"They responded only to the press": Wizards of the Coast miss deadline for recognising Magic: The Gathering Arena union

Wizards of the Coast have missed a deadline for voluntarily recognising the new Magic: The Gathering Arena developer union, according to the latter's organisers. WOTC bosses have so far replied only to press enquiries, the union workers claim, but they're confident nonetheless that recognition is "inevitable".

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Please Rockstar and Take-Two, push GTA 6's price up to $80 for the good of "the entire industry", Bank of America beg

Come on, you know you want to. This is what those who're keen to play GTA 6 on PC around the same time it releases on console have been saying to Rockstar and Take-Two for years. It's also now what the Bank of America are saying to the publisher's boss Strauss Zelnick, as they try to convince him that putting the game's price up to $80 would be good not only for the GTA makers, but the industry as a whole. As of right now, Zelnick seems totally unfussed by the former and might be considering the latter.

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Choose between Buddhist Star Trek, rad vinyl music, and forest fire deathgames in this week's PC releases

How dare you condemn me without knowing the facts! SHUT UP – I'm having a rhetorical conversation with myself. True, there was no new PC game round-up post yesterday, which might be offered as evidence that somebody forgot to write one, but you have no proof, no proof whatsoever that this wholly speculative 'forgetful RPS editor' was me. Also true: I've written 99% of the previous round-ups, but this guarantees nothing, for as David Hume reminds us in A Treatise of Human Nature, our minds are ill-equipped to identify relationships between past and future experience; all we have is the appearance of events following each other.

As such, the list of PC games below is but a sputtering of alienated atoms across the endless instant of ineffability. My memory informs me that PC games were released last week, and there appear to be more being released this week, but to argue for some kind of causal 'trend' would be buffoonish - and you, my dear friend, are no buffoon, or you wouldn't be even now writing a comment about why my reading of Humean skepticism is pretentious and incorrect. Onward!

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"We want to ensure gamers are part of those conversations": Stop Killing Games launch player advocacy group to lobby the UK government

The Stop Killing Games campaign announced plans to set up some non-governmental organisations earlier this year, with the aim of ensuring their work goes beyond a current push to prevent online games being rendered unplayable when publishers shut down their servers. One of these regional advocacy groups has now launched in the UK, going by the name Gamers’ Voice.

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Artius: Pure Imagination is Sonic the Hedgehog for art students in a post-AI world

A thing that kind of got lost somewhere along the way in the Sonic the Hedgehog series is its themes of environmentalism. The games just kind of became about doing Cool Things or kissing human women, all of which I approve to be clear in as earnest a way as I can come across. Thematically, some of the more recent games can be a bit lacking, so it's nice to see a game like Artius: Pure Imagination take a stance on something. That something being, quite simply, making art yourself is good, actually.

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Space Hauler is a full scale space flight sim set around Saturn where every single button in your ship is functional

I do love a bit of space exploration in games, there's something quite beautiful about the infinite openness, alongside having a terrifying primal fear quality. The peacefulness is often the important thing for me though, and the upcoming cargo delivery sim Space Hauler looks like it will, uh, deliver on that front.

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"It meant we got the design right": Resident Evil Requiem's producer on the DLSS5 Grace Ashcroft debacle

Back in March, Nvidia revealed unto the world DLSS5, the next version of its upscaling and frame generation tech. It was ugly as sin, turning Resident Evil Requiem's Grace Ashcroft into, in the words of our own James, yassified Instagram models. The response from developers and onlookers alike was overwhelmingly negative, but of course Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang didn't see it that way (he's still wrong, by the way). Yet amongst the mess is a glass half full outlook from Requiem's producer, Masato Kumzawa.

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Unlike Destiny 2, Marathon's creative director says you'll "always be able to uncover the mysteries of Tau Ceti's past"

Once upon a time, Bungie were quite highly regarded for their storytelling finesse in the way that Destiny unfolded across many years. Aside from the general discontent in Bungie's current approach to Destiny's narrative, there's also been quite a big stain upon the series for a while, which is the fact that a huge portion of the story can't even be played any more due to having been vaulted. With Marathon, Bungie seem to want to do things a bit differently.

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Crimson Desert's latest patch will help with your post-game buff build boredom through boss fight do-overs and more

A slightly strange aspect of Crimson Desert thus far has been that the more you get through it, the more enemies you beat, and the less enemies you actually have to fight. It's been a contentious point for some who want to test out their buff boy end-game builds and only have hot air to slice at. All is not lost, however! As the latest update for the RPG has introduced some handy features that will let you experiment with these builds.

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Wolfenstein meets Metroidvania in Wolfhound, an 8-bit ode to yesteryear with zombies and Nazi mechs

Wolfhound is a game that I've kept my eyes on for quite some time, listing it on both our 2025 and 2026 most anticipated lists. While an exact release date for this retro-inspired indie is still forthcoming, indications hint that it may arrive at the tail end of this year, and a build that I've recently played provided more reasons to be excited.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for walking past a minivan full of Toy Story merchandise with purple, green and white livery and knowing, knowing in your marrow that the owner has named it "Bus Lightyear". These are uncertain times, but any universe capable of materialising the concept of "Bus Lightyear" can't be entirely beyond redemption. Anyway, here's some stuff I've read this week.

