This week brought our first serious look at Shadow of the Erdtree, the major Elden Ring expansion set for release in June, and it certainly looks like FromSoftware is pushing the boat out. FromSoftware CEO and game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has gone on the interview circuit to accompany the trailer and, as well as being maddeningly vague about Bloodborne and re-claiming Dark Souls 2, has been musing on the secrets of Elden Ring’s appeal. 

It turns out first of all that Miyazaki prefers the term “Souls-ish” to Soulslike, though that seems unlikely to stick, and in an interview with IGN went into some detail about FromSoft’s principles for building an open world without all the hand-holding typical of the genre.

“What I want to stress is that we didn’t set o…

If the Nier series does one thing exceptionally well, it’s getting its fanbase to meticulously observe every minute detail for hidden secrets. That’s still very much the case for Nier Automata Ver1.1a, the new anime adaptation that hit Crunchyroll earlier this month. In typical Yoko Taro fashion, there are already strange clues and cryptic messages buried within its first two episodes and of course, fans are already at work deciphering them.

As spotted by Kotaku, secret and seemingly nonsense messages have been hidden within the episodes’ eyecatches. If you’ve ever seen an episode of anime you’ll be familiar with an eyecatch—small transitional images or clips that act as a small intermission between the episode. Nier Automata Ver1.1a’s eyecatches are seemingly very basic at …

Todd Howard recently shared his favorite moment from Amazon’s hit Fallout television series, and if you’ve been keeping up with his work over the years it’ll come as absolutely no surprise: It’s the transition from the safety of the Vault to the dangers of the wide open world.

“I still love the moment that Lucy comes out of the vault,” Howard says in a new Q&A video. “I think that captures so much. It’s an earned moment, and visually a really, really beautiful one.”

Rolling back the massive vault door and walking out into the sunlight has been an essential part of the Fallout experience going all the way back to the very first game—it’s as iconic as Ron Perlman saying “war never changes” (although Walton Goggins got to say it for the show.) But for Howard it’s an e…

It’s best if you imagine Twitch’s latest rules update being read by a downtrodden, barely present spokesperson. 

“Content on Twitch is always evolving,” they mutter, unable to recall how many versions of that statement they’ve composed before. “And we want to make sure our rules work as intended and keep up with emerging behaviors.” 

The behavior that emerged this time is streaming games on butts. That is, using one’s posterior like a green screen, overlaying a gameplay feed on it. (Or just pointing a camera at your butt.)

If streaming Fortnite on your butt or watching other people stream Fortnite on their butts is something you enjoy, you’d better get your butt streaming in soon, because this is one emergent behavior Twitch isn’t going to let continue. On Fr…

Most Warcraft fans expected an expansion announcement for the massively multiplayer RPG at last weekend’s BlizzCon 2023. But to hear Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas tell it, Blizzard Entertainment’s bold decision to debut the next three expansions at once made even its own leaders nervous.

“There were definitely a few like, wait, we’re really showing all the logos? We’re going to tell them all of that? What do you mean, Chris?” said Hazzikostas, referring to executive creative director Chris Metzen’s opening-ceremony debut of the expansions, which are expected to fully roll out by 2030. “You’re going to say where it’s going to be?”

The three expansions will be part of a single story arc, The Worldsoul Saga, which is expected to tie …

The Diablo 4 preorder beta is now underway, and as you might have expected, it’s not going perfectly smoothly. The biggest and most obvious issue for people trying to get into the beta is lengthy queue times: I’m currently staring at an “87 minutes left” message as I try to get in on the action.

Some of us at PC Gamer are looking at even longer wait times:

An hour into the beta, Blizzard has reported “an issue affecting our authentication servers,” which it said could result in slow or failed login attempts. That might sound familiar: The dreaded Error 37 that plagued the launch of Diablo 3 back in 2012, was also an authentication server problem. It’s the one thing about Diablo that genuinely scares us. 

Some things, it seems, never change.

Some people who w…