed may be a wizard game first and foremost what with its wild spells and shockingly in-depth system of grimoires intertwined with ability tree upgrades, but if you're like me and have that specific brain sickness that constantly demands playing as a sneaky sniper DPS edgelord type, Avowed's got you more than covered.

Obsidian is very much on the record as the anti-RPG romance developer. Studio design director Josh Sawyer has expressed a distaste for them that goes back decades, arguing they're often objectifying, crass wish fulfillment. When there are romantic subplots or themes in Obsidian games, they typically run toward the tragic or subversive:

• Wooing one of four partially cult deprogrammed weirdos in Knights of the Old Republic 2.
• Playing wingman for Parvati in The Outer Worlds.
• Seducing a nun, leading her to terminate the resulting pregnancy in Pentiment.
• The achingly tragic love lives of Boone, Arcade, and Veronica in New Vegas.
• And more!

Obsidian explicitly denied that there'd be anything of the sort in Avowed multiple times in the run up to the game's release. "We are building thoughtful relationships with our companion characters," project lead Carrie Patel told IGN last January on the back of Avowed's first gameplay reveal. "Ultimately, I personally am a fan of making that an option, but I feel like if you're going to do it, you really, really have to commit and make sure that you're giving all to fulfilling that in a way that feels both true to the character, but also creates an engaging player experience. So not something we're doing for Avowed, but I wouldn't say never."

We haven't seen how it ends, but there's an optional romantic element to your relationship with Kai, Avowed's poster boy and a new hall of famer when it comes to chummy RPG warrior companions. After completing Kai's multiple act companion quest, Battle Scars, there's a debrief conversation back at camp. Afterward, I had the dialogue option "I feel like we've really gotten to know each other, haven't we?" pop up in Kai's general dialogue tree. That starts a conversation where you can affirm your friendship with Kai, or say you want something more.

And Kai's game! He reciprocates, but basically says "let's talk more about this after the final boss." There may be another conversation down the line to fully commit, but my guess is that this is a choice that will primarily play out in Kai's Fallout-style epilogue card when I roll credits. Again, not Baldur's Full Monty territory, but an explicit part of Kai's story, and largely in line with what we saw in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire's romances.

What we're not sure about yet is if there's some behind the scenes approval over your choices in the game that affect whether or not you get this option⁠—I'm the only one to see it so far on the PC Gamer team. What's more, we don't know if both male and female characters can pursue Kai, or if he's only interested in men, and there are at least some indications that fellow companion Giatta may have her own romantic subplot. We'll have to see as we make more progress in our own games and more people in general get their hands on Avowed, but I find something very resonant, very Obsidian, to the possibility that Avowed may have only one romance revolving around a gay shark-man. That's videogames to me, baby.

Avowed remains tagged with an "unknown" Steam Deck compatibility rating on its store page, but I decided to give it a shot and see if it could be stretched to a playable frame rate on the handheld. Its minimum required GPU, the GTX 1070, came out all the way back in 2016, and recent RPGs with 10-series minimum specs like Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, and Elden Ring have all been able to hit 30fps on the Deck. Unfortunately, Avowed is not joining their ranks.

Just exploring the open world with every setting minimized and FSR performance enabled, I was getting a sluggish 20-25 fps, and I didn't even bother trying to get into a fight with those numbers. I suppose you could go further and try lowering the resolution below the Deck's 1280x800 native res in addition to the upscaling, but at that point we're reaching a state well below the most ambitious, ill-considered Nintendo Switch ports in terms of "you don't have to live like this."

It makes sense with Avowed primarily targeting 30fps on Xbox Series consoles, and the GTX 1070 min spec is a step above the GTX 1060 or 970 demanded by so many games that can reach playable frame rates on Deck. Avowed is still well worth experiencing sitting upright at your desktop, though, and I've found it to have pretty smooth performance at medium-high settings and 1440p on an RTX 3070. For a full breakdown of Avowed's performance across various hardware configurations and resolutions, you can check out Nick's in-depth Avowed performance analysis.

In a preview build played by PCG senior editors Wes Fenlon and Robin Valentine, the camera toggle was exclusively accessible via menu, requiring you to pause the game, go to accessibility settings, and hit the toggle any time you wanted to switch. It seemed intended as a measure for players who suffer from motion sickness in first person games, a last resort for enjoying Avowed at all, rather than the casual quick switch we're used to from Bethesda joints or, indeed, prior Obsidian games like Fallout: New Vegas or The Outer Worlds.

The option's presence in an accessibility settings menu when you first launch the game makes it appear that this is the case in the final release as well. Indeed, Robin didn't realize that there was a hotkey to toggle your camera view until I told him after dozens of hours in the game. By default, this is assigned to the "U" key, but I like having it as a thumb button on my mouse for even easier access.

Just like in Fallout or The Elder Scrolls, though, this is definitely an inferior way to play the game. Even after decades of animation improvements, it's still got that kind of floaty, disconnected feeling I've associated with the third person camera options for this subgenre of RPGs. From Morrowind to Skyrim, Fallout 3 to, er, Fallout 4, it's slippery moonwalking and gently levitating jumps all the way down. Avowed is a much more immersive, tactile experience in first person.

But I still like having the option, and I sorely missed it in Cyberpunk 2077, which keeps you perma-locked to a first person perspective. I enjoy idly flipping to the third person view while hiking around the overworld, taking in the character I spent so much time tweaking, as well as the cool armor upgrades I've found throughout the game. Even if that third person view isn't ideal, it's still better than not having it at all.

The trustworthy Garryck will be by your side during these opening moments, which complicates matters further. While Ilora tries to convince you to find the key to free her from captivity, Garryck is adamant that she can’t be trusted. After all, Ilora was in her cell before chaos broke out on the island, so surely there’s a good reason.

Should you free or leave Ilora?

The decision to free or leave Ilora behind has only minor consequences which are felt almost immediately. If you free Ilora, she’ll fight by your side against the infected Steadman Ralke, a rather tough boss fight. However, if you leave Ilora behind, she'll escape and fight against you during the boss, meaning you'll have to kill her.

Since Ilora isn’t a key character in the story, this choice doesn't have any far-reaching implications, though it's best to free Ilora to make the fight against Steadman Ralke easier. With her in your party, you’ll have a much easier time dealing damage and staying alive against Ralke. On the other hand, Garryck has a habit of running off to fight Ilora instead if you choose to betray her, generally leaving you fending for yourself against the boss. If she dies, you can loot a note from Ilora's body bidding farewell to her crew and providing some extra backstory.

To free Ilora, you'll need to climb into the hatch in the prison roof using the pile of boxes behind you as you enter the room. Head through the hatch to drop down in the jailor's office, bypassing the barred door. You can then grab the jail key off the hanger by the door before unbarring it and opening Ilora’s cell.

Whether you free Ilora or leave her behind, you'll use her boat to escape the island and reach Dawnshore, which ends the prologue. If Ilora lives, you can chat with both her and Garryck at the Claviger’s Landing docks before moving on.

If your morals are getting in the way of freeing this supposed criminal, then worry not. It sounds as though the guards at this fort (and the Living Lands more widely) are rather corrupt. Ilora is a simple smuggler who was caught before reaching Paradis and her contraband is likely something mundane since the empire restricts many basic items (like contraceptives).

To start the hunt for Captain Henqua’s treasure, head to the lighthouse just to the west of Claviger’s Landing. Once there, climb up the outside of the tower until you see a slumped skeleton on one of the platforms. They won’t need their gear anymore so pick their bones to find Captain Henqua’s Spoils treasure map.

Be sure to pick up the Woedica totem fragment while you’re here, too. While it’s still not easy to find, I wish I'd started this treasure map before the Intimidating Feline Codpiece as it features far more recognisable landmarks to guide you.

Captain Henqua’s Spoils treasure map location

Captain Henqua’s treasure is hidden in a cave in the river to the east of the Old Pargrun Wall in Dawnshore (and the handy Western Pargrun Wall Beacon), near the smuggler’s lift and the outer walls of Paradis.

To reach this location:

1. Travel to the Western Pargrun Wall fast travel point
2. Take the path along the river to the east
3. You’ll arrive at the large archway depicted in the treasure map. At the base of this structure, near tree roots, dive into the water to find a cave opening
4. Swim inside the cave and pop back up to find a small opening.

The big reward for this treasure map is the Wind and Wave unique shield, placed next to a chest. This shield provides 10% increased movement speed and 20% resistance to frost damage accumulation, making it a great choice for a warrior build early on—though I still prefer Unflinching Duty found early in the main story.

As mentioned, there is also a treasure chest to loot, which contains a variety of coins and handy crafting materials you can spend on upgrading your gear. Incidentally, don’t miss the nearby adra location under the water at the base of the smuggler’s lift, straight ahead when you leave the cave where Captain Henqua buried his treasure.

If you’re anything like me, I sat on this choice for quite some time, weighing up how much I could trust this disembodied voice and whether the power they offered was worth whatever bargain they proposed. Well, I did what any self-respecting RPG player would and saved-scummed to find out which option is best.

Should you accept or reject the Voice’s power?

The Voice will cryptically offer you the power to “heal and to be healed,” though they demand that you help them in return. The immediate consequence of this choice is which Godlike ability you’ll unlock:

• If you accept the Voice’s power, you will get the Dream Touch Godlike ability
• If you reject the Voice’s power, you’ll get the Godlike’s Will ability instead

Dream Touch heals and revives all nearby allies and deals damage over time to nearby Delemgan, Dreamthralls, and Vessels. This comes in very handy when your companions have gone down, letting you quickly get them both back on their feet without requiring the length revive sequence.

Godlike’s Will gives you an additional ability point that you can immediately spend in the Fighter, Ranger, or Wizard skill trees. It’s a simple bonus but can be very useful if you just can’t wait to unlock a particular skill.

This is far from the last time you'll hear from the mysterious voice in your head. The thing spends a huge chunk of Avowed barging in to ask you favours or trade power while you're out on quests or in your dreams at night. You’ll have opportunities later on to improve your relationship or reject them further. It feels a lot like being unsure whether to lean into your tempting Illithid powers in Baldur's Gate 3, never knowing if this thing is ultimately good or bad. Ultimately, how you treat the mysterious voice will play into the Avowed ending you get, so don't think you're off the hook after this first decision.

After sinking well over 40 hours in Avowed, there are a few things I’ve figured out that have made life in the Living Lands just that little bit more… viable. In fact, one of them rears its head right at the very start.

Background checks

Over recent years, we’ve seen a lot more RPGs return to a full skill check system in dialogue, often directly tying back to choices you made during character creation. Avowed is somewhat similar, having you pick from a number of backgrounds for your character that give you unique dialogue options. These backgrounds dictate your starting stats too, which also leads to additional options in conversation.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll sit here for way too long thinking about what background and attributes would be the most optimal. Well, don’t, it’s not as big of a deal as you might think.

Almost every choice in conversation will have at least one background or attribute option, and often a combination of a few. But unlike a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, these are mainly reserved for additional information and lore, rather than story-altering decisions. In other words, you’re never going long without utilising your character’s history, but it won’t lock you out of certain sections just because you don’t have enough Resolve or you’re a Court Augur instead of a Vanguard Scout. I chose the Arcane Scholar simply so I can be a snobby, stuck-up academic.

This carries over into gameplay where the backgrounds merely affect your starting attribute distribution. The Arcane Scholar begins with more points in Intellect, for example, while the War Hero has more Might. Even this doesn’t have any significant consequences as you can fully reset your attributes at any time. In fact, that’s what I did. My Arcane Scholar is now a greatsword-wielding barbarian, with more brawn than brain.

Steal everything

One of the most surprising things I learned was that the concept of theft doesn’t exist in the Living Lands. Maybe it is as lawless as everyone says it is? Coming off the back of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s full crime and punishment system, I was fully expecting to get a good telling off when I took a merchant's stock from the shelves or wandered into a peasant’s home and stole the food off their plate. But nope, no one cares.

Anything’s fair game in the Living Lands, apparently, and it pays to embrace it. Take everything you can see. I strolled into a shop and took all the grenades left lying around the room; I stocked up on free food at the bar; and I took weapons from the garrison. Hey, I’m the envoy, it’s not an easy job!

Check merchants

While you can pick up a variety of items free of charge from merchants' shops, you will have to pay for some. The grenades were free, but this cabbage certainly isn’t. Avowed has a surprisingly strict progression curve, with experience gains being on the slower side and each gear upgrade demanding ever-increasing stocks of materials. Grabbing and deconstructing every item you find certainly helps, but you’ll need the help of a merchant eventually.

Merchants sell everything from lockpicks and potions to the vital adra you’ll need to upgrade your gear to a higher tier. You’ll need all of these and more if you want to keep pace with the enemies as you explore new regions.

Find the totem fragments

One of the first things you should do once you’ve safely arrived in Dawnshore is scour the map in search of the Woedica god totem and its fragments. This broken relic can be restored with six pieces hidden across Dawnshore, and each one gives you a permanent passive buff that goes a long way in keeping you breathing. Plus, it’s also a great excuse to explore and see the sights.

Each following region also has its own god totem to repair, so you’ll be clued up on what to look out for next time.

Enchant weapons!

Although Avowed throws a lot of tooltips and explainers at you early on, from how to upgrade gear to how certain systems work, you’ll quickly discover that some actually confuse things more than they help. Enchanting weapons is one of the biggest victims. After the tooltip explained that I could change the enchantment of unique weapons but that it would be permanent, I thought “Nah, I don’t need to do that! I love my AoE frost axe.”

Hours went by until, out of curiosity, I checked out what enchantments I could put on it and was horrified that I could’ve made my life easier.

Enchantments effectively act like another form of upgrade of your tools of mass destruction, though there is a choice involved. Typically, unique weapons will have one enchantment that is a boosted version of its standard effect, and one that is slightly different. That’s where my frustration came in, as I could’ve made my frost axe more powerful with just one button press in a menu. Don't make my mistake—check the enchanting table every time you get a new unique weapon!

Beware! Light Avowed quest spoilers ahead. If you want to go in completely fresh, read no further.

Last Light of Day is a unique one-handed sword with two powerful enchantments—one that heals you every time you slay an enemy, and one that adds fire damage to every hit (naturally). That's a great boost in the early game, and I highly recommend making a beeline straight for it as soon as you can.

You can grab Last Light of Day at the end of the quest Dawntreader, which you'll pick up at the Aedyran Embassy once you get to the city of Paradis. You'll be sent there as part of the main quest anyway so it's no trouble to find. Outside, you should see a character called Ofryc—he'll ask you to search for a missing expedition and point towards its last known location.

It's also possible to just head straight to that location if you want and pick up the quest there—you'll find it in northern Dawnshore, just past the Northern Farms Beacon, at a place called Pilgrim's Path.

