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Hi there PC gamers, welcome back to the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast! Wow, feels like it's been a while since I wrote one of these, huh? Lauren and I have been on a little break while we showcased some of the fantastic GDC roundtables conducted by members of the PC Gamer team.

Those are all done and dusted now though, so we're back! This week we're looking at games that have been in the throes of development for many years: the dreaded Development Hell. The games that got announced when you were still in school and now you're married with three kids, and have yet to see anything beyond a 90-second CGI trailer. The games that have bounced between developers more than I bounce between pubs on a Friday night. Well, maybe not quite that much, but close enough.

We've brought our favourite opiniated Brit Robin Valentine along for the ride, where we'll be looking at games that are currently in development hell, famously hellish games that made it out and some that never did. Apologies, we do talk about Duke Nukem Forever eventually... right at the end. We'll get there, trust me.

While we take (Duke Nukem) forever to get to one of the most iconic examples of development hell, why don't you pop over to the PC Gamer forums and share some examples of your own? We'll have a thread set up about this week's episode, and Lauren and I will be joining in on the discussion, too.

You can check out the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• YouTube Music
• Pocket Casts
• Podcast Addict
• Castbox
• Amazon Music
• iHeartRadio

And more!

If you prefer some faces to go with your voices, you can also check out the podcast over on YouTube:

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves.

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For our third and final roundtable from the 2024 Game Developers Conference, we put together a special panel—a quartet of developers who have all been making games since at least the year 1990, and are still active today. Joining us for this conversation: 

• Charles Cecil - Broken Sword, Beneath a Steel Sky
• Khris Brown - Voice director & editor for LucasArts, Double Fine, Ubisoft
• Jordan Mechner - Karateka, Prince of Persia, The Last Express
• Warren Spector - Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Deus Ex

Over the course of an hour our guests talk about how they got into games (and how unlikely their paths would be to replicate today), the challenges of making games with the technology of the '80s and '90s, run-ins with celebrity voice actors like Mark Hamill, and a passion for history. That fascination was key to the stories Jordan Mechner and Charles Cecil told in their beloved adventure games The Last Express and Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (and also led to a particularly memorable encounter for Cecil with Hollywood director Ron Howard).

All four developers have seen the games they've worked on be remade, remastered or followed up by sequels over the years, and they discuss the feeling of leaving behind a legacy.

"System Shock getting remade recently, people still care about a game I worked on 30 years ago—that's cool," says Warren Spector. "Making things that last—when you get to my age, I'm 68 and proud of it, the word legacy comes to mind probably more than it should. I want to leave something behind that's bigger than me. Deus Ex in particular is that for me… later on, when Eidos was acquired by Square Enix and a new series of games set in that universe came out, people would ask me 'how do you feel about that? Does it bother you that someone else is making them?' No! I participated in something that has a life of its own, that has some cultural impact. It's like my baby grew up. Who's upset about a baby growing up? That was pretty special."

The conversation also covers the early days of voice acting in games, with LucasArts veteran Khris Brown talking about how difficult it was for actors at the time to understand the nonlinear storytelling of games compared to film (while working on Double Fine's Brutal Legend, she also taught Ozzy Osbourne how to use his new smartphone). 

You can find the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

1. Apple Podcasts
2. Spotify
3. YouTube Music
4. Pocket Casts
5. Podcast Addict
6. Castbox
7. Amazon Music
8. iHeartRadio

And more!

You can also check out PC Gamer Chat Log on YouTube:

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves. 

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For this week's special roundtable episode of the PC Gamer Chat Log, recorded at the 2024 Game Developers Conference, we gathered a party of adventurers and ventured forth into our second annual deep dive into making RPGs. Here's who you'll hear talking about wizards, lovable and hateable companions, and, yeah, a little game called Baldur's Gate 3: 

• Swen Vincke, founder and director at Larian (Baldur's Gate 3)
• Carrie Patel, game director and senior narrative designer at Obsidian (Avowed)
• Sarah Gruemmer, acting lead quest designer at CD Projekt Red (Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty)
• Adrienne Bazir, founder and sole developer at insertdisc5 (In Stars and Time)
• Ted Peterson, co-founder Once Lost Games and former writer and designer at Bethesda (The Elder Scrolls 1-4)

Across an hour and 20 minutes, our RPG discussion includes a dissection of Baldur's Gate 3's approach to romance, as well as the immense challenges of designing intro quests for lengthy RPGs and finding the balance between linear and nonlinear. 

On the romance front, Larian's Swen Vincke talked through their approach to making a mature-rated game and taking that responsibility seriously: "We try to be as true to life as we could," he said. "Internally in the studio there were some people who felt uncomfortable, and we said, it's a mature game, right? We're going to treat it like what you would see on TV. A series I refer to often was American Gods, which I thought was really well done [in how] it treated mature themes and fantasy settings. You can do really crazy stuff and still relate to it. It was always tastefully done. I mean, the famous bear scene—it was really a squirrel that was not looking. The rest was the theater of your mind. You filled that in, we didn't do that!"

Later, Ted Peterson, who served as a primary writer and designer on the original two Elder Scrolls games, talked about how the first game, Arena, was a linear story inside a large open game world—and how trying to make the sequel more ambitious posed some problems.

