Final Fantasy 7 is a remarkable game for many reasons, not the least of which is the game’s big theme of environmental destruction. It uses the wibbly-wobbly Lifestream conceit sure, but from that rollicking opening sequence this is the story of eco-warriors taking on the evil and planet-destroying megacorporation Shinra. I’m not sure that Final Fantasy 7’s original developers could have imagined that, 26 years after release, the game’s parent company would be the one shilling energy-wasting junk off its back.

The irony-free zone that is Square Enix has announced a set of Final Fantasy 7 trading cards that incorporate NFTs (thanks, VGC). The collection of 207 cards is called Final Fantasy VII Anniversary Art Museum: Digital Card Plus, and are being sold in packs of six phys…

One fun side effect of every live-service FPS updating on similar seasonal schedules is that a few times a year they all decide to go big at the same time. The last big convergence of shooters happened in March, but October is poised to make March look like hot garbage.

No matter what form of first-person shooting you’re into—battle royales, extraction shooters, hero shooters, 5v5 tactical—there’s a reason to give all your favorite games a reinstall right now, and few other notable events ahead in November. My SSD is screaming at me to calm down, but my twitchy mouse hand says “more.”

Here’s every big FPS update happening right now or on the horizon, starting with a game that’s pulling out all the stops to celebrate Halloween.

“The Haunting” in Call of Dut…

In a decade of tuning into Awesome Games Done Quick, I’ve seen runners speed through gaming history while blindfolded, with hands tied behind their backs, and even two runners sharing a single controller, but I’ve never seen what happened today at AGDQ 2024: a dog and his owner teamed up to speedrun an NES classic live, and they smashed it.

The dog is an adorable Shiba Inu named Peanut Butter, and his owner is speedrunner JSR. Together, the pair ran Gyromite (in Game B mode), a 1985 Nintendo platformer that launched with the NES, using a custom-made dog-friendly controller with large colored buttons. Amazingly, Peanut Butter got it done in 26 minutes and 24 seconds, with only a single game over and minimal breaks for belly scratches.

While JSR guided Peanut Butter with hand …

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor might have launched with significant performance issues, but that hasn’t stopped the game proving enormously popular with fans of Star Wars and big-budget action adventures alike. To give you some sense of how far across the galaxy the game has reached, developer EA has released a bunch of stats detailing players’ adventures on Koboh and beyond.

With an infographic, the EA Star Wars Twitter account revealed that players have been defeated by the game’s Rancor over nine million times. This might imply they haven’t watched Return of the Jedi enough, but in fairness, Cal Kestis doesn’t have a handy metal door to drop on the creature’s neck. Unsurprisingly, the Rancor is a significantly better fighter than Rick the Door Technician, although Jedi Survivor’s jok…

It appears that, as first rumored in November, TimeSplitters studio Free Radical Design has been closed. The studio’s website has been scrubbed and now bears a simple message saying “404 Company not found :(,” while multiple employees have said that today was their last day.

Free Radical was originally founded in 1999 by ex-Rare developers, the creators of GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark. Free Radical found success with its quirky shooter series TimeSplitters, which debuted in 2000 as a PlayStation 2 launch title, with further sequels in 2002 and 2005. Although it never appeared on PC, TimeSplitters is held up as an underrated shooter of that era, with a funny campaign, arcadey shooting built on its GoldenEye pedigree, and a decent little map editor, for a PS2 game.

Free Radi…

Part of me would love a VR headset, but the rest of me lives in a flat, which means I’m usually thankful that most VR game trailers don’t do much for me. Besides Half-Life: Alyx and Superhot, there aren’t many games that have me wishing I had an Index or Quest.

Except now they’re apparently making some sort of Assassin’s Creed game for your pint-size holodecks, and it actually looks pretty cool so long as you manage not to throw up.

Assassin’s Creed Nexus was announced back in June for the Meta Quest Pro, 2, and 3, but it’s a recent gameplay trailer (above) that came out ahead of the game’s November 16 release that’s piqued my curiosity. Featuring the game’s creative director David Votypka walking you through the various ways Ubisoft has tried to adapt AC’s stab-happy gamepl…

Bethesda’s Todd Howard and Xbox head Phil Spencer have been on the interview circuit for the launch of Starfield, as part of which the pair granted an interview to Bloomberg Technology. While the questions have a more general business focus and veer into things like Game Pass and the Elder Scrolls 6 (no new info), the show starts with Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow rather starkly putting an audience question to Howard: “why did you not optimise this game for PC?”

“Uh… we did,” says Howard, as Phil Spencer fails to suppress a chuckle. “It’s running great. It is a next gen PC game, we really do push the technology, so you may need to upgrade your PC for this game, but it’s got a lot of great stuff going on in it and the fans are responding awesome.”

Starfield is, of course, a ve…

Valve seems to be gearing up to release its first new game in four years, and we already know way too much about it: We’ve seen dozens of Deadlock’s characters and their full movesets on YouTube, we can poke around in its file directories, it has a pretty popular subreddit, and, as reported by VG247, it hit 17,000 concurrent players this weekend, rising to over 18,000 today. Not bad for a game that hasn’t even been announced yet.

You can observe the fluctuations of Deadlock’s crypto-player base over on SteamDB. According to the utility’s creator, Pavel Djundik, a Steam key submission months ago made the details of Deadlock’s playtest available for public view, and Valve took no action to change that. It certainly looks like the studio has been ramping up the size of Deadlock’s pla…

In one of this month’s more unexpected reveals, The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt will be getting its own fully-fledged modding tools. They’ll arrive sometime in 2024, according to the game’s official Twitter account. 

This is wild (hunt) for a couple of reasons. First off, The Witcher 3 isn’t exactly a new game—it’s eight years old, in fact. I know, I don’t like that either. It’s had a big next-gen facelift recently, sure, but it’s pretty late in the game to provide full modding support.

Second, the game already has a pretty active modding community. We even have a list of the best mods for it. It’s not like there haven’t been fully-fledged quest mods, too, like this one that ties up Blood and Wine. You can even, as my fellow PC Gamer writer Joshua Wolens points out, …