I won't say too much more about the quest itself—it's a great little dungeon crawl with some cool twists and turns, so it's worth experiencing unspoiled. But here's a hint: the sword belongs to the Oracle, so if that character happened to die somehow by the end of the quest, perhaps you could loot it off his body…

You'll definitely feel the advantage from Last Light of Day in early game skirmishes. But it could also stick with you deep into the game and even right to the end if you want. Like all weapons in Avowed, it can be upgraded through several tiers of quality, and you can even enhance that health-stealing enchantment, either making it heal you for more, or swapping it for a neat bonus to parries. In the Living Lands there are loads of weird plant and fungus monsters that are weak to fire, so it's a great tool to have by your side. And let's be honest with ourselves: there are few weapons cooler than a flaming sword.

In mid-2023, a few prophetic minds warned that the imminent launch of Baldur's Gate 3 was going to raise expectations for future RPGs to unrealistic heights. Now, in early 2025, I'm here to say that, sadly, they were right: I'm compelled to point out right off the bat that Avowed is not Baldur's Gate 3, nor is it Stalker 2, nor is it Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It's not Fallout: New Vegas, either. No, it's a much more old-fashioned kind of thing.

Avowed is undeniably a product of the studio responsible for The Outer Worlds and—most relevant in this case—Pillars of Eternity. It spins a gripping fantasy yarn, balancing existential severity with arch humour, while retaining that most enduring and fascinating Obsidian quirk: this is an admirably flawed achievement. It succeeds as an action game, it excels as a choice-based narrative game, but with the criteria determining what makes a brilliant RPG having so dramatically shifted of late, it doesn’t feel like a standout RPG in 2025. Its world, though beautiful, is simply too static—not as malleable or reactive as some of its contemporaries, nor even the classics it recalls.

I am a Godlike envoy of the Aedyr emperor, sent to the notoriously dangerous Living Lands to investigate the Dreamscourge. This "soul plague" sends people and animals mad while blighting them with actually-quite-stylish technicolour body fungi. The virus is spreading fast, so my nameless, voiceless and fully-customisable envoy must put a nip in its fungal bud before it spreads to the Aedyr empire proper.

As an envoy for a powerful empire hoping to claim dominance over the Living Lands, I’m both hated and feared by the races who have planted flags across the island. But that's not the only special thing about me: I'm also a Godlike, which means I’m blessed by a god, boast gnarly divine abilities, and am also marked by fungi signaling my connection to divinity, though without the "going mad" component. I'm also, importantly, harangued by strange voices in my dreams. The character creator is complete with all the lip and ear-size sliders you could want, and if the fungi creeps you out (like some members of the PC Gamer team) it can be toggled off entirely.

As the narrative unfolds, Avowed evolves from a fantasy-flavoured political potboiler into something verging on Dantean: there are ancient gods, forgotten races, and many bewildering philosophical rants. I begin as a mere messenger, but things inevitably get way out of hand, as they surely must in a game that obliquely traverses a lot of thematic terrain—colonialism, encroaching totalitarianism, environmental disaster—without ever feeling heavyhanded. Obsidian is good at writing fantasy. With Avowed, they have a world already substantiated across two meaty CRPGs, and people who played the Pillars of Eternity games will be amply rewarded with callbacks and lore. I for one loved reacquainting with the weirdly cute Xaurips and Sporelings (before killing them).

As unwieldy as the setup may seem on paper, Avowed maintains an admirable focus during its 50-odd hours. I never lost track of what was happening. And I thought I would, given this is a game with a dynamic glossary accessible mid-conversation, à la Final Fantasy 16. Across a handful of discrete "open zones," Obsidian weaves a compact critical path between a wealth of fascinating sidequests that, while ostensibly optional, feel like the substance of the game.

Eora mission

Like in all the best RPGs, it's not the world you hope to save that matters, but the frivolous jobs you do along the way. I remember a dubious situation between a Paradis woman and her weirdly adoring Xaurip admirers more vividly than any of the major plot beats. Likewise, visiting my companion Marius's vanquished home village, crouched in the shadow of a giant volcano, was more impactful than finally confronting the fascistic antagonist for the first time. I was more proud of saving a brothel in Paradis than I was of deciding to have mercy on a villain who I really ought to have, in retrospect, killed. These sidequests shouldn’t be missed, and in truth cannot be, because focusing on the main quest at the expense of the XP and steady upgrade materials they provide probably won’t be feasible for most players.

Marius is one of four companions, and like the others, he's familiar: a diminutive foul-mouthed tough guy with a golden heart. Early favourite Kai is the sardonic but sincere Garrus-like (voiced by Brandon Keener of Garrus fame, coincidentally), while a later character—it may be a spoiler to say too much—is the sassy sexual innuendo enjoyer. And don't fear: there's a bookish, determinedly humourless companion too.

You've met these people before in other RPGs but they're nevertheless well-drawn, with stories and motivations of their own, and an almost unbelievable reservoir of random stuff to say at the campfire sites where I can lick my wounds, improve my gear, and mercilessly question them. Archetypal though they are, they feel alive.

Adventuring with this gaggle across the varied regions of the Living Lands is gratifying mainly because Avowed is a stunning game to look at. Each zone carries a distinct grandeur of its own, and whoever designed these landscapes did so with the sensibility of a cinematographer. It’s common to turn a corner, or mount a crest, and bear witness to a perfectly framed vista that would have looked like overly ambitious concept art 10 years ago. The discrete maps are dense with points of interest, whether caverns chiselling deep into the earth or ruins full of spoils. They don’t feel like real spaces, but that’s not because they feel like videogame spaces: they feel like dreamlike fantasy worlds dreamt up by paperback fantasy bonglords.

Avowed leaves a great first impression. Those first 10 hours I spent in the sprawling city of Paradis and the wider Dawnshore region, learning about the Dreamscourge and life under the Aedyr colonisers, exploring surprisingly deep dungeons, shooting the shit with Kai, and making enemies with the local strongmen, put me in mind of the feeling of playing New Vegas or Oblivion for the first time, but better. Some of the missable sidequests, particularly in the first area, take me places other studios would want to frontload in the opening hours of the main quest. Avowed felt like a sumptuous embarrassment of riches.

But while this is a very good game, with time I came to understand that its ambitions are a touch more humble than some recent genre heavyweights. I realised that it might be more flattering to think of Avowed as a choice-based narrative-driven action game. Or, as a certain kind of simplified blockbuster RPG that is fast receding in the medium’s rearview mirror.

Doom infernal

Let's talk about the fighting first. Avowed is surprisingly combat heavy, especially in its second half. It’s possible to play with the usual array of melee weapons—swords, axes, spears, maces—but you’d be missing out on a lot if you’re not playing Avowed like 21st century Hexen, mixing powerful ranged attacks with down-and-dirty close quarters hacking. Every one-handed weapon can be dual-wielded, so I normally roamed with a grimoire in one hand and a fire-enchanted sword in the other, raining down elemental area of effect attacks on bears, bugs and lizardmen before sprinting in to hack away. For the magic averse, it's also possible to muscle about with a mace in one hand and a pistol in the other, for example.

The grimoire is fun for all the flashing lights and mystical effects it conjures, but if magical pew-pew is more your bag there are wands too. Pistols and arquebuses are present too with all the slow reloading that entails, and so are bows. These conventional weapons have unlimited ammo, probably for magical reasons, but grimoires need essence (basically mana, in this context). Whichever route is taken, high mobility is key, standing still is death, and my envoy’s impressive parkour abilities proved useful when manoeuvring around the hordes.

There are classes and backgrounds to choose from, but all skill trees—fighter, ranger, wizard, and godlike—are available to all classes, and I ended up with a fully blended build without feeling disadvantaged for not specialising. I can't change the gear used by my companions, but they steadily accrue special attacks I can trigger at any time. My crew is pretty good at using these specials themselves, but they're close to useless when it comes to moment-to-moment combat, except when I revisit areas I'm way overpowered for.

Each quest has a difficulty ranking, not based on my level but on the power of the weapons and gear I'm using. The system is pretty vague: while gear is graded along typical RPG lines, I usually had to mix-and-match a bunch before a three-skull difficulty ranking de-escalated to two, mostly blindly, because there aren't any Destiny-style numbers to crunch. Upgrading gear is essential, because finding viable weapons is rare and usually relegated to sidequests or off-the-beaten path destinations. In the early game I found a unique one-handed fire sword that I went on to use right until the end, mostly because I can toggle between two loadouts on the fly, swapping fire for an ice mace and a shock-focused grimoire.

I don’t think Avowed’s combat could sustain my attention over the course of a linear, 15-hour action game, but as one of the main components in a story-led, exploration-rewarding RPG, it’s a lot more fun than I had dared hope for.

Performance was a little shaky on my increasingly long-in-the-tooth gaming laptop. With an RTX 3060, Ryzen 5600H and 16GB RAM, I obviously had no chance of smoothly running raytracing, but even at 1080p and low settings the framerate frequently dropped down to the 30s and 40s when I was in busy areas. The good news is that even at low settings Avowed is gorgeous, though low-quality shadows were a little over-obvious in places, and distant reflective surfaces acquire a weird opaque texture.

Immersive simple

But Avowed isn’t just a first-person action game, and after a while the artifice of its RPG systems started to show. These limits first became apparent when I, a lowly thief, realised I can rob people blind with no consequences at all. It’s possible to just enter some public figure's house, have a look around, open their chests and lockboxes, rob them of their coins, and the worst I’ll receive is a mild scolding.

When I’m not in conversation with someone, that someone forgets that I’m there. Nothing happens in this world unless I’m invited to make it happen or I'm bearing witness to it. This doesn’t make Avowed bad—I loved it—but it’s symptomatic of one area where it falls short compared to its contemporaries, not to mention the first-person Bethesda games it’s clearly modelled on. I can’t attack anyone at will and suffer the consequences (though the narrative stages ample opportunities for me to kill or have mercy). Likewise, while stealth is an option, it’s usually just a means to get an upper hand on a particular foe. Once I’ve attacked—whether from cover or using an invisibility spell—every baddie in the vicinity knows I’m there.

Where agency exists it’s in the conversation trees, and Obsidian makes good in this regard. As in Pillars of Eternity, usually my important choices are between two undesirable outcomes, or between lesser and greater evils. Moral ambiguity usually amounts to whether something bad will happen now, or whether it might happen at a more severe scale later. Decisions culminate in fun ways, especially towards the end where sidequests and the critical path cleverly intersect. Nevertheless, it all builds towards a climax that, while satisfying, loses some of the ambiguity that seems to define the series.

It’s the choices that don’t matter a lot that I really enjoyed: Avowed let me wave my snark flag at high mast, and it’s possible to be very cheeky during otherwise very stern occasions, which always made me laugh. I can be an arsehole, I can be flippant, I can speak with sagacity or well-meaningly, or I can safely opt for the answer that suits the background I chose at the beginning of the game. It’s possible to build a certain kind of envoy, even if, in the end, all it amounts to is guided head canon.

Systems shock

Avowed arrives at a weird and exciting time for RPGs. Baldur's Gate 3, Stalker 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2—heck, let's include Elden Ring as well—have all demonstrated that some amount of friction, whether it be difficulty, complexity or both, is welcome. Maybe even expected.

Avowed is a better RPG than Dragon Age: The Veilguard in almost every meaningful way, ranging from the meandering depth of its companion conversations through to the nuance of its worldbuilding and its willingness to get extremely dark at times. But when I look at them side-by-side I see RPGs made for audiences at scale, at a time when RPGs made for dorks and weirdos are having much more success. I really hoped that Avowed would remove the blockbuster guardrails the way recent genre heavyweights have. Obsidian knows how to do this and is among the best to have done it. Avowed is smart, but it’s not reactive. It’s not breakable. It’s not excitingly pliant, like some of Obsidian's finest.

Perhaps that's not the kind of game Avowed wants to be; it definitely succeeds on the somewhat humbler terms of a narrative-driven action RPG with memorable characters, a gorgeous world, and really fun combat. Just imagine if one day, these separate Obsidian tracks—spicy, reactive CRPGs and sumptuous first-person narrative adventures—perfectly intersect.

The rest of us will have to wait for Avowed's proper release next Tuesday, February 18. Below, I've laid out Avowed's unlock times by time zone, with one section for advanced access, and another for all us plebs.

Avowed advanced access unlock time

Premium Edition players get "advance access" to Avowed beginning at 10 am Pacific on Thursday, February 13.

To play Avowed before its main launch date of February 18, you'll need to have put down $90 on a preorder of its premium edition to play five days early. Obsidian did finally reveal specific launch times for Avowed a few hours ahead of the advance access period to confirm the timing we'd been expecting.

Avowed early access launch times

• 10 am PST, February 13 (Los Angeles)
• 1 pm EST, February 13 (New York)
• 6 pm GMT, February 13 (London)
• 7 pm CEST, February 13 (Berlin)
• 5 am, February 14 (AEDT)
• 7 am, February 14 (NZDT)

Avowed full launch release date

Avowed's full launch date is on Tuesday, February 18, likely at 10 am Pacific. Since its Steam store launch for advance access lines up with a common Steam store unlock time, we should be able to assume the same will apply to its full launch date on the 18th.

Here's how that breaks down in other time zones:

• 10 am PST, February 18 (Los Angeles)
• 1 pm EST, February 18 (New York)
• 6 pm GMT, February 18 (London)
• 7 pm CEST, February 18 (Berlin)
• 5 am, February 19 (AEDT)
• 7 am, February 19 (NZDT)

Can you preload Avowed on PC?

It looks like you can only preload Avowed on Xbox. Going off Microsoft's other releases, we'll likely have to wait for Avowed to unlock to start downloading it on PC.

In December Sony released a new PlayStation ad featuring a callback to Bloodborne, along with the text "it's about persistence". This implied to me and other weirdos that our persistent begging for a Bloodborne PC port—or at the very least, a 60fps patch for the game running on PS5—might soon be gratified. Presumably an actual human or group of humans made that ad, and understood what it might suggest to Bloodborne fans.

Then, earlier this month, came news that Sony had bullied the creator of a Bloodborne 60fps mod for PS5 with a DMCA takedown notification. Granted, that's unpromising material for any rumour mill, but this is how desperate we've become. The reasoning went: perhaps Sony's sudden focus on this mod—which has existed since 2021—pointed to an imminent official solution that might involve the exchange of money between Sony and its customers, who have wasted no opportunity to make it clear that a Bloodborne PC port and/or remaster is something they would pay for. Not only that, but probably in numbers that would easily eclipse those enjoyed by, say, a remaster of the water-treading open world adventure Horizon Zero Dawn.

I'm not suggesting any of this is rational, by the way. It was only last month that former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida provided the most clearcut reason yet for Sony's inaction on Bloodborne, even if his reason was also just speculation. He put forward the theory that creator Hidetaka Miyazaki is interested in a remaster or sequel, but only if he can do it himself. The problem being that he's too busy with a bunch of other things.

Still, at this point it's rubbing salt in the wound whenever Sony dares remind us that it published Bloodborne (it also owns the IP). It's also rubbing salt in the wound whenever the company announces basically any other game, but triply so—quadruply so—when it announces a first-party remaster that is not Bloodborne.

Look at the fully-fledged remasters (as distinct from title updates that improve performance) already received during the PS5 generation:

So imagine the cosmic scale of salty woundedness when Sony announces Days Gone Remastered today, which will release day one on PC. As far as I know, not a single soul on this dear dying planet has asked for a Days Gone remaster.

