How hard can it be to put one yellow letter in the right place? There are only five slots, but it seemed to take me most of today's guesses to finally turn the stubborn thing green. Still, once that was in place… no. Nope. Actually it wasn't as helpful as I thought it was going to be. I did manage to solve today's Wordle, but mostly because there were no other letters left to try.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, February 15

You could use this word to describe a criminal, a thief, or those special curved canes shepard's use when tending to their sheep.  

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you've got the basics, it's much easier to nail down those Wordle wins. And as there's nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day, here are a few tips to help set you on the right path: 

• A good opening guess should contain a mix of unique consonants and vowels. 
• Narrow down the pool of letters quickly with a tactical second guess.
• Watch out for letters appearing more than once in the answer.

There's no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don't need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Here's your weekend winner. The answer to the February 15 (1337) Wordle is CROOK.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Past Wordle answers can give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh. They are also a good way to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer is unlikely to be repeated. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• February 14: DITTY
• February 13: RUMBA
• February 12: RAPID
• February 11: SCORE
• February 10: GOODY
• February 9: BONUS
• February 8: STEEP
• February 7: SWATH
• February 6: PUPIL
• February 5: PEDAL

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and you'll need to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them to keep up your winning streak.

You should start with a strong word like ARISE, or any other word that contains a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You'll also want to avoid starting words with repeating letters, as you're wasting the chance to potentially eliminate or confirm an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you'll see which ones you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

While it's natural to question if Overwatch's pivot to mid-game power ups is a direct response to Marvel Rivals' team-up abilities that can similarly elevate heroes, Overwatch 2 lead gameplay designer Alec Dawson told a roundtable of press at Blizzard's Irvine campus this week that perks were in the works long before Rivals was the new hero shooter hotness. That said, the motivation ultimately came from a growing feeling that Overwatch was at risk of stagnating.

"One of the things we all agreed on was that Overwatch needed to evolve and needed to have more choice," Dawson said.

When Season 15 introduces hero perks on February 18, heroes will earn XP throughout the match and level up twice, picking between two perks at levels 2 and 3. The goal, as Dawson tells it, is to identify the creative ways players are already using heroes and designing perks that serve that fantasy.

"People have always asked for Lifeweaver to be more of a damage dealer. How do we look at that and then give that to you in a way that makes sense for Lifeweaver?" he said. "Another [hero] that's representative of that is Sombra. One of her major perks lets her heal allies with her hack. People have talked about 'support Sombra' for a long time. How can we give a little taste of that?"

Perks didn't start out so adventurous. Dawson talked about early versions of perks that were more conservative than their current iteration and said it took a lot of time and playtesting to learn to stop holding back.

"There was one Tracer perk where, when she recalls, she would get back one blink charge. The one we're shipping with is when she recalls, she gets back all of her blink charges."

That desire to be less protective and "less precious," as game director Aaron Keller put it in a presentation to press, about what an Overwatch match can be has become a guiding principle for Dawn's team.

"There's a little bit of letting go of the fine balance that we've been chasing and see how it all plays out to some degree," Dawson said. "We should be a little scared of what we're putting out there, in terms of how it might affect the game. Within reason, of course.

"I think perks are that. It's gonna be a lot for players to learn and we're going to be monitoring how that happens over time, but also giving it room to breathe."

When asked if the overnight introduction of 168 buffs across 42 heroes means Blizzard is embracing a degree of balancing chaos, Dawson copped to Overwatch's reputation for overcaution and fuddy-duddy balance patches.

"We think players do crave slightly more complexity than we've been giving them for a while," he said. "When we look at some of our balance patches, they've been a lot of tuning and recycling. We want to step out of that and make sure that when we make balancing decisions, they are really felt. I think perks give us a nice turning vector for that."

Multiple Blizzard devs mentioned how excited they are that perks will give the team "new knobs to turn" for future balancing passes. Dawson also mentioned that perks will change seasonally, whether that means balance adjustments, ditching underperforming perks, or through two planned yearly "perk drops" to keep the system fresh—a similar approach to Marvel Rivals' rotating team-up bonuses.

"I do think the team overall wants to make sure that we don't forget Overwatch is supposed to be fun," Dawson said. "We're supposed to have a little bit of wackiness, but also let these heroes play in the ways that our players want to play them."

Overwatch 2 Season 15, starting February 18, will bring hero perks to both Quickplay and Competitive. Stadium, Overwatch's new third-person mode with its own upgrade story unrelated to perks, is coming in Season 16 alongside new hero Freja.

Just two weeks after launching on Steam, "multiplayer extraction survival horror" shooter Level Zero: Extraction has reached the end of the road. In a message posted to Steam, community manager Antishyr said the game has "underperformed compared to our expectations," and thus "it's no longer feasible for our relatively small teams to sustain the game from a financial standpoint."

"As the project's community manager, on behalf of [developer] DogHowl and [publisher] tinyBuild, I'm informing you that Level Zero: Extraction has reached the state that will, most probably, be its final form for the time being," Antishyr wrote. "The final patch for the game was released on January 30th, 2025.

"Level Zero: Extraction is an ambitious debut title from Doghowl. Our desire was to create a game unlike any other by combining the extraction shooter and asymmetrical horror genres. Although we ended up seeing that those are not easy to blend, we're grateful we had the chance to try and gain so much invaluable experience."

Level Zero: Extraction actually began life in 2022 as Level Zero, an asymmetric survival game in which a team of scientists struggle to repair their facility and get the hell out, all while trying not to be brutally butchered by a xenomorph-ish alien monster. But after a couple years of silence, it was "re-announced" as Level Zero: Extraction, a more conventional-looking extraction shooter that cast players as gun-toting mercs rather than pencil-neck geeks.

I wondered at the time about the wisdom of trying to muscle into the crowded extraction shooter genre, but art director Alex Golenishchev said it was "an organic evolution of the concept," and that the combination of genres "empower each other, and ... offers a unique experience" that other extraction and horror games do not.

Sadly, it did not work out. Level Zero: Extraction had a peak concurrent player count of just over 2,600 following its early access debut in August 2024, but that quickly fell off to sub-100 numbers by mid-October. The 1.0 release in January didn't turn things around, achieving a peak concurrent player count of just 98 immediately after launch. At this moment, there are 20 people playing.

Level Zero: Extraction servers will remain online, so the game will continue to be playable, and wipes will continue to happen on the first Thursday of every month but there will be no further weekend events, and of course no new maps, weapons, cosmetics, game modes, or any other features. As for Doghowl, it's now working on a new multiplayer game, this one a co-op experience: "We really hope that the invaluable experience gained with Level Zero: Extraction will help our emerging studio in future efforts," the studio said.

The Epic Games Store rang up 295 million users in 2024, an increase over 2023 of 25 million, and the "Epic ecosystem" grew as well, to 898 million "total Epic cross-platform accounts," up by 94 million from the 2023 number. What really surprised me, though, is that 1,100 new games were released on Epic in 2024, taking the total number of games on the storefront to over 4,000. Frankly, I didn't realize there were 1,100 games on the Epic Store in total.

That's still a far cry from Steam, which saw nearly 19,000 new games arrive in 2024, but it's definitely movement in the right direction. Epic credited that growth of its game selection to continued adoption of its self-publishing tools, the Epic First Run exclusivity program and Now on Epic program for older games (which has been extended to January 31, 2026), growing daily and monthly active user numbers, and Epic's generous revenue share options.

Epic ran into unexpected financial issues in 2023, saying it was "spending way more money than we earn" and laying off 800 employees as a result. Nonetheless, the game giveaways continued apace in 2024, with more than 595 million free games claimed—up from just under 586 million freebies in 2023—averaging out to $2,229 in "total value per player." Epic also confirmed that "the program is not slowing down and will continue in 2025, on both PC and mobile."

The Epic Games Store launcher is still a little rough around the edges: Epic said in its 2023 year in review that it had made performance improvements "reducing loading time to a third of the prior load time according to benchmarks from Q1 2023 for 95% of users," and it's definitely better than it used to be (for me, at least) but still a little sluggish, particularly when dealing with large libraries. Work on that will continue in 2025: The download manager expected in 2024 is set slated for the first quarter of 2025 (so, soon), enabling users to "control the timing of updates, schedule downloads, and reorder your queue, amongst other quality-of-life changes."

Other notable features on the way include gifting, preloading, an overhaul of search and browse functionality "with several under the hood improvements," and new social features including "all new voice chat, text chat, game independent parties, invite/join/play and looking-for-group features across all Epic Games Store supported platforms."

Epic also shared a rundown of its top PC games in 2024, and while specific numbers aren't included it's interesting to see how they break down across three separate categories. Farming Simulator 2022 raised my eyebrow, but 2023 and '24 editions weren't released, and the most recent version, Farming Simulator 2025, didn't come out until mid-November 2024.

Mythic

• Genshin Impact
• Rocket League®
• Honkai Star Rail
• Grand Theft Auto 5
• Fortnite

Legendary

• Wuthering Waves
• EA Sports FC 24
• Destiny 2
• Fall Guys
• Alan Wake 2

Epic

• EA Sports FC 25
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Cyberpunk 2077
• The Sims 4
• Black Myth: Wukong
• Dead by Daylight
• Satisfactory
• Warframe
• Farming Simulator 2022
• Dead Island 2

(Why isn't "Epic" the top tier in the list? I do not know, but it seems like a pretty big oversight to me.)

Not a bad year overall, then, and more free games in 2025 is definitely something to happy about. And yes, there is an infographic—get the crash course version of Epic's year in review below.

The strike was in protest of "layoffs and exhausting working conditions" in the game industry, and saw more than 1,000 people take part across the country. While there have been strikes at individual French studios in the past, this is apparently the first-ever industry-wide strike, according to an RFI report, and comes as the industry continues to grapple with layoffs, studio closures, and other labor disputes. As of 2022, there were 580 game studios in France.

The STJV was somewhat more pointed in its description of the game industry, calling it a "corporate circus" in a call to strike issued in January. It also issued four "highly practical" demands, which it said "come in response to decades of corporate mismanagement, opacity and denial of workers’ suffering:"

• Preservation of jobs, the cancellation of layoffs and the accountability of decision-makers who must first make sacrifices themselves when their companies face difficulties.
• Companies’ full transparency about their financial situation and economic health, so that workers can plan their future, and profit sharing with workers.
• Consideration for work-related health and personal life, through work reorganisation and the reduction of work hours.
• Direct participation of workers in decision-making at their companies in order to avoid management errors and control the proper use of private and public funding.

The union also said that, "as this is a national strike call, no action is necessary to go on strike: just don’t go to work." All very French, indeed, and in the wake of the strike it called for "an even wider movement" to follow.

"Unionise, go on strike, gain new rights!" the union wrote on Bluesky. "Together, we will win ✊"

The GG25 Grève Bundle is meant to raise funds for the STJV's strike fund, which helps compensate striking workers for their loss of income. The theme of the bundle—no surprise here—is "strike," and in keeping with the whole "according to your ability" thing, there are three tiers at $1, $5, and $10, although you can kick in more if you want to do a solid for workers.

While there aren't any real blockbusters in the lineup, Coldridge looked very promising when we checked out its demo last year, and many years ago (it originally released in 2013) we were quite taken by Tetrobot and Co. Off the top of my head, Blocks That Matter, Minami Line, The Purple Hike, and Flipon look like they might be cool too if you enjoy deeply indie games, and I like Phoenix WRONG just because the title makes me laugh.

