Chris Kaleiki is perhaps best known for designing WoW classes for 13 years, but he's trying to change that at his new company Notorious Studios with a new game, the PvPvE RPG Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, which is headed to early access on February 12.

Of course, launching any game these days can be a gamble because, well, there are way too many games to keep track of and gamers only have so much bandwidth to play with them all. Even so, Kaleiki told GamesRadar he feels "super excited" about launch and "in some ways, I was more nervous or had more anxiety when we did the first alpha friends and family play test, because again, I didn't quite know how the game would go." Now that he knows "the game is good based on player feedback," some of that trepidation is gone. "There are some players who play the game literally, gosh, 60 hours during a week play test. So I think there's a market for it. There's a player who is interested in it. I think it's fun."

His personal feelings aside, there's also the commercial side of releasing a game - "the marketing, getting it out there, getting players to see it" is a whole different story. "And this is the bane to every game developer's existence these days because marketing is completely shifting on how to market a game."

Despite all the external challenges, Kaleiki still feels "there's not much we can do there with the budget" and "the most important thing is the game has to be good." That's because, according to him, "Valve does a very good job of surfacing games that players like or that players are enjoying" and "the algorithm is almost impenetrable."

"If you watch some indie dev videos, they'll often say we tried hacking the algorithm, we tried doing all these goofy things, and there's not much you can do," he said. "All you can really do is make a good game, which, in a lot of ways, is good news for us, but also this is really hard because there's no little hacks you can do to surface your game like you could 20 years ago. "

We'll see how Legacy: Steel & Sorcery does when it hits Steam early access in just a few days.

In the meantime, keep an eye on the upcoming indie games of 2025 and beyond.

The former long-time Dragon Age executive producer revealed the interesting tidbit in a new YouTube video, calling 2008's Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood his "favorite" project to work on because there was something "magical about leading a team as small as this game was - it never got much above 20 people."

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood "actually uses Dragon Age: Origins' dialogue system," Darrah said. "Heavily streamlined to fit on the Nintendo DS, but it's still at its base the same code stack. I guess if you really wanted to try, you could make the argument that, because Sonic Chronicles shipped in 2008 and Dragon Age: Origins didn't ship until 2009, that Dragon Age: Origins actually shipped using the Sonic Chronicles dialogue system."

The Sonic RPG team eventually moved on to the cancelled Mass Effect DS game that was planned to have you pirating across the fringes of the galaxy in first person. The spin-off was scrapped due to the economics of shipping games on the Nintendo DS, though.

BioWare now doesn't have the bandwidth for any quirky projects like Sonic Chronicles, though. The entire studio now reportedly employs around 100 people after EA cut even more roles from the team. The publisher blamed the layoffs on Dragon Age: The Veilguard's performance, but one wonders how much more "agile" a team can get.

Baldur’s Gate 3 developer slams EA’s BioWare layoffs as “a short-term cost-cutting measure” that “doesn’t solve a long-term” problem.

The trend was seemingly kicked off by developer quicktequila, who showed off their wildly stylish psychedelic shooter Tamashika and quickly garnered over 150k likes. It looks like you're rampaging through a twisty-turvy corridor that unfolds as you walk, murdering cartoony frogs, equipped with only a pistol for shooting and a knife for parrying and/or stabbing. It's gorgeous, trippy, and unlike anything else I've seen. You can wishlist it on Steam.

Next up is Mightreya, a spectacle fighter in the same vein as Hi-Fi Rush or Bayonetta where you're chaining sick combos and juggling foes in the pursuit of the validation of an S-rank. The twist here is that you're playing as an anime schoolgirl superhero who doubles as a content creator, so I'm guessing those S-ranks also lead to likes and follows and subscriptions. More validation, basically! See it's aerial combat below and check it out on Steam if you like.

Changing gears to something a little less frantic, we have Detective Dotson, a pixel art slice-of-life mystery game set in modern day India. I love how vibrant everything is. I love a good detective board. And, as a Yakuza sicko, I love the glimpses we get at all the mini-games in just 15 seconds. (What a cool trend!) This one's coming to Steam on April 3 - there's also a free demo.

This next one is slightly less wholesome. Car Park Capital looks like a chill, old school SimCity-like that has you connecting roads, building infrastructure, and helping your big-nose residents get around easier. It's actually a "satirical simulator" where the car industry has tasked you to "convert walkable cities into parking lots and use propaganda to convince everyone it's what they want." Truly evil! Sick, really. (It's also on my Steam wishlist, shh.)

Finally, we have Truckful, which seems like an initially chill sim about driving a truck through some of the most serene woods you've seen in-game. You'll soon be trying not to drift off a cliffside while unravelling a "small town mystery." It's also, of course, on Steam.

For more, keep an eye on the upcoming indie games of 2025 and beyond.

The publisher acknowledged that the outages caused "inconvenience as you were unable to participate in the test" in a recent social media post. "Considering that a significant portion of the test period was cut short, we are currently examining the possibility of conducting an additional approximately 24-hour session next weekend or later."

The PlayStation Network was down for basically the entirety of yesterday, February 8, meaning it was impossible for most people to play online games, digitally-owned games, and connect to services like the PlayStation Store. The PSN outage also came at a particularly bad time for fans of slaying big beasts, though.

Monster Hunter Wilds' second open beta was set to take place across two weekends with the first running from February 6 to February 9. Of course, the outages meant that PS5 players couldn't access the beta or its online features for a essentially third of its runtime, but it seems like Capcom might be making up for it in the future.

Sony itself hasn't fully detailed what caused the issues, although it did state that "network services have fully recovered from an operational issue." To make up for blunder, it's automatically giving "all PlayStation Plus members" an "additional 5 days of service."

Elsewhere in the game, Monster Hunter Wilds fans were delighted to see the return of the nightmarish bug that turns everyone into a PS1-style blob. It didn't come as too much of a surprise since Capcom warned folks ahead of time that improvements made since the first beta wouldn't surface until the game's full release on February 28. However, even the developers were happy to see fans embracing the cursed bug.

Check out the best Monster Hunter Wilds weapons and tier list for the beta.

The official PSN Network Status confirms that issues began to arise on Saturday at 00:00am UK time, and players across PS3, PS Vita, PS4, and PS5 might have problems with account management, signing in, game streaming, game purchasing, and most importantly: playing games.

When online servers go down, most players expect not to be able to play multiplayer games or games that require persistent internet access. However, these outages are also reportedly affecting digital single-player games as modern PlayStation consoles need to verify if you have access to a game's license.

"Can't use this content," the error message reads when trying to boot up digital games on the PS5, including exclusively single-player ones like Metaphor: ReFantazio and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. "Can't connect to the server to verify your license."

Even more curiously, some players are reporting that you can't even connect a disc drive to the all-digital PS5 Slim or PS5 Pro at the moment, meaning that entire physical libraries are seemingly unplayable during these outages. "This is why real physical media and disc drive access is vital," writes one player.

"We are aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN," PlayStation tweeted with no further follow up.

This comes a week before Sony is expected to hold a State of Play showcase featuring news from Death Stranding 2, which has been teased extensively over the last few days, and the Metal Gear Solid 3 remake, which just had a trailer and its release date leaked online.

For now, don’t miss a single exciting release with our new games of 2025 and beyond release calendar.

Kaleiki now works as the boss of Notorious Studios, prepping the imminent early access release of its first game Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, which is mixing the get-in-get-out PvPvE gameplay of an extraction shooter with more traditional fantasy RPG trappings. It looks really cool, despite the really generic name.

But one problem that was on top of Kaleiki's mind during development was how the "meta" will often stagnate in modern RPGs and players will almost always declare that one character build is the "best for any given situation," he said in an interview with GamesRadar+. He then found some inspiration in the unlikeliest of places.

"The only solution I think is you have to change the meta continually," he continued. "If you look at Marvel Rivals, actually, it's kind of interesting what NetEase did. They have teamups where two heroes get a bonus if they play with each other, like Storm and I think Thor get something... What they're planning to do, which I think is smart, is that every season or every now and then they'll just change them."

NetEase have said that character teamups will rotate in and out every season or so to keep up with the game's evolving story, but also to encourage players to try out new combinations.

"So constantly the meta is shifting on the player, so players constantly have to re-evaluate and think through 'what is best, what is the new meta?' That's the only thing you can really do," he said. "I think players like it and developers like it. League of Legends does the same thing, they flip the board every time they do a season. This hero that was terrible before is now the best. DOTA does the same thing. That's what we've been seeing and I think it actually works pretty well."

Legacy: Steel & Sorcery doesn't have teamups and special heroes to rejig every season, though, so how is it solving the problem? "Probably what we'll do in our game, we've been talking about adding different maps, and we'll have seasons in the game as well," he explained. "That's a whole other thing I learned from WoW about seasons. Maybe this season certain crafting materials are rarer than others and that can make different builds more common because you can create other items easier than you could last season."

Legacy: Steel & Sorcery hits Steam early access on Febrary 12.

For now, don’t miss a single exciting release with our new games of 2025 and beyond release calendar.

"Over the course of the last year of the galactic war, we have, on numerous occasions, been positively surprised by the actions and choices the community have taken," Joel says in a new video embedded below. "Choices that are now canon. That are now part of Helldiver lore for all time."

The first episode in the series recalls The Defense of Mort, an in-game event that tasked the entire community to defend a planet for two whole days. But it makes the list because the Helldiver's eventual victory was only guaranteed in the last few minutes.

Joel remembers that during the start of the galactic war, while humanity were busy squashing bugs, the sly Automaton Legion got aggressive and moved toward Super Earth. For two weeks, the game was full of bot-based defend events. "The Helldivers were somewhat successful in preventing the Automatons from amassing too much, but the one moment where that tide properly turned was on the planet of Mort," the game master recalls. "That 48-hour defend event came down to the last three minutes."

What makes the defense of Mort so memorable for Joel was how the community banded together to turn what was "projected to be a defeat" into a win. You see, the mission was ending on a Tuesday, the same day when Valve usually takes Steam offline for some maintenance, which left all PC Helldivers MIA during a crucial turning point in the war. But across Reddit and Discord and every other social media site, divers saw the clock ticking and rallied together - and it was perhaps the first but definitely not the last time that so many players got behind a unified, self-organized campaign against the odds. Joel calls the feat "the most nail-bitingly close win we had seen up to that point."

Check out our guide to the best Helldivers 2 weapons.

Using throwing knives, I swiftly take out any templars moving in groups of two or three with well-aimed headshots before they can react. Then, I cleanly finish off any enemies foolish enough to stand around solo with my hidden blade. Disabling any bells as I go, it's not long before the cemetery is as quiet as the dead once more. This mission contrasts greatly to what I was doing previously as Jacob. Surrounded by a group of Blighters, I was instead playing to his strengths by fighting in a way that was anything but stealthy. Throwing fists and landing hits with my cane-sword in plain sight, it was just as satisfying as Evie's covert operation – thanks to the slick combos and double-finishers I was landing as her twin brother.

Revisiting Assassin's Creed Syndicate has made me once again appreciate the sense of variety both Fyre twins offer, and I can't wait to see how that might translate over into the dual protagonist set-up in Assassin's Creed Shadows. But there are also other parallels that can be drawn between Syndicate and what we've seen of Shadows so far that only make me more excited for what's to come.

Two sides

Since Ubisoft Quebec worked on both Syndicate and Assassin's Creed Odyssey – two of my favorite entries in the series – I've been riding the hype train for Assassin's Creed Shadows since it was first announced. Returning to Victorian London to relive the Fyre twin's gang-laden, carriage-riding adventures just reaffirms my excitement. Not only does it serve as a reminder of how downright fun a dual-protagonist set up can be, but it also has me looking forward to see how the studio is bringing the 10 years of experience it's garnered since Syndicate to bring us a new, updated take on the feature in feudal Japan.

Right away, it's not hard to see the similarities between the Frye twins and Naoe and Yasuke. With Noae being a shinobi who goes all in on stealth not unlike Evie, and Yasuke being a samurai who's more combat-focused which is akin to Jacob, both lean into different strengths and abilities. I always liked how Assassin's Creed Syndicate often gives you free rein to decide which twin you want to play as, but there are certain quests that require either twin, and it always felt like it offered up variety in terms of your approach because of it. Now, Shadows is also going to give us the freedom to choose who we want to tackle a given scenario with, and I can only hope it'll be just as satisfying as my shenanigans with the Fyre twins, if not more.

In many respects, the new protagonists feel like an evolution of the Fyre twins, with their own circumstances – such as the fact that they're not closely related – promising to change up the experience and offer up a fresh perspective on the dual-protagonist setup. And not unlike Syndicate, I can't wait to see how and if their dynamic and different skills will offer up an experience as varied as the Fyre twins.

History and hooks

As a longtime fan, I've often considered Assassin's Creed Syndicate my favorite game in the series, and that's not just down to how well it delivers on the dual-protagonist formula. I always appreciated how it explores the history of the Victorian era, its sense of scale, and its satisfying combo-heavy combat system. Not to mention the traversal, with the grappling hook allowing me to zip up to chimney tops and scale notable landmarks with ease. The latter is happily making its way into Shadows with a grappling hook that's far more physics-based, which again speaks to how the upcoming RPG is evolving what's come before, but I'm also hopeful about the other aspects that spoke to me in Syndicate, too.

In terms of the historic aspect, there were so many collectibles dotted around its setting that would tell you more about the time period, from telling you the meaning of different pressed flowers you find, to showing Victorian newspaper illustrations showcasing different historic events in the city. Even the loading screen – which is now becoming a thing of the past thanks to current-gen hardware – would drop kernels of history. It always felt like I was immersed in the 19th century, with plenty to feed my hunger to learn more about London at that time. I very much hope this will be carried forward into Shadows, and I can't wait to see how it will delve into the Sengoku period of Japan.

Since Syndicate is just set in the city of London, which is made up of different boroughs, it succeeds at providing plenty of exploration without feeling as overwhelming as the likes of Assassin's Creed Valhalla. With Assassin's Creed Shadows following the RPG route of Odyssey, it'll likely feel bigger than Syndicate in this regard – with the developer revealing it will have a map that's similar in size to Origins. But I do get the sense that it will scale things back from the bigger RPG entries, and hopefully tap into the slightly more curated feel of Syndicate.