I'm not bagging Days Gone. It has its fans, I assume, but Sony itself isn't among its most ardent admirers since it turned down a sequel. I played it. I have the trophies to show for it on my PS4, at least, though I have no recollection of doing so. It's an open world game about a guy on a motorbike. It has zombies and some neat horde tech. From memory it had that faintly annoying Sony prestige vibe to it. You know what I mean: The Last of Us is a post-apocalyptic zombie game, but seriously. God of War is a game about an angry violent demigod, but seriously. Days Gone is also a post-apocalyptic zombie game, and also seriously.

It's not Bloodborne, that's for sure. Sony's recent habit of remastering games that don't really need remastering is a pragmatic business move during a tumultuous time for the blockbuster end of the games industry. Even if I think remastering Horizon Zero Dawn is ridiculous as a creative decision, I wouldn't argue against the business logic.

The problem is that these remaster projects for niche and/or middling games are always going to be overshadowed by The Bloodborne Problem. Every time Sony announces a remaster and PC release for a first-party PlayStation game, it fails to be Bloodborne. And every time it fails to be Bloodborne, it frustrates the people who simply want to play a modern classic without frame pacing issues that make it look like a stop motion film in fast-forward.

Sony: speak to us about Bloodborne. Don't be cryptic about it, either. Don't cheekily allude to "persistence". Just lay it all out. We're adults here, albeit desperate ones. What initially felt like a smart tease has lately come to feel like a joke. How about this: you talk to us about Bloodborne, and I'll play your lil' Days Gone again.

Word of the longer-than-expected wait for the second expansion was first shared by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who posted Fergusson's update on Bluesky:

While talking about the successes and misses of Diablo 4's launch and subsequent updates and seasons, Fergusson said it was important for developers to share roadmaps of their future plans. Noting that a Diablo 4 roadmap for 2025 is on the way, he said, "Now, our second expansion won't be in that roadmap, because our second expansion is going to be in '26."

The initial plan was to give Diablo 4 yearly expansions, a schedule Fergusson revealed in a 2023 discussion about the game's live service operation. "When you look at the launch of the game and this first season, we see that as building a foundation on which we can build for the future," he said at the time. "So, as we look at our quarterly seasons, and we look at our annual expansions, those are the things we're really focused on for our live service."

Diablo 4's first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, launched on October 8, 2024, and it was excellent: "An expansion that transforms Diablo 4 into one of the best action RPGs of the last decade," we said in our 90% review. That 2024 release naturally suggested that the next expansion would show up sometime in 2025, but apparently Blizzard needs a little more time to get things done.

That may be understandable, given the ongoing pressures of maintaining a live service game, and Blizzard would hardly be the first to run up against that particular wall: Bungie has notably been forced to delay multiple Destiny 2 expansions over the years including Shadowkeep, Beyond Light, Witch Queen, and The Final Shape. It's tough keeping the wheels turning on a live service game, and Blizzard's had its hands full since Diablo 4 first dropped in 2023.

In a statement provided to PC Gamer, Blizzard confirmed that 2026 is indeed the plan. "In his DICE Summit presentation today on building a resilient live service, Diablo GM Rod Fergusson emphasized serving the game over the plan," a Blizzard spokesperson said. "To that, we are excited to share that we are in development on our second expansion for Diablo 4 which will debut in 2026."

What do you know? Warhorse must have heard my cry. The studio just came out and announced that official modding support is coming to the game. "Official modding support is coming to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 on Steamworks," says the studio. "Stay tuned for more details on how you’ll be able to create, tweak, and expand your medieval adventure."

And, well, that's it. But wait, perhaps we can augur something from Warhorse's phrasing and the tack it took with modding for KCD1. First of all, I find it interesting that the studio specifies support "on Steamworks." That sounds to me like it portends full-fledged support for Steam Workshop, which the first game never got. I approve of this, of course. I've said it before, but I'm a big fan of Steam Workshop and wish it were adopted more broadly: being able to subscribe to mods and pretty much never think about them again is a godsend, especially for older games.

That aside, I'd imagine we can expect Warhorse to put out something very similar to the modding tools it released for KCD1 all the way back in 2019. Those came out on Nexus Mods, and consisted of tools the devs themselves used to put the game together along with stuff like a "Database Dump" and "Raw level game data," that I'd probably understand better if I hadn't done history at university.

So I'd be shocked if Warhorse's scantly-detailed modding tools for the second game weren't just as sweeping, and if I'm right about the Steamworks thing I'll be glad to be able to hit a checkbox on the Henry Feethand mod and rest easy, knowing it will be kept updated and automatically installed in perpetuity. We'll find out for sure when Warhorse reveals more, but I very much hope I'm right. Even in 1403, you need a few modern conveniences.

I've been following this upcoming game for a while now—in fact, last year I chatted to the creators at Son of Oak about their vision for it, while they were still crowdfunding for its creation. Legend in the Mist is a fantasy game in a similar vein to Dungeons & Dragons, but using a lighter system that puts more emphasis on your character's place in the narrative rather than mechanical abilities. It's intriguingly flexible, designed to allow characters of wildly different power levels co-exist without issue in the same party—allowing, for example, a humble hobbit to be as crucial to the campaign as the elven prince, experienced ranger, and mysterious old wizard he travels with.

The latest Kickstarter update offers backers a look at WIP versions of the first two chapters of the upcoming core book, and there's a lovely surprise in there. Before the introduction in chapter one comes a 50 page choose-your-own-adventure comic that takes you through a solo Legend in the Mist session.

As a young hunter called Gerrin, seeking a magic herb to cure a poison afflicting his mother, you move through a series of scenes that teach you the rules step by step as they come up. At various stages you choose how you want to approach an obstacle—for example, in a confrontation with bandits threatening a local peddler, you can either rush to the rescue, try to scare them off with a warning shot from your bow, or attempt to rally the peddler to your side.

Different choices lead you to different pages, which take you through how that action is resolved, before you roll and find out your results. Despite the limited format, it's a proper implementation of the rules—you not only succeed or fail, you can have mixed successes, gain bonuses or take conditions, find items, and more. Like a videogame tutorial, you learn by doing, and there are even two different endings based on whether your quest succeeds or fails.

It's a really clever approach, and a visually impressive one too. Even with most of the art still WIP and uncoloured, the comic book quality art really sells the style and atmosphere of the game. It feels like a distinctly modern approach to an age-old problem—but the irony is, it's actually just running with an idea that's over 40 years old.

One of the earliest D&D starter boxes—the iconic "Red Box" Basic Set—featured its own singleplayer tutorial. It wasn't a comic, but like Legend in the Mist used some of the conventions of choose-your-own-adventure books to take new players through the rules, and similarly invited you to not just pick options but also roll dice and track your stats. In retrospect, it's strange that the idea didn't catch on—and it's certainly welcome to see it revived in a more lavish form than ever.

After the comic, the sample goes into the game's introduction—laying out how the game handles different styles of fantasy—and then an extensive chapter on character creation, which covers making everything from a clueless farmhand to a vampire king to a talking beaver. Right now this is a preview for backers only, but if you're curious about Legend in the Mist, it's worth checking out the free demo kit, and you can also preorder the game on Son of Oak's website. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm taking a second run at the tutorial—I swear I'm going to show those bandits who's boss this time...

"I can confirm that Geralt will appear in The Witcher 4," Cockle told me in an interview, reiterating what CDPR also confirmed after revealing its first trailer for the game back in December, at the end of which we heard Geralt's voice, implying would turn up somehow. "I just can't say exactly in what way or how much," Cockle added.

Now, Cockle's said this before. Back in August he said "Geralt will be part of the game," caveating the same thing: that he wasn't sure to what extent and in what capacity.

Apparently he got a bit of a finger-wagging from CDPR, he admitted later, for running his mouth before it had gotten to do its official reveal. We learned in November that The Witcher 4 is now in full production and then the first proper trailer for The Witcher 4 turned up at The Game Awards in December. Presumably he's gotten the thumbs up to be confirming things this time around, since he's not really saying anything that CDPR didn't already back in December.

"I'm thrilled," Cockle said of finding out that Ciri would become the new protagonist for the series. "I can't wait to see what they do with Witcher 4. I'm excited to go on Ciri's journey with her."

But don't go reading into that statement too literally and get Doug in trouble again. I imagine he probably means "go on Ciri's journey" in a metaphorical way. As far as we know for now.

Original story: There's probably a few holdouts somewhere, but for the most part, it seems like we've all come to accept Beamdog's "enhanced" versions of D&D classics like Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights 1 as those games' go-to editions. But there are a couple of classics still missing from the lineup: Icewind Dale 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2.

Icewind Dale 2's missing source code means the outlook for a remaster of that one looks grim, but an addition to SteamDB (spotted on Reddit) has me pretty much convinced we're due for an imminent dolled-up re-release of Obsidian's follow-up to the OG Neverwinter Nights, which up to now has reputedly been in licensing rights purgatory.

The package on SteamDB—which, if you're not familiar, is a third-party website that tracks changes to Steam's backend—is called Dungeons and Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition. Which could mean anything, really. I'm not a detective, how do you expect me to work out what that could possibly signify?

But wait, there's more. Alongside that inscrutable name, the package's update history suggests we'll be able to launch the game in default mode, Dungeon Master mode (misspelled "Dungen Master," somewhat charmingly), or launch the NWN2 Toolset. It's also already been tagged as: RPG, Action-RPG, Dungeon Crawler, Story Rich, and Fantasy.

Yeah, I'm as stumped as you are. Unless, wait, could "Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition" possibly be an enhanced edition of Neverwinter Nights 2? It just might be, and according to SteamDB's data, the new release of the classic will come in at a meaty 36GB of size, compared to the original's 5.5GB of required HDD space. It also seems to come with Steam Deck support out the gate.

To be fair, it looks like the devs have done a bunch of upscaling for the game's textures and whatnot to make them fit for modern screens. Plus, it looks like it comes with all the gubbins for the game's expansions: Storm of Zehir, Mask of the Betrayer, and Mysteries of Westgate.

Sounds great to me. The EULA tied to the package only mentions Aspyr, but I really have to imagine that the company handed the work off to Beamdog, which it acquired in 2022. If that's the case, consider me excited. Beamdog does great work on exactly this kind of thing, and I've wanted to play NWN2 (specifically, Mask of the Betrayer) for years. Looks like I'll get my chance, and probably soon.

I played three hours of Nightreign at a preview event last month and had a good time, but it's more than a little jarring to see From's sprawling open world RPG adapted into a run-based, 3-player squad game about racing around the map killing anything that moves. I had access to four Nightfarers (essentially "heroes"):

• Wylder: A jack-of-all-trades knight
• Duchess: A Bloodborne-y rogue with a dash instead of a dodge roll
• Recluse: A mage who absorbs FP from enemies
• Guardian: A birdman shield user with a powerful block

My biggest takeaway from Nightreign is how simple it is. You essentially jump in, kill stuff, and stack upgrades until the final boss. We should be thinking about it like a much smaller game than its predecessor. It's centered on a single chunk of map (for now, at least), doesn't have much progression unless FromSoftware was keeping much of the scope secret in my preview, and seems solely focused on combat and roguelike build crafting. Which is pretty cool, but probably not what everyone who loved Elden Ring is looking for.

If the current 2025 release schedule holds, Nightreign won't have to share May with many other games. Just Doom: The Dark Ages is currently set for the month, though there are dozens of 2025 games with TBA dates that could end up in the same window.

The From Software leveling experience is one reason why I like Souls games, but don't love them. Agonizing over where to dump points into stats to make meters slightly longer isn't my idea of satisfying progression, so when I touched a site of grace in Nightreign and watched my stats automatically increase according to my character's specialties, I thought, "This rules, and it's gonna piss some people off."

I hope I'm not dealing fatal psychic damage when I say that, structurally, Elden Ring Nightreign has more in common with Fortnite than Elden Ring. There's the battle royale-like closing circle, of course, but the flow is similar too. A full Nightreign run takes place over three in-game days, with days one and two lasting around 15 to 20 minutes. The daytime is basically one long looting phase: Your three-person squad runs around the map clearing mob camps, looting, killing lesser bosses, leveling, and maybe solving the odd 10-second puzzle. At night, you challenge a harder boss and then the sun rises for the next day. Leveling up? One button. Loot? Simple as grey, blue, purple, and so on. Dying? Not a big deal, just revive your buds by slashing at their corpse. Need to cross the map to outrun the closing circle? Just hop on a spectral bird and glide there.

One foot in the Limgrave

As someone who somehow clocked 106 hours in Elden Ring without seeing credits, it's jarring to see where From has hacked away at its complexity to reconfigure the RPG into a run-based hack-and-slasher. Armor isn't a thing, enemies don't respawn when you die, there are no NPCs in Limgrave to chat up other than the occasional merchant, and there's seemingly little progression between runs. Nightreign breaks more Souls game rules than anything before it. In that way, this really does play like a super ambitious mod, and so far it's pretty good.

Though my "so far" isn't very far at all. Day three is when you can challenge the major boss to complete a run, but due to some unfortunate networking issues at the Las Vegas event I attended, we never got past the day two boss without somebody dropping out. Bandai reps assured attendees this wasn't indicative of the final game, which I'm sure is true, but honestly, I don't think it was the last time I'll be kicking my desk after a botched Nightreign run—spotty multiplayer would be nothing new for a Souls game.

One aspect of Elden Ring that made the jump to Nightreign relatively unchanged is combat: My first round with Wylder, a knight character that Bandai described as beginner-friendly, was immediately comfortable, like loading up an Elden Ring save from 2022. I'm not one to tinker with builds for hours in these games, so it's great to choose a predefined Nightfarer and just roll with it. Eventually, I gravitated toward Guardian, the birdman who begins with a big shield and halberd, two items I entirely avoided in the base game.

The improvisational nature of Nightreign's builds alleviates the pressure of maintaining perfectly complementary gear: All characters can hold all weapons, so I spent three hours experimenting with swords, axes, crossbows, and spells I never considered in the base game.

Round and Roundtable

Build variety is bound to be Nightreign's greatest strength as it pulls from an already deep pool of weapons, Ash of War skills, bosses, and whatever new stuff director Junya Ishizaki's team has cooked up for the $40 standalone, and there's a thrill to its accelerated power curve. My GamesRadar cohort (and dedicated Souls fan) Austin Wood was consistently finding some of the most powerful Elden Ring weapons on day one and two of a Nightreign run. By the time the sun set on day two, I felt more powerful and capable than I ever did in base Elden Ring.

I'm less convinced by the repeatability of Nightreign's map. It's a remixed version of Limgrave with new structures and randomized elements—Bandai mentioned the full game will have a chance to spawn unique points of interest we didn't see, like a volcano in the middle of Limgrave—but ultimately, this is one map, not particularly huge, and too familiar to feel truly new.

Nightreign will be an interesting litmus test of why people come to Souls games. If it's all about swinging big swords and dodge-rolling away from impossibly hard bosses, Nightreign is gonna be a feast. But if it's From's quieter moments that stick with you—exchanges with weird NPCs, taking careful steps deeper into a vast fortress, contemplating The Lands Between's cryptic questlines—well, Nightreign ain't got time for any of that. The circle is closing! Your buddy just pinged the next monster camp! Stop looking at that beautiful skyline, there's XP to grind!