STJV said the previous edition of this bundle raised $1,500 with an average donation of $11 (the top-tier bundle price is $10 but), and with two weeks to go this bundle has blown way past it, earning more than $28,000 and an average contribution of over $15. The Grève Bundle on Itch.io will be available until February 28.

I know that all sounds incredibly cool, and elements of Omikron undoubtedly are, but let me slightly temper your expectations: It's a very average game, even by David Cage standards. That's not to say it wasn't also massively ambitious, had some great ideas, and of course involved Bowie (if you're interested, it can be had on GOG). Which was mainly because one of the key designers was a massive Bowie nut.

"[David] Cage’s list of bands went Björk, Radiohead, Future Sound Of London, Garbage," Omikron’s senior designer Phil Campbell told MOJO. "I threw Bowie on there because I’d been in the fan club since I was 11: And I knew he would complement the world we were creating.”

Campbell worked for Eidos at the time, which had signed up to Cage's vision and partnered with Quantic Dream to make the game. They initially wangled a meeting with the rock legend just to talk about "licensing his old music" but Bowie quickly got interested in the game's ideas.

"He loved David Cage’s vision for Omikron," says Campbell. "That you were sucked into this world, the themes of oppression and being awakened, and he loved [art director] Loïc Normand’s visuals. The next meeting he brought Iman and Joe [Duncan Jones]. Then he brought [guitarist and Bowie collaborator] Reeves Gabrels.”

Bowie was sold, and decided to not only write new songs for Omikron but hole-up with the developers for two weeks in a Paris apartment. Long known for using the "cut-up" collage technique when writing lyrics, Bowie had even upgraded to doing this on a PC. "I saw the computer program he used to do his William Burroughs lyric cut-ups on," says Campbell. "He said, 'I used to do it manually but now I have this.'"

Such close involvement meant Bowie's presence in the game increased, and Omikron would eventually feature a virtual band called The Dreamers that played three concerts in-game. He also became Boz, a living hologram involved in the resistance. "I can’t remember when it was decided that Boz should be Bowie," says Campbell. "It might just have been us pushing our luck. But he was super-super on-board. We put him through the indignity of having dots stuck all over his face for the motion capture. He’d never done that before."

Bowie even wondered at one point, in-line with the game's themes, whether he could "leave his Bowie persona in Omikron, and come out as David Jones… it fitted the spirit of the game: Omikron was a giant trap, you could lose your soul in there forever."

Omikron sold "OK" says Campbell, but the 600,000 or so units it shifted were almost entirely in Europe. "It got no press in America. David did some chat shows: Letterman would show the box. But something about it didn’t gel enough for people even to try it. I think David was a bit pissed off."

Despite that, Omikron had a definite influence on Bowie that's felt on the 1999 album Hours, which features a rework of the game's theme as New Angels Of Promise. And it certainly encouraged his thirst for exploring new ways to use technology.

"We talked about buying up a bunch of old satellites that were circling the Earth," says Campbell of a post-Omikron hangout. "He was going to relaunch Ziggy Stardust from space. The idea was that Ziggy would beam us transmissions: 'Are you receiving me…?'"

If that puts you in mind of Starman, and a certain Top of the Pops performance, you're not alone. Bowie would drift away from videogames after Omikron, though they didn't forget him: Hideo Kojima's entire oeuvre is shot-through with Bowie worship, reaching its peak with 2015's Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, featuring The Man Who Sold the World as its key motif alongside the player building up the Diamond Dogs mercenary force.

One more historical nugget from the time of Omikron is this 1999 interview Bowie did around the game's release. "The idea of developing a soundtrack idea for a game is really quite unusual," begins Bowie. "The idea of writing songs specifically for a game was really a compelling factor and the one thing we wanted to do. They didn't give us a preconceived idea of what we should do, we were left to our own devices."

Bowie's asked about his own experience with computers. "Not many people know this," says Bowie, beginning his answer with a Michael Caine impersonation. "But actually I was the first artist to take computers out on the road in the very early 1980s, the Serious Moonlight tour, 1983, and we were going online then and delivering all the facts and figures back to home base. So my experience with computers does go back a long time. I've been working on the Internet now for about two years and actually six months in operation, and I've been producing art on the computer since 1994, that's when I did my first series of things. So I can mouse about."

And his experience with games? "My son is the games merchant in our household," says Bowie. "I've played games, of course I played Tomb Raider and like every other hot-blooded male fell in love with Lara… momentarily, then I realised that it's not real, it's just not real, and this is definitely the end of the millennium."

Bowie goes on to discuss he and his collaborators' approach to the soundtrack, saying "what we're trying more to do than anything else is provide an emotional heart to the game. The one thing I did find in the games I viewed before we started work was that a lot of the games have a cold emotional drive.

"I think the one thing that we noticed immediately is that most of the material used in games is taken off albums," says Bowie. "Very rarely is music actually produced with the game. They've taken an album track here and an album track there, and it sort of works some of the time."

Finally he's asked about his own involvement in becoming a character in a videogame.

"I said my priority was that I looked about 24 years old and that was my input really," laughs Bowie. "And then for weeks and weeks they kept sending me sketches and it was 'no, no, no… YES, that one!'"

Dark and Darker, a fantasy PvPvE extraction game, made a big splash when it first appeared in early 2023, even though it was in a pretty rough alpha state at the time. Before long, though, Nexon started making noise about it, accusing Ironmace of using "stolen" code and assets to build the game. Nexon was reportedly working on a similar project, codenamed P3, but pulled the plug on it in 2021; Ironmace was founded shortly thereafter by former Nexon employees.

Long story short, Nexon filed a complaint, Ironmace issued denials, investigations were conducted, and in March 2023 Dark and Darker was removed from Steam. The studio managed to turn the delisting into a bit of a PR coup by continuing to distribute its game through BitTorrent—"going old school," as the studio put it—which an awful lot of players loved. Still, it's better to be on Steam than not, and after a court dismissed Nexon's preliminary injunction against Dark and Darker in January 2024, it returned to the storefront in June of that year.

Legal wrangling continued, however, and now the courts have come down with something of a split decision: Ironmace did not commit copyright infringement but did infringe on Nexon's trade secrets. What's the difference, you wonder? The Copyright Alliance says copyrights are specific, individual rights applied to "an original work that is fixed in a tangible medium like a photograph, a book, or an mp3 file." Trade secrets, on the other hand, are less specific: "Information that has an economic benefit due to its secret nature, has value to others who cannot legitimately obtain it, and is subject to reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy."

So, I guess, because Nexon's P3 was never actually a thing, copyright infringement is out, but because Ironmace seemingly built Dark and Darker on a foundation originally laid by Nexon—which had more or less kept a lid on the whole thing—trade secret infringement is in. And that's going to cost Ironmace 8.5 billion won (roughly $5.9 million) in damages.

The good news for Ironmace is that Dark and Darker continues: The early access version on Steam holds a "mostly positive" user rating and continues to put up decent player numbers—currently there are nearly 14,000 people playing on Steam.

The bad news is that this may not be the end of the matter. Nexon said in a statement that the award is "meaningful, as it addresses illegal infringement actions that disrupt fair market competition." But, it added, "After carefully reviewing the ruling, we plan to seek further legal judgment through a higher court." I've reached out to Ironmace for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

One need only look at some of the more questionable corners of modding to see that the human impulse to see virtual humans naked shall never subside. But now we may have a new origin point for one of videogaming's most persistently grubby habits. Brace yourself: It's over four decades old, and involves… Smurfette.

Nothing new under the sun is there. This news comes courtesy of the wonderful Videogame History Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the medium's history, and recently added a scan of Electronic Games magazine, volume 2 issue 16. As well as featuring an excellent cover photo of a nerd fighting a bald man wrapped in a curtain, it includes a reader letter relating to the nude Smurfette discovery.

"Content warning: glitched naked pixel smurf," says VGHF, in what is both one of the greatest content warnings of all time and four words you probably won't ever see jammed-together ever again. "Just discovered in our archive: We thought 'nude codes' in games dated back to the original Tomb Raider, but we found a functional one in Electronic Games way back in 1984."

The game in question is Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle, and on the letters page one enterprising soul shares their discovery. Unfortunately this contribution is not named, so our hero must remain unknown.

"There's a way to keep Smurfette's dress off until your energy runs out." No notes on that part. "You need the Roller Controller, or two joysticks plugged into one port through a Y-adapter. Stand on the skull and push one joystick down and the other up. Smurf gets lower and lower. When he disappears, the lady does her striptease act. Smurf will reappear at the top of the screen."

As can be seen from the image, if you squint a bit this does look like the Smurfette sprite suddenly has no dress, and a blue pixel beneath her arm one could very arguably describe as a breast. It seems self-evident that this is a visual glitch rather than anything intentional on the part of the programmer/s, though it is also a set of inputs that leads to an apparently naked character so certainly fits the definition of "nude code."

Props to Jupiter Jazz on Bluesky whose reaction inspired this article's headline: "Good to know the exact year we left gods light."

Well I hope we've all learned something today, especially those of you that zoomed-in on the image of poor Smurfette. Our nameless discoverer choosing to describe the moment of activation as "the lady does her striptease act" really does drive home that, back in the day, you had to make your own entertainment.

Over on the Baidu forums (as spotted by Wccftech), two pictures were posted, one of which showing what was claimed to be the AMD Radeon 8050S integrated GPU but the CPU's OPN actually suggests it is the 8060S-equipped AI Max+ 395. This is more than likely just a prelaunch software or database issue. This device managed to achieve a GPU score of 10,106 and a CPU score of 5,571 points in 3DMark Time Spy.

For clarity, that GPU score places what is currently assumed to be the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 around 2,000 points in the GPU category ahead of the average score of laptop RTX 4050 scores on 3DMark's website, and just a few hundred points behind laptop RTX 4060 scores. 3DMark is a pretty good benchmark for understanding graphical power though it's important to note it's not the be-all and end-all of gaming performance. A wider suite of games might give a better idea, but nevertheless this is a good starting point to figure out where AMD's top APU lands.

Ryzen's APU goes without a dedicated GPU, like those measured laptops above, which means if the score holds firm in actual testing, we might be able to expect RTX 4060 laptop performance out of this chip when it lands in gaming laptops, and at least one tablet from Asus.

We were hoping for a little more from the big leap in graphics cores to make the larger APU worth it over more power-savvy numbers for handhelds, like the Ryzen AI 9 HX 390. AMD previously suggested the top-end chip would perform similarly to an RTX 4070 gaming laptop (well, tablet) but these early figures put it closer to an RTX 4060 laptop. Discrete performance from an integrated GPU is still impressive but not quite what we were expecting.

It reportedly took AMD four goes to actually get the Strix Halo APU right and that's because it's more bespoke than one might think on first look. Strix Halo uses its own Zen 5-based CPU CCDs and it uses a new way to interconnect them, as the methods to get the Ryzen 9 9950X up and running saw limitations in power efficiency.

This power efficiency could allow the chip to become less power-hungry, which is a natural boon for the battery life of gaming laptops. That being said, the configurable wattage of this chip goes all the way up to 120 W and any change in the power of a given machine could make for large fluctuations in performance.