Of course, Syndicate offered plenty to do within the city, with a host of different side activities to complete that tapped into the culture of the time. Most interestingly, every activity is tied to a particular ally you meet as Evie or Jacob, and completing them will build their loyalty and earn rewards – which incentivizes me to do all of them. I'm curious to know if such a feature, or something like it, may factor into Shadows. We already know that you'll be able to recruit people who will also stay at your home base. You can get to know them and hear their stories, but I wonder if there will be other allies not unlike those in Syndicate that will give you a similar kind of motivation.

I know Syndicate's combat didn't click with everyone, but it really did always make me feel like I was a slick fighter. Landing combos without taking a hit and putting different weapons to use always felt satisfying. While the hidden blade has been a mainstay fixture, combat in the series has changed a lot in the years since. As more entries have gone down the RPG route, we've seen fighting that's far more action-oriented, with more weapons introduced into the mix. From what we've seen so far of Shadows, it looks like it's drawing from Syndicate's mix of the protagonist's strengths and building on it between Naoe and Yasuke, while also leaning into its RPG direction by making full use of the more action-based combat systems we've seen in the likes of Odyssey and Valhalla.

I did enjoy fighting in the latter games, but I'm also glad there'll be more of stealthy focus on Naoe's side to offer up a mixture of approaches. And just like the cane-word, knuckledusters, and Kukri blades in Syndicate, I'm looking forward to seeing how Shadow's arsenal of weapons may offer up something unique to the time period.

My time with Evie in the cemetery and Jacob against the Blighters only makes me more excited about what's in store for us in Shadows. I can't wait to discover how the studio might have evolved the formula over the years since both Odyssey and Syndicate, and how my favorite game may have informed the adventure set in Japan. With only a month to go before we'll be able to step back in time and meet Naoe and Yasuke for ourselves, I won't have to wait much longer to find out.

Explore the future of the series with our roundup of upcoming Assassin's Creed games.

It might not seem important at first glance, but those physiques are one of the most essential factors in any hero shooter, and Marvel Rivals' discipline in this area isn't just slipshod: it's getting worse with every update.

Clear and present danger

Like many multiplayer shooters and certainly most hero shooters, the battlefield of Marvel Rivals tends to be busy. Lunar boomerangs ricochet off tacky New Age jewellery while skull-pattern murderers sling pink smoke bombs, neon webbing spills over the arena, and we've barely started. Arrows are in flight, hulks are hulking out, and a burgundy soccer mom is floating above all of this and threatening to blow herself up if her demands are not met. In normal circumstances this situation should be mentally overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be. Not when characters have clear silhouettes.

This is a trick almost as old as multiplayer itself. Even more important than the colors a character wears, their outline is what your brain notices first, and comprehension immediately follows. Without that attempt to meet you halfway the game risks getting immediately frustrating, as you can't process what you're looking at fast enough to make an informed choice about how to murder it.

In some respects Marvel Rivals is good at the silhouette game. For example, Hulk, Venom and Thor are all large tanks, but still have very distinct shapes. Hulk has a small head, making him pointy at the top. Venom is hunched with little legs, making him into an upside-down triangle. Thor is basically a rectangle, with a fluttering cape to further draw the eye. All great, no notes.

But as you get further into the roster of Marvel Rivals characters, things start to get tricky. Winter Soldier and Punisher are both middling-sized men in dark clothes holding guns in front of them, and now it's getting harder to tell at a distance. Likewise, Wolverine and Black Panther have similar movements and builds that make their rough shapes indistinct, not helped by both of them moving in fast pounces that make them difficult to track with the eye. Still, Logan's ugly jacket being coloured like a tropical fish does help mark them apart.

But clarity takes a hit again once you reach the bulk of the women in Marvel Rivals. After all, the men come in all shapes and sizes, from the lithe and acrobatic Spider-Man to the regal bearing of Magneto. But if you told me that Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, Mantis, Magik, Psylocke and Luna Snow were all built off the same wireframe model, I'd absolutely believe you. And Dagger and the new Marvel Rivals Invisible Woman are the real offenders: both hourglass figures in white jumpsuits with long, blonde hair, slinging small, glassy projectiles that heal allies and hurt foes. Most would struggle to separate them in a police line-up, let alone in the frenetic chaos of a dozen demigods trying to kill each other.

The shape of Things to come

It's hard to argue that this isn't a failing of the visual design. These characters aren't meant to be blurring together through some camouflage mechanic, this isn't supposed to be part of the meta. It's just unclear visual language.

Oh, and it gets worse when you factor in all those paid skins. Remember how Wolverine's varsity jacket helped separate him from the rest of the cast? Well, there's also several paid alternatives that give him all sorts of hues, and now I can't trust anything. Meanwhile, Star-Lord's "Lion's Mane" outfit looks so different to his regular clothes that it makes it hard to tell if it's even Peter Quill underneath that glam rock wig, ruining both the color theming and the silhouette in a single strike. Oh, and both Iron Fist and Black Widow now have similar costumes that muddle the issue further, so now I can't tell the flying space rogue, martial arts master and sniper apart. If anybody out there had actually played Black Widow, it would be a catastrophe.

Overwatch wasn't completely perfect in this regard, but in its heyday it was pretty solid at keeping its cast visually distinct, even with the wildcard factor that is paid cosmetics. Cartoonish visuals always help here. Team Fortress 2 was even more skilled at this (especially in the pre-Hat era), which is doubly impressive considering that the reds and blues had to be… well, red and blue, a limitation that Valve's artists effortlessly worked around.

I'm not really sure how Marvel Rivals fixes this problem retroactively without a lot of refunds, but they can at least keep it in mind going forward. Embracing more body types, especially for the women in the cast, won't just be good for representation (though it would also be that), it's good for optical clarity. Staying creative with costumes and armor will also help, like with Magneto's unique hood ornament, and making sure that future skins don't blur their silhouettes will do a world of good. Use whatever colors you want, NetEase – but for fun's sake, please color within the lines.

Follow up your time in Marvel Rivals with more of the best superhero games

"After a long hiatus - I'm pleased to announce that I have developed a functional version of the seamless co-op mod for Dark Souls 3," the modder announced on their Ko-Fi page. "This is a a mod that aims to make the co-operative side of multiplayer in the game more fun."

Of course, Dark Souls 3 already has some form of multiplayer. You can summon other players to help out temporarily, but they'll disappear after a short while. This upcoming mod is turning the game into a start-to-finish co-op affair with "persisting multiplayer sessions after death, boss kills, teleports, etc." There's also be a toggle for "full progress synchronisation" and "optional difficulty modifiers" that let you increase enemy health or turn on friendly fire, for example.

It might sound a little too good to be true, but Yui even published a little co-op clip running through Lothric Castle as evidence. "Play with friends from the tutorial to the very end of the game, with synchronised progress, and no resummoning or interruptions," the video's description reads - see it in action below!

"The mod isn't quite finished yet and there are a few bugs to iron out and quality of life features to add - however I'm expecting to have it sometime soon," the modder explained. If their previous work is anything to go by, you'll definitely want to keep an eye on this one.

Check out our top Elden Ring tips if you're making your way through the Lands Between again.

Kaleiki recently sat down with GamesRadar+ for a comprehensive talk about Notorious Studios' debut game, Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, which he bills as a AA game sitting somewhere between indie and AAA. The conversation frequently gravitated toward some of the key distinctions, in Kaleiki's view, between indie, AAA, and that nebulous space in between the two. Those distinctions played a big part in his decision to leave Blizzard back in 2020.

"When you're a game developer in AAA, you're doing all the things that game developers do, like design and put stuff into the game and iterate, but it's a very different experience to what we're doing now, which is starting our own game and working from scratching, starting up all the foundations and creating philosophies and pillars of what we should be doing for the game," he said.

It sounds to me like a big reason Kaleiki left Blizzard was due to the heavy compartmentalizing of developers into specific teams working on very specific parts of the game, leaving them without a comprehensive understanding of what's being made.

"I saw the studio model and their motivations and what kind of games we wanted to make were changing," Kaleiki explained. "I thought, 'I haven't really changed much but the studio has,' and that's kind of why I left.

"Like I was saying earlier, I didn't really feel like a game developer in some way. I felt like I was a World of Warcraft class designer or game designer, but I didn't really know the full gambit of the entire game development process, which I do know now."

Kaleiki also agreed with us that "it becomes harder for these larger AAA studios to maintain this connection to the player as they grow, because it becomes a challenge of scale."

Distilled into the simplest possible terms, the concept for Legacy: Steel & Sorcery is an RPG that plays like "World PvP: The Game" and feels like a mini MMO channeling "early Blizzard." It's due to hit Steam Early Access on February 12.

In the meantime, here are the best MMOs you can play right now.

"[SCS Software has] a ginormous, huge audience and extremely dedicated fans," Warhorse global PR manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling tells GamesRadar+. "And they have the nicest offices here from all the game studios. They've built up their own Silicon Valley kind of thing. We're not there yet. They have way more developers than we do. The Czech gaming industry is flourishing, and KCD maybe helps to spread some love and whatnot, and maybe motivate some new studios to come up."

As Warhorse figures, their similarities with SCS might actually go beyond their country of origin. "In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, we attracted quite a lot of people who never play games, which is sort of unique," senior game designer Ondřej Bittner says. "It's sort of like Euro Truck Simulator – a lot of people who play Euro Truck Simulator don't play other games. So we interact with a lot of people who love history, or fencing, or historical martial arts, or whatever, and they didn't have a problem with most of the mechanics."

Bittner is alluding here to KCD's more divisive mechanics, like its limited save system - something players who are coming for the RPG's grounded historical focus don't seem to mind. Similarly, I doubt too many people are banging down SCS Software's door hoping to transform Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator into high-speed arcade racing games. It pays to understand your niche, and unlikely as it may seem that's something these two Czech studios have in common.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's developer knew it couldn't "repeat the Eurojank" of the first game – and as sales soar, Warhorse is having a Witcher 3 moment.

It seems like all of Street Fighter's social media accounts have temporarily paused posting quotidian, asexual things like updates, bug fixes, etc. in order to collapse to their knees and start barking like untrained puppies. On TikTok, Capcom posts romantic footage of Mai's – let's face it – giant boobs – defying gravity as she leaps into a backflip amid cherry blossoms to the tune of Kelis' "Milkshake."

"Mai's milkshake brings all her foes to the yard," Capcom declares in the caption. Sure, Capcom, just her "foes." On Twitter, Capcom again references the song – which is about tits, ass, or any number of sexual acts, depending on who you ask – saying Mai "can teach you, but she'll have to charge."

Right. So, I've been noticing that Capcom is trying to be sneaky about all its barely veiled innuendos, following up winky references to how Mai is obviously so hot, it's an evolutionary innovation, with references to or footage of her seamless combat skill. That said, the developer is doing an embarrassing job of acting coy. Its pheromones are gushing like water from a fire hydrant. I can hear its horny wailing from like, three Street Fighters away.

"Play Mai for two reasons," Capcom says on Twitter, "ninja trickery and aerial attacks." OK, sure. "She's giving fierce. She's slaying," the developer says in another post.

But what am I supposed to make of Capcom's January announcement that "Mai from Fatal Fury promises to warm you up when she bounces in to #StreetFighter6 on February 5. Don't keep her waiting," with a fire emoji at the end? Capcom has even added more replay mechanics with its Mai update, allowing players to pause more easily. I have an idea: how about you all pause and look inward?

Once you cool off, peruse our list of the 25 best fighting games you can play right now.

"I think the mechanics you're describing – a little more involved gameplay – falls around the fact that players may be finally [realizing] that it doesn't really matter how long a game is," Bittner tells GamesRadar+. "What matters is if your individual sessions are individual enough. If a game is 150 hours and all of your sessions are the same, you're gonna get bored. A little more involved mechanics [means] more original content."

It's neighboring an old topic that's seen an uptick in debate recently: are games too dang long? Several well-known executives and designers have argued that extremely long games are out of place or outright fatiguing today. The question becomes: are games too long, or are some long games simply running out of ideas long before the credits roll? If they had more gas in the tank, more unique experiences to bring out, that long runtime may feel justified; players may be excited to have more of this thing they love, rather than fatigued by the long familiar road ahead of them.

Bittner offers an example of what sessions may look like in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – a unique adventure erratically strung together from boot theft, bar hopping, bandit hunting, and murder mystery. "Because these are vastly different, you don't get bored," he says of the experience.

"And it doesn't really matter if it's like 100 hours or 50," he continues. "And that goes for games like Elden Ring and all that. You know, with all the secrets. Elden Ring is kind of simple mechanics, but it's so involved in the levels of where you can go and what you can discover. Or Zelda games which, on the other hand, have the awesome mechanics and stuff. So I think this is good for the industry and for the players, that the entertainment is more qualitative than certain titles that are just very repetitive."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an unflinching RPG, ready and willing to kick you with steel-toed consequences, but Bittner reckons it's also approachable. The goal with the sequel was to "keep the complexity, keep all the living world that can tell the emergent stories, but make it more accessible so we can break out of the niche and be like, hey, this is for everyone. You can do it. Everyone can enjoy it. After all, the game is not hard to play, because you can always do it somehow differently."

He compares this to the demands of a game like Elden Ring, which also gives players plenty of ways to overcome challenges, but sets a high minimum for what you have to do to progress. You can beat that boss however you like, but you do have to beat it and it's still very challenging. Bittner's experience with Elden Ring is an interesting example of how some games just don't click for you even if you recognize what makes them great. FromSoftware's flavor of action has been especially polarizing over the years – at GamesRadar+ alone, we have writers who love it (me) and folks who find it impenetrable.

"I'd say I can't play Elden Ring because I'm just not good at the combat and that's all there is," Bittner says. "It's super hardcore for me and I can never understand how people can play it. But I think Kingdom Come is way more, like, you can just walk around and wear nice clothes, and you can do it, you know. So I think it's actually quite a welcoming hardcore game."

This approach, a refinement of the first game's philosophy, has certainly resonated with players. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 sold 1 million copies and recouped its development costs within a day, per Warhorse co-founder Daniel Vávra.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev weighs in on why it's getting harder to survive in RPGs.