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I tested the MSI Cyborg 14 gaming laptop by carrying it for 105 miles through the mountains of Wales

A little while ago our deputy editor James 'RAM-bo' Archer said he wanted us all to get more involved with hardware criticism, because we all appear to think that videogames are powered by telluric currents and swearing. He offered me specifically the chance to write about a laptop - the relatively affordable (I stress, "relatively") MSI Cyborg 14, loaned to RPS for a few weeks by Swipe Right PR.

It was a grievous imposition, dealt out by somebody I had thought a friend. I do need a gaming laptop, and I am interested in the monstrous convolutions of the hardware industry, but I'm not really your guy for hot chat about keyboard depth and graphics card benchmarking. I care about that stuff a lot less than, to pick an example at random, climbing mountains. By happy coincidence, when James came knocking I was about to go on a 105 mile hike through the Eryri national park in Wales, including an ascent of Yr Wyddffa, Britain's second highest peak. The compromise was as obvious as it was irresistable: I would attempt to review the MSI Cyborg 14 while hiking up Welsh mountains.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

Due to work and a press trip, I am still only half way through redecorating the kitchen. The walls are now a lovely shade of terracotta, but dust sheets cover the floor, there are no doors on the cabinets, and paint pots and stained brushes litter the room. I just want to cook a meal on the hob. A single delicious hot meal.

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Subnautica 2's early access PC system requirements are on the punishing side

Unknown Worlds have released the PC system requirements for Subnautica 2, the ocean exploration and survival game hitherto defined by extravagant legal clashes between publishers Krafton and certain ousted and/or reinstated UW executives. I fear they are going to make you cry. The system specs, not the executives.

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Obsidian are delisting the original version of The Outer Worlds in favour of the swankier (but pricier) Spacer's Choice edition, and lobbing some grenades at you too

The Outer Worlds. It's a game I haven't thought about much since reviewing The Outer Worlds 2 last year, and it's just gotten its first patch in about three years. That's because Obsidian are planning to delist its base version from storefronts at the end of this month, leaving the more polished Spacer's Choice edition as the definitive Outer Worlds going forwards. They're also adding grenades to it, as an apparent make good aimed at pyromaniacs.

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Alas, you and I will never look and sound as good as Rebounder

Reader, I used to worry about being insufficiently cool. I no longer have that albatross around my neck, because no matter how cool I get, I will never be cooler than Rebounder - "a precision platformer set in a four-ink, pulp-print world", created by ATOMIK devs Thirtythree Games, which makes me think of the Mega Drive's awesome Comix Zone. It casts you as a 2D astronaut who gets around by grabbing, hurling and 'rebounding' from explosive alien spores.

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Morrowind turns 24 today, so come Nerevar and celebrate as an Elder Scrolls tax collector with this huge OpenMW quest mod

Yep. May 1st 2002. You came and looked upon the Heart and Akulakahn for the first time. You brought Wraithguard, because the nice guy in the mask and loincloth had need of it. The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind came out. It's now raised a glass of sujamma to salute its 24th anniversary. If you're looking for ways to celebrate, a fresh Morrowind modathon's just kicked off on Nexus Mods, and one of its early entries adds more tax-adjacent missions than the average accountant tackles on a yearly basis.

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Total War: Warhammer 40,000's map destruction is "the biggest mental shift" for the strategy series in years, but "we've kept it to areas where it it really works"

I confess, I don't think very hard about cover when I'm playing Total War games – I'm too busy micromanaging cavalry and ensuring all of my ranged unit formations are nice and stretched out, with minimal depth for a cannon ball to travel through. I'll have to address that mentality when playing Total War: Warhammer 40,000, which is not only a strategy game in which you can do an Exterminatus on planets, but also one in which players can destroy many other objects smaller than planets, including objects your squishy Imperial Guardsmen are cowering behind.

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Subnautica 2's early access has chased a campervanning game about starting fires and hacking PCs into an earlier release

As you've probably heard by now, Subnautica 2 is releasing in early access on May 14th. Unknown Worlds have packed up all of their leviathans and everything. Cool. Unless you're planning to launch a campervanning game that same day. Square Glade Games have decided they'd rather not.

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"Turning solitary AI dreams into a social, playable reality" is the aim of Roblox's new upscaling tech, which will make sentient blobs photorealistic

Welcome to the Roblox Reality, say the makers of Roblox. That sounds a bit terrifying, I respond. Don't worry, it's the name of some AI-powered upscaling tech we've just started showing off, the Roblox makers reassure me. It can make our game's blocky characters and environments look photorealisic, they add. Ah, I say, could you explain that to me via a blog post full of complex techno/marketing babble?

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