He then admitted last year that maybe he went a little overboard with chucking them in every single game, though of course there was still one in Shadow of the Erdtree. One upcoming FromSoft game that notably doesn't include a poison swamp, however, is Elden Ring's roguelike spinoff Nightreign.

That's probably because, as Kitao Taidai joked, Miyazaki isn't the one rubbing his purple-tinged hands all over the game. As reported by Famitsu, Taidai approached the subject of Nightreign's poison swamps, or lack thereof, during a livestream of the game over on YouTube. "There aren't any," Taidai told viewers (via a machine translation). "This time, the director is not Miyazaki, but [Junya] Ishizaki, who has been the battle director of Elden Ring, so maybe no one wanted to include it."

Ouch, a devastating blow to Miyazaki's neverending love for bubbling, venomous marshlands. It does make a lot of sense that if any Souls game was going to be missing one, it'd be Nightreign. The game's focus seems to be leaning a lot more heavily towards being a fast-paced slashfest—hell, our Morgan Park surmised it was closer to Fortnite than it was to Elden Ring when he had a hands-on with the game earlier this month—and I can imagine forcing players to trudge through toxic sludge isn't the kind of thing you need when trying to pull that off.

It does feel like a tiny bit of a shame though, but I'm sure Miyazaki's DNA will be running through Nightreign even without him at the helm. I would love to tell you myself, but, uh, I haven't had much luck trying to get into the (unfortunately non-PC) network test that's currently running this weekend. Either way, I'm sure Miyazaki will make up for Nightreign's missing poison swamps with plenty of dastardly creations in whatever creation he'll be cooking up next.

Some people look at a 3D printer and think "this will make useful parts for my projects." Some people hear an air raid siren, and assume there must be an historical war re-enactment taking place nearby.

I am the third type of person, who hears a 3D-printed air raid siren and experiences a flash forward to my apocalyptic future yet to come. Bear with me here folks, I'm cooking.

Youtuber Mark Makies has created a 3D printer air raid siren. This you probably know, if you viewed the video above (via Hackaday). What I'm not entirely sure of is why it sounds like both a comedy bit in once-popular children's TV show Noddy's Toyland Adventures, and the sound of impending doom, all at once.

It's a cool project, anyway, and I'm all down for that. A combination of cheerfully-coloured 3D-printed components and RC parts have been employed to make something both charming and terrifying, and for this Mark should be applauded.

Internally, a brushless motor controlled by a speed controller turns a rotor, which pulses air pressure inside a stator. The slots inside the stator (stay with me, this is technical) make a wooooooo sound through the honking trumpet, and cause the hairs to stand up on the back of my neck. Something like that, anyway.

Impressive. A potentiometer attached to the speed controller means the pitch can be adjusted by ramping the speed of the motor up and down, meaning those wooooos can become weeeees, and so forth. And for some reason, it reminds me of my youth.

I grew up in a small town just outside London, and every Tuesday morning a WW2 air raid siren would go off, waking me from my slumber/hangover. To this very day, I know not why. Friends would discuss it over an afternoon pint. Why does the siren sing for thee?

Still, it was both a useful way to tell me I was late for work, and a good excuse to check the skies to make sure the end times had not begun while I slept, blissfully unaware of my potential fate. The world kept turning, and the siren, it seemed to sing for no reason at all.

This video takes me back to those times. Ah, the halcyon days. Now, I fear that one day, I will hear the siren again. Hopefully it's a brightly coloured one, at least.

In fact, the FT claims Arm could unveil its first in-house processor as early as this summer with future chips powering a revolutionary AI strategy—including a new Jony Ive-design personal device.

The first chip is said to be a server CPU, so it won't be going into your next gaming PC. But it's still very big news with all kinds of implications.

The FT says the move is part of a broader plan by Arm's Japanese owner Softbank to move heavily into, yup you guessed it, AI, with a planned $500 billion to be spent on infrastructure in partnership with OpenAI.

That initial in-house Arm chip is actually said to be a server CPU that can be customized for clients, the most notable of which is claimed to be Meta. It's not clear how that chip, which does not appear to be overtly AI-aligned, fits in with Softbank's broader strategy for Arm.

That said, the FT mentions how Arm's move could be part of plans by former Apple designer Jony Ive in partnership with OpenAI and Softbank to create a new AI-powered personal device with a revolutionary, highly intuitive interface.

Back on the humble old dumb PC, Arm moving into making its own chips will surely only serve to accelerate the long-mooted annexation of the PC, with Intel and AMD's x86 processors eventually usurped by Arm chips.

That's been predicted for decades and yet never actually materialised. However, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips have been the most plausible possible usurpers, yet. Meanwhile, Nvidia, which tried and failed to buy Arm recently, is also said to be planning a new PC chip of its own based on Arm IP.

It's worth noting that Arm currently licenses both its instruction set and actual CPU designs. But it doesn't actually commission the production of any chips itself.

What's more, it's not clear what the implications might be with its ongoing fight with Qualcomm. During court fisticuffs with Qualcomm late last year, Arm pointed out that it has never built chips itself. However, it also said it is also always considering new strategies for the future.

Anyway, this is ultimately a case of wait and see. Will Arm do its own chips? Will they eventually go into PCs? Could Arm become a major player in AI? Could your smartphone be replaced by a whole new device paradigm powered by an Arm-made AI chip? Honestly, who knows!

Except it's not called System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition anymore, apparently. It's just unveiled itself as System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster, which is a pretty nice way of spinning the six years since it was announced all the way back in 2019. When life gives you lemons, make the lemonade look like it was your plan all along.

Not only that, but Nightdive has finally announced a date… on which it will reveal the release date. Those rapscallions. We'll get to hear when the game will make landfall on March 20, during the Future Game Show Spring Showcase at GDC 2025. (The Future Game Show is run by, well, Future, which also owns PC Gamer).

Of course, given that System Shock 2 was a 1999 game, this year will actually mark its 26th anniversary, but that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely, so it's either stick with 25th Anniversary Remaster or wait another four years until it can come out as the 30th Anniversary Edition. I prefer this option.

Aside from the date for its release date, Nightdive doesn't have much more info for us just yet on its dolled-up SS2, save that the March 20 announcement will be accompanied, naturally, by a new trailer.

Nevertheless, I am excited. Every fragment of info the studio has dropped about the remaster makes it look like it's taking very special care with it, preserving its brilliant System Shock-iness while making it run spick-and-span on modern, high-res machines.

Yeah, so first of all, Nightreign's network test is kinda weird. Instead of running for a set period of time—you know, like how most games'll run their tests or betas for 48 hours or so—instead it's choosing a sprinkling of three-hour pockets from now until February 17. That first session wrapped up at 6am PST / 9am EST / 2pm GMT today… not that it really matters, since it seems like barely anyone was able to get in anyway.

Happy Valentine day from r/Eldenring

The Elden Ring subreddit is full of folk laughing through the pain as Nightreign's servers appear to have crapped out less than an hour into the session. I gave things a try myself at around 11:30am UK time, only to be repeatedly met with login errors at the title screen. The FromSoftware player support Twitter notes that the "game server is experiencing high traffic, making it difficult to match" before shortly following it up with acknowledgement that the whole thing was borked.

"Currently, there is a malfunction on the Elden Ring Nightreign game server," the account posted. "We will restart the server to restore service." Well that happened, around 40 minutes later. Not that it seemed to make much difference, mind.

I continued to try myself between 12:30pm and 1:30pm UK time, and the furthest I was able to get was into the hub. The game never actually managed to throw me into a match, forcing me back to the title screen to start the whole thing all over again. I finally gave up shortly before 2pm, resigning myself to a session lost before crawling back to my beloved desktop.

The whole sub rn from r/Eldenring

That doesn't mean everyone was unable to play, though. There are a scattering of Reddit posts of folk who managed to successfully get through the matchmaking and take on the network test's bosses within.

But, unfortunately, for the most part, it seems like would-be Nightreigners missed out. The FromSoftware Twitter page posted one final apology as the first session concluded, added that it may rerun the test to make up for things. "We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to all players due to the game server issues," the post read. "Today's network test will end at 23:00 [Japan time] as scheduled, and we will proceed with improvement work. We are considering holding an additional test for today's session. Your understanding and cooperation would be greatly appreciated."

Ultimately, it's a frustrating situation for both sides. Of course it would've been rad to try and dive in, but I'm sure FromSoftware was having an equally bad time at trying to put out the fires as I was getting hard stuck in a log-in-disconnect loop. Unfortunately for me, the next session runs at, uh, 3am in the UK, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow's 7pm session to give things another go. Hopefully FromSoftware manages to get things a little more stable before then, and I'll be over here hoping that PlayStation and Xbox users get to be the guinea pigs so that when the network test inevitably comes to PC, we won't suffer the same issues. Hopefully, anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

As spotted by SteamDB, the site known for tracking Steam data (via PC Mag), users who downloaded survival crafter PirateFi were informed that "The Steam account of the developer for this game uploaded builds to Steam that contained suspected malware".

As a result of this, Valve urges users to either run a "full-system scan using an antivirus product that you trust or use regularly" or "consider fully reformatting your operating system to ensure that no malicious software remains on your machine". Both are smart ways of counteracting potential malware but this is a worrying message to get from a trusted platform such as Steam either way.

The Steam reviews for the game paint a suspicious story. The first few days of launch saw a handful of positive reviews, from accounts that had played the game for no more than two hours, though many of them aren't entirely fresh accounts. The latter point is normally a good sign of legitimacy.

However, later negative reviews are mostly from fresh accounts, accusing the game of stealing their data, spending their Steam wallet, and one user even suggests the game's screenshots are stolen from another pirate game. Given that the new negative reviews are from fresh accounts accusing the game of stealing their old accounts, those old accounts could potentially account for some of the positive reviews.

According to PC Mag, a Telegram account named Jose Andres offered people $17 an hour to moderate the web3 survival pirate game. In those same chats, they claim the game has had over 7,000 players. It seems this 'job' was just a scam to get more people to play the game as part of the induction process for it was to download PirateFI.

After being active for six days, Valve took action and took the game down on February 12. Based on the SteamDB figures, it seems likely the 7,000 players figure was just part of the talk to build up trust for their scam as the game has an all-time peak of five players. However, many report the game doesn't open so the likelihood of having many concurrent players is pretty low. According to those analytics, Gamalytic reckons the game got around 800 downloads and VG Insights thinks that number is up to around 1,500.

Either way, this sets a bad precedent for the safety of the Steam store and we don't yet know about internal changes made by Valve to catch future attempts. Hopefully, this remains an isolated event.

We have reached out to Valve for comment.

How much? $55 dollars to you sir. And as with many Kickstarters, the sting is in the shipping: That total goes up to around $85 for one mug when you include shipping. I mean, even if you've had a particularly fruitful day in the mines, that's a lot of money for a plastic mug.

Now, I'm not necessarily complaining. Grown adults can spend their money on what they like, DRG players adore the game, and the mugs look great. It should also be said that, with 30 days to go, the Kickstarter has sailed beyond its initial $200,000 target and is currently around $300,000, so lots of folk are happy to pay this price.

Still… hell of a lot of money for a mug. And what amused me about this is the rationale for the price. One person backed the Kickstarter for a dollar, only so that they could leave a comment for Scorched Steel Industry saying "$85 (with shipping) for a plastic mug is too expensive for many of us."