This is an extended version of a scene we previously saw in the State of Play trailer last January, where Sam and Fragile are discussing a mysterious benefactor who Sam doesn't trust. "We've both been used and lied to before, it's true," Fragile responds in this extended cut. "But as long as they keep up their end, I won't pry."

I've seen some discussion from fans that Fragile's face model might be improved from its previous presentation throughout the clip, more closely matching actor Léa Seydoux's actual appearance, but it's a bit tough to tell in this grainy, off-screen presentation.

Kojima notes that this is part of "main sound mixing with London," which seems to effectively confirm previous speculation that he's been teasing a new Death Stranding 2 trailer on social media over the past few days. There have been various rumblings about a new PlayStation State of Play event in the near future, and that'd certainly be a solid place to debut the next look at Death Stranding 2.

The previous Death Stranding 2 trailer noted that the game was set to launch in 2025. Here's hoping the next trailer reconfirms that window and narrows it down just a little.

Death Stranding 2 actors are finishing filming and getting gifts from Hideo Kojima, but "the game still remains in development," so don't expect it out any time soon.

Talking to Bloomberg, the solo developer who goes by LocalThunk revealed he's been able to quit his job in IT and buy a house with his partner thanks to the success of Balatro, but, otherwise LocalThunk's life has been relatively unaffected by his newfound wealth.

"It's been a lot of stress, but very fulfilling, being able to walk on something that I love all day, every day, as long as I want," LocalThunk said. "We'd been living below our means anyway when I had that IT job, so our lifestyle hasn't changed all that much. I travel a little more so I can visit friends. I'm just trying to be responsible right now with anything. I still have a job to do."

Without a day job keeping him preoccupied, LocalThunk is able to dedicate his work day to making updates for Balatro. In the same Bloomberg interview, he revealed he's working on Balatro update 1.1, which will add new Jokers and a revamp of the confusing Matador Joker. That, he hopes, will be out sometime this year.

As for what's next for LocalThunk post-Balatro, he's not quite there yet, telling Bloomberg he gets "obsessed with something for a long time." Although he admitted he's had ideas for other games, he said, every time his mind goes to new games, he thinks, "'you can't do that right now, you're in the middle of something else.'"

After an unbeatable year for Balatro, we asked a professional poker player to break down what makes the indie roguelike so good.

In the first beta, PC players found that, seemingly due to GPU bottlenecks or loading issues (depending on your rig), monsters and characters in Monster Hunter Wilds would occasionally end up lacking, well, dimensions. In most cases, there'd be missing textures or large details, but severe examples can cough up flailing oblong chimeras that make the Fighting Polygon Team from Super Smash Bros. look certifiably high-def.

These monstrosities were quickly nicknamed origami monsters and even spawned their own fanart, not to mention mods for other Monster Hunter games deliberately recreating the blocky look. This kind of issue wouldn't be nearly as funny in the full game, but some players have expressed hopes to see event quests in Wilds commemorating the beta's iconic origami mons.

Now seemed like a good time to share a fun anecdote from a previous exchange I had with Monster Hunter producer Ryozo Tsujimoto, Wilds art and executive director Kaname Fujioka, and Wilds director Yuya Tokuda. In a group interview, I asked if they'd seen all the players having fun with origami monster memes and mods, and how it feels to see the beta's brokenness celebrated in this way. I compared the low-poly beasts to the original PS2 Monster Hunter – if anything, they're much more retro – and as the question was relayed in Japanese by our interpreter, the group fell into laughter cut with just the tiniest bit of the resignation that's born from technical issues.

"They were aware of how people were experiencing some of the low polygons and having their fun with it," our interpreter explained, focusing on Fujioka's response to begin with. "It was a nice thing to see that people were enjoying it in a way that they were having fun with it."

Relaying Tsujimoto's response, the interpreter continued: "But obviously we would recommend people do play and get the full experience on the PC with the recommended PC specs that we have stated out there. Obviously, when you play on the PC, the specs vary widely depending on what kind of environment you have, so our suggestion is for people to please play on the recommended specs to get the full experience. But it's nice to know that some people are enjoying or having fun with Monster Hunter Wilds."

As it happens, those PC specs have been reduced slightly after some optimization on Capcom's end. Monster Hunter Wilds isn't a lightweight game by any means, and in early performance tests using the new benchmark tool, it seems to be CPU-limited just like Monster Hunter World was, but running it is now a slightly less daunting task. The PC performance of the full game remains to be seen, however. Again, don't let the outdated beta build throw you off, but don't put too much stock in the benchmark tool's limited scenarios either.

Monster Hunter Wilds saved some big surprises for the second beta: "online single player," Gore Magala, a new monster, and photo mode.

Introduced as part of the Helldivers 2 Servants of Freedom Warbond, the Ultimatum is a secondary weapon described as "a pistol front-loaded with a single, powerful explosive. The weight of the projectile limits the weapon's range." Simply calling it a "powerful explosive" might be understating things, though, as this is basically a mini-nuke along the lines of what you might see in a Fallout game.

The Ultimatum is indeed a bit hard to aim, as you've got to work hard to correct for its arcing flight path, but if you hit just about any target it's immediately done for. That even goes for notoriously sturdy objective targets like Detector Towers, Jammers, Science Labs, Fabricators, and more.

You only need a quick browse through the Helldivers 2 subreddit to see that the Ultimatum is the hot-button topic of the moment, though the war is admittedly a bit lopsided. There are a handful of players suggesting that its power to destroy objectives is a bit much for a secondary weapon, and many, many more preemptively trying to shut down any idea of a potential nerf while suggesting that the weapon is perfectly balanced as it is.

Balance is a tricky topic to unpack in any multiplayer game, so I guess we'll see what Arrowhead decides to do, but with a cooperative PVE-focused title like Helldivers 2 it's difficult to say anything beyond "mini-nuke go brrrrrrrrrrr."

Check out our guide to the best Helldivers 2 weapons.

Let's say I warmed up to it. Black Ops 6 is as remarkable as the series can be – we especially appreciated its fluid movement mechanics in our Black Ops 6 review – but I didn't think about it at all when it released late in 2024. I associated Call of Duty with the boys at my middle school, chocolate milk spouting out of their noses at lunch.

I felt like Call of Duty wasn't for women. Or, not for women like me, who are nervous, slow beginners with horrifyingly average aim. Anyway, I'd seen videos of girls talking to their teammates over voice chat, and it usually ended in flaccid commands to "make me a sandwich," or the kind of sexual depravity you find in a Paul Verhoeven movie. Thus, my association with boys at lunch snorting dairy.

It's appropriate, then, that my bedroom meet-ups with Black Ops 6 began with a boy.

Smooth operator

When my boyfriend told me he was going to start playing the FPS, I thought he was kidding. Like, do I even know you anymore? Are you going to spend $30 on the bong gun and forget about me?

Worse than that, while I certainly associate my favorite games – including Bloodborne and American McGee's Alice – with bloodshed, Call of Duty's inherent worship of military barbarism always crossed a line of being too real for me. Why should I play a video game that delights in force, in nationalism, in individualism when I'm constantly subjected to the queasy same on the news? Play should be liberating, not indoctrinating, right?

I think that's true, still, but I can't deny that Call of Duty worked its sleazy magic on me. I started getting sleepy ideas around 3 AM. I've been learning to live with insomnia, a condition that waxes and wanes with my nervousness around things like success and online multiplayer.

My boyfriend's interest in Black Ops 6 came at a critical period in my coping with insomnia, when I was sort of at peace with the idea of tossing and turning, though being tranquilized seemed a lot more relaxing. While I wrestled with my fear of staying awake, I'd peek over the covers at the guys holding SMGs on my boyfriend's computer.

The muffled sound of machine gun fire and gruff victory announcers – "All mission objectives met," "They never stood a chance," and so on – finally became so repetitive, I started thinking of them as a white noise machine.

After falling asleep enough times to mechanical keyboard clicking and grenade bursts, I began looking forward to my boyfriend's late Call of Duty sessions. I'd ask him if he was going to play Black Ops tonight, or if I could watch his matches, too, and get soothed by their visuals. Black Ops 6 is impeccably smooth and wet-looking, like rain on the window, except it sometimes involves a sniper using a skin that makes them look like a handsome dragon.

As my boyfriend raged against losing and cheaters , I became more attuned with this bizarre side of Call of Duty that older games in the series ignored for army grit.

Braggy Americana – that's what I hated about Call of Duty. But, from the comfort of my bed, I started learning that I was working from an outdated model. Black Ops 6, like the equally monolithic Fortnite, instead indulges in the fact that it is an online service with mass appeal. Behind my boyfriend's shoulder, I saw players blowing themselves up on purpose, or scooting around on the floor like a pissy dog to celebrate their match victory. There's an emote that does a slide whistle sound as your character pulls a thumbs up into a sneering thumbs down.

It's ridiculous. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, the game with a reputation of raising blood pressures, features hardly any blood. It's actually reliably absurd, so I now think of it as a shortcut to dreaming. Though, part of me worries that my new indifference to Call of Duty's macho guns and gall means the propaganda is working. But I've realized it's better to trivialize what scares me than let it win.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Season 2 brings back a beloved game mode fans have been begging for, but all I care about is a practically meaningless bug fix.

"Enemies do not scale with your level," Patel puts it plainly in a new rapid-fire interview with MinnMax. This might surprise you – level scaling is becoming more common, evidenced by RPGs like Cyberpunk 2077 and Diablo 4 – but I'm looking forward to exploring Avowed's dangerous cliffsides with the knowledge that power is power. One of the most liberating feelings I've experienced involves returning to a game like Dark Souls' starting area, as overleveled as a grass-fed cow, and chewing up everything in my path.

Less surprising than the game's lack of level scaling, however, is the fact that Avowed might have some bugs at launch. Big, buggy launches, such as Civilization 7's recent stumble into the spotlight, have seemingly become synonymous with AAA gaming.

That said, bugs have always been part of gaming, and some people have always been huffy about it. In their defense, I don't think anyone has ever outright enjoyed paying for a game and finding out it's easier to break than glass. In 2009, a younger GamesRadar+ even reported on the fact that the EU was proposing a law that would secure refunds for broken video game releases.

But, if we ignore gamers' rights for just a second, we can recognize that most unique, new products aren't flawless at first. To that point, Patel thinks jank is unavoidable while taking risks.

"You gotta accept a little jank to do something fun and creative," Patel tells MinnMax. We'll find out how "fun and creative" Avowed is when it releases on February 18.

Avowed director confirms the game follows The Outer Worlds' lead to skip New Game Plus, but DLC is still a "maybe."

You can read our previous coverage on the exploit for more details on how it works, but in short, the new blacklist means that when you block a character, you now block all characters tied to an account. That function is facilitated by the fact that servers now broadcast an account ID for all the characters you come into contact with. This isn't visible to players, but if the right mods were created, you could collect account ID information and start building a list of every character tied to a given player's account.

A mod that did exactly this soon went public, and, while it's since been driven underground, players came to fear that stalkers would use the information generated by this mod to create alternate accounts and start harassing a target's alternate characters.

A few weeks after these concerns started taking hold, Yoshi-P put out a public statement noting that the devs "will continue to take a firm stance against" the usage of third-party mods, and were exploring both "requesting that the tool in question be removed and deleted" and "pursuing legal action."

In today's Letter from the Producer broadcast (which was entirely in Japanese, but helpfully translated by the folks at the unofficial FF14 Discord), Yoshi-P reiterated some of the details from that previous statement, reconfirming that no personal information – such as address or payment information – could be accessed by the tool.

Nonetheless, Yoshi-P said "I am very disappointed that this kind of tool exists, but we will be improving the system going forward," according to that fan translation. These improvements – which the devs are remaining vague about for now – will start to land in the upcoming patch 7.2, which promises to be the biggest Dawntrail update yet.

"It's simply impossible": Final Fantasy 14 lead explains why the MMO's difficulty level will never be "just right" for all players.

The Steam Idler Fest is live right now and runs through February 10. As always with the storefront's genre-specific celebrations, you could lose hours just scrolling through everything that's had its price tag slashed, so here's a few recommendations from moi.

Rusty's Retirement is probably the one that most people are familiar with. It's essentially a Stardew Valley that plays itself, so, no surprise it's racked up over 10,000 overwhelmingly positive Steam reviews. Rusty lives alone at the bottom of your screen and it's your job to help him develop a flourishing, automated farm that becomes ever-complicated (and profitable).

Sticking with the 'lonely animals that farm' vibes, we have Ropuka's Idle Island, which sees an isolated frog-person repeat a chill Groundhog Day. Ropuka lives on a floating island and does nothing but cut grass, nap to recharge stamina, and repeat. It's quite horrifying when you think about it for too long. So don't think, because Ropuka's an otherwise great companion and you can decorate his adorable little home with the grass he gathers. Plus, the lo-fi beats oozing out from the island are perfect if you're looking for something to help you focus - he's sweating away while I bring you this very news, in fact.

I'd also recommend My Little Life, which is a largely condensed management game that came out on the very same day as The Sims re-releases and features a lot of the same quirks. You can't trap your little digital friend inside four walls, delete the door, and watch as they slowly die, sadly, but you can help them progress through the happier stages in life. Decorating a home. Finding companionship. Working through a sustainable career - and that's almost as fun as summoning the grim reaper.

Not all idle games exist on your desktop, however. Chillquarium has you collecting fish and selling them to turn a profit, while Chonkers makes you adopt cats, feed them until they're laughably chonky, and then find them a good home. Then, for all the Baldur's Gate 3 lovers, there's Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, a management RPG featuring characters from across the D&D canon.

Steam Idler Fest has discounts and/or highlights all of the above, plus so many more, and also has a page for upcoming idlers you might want to wishlist. Check it out.

For more, keep an eye on the upcoming indie games of 2025 and beyond.

