Joker

You likely already know this if you keep track of our running list of Steam sale dates, but just in case you don’t—or perhaps you’ve just forgotten amidst all the Black Friday hubbub—the 2023 Steam Autumn Sale is live now, and runs until 10 am PT/1 pm ET on November 28.

As always, the launch of the Steam Autumn Sale also signals the start of the 2023 Steam Awards nominations, enabling you to show some love for your favorite games across 11 unique categories:

• Game of the year
• VR game of the year
• Labor of love
• Best Game on Steam Deck
• Better with friends
• Outstanding visual style
• Best game you suck at

Valve came prepared for Steam Deck OLED launch day. As people race to the store page for its improved handheld gaming PC, the estimated delivery dates for the three available models hasn’t been extended. Only the gray, translucent OLED model has had its expected delivery date pushed from days to weeks.

When the original Steam Deck launched last year, it went on backorder within a few hours, and it took Valve several months to catch up with the demand. The new version, which comes with a beautiful new OLED screen, improved battery life, and a list of other small improvements, looks like it won’t suffer from the same issue. The store page for the $549 (512GB) and $649 (1TB) OLED models still say they’ll be delivered within three to five business days. The same goes for the original …

The surprising news that came out of Bungie yesterday is that The Final Shape, the decade-long saga’s climactic expansion, is adding an entirely new subclass that will enable guardian’s to mix and match powers from all of the existing subclasses. (My emphasis there is to reflect how excited this made our resident Guardian (aka PC Gamer brand director Tim Clark). 

However, once the shock had died down a little, things got weird. You see, it turns out that a month ago someone on Reddit not only predicted that we would be getting a new subclass—an unlikely but not unreasonable guess—but also pretty much the exact details of how Prismatic works, which nobody would reasonably have guessed at that time. 

Which of course now has the community very interested i…

We need to do some kind of wellness check on the Team Fortress 2 community. Sure, the game might have gotten a big summer update and smashed its all-time concurrent player record in the last year, but it’s hardly the apple of Valve’s eye in 2023. Players of the venerable shooter were left to gaze forlornly over at Counter-Strike 2 when that game was announced back in March, wondering if TF2 might get similar treatment “in another decade”.

I think that loneliness might have driven the poor souls to breaking point. In a fit of nostalgia, players across the TF2 community are reminiscing about better times, the golden old days when the game was a brand new and potential-filled part of The Orange Box. Specifically, they’re all singing tributes to the game’s missing tenth class: The Mad…

My friends, it’s my delight to inform you that we have entered the era of magical gun wizards. At least, that’s my takeaway from the trailer for Veil, a just-announced, four-player co-op shooter based around squads of tactical warlocks as they try to keep demons from spilling over into our world. It got its first gameplay trailer today, which you can see above.

Billed as a “mission-based shooter, where you perform work for various power-hungry groups locked in century-long struggle,” Veil looks to me like someone took a Rainbow Six game and gave everyone in it Eldritch Blast. “You’re not just a grunt with a gun,” continues the description, “to even the odds against numerous and powerful enemies, you make demonic pacts that grant you supernatural powers.”

It looks and sounds …

On April 30, 1993, CERN released the World Wide Web to the planet, free-of-charge.

The “collaborative information system” was used by the scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to communicate without delay across countries and continents, but deciding this tool was too useful to keep to themselves, the boffins over at CERN handed out the concept and code for everyone to use.

CERN wrote a letter on April 30 titled “Statement concerning CERN W3 software release into public domain,” (via The Register). It reads:

“The following CERN software is hereby put into the public domain:

• W 3 basic (“line-mode”) client
• W 3 basic server
• W 3 library of common code.

“CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights t…

Undertale developer Toby Fox has confirmed that work on the next chapter of his new game, Deltarune, is going smoothly. While there’s no confirmed release date yet for chapters 3 and 4, he does confirm that the dev team is making great progress.

“Chapter 4 development is going better than ever,” Fox says in a newsletter. “We are on track to meet our internal deadline. The new hires are already making a great difference to improve the atmosphere and feel of the chapter. I feel really good about this, champ.”

After hiring a new producer and inviting new talent to work on the project, things seem to be going great for Deltarune. Fox even outlined the current progress, which included most of the cutscenes being finished, with only a few of the tougher ones left and a couple of o…

Skip straight to the best bit and win today’s Wordle in record time—the answer to the November 13 (877) puzzle is never more than a cheeky click away. Or if you’d like guidance rather than a quick victory, keep on scrolling and you’ll find a clue written just for today’s game, as well as general tips and tricks designed to boost every guess you ever make.

I did well enough today—a win in four is fine, if not anything worth shouting from the rooftops. But I still managed to make a fool of myself when I was one guess away from today’s answer and had the majority of the word filled in. It was right there, plain as day, and I somehow still spent far too long wondering what on earth I was supposed to add to this mysterious word to win. 

Wordle tod…

Update: That was fast. Shortly before this story first went live, Bethesda design director Emil Pagliarulo amended his reveal about Fallout 4’s male protagonist, whose default name is Nate.

“I wanted to share what I thought was a cool Fallout tidbit without realizing how divisive it might be,” Pagliarulo tweeted. “I should have… Not every bit of Fallout info I share is automatically canon. Nate is NOT a war criminal.”

Alright, fair enough. I hope Pagliarulo isn’t getting too much flak for this, since it’s all the theoretical history surrounding a fake guy who lives in our desktops. I cannot stress enough that Nate Q. Falloutfour is not real, and neither is America’s 2072 annexation of Canada—yet.

While Nate is innocent, the now unidentified sec…