Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

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The guys at PCGamer had time to spend the Holidays so, thankfully, there haven’t been many articles:

Commander Shepard actors will return for the new Mass Effect game 'with bells on' if BioWare asks them: 'Email the powers-that-be who make these games and say, Give us more Shepard'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/commander-shepard-actors-will-return-for-the-new-mass-effect-game-with-bells-on-if-bioware-asks-them-email-the-powers-that-be-who-make-these-games-and-say-give-us-more-shepard/
We don't know much about the next Mass Effect game in development at BioWare except that it's happening, and even that feels a little soft right now, what with all the layoffs and looming sale of Electronic Arts to Saudi Arabia. But one thing we do now know, thanks to a Fall Damage interview on YouTube with Commander Shepard actors Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale, is that they're both pretty eager to return to the role.
>> If they haven’t been approached yet to do some lines, I don’t think that will change.

Blade director reassures suffering fans with soothing words: 'Please be patient, it will be a special game'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/blade-director-reassures-suffering-fans-with-soothing-words-please-be-patient-it-will-be-a-special-game/
Arkane revealed Blade at The Game Awards 2023, PC Gamer associate editor Ted Litchfield lost his gourd, and not a whole lot has happened since then. The silence has gone on long enough to make PCG's Fraser Brown nervous: Its no-show at Xbox Games Showcase this summer "makes me wonder if there have been some major road bumps," he wrote earlier this year, noting that troubled development would be particularly bad news for a studio that's already very clearly under the gun.
With Blade also failing to put in an appearance at the recently-passed Game Awards 2025, some folks are getting antsy. The plaintive pleading of one such fan led Arkane co-creative director Dinga Bakaba to pop in on X with some soothing reassurance.

Star Citizen is on course to reach $1 billion in player funding in 2026, and we still might not get to play its singleplayer campaign next year
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/star-citizen-is-on-course-to-reach-usd1-billion-in-player-funding-in-2026-and-we-still-might-not-get-to-play-its-singleplayer-campaign-next-year/
In 2026, gaming will (almost certainly) reach a huge, seemingly inconceivable milestone. No, I'm not talking about the release of Grand Theft Auto 6 . I'm referring to how Star Citizen's ridiculously successful, seemingly unstoppable, ethically debatable funding model is set to surpass $1 billion next year.
We last checked in with Star Citizen's Godzilla-sized money magnet in April, at which point the game had just crossed the $800 million mark. But that number has grown substantially in the last eight months. At the time of writing, Star Citizen is sitting pretty atop a mountain of 925,647,996 simoleons.

'Our fans have been very passionate': How player feedback has been at the core of the first six months of Persona 5: The Phantom X
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/our-fans-have-been-very-passionate-how-player-feedback-has-been-at-the-core-of-the-first-six-months-of-persona-5-the-phantom-x/
Persona 5: The Phantom X has just kicked off its half-anniversary celebration marking a whole six months since the release of the gacha spin-off (at least in Japan and the Western world, anyway). It's not been an easy journey, to say the least. The game's launch was criticised for stark differences between reward distribution in the Chinese version versus the global release and was arguably (and very surprisingly) eclipsed by horse girl gacha Umamusume: Pretty Derby releasing just one day sooner.
In the time since global launch, the teams at both Sega and Atlus have been hard at work on The Phantom X to bring the standards up to what gacha gamers have come to expect. When I asked what the team's biggest initial challenge was, operations director Yuta Sakai told me: "It was definitely the game balance or the balance of the events. So when we created the Japanese and English versions, we made various adjustments from the original release—the Chinese and Asia versions—and it was mostly focused on the quality-of-life and making sure that the game would fit new players because we had some extra features that were not originally present when it was first released.
>> There has been a couple more articles about this game: “Persona 5: The Phantom X had a hard time doing away with the series' iconic calendar system: 'It was very difficult to convince the team'” (link) and 'It was definitely interesting': Persona 5: The Phantom X developer was surprised that people outside of Japan were 'cheering' for the Subway Slammer” (link).

Peak devs were ready to go 'into vacation mode' after releasing it, but then it sold 1M copies in the first week: 'That quickly became a pipe dream'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/survival-crafting/peak-devs-were-ready-to-go-into-vacation-mode-after-releasing-it-but-then-it-sold-1m-copies-in-the-first-week-that-quickly-became-a-pipe-dream/
One of 2025's surprise hits was Peak, a co-op climbing game that was created in a mere four months by studios Aggro Crab and Landfall. It caught fire on Twitch and in every friend group hooked on so-called "friendslop" since 2023's Lethal Company.
Even though there has been a strong trend of co-op games in the past few years, Aggro Crab and Landfall weren't expecting Peak to explode in popularity.

Action RPG players will exploit anything in the name of efficiency, which is why Path of Exile 2 players are locking themselves in the campaign for profit
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/action-rpg-players-will-exploit-anything-in-the-name-of-efficiency-which-is-why-path-of-exile-2-players-are-locking-themselves-in-the-campaign-for-profit/
In a lot of ways, action RPGs like Diablo are an open invitation by the developers for players to find all the things they didn't expect you could do. Ideally, that is limited to powerful skill interactions and builds, but it's often the case that it includes somewhat game-breaking exploits that go against the spirit of the game.
I'm not sure I'd call what Path of Exile 2 streamer Fubgun is doing with the new seasonal mode "game-breaking", but it's clearly not supposed to work like that.