Dough Spectrum Black 32 prices start at $899 for the matte version, and that’s honestly not half bad for a 31.5-inch 4K 240Hz dual-resolution that rivals the best gaming monitor options. It’s a chunk cheaper than my current favorite screen, the LG Ultragear ‎32GS95UE, despite using the exact same WOLED panel, not to mention the $1,099 model I’ve been testing boasts that extra layer of glossy Gorilla Glass. You’d think that would help it steal the crown, I mean, I was rooting for it. However, when you combine those aforementioned firmware issues with the fact it doesn’t come with a stand, LG’s own screen still comes out tops.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, the Dough Spectrum Black 32 is one of the best 4K monitors for gaming. It also happens to be a killer 1080p screen since it can moonlight as a 480Hz panel. I’m just not sure most players should buy it by default over the Ultragear ‎32GS95UE as, while both experiences are fairly close, Dough’s display isn’t quite as tight.

Design

Dough monitors tend to look more like professional Apple-esque screens than gaming displays, and the Spectrum Black 32 is no different. The screen maker started leaning into the Apple Studio vibe with the Spectrum Black 27, and it makes a nice change from brands forcing RGB lighting and weird ridges into aesthetics as a check box exercise.

From the front, the Spectrum Black 32 keeps things fairly conservative. We’re talking about a black rectangle with a not-quite edge-to-edge design, thanks to the usual black border around OLED screens. It’s slick, but not exactly what I’d call a head-turner even with its optional square pedestal stand attached. What it does embody, however, is a premium vibe that will add an element of elegance to your gaming desk setup using a blend of metals and high-quality plastics.

The back sings a similar tune, keeping most of the guts to a rectangular hump while keeping everything else pretty thin. The monitor’s ports also fire outwards rather than being tucked under a lip since the protruding parts of the case are flush with the bottom, but I much prefer this approach since it makes hot-swapping cables out from the front easier.

You’ll find the OSD controls, power button, and dual resolution toggle in that bottom region too, and yes, it uses one of those dreaded menu joysticks. While the buttons on the Spectrum Black 27 used to face outwards on the back, they’re now underneath the front, which does result in less fumbling around. Does that help the OSD nub control a little better? Actually, no, as it’s smaller this time around, which means I can’t quite grip the edges with my finger as well for enhanced tactility.

I’d occasionally find myself accidentally pressing one of the directional shortcuts for things like crosshairs and source input rather than a center press, which is incredibly annoying. If Dough, or any other monitor maker for that matter, wants to stop me moaning about this in every review, I’d start adding in a small remote control. I get that there are cost implications, but it’s the sort of luxury I want from a premium monitor in 2025.

Features

Dual-resolution monitors are all the rage going into 2025, and I’m totally here for it. Being able to (sort of) instantly hop between 4K 240Hz and 1080p 480Hz should save you thinking about buying a high refresh rate monitor for years to come, and the Dough Spectrum Black 32 fully embraces that.

Of course, it’s far from being the first 4K 240Hz dual-resolution monitor on the market, and just like its rivals, it's ultimately a spin on the LG Ultragear ‎32GS95UE. That’s less a case of Dough copying homework and more the company adding some enhanced spice, or at least that’s the case with the glossy Gorilla Glass version. If you pick up the base model, you’re getting something that’s incredibly close to LG’s WOLED screen, whereas the top model adds a USB-C hub with power delivery into the mix.

The model I’m testing sadly lacks the USB-C extras, which means no fooling around with gaming handhelds and using single-cable Power Delivery abilities. It’s a future that’d be nice to have, but you can grab a Steam Deck dock for less than the difference between models ($1,099 versus $1,299), although you’re getting DisplayPort 2.1 instead of 1.4 with that yet-to-be-released variant.

But hey, I can only speak for the non-USB-C glossy model, so let’s dive into what it offers beyond dual-resolution. The panel itself is armed with LG’s MLA+ tech, the same feature that earns the LG OLED G4 the best gaming TV crown, FreeSync Premium Pro, Variable Refresh Rate, and HDR True Black 400 support. On top of that, you’re getting a myriad of maintenance settings that ensure burn-in is never an issue, including logo extraction algorithms, menu bar detection, and even a “transistor wear compensation” option that’ll help prevent image retention even as the hardware starts to suffer from old age.

I don’t want to dunk on the number of options in the Spectrum Black 32’s OSD, but it is a little overwhelming. The menu is packed to the brim with features most players might not even have a second thought about, which does hammer home the screen’s enthusiast market. That’s both a good and a bad thing, as it makes the monitor extremely customizable while making general use a little harder and increasing your chances of weird quirks.

Performance

Here’s where things with the Dough Spectrum Black 32 get interesting, as it offers up killer 4K capabilities laced with glossy goodness. However, I came across multiple instances of the monitor’s firmware being a pain, and while it didn’t completely hamper things on a visual level or make the screen completely unusable, it left me feeling like the dough had to go back in the oven.

Starting with HDR, I initially had to install a firmware update to tackle issues with brightness. The fix worked, but High Dynamic Range content seems to still feel a little off on this screen. Windows 11 normally looks a little weird at first with the setting switched on, but even after some calibration and playing around with color options, tone mapping seems to be providing inconsistent results. I found myself switching HDR off in those instances, but it's another step I’d rather not have to take to use the feature.

My second gripe is a bit of a weird one, and it may very well be a one-off. After a few weeks of using the screen’s dual resolution toggle without a hitch, I found that it’d no longer jump from 4K 240Hz to 1080p 480Hz. I was still able to switch resolutions in the OSD, but the fact the button wouldn’t work was grating, to say the least. The issue still remained following both a reset and reinstalling firmware, which made me think something had gone seriously wrong.

I eventually managed to fix things by switching the toggle in the menu to another function and then back again. I’m not sure why resetting things didn’t produce the same results, and I’m willing to admit that it could have been either a one-off or something that occurred during testing. For that reason, I’m not going to hold the instance against the Spectrum Black 32, but it’s worth recording the blip so that I can stop gaslighting myself.

I eventually managed to fix things by switching the toggle in the menu to another function and then back again. I’m not sure why resetting things didn’t produce the same results, and I’m willing to admit that it could have been either a one-off or something that occurred during testing. For that reason, I’m not going to hold the instance against the Spectrum Black 32, but it’s worth recording the blip so that I can stop gaslighting myself.

Okay, on to the pros of using the Dough Spectrum Black 32, as they thankfully outweigh the cons. Just like with the Spectrum Black 27, the display takes a physical approach to elevating contrast using a glossy screen, building on top of the vibrancy already provided by the wonderful OLED panel within. This naturally helps 4K visuals pop even harder when put to good use, but I’m pretty impressed with how it benefits 1080p 480Hz scenarios too.

For my sins, I still play a lot of Overwatch 2. I’ve become accustomed to playing the shooter at 1080p since it enables me to boost fps to match even the fastest monitors out there. Hitting 480fps to match the Spectrum black 32’s max refresh rate is pretty easy, but the thing that caught me off guard before taking off as Pharah was how nice the visuals remain compared to 4K.

Yes, there are some jaggies and softness when playing at 1080p, and using a 32-inch monitor exacerbates that. However, I found myself noticing it less thanks to the gorilla glass coating, as it helped highlight the visuals and colors regardless. I will admit that 1080p mode isn’t designed for leisurely walks, the whole point is that you’ll be able to treat this screen like an esports screen. And I certainly did just that playing competitively at 480Hz, but the setup does go the extra mile to help even its fastest visuals look nice.

For a change, I’ve also been giving Marvel Rivals a go, and while it’s much harder to hit 480fps consistently in that shooter, even with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, the screen’s responsiveness came through. 0.03ms GtG response times are a staple of OLED displays at this point, and it does give the Dough Spectrum Black 32 an advantage over IPS and VA rivals. That’s not to say I’ve been playing the comic book romp like some sort of esports pro since I mainly just cause chaos as Squirrel Girl, but speed still helps firing nuts and critters around the map feel more enjoyable.

The funny thing about dual-resolution monitors is that 4K 240Hz could also be considered suitable for competitive play. It feels like only yesterday that anything above 165Hz was considered ultra-fast, and since some games aren’t good at matching higher refresh rates with an appropriate frame rate, some of you might not benefit from the resolution-switching toggle. I happen to think being able to hot-swap between two different screen configurations is pretty game-changing, but I’d say it fully depends on the games you play and your PC configuration.

At 4K, the Dough Spectrum Black 32 hammers home the benefits of glossy gaming monitors. The extra sharpness provided with UHD resolutions is highlighted by the screen type, with text popping and textures standing out that bit more compared to a matte panel. When HDR isn’t misbehaving, it pairs with the coating to produce beautiful results, and I was pretty taken mersmurized upon checking out the streets of Night City with Cyberpunk 2077’s RT Overdrive mode switched on. Ray-traced reflections and the glow of neon lighting excel on glossy screens like this, and the elevated richness certainly enhances immersion.

I ended up testing the Dough Spectrum Black 32 alongside the brand new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, which allowed me to check out fresh releases like Dragon Age: The Veilguard for the first time. Let’s just say that I’m glad my eyes got to experience the fantasy outing on this glossy screen first since it breathes extra life into Bioware’s latest RPG romp. The adventures’ detailed textures and role-playing text elements all punch harder thanks to the Gorilla Glass gloss, and the same benefits apply across the genre. Considering I had a blast playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on the 27-inch QHD version, it’s safe to say that ramping things up to 4K will only make the D&D epic more magical.

I’d love to say that there are no caveats tied to glossy monitor coatings. For what it’s worth, Dough does a nice job combating existing cons, but the 32-inch Spectrum Black is a bit more susceptible to glare than its 27-inch sibling. The screen fairs much better with HDR switched off and brightness cranked to max, but the extra surface space manages to catch more reflections otherwise. I sit next to a fairly bright window, so my tests are a little more brutal than other usage scenarios. Nevertheless, being able to see the outside world in the top-left corner had me pining for the anti-glare superpowers of the Samsung Odyssey OLED G6.

Should you buy the Dough Spectrum Black 32?

The Dough Spectrum Black 32 is a 4K heavy hitter that takes the dual-mode gaming monitor format and revamps it with glossy Gorilla Glass. It’s certainly a display designed with fidelity enthusiasts in mind, and its elegant design, excellent build quality, and abundance of protective OLED measures will help it stand the test of time. Sadly, finicky firmware ultimately keeps the screen from taking the crown right now, as quirks with HDR and functionality keep perfection out of reach.

Again, I do consider the Spectrum Black 32 to be one of the top 4K gaming monitors out there right now. The main issue is that it shares DNA with screens like the LG UltraGear 32GS95UE that feel like a more rounded experience. If you’re looking for 4K visuals with an extra kick, opting for the glossy model is well worthwhile. Otherwise, you’ll want to go straight to LG’s model for reliable HDR and extras like built-in speakers.

How I tested the Dough Spectrum Black 32

For two weeks, I used the Dough Spectrum Black as my main gaming monitor for casually playing games and benchmarking graphics cards. During that time, I tested the display’s dual-resolution capabilities by running Cyberpunk 2077 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard specifically with 4K Ultra settings enabled while also playing Overwatch 2 and Marvel Rivals at 1080p 480Hz. To assess brightness capabilities, I assessed the screen both in daylight and in a darkened room, which also helped provide insight into any glare with the glossy coating.

For more information on how we test gaming monitors and other displays, check out our full GamesRadar+ hardware policy.

Project Arc is now called PUBG: Blindspot, a name which was chosen to reference the shooter's "core gameplay elements" as well as design philosophy. Namely, players use "real-time shared vision" with their teammates, so what you can (and can't) see will play a large part in your strategies.

The Steam demo is set to go live on February 20 at 8pm PT (that's 11pm ET, or February 21 at 4am GMT), allowing us to get our hands on 10 different playable characters – each complete with unique weapons and "special tools" at their disposal. In total, there'll be seven different maps to try out – three of those are team deathmatch maps, while the other four are demolition mission maps. You can take a look at a demolition mission in action in the latest trailer below to get a flavor of what's to come.

GamesRadar+'s Andrew Brown had the chance to go hands-on with PUBG: Blindspot last year (when it was still known as Project Arc), and had some very positive things to say about it, although noted that the deathmatch mode was "absolute carnage," and didn't leave quite as good an impression as the Rainbow Six Siege-like standard mode. "Its top-down perspective emphasizes the strategic thinking that draws me to games like Counter-Strike in the first place, with less weight on quick reaction speeds and accuracy," he wrote about the latter.

It's not long now until everyone is able to try PUBG: Blindspot out for themselves, anyway. There's still no word on the full game's release date, so be sure to make the most of the upcoming demo.

For more games that'll give your brain a workout, be sure to check out our roundup of the best strategy games.

Revealing as much during the most recent live letter stream from Square Enix, Final Fantasy 14 producer and director Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida walks fans through some of the content releasing with patch 7.2 in late March. Dubbed "Seekers of Eternity," the patch brings new main scenario quests continuing the post-Dawntrail story as well as duties to run alongside them. For more story-focused or casual players, there's The Underkeep dungeon.

The Arcadion: Cruiserweight Tier is coming, too, with four new Normal raids and Savage variants. Another trial is also joining the plethora of patch 7.2 duties in both its Normal and Extreme form, titled Recollection. As for content geared toward more dedicated fans of crafting and gathering, Cosmic Exploration is coming with Seekers of Eternity – and it's massive. Think the Diadem or Island Sanctuary, but if they were set among the uncharted stars.

Fans of instances like Eureka and The Bozjan Southern Front are eating good this patch, too, thanks to the addition of the Occult Crescent. With large-scale boss battles and 48-player raids, it sounds downright chaotic – but it's the jobs available within the Occult Crescent that truly set it apart. Known as Phantom Jobs, these unique mix-and-match classes offer new abilities on top of the ones already granted by normal jobs.

It's a lot of content coming at once, and this doesn't even cover it all. According to Yoshi-P, the patch will also address community concerns like the backend exploit third-party tools were taking advantage of. You can watch the full stream for more information if you're as excited as I am to hop into 7.2 once it's here, but it's important to note that the stream is in Japanese and hasn't yet been translated into English.

"It's simply impossible": Final Fantasy 14 lead explains why the MMO's difficulty level will never be "just right" for all players

The famed studio behind beloved superhero romps Batman: Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, and Arkham Knight has had a turbulent few years. Developers were seemingly stuck in development hell while working on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League for seven years, a live-service looter shooter that didn't play to the team's strengths, was mired in behind-the-scenes turmoil, and was ultimately too late to the trend to make much money. Publisher WB Games had attributed a $200 million loss to the game.