SSI's response is an instant classic. "We are aware the price of the mugs is quite high and not for everyone sadly. It is explained by the very high cost of the steel molds and the number of parts requisited [sic] for each mug. A few of the manufacturers we talked with told us it might be the most complicated mug made industrially on Earth, and amongst the most complicated projects for them."

I'm not sure exactly how, but "the most complicated mug made industrially on Earth" feels seriously on-brand for Deep Rock Galactic. But there's more! "We also chose a rather expensive polymer to get the best look and properties" and, very reasonably, "small batches of just a few thousand pieces are very expensive compared to mass production in the hundreds of thousands or millions."

I didn't want one of these mugs this morning, but I'm slowly leaning towards them. DRG fans are mostly mollified and amused by this explanation, though there's still some grumbling about the steel molds argument (there are four mugs, but they clearly share the same mold).

"Yeah, I don't think anyone who knows about Kickstarter stuff is going to say these are cheap," says ChillyG27. "But still, you can make it to be the most high tech safe and secure mug in the world, but it still remains an 80 bucks plastic mug."

"Made of neither rock nor stone," notes SergeantSleepy1995 disapprovingly. HowlingHipster meanwhile makes the decent point that "people are treating these like fun casual drinkware and not collectors items. These come across like the millennial nerd version of the pink glass dishes my mom hoards in a cabinet."

Speaking as a dad whose daughters are obsessed with Stanley Cups, and who deeply resented having to pay $45 for a god damn cup, I can tell you that no mug is worth this amount of money. But it's all in the eye of the beholder, and very much you pays your money, you takes your choice. But let's just enjoy that line one more time: "The most complicated mug made industrially on Earth."

Counterswapping is a pretty contentious subject in Overwatch. The actual definition is when players repeatedly switch their hero to one that counters someone specific on the other team, but a lot of players have watered this down and take it to mean anytime someone is playing a hero that counters something that they are playing, even if it's just a coincidence and not intentional.

Despite the fact that countering enemy players is just part and parcel of what it takes to win in a hero shooter—it would be kind of pointless just to lie down and die instead of swapping to another character that is better suited for the match—I can understand why, at its worst, counterswapping is annoying.

Because every perk is unique to each hero, they won't carry over if you switch mid-game. So, every time you pick a new character, you'll have to start back at level one. Even if perks unlock slightly faster for new picks, players are hoping that this disadvantage will work as a disincentive for those who spend too much time counterswapping.

"Yep, probably a good thing, though the level of catchup mechanic is important," one player says. "And that initial meetup likely is still not so bad to stop first fight swaps, but it's a step forward. Remove some ult charge retention, and we're getting somewhere." While other players point out that this could specifically help with counterswapping tanks.

Tanks in 5v5 Overwatch tend to have the hardest time when it comes to counterswapping, because they are often the lynchpin of a team, there's only one of them, and they have some very obvious counters. For example, if I went Hog, the enemy tank should probably go Mauga, then I would go D.Va, then they'd go Sigma, then I'd go Doomfist, then they'd go Zarya, then I'd go Reinhardt, then they'd go Ramattra, and then I'd be back to Hog and the cycle begins anew.

It's incredibly convoluted, and realistically, no one should be changing that much each fight, but as the only disincentive before was restricting ult charge, it was a possible strategy. It still is, even with perks, but now there's one more reason not to, and that may be enough for players just to switch things up a couple of times and then leave it at that.

Blizzard has made previous changes to try to dissuade players from counterswapping as well. Season 13 introduced a small update to the scoreboard, which meant if you switched hero mid-fight, players on the enemy team can't see who you've picked for 15 seconds. "This change adds more friction to counterswapping, especially in the extreme case where two players on opposite teams are both sitting in spawn with the scoreboard open and rapidly switch their heroes in response to each other's choices," a developer commented.

While this update was a small help, it didn't completely eradicate counterswapping from Overwatch 2, and it's pretty likely that this perk feature won't either. Swapping is just part of the game—it's why there are counters, there are so many heroes, and you can switch heroes mid-fight. So next time you get someone yelling about CounterWatch in your chat, just remind them that you wouldn't do it if it weren't a massive strategic part of the game.

This rumour, and it very much is a rumour, comes from an equities analyst at investment bank Baird who cited discussions between TSMC and Intel. According to the Wall Street Journal and to broadly précis this particular yarn, the rough idea is for TSMC to send some of its best engineers to Intel's fabs to sort them out. They can then be spun off into a separate entity managed by TSMC but co-owned by both companies.

If you're thinking this sounds like wild speculation, it does. But the markets are taking it seriously, with Intel's share price spiking by fully 6% when the rumour broke. So the question is, does it make sense?

For starters, if there's any truth to this story then it speaks volumes about the health of Intel's all-important upcoming 18A node. And not in a good way. If 18A is all Intel is cracking it up to be, then there would be no need to parachute in TSMC engineers and Intel wouldn't be looking to spin off its fabs.

Personally, I doubt 18A is as healthy as Intel claims, otherwise CEO Pat Gelsinger would not have been ejected, sorry retired, from his role. So, let's take this rumour seriously for a moment and consider the implications.

On the one hand, the idea that TSMC in part or whole takes control of Intel's fabs could be great for the US chip industry and the broader chip supply chain. The world's chip supply would no longer be so dependent on production in a location constantly teetering on edge of a geopolitical crisis thanks to tensions between Taiwan and China.

More chips produced in the US also sidesteps any concerns over increasing electronics prices thanks to the possible imposition of hefty tariffs on Taiwanese chip of up to 100% by the Trump administration.

On the other, handing over control of even more of the world's cutting-edge chip production to TSMC looks like a megamonopoly in the making. And it's hard to find any examples of long term and overwhelming monopolies in important industries working out well for the average consumer.

You could take the view that if Intel's fabs are in more trouble than the company is letting on. It might be a choice between partnering with TSMC or watching those fabs go up in proverbial smoke.

In other words, the real-world choice might be between partnering with TSMC or seeing Intel's fabs down and ceasing to exist in the medium term. In which case, it's got to be worth giving the TSMC thing a go. After all, the US government could take control of or shutter those fabs should it wish.

Moreover, if tensions between China and Taiwan increase yet further, TSMC may benefit from a larger US presence. It already has a 4nm fab of its own up and running in the US, with 3nm and 2nm fabs in the planning.

In the long run, that could once again make the US the global center of chip production. And yet the idea makes my spidey sense tingle. You only have to look at graphics card prices to see what happens when one company dominates. The idea that TSMC swallowing up Intel's fabs is going to be a good thing for we mere gamers doesn't feel at all convincing.

In the end, the only thing we can be fairly confident of is that the next decade or so looks likely to be volatile if not tumultuous in the tech industry. Tariffs, AI, geopolitics, scalpers, fake frames, a mooted mega monopoly in chips, it's all pretty baffling. Long gone are the innocent days when the most controversial aspect of building a new gaming PC was whether you were an Intel or AMD fan. It's all so much more complicated now.

But the devs at Heart Machine tell PCG they're undaunted, and despite a "teamwide 'oops, guess we made it too hard' moment" when the game first hit Steam, they've got "No regrets" about releasing in early access. "There is no amount of time you can spend in isolation that will make the game great," says lead producer Michael Clark. "You get the best version of a game by maximizing the amount of feedback-and-iteration loops you can go through, and Early Access is the way to do that for a title like this."

So, for now, Heart Machine has turned its first barrage of mixed feedback into an early access roadmap, released yesterday. The devs promise a February update consisting of performance fixes, a combat and gear rebalance, bug fixes, and new stuff: enemies, affixes, a new player character, and so on.

That'll be followed by another (relatively) small update in March before a bigger, named patch in April: the Buried Below update. That one will feature more tweaks, more new stuff, and an "improved onboarding" experience for new players who find themselves a little baffled by the game at first blush. Which, yeah, I get that. Although I liked my time with HLB, I could easily see a new player getting overwhelmed with how much is going on and bouncing right off. Better hand-holding wouldn't go amiss.

I've got high hopes for the game, and Heart Machine sounds very open to change. "We had a lot of balance changes going in right up to launch," says Clark, "and we had been tuning things to be more difficult, as we had found that we were getting pretty good at beating our first Cycle on a fresh save." But they might have overcorrected just a little: "We knew that we were better at the game than a new player would be, but we misjudged the difficulty.

"We want the game to be tough, but fair and clear to understand… We aren't looking to make it easy, but it should be fair and you should be able to analyze what you did wrong and git gud." Not a bad philosophy, if you ask me. Here's hoping Heart Machine pulls it off.

Set to air at 8 AM EST / 5 AM PT on the AMD Gaming YouTube channel, the RX 9070 live stream is going to give more information on the cards that are confirmed to launch in early March.

With the RTX 5070 Ti set to launch on February 20 and RTX 5070 launching on March 5, the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards will likely launch just after these two Nvidia cards.

These will be AMD's first graphics cards to use the RDNA 4 microarchitecture so there's quite a lot of hype and/or speculation surrounding them. Notably, these cards are reportedly targeting the more midrange market so won't be a replacement for that RTX 5090 card you've been looking for.

They could, however, sway you away from the cheaper 50-series cards if the live stream and subsequent launch suggest RDNA 4 has led to big performance gains.

In the wake of Nvidia's card selling out nearly instantaneously, AMD's David McAfee announced AMD is "planning to have a wide assortment of cards available globally for its launch in March."

We know surprisingly little about AMD's next set of graphics cards right now but a recent leak suggests the AMD RX 9070 XT can run the latest Monster Hunter Wilds benchmarking tool at 211.7 average fps, which is mighty impressive.

This is at 1080p with frame gen enabled but impressive nonetheless. If these stats bore out in real tests, and customers can actually get them on shelves, AMD could have a surprise hit on its hands.

I know I just hope the price is right to compete, and an FSR improvement wouldn't go amiss.

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

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

Honkai: Star Rail codes—All current livestream Stellar Jade

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

How to redeem Honkai: Star Rail codes

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

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

Or you can do it online:

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

As we discussed, back at CES Nvidia originally said both GPUs would be available in February, though didn't put a specific date on that. So, a March 5 release for the RTX 5070 is definitely a delay. The question is why?

Hopefully, the delay is mostly about making sure there's plenty of availability at launch, what with RTX 5080 and 5090 cards predictably selling out in picoseconds after their launch. Pushing the launch of the RTX 5070 back by a couple of weeks could help with that.

However, we suspect it's as much about triangulating the 5070 release to undermine the launch of AMD's competing Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT. Those two GPUs were originally rumoured to launch earlier this year.

AMD never said that would happen. However AMD has said that it decided to delay both cards to give them a little polish. "We are taking a little extra time to optimize the software stack for maximum performance and enable more FSR 4 titles," AMD's Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics rep David McAfee said on January 22.

Likewise AMD has since inked in "early March" as the launch window for those new GPUs. With that in mind, Nvidia also moving the RTX 5070 to early March seems like a little too much of a coincidence. Odds are, it's an effort to win the PR war with AMD by ensuring that the RX 9070 GPUs have to share the news cycles with the RTX 5070.

Incidentally, it could be quite the fight. The latest rumours suggest the 9070 XT could have a boost clock of 3.1 GHz and offer performance comparable to a 7900 XTX in the Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark.

Copious caveats apply and we'll have to wait and see just how good the 9070 XT is. But if those rumours are right, this could be one of the most exciting GPU launches in years. Oh, provided AMD gets the pricing right.

