I don’t envy the folks at Arrowhead charged with balancing Helldivers 2 guns fans have grown attached to. Arrowhead has rolled out a handful of sweeping balance patches in the game’s first few months, all of which I believe made the game better by both buffing guns with untapped potential and, less often, nerfing a weapon that’s dominant to the point of being boring.

But there’s an argument to be made that balancing shouldn’t be taken so seriously in a purely PvE shooter like Helldivers 2, and that it’s ok if one gun is dealing more damage than the rest. Replying to a player on Twitter who said recent patches have made the game “unplayable,” Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt conceded that he’s not satisfied with his studio’s current balancing approach.

“Hey, yeah I think we’ve g…

If there’s one thing Baldur’s Gate 3 players know, it’s that Sacred Flame, Shadowheart’s starting offensive cantrip, almost never actually lands. Players have been trying to figure out the arcane maths behind this most accursed of spells which, by all accounts, should probably hit some of the time—but it remains a mystery.

This morning, however, I stumbled upon a thread on the game’s subreddit that appears to have found the culprit, decrying Sacred Flame’s lack of accuracy as a mirage. The conclusions drawn don’t appear to be exactly right, but in investigating this myself, I’ve confirmed that Baldur’s Gate 3’s spell tooltips are indeed bugged—and may have even been this way for months.

But first, if you’re unfamiliar with tabletop systems, you’…

After powering through Nightdive’s superb System Shock Remake, former Looking Glass developer Marc LeBlanc has returned to Twitch and YouTube to stream The Black Parade, a lauded mod that presents an interquel between the classic Looking Glass stealth games, Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age.

Thief modding is one of those little universes all its own, comparable to other retro treasure troves like the Doom and Quake scenes. Even still, the recent 10-level campaign The Black Parade is in a league of its own, boasting utterly huge levels, new voice acting and gadgets, as well as fresh systemic interactions like house servants who will clean up your sound-dampening moss arrow surfaces or relight torches you’ve extinguished. YouTube reviewer MandaloreGaming argues it …

After years of waiting, Rockstar says it’s finally going to bring the PC version of Grand Theft Auto Online to parity with the “enhanced” edition that’s been available for consoles for the past two years.

GTA Online came to Xbox Series X-S and PlayStation 5 in March 2022 with a variety of “technical and graphical improvements.” That version of the game has received several exclusive upgrades since, including ray tracing and the GTA+ subscription service, which offers players a range of monthly cash and content drops—all of it unavailable on PC. As we said last year, it felt like PC players were being left in the dust because… well, we were.

The first real sign that PC players might finally be brought up to speed came to light in September when Rocksta…

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Wired headsets can feel a little old-fashioned these days. After all, with so many great wireless headset options available, tying yourself to your machine with a cable seems like quite the restriction. Plus, it limits your options as to what role in your life it can provide—plenty of great wireless headsets support Bluetooth as well as RF 2.4 GHz connections, making them perfect for travel, whereas many modern phones don’t have 3.5 mm audio out ports anymore.

Still, when it comes to ultimate sound quality, many point to wired headsets as delivering the goods better than their wireless counterparts. That means any wired gaming headset is going to have one main purpose—delivering great audio while you’re sitting in front of your PC. And if you’re askin…

If there’s one thing that might hold you back from your next headset purchase being cable-free, then it’s likely to be the battery life. While a good wireless gaming headset unchains you from your desk, it does mean keeping an eye on the battery indicator and rummaging around for charging cables on occasion.

Well, rejoice, because our best wireless gaming headset has a truly monstrous 300-hour battery life, meaning those visits to the wall plug will be much less frequent. I’ve found the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless for $139 at Amazon, and at that price, it’s an even more obvious pick for cable-free gaming audio.

It’s not just that battery life worth shouting about, either. With a set of 50mm dynamic drivers, the Cloud Alpha Wireless offers a powerful, rich, and well-balance…

Baldur’s Gate 3 has choices—oodles of ’em. Choices that Larian’s accounted for, for the most part. In my recent playthrough, instead of taking a certain character to a certain body for a story quest, I picked up the corpse and dumped it back in camp like a cat bringing their owner a dead bird. The dialogue still worked (though I had to have them in my party) besides one or two out-of-context lines. 

However, one player has found an edge-case scenario that the game doesn’t account for at all, and it’s honestly pretty reasonable when you break it down. Spoilers for Act 1 and Gale’s storyline to follow, as well as a minor Act 3 spoiler. 

As outlined by ThePawn08 on the game’s subreddit, reverse-pickpock…

If you’ve been settling into the first few hours of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, you might’ve responded in the same way I did—with a reflexive grimace every other line. Now that I’ve sunk close to 50 hours into the game, I’m here to tell you to keep going. The story does get better. Kinda.

I still think Dragon Age: The Veilguard misses the mark in a lot of ways, and the problems of its opening hours are still present in the rest of the game. But there are things to like here. Its characters sometimes have charming moments, it does have some interesting lore drops, and I have, at times, found myself genuinely endeared to its cast. I still think we’re leagues below Dragon Age: Origins in character writing (and still measurably lower on the ladder than Inquisition), but there a…

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Black Friday is now only a month away and that means you’re likely to see gaming keyboard and mouse deals increase in number. After all, November now just seems to be a permanent sales month for all tech retailers. We didn’t say many real bargains in Amazon’s October Prime Day event, so hopefully that means retailers have been holding bac…

AMD’s Threadripper Pro 7000-series CPUs are launching very soon. While they might not seem all that relevant to gamers—at least the high core count options anyway—I am very much an advocate for proper high-end desktop (HEDT) platforms and would love to see consumer level Threadripper make a return.

According to Wccftech, AMD plans to unveil Threadripper Pro CPUs on October 19th. These chips will be based on the Zen 4 architecture led by the range-topping 7995WX with 96 cores and 192 threads. Add to that 384MB of L3 cache and you’re looking at an absolute monster of a chip. Of course such a chip isn’t particularly relevant for gamers when most game engines struggle to make use of today’s 16-core AMD CPUs. 

Even the 64-core 7985WX and and 32-core 7975WX chips …

The arc of Dwarf Fortress is long, but it bends towards, well, not having arcs. In a chat with PC Gamer at GDC, Dwarf Fortress creators Tarn and Zach Adams spoke a little about their approach to the game’s meatiest patches in a post-premium edition world. Long story short? More bite-sized updates at a faster tempo. The Big Wait is dead.

Tarn said Dwarf Fortress’ model for updates at this point won’t be about “[running] off for 26 months, [seeing] what I can get done.” With new artists helping out for the game’s sound and audio and partners at Kitfox to help with marketing the game, Tarn’s going for something a bit “more orderly.” 

After all, Tarn’s previous approach of absconding for months to work on major updates—usually called arcs, even after the game’s develo…