Bloomberg now reports that Rocksteady is pivoting back to what made it a household name in the first place, citing anonymous sources familiar with the studio's plans. Rocksteady is allegedly "looking to return" to single-player Batman, though the game is years away from launching right now. It's also unclear if the project will be a continuation of its existing Arkham universe or if it'll exist in a different canon. I imagine the events of Suicide Squad, which were weirdly reversed in a comic-strip-style post-launch ending, might make the latter a more attractive proposition. (Batman Beyond might be cool!)

The change in direction could be down to several factors. Parent company Warner Bros. Discovery announced that head of WB Games David Haddad, who was in charge of the division throughout its live-service push, was exiting the company. Fellow online hopefuls, like Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions and soon-to-be-shutdown MultiVersus, also underperformed. In fact, one of the publisher's only purely single-player games in recent years came from Hogwarts Legacy, which has sold a whopping over 30 million copies so far.

Whatever Rocksteady's cooking up next won't have the involvement of studio founders Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker, who left late into Suicide Squad's development and quietly launched a new company called Hundred Star Games.

While we wait, don’t miss a single exciting release with our new games of 2025 and beyond release calendar.

Unfortunately, that approach isn't exactly ironclad. A few minutes after fleeing the starting town of Troskowitz, lute safely stashed in my inventory, a notification warns me that guards have put two and two together and know what I've done. I'm now wanted in Troskowitz, but that doesn't mean too much to me. I'm already far away, and I've got what I wanted. Besides, how much can one lute be worth?

The gang gets branded

Some context: during my earlier travels, I met a pair of bards who wanted to immortalize Henry with a ballad. The only catch, as you may already have guessed, is that they didn't have a lute. Not to worry – they know the carpenter in Troskowitz has one hanging on the wall of his workshop, though the owner who commissioned its repair never came to collect it. That, according to 15th century RPG custom, makes it free real estate. I treat it as such – you already know what happens next – and by the time it's safely in the hands of my new bard friends, I've already forgotten the cold reception that's waiting for me in Troskowitz.

Unfortunately, the townspeople of Troskowitz have a better memory. Crime and punishment in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an intricate system, and avoiding the consequences of your actions is easier said than done. Bohemia has several tiers of sentencing, depending on how badly you've flouted its laws. Steal a few things, and you'll have to pay a fine and spend a few days being pelted with rotten fruit and veg in the village stocks. Break the law too soon after your first punishment – or commit more serious offences – and you'll be branded, permanently marking you as a criminal. Besides the wound itself being a pain to deal with, the brand forever impacts how everyone treats you going forward. Really screw up, though, and you'll be executed – and there's, er, no coming back from that.

When I trot back through Troskowitz a few hours later, none of this is on my mind. I'm here to pass the night before going to work for the local gravedigger at dawn, and also stock up on a few healing potions. But as I leave the apothecary, a guard waits at the door to confront me. A few things have gone missing and they know I did it, which is fair. What's not fair is the 200 groschen fine I'm expected to pay for something I didn't even keep – don't they understand how quest objectives work? I'll admit, I was following the rules of every RPG since the beginning of time: that guards have the collective memory of a single overworked goldfish, and leaving the scene of the crime for some time would resolve things. I still believed that when, indignant at the prospect of shelling out almost all of my money, I decided instead to bowl through the guard and flee – after all, the gravedigger had been very specific about me being there at dawn.

After running away from my problems, I stuck to my theory that time was the best medicine. I stayed away from Troskowitz for another day, kept busy with helping the gravedigger, and generally tried to keep Henry out of trouble. For several more days, I tried to keep my interactions with the town to a minimum. I'd either circle right past it or careen straight through on my trusty steed Pebbles, ignoring the cries of guards who tried to apprehend me (which they tried several times).

Eventually, though, my life of crime became too awkward to work around. One main quest had multiple objectives in Troskowitz, and when I tried to sneak in on foot to complete them, I was chased out by its ever-vigilant guards. Having made a little more money since the initial crime, it was time to face up to the music – so, sword in scabbard, I strolled right in and surrendered. Except there was one small catch: presumably because of all the running-away I'd done, my fine now stood a little over 2000 groschen – a sincerely unfathomable sum. If I couldn't pay up, they were going to brand me. I tried to sweet-talk my way out, to no avail. I owned up to the fact that I didn't have that sort of money, to no sympathy. Nothing worked – and given there was no way I would let Henry be branded so early in the game, there was only one option left. I fled, knocking out my would-be captor with a nasty uppercut and making a quick exit on Pebbles.

As it stands, I'm staying away from Troskowitz for real this time. My plan is to scrounge and save from honest work in the countryside until I have enough to pay off the fine. At first, having a major town off-limits was a nightmare – I still can't tick off that main quest, and Troskowitz is a very handy hub. Now, I'm quietly enjoying the ways Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is forcing me to reckon with the consequences of my actions.

My outlaw life is the most immersed I've been in an RPG in a long time, and I relish having to get inventive when it comes to making money. Does it count as graverobbing if you only took what the real graverobbers, all inexplicably stabbed to death, had already dug up? Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's world is too big to bend into shape – and by trying to do so in the main character-esque way you'd approach most RPGs, you'll only twist yourself up. For now, I'll continue to scrape enough coin together to buy forgiveness. If I'd really learned anything, I'd march back into Troskowitz and accept the real consequences – a big sizzling Crime Barcode – of my deeds. But stolen lute be damned, I won't be paying for my crimes just yet

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev weighs in on why it's getting harder to survive in RPGs – "If a game is 150 hours and all of your sessions are the same, you're gonna get bored"

How to complete the Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 Materia Prima quest without getting caught

Before getting started on this Kingdom Come 2 Materia Prima stealth operation, I recommend getting acquainted with lockpicking by heading into the barn where you grabbed the flour sacks from. To the left of where the sacks were, there are three lockpicks and a dagger that you can collect as well as a "very easy"-rated locked crate. Crack it open and you'll find seven more lockpicks – if things go well, you won't actually need these, but it's well worth picking them up while you're here.

Next, head over to hired hand Hensel and tell him you want to try both pickpocketing and stealth takedowns. Again, if all goes smoothly, you won't need to rely on these techniques, but knowing about them will help if things go wrong.

Finally, make sure you bring a Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 torch with you in case you get caught skulking about at night and do not wear armor and other clothing that substantially increases your Noise stat – honestly, going in naked isn't a terrible idea if you're desperate.

With your preparations complete, here's how you steal the document in Troskowitz for Kreyzl:

1. Fast travel to Troskowitz and speak to hired hand Zinek who is locked in the stocks in the middle of town. He asks for a password but there is no right answer here, so just pick any of the options. He explains that the document is in a chest of stolen items in the Troskowitz Rathaus jail, which is at the back of the Rathaus under the guardhouse.
2. Sleep or pass the time by doing other activities until it has passed midnight. Everyone should be asleep by this time aside from patrolling guards. You could brew some Saviour Schnapps potions using Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 belladonna so that you can set up plenty of save points along the way to fall back on.
3. Don your stealth outfit, crouch, and do not draw your torch when it's dark. This is also a great time to drink a Nighthawk potion if you have one, which will help you see better in the dark.
4. Head over to the small, white guardhouse building at the back of the Rathaus. There might be a guard leaning against the wall right next to a set of descending stairs.

6. If there is a guard, knock him out with a stealth takedown and move the body out of sight. You can also try luring him away with a thrown rock or similar distraction.
7. Go down the steps and immediately on your right, you'll spot a cellar you can go into. Grab the book at the back of the cellar called "The Strength of the Knight II".
8. Leave the cellar, go down the hallway, and into the jail. You'll reach a junction where you'll see the looked chest of stolen goods, a set of ascending steps straight ahead, and jail cells to your left and right. Avoid the steps ahead as this leads into the guard bunks. You can obviously try pickpocketing them while they sleep for any loot, but it's risky.

9. Go into the cell on your left and grab Zinek's forged key. It's under the right side of the bed, partially buried by some hay.

10. Unlock the chest and take the Offer of Hermes Trismegistus. There are some potions, a lockpick, and a wolf fang you can grab. Now is also a good time to chug a Saviour Schnapps and save!
11. Head back the way you came up the stairs, being cautious of any patrolling guards. Wait for them to pass, then sneak out towards the tree and bushes by the guardhouse.
12. Head towards the fields to the north of Troskowitz to get clear.
13. Fast travel back to the Lower Semine Mill, wait until morning if it's still nighttime, and speak to Kreyzl. Tell him you have the document to hand it and the forged key over in exchange for 45 groschen, a book called "With the silence of a cat I", and improvements to Stealth and Thievery.

With the letter handed over to Kreyzl, that's the end of the Materia Prima quest in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Assuming you followed the steps in this guide, you should have 10 lockpicks, 45 groschen, two books, and a few potions and other bits to show for your efforts. You can study The Strength of the Knight II and With the silence of a cat I to increase your Strength and Stealth respectively and then sell both.

Completing Materia Prima also means you've started the miller's path for the Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 Wedding Crashers quest, so if you keep asking Kreyzl for work, he'll eventually get you into the wedding. However, if you’re past that point and have completed the Kingdom Come Delivernace 2 For Whom the Bell Tolls quest, you can still follow Kreyzl's weird questline for some rewards.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

During the first open beta for Capcom's big beast-slaying, fast fashion-crafting blockbuster, players struggled with all types of technical issues, from performance dips and stuttering to a graphics bug that would turn the game's usually handsome characters into nightmarish, polygonal blobs that'd even scare N64 NPCs. Funnily enough, some monsters were also affected and became giant, non-descript blobs.

Well, that pesky bug has reared its head once again. It shouldn't be too much of a surprise, though. Even at the time, Capcom admitted the beta build was outdated and said the in-development game was "already in a more improved state." Since then, the developers have only continued to hammer away at known issues, though the publisher had already confirmed that such improvements wouldn't be present in the second beta as the team were busy on Monster Hunter Wilds' final release, coming in just a few weeks.

Still, I'm not-so-secretly happy that the cursed bug is back because, like, just look at some of the screenshots below. How many big-budgets games look like that anymore!? It's glorious and ugly and the icing on the cake is how damn grumpy the Palicos look.

I wanted to share the silly graphical issue from r/MHWilds

My game looks good from r/MHWilds

It's not just humans and our feline friends who are being transformed into unsightly shapes. The bug is also laying claim to the titular monsters. The one below is some kind of ominous entity, and I really hope Capcom actually releases a post-launch enemy with a similar design as some sort of homage.

Polygon hunter: Wilds from r/MHWilds

If the wonky textures are really getting on your nerves, don't worry too much. Capcom's improvements will be in Monster Hunter Wilds' retail release, coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S on February 28.

Check out the best Monster Hunter Wilds weapons and tier list for the beta.

Arthur Ackerman provides the perfect introduction to this many-wheeled murder mystery. On the surface, as a lawyer who loves paperwork, this will-penning leading man may seem a little dry – but, almost Guybrush Threepwood-esque, his hapless demeanor makes him the perfect foil for stumbling upon comically complex puzzles aplenty. So single-minded is he on his precious papers, that he carries a real himbo energy for everything else, making getting to grips with the cast of characters and different train compartments a joy.

Investigation derailed

Not only a series of screens, the nature of the train setting that makes up the majority of Loco Motive's environment also means each screen can serve a very clear purpose. One of those old timey-style posh sleeper trains, rather than the commuter to London Paddington, there's a sleeper carriage that offshoots to other rooms; a dining carriage with its own bar; a kitchen where struggling chefs attempt to corral dinner; an entertainment carriage with its own stage, complete with VIP green room; and even a casino full of high-rollers. And, rather than having to worm in and out of buildings, they're only a click away as you move from carriage to carriage – Arthur and company (there's three characters overall) able to run at speed between them.

At times, this can still mean a bit of backtracking as you dash to and fro. Especially as for the most part Loco Motive takes a "more is more" approach to its inventory that ends up stuffed to the brim in no time at all. Yet, a nicely arranged chapter system helps to avoid overwhelm, making the parameters of your objectives between each one quite clear, handing off between protagonists not only refreshing your main goal and inventory but stopping things from spinning too wildly out of control. Because of the enclosed setting, you can even carry an amount of foreknowledge about locations and events that can prompt you on what to investigate as a different character in the next chapter.

But, what's most important for an adventure game to nail, for me, is a sense of character – and every element of Loco Motive feeds into this. Whether it's exuberant animated sequences that have lashings of cartoon 'squash and stretch' movement; dialogue trees with enough silly responses for you to want to hear them all; and plenty of 'aha' moments as oddball ideas for how to smash together inventory pieces to solve conundrums actually pays off. The gorgeous pixel artwork and terrific audio design make it feel like this train has taken me through a tunnel to the past, and I'm right back playing my favorite LucasArts adventure games yet again.

I'm only left wishing, by the end, that Loco Motive was able to go a bit more off the tracks than it does. While early non-train screens are little more than simple tutorials, the ones that come later really showcase some smart design that extends the principles of the connected 'screens' that make up each carriage.

Minor spoiler warning, perhaps, but here at the end you get to play as all three characters at once, able to switch between them a little like in the classic Day of the Tentacle. The puzzles here come from the very limited interactions each is able to perform in their own mini-spaces, and how they can shunt items back and forth, and affect the puzzles active in other characters' areas.

These end up being quite straightforward, perhaps in part because once introduced there's only an hour or so left in the game, but they end up being the ones that delight me the most. With less ground to cover, the characters and the puzzles really come to the forefront, highlighting the areas where the game rocks the most. I'm left wanting more, yet satisfied with the journey I undertook, which is all to say that yes, I'd love to board the Reuss Express for a second trip any time – let's get that puzzlebook passport another stampin'.

Loco Motive is out now on PC and Switch. For more recommendations, head on over to our Indie Spotlight series. Or, check out our best game stories list for more!

Square Enix just released its financial results for the nine-month period ending on December 31, where it broke down just how much money it made from merch. In the last nine months of 2024, the company cashed 14.8 billion yen (or roughly $97 million), which is a steady jump from its merch sales in the last two financial years over the same period.

So, what's responsible for the spike? Square Enix says it's "mainly driven by strong sales of new character merchandise," and pointed to a trio of "major products," namely, a set of acrylic Dragon Quest stands, a Tifa Lockhart action figure probably bolstered by the release of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and an exorbitantly-priced 2B statue.