Graceful descent

At times, the circle was a real buzzkill. So much of Nightreign is about freedom and empowerment—the superhuman sprint speed, juiced weapon stats, overpowered ultimate abilities—but there's no time afforded to stop and smell the scarlet rot.

In one run, we decided to explore a mine shaft hoping to find the advanced upgrade material for our weapons. In Elden Ring, mines gave me the creeps—it was always a "shield up" affair as I tiptoed around corners expecting the worst—but here, I was first through the door sprinting straight down the tunnels, skipping ambushes entirely and rushing toward the miniboss at the end. It's not how I usually like to absorb FromSoft's worlds, but there's not much of a choice when you're killing against a clock. In a world where From makes its game especially for me, Nightreign would be more like a base Elden Ring lobby with the Seamless Co-op mod installed.

The lack of a social hub or even a true pre-game lobby seems like a missed opportunity. You can explore the Roundtable Hold solo and chat up the Nightfarers between runs, but I'm kinda shocked there's no way to invite your buds to a group and visit the hub together before a mission. Instead, we're still punching in private lobby codes like "8888" and praying to lock hands with our friends in the matchmaking void. Honestly, why isn't this part of the game just exactly like Monster Hunter?

Which isn't to suggest a co-op, fleshed-out Elden Ring arcade mode is a bad idea—we had lots of fun in our short burst—but Nightreign's fixation on pure combat and forward momentum is already showing its limits. A couple hours in, after getting comfortable with the flow of days one and two, that long daytime looting phase was starting to get dull. Anything smaller than a boss didn't really pose a threat unless we got careless, and the more efficient we got at wiping out mob camps, sprinting to the next one, and upgrading our flasks at churches, the more it felt like the majority of playing Nightreign is thwacking various loot piñatas with a stick until the real fun begins.

As our final run of the day—our furthest push into the day two boss—was once again cut short by a dropped connection, I was glad to get the chance to rein in my Nightreign expectations so far ahead of its May 30 release. I want to play more, try the four Nightfarers we didn't have access to, see other map variations, and finally finish a damn run. But I won't be looking for Elden Ring qualities that Nightreign isn't here to supply.

Barely anyone in KCD2 expects exclusivity, which is pretty forward-thinking of them for the 15th century, and the game won't limit you to picking one of its romances and sticking to it. You can blaze a trail across Czechia's bathhouses and bedrooms that would make Casanova blush if you so choose, although it's maybe worth bearing in mind that Henry at least notionally has a sweetheart—Theresa—back home. What happens in Kuttenberg stays in Kuttenberg?

So if you need a helping hand to win someone's, uh, hand, we've got your back. Below you'll find a guide to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's many romances, detailing just what you need to know to make 'em swoon.

How to romance Klara

Klara was the first romance I encountered in KCD2, and if you need evidence about how easy it can be, I wooed her pretty much by accident. She's the healer and herbalist at Nebakov Fortress when you travel there with Hans during the Back in the Saddle quest.

You can strike up a conversation with her after you've duelled Adjutant Michael for Lord Capon's honour. Klara will tend to your wounds, and while you'll have a choice to accept flirtily or more straightforwardly, it doesn't matter which you pick for the romance to continue. I told you it wasn't complicated.

Once she's done fixing you up, she'll ask you to help her gather herbs in the woods. Just accept, follow her to the glade, regale her with some tales of chivalric heroism on the way, and collect the herbs she asks you to. They're all right there in the spot she leads you to, so you don't have to look hard.

This is probably the only time you might actually mess up. The first time I did this, I took too long getting the herbs and Henry eventually decided it was time to go back and see Capon, leaving me unable to finish Klara's quest. So make sure you move quickly.

Once you've got the herbs, Klara will lead you to a clearing and present you with a riddle. Pick the answer "I think she's called Klara" and, hey presto, Henry's pulled.

But wait, there's more. Klara's romance continues later on in the game during The Finger of God quest. At this point, Henry and pals—Klara included—are besieged behind the walls of Nebakov Fortress.

You'll find Klara arguing with guards outside Nebakov's dungeons, demanding she be let in to tend to your wounded enemies. You can intervene and get her access if you pass a speech check, but either way she'll eventually end up outside her hut and ask you for help healing your own injured men: Mark, Kozliek, and Zwerk.

Grab the schnapps from the chest on the top floor of Klara's hut behind her and head down the hill to the wounded.

To heal Mark, you'll need to:

• Clean his wounds with the schnapps
• Bandage him up

And that's all. Who said this doctor lark was hard, eh? There are other things you can do, but they're not necessary, and since you run the risk of failing one of the skill checks, it's best to leave it.

To heal Kozliek:

• Clean his wounds with the schnapps
• Cauterize him using gunpowder
• Give him clean bandages
• Give him a digestive potion

And, finally, to heal Zwerk:

• Clean his wounds with the schnapps
• Bandage him up
• Rub Chamomile on his ankle
• Give him a Saviour Schnapps for the road

That's it, you're a regular Florence Nightingale. Head back to Klara and give her the good news, then select the "There must be someone you care about" dialogue option. After that, choose either the "No walk today, I reckon" or "Let's go and get that drink" (the first one is easier) speech check.

When you finish your quests around Nebakov, go to bed in Klara's cabin and she'll join you.

How to romance Katherine

Katherine is Zizka's partner in crime, and romancing her isn't much harder than courting Klara. Your interactions with her early on, in Troskowicz and Trosky Castle, don't matter, so don't worry about blowing your chances if you lose a bunch of rep in your first couple of interactions.

Note, however, that seeing this romance through will prevent you from romancing Hans Capon.

You might as well be kind and flirty with her across all your interactions, but the bits that really matter come in the form of two sidequests.

First up, The Fifth Commandment. You get this one once you arrive in Kuttenberg, where Katherine is working at a local inn. She wants you to track down a serial killer preying on young women in the city.

All that matters is that you complete the quest. How you complete it is irrelevant. You can either hand the culprit over to the bailiff or let Katherine exact vigilante justice herself. Neither one will prevent you from romancing her later.

The next important side quest is The Stalker, which Katherine will give you when she's undercover as a bathhouse maid in Sigismund's Camp. She's caught the eye of a creep, and wants Henry to put a stop to it.

Make sure you finish this one before you finish The Lion's Den main quest, as you'll miss your opportunity afterwards.

The easiest way to do this is to pass the Houndmaster speech check "Mutt will track him down." Katherine will give you her shoe, which Mutt will sniff and lead you right to the villain's tent. If Mutt's not with you, you can just wait by her tent for the stalker to appear at night.

Once you find him, you can get him to leave Katherine alone with either a speech or intimidate check, a 200 groschen bribe, or just by beating the snot out of him. Return to Katherine to finish the quest.

Done all that? Great. Fast forward to the main quest Hunger and Despair and, when it comes time to say your farewells to everyone, pick the option "I'll bring help, and everything will be alright again" (it should be marked with a romance icon) with Katherine, then continue with the quest as normal. Just before you abscond from Suchdol, Katherine and Henry will share a tender moment.

How to romance Rosa

Rosa is the bookish scion of Kuttenberg's foremost banking dynasty, and the good news is that you can romance her without cutting yourself off from anyone else, if you want to be a lothario about it.

Her romance kicks off during the quest Taking French Leave. Head upstairs and chat to her before going to Maleshov and she'll tell you about a secret passage and give you the side quest Rosa's Book, asking you to retrieve a tome from the fortress.

The book she asks you to get is called A book of humorous anecdotes, and it's on the second floor of the Maleshov Fortress tower, by the window in Lady Ofka's room. Make sure you grab it and give it a skim right away, as you won't get another chance outside of this main quest.

Once you've completed Taking French Leave and rescued Capon, return the book to Rosa.

Tell Rosa "I perused it" and you'll get three possible speech checks:

• [Scholarship] "The writing style seemed familiar"
• [Charisma] "The author really isn't holding back"
• [Persuasion] "What do you like about it?"

Regardless of your choice, you'll learn that Rosa wrote the book herself, and wants help finishing it.

In Rosa's room, ask her to make the book about "A woman" and to "Make her courageous."

The romance is then on hold until Dancing with the Devil, when Rosa is a hostage in Maleshov tower. The only choice that matters here is that you don't pick the dialogue option "There's no other way. We're torching the tower." Women apparently don't like it when you try to set them on fire. Weird.

Fast forward to the Oratores quest, and make sure that you offer to carry Rosa over the water during your infiltration of Ruthard Manor.

Later on in the same quest, once you've cleared out the bandits, speak to Rosa and choose the following dialogue options:

• "It'll be alright."
• "Allies are our most valuable asset."
• "Maybe it won't be necessary."

You'll then get a timed dialogue choice where you should choose to Kiss Rosa. Romance, thy name is Henry.

How to romance Hans Capon

So far as I'm concerned, the only correct romance choice in KCD2 is this one, and luckily the game makes it laughably easy to see through. Just make sure you choose every dialogue option with a heart icon next to it when they appear. You'll notice the first one at Trosky castle, a little bit after you rescue Hans from the gallows.

That's really it. Then, during Hunger and Despair near the end of the game, make sure you go and say your goodbyes to Hans before you leave the castle. He will, rather awkwardly, bring up a tale of two knights who seem to have been a little more than friends. Remark "We have a lot in common with them" then choose Kiss him.

Then congratulate yourself on bagging a rich guy.

How to romance Margaret

There's solid odds you'll miss Margaret completely in an average playthrough, so make sure you pop down to the mill southwest of Bylany in the game's second map when you get a chance.

Once there, you'll hear Margaret crying out for help from a locked barn. Release her and then settle things with the miller.

Margaret will then vanish, but you can find her again, begging at the crossroads at the intersection between Pschitoky, Miskowitz, Bylany, and Kuttenberg. Let her explain herself and don't choose hostile dialogue options.

Once you've heard her story, you'll have an option to give Margaret the money she needs outright. Don't. To romance her, you need to help her with her scheme to blackmail the merchant Latsek.

Follow the quest through to its end and make sure you obey Margaret's instructions to the letter. At the end, she'll offer to kiss you. Accept, and you'll spend the night together, although you'll pay the 250 groschen she nicks off you for the pleasure.

Quick Flings

Those aren't the only, ahem, romantic encounters available to you in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. There are also a bunch of quicker one-night-stands you can pursue over the course of the game.

The most obvious of these is the bathhouse maids, who double as sex workers in medieval society. You can, if you're so inclined, pay for those services whenever you take a bath (it's the one marked by the heart icon), which will net you same Time Well Spent perk that a tryst with anyone else does, which adds +1 to your Strength, Vigor, and Vitality.

You can also romance one bathhouse maid in particular in Kuttenberg: Lousy Mary, who is much nicer than her name suggests. During the quest Into the Underworld, you can chat with Mary about the whereabouts of Goatskin, at which point she'll invite you to drink. Accept her offer and, when she follows that up with an offer of a roll in the hay, say "Let's do it!"

Probably the first true 'romance' scene you'll get, though, comes during the Wedding Crashers quest. At the wedding, the mother of a guest named Doubravka will ask you to invite her to dance, as she's a bit of a wallflower.

Accept the quest and head over to Doubravka. Pass a speech check inviting her to dance and, well, dance with her. Later on in the evening, chat to her again and she'll invite you for some alone time somewhere more private (although I have to be honest, it's a lot more entertaining to pass the speech check which has Henry let her down gently with a tale about being kicked by a horse).

There are also two romances available during the feast in For Victory! You can spend a delightful evening with either the knight Black Bartosch or the Widow Johanka.

To romance Bartosch, chat with him about the pretty girls at the party and, when he indicates his lack of interest, say "I reckon I know what you're getting at" then "Shall we spend the rest of the evening alone?"

To romance Johanka, chat to her instead, and pick the speech checks you're most likely to pass when regaling her tales of your bravery. After that, accept her invitation to go outside and choose the option "I think I can convince you" when it comes up.

"Avowed breaks down barriers with cross-buy" is the bold claim made in the title of a new Blizzard blog post: "It's nice to have options. With Avowed, we're introducing 'cross-buy' to Battle.net, a feature that opens up more ways to play games in more places with a single purchase. When you buy any edition of Avowed on either Battle.net or Xbox, you can then play the game on both platforms by linking your Xbox and Battle.net accounts."

Being able to play a game that you have paid for on different platforms may not sound very groundbreaking, but surprisingly, it's not all that common for videogames. In games like Overwatch 2, players have been able to merge different accounts for various consoles, but you have to choose one as the main account and then stick to that. And while other games like the Call of Duty series are available to play on Battle.net, Avowed is the first game outside of Activision Blizzard that is available to play on the launcher since Microsoft acquired the publisher.

But while this news is good for those people who happen to own an Xbox and a PC, some players don't think it's as groundbreaking as Microsoft would lead us to believe. "Give my Steam copy an option to be played on Xbox, then we can talk about broken barriers," one player says. Someone else points out that this is a relatively simple step for Microsoft: "PlayStation, Nintendo, and Steam don't have storefronts on the other platforms. MS can do this because they're sticking to the storefronts they own. It's not cross-buy to Steam. Likewise, the other platforms would potentially lose a cut if they allowed it to be eligible for their platforms too."

Back in 2016, Microsoft introduced the Play Anywhere program just as it started to focus on PC gaming again. This lets players buy a game once and then play it on a PC or console; save files, DLC, and achievements all carried over. While this did provide more options, it also had a catch for PC players: Instead of getting to buy a game via Steam, those who wished to take advantage of the Play Anywhere program had to use the dreaded Microsoft Store, whose infamous UWP framework caused a ton of problems.

The only saving grace now is that instead of being roped into just using the Microsoft Store, players now also have the option to use their Battle.net, which is easier and nicer to navigate. Otherwise, this cross-buy feature for Avowed isn't really that new, and it doesn't seem to break down any significant barriers.

Both actors spoke about the in-production second season in separate interviews recently, but they were similarly optimistic about how filming is going. Purnell shared her enthusiasm for season 2 during MegaCon's Orlando panel (via Tom's Guide), stating "It's going to be really good, I think. It's a wild ride. It's a wild ride. I'm really exhausted. We're working really well to get it out on time.” She also suggested that seasons 2 will contain some pretty big surprises. “No one's going to be able to predict what happens. There's some big twists this time around.”

Purnell's thoughts were echoed by Goggins in an interview with Deadline, where he revealed his own feelings about filming season 2, which has been ongoing since November. "I thought season 1 was extraordinary, personally, I was very pleased with it. This blows it out of the water. What these writers have done and the artisans that have come together to tell this story. It's really gonna be something. I can't wait for people to see it. We're working really hard to make that happen."

Now, it's worth bearing in mind that Purnell and Goggins are unlikely to publicly disparage the show's progress even if filming wasn't going well. But given the strength of the first series, and the boldness of the pair's claims, it seems fair to say that their confidence in season 2 is genuine.

