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

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The second part of the Monday gaming news:

Final Fantasy 14's newest expansion name almost broke the series' 12-year tradition as Yoshi-P 'really wanted' his original idea
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/final-fantasy/final-fantasy-14s-newest-expansion-name-almost-broke-the-series-12-year-tradition-as-yoshi-p-really-wanted-his-original-idea/
The last few times Square Enix has unveiled the name of a new Final Fantasy 14 expansion, I've wondered whether the team plans to stick to its love for a good compound word. As it turns out, the answer is "yes" every time: Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, Endwalker, Dawntrail, and now the upcoming Evercold.

2K Games confirms layoffs at Project Ethos shooter studio and hints at new design direction: 'It's become clear that changes need to be made'
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/2k-games-confirms-layoffs-at-project-ethos-shooter-studio-and-hints-at-new-design-direction-its-become-clear-that-changes-need-to-be-made/
2K Games studio 31st Union has confirmed the layoff of an undisclosed number of employees, first reported by GamesIndustry, as it continues to develop Project Ethos, the free-to-play hero shooter announced in 2024.
In a memo sent to 31st Union employees and shared with PC Gamer, 31st Union studio head Ben Brinkman, who left Respawn to take the role in October 2025, said "it's become clear that changes need to be made to our team in order to realize our goals and deliver this experience for players."

True permadeath: You can never play this game again if you let its immortal snail assassin touch your mouse pointer
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/true-permadeath-you-can-never-play-this-game-again-if-you-let-its-immortal-snail-assassin-touch-your-mouse-pointer/
I've seen a few different versions of the "snail assassin" or "immortal snail" or "snail hunting you down" meme over the years, but it looks like it originated from an episode of the Rooster Teeth podcast back in 2014, where the question was basically this:
Would you take $10 million dollars, but an immortal snail would always be slowly crawling toward you no matter where you were, and if it touched you, you'd die?
(...)
Soon you'll be able to live out that scenario on your desktop, including the life or (perma)death stakes. Don't Touch The Snail is a game where a snail slowly, ever-so-slowly, is always moving toward your mouse pointer. If the snail touches your pointer, it's game over… forever.

Arrowhead addresses the Helldivers 2 community as recent Steam reviews slump to Mostly Negative: 'We want to be clearer about what we're working on and what's coming next'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/arrowhead-addresses-the-helldivers-2-community-as-recent-steam-reviews-slump-to-mostly-negative-we-want-to-be-clearer-about-what-were-working-on-and-whats-coming-next/
It was only in February that we reported that Helldivers 2 was in the best shape it had been in since launch. The siege of Cyberstan galactic campaign was the glittering jewel in the game's live-service storytelling crown, delivering new toys like the Bastion tank and colossal new enemies called Vox Engines, as well as a dramatic invasion of the Automatons' home planet where every dead patriot reduced the chance of success.
Yet only three months later, Helldivers 2's recent reviews have plummeted to 'Mostly Negative', with a host of issues from alleged hidden changes to weapons to underwhelming warbonds putting the community at loggerheads with developer Arrowhead Studios once again. This came to a head on Friday, with Arrowhead publishing a Steam post addressing the community's grievances.

Anticipated supercannon sim PVKK delayed until 2027, but for the kind of reason you want to hear
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/anticipated-supercannon-sim-pvkk-delayed-until-2027-but-for-the-kind-of-reason-you-want-to-hear/
PVKK, or Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant if you're particular, is a game we've been eagerly awaiting: It was named one of our most anticipated games during last year's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted rundown, largely by virtue of how badly we want to fiddle with the many deliciously tactile switches, levers, knobs, cranks, and buttons it offers for the operation of its titular planetary defense cannon.
Unfortunately, we've now got a longer wait before we can play the Papers Please-like supercannoneer sim for ourselves. In a Steam news post, game director René Habermann announced that PVKK has been delayed until 2027 "to make sure PVKK is in the best shape possible at launch."

Abiotic Factor just got another massive update that adds better pets, a ludicrously involved chemistry system, and most importantly, a mop for cleaning up all your failed experiments
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/survival-crafting/abiotic-factor-just-got-another-massive-update-that-adds-better-pets-a-ludicrously-involved-chemistry-system-and-most-importantly-a-mop-for-cleaning-up-all-your-failed-experiments/
Abiotic Factor is already a massive game; you could easily spend 80+ hours exploring its sprawling, Black Mesa-ish research facility. But that hasn't stopped developer Deep Field Games further extending the tendrils of its labyrinthine, interdimensional science lab. Last December's "Holiday Cryosphere" update added a giant, living snowglobe that players could frolic festively around, and its latest patch opens up another strange dimension for your expeditious scientists to investigate.
The Cosmic Companions update invites players to brave the Dunkeltaler Forest, a coniferous portal world home to the Alpen Signal Observatorium. Accessible via a portal in the Hydroplant, the portal world will challenge you to track down the source of the signal picked up by the Observatorium. Mysterious!