That's no exaggeration, either. The Masterline Deluxe version of Nier: Automata's mascot retails for a whopping $2,600, while the regular old figure costs a marginally more 'affordable' $2,400. In fairness, the three-foot statue is absolutely gorgeous and I'd probably grab it if I ever unlock the IRL infinite money cheat.

"The base includes the support unit 'Pod 042,' as well as many elements that tell the story of the battles of the YoRHa unit, such as parts of the YoRHa heavy armament unit and flight unit, as well as Virtuous Treaty, all of which are presented as a single three-dimensional piece," the item's description reads.

The deluxe version tries to justify the extra $200 with a head part without combat goggles, a right arm with the Virtuous Contract in hand, and a lower body part "in self-destruct mode" - AKA, her iconic outfit all ripped up, and that's probably the reason it seemingly outsold the cheaper version. (Sigh.)

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s PC sales were “fantastic,” analyst says after Steam players put the JRPG atop the US’ best-selling games chart.

The first DLC was discussed in December when Team Folon revealed it would "feature both new content and previously cut content that we're working hard to restore," with not much else said regarding the release since. Dubbed "Rabbit & Pork," the DLC might be just around the corner now, as Team Folon states in a recent post(spotted by VG247) that "big things are coming," with the exciting launch "getting closer" and devs "working non-stop."

That's not all, though – it sounds like there's more to come, too, as Team Folon hints toward "some more surprises" and says there are "exciting times ahead." The DLC is only the first of three according to an older announcement from the modders, featuring a sneak peek at each one's planned title. There's Rabbit & Pork, Last Orders, and the New Vegas-esque Wildcard to look forward to – as if Fallout: London wasn't big enough already.

Fallout: London first came to fruition in 2019, with its creators at Team Folon aiming to make a total conversion mod set in England's capital for Bethesda's 2015 action RPG. The mod finally launched this past summer, boasting hours of new content, a massive map, and talent from Baldur's Gate 3. Since then, Fallout: London has received over 500,000 downloads, with Team Folon even revealing plans to "launch our own indie games company."

Ambitious Fallout mod project aiming to recreate Fallout 1 inside Fallout 4 calls it quits, suspending the project but making it clear that it's not Bethesda's fault

How to get the best armor in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2

The best armor in KCD2 is made out of the following pieces:

• Brocade Hood
• Noble Bascinet
• Mail Hood with Coat of Arms
• Aketon Short
• Hauberk long
• Riding Waffenrock
• Milanese Cuirass
• Nuremberg Gauntlets
• Nuremberg Plate Gauntlets
• Noble's Plate Legs

It goes without saying that you'll want to get all of these at gold quality, as that will massively increase their stats. With these pieces combined though, you'll be as durable as it's possible to be in KCD2 (though the hood and waffenrock barely make any difference and are mostly there to add visual flourish and secondary stat bonuses).

To get this armor, you need to reach the second region of the Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 map and go to the city of Kuttenberg to the East. At the map location shown above you'll find an Armorer by the name of Master Nicholas Krondel who will sell you all of the plate pieces.

However, be warned: they're incredibly expensive, with some individual pieces costing over 5000 Groschen. The whole ensemble will cost well over 20,000 Groschen, even if you haggle but don't lose hope: it's possible to find random bandits and enemies with pieces of that gear throughout the game. It's rare, but it does happen, and either way it works out: sell the second-tier armor you find off them to afford the set above, or just use any armor that fits into the outfit we've outlined. In fact, selling these high value armor pieces is basically the best late-game Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 money farm, so it's just good practice at this point.

Want to find some solid armor before that point? We've outlined where to find all the Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 Brunswick armor locations, or check out how to pair your kickass armor with the best weapon in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission

Acknowledging the game's mixed feedback on Steam in a new announcement, Firaxis says players' voices aren't going unheard. "Over the last few days, the team has been poring over your feedback, including our most recent Steam reviews during the Early Access period," writes the studio. "As stewards of the Civilization franchise, we hold ourselves to a high standard and always strive to create the best game possible."

The devs continue, stating that "Civ would not have come this far without you, and your opinions matter greatly to us." In response to fans' recent feedback, Firaxis reveals it has "identified three key areas that we're prioritizing work against as quickly as possible." The team is also working on a roadmap, but the "three key areas" described seem to cover most Steam users' complaints – from the UI to better multiplayer.

UI improvements are Firaxis' "top priority," with the studio assuring fans it's "committed to getting this right." Current fixes addressing UI problems include "making UI interactions more intuitive, improving map readability, fixing areas of polish like formatting, and more." The devs are also looking into "implementing community-requested features" elsewhere, namely in multiplayer with co-op teams and hotseat support.

Alongside these tweaks, a wider variety of map types, quality-of-life changes, and better customization are coming, with Firaxis saying work is "already well underway on Patch 1.1.0" – an update set to drop sometime in March. Hopefully, updates help see the game's full potential shine through its quirks, as it's certainly there. Our own Civilization 7 review dubs the title "a revolutionary strategy game that cements the series' legendary status."

Civilization 7 director tweaked diplomacy because the entire design team "ganged up" on him in multiplayer

Publisher Sega and developer Sports Interactive announced the news earlier today, writing that Football Manager 2025 had been scrapped after two previous delays to "shift our focus to the next release," presumably Football Manager 2026 or 2027. In an era where annual sports series will come out regardless of how good or functional/dysfunctional they are, the decision to can it altogether is kinda admirable.

"We know this will come as a huge disappointment, especially given that the release date has already moved twice, and you have been eagerly anticipating the first gameplay reveal," the announcement blog reads. "We can only apologize for the time it has taken to communicate this decision. Due to stakeholder compliance, including legal and financial regulations, today was the earliest date that we could issue this statement," it continues, likely referring to Sega's quarterly financial results.

Sports Interactive says the delay comes from a "variety of challenges that we've been open about to date," including the tight timelines it laid out with the game's previous delay, "and many more unforeseen." The developer explains that "the overarching player experience and interface is not where we need it to be," despite getting "clear validation for the new direction" via recent playtests.

What's most eye-catching in the announcement is that the studio acknowledges it could have "pressed on," released the game in an unfinished state, "and fixed things down the line" as so, so many major releases have done in the past. "But that's not the right thing to do," it says. "We were also unwilling to go beyond a March release as it would be too late in the football season to expect players to then buy another game later in the year."

Sega's financial results claim the next release will be "taking over development assets" from the scrapped FM2025. The now-canceled game was set for release in March, but the developer assures that all pre-orders will be refunded.

Check out all the video game release dates coming up.

In a quickfire interview with MinnMax, Patel was asked what Pillars of Eternity fans are hoping to get from Avowed, which takes place in the same world of Eora. She said Pillars fans want to "see the world they got to know over two games in a big immersive space around them that they can explore." Asked if that has been accomplished in Avowed, she replied, "mission accomplished."

She also revealed that "maybe a third of the team that worked on Pillars is on Avowed." Finally, she confirmed that there will be Pillars of Eternity characters in Avowed, and when asked if there will be more than three, she replied in the affirmative.

Hitting Xbox Series X, PC, and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate on February 18, Avowed will take players back to Eora for the first time since 2018's Pillars of Eternity 2. And if you haven't played the Pillars games, you needn't worry; Obsidian designed Avowed specifically to be an entry point to the plague-ravaged Living Lands. Obviously longtime Pillars fans will have a lot of fun with the crossover content, but it's not necessary to understanding the story.

"It can't start in a way that just feels crappy": Avowed devs are turning to animation to solve an RPG "challenge" of offering a sense of progression without sacrificing a strong start.

The announcement came from the social media of Tatsuki Waki, an editor for Shogakukan's monthly Coro Coro Comic magazine (translation courtesy of Siliconera), who states that this will be the first manga reader released for the Nintendo Switch in Japan.

Here's the original post:

Included in the post is an image of the manga Unmei no Makimodo Shi - All Great Achievements Require Time, by Fūta Kimura, which is published in Coro Coro Comic. This shows that the app is used by orienting the Switch vertically, rather than its usual horizontal position.

Those are just about all the details available right now, including how much of Shogakukan's catalog of manga will be available, or what the app's digital release schedule will be.

That said, it's possible that the new Switch app will take its cues from Shogakukan's recently launched Novelous app for iOS and Android, released on January 23, which uses AI-translation tools for English releases.

Like we said though, we don't know if or when the Shogakukan's Switch app will launch in the US, so it may be some time before American readers will need to worry about how the stories are translated to English.

The Shokugan Switch app is scheduled to go live in Japan on March 13.

Here's our guide to everything we know about the Nintendo Switch 2.

"We believe that arrogance is the enemy of continued success," Zelnick said in a Q&A session following the Take-Two financials. "We run scared. We're looking over our shoulder. Our competitors are not asleep. And so what do we do about that? We try to be the most creative, the most innovative, and the most efficient company in the entertainment industry. And Rockstar Games in particular seeks perfection in everything they do. And we believe that if we do that right, and we focus on delivering for consumers, that's our best opportunity to succeed."

Zelnick has repeated similar lines about GTA 6 since the game's official reveal, saying in February 2024 that Rockstar was "seeking perfection" and reiterating in May 2024 that "It's about creating an experience that no one has seen before, and Rockstar Games seeks perfection." You heard it here, folks: GTA 6 will be a perfect video game.

Well, maybe not literally perfect, but after years of anticipation it feels like nothing short of perfection will come close to satisfying the fans who've spent all this time waiting for GTA 6.

GTA 6 still coming this fall, Take-Two boss says "there's always risk of slippage" but "we feel really good" about a 2025 launch.

In the Drawings tab of the patent's webpage, you can see a bunch of sketches of the Switch 2 and its new magnetically docking Joy-Cons. A handful of those show the Joy-Cons being used like you would a normal PC mouse, and in some cases, with one Joy-Con in each hand.

The patent abstract says the Joy-Cons have "a front surface, an upper surface, a first side surface, a second side surface, a direction input unit, a first upper surface button, and a sensor for mouse operation."

In the same description, Nintendo says "the sensor for mouse operation detects reflected light from a detected surface," which, yes, is exactly how a PC mouse works. I still fully expect for Nintendo to come up with some cute, quirky, Nintendo-y name for the Joy-Con's mouse function, but it's good to have full confirmation of Nintendo's intent behind the thing.

Of course, the larger question still looming is how exactly Nintendo wants us to use the Joy-Con mouses. You can safely expect it'll be used in a gimmicky way in conjunction with motion controls in various games, but I'm curious if it'll have more practical applications. If anything, I could see it making the process of typing stuff out a little quicker.

Hopefully we'll learn more during the Switch 2 Nintendo Direct in April.

"I just wanna give you folks a big props for the DSS maneuver you did," Shams Jorjani says in Helldivers' Discord. "Brilliant move. J.O.E.L. is out to get you now."

What earned ire from Joel, Helldivers' nefarious Game Master at Arrowhead? The fan account Helldivers_NOW explains players' winning DSS strategy in a post on Twitter.

"In the past, the Helldivers community had struggled in fully controlling the Democracy Space Station (DSS) in terms of strategy and its usefulness," Helldivers_NOW says.

But, "as of recent and in a surprise, the Helldivers were able to completely use the DSS to its full potential" by coordinating an assault on Lesath with offensively sending the DSS to Menkent and halting a Jet Brigade in its tracks, as per a Major Order.

As per Joel's Major Order. Let's remember that J.O.E.L. is the Terminator of third-person shooter co-op, and doesn't like to be bested. That's why he, or it, often pushes even the most idealistic Helldivers soldiers to commit unspeakable acts in the name of his neverending war.

Like in November, when Helldivers introduced the so-called "weapon of mass liberation" DSS, Joel directed Helldivers to exploit "disenfranchised families" as "cheap labor" to finish its construction. Does his cruelty know no bounds?

Now, he's definitely quaking in his evil boots about the fact that Helldivers 2 grunts are using his superweapon to their own advantage. Deal with it, J.O.E.L.

Helldivers 2 is getting a portable hellbomb that looks just as chaotic and deadly as Fallout's mini nukes.

"Look, there's always a risk of slippage and I think as soon as you say words like absolutely, you jinx things," Zelnick tells IGN. "So we feel really good about it."

In a separate interview with VentureBeat, Zelnick notes that "it’s always the possibilities in our business. However, we’ve given the narrow window for upcoming titles. After all, it is February and we’ve outlined the release schedule through calendar year end."

These interviews come alongside Take-Two's latest financial report, in which the company once again notes that we can expect "Grand Theft Auto VI in the Fall." While the official GTA 6 trailer only offered a vague release window of 2025, Take-Two has been specifying fall 2025 since last May. Clearly, the company is still sticking to those guns.

Take-Two expects a big year in 2025, with Civilization 7 launching in February, Mafia: The Old Country coming in the summer, GTA 6 in the fall, and Borderlands 4 coming sometime in 2025. Zelnick has noted that the publisher plans to ensure those releases don't stack directly on top of each other, as "we wouldn't, and no one would, stack up huge releases."

Former GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 animator says GTA 6 is likely playable "all the way through" right now.

"This is the dream, baby," EdyBot says on stream, 1,097 deaths into her run. "We're so close."

The Century training dummy she's using appears to be rigged with motion control wires that allocate each section of its body to a button – she hits and presses on the top middle of its chest, for example, to deliver standard and heavy hits – while a cord in her shorts connect her to both the dummy and a heart rate monitor. To run and roll, she seems to be using a modified dance pad.

That means, during her fight with Malenia – who is notoriously difficult to conquer, since she regenerates health each time she lands a hit – EdyBot was tired. Using the Bloodhound's Fang curved greatsword, EdyBot huffs as she rapidly punches her dummy's pecs to carve out big slices of demigod. She only breaks her flow to glug Crimson Tears, which she swigs by knocking her dummy, who she calls Fleshman, directly in the groin.

The moment Edybot finally manages to take down Malenia, she collapses to the ground completely out of breath.

"Oh my God," she wheezes, "I fucking did it." She pulls Fleshman in for a big hug, and then she brings out a stool that also seems to be fixed with motion control censors. EdyBot squats over it, and her bald Elden Ring character performs a few fatigued teabags.