Of course, all of this will be academic for most gamers unless both Nvidia and AMD manage to get a decent number of cards onto retail shelves. Comments on X in response to Nvidia's announcement of the launch dates say it all. "When will availability for the 5090 and 5080 cards start?" one X user replied. Well, quite.

This latest court filing describes the bid for OpenAI's governing non-profit publicised on Monday as "serious." This, despite Musk allegedly telling staff at X over email, "Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even."

Furthermore, sources told Reuters that OpenAI's board of directors had apparently not received a formal bid from Musk's side as of Tuesday. Still, the original bid has arguably succeeded in at least one of its goals: to draw public attention to OpenAI's reported intention to go for-profit through its latest restructure, and to get us all talking about it—like this.

Whether any amount of public attention will keep OpenAI non-profit still remains to be seen though. The company started as a non-profit, before shifting into a 'capped-profit' structure back in 2019. The non-profit part of the company Musk et al allegedly want to buy is what steers the ship of the wider, capped-profit company. The aforementioned restructure intends to go more traditionally for-profit in the form of a public benefit corporation.

OpenAI is presently playing it cool. The original unsolicited bid was dismissed by OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman, who went as far as to write on X, "No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want".

Theoretically, the board could still accept a bid despite this rejection from Altman, though a recent comment suggests that's unlikely; counsel to OpenAI's board, Andrew Nussbaum, provided a statement to Bloomberg News which further clarifies the company's stance: "The nonprofit is not for sale."

For those unaware, Elon Musk co-founded the company that went on to create ChatGPT alongside Sam Altman back in 2015. Musk then left in 2018, with the company saying at the time his departure was to avoid a potential conflict of interest as Tesla became more interested in AI.

Last year, OpenAI shared redacted emails and DMs suggesting that this split was anything but wholly amicable. Not only that, but these messages also indicate that Musk wanted to push OpenAI towards becoming a for-profit organisation as early as 2017.

Sam Altman recently told Bloomberg Television, "I think he is probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor. I wish he would just compete by building a better product, but I think there’s been a lot of tactics, many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff, now this." The Musk-backed competition in question is xAI and their boorish chatbot Grok. You know what? I think I'm finally getting it.

Fine. Fine. If Wordle was going to be like that, lumbering me with some unhelpful yellows and nothing more, then I was going to take them, make some wild guesses I normally wouldn't, and see what happened after. Which in this case meant immediately revealing four green letters which led me straight to today's answer. Nice. Unexpected, but I wasn't going to complain. 

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Friday, February 14

A simple song or a short tune. Some piece of music that's straightforward and easily forgotten, but not necessarily unpleasant.  

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you've got the basics, it's much easier to nail down those Wordle wins. And as there's nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day, here are a few tips to help set you on the right path: 

• A good opening guess should contain a mix of unique consonants and vowels. 
• Narrow down the pool of letters quickly with a tactical second guess.
• Watch out for letters appearing more than once in the answer.

There's no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don't need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

You might need this. The answer to the February 14 (1336) Wordle is DITTY.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Past Wordle answers can give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh. They are also a good way to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer is unlikely to be repeated. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• February 13: RUMBA
• February 12: RAPID
• February 11: SCORE
• February 10: GOODY
• February 9: BONUS
• February 8: STEEP
• February 7: SWATH
• February 6: PUPIL
• February 5: PEDAL
• February 4: TOOTH

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and you'll need to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them to keep up your winning streak.

You should start with a strong word like ARISE, or any other word that contains a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You'll also want to avoid starting words with repeating letters, as you're wasting the chance to potentially eliminate or confirm an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you'll see which ones you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Positive previews that highlight the immersive world, stunning graphics and variety of gameplay brought by the dual-protagonist approach," Ubisoft wrote in its Q3 2024-25 financial report. "Pre-orders are tracking solidly, in line with those of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the second most successful entry of the franchise."

Preorders don't tell the whole story, not by a long shot, especially when they've only been open for a few weeks. But there's not much else to go on in the pre-release period, so you go with what you've got—and as far as it goes, Ubisoft CEO Frederick Duguet said the numbers are encouraging.

"Odyssey's been the second-biggest performer in the franchise history, very close to Valhalla in terms of units sold on a comparable time basis," Duguet said during today's investors call. "At the time when we launched Odyssey, it set a new benchmark for the franchise, it was a very successful first week. So that's what we can say at this stage. When we look back, Odyssey has been accumulating 40 million players to date, so it's been really a great success. So what we see as a preorder benchmark is encouraging."

Duguet acknowledged that the bulk of the preorder period still lies ahead, and that leaves a lot of time for things to either catch fire or fizzle out. But, he said, "What we can see to date, it's really positive."

The other upside for Assassin's Creed Shadows is that it looked very good in pre-release previews. The delay sucked, sure, but after spending six hours with it in January, PC Gamer's Morgan Park thinks it'll be "worth the wait," writing that even though Ubisoft has a lot riding on it (after years of struggles, this is as make-or-break as it gets), Shadows "showed a level of confidence I haven't seen from the publisher in years. Six hours is a drop in the bucket of what's likely a 40-60 hour game, but I'm feeling a lot better two months ahead of Shadows than I did two months ahead of Star Wars Outlaws."

"A thing I noticed," observes host Bing Gordon at one point, "nobody who's ever left Blizzard seems to have done great… there's some secret sauce there." Which is obviously an over-simplification of the situation: Hundreds of hugely talented but lesser-known names have come and gone at Blizzard over the decades. But it's clear what he's driving at as Gordon names senior leadership like Mike Morhaime and Chris Metzen, which is that sense that nobody's really left Blizzard and created the new Blizzard, or even something close to it.

"Look, when we bought Vivendi Games you can't imagine what these guys were doing," says Kotick. "They had 25 different development projects that were not the Blizzard franchises, they had a social media division, they had a mobile gaming business, they had like thousands and thousands of people and the whole company wasn't making any money. Only Blizzard is, and only World of Warcraft is making any money."

Kotick felt such an environment wasn't doing Blizzard any favours, and had led to stagnation around the studio's golden goose. Necessary context for the start of the next response: Activision merged with French media publisher Vivendi to form Activision-Blizzard in 2008, before five years later Activision-Blizzard spent $8.2 billion buying back the majority of Vivendi's shares in the company.

"And so we traded for the company and my view is World of Warcraft is going to continue," says Kotick. "But you have to make it less taxing and demanding on your time. Because you couldn't enjoy it and be competitive in it without playing four hours a day. And people age out. They have kids. You just couldn't play it."

But the game's broad appeal was obvious, and the business model had proven a masterstroke even if, inevitably, players did age out of it (I know I did). "You'd be shocked," says Kotick. "150 million people churned out of World of Warcraft [over its history]. That's a crazy number. Those are people paying $15 a month. It was the best subscription business of all time."

At this point the host, who's sure to be a favourite among gamers, suggests that the only issue was that a WoW subscription could've been priced more highly. Surprisingly enough Kotick pushes back against this idea, though that's only because he thinks there are better ways to monetise such an audience.

"We never raised the price," says Kotick. "My view was we come up with value-added services, come up with new things to sell, but just leave the price. We could figure out how to come up with other things to sell them. And it's a prickly audience, you know? You don't wanna do too much to agitate them. And even a dollar increase would've been a problem in my view."

A notable element there is Kotick's understanding of WoW's audience, which may not be appreciated by many players but I think is broadly accurate from the perspective of a publisher. MMO players tend to be incredibly invested in and protective of their chosen game, and while some suits would think that's a no-brainer for a year-on-year increase in the subscription price, Kotick saw even a dollar increase to the baseline subscription as creating a problem the publisher didn't want. He was still laser-focused on getting money out of players, of course, but these kinds of instincts are what saw wild success for Activision-Blizzard and that eventual $68.7 billion sale to Microsoft.

Some may find the tone of this business-focused podcast galling, because Kotick left Activision Blizzard in 2023 under something of a cloud and remains something of a villainous figure among gaming fans: The epitome of the cutthroat capitalist out for profit over artistry. Kotick casually pronouncing on the failures of Vivendi should also be taken in the context of his own failure to adequately deal with systemic sexism and harassment problems at Activision Blizzard.

But no one can deny that Bobby Kotick understands the videogame business. And arguably wasn't wrong about Blizzard either: Among other things Kotick thinks the Warcraft movie was a disaster, burning out Chris Metzen to the point he left was a huge mistake (and Kotick was behind his return), and that the studio had lost focus on serving WoW players. WoW is now arguably in something of a golden age. You do wonder where it would be now if Vivendi stayed in charge.

In practical terms, the advance list of Steam sale dates is mostly useful for developers, so they can plan out how they want to take part in all the various events. But it's also of interest to the public at large, because while Steam sales may not be the thrilling special events they were in days gone by, they're still great opportunities to save big piles of money.

It's also nice from my own personal, admittedly unusual perspective: I used to have to pay very close attention to Steam at certain times of the year, and then mash out a panicked Steam sale is live! news story the moment it popped up on the storefront. Now, I can plan, and it's much less stressful.

In any event, here's what you've got to look forward to over the second half of 2025:

• Automation Fest: July 14 – July 21
• Racing Fest: July 28 – August 4
• 4X Fest: August 11 – August 18
• Third Person Shooter (TPS) Fest: August 25 – September 1
• Political Sim Fest: September 8 – September 15
• 2025 Steam Autumn Sale: September 29 – October 6 (Please note this is a different time frame compared to previous Autumn Sales)
• Steam Next Fest - October 2025 Edition: October 13 – October 20
• Steam Scream 4: October 27 – November 3
• Animal Fest: November 10 – November 17
• Sports Fest: December 8 – December 15
• 2025 Steam Winter Sale: December 18 – January 5

The Autumn Sale is the one of particular note. As Valve said, it's taking place in "a different time frame" this year, and that's putting it mildly. The September 29 start date is two months earlier than the late November dates of past years: The Autumn Sale began on November 27 in 2024, November 21 in 2023, and November 22 in 2022.

Valve didn't say why it made the shift, but the obvious reason is simply to space things out between the Autumn and Winter Sales. The 2024 Winter Sale began on December 19, just a couple weeks after the Autumn Sale ended. That's not much of a chance to recover your financial situation between two major seasonal sales. It also spaces things out more evenly across all Steam's seasonal sales, leaving roughly three months between each.

So now you can strategize how you want to blow your gaming budget for the balance of 2025: For what's left in the way of Steam sales and events in the first half of the year, here's our list of all the upcoming Steam sale dates.

What other bosses from its older games is FromSoftware sticking into Nightreign? What does it all mean for the lore? Well, on the first point, FromSoftware's not talking. But on the latter, it's given a pretty straight answer: Don't worry too much about it.

"The primary reason for these existing bosses in Nightreign is from a gameplay perspective," Nighteign director Junya Ishizaki told Gamespot in a recent interview. "Of course, with this new structure and with this new style of game, we needed a lot of different bosses… so we wanted to leverage what we deemed appropriate from our previous titles. We obviously understand that our players have a lot of affection for these characters and they have a lot of fond memories of battling them in these games, so we didn't want to encroach too much on that lore aspect. We wanted them to make sense within the atmosphere and vibe of Elden Ring Nightreign."

