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. 

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

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

Map quest

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

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

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

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

Need a lift?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Strange lands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hardcore to the mega

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

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

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

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

James "Lycerius" Moore spent nearly a decade playing one game of Civilization 2 off and on, pushing it as far into the future as he could. In a 2012 Reddit post, he described the world that resulted as "a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation."

Only three civs were still standing in 3991 AD—the Celts (Lycerius' civ), Vikings, and Americans—and they were in constant conflict over an earth that could barely support human life.

"The ice caps have melted over 20 times (somehow) due primarily to the many nuclear wars," Lycerius wrote. "As a result, every inch of land in the world that isn't a mountain is inundated swamp land, useless to farming. Most of which is irradiated anyway."

Attempts to cooperate with the other nations were futile.

"The three remaining nations have been locked in an eternal death struggle for almost 2,000 years," said Lycerius. "Peace seems to be impossible. Every time a cease fire is signed, the Vikings will surprise attack me or the Americans the very next turn, often with nuclear weapons. Even when the UN forces a peace treaty."

You can still read Lycerius's original Reddit post about the The Eternal War, which spawned a whole subreddit of its own where players loaded his save and attempted to either win the war or negotiate peace, as if it were a chess puzzle. Someone managed to defeat the other civs in 58 in-game years.

In 2012, we published an interview with Lycerius in which he discussed his sudden fame (the story got quite a bit of mainstream attention) and the question of whether Civ 2's projection of the future might have been prescient.

"I think people in general have this morbid curiosity about the world and where it's going, and I think they saw this and just kind of latched on," he said. "You know, it's by no means an accurate simulation of world affairs or anything like that, it's just a game roughly based on such things, but I think it really captured a lot of people's imaginations."

Over a decade later, I'm wondering if maybe Civ 2 was more accurate than we knew.

Meanwhile, Civilization 7 has launched to mostly positive reviews from critics—we said it was good, but not as good as the last two games, in our Civilization 7 review—and "Mixed" reviews from Steam users. I like it, but now that I'm thinking about Civ 2 again, I'm pining a little for the feeling of those older games.

Civ 7 feels more positive overall about humanity's agricultural and industrial revolutions—it omits the effects of climate change, for instance, something I hope is added in an expansion as it was in Civ 6's Gathering Storm. And though it was a little clunky from a political theory perspective, I like that your citizens in Civ 2 could revolt and temporarily replace your government with anarchy, and that corruption and waste were simulated.

If you want to play Civ 2, it's not too hard to find a copy online, but it's not available for sale digitally anywhere. You can still get Civ 3 on Steam and GOG, though. I don't know whether it'd be a fruitful pursuit for Firaxis, or if any copyright snarls would block it, but I'd sure love a lightly remastered collection of Civs 1-4 someday.

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!'"

Fishing rears its ugly head in all sorts of games, but it's become a plague for me personally now that it's stock standard for all of the many cozy game derivatives of Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon. If we were to rebrand the whole lot as "4F games," it would be a critical member: farming, foraging, fishing, and friendship. But one of those things is not like the others.

Fishing, uniquely among activities in the farmlife sim umbrella, forces me to stop playing the game. In a genre where time is the ultimate resource, fishing makes me waste it. Each day of Stardew Valley involves a lengthy checklist that I can never quite complete. I need to water crops, chop trees, say hello to the villagers, and remember to sell my goods, hopefully sliding into bed just before 2 am. But if I want any chance of completing the community center bundle to unlock my greenhouse before the first winter I need to spend time fishing, too.

But time fishing is spent, well, just fishing—and looking down at my phone while I wait to hook something. Every minute my bobber is in the water I feel antsy, like I should be doing ten other more important things. I don't resent it so much on rainy days when my crops get watered for free, but on a sunny summer afternoon I can't help watching the day tick away, imagining all the trees I could be cutting or friendship I could be earning if I weren't stuck with my feet planted at the edge of the river waiting to catch another pile of trash.

When that happens—catching things I don't even want—it only adds insult to injury. I plant carrot seeds and get carrots. I buy cows and get milk. I cast my fishing line and I get… who the hell knows what? In most farmlife games you're meant to learn which fish spawn in different waters and conditions like catching salmon in the river only during the autumn. Even if you know your stuff though, you could just go home with a lot of seaweed and smallmouth bass instead.