Ultimately, EdyBot wrapped up her knuckle-breaking Elden Ring challenge after 2 weeks, with 1,428 deaths down. It doesn't sound like my preferred method of gaming, but it does seem more entertaining than the elliptical.

Elden Ring streamer puts us all to shame and beats every boss – including the DLC fights – in a single hit in 54 hours, which is less than your average playthrough.

This Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 encounter was shared on Twitter by Game Heroes' Blaine Smith, and it shows Henry having a conversation with an NPC who's sporting an arrow sticking out of his forehead. Now, if you've ever played an RPG, you might assume at first that you'd simply stumbled upon a glitch of some kind, but no, this encounter is very much intended and is a pretty obvious nod to Skyrim.

After Henry understandably inquires about the thing sticking out of the guy's forehead, the character explains: "It's an arrow. Well, what's left of it, that is. A metal arrowhead and a bit of a wooden shaft. It used to be longer, but I broke it off after I nearly took a wench's eye out with it."

Henry then remarks that he once "heard of a bloke that took an arrow to the knee," clearly referencing Skyrim's guards. "Hah! To the knee? That's nothing," the NPC responds. "You could go dancing the next day with a scratch like that. But, have you ever heard of anyone who took one to the head and lived to tell the tale?"

According to Fextralife, you can find this legend of an NPC in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 by heading down the path between Grund and Devil's Den. Interacting with him and choosing the right dialogue options will eventually open up the "Arrow-head" side quest that rewards you with seven Groschen upon completion.

I hated my first few hours with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, but now you couldn't take it away from me.

Yes, there are also complaints about features and gameplay system changes - the exact same kinds of things fans get upset about with every new entry in the Civ series. But I'm not sure I've ever seen a AAA game get beaten down so vociferously and angrily for poor user interface design.

The issues with the UI won't be immediately apparent if you just spend a few seconds looking at screenshots, but this appears to be a death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation. Necessary information is difficult to access. Menu buttons are placed in awkward locations. There's not enough good feedback when you're making a selection. Crucial readouts sometimes overlap each other. There aren't as many hotkeys as there used to be. Text is sometimes misaligned. The lines through the tech tree jut out at awkward angles. The list goes on and on and on, so say thousands of players.

This tweet, which drew an explanatory response from the devs on Twitter, might be one of the more egregious examples I've seen. "Denounce: accept or reject?" You can certainly draw some context clues from the numbers to guess what this does in-game, but that's a nonsense question that's impossible to parse at a glance. Apparently, in this situation the player is being denounced, but can choose to reject that action. Even in Civ, where the machinations of global politics are being abstracted into a set of numbers, it'd be nice to have a more concrete sense of what's happening.

Civilization 7 currently has 3,231 reviews on Steam, and even many of the positive reviews note that while the core game might be enjoyable, the interface is a capital-P Problem. The devs at Firaxis have directly responded to some of those reviews, noting that "we are aware of and looking into feedback on the game's UI."

Here's hoping that if the devs have fixes in mind they come in soon, so we can start judging the game on its strategic merits. In our Civilization 7 review, Andy notes that "though some tweaks around diplomacy and Ages fall short, a host of small reinventions – along with Firaxis' biggest gamble in tackling the tedium of long-running campaigns – pays off superbly."

Civilization 7 director tweaked diplomacy because the entire design team "ganged up" on him in multiplayer.

The debut trailer for Cloudheim has everything I could ask for in a video game: a kaiju-sized turtle, multiple muscle ladies, and combat all about hitting dudes with other dudes. Cloudheim's central hook is its combo-based combat, where you can knock enemies into the air, juggle them with other players, toss them into each other, or tear down chunks of the world to drop on their heads.

"Our core gameplay began with a simple question - what if we take the juggling from fighting games, and make it the combat foundation in a co-op action RPG?" according to David Hunt, CEO and founder of Noodle Cat. Hunt previously served as lead systems designer on Fortnite from 2013 through 2022, and before that he was a designer at BioWare on Star Wars: The Old Republic. According to a press release, the studio's "gameplay thesis is based on applying the design principles behind Fornite's explosive growth to create a collaborative physics-based action RPG combat in the gameplay loop of a survival craft game."

Cloudheim is teasing robust crafting systems and a wide array of locations and dungeons to explore, and given how nice it all looks I'm very much ready to find out what's in store. The game is set to launch in Q3 2025 across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.

These are the best RPGs you can level up in today.

The Sims 2 was the first game in the series to introduce the motherlode money cheat code we still use in The Sims 4, but this is just one of the many useful cheats available in The Sims 2. Whether you want to force a twin pregnancy, kidnap neighbors for your household, or even control aging, The Sims 2 Legacy Collection cheat codes allow you to further mold your virtual experience to your liking.

Our guide below lays out every cheat code we know works with The Sims 2 Legacy Collection (we've tested them), alongside some handy cheat tips to make the most of them. Just picked up the re-release? Check out our guide to The Sims 1 Legacy Collection cheats, too.

How to enable The Sims 2 Legacy Collection cheats

To enable cheats in The Sims 2 Legacy Collection, press Ctrl, Shift, and C on your keyboard – this method is the same as every other The Sims game on PC. This brings up the cheat console text box in the top-left corner of your screen. To enter a cheat, type it in as below, then press Enter. If the cheat is successful you'll see your changes in the game, but if it's typed incorrectly or isn't a working code, an "Error in cheat" message appears in the text box.

To expand the cheat console, input "expand" and press Enter; to close the console, input "exit" and press Enter.

The Sims 2 Legacy Collection Money Cheats

• Kaching - Adds 1,000 Simoleons to your funds
• Motherlode - Adds 50,000 Simoleons to your funds
• FamilyFunds [family name] [value] - For example, "familyfunds cordial 100000;" sets your household's funds to a specific value
• FamilyFunds [family name] [+/-][value] - For example, "familyfunds cordial +10000;" adds or subtracts from household's funds

The Sims 2 Legacy Collection Sim and Household Cheats

• AddNeighborToFamilyCheat [on/off] - When on, you can add neighbors to your household by clicking on them. This doesn't work on service NPCs while they're working or special NPCs like the Grim Reaper. Allows you to add more than the usual eight-Sim household limit
• AgeSimsCheat [on/off] - When enabled, you can select a Sim and "Set age" to Toddler, Child, Teen, Adult, or Elder
• Aging [on/off] - Turns Sim aging on or off
• AspirationLevel [0-5] - Sets the aspiration level of the selected Sim, five is highest and zero the lowest
• AspirationPoints [0-100000] - Gives your selected Sim the inputted number of aspiration points. We found you can comfortably go to 100,000, but this cheat can bug if overused or you go above that, resetting the points to zero and disabling you from adding any points with the cheat
• Forcetwins - Select a pregnant Sim and enter to turn pregnancy into twin birth
• DisablePuppyKittenAging [on/off] - Enables and disables puppies and kittens aging
• PlumbBobToggle [on/off] - Plumbob above Sims head disappears when on
• LockAspiration [on/off] - Locks and unlocks the aspiration score of Sims on the lot
• MaxMotives - Maximizes motives of all Sims on the lot
• MotiveDecay [on/off] - Enables and disables motive decay for all Sims on the lot
• StretchSkeleton [number] - Stretches Sim; the higher the number the longer the Sim and the smaller the shorter (1.0 is default)
• ShowHeadlines [on/off] - Hides all thought bubbles and speech balloons
• UnlockCareerRewards - Unlocks all career reward items for a Sim

The Sims 2 Legacy Collection Neighborhood and Lot Cheats

• DeleteAllCharacters - Deletes all characters in the current neighborhood; only works when in neighborhood view
• ChangeLotClassification [low/middle/high] - Changes classification of current lot
• ChangeLotZoning [residential / community / greek / dorm / secretsociety / secretvacationlot / hotel / secrethobbylot / apartmentbase / apartmentsublot / secretwitchlot] - Changes lot zoning type
• ClearLotClassValue - Clears lot class value and overrides flag
• TerrainType [Temperate / Desert / Dirt / Concrete] - Changes neighborhood terrain type; use in neighborhood view
• DumpNPCCount - Tells you the number of service NPCs in the current neighborhood per type
• ModifyNeighborhoodTerrain [on/off] - Toggles neighborhood terrain modification; when enabled, select terrain with cursor, and then use use P, /, and \ to adjust
• PrintLotClass [low/middle/high] - Prints lot class
• Boolprop displayLotImposters [true/ false] - Setting to false removes house graphics from neighborhood view
• Boolprop displayNeighborhoodRoads [true/false] - True shows roads in neighborhoods, false hides them
• IntProp maxNumOfVisitingSims [number] - Use in neighborhood view increase number of guests a lot can have
• Boolprop lotTerrainPaints [true/false] - Setting to false removes terrain paints from lot
• Boolprop displayNeighborhoodRoadsWithModel [true/false] - Setting to false removes neighborhood bridges
• Boolprop displayNeighborhoodFlora [true/false] - Setting to false removes neighborhood plants and trees
• Boolprop displayNeighborhoodProps [true/false] - Setting to false remove's neighborhood props
• boolprop lotWater [true/false] - Lot water (like ponds) is visible or invisible
• SetLotLightingFile [filename.txt/clear] - For example, "SetLotLightingFile Downtown_Lot.txt;" override some lighting parameters and uses lighting of the specified lot or you can use clear to reset it

The Sims 2 Legacy Collection Build Cheats

• DeleteAllAwnings - Remove all awnings
• DeleteAllFences - Remove all fences
• DeleteAllHalfwalls - Remove all deletable half walls
• DeleteAllObjects [doors/windows/stairs] - Deletes all of specified object
• DeleteAllWalls - Remove all deletable walls
• RoofSlopeAngle [15-75] - Slopes roof angle in degrees (45 is default)
• BoolProp snapObjectsToGrid [true/false] - When enabled, snaps objects to lot grid
• SetHighestAllowedLevel [3-255] - Allows you to build more floors, enter in neighborhood view (can crash game if you add too many)
• SetQuarterTilePlacement [on/off] - Turns quarter tile placement on or off

The Sims 2 Legacy Collection Visual and Filmmaking Cheats

• BoolProp enablePostProcessing [true/false] - This must be set to true to allow the following cheats to work
• Bloom [R G B X] - For example, "bloom 0.3 0.1 0.0 0.7;" changes screen visual color, RGB controls colors red, green, and blue, and X controls bloom amount
• FilmGrain [X] - Adds film grain to screen visuals, X is the film grain value (0 is default)
• LetterBox [0.0-0.4] - Adds black borders to top and bottom of screen (0 is default)

The Sims 2 Legacy Collection Miscellaneous Gameplay Cheats

• SetHour [0-23] - Sets time
• AutoPatch [-on/-off] - When enabled, your game checks for available patches; ensure you use the hyphen before on or off and leave a space between "patch" and the hyphen
• BugJarTimeDecay [on/off] - When disabled (off) bugs can live forever
• Expand - Makes cheat console bigger or smaller
• Exit - Exit cheat console
• Help - Shows a list of working cheats
• FaceBlendLimits [-on/-off] - Enables and disables facial blending limits
• Moveobjects [on/off] - When enabled you can move objects you usually can't, like mailboxes, trash cans and Sims; you can use this to delete, too
• Vignette [X, Y, Z] - For example, "vignette 100 100 100;" adds vignette/blur to visuals from specified center, X is upper left, Y is lower right and Y is amount of blur
• Vsync [on/off] - Setting to off improves game performance at the cost of graphics
• Slowmotion [0-8] - Higher number makes game slower (0 is default)
• TextDebugging [true/false] - Toggles text debugging
• Boolprop testingcheatsenabled [true/false] - Opens up more cheat options, but can cause a lot of issues

The Sims 2 Legacy Collection Cheat Tips

• In some cases, if you start typing in a cheat code, you can press Tab and the console will fill in the rest. You just need to add the "true/false" or "on/off" to relevant cheats.
• Use the Move_objects on cheat to delete bills, trash, and more. You can even use it to delete Sims, but unlike The Sims 1, this doesn't boost their mood and you need to leave the lot and return for the Sim to come back.
• Be aware that using The Sims 2 cheats can cause in-game issues, especially if you use a lot, so be cautious.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

If you spent countless hours with The Sims 1, you likely remember some cheats through sheer muscle memory. The Rosebud money code, which quickly increases your funds (AKA Simoleons), remains imprinted in players' brains, while other classic codes, like move_objects, are great at dealing with pesky things like bills and trash. Don't worry; you won't need to remember them all, because our The Sims 1 Legacy Collection cheats guide lists the cheats we've confirmed work with the re-release – as some original cheats aren't valid with this version. So, whether you're new to The Sims 1 or a returning player, these cheat codes give you even greater control over the life sim.

How to enable The Sims 1 Legacy Collection cheats

Just like in the original The Sims 1 game and more recent releases, you can access the cheat console by holding Ctrl and Shift, then selecting C on your keyboard.

A text box appears in the top-left-hand corner of your screen where you can now input your cheat code. Press Enter to confirm the cheat code and, if it's successful, you'll see your relevant changes in-game. If your cheat code is entered incorrectly, you'll get a pop-up that says, "Sorry, no such cheat!" In some cases, the pop-up may prompt you for more detail, like a number, indicating that the cheat code is right, but perhaps the format isn't.

If you want to input more than one cheat at once, simply insert a semicolon (;) between each cheat code and press Enter when you're done. To repeat the last cheat you entered, without typing it out again, type an exclamation mark (!) into the text box and press Enter.