While there's little hard information about season 2 available right now, we do know that New Vegas will feature prominently, and that Macaulay Culkin is joining the cast as a "crazy genius-type character". Meanwhile, some recent photos purportedly from the Fallout set showed a dinosaur head that looked an awful lot like Dinky the T-Rex, the towering statue in Fallout: New Vegas where you encounter one of the game's best companions.

There's also no word on when exactly season 2 will arrive, though the general consensus seems to be early 2026. Filming of the second season was recently delayed by the LA wildfires, which may be what Purnell was referencing when she emphasised how hard the team was working to get the show wrapped on time. Either way, I'm happy to wait as long as it takes if it means the season 2 is as good, if not better, than the first.

It's a mess alright, but one person who's having none of it is Samantha Béart, best known for their portrayal of Karlach in Baldur's Gate 3. That performance has apparently attracted the attention of at least some of the people working on Disco Elysium follow-up projects, but sadly for them Béart said they're not interested unless the project meets one very specific requirement.

"To the next studio that tries this: if your 'spiritual successor' to Disco Elysium does not involve creator Robert Kurvitz, then save both of us some time and miss me with that casting call," Béart wrote on X (via GamesRadar).

Béart didn't share specifics on which of the known Disco Elysium successor projects made overtures, but it seems clear that at least one of them did. And with good reason: Karlach is one of Baldur's Gate 3's most beloved characters (and number one in our hearts), and Béart earned a BAFTA nomination for the role in the Best Performer in a Leading Role category. The name recognition alone would be a real boost for any ZA/UM wannabe looking to break through the noise.

The good news for people who'd like to see a Béart/Kurvitz crossover happen (which is to say, pretty much every RPG fan everywhere) is that it could. Kurvitz, the lead writer and designer of Disco Elysium, has launched a new studio called Red Info along with artist Aleksander Rostov and writer Helen Hindpere. It's not clear what they're working on just yet, though: As of October 2024, Red Info had filed a copyright claim for something called Corinthians, but was also still battling with what's left of ZA/UM over the rights to Disco Elysium.

So it goes with Morrowind's predecessor—The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall. Daggerfall is a weird, wide, rambling thing, and absolutely still worth playing in 2025, especially since it's now free. But if you were to just Google an easy way to play it, chances are you'll stumble across the 2022 Daggerfall GOG Cut, a version of Daggerfall with the GOG stamp of approval, bundled up with a bunch of mods to make it feel a bit more approachable in the modern era.

Problem is, just like MGSO, it's not great. In most ways, it's inferior to just downloading the genuinely excellent Daggerfall Unity by itself and running the game straight from there. The GOG Cut is outdated, the mods it includes aren't their most recent versions, and some of them don't quite mesh. It's been the bête noire of the Daggerfall community for a while now, and so GOG has come out and announced it's delisting the whole thing tomorrow, February 12, at 2 pm GMT.

In a post on the GOG forums yesterday, company spokesperson king_kunat told players that GOG was delisting the Daggerfall GOG Cut because "at this time, the pack is outdated and no longer fulfills its purpose of providing a hassle-free modded experience to the game."

Anyone who already has the Daggerfall GOG Cut in their library—and anyone who adds it before the deadline on February 12—will get to keep it, but otherwise? That's the end of the road, buddy. Honestly, it's for the best. The community's complaints about the package weren't wrong. What's more, king_kunat says GOG is "working on a solution that will allow us to publish and maintain such projects better in the future, so stay tuned!"

Which I find very intriguing indeed. As someone who still regularly revisits old games—replays of Deus Ex, Bloodlines, KOTOR, the original System Shocks, and plenty more besides—I've reached a point in my life where I'm fed up with the faff of finding out which community patch is now the de facto best and which quality of life mods are considered total necessities every time I go back to a classic. I could just play the OGs in their original, fuzzy, 4:3 resolutions and with their original charming crashes, sure, but also I don't hate myself (in that precise way).

So if GOG is trying to figure out a way to make that process a bit less of a pain, sign me right up. For a long time I've longed for a world where Steam Workshop got magically switched on for all my favourite classics, so that keeping them in a ready-to-go state was as simple as subscribing to a few mods and never thinking about it again. That's not happened, but hey, maybe GOG has an alternative up its sleeve? I live in hope.

But the start of that journey is the end of the GOG cut of Daggerfall. If you want to grab it for posterity's sake, you should make sure you do it before it gets yoinked off the store tomorrow.

There's always a scrappy, DIY energy to it all, and tons of creativity flowing. The result is a bunch of great and often very weird ideas that might not otherwise get the chance to blossom in the hobby. It's a perfect opportunity to pick up a few things to spice up your shelf or your campaign without breaking the bank.

But there are a lot of projects to go through, and it can be hard to find the ones for you. That's where I come in. Just like I did last year, I've searched high and low for the cream of the crop and picked out my favourites for you, across a wide range of styles, genres, and games. Read on, and find your new favourite zine.

Cryo-Siq

After the success of last year's GAS! GAS! GAS!, designer Waco Matrixo is back with another adventure for brilliant sci-fi horror RPG Mothership. This time it's a spooky space slasher flick, with a crew newly awakened from cryo-sleep being stalked by a chemically-enhanced killer. I shudder to think what's in the "coffin-sized box" they've been hired to transport. Expect twists and turns, great layout, and art packed with personality—Waco has been doing great work with Mothership adventures and videos for years now.

The Goblin Guide to Advanced Dice-Rolling

Unusually, this project isn't an adventure, supplement, or game at all. Instead, it's pitched as an accessible guide to the mathematics of dice-rolling, including how various rare dice types—your d16s, d40s, etc—can be simulated with dice you already own. In fact, creator and YouTuber Z Gosck claims that with this guide, you could replace your entire dice collection with just a d12 and a d10 and still be able to make any roll you needed. Efficient! And it all looks to be delivered with enough personality and humour to make it all entertaining to boot.

Passage to Yondoor

If you like messing about with miniatures, and especially 3D printing, this two-player tactical combat RPG seems like the perfect excuse. One of you plays a party of heroes, the other the GM, building out a procedurally-generated dungeon full of monsters as you play. The nice thing about this campaign is that if you're curious, you can actually already download for free not only the core rules but a whole set of STLs for the models too. If you like what you see there, you can back the campaign for a printed version of the rulebook and more STLs, including a fun set of dungeon blocks that have a charming Minecraft-esque look.

Something Rotten

A troll has fallen down a well and his body's exploded into dismembered parts, and somehow that's kicked off a goblin cult uprising in the depths. This 5e-compatible adventure promises "the opportunity to get slapped around by a severed troll hand or kicked up the backside by an enormous foot", which would be a hard pitch to pass up on its own. Paired with the wonderfully quirky art, it's irresistible.

Thieves of the Tome

This one falls into the 'it'll be fascinating if they can pull it off' category. You play book thieves out to steal magic hoarded by corrupt wizards, but the twist is that all the elements of the game are dictated by what actual books you have at home. Everyone grabs one off the shelf and uses the writing in it to design their characters and spells, and the GM even does the same to determine what will appear in the adventure. It's the sort of high concept pitch that might just not work at all in play, but if there's ever a time to throw a bit of money behind a cool, mad idea, it's ZineQuest month.

So Many Horrid Ghosts

Shakespeare characters that were killed off in their plays unite to take revenge on their creator. Now that's a perfect premise for a one-shot RPG. Even better, the mechanics are influenced by iambic pentameter—when you take an action, you roll a d10 and get that many syllables to describe it, with only a perfect line of ten being a guaranteed success. Playable heroes include Lady Macbeth, Mercutio, Ophelia, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as one combined character. Finally, the tabletop fan/English Lit nerd demographic is being served.

Horii seemed like a man who had all the time in the world, and was going to enjoy it. Dragon Quest fans may well agree, because they've now been waiting eight years for the next instalment in the much-beloved series, the longest gap by far between releases, with no indication of when Dragon Quest 12: The Flames of Fate may be coming, or even if it still is. The series has lost two of its key creatives since Dragon Quest 11: Akira Toriyama, Dragon Quest's main artist, died in March last year, while series composer Koichi Sugiyama died in 2021.

Yuji Horii is of course the creator, director and main writer of the Dragon Quest games and, speaking on a recent livestream with his group KosoKoso Hōsō Kyoku (thanks Automaton), sought to reassure players that Dragon Quest 12 remains very much a going concern.

Horii says the team's "working hard on Dragon Quest 12" and to expect new information on the game little by little. Dragon Quest 12 was first announced in 2021 with a teaser video but, since then, there's been almost no information about it: Horii has previously said it will change up the series with a darker and more mature tone, with a story built around impactful player choices, and an overhaul of the traditional command battle system. This entry is being co-developed by Square Enix, Hexadrive and serial DQ collaborators Orca.

Last year Horii spoke about Dragon Quest 12 following the death of Toriyama. "There have been some concerns about Dragon Quest 12, but I was actually in a meeting about it very recently," said Horii on X. "While I can’t share any details yet, I want it to be something worthy of the posthumous work of the two [Toriyama and Sugiyama] who passed away. I’ll do my best!"

Despite the lack of details on this most recent livestream, Horii apologised for any confusion around the game's status, and shot down any speculation it had been cancelled.

That never seemed particularly likely, as the Dragon Quest series remains one of Square Enix's biggest hitters: The most recent release, Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake, is one of the rare games that managed to actually exceed Square Enix's ludicrous sales expectations. And while we're waiting for the info on 12, there's plenty more Dragon Quest in the meantime with a remake of the first two entries due on Steam this year.

A little skull wheel will appear in the bottom right and start counting down. If you assumed that it'd just make you sick and you'd get better, you're wrong. Food poisoning in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 kills you if it goes untreated, so you'll want to get that done as soon as possible and perhaps even carry a spare cure with you in case it happens again while out and about.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 food poisoning cure

To cure food poisoning you'll need to either buy or brew yourself a digestive potion. You can purchase these at most apothecaries—such as the one at Troskowitz where you start— or you can even just buy the recipe itself, though it's a lot more expensive. You could also just brew the potion using the recipe below.

You will need water, two handfuls of thistle, a handful of nettle, and a handful of charcoal:

1. Add the thistle to the cauldron and boil for two turns
2. Grind the nettle and add it to the cauldron
3. Boil for one turn
4. Grind the charcoal and add it to the cauldron
5. Finally, pour

If you need an alchemy station in the first area, use the one at Bozhena's Shack from the prologue. Trying to use the Troskowitz apothecary's station behind the counter just makes him kind of mad.

Obviously, this isn't ideal if you're out in the middle of nowhere and watching that death circle rapidly deplete, but sadly there's no other option. You might want to load a save and in future just make sure that you always have digestive potion stored on your horse in case of accidents. It is surprisingly easy to eat a bad bit of food in your inventory after not noticing it had a red condition.

Generally, your best bet for avoiding food poisoning is to eat fresh food or carry dried food with you. Either that or eat from the cooking pots when you're staying at inns. Early in the game, both Miller Krezyl and Blacksmith Radovan let you eat from the cooking pots in their houses when you're staying there in the Wedding Crashers quest, so it's easy enough to get food.

A video shared by Niktek on X (via GamesRadar) reveals what happens to players who insist that it's good to be bad, and it's not pretty. Details of his crimes aren't specified but it's clearly some heavy stuff: A local gendarme informs Henry that he's crossed a line, and Henry, perhaps tired of the weight this cruel world has placed upon his shoulders, meekly submits. Cut to a shot of Henry in the slam, where it appears he might be having second thoughts about the whole thing, and then he's led out through a jeering crowd that seems disturbingly eager to watch him swing.

Up the gallows he goes, and onto the stump as sad music plays. Birds fly overhead; Henry clenches his fists and closes his eyes as the music fades to silence and the local boss tells the executioner to do his duty. And then, ka-yoink! Henry is Bohemia's newest wind chime. Cut to black, and a split-second later, a game over screen appears: "You have been executed for your crimes."

Capital punishment isn't cool, but it is cool that Warhorse Studios has worked in a full-on premature conclusion to the story of Henry—no horsing around with scripted breakouts or text popups telling players he spent six months in prison and now he's out and feels very badly about the whole thing. Your business is concluded for all time, and sure, a reload will get you back to the world of the living, but whatever you were doing that led into this mess, you're going to have to think of a different plan.

This kind of surprise ending is rare but not unprecedented. You can finish Far Cry 4 in about 15 minutes by just waiting for Pagan Min to come back to the dinner table, and that was such a popular little Easter egg that Ubisoft worked a similar premature conclusion into Far Cry 5. Far Cry 6 has an unexpectedly early ending on offer too, although it takes a few hours to reach rather than a few minutes; you can also wrap things up in Baldur's Gate 3 earlier than you might expect, and you can forgo a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 by following a certain path in the Phantom Liberty expansion.

Like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, what makes these finishes notable is that developers included a complete process for a proper game-ending scenario that shouldn't be. You're not just skipping to the end using a glitch or knowledge you shouldn't have, you're getting a full and proper ending. Just one that, y'know, sucks.

The consistency with which NPC and player walking speeds fail to match up suggests some sort of global conspiracy. Nothing else makes sense. It's such a simple thing, you'd think, given that designers know that there's always going to be a specific speed range that players are moving within.

Sure, you might have a sprint, or a sneak, and you might be able to control your speed more precisely when playing with a controller, but there's still always a minimum and maximum speed. Yet so many games are filled to the brim with NPCs that willfully ignore this, walking or running at a pace that's too fast for the slowest player speed and too slow for a faster one, making it impossible to match the NPC's pace without constantly stopping and starting.

This is just annoying enough for it to be distracting—you become more focused on keeping pace with the NPC than hearing what they have to say, turning even the most leisurely stroll into a big ol' chore. And we've been very vocal about hating it, yet it crops up all the frigging time. It is an ancient issue that has multiple demonstrable solutions, but rarely do games bother trying to rectify it.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 does not fall into this camp. It's one of the rarities—the type of game we should treasure—that finds a nice, clean solution. Instead of NPCs having to take into account all the possible speeds the player might move at, and instead of players needing to find a sweet spot where they can match the pace of the NPC, the process is automated. You hit a button and you simply follow the NPC without any further input.

Now you can just enjoy the conversation and soak in the sights of Bohemia without a care in the world. Well, except for the civil war, the mountain of injustices and the very real possibility that you might get stabbed in the face. Walking with a pal, though, is no longer a concern. This extends to trips on horseback, too, and if you're riding with multiple people you can choose who to follow.

This is just one of several ways that KCD2 makes travel less frustrating. The fast travel system is one of the best around, for instance, and finds a sweet spot between convenience and maintaining interesting journeys. And even when you're riding alone, you can command your horse to follow the road, so you don't need to worry about your speed or direction until you hit a junction or hop off the beaten track.

You'll cover a lot of ground in Henry's shoes, and meaty journeys are part of KCD2's appeal, so it's such a relief that it cuts out a lot of the bullshit, instead just allowing you to enjoy exploring its gargantuan pair of maps without fiddly systems interrupting the good times. In huge games like this, it's often these small details that make all the difference.