It's realistic, I'll give it that. I don't even think I would want fishing to be more guaranteed to give me what I'm angling for. It sure does raise my blood pressure when I waste a whole afternoon without catching that one thing I still need to add to the community center, though.

Fishing continues to fail at hooking me because the pool of fishing minigames itself has stagnated. The most dominant style is Stardew derivative: press a button repeatedly to balance your fishing bar over the top of a moving fish. The slightly less popular stamina-based fishing minigame asks you to pull on your rod to exhaust a fish from fighting, though not so much you snap your line, and then reel it in while it rests. Others don't actually involve a minigame at all and you just need to press a particular button on cue when a fish bites your hook. I still don't know if I'm grateful to that style for reducing the demands fishing makes on me or if I resent it for making fishing feel even less engaging.

There are a few standouts among fishing minigames in the farmlife space. I do enjoy how Roots of Pacha turns fishing into a sort of stealth game where I'm chasing a fish with my bobber and trying not to alert it. The Garden Path also has a novel fish concept that involves whistling a tune and trying to navigate to the right pitch on a grid while you fish.

Fishing turns up in other genres, too, but even without the pressure of a life simulation's daily clock I just find myself checking out bored. Survival crafting games like Valheim include fishing, as do some MMOs like Final Fantasy 14. I can almost get behind fishing in an MMO where I already enjoy a bit of lounging in town chatting with friends. In that case, though, I don't really need the fishing as a watercooler activity excuse. Heck, fishing is even in some of the Yakuza games. I wouldn't know if it's any good though—I refuse to try it.

I accept that fishing is just a non-negotiable part of one of my favorite genres. It's a popular minigame, including with some of my PC Gamer colleagues, who were scandalized to discover my anti-fishing stance. But I'm not afraid to say it anymore: Fishing is the worst part of any game it's in. Except maybe fishing games, but even then it's borderline.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Background checks

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

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

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

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

Steal everything

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

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

Check merchants

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

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

Find the totem fragments

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

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

Enchant weapons!

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

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

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

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

Should you accept or reject the Voice’s power?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should you free or leave Ilora?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Captain Henqua’s Spoils treasure map location

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

To reach this location:

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

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

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

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."

"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eora mission

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doom infernal

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immersive simple

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

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

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

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

Systems shock

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

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

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

And if you weren't able to hop in for that first open beta test for the weapon pendant reward, fear not. Participating in the second open beta, when it unlocks, nets you both sets of rewards. Here's the full list of everything you can get.

All Monster Hunter Wilds beta rewards

• Felyne weapon pendant (OBT 1 reward)
• Raw Meat x 10
• Shock Trap x 3
• Pitfall Trap x 3
• Tranq Bomb x 10
• Large Barrel Bomb x 3
• Armor Sphere x 5
• Flash Pod x 10
• Large Dung Pod x 10

Those are some damn good rewards, if you ask me. For starters, you'll be able to capture monsters right off the bat thanks to the traps and tranq bombs—capturing is generally always the better option, though some hunts require you to kill and some materials have a higher chance of dropping from carving—and even give yourself a nice defence boost thanks to the armor spheres.

How to obtain the beta rewards

Thankfully, nabbing the rewards doesn't require you to do any actual hunting. All you need to do is get through the character creator so that the beta can create your character data, which can then be carried over to the full game if you want.

You'll also need to make sure that you're doing this on whatever platform you want to play the full game on. Since you're here, I presume that's PC, but Monster Hunter Wilds doesn't have cross-save so you won't be able to play the beta on PS5 and then claim the rewards on PC later or vice versa.

You can only receive each reward once—so if you've played all three betas, you'll only get the rewards listed above. No duplicates unfortunately!

The second Monster Hunter Wilds OBT 2 begins on February 13 at 7pm PT / 10pm ET / February 14 at 3am GMT and runs until February 17 at 6:59pm PT / 9:59pm ET / February 18 at 2:59am GMT.

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.

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

Avowed advanced access unlock time

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

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

Avowed early access launch times

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

Avowed full launch release date

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

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

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

Can you preload Avowed on PC?

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

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.