Reading between the lines, I think Ishizaki's point about not encroaching "too much" means we won't be seeing a ton of Dark Souls bosses pop up in Nightreign; Elden Ring already gave them more than 100 to pull from. But if the developers already put two in the reveal trailer (in addition to The Nameless King, Dark Souls' Centipede Demon popped up), I think we can expect a few more to show up, too. I wouldn't mind another crack at the Dancer of the Boreal Valley.

PC Gamer's Morgan Park recently went hands-on with Nightreign and came away with the same appraisal that I did—the game feels an awful lot like a mod, which isn't an insult. It's FromSoftware in looser form than usual, more experimental than it's been in the last decade. But the studio has a history of this approach from its pre-Souls days, particularly with its Armored Core spin-offs.

With the news that Nightreign will have post-release DLC including more characters and bosses, I'm looking forward to seeing just how wacky this thing can get.

There was initially some question as to whether this is actually an official Rockstar Discord, but it is: There's a little note about it at the bottom of the latest GTA Online update on the Rockstar News Wire. The Discord includes dedicated looking-for-game channels as well as others for community challenges, bounties, and other activities in GTA Online and Red Dead Online, and there's one dedicated to "Rockstar classics," although it seems to be mostly GTA 6 talk right now too.

But Grand Theft Auto 6 is the big topic, and as you might expect it's pretty chaotic in there. I got rolled when somebody proclaimed a new GTA 6 trailer had dropped on YouTube, leading numerous others to declare they'd seen the same thing. In a panic, I rushed to Rockstar's YouTube channel to check it out, and... no. There was no trailer. Of course not.

As noted by Kotaku, insults and slurs are also common, although things have apparently calmed down somewhat since the Discord first went live—it's hard to keep up but I've only noticed a couple instances of overt racism. Bizarrely, there was also apparently some kind of AI-powered chatbot firing off weird answers to inquiries, although it was taken down quickly.

But the sheer volume of messages is the number-one challenge: Slowmode is currently enabled, meaning you can only post a message every 10 minutes, but with more than 43,000 people currently online and eager to share their thoughts it's pretty much a non-stop flood of speculation, hope, a bit of doomsaying, and "trailer 2 when?"

On the speculation front, an awful lot of people seem to think (or at least hope) that the rollout of an official Discord means a new GTA 6 trailer, release date, or something substantial is imminent. In most cases I'd probably agree, but with Rockstar it's just impossible to say: It just does what it does, when it wants, how it wants. A new trailer could absolutely be on the way, but it's also possible, as was theorized ahead of the GTA 6 reveal in 2023, that Rockstar is just messing with us.

For those just tuning in, Grand Theft Auto 6 remains on track for release on consoles sometime in the fall, although a specific release date has not yet been announced—and no, it's not confirmed for PC yet, either.

Druckmann mentioned the casting process in a talk with Santa Monica Studio creative director Cory Barlog (God of War) on Wednesday at the D.I.C.E. Summit, an annual industry get-together put on by The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.

While watching the auditions live, Druckmann said he "was sure it was going to be a different actor." After later studying the audition videos "frame-by-frame," however, he began insisting on Bailey for the part even though the consensus at the studio had been that she wasn't right for it because "she's in everything." That includes Druckmann's previous project, Uncharted 4.

In one moment, studied carefully, Bailey showed a "vulnerability" that none of the other actors had, Druckmann said. He played the video back to others at the studio, and they were convinced.

For her performance as Abby, Bailey won a Game Award and a BAFTA Award, and was nominated for a D.I.C.E. Award. She also made a cameo in the HBO show based on the game. Actor Kaitlyn Dever will be playing the live-action version of Abby in the show's upcoming second season.

The Last of Us Part 2's story and characters, particularly Abby, also led to online threats and harassment directed at Bailey and others involved with the game.

A similar 'almost didn't get the part for being too popular' story was recently told about the casting Troy Baker in Indiana Jones and The Great Circle. According to Baker, Bethesda's Todd Howard wasn't into the idea of casting the prolific videogame actor as Indy, but test audiences disagreed.

The story of Bailey's casting was a brief anecdote in a larger conversation about creative decision-making—an example of a situation in which Druckmann went against his first instincts after careful examination. Barlog described a much more metaphysical process in which the right decisions "just feel correct" and appear to him as a "sort of sine wave vibration."

The Last of Us Part 2 originally released on PlayStation in 2020, and a remastered version will be out on Steam this April.

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

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

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

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

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

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

EA's opinions on live service games came to the fore in the wake of Dragon Age: The Veilguard's failure to meet sales expectations. In a subsequent investors call in January, CEO Andrew Wilson said "games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives," and that while Veilguard "had a high quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played ... it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market."

The obvious takeaway was that, in Wilson's opinion, if Veilguard had "shared-world features and deeper engagement"—that is, if it was a live service game—it would've had a better chance of doing the kind of numbers EA wanted. We rather strongly disagree with that assessment, and so does Fares, who recently told Eurogamer that Hazelight "will not have them, I do not believe in them."

"I think [live service] is not the right way to go," Fares said. "I hope more and more [developers] focus on their passion, and what they believe in. At the end of the day, we see clearly—and Hazelight is living proof—that when you trust in your vision and go with it, you can still reach a big audience. That's what I want people to focus on."

Fares said he understands that publishers have to worry about the "money issue," and that there have to be some boundaries—"You can't just say, 'Give me $100 million, I want to do what I want to do'"—but publishers "have to respect the creativity as well."

"There has to be a balance," Fares said. "It can't just be towards the finance side. So, no, it will not happen with a Hazelight game, ever. I guarantee."

Hazelight has indeed found success with its somewhat offbeat co-op formula: It Takes Two was a big sales hit and claimed game of the year wins at both The Game Awards in 2021 and DICE in 2022. That's presumably bought the team a certain degree of freedom in its work that other studios might not have. Split Fiction is another co-op action game, similar to It Takes Two, but it looks every bit as weird (and good), with no visible injection of trend-chasing or need to "reallocate toward our most significant and highest potential opportunities."

Not everyone can get away with publicly shooting holes in EA's grand strategy, no, but as PC Gamer's Tyler Wilde succinctly (and, to be clear, complimentarily) put it in his Split Fiction preview, "Josef Fares and Hazelight Studios aren't normal."

Split Fiction is set to launch on March 6.

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

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

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

As proof, the new Fantastic Four movie trailer that came out this week shows everyone using their powers except Pedro Pascal's Reed Richards, because even a level-100 Zaddy can't make stretchy noodle arms look cool.

This is why I'm so excited for Season 2 of the live-action Twisted Metal series on Peacock—even though I didn't (and probably won't) watch the first season. Twisted Metal Season 2 is coming this summer, as announced by a new teaser you can see below, with Anthony Mackie as John Doe, Beatriz as Quiet, and hey, the first appearance Anthony Carrigan as Calypso. (You like him. He played NoHo Hank in Barry.)

Cars, guns, explosions, yeah yeah yeah, but there it is, at the very end, the tiniest glimpse of a driver I can't wait to full see realized in live action:

Yeah, that's Axel sticking his hand into a giant gear that starts turning. In the Twisted Metal games, Axel is a guy named Axel who drives a vehicle named Axel that is basically two giant wheels his outstretched arms are locked into. There's no cab in Axel's car, his body is just out there completely unprotected while he drives around between huge tires shooting rocket launchers that are mounted on his shoulders.

They're gonna put Axel on the screen. They're gonna put this gloriously dumb vehicle on the screen in live action:

You can also catch a couple frames of Axel standing next to Axel as it's parked in the background in this shot:

It's probably going to look really stupid, a guy driving around between two enormous tires, which is probably why they only teased Axel instead of showing Axel, but who knows? Maybe it'll look awesome. Or maybe it'll look so stupid it'll just be awesome. Either way, like Axel, I'm ready to roll.

A final transmission sent from Angel's Venture at 5:07 AM PST warned its citizens to evacuate the planet immediately. By 6:39 AM, all signals were lost.

Players who jumped into Helldivers 2 when it launched last February might remember Angel's Venture as one of the very first Terminid planets that divers were ordered to capture. Millions of battles were fought among its amber forests and pink/green foliage. Its lush landscapes made for the perfect first impression of this special game, and now they're gone. A chilling anniversary.

Super Earth high command has declared 24 hours of mourning for those lost:

"This is an incalculable loss. The land cultivated by generations. The lives of the Super Earth citizens whose evacuation could not be prioritized. The proud pines shading the Democratic Youth Scouts campground. All gone forever, ripped to shreds by savage cosmic forces," the in-game dispatch reads. "Finally the Illuminate, hiding behind their mask of intelligence and sophistication, have revealed what they truly want: carnage."

The Helldivers 2 community's long-held suspicion that it's the Illuminate who have seized control of the black hole, officially designated the Meridian Singularity, was on the money. For weeks, the singularity has been cultivating "dark energy" via an in-game tracker. The more energy it absorbs, the faster it moves.

That's an existential problem for us: The galactic map shows the Meridian Singularity on a direct course for Super Earth. Directly in its path are five other planets that could suffer the same fate as Angel's Venture if we can't stop it soon: Moradesh, Ivis, Nublaria I, Pilen V, and New Haven. The future is uncertain, but I have full faith in the government to work out a solution in the eleventh hour.

Though, it's impossible to ignore the irony here. Let us never forget that the Meridian Singularity itself was the result of Super Earth hubris. Last summer, Helldivers were deployed to spread an experimental chemical weapon called 'Termicide' across bug planets. Termicide not only failed to contain the Terminid threat, but triggered reckless mutations that spawned flying Shriekers. Super Earth's solution? Dark matter bombs that eventually swallowed the planet of Meridia whole, creating the Meridian Singularity.

Hmm, maybe we're not in good hands after all. Rest in peace, Angel's Venture.

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

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

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

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

I've been kind of jazzed for Hell Is Us since it was announced in 2022, in large part because the project is being headed up by Jonathan Jacques-Belletête—I loved his work as art director on Deus Ex: Human Revolution. (Yes, I am an unrepentant fan of the piss filter.) But then it fell off the radar for a couple years and I forgot about it until a surprise appearance in Sony's 2024 State of Play showcase, with a 2025 release target. And now, thanks to the most recent State of Play, we have a full-on release date: Hell Is Us will be out on September 4.

As is the way of things, the release date announcement brings us a release date trailer, and if you think you recognize the narrator's voice, you are correct: That's Elias Toufexis, the voice of Adam Jensen in Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided (among a great many other things), who portrays the lead character Rémi in Hell Is Us.

"I'm delighted to join my friends on Hell Is Us," Toufexis said. "I wanted to take this role because Rémi is particularly interesting: While he may seem cold or reserved at first, we gradually discover the complexity of his character, and the events that have shaped his personality. The world of the game is so endlessly fascinating. I can't wait for people to play it!"

The trailer isn't super-clear on what exactly Hell Is Us is all about: Rémi is on a quest to discover his origins in a country torn apart by civil war. Perhaps more pressingly, "supernatural creatures reminiscent of ancient headstones and monuments" have also recently started popping up, and apparently they're not to make pals: The only way to deal with them is with weapons forged specifically for the job, which is presumably why Rémi is packing a mix of high-tech hardware and medieval head-crackers.