We've seen other solutions, too, though. Some games simply—and I know, this is madness—have NPCs move at either your slowest or fastest speeds, so you just follow along behind them. Others, like older Assassin Creeds, allow you to match the speed of the NPC when you get close enough, letting you sync up due to your proximity. These are not out-there solutions. They're just common sense. And they're not new ideas, either.

So yeah, I don't think it's too radical to suggest that devs who continue to force us to stop and start and stop and start and stop and start until we just break down and start screaming at NPCs should do jail time. By willfully tormenting us for years they have broken an important social contract and must be punished. They won't learn, otherwise.

This isn't one of those RPGs with a tonne of different endings—you'll find yourself in a similar spot regardless of what you do. There are, however, some key decisions you need to make if you want to get the most positive version of said ending. Since some of these decisions are also made around 30 hours before the ending itself, if you were bad, there's not that much you can do.

Below I'll run through all the necessary choices to get the best ending variation. This guide will, of course, contain spoilers around key plot points in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, as well as the ending itself.

Kingdom: Come Deliverance 2 best ending

After the siege of Suchdol is lifted, Henry wanders onto a hill above the battlefield and sits down to ponder his journey. Before long he's joined by apparitions of his dead parents who proceed to recount and judge the choices you've made in the game.

It's worth noting that this is the only version of the ending—what changes based on your decisions is what they say to you, whether they approve, plus at least one variation on the events at Suchdol itself which I'll go into below this list.

Here's what you need to choose to get the best ending variation:

• Save Semine: You can either do this by finding out about Olda Semine's involvement with the bandits and not telling Von Bergow to prevent the raid, or you can side with Semine instead of Hashek if it does happen.
• Stop the Dry Devil from burning Maleshov: During the Dancing with the Devil quest when you attack Maleshov castle, you need to stop the Dry Devil from burning the town by fighting him and taking command.
• Don't take revenge on Brabant: When you sneak out of Suchdol castle into the Praguer's camp, you'll find that Brabant has taken Sam hostage. You'll have to best him in combat and then you'll get the choice to kill him. As tempting as this is, you shouldn't. This sadly makes the next section harder as he raises the alarm, but your conscience will be clear.
• Refuse to kill Markvart Von Aulitz: Also in the praguer's camp, you can find a dying Markvart Von Aulitz in the Suchdol Inn. This is a fantastic scene but if you want the best ending you need to leave him to die instead of killing him yourself.
• Be an honourable dude: That means try not to steal, murder, and rob people. The same goes for doing dishonourable deeds during quests. Henry needs to be a good guy in order for his parents to approve. It's possible that if you use an Indulgence Chest and repent that your parents might recognise this in the ending, but that's unconfirmed. Better to stick on the straight and narrow if you want mummy and daddy's approval.

If you do all of these, your parents will entirely approve of your decisions and shower you with praise. It isn't absolute, though. For example, if you save Semine and Maleshov but you were an unrepentant thief and murderer, your parents will praise you for the former while telling you that you were unfortunately a bit of a bastard.

Should you save Sam or leave him?

The only other choice relevant to the ending is whether you escape with Sam after you defeat Brabant and this actually has a big impact on certain parts of the ending:

• If you escape with Sam: You'll have to carry him to a horse in the praguer's camp, making that section harder, but Sam will live. The unfortunate downside is that with a wounded Sam in tow, Henry spends longer getting reinforcements, and so the praguers manage to break into Suchdol and steal the Sigismund's silver back.
• If you leave Sam: This makes escaping much easier and Henry is faster getting reinforcements, which means the praguers don't have time to steal the silver. However, Sam gets hanged in the praguer's camp since you left him behind.

It's a little up to interpretation, but the best result here is you saving your half-brother. Blood is thicker than silver or something like that? Either way, it'll lead to the happiest outcome.

This was then confirmed again, when a report for the first half of the fiscal year ending in March 2025 (the post-Dawntrail times) said that it was, uh, still doing that, forming part of an MMO segment that raked in ¥13.1 billion (about $86 million) for the company (while its "HD games" segment lost it ¥1.2 billion, or $7.8 million).

Well, I am once more here to report that Final Fantasy 14 is continuing to do exceptionally well in yet another set of financial reportage—but this time the results are consolidated. Snazzy! Because this is a summary, there aren't any numbers to go off for FF14 specifically, but Square says the segment's been doing just as well—better, even.

"In the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) Game sub-segment, net sales and operating income rose compared with the same period of the previous fiscal year on the launch of 'FINAL FANTASY XIV: Dawntrail,' the latest expansion pack for 'FINAL FANTASY XIV.'" For reference, that full fiscal year's report saw the segment pulling in ¥19.3 billion (approx. $126 million) in operating income, and ¥47.3 billion (around $310 million) in net sales, so Dawntrail is making more than that.

Which might come as a surprise if you've been following the news or community sentiment surrounding the expansion, because it sort of sounds like we're all a bit fed up. The story was a bit of a miss, content comes out too slowly, the formula's stagnating, the sky is falling, yap yap yap. Is its success just a mirage, or are we all just engaging in the time-honoured MMO tradition of complaining?

The answer is "maybe". Most of FF14's current major issues affect what I'll call 'caught up' players—folks who've been subbed and playing for years, and have exhausted its reams of content. I still maintain that this MMO is a bloody bargain and worth playing if you haven't, because you still have 10 years of solid RPG storytelling to chip through, and Square's savvy design structure has made it all relevant and playable—with its earliest foibles receiving a new coat of paint in Endwalker. The new-player honeymoon period lasts for hundreds of hours, so it's a worthwhile journey even if Square continues to stumble about for the next couple of years.

As for the illusion of success, well, it should be pointed out that everyone—myself included—felt pretty dang hyped for Dawntrail. The start of a new story arc and a shiny graphics update were all major draws to, you know, buy the thing and bump that operating income number up significantly.

While this is somewhat comparing apples to popotos, I should point out that the initial financial glow of an expansion isn't an accurate sign of how things are going. WoW's Shadowlands, one of the most loathed expansions in the game's history, sold 3.7 million copies on its first day. I don't doubt that Blizzard's numbers were looking similarly merry.

This is not to say it's all doom and gloom, though. What Square Enix's Creative Studio 3 faces at the moment is a slow and insidious problem—one that will be stop-gapped by the release of 7.2 in March, which'll include a meaty batch of content for the game's currently-starved casual-to-midcore playerbase. Should it have taken over 200 days for the statistical majority of your players to have something to do? No, but it'll be there.

It's for this reason that I think Dawntrail'll continue to pull in numbers, as well. I don't raid, so my subscription is basically a tax I pay to keep on roleplaying with my mates—and I'm otherwise not touching the game—but I'll be getting stuck into Shades' Triangle with glee.

Since it'll come out around March, and the current fiscal year ends in March 2025 for Square Enix? Things will be hunky-dory for the foreseeable future unless the content is somehow a complete stinker, and the ol' reliable MMO segment will still pull the requisite numbers. Come the next expansion, though, and its subsequent content droughts? I don't know if FF14 can endure its slow-burn discontent from veteran players for another decade. Let's pray for a shake-up.

Enter DevilutionX, a source port for the original Diablo that has, for years, been merrily making Blizzard's classic playable on just about anything. No, really, anything. Modern Windows? Of course. MacOS? Try something harder. 3DS? You betcha. Want to play OG Diablo on your Amiga, original Xbox, or Vita? Of course you do; who wouldn't? With DevilutionX, it's all possible (so long as you have a legit copy of the original game, like the one on GOG).

I've actually waxed lyrical about the port before—it's how I played D1 for the first time a couple of years ago—and now I'm here to inform you that it's just got a new update. The headline item of the 1.5.4 patch is, I guess, that the new version has tweaked its gamepad support to better make use of your controller in this PC game from 1996. Specifically, it's now easier to zip about stash using your DualSenses, XInput devices and what-have-you.

But what I actually want to talk about is the supported platforms added by the new version. Specifically, DevilutionX has made someone's day somewhere by adding support for macOS 10.4 PowerPC, and made probably a few more people's day by adding support for Windows XP, which I know some of you sickos are still using. Not that I blame you.

If you're unaware, macOS 10.4 is a major release of Apple's desktop/laptop OS that first released, oh, 20 years ago, and last got an update in 2007. That people have made their Diablo source port work for it in 2025 is mad and great, that they've made it work for its PowerPC version specifically is madder and greater.

If you're not up on your Apple history, Macs used PowerPC chips for a good long while before it switched to Intel chips (which it then ditched for its own Apple Silicon in the last few years). It's an architecture that was already long-in-the-tooth when macOS 10.4 came out, and yet here we are, porting Diablo 1 to it because, goddammit, everyone deserves Diablo.

Here are the full patch notes. I can't wait to find out what ridiculous thing I'll be able to run Diablo on come 1.5.5.

DevilutionX 1.5.4 Patch Notes

Features

• Multiplayer
  • Make invalid items unusable
• Controls
  • Better support for various gamepads
  • Gamepad: Improve navigation of the stash
  • Improve keymapper options
• Platforms
  • Added support for macOS 10.4 PowerPC
  • Added support for Windows XP
  • Android: Avoid game lagging on devices that can switch refresh rates
  • Correct networking support on big-endian systems
  • iOS: High refresh rate support
  • Xbox One/Series: Include translations
• Translations
  • Improve rendering of Turkish texts
  • Update Italian translation
  • Update Russian translation
  • Update Ukrainian translation
• Stability / Performance / System
  • Fix crashes on device hot-plugging
  • Fix game crash
  • Hide Upscale option in the Settings menu to avoid stability issues
  • Looser validation in Single Player games
  • Make file sync services less likely to corrupt saves
  • Make it clearer how to switch between Hellfire and Diablo
  • Use available screen space in the Settings menu

Bug Fixes

• Gameplay
  • Fix being able to repair equipped items for free
  • Fix game freezing when loading Lazarus lair from a save game
  • Unique drops now reset on a new game
  • Wake up the whole pack of Gargoyles when disturbed
• Platforms
  • Android: Fix performance and audio issues on recent versions
  • Android: Fix full immersive mode in Android 9 and higher
  • Incorrect menu graphics on DirectFB devices
  • PS4/Switch/Vita/Xbox One/Series: Correct controller mapping
• Multiplayer
  • Correct some item validation
  • Fix items being lost when held in the cursor during lag spikes

Bug Fixes for Original Diablo Bugs

• Gameplay
  • Fix non-solid fences in the caves

Bug Fixes for Original Hellfire Bugs

• Gameplay
  • Fix incorrectly solid tile next to crypt stairs down
• Multiplayer
  • Fix runes not being seen as a player spell in PvP
• Known Issues
  • Releases still being build and will be uploaded soon

“I think that ARPGs in general have started to lean into this: kill swaths of enemies all over the place extremely quickly," Brevik told VideoGamer. "Your build is killing all sorts of stuff so you could get more drops, you can level up, and the screen is littered with stuff you don’t care about.”

By contrast, Brevik argues that Diablo 2 had a more "personal and realistic" feel with the amount of enemies onscreen and the powers you could bring to bear against them. “The pacing on Diablo 2, I think, is great. That’s one of the reasons it’s endured," said Brevik. "I just don’t find killing screen-fulls of things instantly and mowing stuff down and walking around the level and killing everything very enticing. I just don’t feel like that is a cool experience. I find it kind of silly.”

Brevik criticized the way players of newer ARPGs like Path of Exile or Diablos 3 and 4 are incentivized to level up their characters as quickly as possible to reach an endgame that constitutes the real draw of the experience, and argued that the true fun of ARPGs “actually isn’t getting to the end, it’s the journey." Brevik concluded by saying, “When you’re shortening that journey and making it kind of ridiculous. You’ve cheapened the entire experience, in my opinion.”

This 100% hits the nail on the head of what puts me off these games: I'm just built for a slower paced, probably more singleplayer-oriented action RPG along the lines of classic Diablo, Torchlight, or FromSoftware's Soulsborne games. The current field of top-down, Diablo-derived ARPGs, by contrast, is geared towards seasonal, repeatable play and leveling up a character as quickly as possible to engage with it. I was honestly shocked when a coworker explained to me that you have to make a new character for each League (season, basically) in Path of Exile, with the "real game" being the endgame mapping experience after you hit max level.

PCG contributor Len Hafer really put a fine point on this feeling back when Diablo 4 first released: "The way I used to enjoy Diablo games has been replaced, and it sucks." At the same time, this definitely seems like a generational thing, or at least a question of taste: Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2 are bigger than Jesus and maybe also the Beatles.

I also can't deny the raw lizard brain thrill of clearing waves of throwaway sickos Dynasty Warriors-style with Diablo's dark fantasy aesthetics, but I get those kicks from the wonderfully bite-sized, Diablo-coded Vampire Survivors riff, Halls of Torment.

After injecting co-op into Armored Core 6 last year, the creator of the mods, who simply goes by Yui, has turned their attention to another FromSoft game: Dark Souls 3. On Friday, Yui posted a video of the Dark Souls 3 Seamless Co-op mod in action, describing it as a "mod which removes all multiplayer boundaries and allows for connections to persist after death."

The video shows Yui and a friend making their way through the Lothric castle area of Dark Souls 3, kicking off with a battle against the Dancer of the Boreal Valley. Together, they tie the dancer into knots, though this isn't that remarkable since you can fight bosses with other players in DS3 anyway. But normally a win brings that multiplayer session to an end.

Once the dancer has spun its last pirouette, however, the pair carry on into the castle itself, carving their way through a bunch of regular enemies before arriving at a bonfire and teleporting to Firelink Shrine. Both players arrive at the shrine without issue, then warp back to the castle to carry on their adventure, all without DS3 once glitching or crashing or throwing a massive tantrum.

I have to say, it looks glorious, and once again highlights how much fun FromSoft's games are when you can bring a friend along. Yui doesn't provide many other details about the mod or how it works, but they do specify you'll be able to "play with friends from the tutorial to the very end of the game, with synchronised progress, and no resummoning or interruptions." Further, they add "Invasions are optional and active by default" and that players "Can adjust the multiplayer scaling of the enemies to [their] liking." In other words, it's a fully functional co-op mode for Dark Souls 3, just like the Seamless Co-op mod for Elden Ring.

There's no word on when the mod will actually be released, Yui simply says it's "work in progress." The modder does appear to have had a change of heart over making further co-op mods after their work on Elden Ring. In an FAQ on the Elden Ring Seamless Co-op mod's nexusmods page, Yui posited the question "Will you make a similar mod for Dark Souls?" to which they then answered "No." It's possible they meant specifically Dark Souls, which runs on much older tech than Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring, and is presumably much more difficult to create a seamless multiplayer mode for.

In any case, it's great to see Yui bringing their excellent multiplayer modding skills to other FromSoft games. It's possible FromSoft itself has taken a leaf from the modder's book, given its next project, Elden Ring Neightrein, is a multiplayer-centric version of the RPG. Certainly, FromSoft is aware of Yui's work, and even stated it might 'consider ideas like that' with future games.

In a thread on Bluesky, Walther outlined the situation, which started with her posting a video promoting BloodbornePSX on YouTube. "I have now been provided with evidence that Markscan is working under Sony to issue a legitimate DMCA takedown on my video." Walther subsequently explained that the takedown was aimed not at the video itself, but the download link in the description. In compliance with the request, Walther removed the link, but also said she had taken the decision to "not make the fan game available to download in the future."