The Sims 1 Legacy Collection Money Cheats

• Rosebud - Gives you 1,000 Simoleons (every ;! after it adds another 1,000 Simoleons)
• Rosebud;!;!;!;! - Gives you 5,000 Simoleons
• Rosebud ;!;!;!;!;!;!;!;!;! - Gives you 10,000 Simoleons

The Sims 1 Legacy Collection Sim Cheats

• Interests - Shows interests of selected Sim
• Sim_speed [-1000 to 1000] - For example, "Sim_speed 1000;" alters Sim's movement speed, with -1000 super slow and 1000 super fast
• Autonomy [1-100] - For example, "Autonomy 100;" controls level of free thinking, with 100 giving your Sims the highest level of control over themselves
• Bubble_tweak (number) - Sets, in pixels, how far a thought bubble appears from a Sim’s head
• History - Saves your family history file, which you can find under FamilyHistory.txt
• Sim_log begin - Starts Sim logging
• Sim_log end - Ends Sim logging

The Sims 1 Legacy Collection World and Environment Cheats

• Set_hour [1-24] - For example, "Set_hour 23" to set to 11pm; sets in-game time
• Move_objects on - Enables free object movement, letting you delete trash, bills, and more
• Move_objects off - Disables free object movement
• Genable objects on - In-world objects (like radios, lamps, etc) are visible
• Genable objects off - In-world objects are invisible (but still exist)
• Genable default - All Genable settings return to default
• Genable terrain on - Terrain is visible
• Genable terrain off - Terrain is invisible (but still exists)
• Genable walls on - Walls are visible
• Genable walls off - Walls are invisible (but still exist)
• Genable floors on - Floors are visible
• Genable floors off - Floors are invisible (but still exist)
• Genable people on - Sims are visible
• Genable people off - Sims are invisible (but still exist)
• Genable clear/full_draw/static/old_clear/static rows on/off -(No visible in-game changes)
• Genable all on - All the above are visible
• Genable all off - All the above are invisible (everything disappears, but still exists)
• Genable status - See genable status of all houseviewer models
• Rotation [0-3] - For example, "Rotation 3;" rotates camera, 0 is normal
• Prepare_lot - Scans your lot and tells you if you are missing any key items, like a mailbox, and tries to repair any issues; this won't replace objects deleted with move_objects on in our experience
• Draw_all_frames on - Enables draws all frames
• Draw_all_frames off - Disables draws all frames
• Draw_floorable on - Enables floorable grid
• Draw_floorable off - Disables floorable grid
• Map_edit on - Enables map editor
• Map_edit off - Disables map editor

The Sims 1 Legacy Collection Miscellaneous Cheats

• Nessie - The Loch Ness Monster appears in the water when in Downtown, Old Town, or Vacation neighborhood view
• Log_mask [number] - Sets event logging mask
• Route_balloons on - Enables routing debug balloons
• Route_balloons off - Disables routing debug balloons
• Sweep on - Shows in-game bottom bar
• Sweep off - Hides in-game bottom bar
• Tile_info on - Tile information visible
• Tile_info off - Tile information hidden

The Sims 1 Legacy Collection Cheat Tips

Armed with the cheat codes above (and years of experience), here are some of our top cheat tips for The Sims 1.

How to refill your Mood bars (or just delete your Sim)

In The Sims 1, you could use the move_objects on cheat to simply delete a Sim through Buy or Build Mode. You can't outright do that now, but there is a way around it to get rid of a pesky Sim or to give your Sim a serious mood boost. Have the Sim sit on a chair, then delete the chair; this deletes the Sim and the chair. To bring your Sim back, click their portrait, and they'll return with full Mood bars. This is a great way to get promotions quickly.

How to delete bills

Enabling the move_objects on cheat means you can delete annoying bills via the Buy or Build Mode. To avoid bills completely, delete your mailbox.

How to avoid missing work

This tip also utilizes the move_objects on cheat. Place an object in the middle of the road, to block the way ahead for your carpool. The car won't be able to go anywhere and you can jump in, even if you're a little bit late. Just delete the object when you're done, so the car can move off as normal.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Oddly specific? Sorry, I'm still working through some things in my own playthrough (and if your travels take you through Troskowitz on your travels, tell them I'm sorry). But there's no denying that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has taken the hardcore-leaning RPG mechanics of its 2018 predecessor and taken them to a far larger audience, landing over one million sales in its first day alone.

It feels like developer Warhorse Studios is having something of a Witcher 3 moment – that is, refining and iterating its RPG series out of semi-niche status in the same way that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched CD Projekt Red's potion-guzzling series into the mainstream in a way past entries hadn't quite managed. But how did it make that leap?

Live by the sword

The first Kingdom Come: Deliverance takes up an awkward space. While its unforgiving nature, wealth of mechanics, and rough-around-the-edges bugs kept it from widespread mainstream appeal, it is in many ways too big to be niche. After all, we're talking about a game that has sold 8 million copies and counting. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 doesn't compromise on the friction that made its predecessor a success, but it does a far better job at easing players into life in 15th century Bohemia.

Speaking to Warhorse Studios' senior game designer, Ondřej Bittner, and global public relations manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, the pair acknowledge that making that leap meant tidying up some of the first games messier edges.

"Like you say, it's too big to be niche," says Bittner. "So we can't really repeat the Eurojank situation. So we really invested in optimizing, bug-fixing, and polishing all these little mechanics. And actually [we aimed] just to be big, not niche – because for a niche game, people are like 'Oh yeah, it's a niche game from a small indie studio, whatever'. We couldn't afford this a second time."

As the beginning of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – which cuts you loose in the 1400s with nothing but a pair of pants to your name – attests to, improving on the original game didn't require dialing back its lifelike elements. You still need to eat, drink, and sleep, while combat can come to a quick and brutal end if you find yourself outnumbered. While we spoke about the game's survival mechanics at length, Bittner also argued that this approach is perfectly compatible with players who may consider themselves casual gamers.

"In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, we attracted quite a lot of people who never play games, which is sort of unique," he says. "It's sort of like Euro Truck Simulator – a lot of people who play Euro Truck Simulator don't play other games. So we interact with a lot of people who love history, or fencing, or historical martial arts, or whatever, and they didn't have a problem with most of the mechanics. It was usually the gamers – like [controversial save item] Saviour Schnapps! People who never played games would be like 'It makes sense to have to eat or sleep', while people who play games are like 'I can't just press F5 to quicksave?'"

"We tried to still keep that complexity, keep all of the living world elements and emergent stories, but make it more accessible so we can break out of the niche and be like 'Hey, this is for everyone – you can do it, everyone can enjoy it'," Bittner adds. "After all the game is not hard to play – you can always do it differently. I can't play Elden Ring because I'm not good at the combat, and that's all there is. It's super hardcore to me, and I can never understand how people play it. But I think Kingdom Come is way more like… you can just walk around and wear nice clothes. So I think it's actually quite a welcoming hardcore game."

Leveling up

From a more day-to-day perspective, Stolz-Zwilling says that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 meant overcoming practical constraints that the first game struggled with. "There were limitations – money, resources, less people, less experience. While many of the developers were experienced, at least half of them never released a game before," he explains, pointing to the original Kingdom Come being Bittner's first game.

But Stolz-Zwilling believes there's still more for Warhorse to learn. "Now we do have the experience, but what we are still not the best at is time management," he says. "We learned a lot from the development of the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance in that we tried very hard to put as many features and things into the game as possible, but then at the end lacked the time to polish it, make it nice, and round out the experience. We've put a lot more effort into that."

"I wouldn't really change anything," agrees Bittner. "I would just go back and make all the good decisions sooner so that we could make this sooner, so we could start making the next great thing. I still wouldn't be sad – all of it is a huge amount of experience you can't really get anywhere else, especially in the design department [...] so I'm grateful we made this, we learned a lot, and we'll use that to make better games."

Besides keeping a closer eye on the clock, Stolz-Zwilling says Warhorse's next priorities are already clear. "For future projects, the most important thing is to keep the team together," he explains. "[Developers leaving] is something you naturally have – especially in artistic positions, like concept artists just want to try something new. But other than that, it's important to have cool new projects so that the team stays together and talent doesn't get lost."

The pair also agree that challenges within the industry – namely crippling layoffs and studio closures – did not harm the sequel. Stolz-Zwilling ascribes that to "luck" and says "this struggle passed us and didn't really impact us at all," while Bittner points out that financial stress was relieved because "the first game almost funded the second".

From an outside perspective, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a testament to iteration – something that many studios simply aren't afforded nowadays. All too often it feels a game is either a hit or it isn't, and what it could be rarely factors into the equation. Here, we see Warhorse not only better itself in essentially every way, but selling a million copies (and counting) for its effort. "Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2," says Stolz-Zwilling, "is the game we always wanted to make."

If you're on the fence about jumping into Bohemia, check out our Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review to help make up your mind

It's an especially exciting time to be a Simmer right now, between The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 re-releases on PC and The Sims 4's celebratory update featuring more than 70 items – but that's not all. The rumors of a possible expansion for the fourth game focusing on activities and jobs floating about on social media recently have turned out to be true, with a new trailer revealing a Businesses and Hobbies pack arriving next month.

The pack instantly strikes me as The Sims 4 version of The Sims 2's own Open for Business expansion, boasting long-awaited features like multi-type lots in which Sims can both work and live. As for the showcased hobbies and jobs themselves, the video highlights all sorts of activities for Sims to engage in, from running an entire candy shop to training and operating as tattoo artists with fully customizable tattoos.

Yes, fully customizable – players can draw their own tattoos without restrictions to place on Sims' bodies – whether that's for better or worse. As a Simmer myself, I can already foresee the whacky ink the community is sure to come up with, and the trailer's inclusion of a snail wearing a cowboy hat atop a skateboard likely doesn't even scratch the surface of what silly designs fans will create come Businesses and Hobbies' launch.

The trailer shows other hobbies and jobs in action, too, including pottery – one that aligns especially well with other packs' such as Nifty Knitting. There's no telling what else is to come with the Businesses and Hobbies expansion just yet, however, until it launches on March 6. If you're like me and you already can't wait to play, you can pre-order the pack now on the official EA website for $39.99 and score some extra goodies.

The Sims is back after 25 years, and it's teaching Sims 4 players a lesson in retro life sim difficulty: "Damn this game is hard"

However, as soon as you load up Hello Kitty Island Adventure, the very first thing you do is line up at the plane's door with a big smile on your face, waiting for your turn to jump out of the crashing vehicle. It's a jarring opening, but with cute Sanrio characters around you and an upbeat music track, a plane crash is almost presented as "oops, oh well, gang!" instead of pure panic. It's pretty dark when you take a step back and actually think about the situation Hello Kitty and her friends are in.

But it's also not the first time a "cozy game" has given us a surprisingly intense premise and some covertly mature world-building.

That's right, the relaxing, adorable animations and bright colors are often a deceptive layer of comfort in games where war, blood curses, and now-stranded Sanrio characters exist. And as a Stardew Valley, Infinity Nikki, and now Hello Kitty Island Adventure player, I've become fascinated with how the most innocent and cutesy games often have some of the most intriguing lore and dark themes that are so often overlooked.

An overview of cozy game lore

If you aren't in the cozy game sphere, you may write off a number of the genre's most popular titles as just farming games, life sims, or dress-up outings. However, let me give you some brief insights into all the dark bits of lore hiding under those titles' innocent seeming exteriors.

In Stardew Valley, one of the most famous cozy games ever made, Pelican Town isn't as laid back and quaint as you may think it is. Behind all the Junimos bringing you gifts for completing bundles and the relaxing sound of your axe hitting oak trees, there is a story of an ongoing war – complete with traumatized soldiers.

If you pay attention to character dialogue and easter eggs in the game, you'll learn that Stardew Valley is part of the Ferngill Republic, which is at war with the Gotoro Empire. Remember how the NPC Kent (aka Sam's dad) only comes to the town during Year Two of the game and alludes to having nightmares and trauma from explosions? There's a reason why he was busy in Year One: he is our direct reminder that conflict is happening during all your farming activities and cheery town festivals.

If you loved the 2024 gacha game Infinity Nikki, then you'll also know how a pink pastel dress-up game is actually set in a world where all gods have left Earth (after an event known as the Heaven Fall). An evil force known as The Dark was left unchecked until it was sealed away, but only after a war took place that resulted in one of the eight "remnants of divine light" sacrificing themselves. Still with us? Well, that's only a fraction of the game's story, and just be glad that Infinity Nikki is technically set in a new timeline. Previous entries in the Nikki series also had blood curses, murder, and even some casual political coups.

Yes, Infinity Nikki's main core mechanics surround outfits and collecting dresses with certain labels to compete in fashion contests, but its world-building is one of the most in-depth experiences that you can get out of most online games. Similarly, it and Stardew Valley are only two examples of this dark-tone trend in cozy games.

In Disney Dreamlight Valley, emotional turmoil literally destroys your friends' homes and wipes their memories. In Animal Crossing, multiple games show that you are being watched by aliens, and the Gyroids you can collect are hinted to contain deceased souls. Honestly, if it's a cozy game, chances are you'll find some horror-adjacent tidbit somewhere.

Hello Kitty meets a menace

So, as you can tell by now, dark secrets in cozy games aren't anything new, and Hello Kitty Island Adventure is just the latest continuation of this secretly mature trend. Besides jumping out of a plane during its opening scene, its main story revolves around restoring the theme park on the island.

After completing quests, puzzles and raising your friendship level high enough with the other stranded Sanrio characters you'll unlock certain cutscenes that show how each area was destroyed.

The AI ghost called Tophat is at the center of each incident, and while he is cute and "innocent," you can't help but wonder how bad his safety regulations are and if he should consider getting a new job. I mean, we find the island is in literal shambles with broken ziplines, destroyed stairs, and the only sign of life prior to our crash being the island's native creatures called Nuls (which, by the way, you can make work for you for free – no labor laws here).

Once you strip away the cute characters and upbeat soundtrack, the island doesn't seem safe at all. This history of destruction has made me unable to stop playing the game. I need to see what each rundown area has been through, goddamit.

Cozy games are relaxing, they are adorable, and they are easy for everyone to pick up and play. However, it's time we actually give them more credit for their world-building. I've seen a lot of folks guilty of judging a book by its cover when it comes to this genre. Equally, I've seen them shocked when I've broken out the Nikki timeline or given a spontaneous history lesson of the 1000-year war between the dwarves and shadow people in Stardew Valley.

If Hello Kitty Island Adventure can teach us anything, let it be that cute doesn't equal harmless. In fact, all the dark easter eggs and horror-leaning situations buried under quests about friendship are sometimes their most memorable. So, if you have a cozy gamer in your life, be sure to check in with them. If you're bored, ask for some story breakdowns – because we have a ton in our deceptively adorable banks.

To keep up with the latest titles, check out our guides to all the new games of 2025 and beyond and all the upcoming Switch games heading our way.