Europa Universalis 5's 'biggest update yet' expands the Balkans, overhauls the economy, and fixes more than 2,000 bugs
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/strategy/europa-universalis-5s-biggest-update-yet-expands-the-balkans-overhauls-the-economy-and-fixes-more-than-2-000-bugs/
Paradox Interactive has rolled out its "biggest update yet" for Europa Universalis 5. This is a slightly cheeky way to phrase things, considering this is only the second major update for Paradox' latest, dizzyingly complex grand strategy. But it's also accurate. With patch notes that Paradox claims would fill 72 pages of a Google doc, the Encinades update overhauls several of the game's major systems and squashes more than 2,000 bugs.

Stellaris is getting space nomads and scenarios for its 10th birthday
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/strategy/stellaris-is-getting-space-nomads-and-scenarios-for-its-10th-birthday/
Most strategy games that make it to 10 years old have already passed the event horizon of their development cycle and are being pulled apart like spaghetti by the gravity of the thousands of new games released every day. Not so for Stellaris, Paradox's spacebound grand strategy 4X. How it got to where it is and is still drawing in intrepid stellar statebuilders is a saga worthy of a Star Wars title crawl. But it's not even done yet, with the newly announced Season 10 finally bringing space nomads to the table.
Nomads, with a current release date of Q2 2026, will finally let you play a species without a homeworld. This is something that Paradox has wanted to do for a long time, but posed significant technical challenges. We got to chat with game director Stephen Murray about what's coming.

Rust's latest update adds mortars but 'no visual guide to help you land shells,' so get ready for some chaos
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/survival-crafting/rusts-latest-update-adds-mortars-but-no-visual-guide-to-help-you-land-shells-so-get-ready-for-some-chaos/
Facepunch Studios may have only just released S&box, but the launch of its spiritual successor to Garry's Mod has done nothing to slow down its monthly Rust update. It is as predictable as the tide, or having your base raided by your half-naked neighbours. This month's "Upgrade hard, raid harder" patch brings a major overhaul to one of Rust's key systems, though personally I'm more interested in the addition of mortars, sicko for explosions that I am.

Two Point Museum's latest DLC features a buildable studio where artists can create 'millions' of unique artworks, and there's 'no generative AI involved' whatsoever
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/strategy/two-point-museums-latest-dlc-features-a-buildable-studio-where-artists-can-create-millions-of-unique-artworks-and-theres-no-generative-ai-involved-whatsoever/
I'm a big fan of Two Point Museum, the latest and greatest of Two Point Studios' revival of the Bullfrog-style management sim. But I am also a fan of how the developer has approached the release of its DLCs. You can pay for expansions like Zooseum and Fantasy Finds to get a big chunk of extra stuff to build, but you also get a portion of the DLC for free with each of the game's updates.
Such is the case with Two Point Museum's latest add-on, Arty Facts. As the name implies, this expansion lets you add an art gallery to your institution. The pack adds 27 new art exhibits for your guests to gaze meaningfully at, but it also adds a new "art studio" room where your experts can create paintings of their own. According to the expansion's launch trailer, the art studio facilitates "millions of potential outcomes", thus providing an "endless" stream of custom art.

Elder Scrolls 6 is a ways off, but who needs it? The world's most specific game jam is back with 40 playable entries based off Oblivion's wonderful/awful persuade-o-wheel
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/the-elder-scrolls/elder-scrolls-6-is-a-ways-off-but-who-needs-it-the-worlds-most-specific-game-jam-is-back-with-40-playable-entries-all-based-off-oblivions-wonderful-awful-persuade-o-wheel/
Remember Oblivion's wheel system for grinding NPC disposition? You probably do, since a very popular remastered version of that game came out a single year ago. But if not then, well, you Skyrim kids don't know what you're missing. Where the most recent Elder Scrolls (the one that's 15 years old), only let you affect your relationship with NPCs by completing quests and joining factions, Oblivion would let you affect everyone's opinion of you granularly, via a wheel-based minigame you could drop into mid-conversation.
Was it good? No. Was it intuitive? No. But was it representative of the actual experience of building up a rapport with other human beings? Again, no. No wonder then that it has become an object of cathexis for a certain generation of videogame players who found themselves developmentally T-boned by Oblivion's jelly-clockwork world at precisely the right age. We miss it, we yearn for it, and some of us have brought it back—for the second time.
Wheeljam 2 is the second iteration of a game jam that tasks participants with the speedy creation of playable things that feature "either the lockpicking minigame or persuasion wheel in some capacity." That's right, folks, the lockpicking minigame is in there too now.