This is likely because MarkScan, the company working as a copyright enforcer on behalf of Sony, also issued a takedown notice for Bloodborne PSX's Itch.io page. In its notice (via The Verge) MarkScan claims it has found "copyright infringements" on the itch page, and that Walther is therefore "indulging in acts of digital piracy".

This isn't the first time Walther has come under Sony's legal eye—Nightmare Kart was originally named 'Bloodborne Kart' before Walther changed it following a request from Sony to ditch the Bloodborne branding. This time Sony seems to be playing hardball, however.

Perhaps that's because MarkScan is cracking down on Bloodborne-related fan projects at large. The enforcer was also behind the recent removal of a 60 fps patch compatible with the ShadPS4 emulator, one of the few ways you can technically play Bloodborne on PC. The patch's creator, Lance McDonald, commented on X that the DMCA takedown was "from the same company that SIE hired to take down the 60fps patch".

While I accept Sony's right to protect its copyrighted works, MarkScan's approach to enforcement seems extremely heavy-handed, especially considering how Sony dealt with the Bloodborne Kart situation. As PCG's Ted Litchfield notes in his reporting of the 60 fps patch takedown, Sony's argument there seems particularly spurious, given " the consumer right to modify software for non-commercial use has strong precedent". These slash and burn tactics have naturally prompted speculation that they may be paving way for a more official release of Bloodborne on PC, but even if this is the case, surely it would be wise to service the audience before clamping down on these frankly harmless fan projects.

Naoki Hamaguchi, director of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, has said, "As someone who plays games on PC, I sometimes use mods myself," and added that "I see it as a positive thing myself." Which is why I expect there to be absolutely no complaints about the coming influx of mods that make the more boring parts of Cloud's Big Adventure easier to rush through on your way to the next game of Queen's Blood.

Modder LordGregory is responsible for this one, Easy Chocobo Catch, which means you won't have to replay any of the auto-fail stealth sequences where you sneak up on that region's chocobo. Normally these are something you need to cross off your bottomless checklist of tasks before you can use a region's Chocobo Stops as fast-travel points, and given that some chocobos have special traversal moves, may need to be completed before you can access parts of each map.

Where normally you'd have to sneak up on the head chocobo, bypassing their guards by hiding behind mine carts or whatever, with Easy Chocobo Catch the birds won't see you even if you crouch-walk right in front of them. It also triples your speed for good measure. Catching chocobos isn't the most difficult challenge in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, but it's yet another point of slowdown and friction in a game with so much friction it can feel like wading through dry sand.

While you're browsing Nexus Mods, have a look at Most Combative Team Members, which makes your party members more likely to attack while you're not controlling them, and Silent Chadley and Mai in the Open World, which casts Shushaga on your talkative cyborg friends. Now if only there was a mod to get rid of the autofail stealth bit in the protorelic quest. Or give the game a satisfying ending.

I subscribe to the same hardline stance as Dragon's Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno: "Travel is boring? That's not true. It's only an issue because your game is boring. All you have to do is make travel fun." Preach Itsuno-san, but I admit that's a blanket suggestion that ignores the nuance of open world games. Travel is fun when you're seeing regions of the map for the first time, but backtracking is comparably dull. We want travel to be more exciting and involved than pressing a button, but not so slow or punishing that getting somewhere we've already been is a chore.

It's a tough nut to crack, which is why I've spent the last few weeks endlessly impressed by Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's unique take on fast travel. Fundamentally, fast traveling in KCD2 is as easy as clicking on the city or village you want to visit. You can just go as long as you've been there previously like in any Bethesda RPG, but the process isn't instant here. You get to watch your little Henry on the map walk or ride to his destination like platoons on a war map, witnessing the hours pass and the road take its toll on Henry's hunger and stamina.

The best part is that this fast-forwarded travel sequence isn't just pageantry—the clockwork world of KCD2 is still running in the background, and that means all the random NPC interactions Henry has on the road will still appear in menu transit. When you're riding somewhere manually these side adventures occur as naturally as they do in Red Dead Redemption 2, but in fast travel they pop up on the map like old school Oregon Trail encounters. You can choose to stop and see what's up or continue the journey. If there's an immediate threat, like a bandit ambush or a pack of wolves, you can attempt to flee.

Something I really love about these mini-adventures, which is actually an extension of something great about KCD2 in general, is how mundane they can be. The first Kingdom Come had a similar travel system, but Warhorse seriously pumped up the variety of encounters in the sequel. A few of the run-ins I've had in 50 hours of fast travel:

• Two guys resting at a camp who invite me to stop and have a beer
• A former-knight who politely wants to rob me, but really just needs help getting his stuff back
• A woman surrounded by wolves
• This traveling writer who offers money to solve his riddles
• Bandits, to fight or be avoided
• The odd grave robber
• This one guy who keeps mistaking me for his friend Hans
• Two guys boxing in a makeshift fighting pit
• A fella with an arrow lodged in his skull
• German knights who propose a friendly spar

It's a slick system that lets players in a rush get around quickly while still participating in the sort of random roadside discovery that you'd totally miss in Fallout or Skyrim when beaming around the map. Warhorse's solution also acknowledges that, yes, this is a beautiful and large open world with not a ton happening in every inch of it. It's a wonderful game for trotting down roads at a leisurely pace while you wayfind with landmarks or get pleasantly lost, but even I don't want to play that way all the time.

As much as I respect Dragon's Dogma 2's limited fast travel and love its archaic wagon network that will taxi you between some cities (but not all of them), I often felt constrained by elements that were supposed to be freeing. Backtracking was super slow and the sandbox just didn't have the variety to make a ninth journey to the same city fun.

KCD2 cuts the genuinely boring bits out of backtracking while adding weight to the decision to fast travel. You're encouraged to make a plan: Take note of the time to avoid night hazards, pack food so Henry isn't starved when he gets there, and equip armor in case of an ambush.

It's a balanced system from every angle. Not to suggest this is exactly how every open world RPG should do things from now on—random ogre pop-ups in Dragon's Dogma 2 wouldn't make that boss fight any less repetitive—but I hope its execution inspires other studios to weave fast travel into the world in ways that enhance immersion while also being genuinely quick.

Still with me? Great. Per its author, who lists themselves as "me" in the Created By box and "resetygk" in the Uploaded By box, it uses a foot model taken from the less gnomically titled VTK Vanilla HD Body for FemV mod and—as I mentioned earlier—replaces V's usual hands with them. Feethand, you see. You get it. You're smart people.

"Change hand to feet," explains resetygk, crisply, in the mod's description. They're right. Having played probably too much of Cyberpunk 2077 using V Feethand, I can offer you my assurance that it absolutely change V hand to feet. There's just no getting around it. Also, it's genuinely a bit fantastic and—if you'll permit me to switch briefly to my self-serious games critic persona—exemplifies what I love most about this ramshackle platform of ours: untrammelled player creativity, even in instances where maybe a bit of trammelling wouldn't go amiss.

V Feethand (it changes hand to feet)

Resetygk doesn't go into much detail as to what their motivations were in creating V Feethand, but that's fine. We don't need them to, do we? We all know why they've done this.

All the insight we get is this: Besides the concise description of the mod's function and a tip of the hat to VTK Vanilla, all our author says—and the Mandarin subs in their screenshots lead me to believe English is probably not their first language, so don't take this as mean-spirited mockery—is "dont work well but i want one".

I'm interpreting that as 'Look, I'm just a person/visionary who really wanted V's hands to be feet, and since no one else had made that mod for some reason I did it myself, which is why it's a little janky.'

And frankly, I think they're doing themselves a disservice. I've played probably more V Feethand than anyone else alive on Earth at this point, and honestly it works scarily well. There is an issue with implants: try to use arm augmentations and V's hands will just turn invisible, but so long as you're using her default meaty paws? It's flawless feethands as far as the eye can see.

They work with disconcerting seamlessness, as if an animator at CDPR has had a Google Alert set up for precisely this kind of mod for the past five years and could barely contain themselves when it finally pinged. Watching V kick the bolt of a rifle backwards as she hoofs another magazine into the well—you struggle to imagine it looking any other way.

My favourite thing has gotta be driving, though. First-person mode is a gift for the V Feethand users of the world. Once our hero has ejected a vehicle's current occupant with a hasty toe grip, it's almost as if she immediately reclines in the driver's seat, two heels on the wheel as she cruises toward whatever the future brings. I like to imagine her rolling a cigarette with her hands. Except, of course, her hands are feet. V Feethand.

The bit where I attempt to arrive at a point

Why V Feethand? Why anything, reader? Why love? Why charity? Why honour? Why life?

But OK, I should probably gin up some kind of post-hoc justification for inserting these images into your brain until, let's be honest, the day you die, and I think I actually have one. I love mods. And not just the great, goliath projects like Tamriel Rebuilt or The Long War, but the bizarre little tweaks and fixes that will only ever be relevant to a vanishing minority of hyper-particular people. It's wonderful not only that these can exist but that they actively flourish.

If anything, V Feethand expands CP2077 in a fairly lore-accurate way. There would absolutely be people in Night City who replaced their hands with feet. This is just someone plugging a plot hole in the implant system that CDPR left behind.

It's the thing that makes this particular corner of our hobby—the PC corner—really worth all the fuss, worth all the bloody fingers from rooting around PC cases, the twisted backs from hunching over desks. It's not the DLSS version whatever, it's the fact that any beautiful madman with a dream can pick up a spanner and, you know, replace his hands with feet. It's the openness and creativity and nothing else. So raise the V Feethand banner proudly: Long may it change hand to feet.

Still, that doesn't mean the burly pack monsters are any kind of cakewalk. Here's a handy guide for how to best Doshaguma—and Alpha Doshaguma—for anyone needing a few tips.

What type of monster is Doshaguma?

Doshaguma and Alpha Doshaguma are Fanged Beasts—Monster Hunter's term for the relatively small pool of mammalian monsters amidst its sea of large, angry lizards. They're massive, shaggy sand beasts, somewhere between a bear and a lion. They come in two varieties: the standard Doshaguma, and the Alpha Doshaguma—a larger, more aggressive specimen easily recognized by the crimson streak in its mane.

The "alpha" bit isn't just for show. Doshaguma are the first showcase for the new pack behaviors in Wilds. You can find solitary Doshaguma wandering the Windward Plains, but you can also find an Alpha Doshaguma accompanied by an entire Doshaguma pack.

Obviously, you'll be better off if you aren't trying to fight four monsters at once. If you're hunting an Alpha Doshaguma, you'll want to bring a Large Dung Pod, which can scatter a pack of monsters with its powerful stink so you can face them individually.

How to fight Doshaguma

In combat, Doshaguma are a fairly straightforward affair, relying purely on their claws and fangs (and the massive amounts of muscle packed behind them). That means there aren't any elemental attacks or ailments you'll have to worry about, but that doesn't mean the beasts are a slouch. If you aren't paying attention, you can find yourself taking some heavy hits.

Because Doshaguma is entirely a matter of dodging and countering its swipes, bites, and slam attacks, fighting them is a great training program for the basic rhythm of Monster Hunter combat. And thankfully, Doshaguma heavily telegraph their most dangerous attacks, which makes it easy to know when you should be making some extra space.

In short, Doshaguma will rear back before making almost all of its attacks, communicating exactly how it's about to try to hit you. Before it bites, it'll pull back and open its jaws. Before it does a slam attack with its claws—one of its more common attacks—it'll rear back on its hind legs and draw a foreleg back. Basically, Doshaguma teaches you how to fight it.

As Doshaguma enrages, its recovery time between attacks will shorten, and it'll start chaining more attacks together in sequence: Where it might normally do one claw slam, it might do up to three. If the Doshaguma roars and you notice steam shooting out its nostrils, expect to have to dodge a few attacks in a row before trying to get your own hits in.

How to deal with Doshaguma's heavy slam

One Doshaguma attack you'll definitely want to watch out for is its heavy slam, where it'll smash both its forelimbs into the ground before ripping up a massive chunk of terrain for an AOE attack. If you're not careful, you might dodge the initial claw slam and think you're safe to attack, only to get caught in the follow-up with some hefty damage.

Luckily, this attack has a longer wind-up than anything else in Doshaguma's repertoire. It'll go through a lengthy animation where it stands on its hind legs before slowly lurching forwards into the initial slam. If you notice a long pause like in the video above, make some space.

Other Doshaguma attacks to watch out for

• Spinning attack: Particularly when enraged, Doshaguma can continue one of its lighter claw swipes with a whirling follow-up that might catch you off guard. If it slashes at you with its claws, take a beat to make sure there's not a bigger attack on the way.
• Corpse toss: Like many predatory monsters, an exhausted Doshaguma might try to refill its stamina by running off to kill a small prey monster like a Ceratonoth. Stay alert as you sprint back into combat, because a feeding Doshaguma isn't defenseless: It can lift a dead prey animal and throw it at you as a projectile.

Weaknesses

Because the beta lacks the usual in-game monster guide, we won't know until the full release what elements and ailments Doshaguma is weak too.

However, it does have a few vulnerabilities you can take advantage of. Doshaguma can enter a kind of "super enraged state," where they apparently get so angry that their skin rips open and creates a bunch of wounds across their body. Unsurprisingly, they'll be more aggressive in the aftermath, but it provides some good opportunities to destroy those wounds with Focus Strikes.

Additionally, when it rears up on its hind legs for the heavy slam attack covered above, it's a great time to whip out a flash pod to temporarily blind the monster.

Thankfully, what Yoshi-P has to say this time is a lot less nothingburger than the forum post he penned a couple weeks ago, essentially saying the team was considering taking drastic measures such as… asking the plugin users to stop. This time, speaking during the latest Letter from the Producer livestream, Yoshida revealed counter-measures would be introduced, starting in Patch 7.2 releasing in late March.

Community producer Toshio "Foxclon" Murouchi provided a rare English translation, which I've edited for clarity, reassuring players that the plugin's exploit begins and ends at character information. "The one thing we want you to feel safe about is, whenever you read that internal ID, you will never reach personal information or billing information, so please do not be concerned about it," he said. "However, we are taking it seriously because it is not good to read that internal connection … we are not very comfortable with it."

Murouchi clarified that the team wants to "keep the same level of the blacklist function," but it seems like additional steps are being taken to try and keep account IDs away from prying hands in the future.

Translations courtesy of the Final Fantasy 14 Discord server offer a little more insight into Yoshi-P's thoughts, with him telling viewers: "I am very disappointed that this kind of tool exists, but we will be improving the system going forward," while later adding "Obviously we as a dev team are not ignoring this, I cannot say how far we're going but with Patch 7.2 we are taking steps to counteract this."

As always, both Yoshi-P and Moruichi ended the discussion with their usual pledge for people to stop fiddling around with plugins and mods, not that it's ever swayed anyone away before.

It's nice to see that the team is paying more attention, beyond how it initially came across in last month's forum post. While fear around the plugin has largely died down now—thanks in part to time and also more reasonable all-knowing plugin folk (who had nothing to do with the controversial one in question) trying to snuff out some of the larger concerns. That doesn't mean there aren't a few bad apples ready to ruin the bunch though, and any extra measures to make life more difficult for would-be stalkers is good in my book.