The announcement also reiterated what I think may be the most interesting aspect of Hell Is Us, at least out of the gate: A design approach that encourages players "to follow their instincts rather than markers" as they make their way through the world. Jon Jacques-Belletête said when the game was announced that developers wanted to "bring back true adventure and exploration," adding, "There's no need for a detailed quest log or precise waypoint on the map: We want players to feel the thrill of adventure, guided by their feelings and instinchttps://youtu.be/8iZbNIAM8eQ?si=lFLJCpTYu79upiyWts."

The release date announcement makes the same point, saying Hell Is Us "encourages reflection and observation by eliminating all forms of intrusive assistance." How that will work out in practice remains to be seen but at the very least I imagine it means we can expect an absence of yellow paint.

The State of Play showcase naturally focused on the PlayStation 5 edition of Hell Is Us, but yes, it is coming to PC too (and Xbox Series X/S, if that's what you're into) on the same date. It's available for pre-purchase now on Steam.

It ain't Elden Ring 2, that's for sure, but a much simpler and more streamlined experience: And as a spinoff, the asking price is an unexpectedly reasonable $40 (you know Bandai Namco could've charged whatever it wanted for this). But that may not be the only price you end up paying. Elden Ring Neightreign's release date came with a Steam page, which initially contained the following at the bottom of the game's description:

"Additional DLC—Additional playable characters and bosses."

That line has now been removed, but seems a fairly straightforward slip-up and confirmation that there will be more Elden Ring Neightreign to come.

I'm probably going to sound a bit fanboy here, but this can only be good news. FromSoftware's track record with DLC and expansions is frankly outstanding, and over time the studio has only become more ambitious: My personal favourite remains Bloodborne's The Old Hunters, but there's no denying that Elden Ring's own Shadow of the Erdtree was truly epic in scope and a fitting capstone on a magnificent game.

Admittedly this description makes Nightreign's future DLC sound much smaller in scope than that, and no doubt it will be, but in a game constructed around character builds and boss fights, don't expect FromSoftware to just be content knocking out the usual, but using the DLC to invert and change-up the vanilla experience.

Elden Ring Nightreign arrives on May 30, and we already know a lot about it. "Nightreign will be an interesting litmus test of why people come to Souls games," reckons Morgan. "If it's all about swinging big swords and dodge-rolling away from impossibly hard bosses, Nightreign is gonna be a feast. But if it's From's quieter moments that stick with you—exchanges with weird NPCs, taking careful steps deeper into a vast fortress, contemplating The Lands Between's cryptic questlines—well, Nightreign ain't got time for any of that."

It's still very much borne of the ever-churning rumour mill, of course, but from X user HKEPC (via VideoCardz) we have a screenshot of GPU-Z showing a 'Navi 48' GPU, this being codename for the upcoming RX 9070 XT. And the specs? Well, they're in-line with what we expected—4,096 shader cores, 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, and a 256-memory bus—but it's nice to actually see these specs on paper– err, I mean, on-screen.

HKEPC also shared a screenshot of a supposed RX 9070 XT achieving a whopping 211.7 fps in the Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark, albeit at 1080p and with frame gene enabled. But hey, as I discovered in my own testing of this benchmark for our Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark round-up, the game is pretty brutal on the ol' GPU.

For reference on the core front, by the way, the RX 7800 XT has 3,840 and the RX 7900 XT has 5,376. Just as previous plausible leaks had it, then: the 9070 XT sitting between the two in core/CU count. Again corroborating these previous leaks, we're (supposedly) looking at a higher boost clock for the RX 9070 XT—in this case, even higher than previously thought at 3,100 MHz, presumably due to a particularly aggressive factory overclock.

All very exciting stuff, and we shouldn't have too long to wait for it, either, given Dr. Lisa Su has confirmed the GPU is officially arriving in early March. It might even beat the RTX 5070 to market given that it's rumoured to be delayed until March now, too. Maybe this will make up for AMD's botched CES appearance wherein they showed our eager eyes practically nada of the GPUs.

Then again, Nvidia's just announced a February 20 launch date for the RTX 5070 Ti, so the RX 9070 XT will have that card to go up against. But even then-again-er, Nvidia's recent RTX 50-series launches haven't exactly given us much hope for, y'know, actual stock on shelves.

Maybe that's where AMD can find an advantage: by actually having GPUs available to buy. If it can pull that off while pumping out this kind of Monster Hunter Wilds performance with 16 GB of high-bandwidth memory, preferably for cheap, I'll be one happy chappy. We'll see.

"Welcome Freja, the newest addition to the Overwatch 2 roster," a Blizzard blog post says. "A former search and rescue operative turned bounty hunter, Freja brings a new dynamic to the game with her explosive crossbow and unique abilities. You can expect a challenging and rewarding experience, as she requires precision and a steady aim to master."

Freja's Revdraw Crossbow lets you unload a flurry of rapid-fire bolts in quick succession and also aims one high-speed explosive bold that deals immediate and secondary damage to hit targets. Both are useful in their own right during a match. The first attack will likely be helpful when trying to deal as much damage as possible into a crowd of enemy players, sniff out invisible Sombra players, or just try to whittle down a tank's health. The second attack is more precise and will likely be helpful when it comes to dealing the final blow or attacking supports sheltered in the backline.

This DPS hero is also fairly mobile. Freja has a Quick Dash ability, which allows her to move in any direction while also simultaneously reloading an explosive bolt attack. You can also use the Updraft ability, which seems to make use of a powerful gust of wind to launch yourself high into the sky. Tricks like this are always helpful when it comes to map traversal, avoiding incoming attacks, or just trying to find a good vantage point where you can pick off heroes on the enemy team.

The final powerful ability that Freja holds is her ultimate, Bola Shot. This shoots out an explosive Bola Shot, wrapping enemies up and pulling in the rest of their teammates. It may not be very lethal on its own, but this is the kind of ultimate that'll prove very useful in combos. It's always dangerous anytime you can pull a bunch of enemy players into one spot—we've seen it with Zarya's ultimate or Orisa's old gravitational energy orb. These tend to be followed by ultimates with a small area of effect but which also deal a high amount of damage, like Hanzo's ultimate.

You'll be able to try her kit out for yourself later on in Season 15 during a free trial weekend, but the specifics of when that'll happen will be announced at a later date.

There's also another hero, codenamed Aqua, who is being teased right now. "Aqua is a Chinese hero, wielding water-based abilities that can manipulate the battlefield with an innovative playstyle," the blog post says. We won't see more of this character until Season 18. But for now, learning about Freja and how to best use her kit is more than enough to get on with.

After 28 years, pioneering MMO Tibia will finally have a fifth playable character class. Joining the previous vocations of Knight, Sorcerer, Druid, and Paladin is the Monk, who will become the second melee character type in all of Tibia. It's a pretty wild changeup for a game that launched in 1997 and has had the same four classes ever since—with no hints that the developers ever saw a fifth class as a good option.

"This is bigger than GTA 6," says the top comment on the Reddit post linking the announcement. "I'm flabbergasted," says another. "Hell is freezing," a third.

The Monk will be a damage dealer, as are all Tibia classes, but will have secondary roles as a Tank and Healer. The Monk will be able to build up Harmony by using their attack spells, then consume it to boost their power or use potent healing and damage abilities. The Monk will also have an interesting mechanic—Serene—which boosts their power when not adjacent to an ally and with fewer than five monsters adjacent. It'll solidify their role as a secondary tank who doesn't group up tons of monsters to attack, but separates and defeats small groups of foes.

The Monk will start external playtesting among the Tibia community starting on February 25, and is scheduled for official launch in the second quarter of this year. "Of course, there will be a lot of content available for this vocation right from the start. Powerful spells, mighty robes, devastating weapons and enchanting realms," said CipSoft.

"All in all, we see the addition of a new vocation as an opportunity to rekindle the sense of discovery that was always part of Tibia. A chance to learn the intricacies of a new vocation, experiment with new strategies, and adapt to new team compositions," said Tibia developer Niadus, who led the creation of the Monk.

You can read the full announcement, and try out Tibia for free, on Tibia's website.

You may remember Tibia from its previous big public events—like that time that it got sound effects after all those years. Or its mysterious door that would only open for someone who got all the way to level 999.

The main litmus test is ray tracing, as games today (*cough* Indiana Jones and the Great Circle *cough*) are moving towards a 'ray tracing by default' approach, ie, where you can't play the game at all without ray tracing. On this front, technology director Pierre F gives us plenty of hope:

"If your GPU does not support hardware raytracing, such as pre-RTX GPUs, we have developed our own solution to allow competent, yet older, GPUs to run Assassin's Creed Shadows. The game will use a proprietary software-based raytracing approach developed specifically for that."

Software ray tracing isn't exactly new. Lumen, in Unreal Engine 5, for example, is a software-based ray tracing and global illumination solution. But if this Assassin's Creed Shadows solution is proprietary and "designed specifically" for pre-RTX GPUs, there's reason to be hopeful it'll perform quite well even on older hardware—hopefully better than Lumen does. Ubisoft's got at least some experience with this, as its other big engine, Snowdrop, has been using software RT for a while (in Pandora and Outlaws, for example).

The technology director says: "We made efforts to support pre-RTX GPU (GTX 1070, GTX 1080TI and equivalent) that are still competent today but lack hardware level raytracing capabilities. To further highlight our commitment to this direction, we've developed a proprietary software raytraced GI [global illumination] solution to support the new dynamic Hideout."

This is implemented because there is, unfortunately, a definite ray tracing requirement for at least some of the game. This might make us wonder: Okay, what if I can do ray tracing but I don't have a card that can do ray tracing well? Thankfully, the devs are giving the option for a "Selective Raytracing" mode that will only use ray tracing when in the Hideout portion of the game.

"The reason behind this is that the Hideout allows extensive player customization at a level never seen before on Assassin's Creed. Because of that, we cannot use traditional, pre-calculated, global illumination techniques, and therefore need to adopt a real-time approach. In all other gameplay situations, such as in the open world, raytracing will not be used."

So much for ray tracing, but it doesn't stop there. The game's also going to allow us to mix and match our frame gen and upscaling solutions. This means that I (with my RTX 3060 Ti) and others like me should be able to slap on DLSS upscaling alongside FSR frame gen, for instance. Neat.

There are some other peculiar shenanigans going on that might make for decent performance on older hardware, too: "Various upscaling technologies (TAA, DLSS, FSR and XeSS) can be used in conjunction with dynamic resolution scaling to target a given framerate, in which case the game will adapt pre-upscaling resolution to try and reach the desired FPS."

So... a doubly dynamic scaling and upscaling system, then? That seems complicated to balance out but whatever helps, I suppose.

The game also uses the company's "proprietary Micropolygons system" which is "a virtualized geometry system which allows us to render more polygons with more level of details continuity [sic]." Crucially, it features a scalable preset, "from Low to Ultra", which presumably means you'll be able to get quite low-poly with it if you need to.

This wouldn't necessarily be a boon if Pierre F didn't seem so confident that the whole thing should make for a great experience on lower-end hardware. But he does seem confident: "The game will look stunning even on the lowest settings. Everyone will enjoy the experience."

Fingers crossed this all pans out as planned. It's not as if there are a ton of high-end graphics cards lining the shelves right now; older hardware might be what a lot of us have to make do with. I guess we'll find out when the game launches, which should be pretty soon.

In a recent tech Q&A, Pierre F, technology director of Assassin's Creed Shadows, explained that the upcoming game will offer the full cornucopia of frame gen solutions (minus DLSS 4 Multi Frame Gen, it seems). And more than this, you'll be able to mix and match it with your upscaler of choice for quite the non-native buffet.