If you don't know how to deal with this particular attack, you kind of have to just take it in your stride. Luckily, there's some gear you can bring to mitigate the attack's effect, and after getting flashed more times than I can count, I also worked out how to directly counter it, which I've detailed and included in a clip of below.

What type of monster is Gypceros?

The Gypceros is a returning bird wyvern monster that appeared in the first ever Monster Hunter and more recently in Monster Hunter Stories 2. Similar to Tzitzi-Ya-Ku in World, it has the ability to produce a flash from its head which temporarily stuns you. It can also spit poison and has an extendable tail that it can use to smack you around. Despite these, it isn't a particularly difficult monster provided you bring antidotes to cope with its poison and learn how to deal with its flash attack.

The Gypceros will sometimes have a mate nearby that will interfere in battles, but it usually disappears when the monster changes area.

How to fight Gypceros

The most important tip for fighting Gypceros, as with any poison monster, is to bring antidotes or herbal medicine to remove poison. Herbal Medicine is definitely the better option of the two since you can use it faster, though you will need to craft some yourself by grabbing some blue mushrooms. If you turn on auto-crafting for herbal medicine, then everytime you pick up a blue mushroom, you'll make some.

Considering how quickly Gypceros can flash and stun you, it's better not to get stuck slowly drinking antidotes and to use this quick fix instead.

How to deal with the Gypceros' stun attack

The Gypceros' flash blind attack is pretty easy to recognise—it bobs its head three times, emitting a crack and a flash of light from its crest with each. On the fourth bob it creates a flash that stuns you. There are two variants of this attack. In the first it bobs its head while hopping forwards; this won't affect you if you're behind it.

The second, however, where it stands stationary, is pretty much impossible to dodge if you're at close range. Instead, what you need to do is Focus Thrust the Gypceros' head as it's charging the attack. As you can see in the clip above, the monster's head glows red—indicating an opportunity to Focus Thrust—when it's about to perform the flash and shortly after. If you land the strike, you'll knock it down, giving you an opportunity to deal damage. You can use Focus Thrust by holding LT on controller to enter Focus Mode and then RB to launch the attack.

While gear is fairly limited in the beta, you could also equip the Hope Mask and Balahara Greaves for 60% reduced stun duration. With these equipped, the Gypceros will struggle to follow up on its stuns with any big attacks.

Other attacks to look out for

• Tail extension: Throughout the fight, Gypceros extends its tail and tries to slam you with it. While this attack has quite a wide range, the tail will get stuck afterwards, so it's the perfect opportunity to deal slashing damage to it.
• Playing dead: This unusual mechanic sees Gypceros play dead. It'll even let you carve materials before springing up and damaging you. Look for its telltale twitching and pay attention to whether the hunt has actually concluded to suss this out.
• Poison charge: The Gypceros charges, spitting poison as it does to create a number of AoE pools. Simply stay away from it while it does this and wait for it to stop, plus watch out for any poison it drops nearby. The Gypceros can also spit poison at you directly, so be mindful when facing it head-on.

Gypceros weaknesses

Your best method for fighting Gypceros depends on your weapon. You'll want to smack its head if you're using a hammer or hunting horn, since this impact damage will lead to stuns and give you opportunities to deal more damage. For those using a bladed cutting damage weapon like a greatsword or longsword, or a shot weapon like bowgun, you should hit its tail whenever you can. Also make sure to break the wounds you're creating on its head and tail with Focus Thrusts.

Considering how often Gypceros extends its tail for attacks, you'll have plenty of opportunities to slice at it. In terms of elemental weaknesses, Gypceros used to be vulnerable to fire, but since elemental weapons are few and far between in the beta it's hard to confirm. I'll be sure to add more details about this on full release.

The uniques are boring.

Unlike most of the randomized loot in Path of Exile 2, unique items are a rare class of equipment that are fully authored by Grinding Gear Games. They've got their own name, their own art, and their own preset modifiers—some of which can't be found anywhere else. Like equivalent item classes in other ARPGs, uniques are PoE 2's way of providing the classic medieval fantasy of finding a legendary sword or magical helmet worthy of its own name and mythology.

That's the idea, at least. So far, however, most of PoE 2's uniques just make some numbers go up by making others go down. And when they don't, they feel less like build definers and more like build multipliers.

Looking through PoE 2's lists of uniques, I don't feel like I'm looking through a gallery of Excaliburs and Durendals. Instead, it feels like a mathematician's idea of compelling trade-offs: Quill Rain makes you shoot arrows faster, but your arrows don't hit as hard. Husk of Dreams gives you a chance to not consume flask charges, but the flask charges you do use are increased. Those choices might make interesting numerical problems for theorycrafters to ponder, but they don't exactly leave me enchanted. Nobody's writing any adventure novels about a guy who can drink potions a bit more than usual.

With simpler uniques the prevailing philosophy seems to be "Item, but More," with any number of Brynhand's Marks and Taryn's Shivers that just offer better-than-normal functionality for characters with aligned build mechanics. They're missing the creativity that should set uniques apart.

There are exceptions of course—uniques like Choir of the Storm, which makes critical hits call lightning bolts down on enemies, or Quecholli, which detonates enemies killed with critical hits to deal damage in a radius. But for the most part, PoE 2's current slate of uniques don't offer a distinct enough gameplay experience to feel like gaining possession of a storied artifact. That's important for the power fantasy of an action RPG as well as its replayability—I want to start dreaming up new builds when I pick up a unique that does something no other item in my inventory can.

While I broadly prefer PoE 2's progression and buildcrafting, Diablo 4 knows how to make a unique hit. D4's uniques are more than beefy stat bonuses—they're often completely new class fantasies, wrapped up in a single item. Grasp of Shadow can turn rogues into walking armies of shadow clones. Greatstaff of the Crone gives werewolf druids an entirely new form of lightning-based lycanthropy.

The best ARPG uniques offer another layer of player expression. I love to build a character around a specific item's gimmick—not because it's the most effective option, but because it constructs a different identity to inhabit during play. Say what you will about Grim Dawn's unique poopy pants, you're going to feel like you're playing a character that's wholly your own if that's the basis of your build. I'm not necessarily saying PoE 2 needs more diarrhea, but there's a reason "walk a mile in another man's shoes" is a cliche while "walk a mile in another man's diarrhea pants" is an entirely new sentence. Uniques grab your attention and imagination when they get weird with it! That's a good thing (soiled trousers notwithstanding)!

When an item marked by a pillar of light and a name like Foxshade tumbles out of an enemy, I want to feel awed. My build might not work with a unique, but I want to feel tempted to make it work. In PoE 2, though, my reaction is usually "Huh, alright," and then I toss the item in my stash where it's promptly forgotten.

Still, I have hope. Grinding Gear Games designed a panoply of compelling uniques in the first Path of Exile that felt worthy of the designation: weapons like The Poet's Pen, which triggers socketed spells as you attack, or the Varunastra, a one-handed weapon that counts as all weapon types at once. GGG's proven it has the skillset for packaging a strong fantasy into an exciting item drop. I'd just like it to hit PoE 2's early access sooner than later.

Before playing Skald: Against the Black Priory, I liked the idea of this throwback roleplaying game, but wasn't sure it was for me. I love old-school RPGs, but pre-1997 is too old-school for my tastes, and Skald's primary source of visual inspiration is an era of DOS and Commodore RPGs I have respect, but not much affection for. Skald's gorgeous VGA-inspired pixel art scared me off as much as it enticed me.

Finally diving into the game, though, I found something decidedly more modern: Skald is crisp and tight, threading the needle with an elegant, modern design sensibility that doesn't sand off the complexity and depth I crave in my RPGs. It's easy to get your arms around, but also challenging and surprising the whole way through. The biggest shock of all was the writing: Skald is one of the most effective, unnerving cosmic horror stories I've seen in a game, and part of that comes from all the effort it puts into fleshing out its fantasy world and characters before tearing it all down.

Roll for initiative

When I'm playing an RPG with its own bespoke rules (that is, not based on something familiar like D&D or SPECIAL), I always feel like I'm making a leap of faith. Is this one where dialogue skills are fun and useful? Which weapon and armor proficiencies are actually supported by the game's loot? Do rogues just suck for some reason? For every Divinity: Original Sin or Disco Elysium that knocks it out of the park, there's something like Broken Roads or Rogue Trader that leaves me frustrated, pondering an empty character sheet full of stats, skills, jargon, and effects of dubious utility.

Skald blessedly falls into the former camp. It's very much iterating on D&D, but with a unique progression system and checks based around 2d6 dice rolls rather than the d20. Every class can be powerful and find a niche in a party of six, and you only mess around with skills and attribute numbers at character creation. As the game goes on, you can increase those scores with gear and the passive bonuses of feats you choose on level-up. Ranger feats, for example, will boost your dexterity and survival in addition to giving you powerful new attacks.

Skald's combat is similarly simple and elegant. Battles are turn-based and on a grid, while the classes feel very distinct to command. Rogues are all about positioning, backstabs, stealth, and beginning fights with advantageous ambush rounds. Armsmasters are your classic fighter, wanting to charge in and facetank everything. The Guild Magos (wizard) and Battle-Magos have a Baldur's Gate-esque variety of spell effects that you can learn both on level up and through scrolls you find in the world (but the level-1 Swarm of Gnats is a beast that can carry you through much of the game), while rangers are machine gun turrets that can snipe enemies from anywhere on the screen.

Most of Skald's quests end in with a fight, but there's a lot of non-combat gameplay, comparable to Baldur's Gate 3 or Obsidian joints like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity. You don't just use diplomacy to get around fights: Lore can unlock a ton of clues, background, and context in quests and conversations, while athletics can open up alternate paths through the environment via climbable walls and difficult jumps. Lockpicking is extremely useful, you can rob shopkeepers blind, and I absolutely love that every candle, torch, and fireplace in the game can be put out to help sneak past enemies, or lit to make spotting hidden items easier. Every skill check is represented by an in-game dice roll, with Skald's pixelated 2d6 a delightfully retro echo of Larian's iconic digital d20.

An early standout quest involves infiltrating a city that's fallen to crazed cultist barbarians, with some of the islanders' genetic memory of worshiping eldritch fish-people having driven them to an orgy of violence. The city itself is dense and fun to explore, while your struggle against three factions of cultists can play out a number of ways. I managed to get them to wipe each other out by pinning the theft of a sacred idol on the strongest faction, then convincing the other two to unite against them. It felt like the open-ended nexus of New Vegas' Second Battle of Hoover Dam but in miniature.

As the game went on, some of its fights began to feel a bit easy and throwaway on the middle "Normal" difficulty⁠—Skald recommends beginners start with "Easy"—but its big story beat battles always felt properly interesting and substantial. Skald offers a bit of flexibility in crafting your party, with a well-balanced complement of preset characters available to join you over the course of the story, as well as blank slate "mercenaries" you can find, buy, and customize as you see fit.

Psychedelia

But you'll want to stick with the premade guys, at least on a first playthrough. These aren't full-on BioWare loyalty mission romanceable companions, but the canon crew is varied, interesting, and they'll regularly pipe up to comment on story events and sidequests. Classico fighter-tank Roland, a reliable sellsword haunted by past crimes, is a favorite of mine, and a spoilery midgame party addition adds a lot of context to the cosmic horror parts of the story. Skald's companions are sketched with a light hand, but give the impression of depths and history that will never be fully revealed. They left me wanting to know more about them, rather than bowling me over with way too much backstory.

Skald's setting is some familiar western fantasy, but with an edge and sense of history that I always crave. The emperors of this world's questionably moral dominant polity are living demigods, and when they die, their bodies remain radioactive with magic, needing to be interred in some kind of Raiders of the Lost Arc deep vault after death. All magic is derived from an eldritch ozone layer cloaking the planet that may be sentient, is likely not benevolent, and yet seems to be protecting Skald's world from the gaze of something truly horrific out in the darkness.

This is some pretty rad worldbuilding on its own, which is what makes developer High North's commitment to utterly destroying it with a deluge of horror so impressive. As you explore the Outer Isles, there's this feeling that you're descending into a truly vile, subterranean, alternate world separate from anything human or kind. Having this initial context of an interesting fantasy world, likable characters, and engrossing human drama sharpens the contrast with what comes later: You have a frame of reference for exactly how far everything's fallen.

As things get freakier, one of Skald's greatest pleasant surprises of all is the sheer quality of lead developer Anders Lauridsen's prose. I'm talking bigass chunks of text straight out of Planescape: Torment or Disco Elysium, with the same sort of evocative, poetic quality that always sent chills down my spine in those games. Skald is decidedly low-fi, but the excellence of its pixel art and soundtrack really drive home its unique atmosphere: CRPG fantasy nostalgia undercut with something deeply sinister.

After a knockout last level, things take a final dive into the strange and deranged that left me speechless, and the game finally comes back up for air with a hilariously, deliberately anticlimactic epilogue slideshow that had me hooting with laughter. Skald was one of the absolute best RPGs of last year, a pleasant surprise like nothing else, and a first outing from High North Studios that has me thrilled for what's next.

The update fixes a number of crashes, bugs, and scripting errors introduced with all of Patch 8's changes, including some tweaks to Baldur's Gate 3's long-awaited crossplay. It also features a number of quality of life improvements to BG3's upcoming photo mode. On the balance side, some bugs and unintended interactions have been cleaned up. The update has ever so slightly buffed the Death Domain Cleric's new cantrips while nerfing its Reaper passive, making it so you have to target two creatures with your double cast and can no longer hit the same one twice.

That last one really stands out to me because it's a balance change, and one that contrasts with pre-existing abilities like the Swords Bard's ranged Slashing Flourish, which can target the same enemy twice, unlike in tabletop. I was surprised to see a balance change of this nature pushed out without any similar tweak to tune down the power on the new Booming Blade cantrip.

As it stands, Booming Blade is effectively a free Paladin smite that can be used as many times per turn as you can attack. A unique interaction with the previously-underwhelming Eldritch Knight subclass allows them to attack three times per turn by level seven, four by the end of the game, and all without expending any resources like spell slots, superiority dice, or channel divinity charges.

I'm definitely conflicted by all that pure power having no drawbacks, and the Baldur's build sickos over on the BG3builds subreddit are similarly torn on whether it's the best or worst thing to happen to the game's meta. On the one hand, it seems fun as hell to be a super-powered thunder-smiting spellsword. On the other hand, there's an anxiety that the relatively simple, risk-free character build of Hexblade 1 / Eldritch Knight 11 could eclipse just about everything else in the game, particularly the incoming spellsword class Bladesinging.

But I'm feeling less worried about the prospect as it appears more likely to be carried through to the final patch. Baldur's Gate 3 already has plenty of easy money game breakers like the Open Hand Monk / Thief or College of Swords Bard / Fighter / Thief, and I find myself coming back and trying new builds regardless. Even if Patch 8 goes live with Booming Blade war god Eldritch Knights, I'll still probably have my first run be with the new Arcane Archer subclass.