The tech director says: "DLSS 3.7, FSR 3.1 and XeSS 2 are all supported for both upscaling and frame generation purposes. Our own Temporal AA solution is also available. Note that a mix and match approach is possible. You may select one technology to upscale while using a different technology for frame generation purposes."

Of course, those with an AMD or Intel card won't be able to use Nvidia's DLSS upscaling or frame generation, but the ability to mix and match might be of special benefit to Nvidia RTX 20-series and 30-series gamers. It will mean these GPUs will be able to use FSR frame gen, for instance, in combination with DLSS upscaling.

AMD GPUs would be able to use XeSS upscaling alongside FSR frame gen, but only with a version of that upscaling that's not as good as FSR 3.1. And regarding Intel GPUs, well, they'll probably be sticking with XeSS 2 frame gen, as even Alchemist cards can use it.

Speaking of Intel XeSS 2 frame gen, though, isn't that somewhat of a rare gem? To date, we only have two games that support it: F1 24 and Marvel Rivals. Assassin's Creed Shadows will make a third, and that's thanks to Ubisoft's partnership with Intel for this game.

Pierre F explains: "As part of our partnership with Intel, we had direct and privileged access to XeSS 2 before it was made public, and we worked directly with Intel engineers to provide the best implementation possible." It'll be interesting to see how the blue team's frame gen plays out in more games against the titans of FSR and especially DLSS.

We shouldn't have long to wait to find out. Assassin's Creed Shadows—after a disappointing delay—is set to launch on March 20, 2025. This next iteration in the series is promising dual-protagonist gameplay to satisfy both stealthers and hack-n-slashers alike—plenty for frame gen and upscaling to deal with.

For me, excitement for new hardware is only matched by the existential dread that arises when confronted with a CPU box full of styrofoam packing peanuts that you know is just gonna go straight to landfill. Well, perhaps no longer; as of February 11, new EU regulation came into effect that will see those pesky CPU boxes finally cut down to size (via TechPowerUp).

The European Commission's refreshed Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) seeks a number of aims, though the most pertinent here would be, "Minimising the weight and volume of packaging and avoiding unnecessary packaging." Some are already wondering aloud whether this means those cooler bundles CPU manufacturers are so fond of may soon become a thing of the past, but I'm unsure whether those would fall under the designation of "unnecessary" packaging—surely some people use those bundled coolers, even if most of us rightly slap on a third-party one.

We already have EU regulation to thank for standardised charging ports on your phone, stronger legislation around 'right to repair,' and—with a bit of luck—the avoidance of anything like an AI monopoly in the future. This latest packaging regulation gives manufacturers far and wide an 18-month grace period to get their act together for a hopefully less wasteful, potentially greener future. That means the days of Destiny engram-esque packaging or any of the infamous examples seen in this story are decidedly numbered.

Furthermore, the PPWR aims to both "make all packaging on the EU market recyclable in an economically viable way by 2030," and "decrease the use of virgin materials in packaging and put the sector on track to climate neutrality by 2050." E-waste is something that continues to give me The Fear, so I definitely welcome the European Commission taking aim at wasteful packaging more broadly.

Practically speaking (and less full of existential dread), holding on to the original box can be handy for ensuring delicate tech survives, say, a stressful house move. For this reason, I've been wishing for a long time that hardware boxes were ever so slightly smaller—after all, if the boxes for my anime figures can form a pleasingly compact fort, then why not CPUs?

The Fantastic Love Streamer giveaway takes place today, February 13, from 8-10 am PST/ 11 am - 1 pm EST/ 4-6 pm GMT. To be eligible for the giveaway, you need to join a Quick Match on the Frankfurt server and match with lydiaviolet, ML7support, Necros, or TeamCaptain001. There'll also be another giveaway happening tomorrow at 3-5 am PST/ 6-8 am EST / 11 am - 1 pm GMT with four other streamers on the Tokyo server.

If you do end up matching with one of these streamers, then you'll get The Mister Fantastic and Invisible Woman 60th Wedding Anniversary Bundle. The matching skins are a rather adorable idea for Valentine's Day, and the pair's formal wedding attire does make for a couple of cool skins.

The couple already had some comicbook-accurate skins at the beginning of Season 1. Invisible Woman got the incredibly popular Malice skin, which first appeared in Fantastic Four #280 back in 1961 and saw Sue Storm turn evil after a slew of awful events. Mister Fantastic got The Maker skin, which is from the Ultimates Comics, in 2011, and also sees Reed turn evil after some tragedies, even fighting against his universe's New Avengers.

While the new wedding bundle skins may not be accurate in the same way those skins were, there's still a thread of comics fidelity here. Sue Storm and Reed Richards got married in Annual #3 in 1965, so it really is their 60th wedding anniversary—it seems like the stars aligned for this event.

But there are a couple of rules that players need to follow to get this bundle. First off, no rage quitting. "If you disconnect during a match and do not complete it, you will be considered ineligible for rewards," the blog post says. But if someone else in your match leaves or disconnects before the game is over, you will still be eligible for the rewards. You also don't need to be on the same team as a streamer to qualify for the bundle—you just need to be in the same match as them. So even if you end up getting stomped on by Necros, you'll still, at the very least, get a free bundle.

Yep, Monster Hunter World continues to make bank for Capcom, it seems, as Automaton Media (via IGN Japan) reports that it managed to sell over one million copies between October and December last year. It went up from a reported 27 million copies sold in September, to 28.1 million in Capcom's latest financial results call. Sales of expansion Iceborne weren't far behind, with around an extra 900,000 units shifted in the final quarter of 2024.

I reckon that was definitely helped by Capcom pushing some tidy discounts of the game throughout November and December, bringing the base game down to just over £8 or just under $10. But I also reckon, more broadly, that it's down to the astronomical levels of hype around Wilds that, even as a veteran Monster Hunter fan, I could've never anticipated.

After all, it was the most popular booth at Gamescom by far last August, with 10-hour queues to play taking up a ridiculous amount of space on the showroom floor, disrupting other booths on the first day before Capcom finally had to bring the hammer down and bring the queues to a (still eye-watering) four-hour wait, turning would-be hunters away when the line got too long. It's also currently the most wishlisted game on Steam, beating out some huge-hitters like Hollow Knight: Silksong and Elden Ring Nightrein.

Those last three months also happen to coincide with the first open beta for Monster Hunter Wilds—a chance to play the game that didn't require flights to Germany and slowly shuffling through a queue for half the day. While it was a great chance to play, it was also a nightmare performance for a lot of PC players thanks to some poor optimisations, which also has me wondering if that drove newer players over to World to get a better look of what Monster Hunter is all about.

Now I'm mostly talking about World here, since it's closer to Wilds in its whole shtick, but the more recent Monster Hunter Rise hasn't been performing too badly, either. It sold around 700,000 copies in the same three months, which isn't bad going at all if you ask me.

It's actually really cool to see the Monster Hunter hype train chugging full steam ahead right now. More folk trying one of the coolest action game series out there is never a bad thing, and I hope enough of those new buyers liked World to make the jump over to Wilds later this month. Even if they didn't, I don't think Capcom is fretting too much. Producer Ryozo Tsujimoto said he's "very confident" that the game is going to do well. Judging by all of the above, I believe it.

As soon as I saw I had just one weird yellow to work with after my opening guess I knuckled down, bracing myself for a tough game. This was probably going to take a while, especially as my second row didn't do much better. The third row though… that was… OK it was still mostly wrong, but wrong in all the ways that made the clues I had make sense. A weird win in four? I'll take it.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, February 13

You'll need to think of a popular kind of Latin dance to win today, specifically a slightly slower one that originated in Cuba.  

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is not a double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you're new to the daily Wordle puzzle or you just want a refresher after taking a break, I'll share some quick tips to help you win. There's nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day. 

• A mix of unique consonants and vowels makes for a solid opening word. 
• A tactical second guess should let you narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• There may be a repeat letter in the answer.

You're not up against a timer, so you've got all the time in the world—well, until midnight—to find the winning word. If you're stuck, there's no shame in coming back to the puzzle later in the day and finishing it up when you've cleared your head. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Another day, another win. The answer to the February 13 (1335) Wordle is RUMBA.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Keeping track of the last handful of Wordle answers can help to eliminate current possibilities. It's also handy for inspiring opening words or subsequent guesses if you're short on ideas for the day.

Here are the last 10 Wordle answers:

• February 12: RAPID
• February 11: SCORE
• February 10: GOODY
• February 9: BONUS
• February 8: STEEP
• February 7: SWATH
• February 6: PUPIL
• February 5: PEDAL
• February 4: TOOTH
• February 3: REVUE

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes every day and the aim is to figure out the correct five-letter word by entering guesses and eliminating or confirming individual letters.

Getting off to a good start with a strong word like ARISE—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good tactic. Once you hit Enter, the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune—best known for starring in films like Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, and Yojimbo for director Akira Kurosawa—has been dead for nearly 30 years. But apparently that can't stop him from starring in a new videogame in the year 2026.

Since December Capcom has been teasing the revival of its early 2000s samurai action series Onimusha, and during today's PlayStation State of Play livestream it finally showed a bit of combat and some cutscenes focused on Onimusha: Way of the Sword's protagonist, who happens to be one of Japan's most famous historical figures, the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. And wouldn't you know it—Toshiro Mifune played Musashi in a trilogy of movies released in the 1950s. Capcom apparently decided he was still the man for the job, even 70 years later.

"In Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Musashi is a fierce young samurai who, in a supernatural twist of fate, finds himself wielding an Oni Gauntlet and battling hordes of demonic Genma," Capcom detailed in a press release on Wednesday. And here's the confirmation: "Musashi’s face is modeled after Toshiro Mifune, the late, iconic Japanese movie star who portrayed Musashi in classic samurai films."

The official site offers a bit more color, explaining that Mifune's face was used as the model for Onimusha's Musashi while he's being voiced by actor Kenichiro Thomson. "The protagonist of this game is a fierce young samurai, constantly moving from one bloody and gritty fight to the next. To cement this image of a striking samurai, Capcom has turned to none other than the late, iconic Japanese samurai movie legend Toshiro Mifune to star as the face model for this rendition of Miyamoto Musashi."

After his success as an actor Mifune founded a production company that exists to this day, which presumably controls the use of his likeness. I'd love to know how stingy or eager they are to license out the actor's face. Did Capcom really have to give them the hard sell?

We don't see much of the combat in Onimusha's protagonist trailer, but the swordplay immediately stands out to me as slower-paced and weightier than a lot of action games today, including Capcom's own. Musashi's making some really deliberate swings, here, seemingly with an emphasis on one-on-one duels. I'm not gonna use the word realistic here—at one point Musashi fights a giant demon, and in my favorite moment of the trailer, he leans his full body weight onto his sword to cut a dude clean in half from noggin to nuts. But from this brief peek, I'd say the swordplay steers much closer to Sekiro or perhaps Ghost of Tsushima than, say, a combo-heavy Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry. But I'm trying to deduce a lot from about 30 seconds of footage.

In hindsight, the signs that Mifune would serve as the likeness for this Onimusha reboot were all there. Capcom pulled this very trick with an anime adaptation of Onimusha released in 2023 starring Musashi. Props to Redditor Born_Comfort_6258 for totally calling it back in December.