"[The Elder Scrolls: Arena] was not even meant to be a roleplaying game," he said. "Because it was turned into a roleplaying game it became super linear. The original idea was that you'd go around to a bunch of fighting arenas, build your characters up, and eventually go to the Imperial arena and fight the evil wizard at the end. But as the arena combat didn't work out, we changed it into a roleplaying game where you had to fight through these arenas in a distinct order… so linear was our easy choice."

Peterson remembered that when Arena came out, the reaction was positive—except for players who said "the story kind of sucked."

"I overcompensated by making Arena super nonlinear, and nobody understands the story to this day." 

Thanks to the revival of The Elder Scrolls 2 in fan remaster Daggerfall Unity, Peterson said he's actually been working on a series of books to "explain the background of this story that I wrote 25 years ago and try to patch it all together." 

If you haven't heard of indie RPG In Stars and Time, you're in for a treat: solo writer/developer Adrienne Bazir dives into the unique way the game deploys a time loop mechanic to consider the meta storytelling layers that come from a player and character reliving the final moments of a quest over and over again. And make sure you stick through to the end—I promise you won't want to miss Carrie Patel's story about a moment from The Outer Worlds that didn't make it into the final game for reasons that become more and more clear as the tale unfolds.

And if you're hungry for more after this conversation is over, you're in luck: our 2023 RPG roundtable is also a great listen with a whole different crew of experienced designers.

You can find the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

1. Apple Podcasts
2. Spotify
3. YouTube Music
4. Pocket Casts
5. Podcast Addict
6. Castbox
7. Amazon Music
8. iHeartRadio

And more!

You can also check out PC Gamer Chat Log on YouTube: 

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves. 

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In this special episode of our podcast, recorded at the 2024 Game Developers Conference, PC Gamer Global Editor-in-Chief Evan Lahti sat down with a special group of guests to talk about where PC gaming is at right now. Here's who we brought together to talk about what's going on in PC gaming: 

• Michael Douse - Director of Publishing, Larian (Baldur's Gate 3)
• Rebecca Ford - Creative Director, Warframe
• Eyrún Jónsdóttir - VP of Publishing at CCP (EVE Online)
• Casey Yano - Co-founder, Mega Crit (Slay the Spire)

Across an 80 minute conversation, our panel of game developers talked about making "hyper-engaging" games that defy the traditional advice of appealing to as broad an audience of players as possible; the innovation in game development only happening on PC; Steam as a "democratic" platform; industry layoffs and the emerging use of AI in development; and what we should take away from the standout successes of 2024, like Helldivers 2 and Balatro, which is one of many games to follow in the footsteps of the roguelike deckbuilder space that Slay the Spire popularized.

"[Slay the Spire] wasn't intended to be a new genre-creating thing," Mega Crit's Casey Yano says. "The expectation for a card game was that it has to be PvP, and I didn't think that was true. The only way to prove anything on the internet is to do it yourself, so we just made a game." 

Larian's Michael Douse pointed out that Slay the Spire, Balatro and Baldur's Gate 3 are all "completely unbothered by any notions of casualization or trying to create something for an audience beyond your own audience. Balatro's unbothered by any notion of what it 'should' be, and focused on what [the developer] wants to make. We're definitely going to see more of that in the PC space." 

"We've found that the best people to draw in new players are the players themselves," said EVE Online's Eyrún Jónsdóttir. "When current players draw other players into the game, that [helps] combat the complexity. You need a bit of social support to get into it. Then players really, really enjoy it when they have that kind of onboarding."

Later in the conversation, Warframe's Rebecca Ford highlighted that PC gaming offers a kind of community access you can't find anywhere else.

"I'm a very optimistic futurist for PC as the primary platform," Ford said. "I think it's the most important for people in our age cohort, and has the greatest potential for border-crossing community building. I've connected with more people than I ever thought possible in my entire life, all because I sat in front of a PC, installed Steam, and installed Discord and played games with them. These two things together as forces are so supremely positive, even in isolation. It's a shame you can have very difficult times online, they're not sanitary by any means—but I cannot imagine a better opportunity to be a good online citizen with people connected through something like what we do.

"There's just nothing like it, and I doubt there will ever be anything like it again."

You can check out the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

1. Apple Podcasts
2. Spotify
3. YouTube Music
4. Pocket Casts
5. Podcast Addict
6. Castbox
7. Amazon Music
8. iHeartRadio

And more!

You can also check out PC Gamer Chat Log on YouTube:

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves. 

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Happy Thursday PC gamers, welcome back to the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast! How are we all this week? If y'all watch the video version of this pod, you'll know that I've discarded the beloved split dye hairdo I've been donning since before my time at PCG (and I've been here for over three years!!) It's quite strange getting rid of something I've spent so long associating as a huge part of my identity, but anyone who's bleached their hair for an extended period of time will know that it does an absolute number on your locks.

Now my hair may change, but you know what doesn't change? War. War never changes. No, I am not sorry for that terrible segue. The Fallout TV series graced our screens last week and you know what? It's actually pretty dang good!

We've brought Chris Livingston on board to chat all things Lucy, Maximus and the Ghoul, as he was fortunate enough to be able to watch the show ahead of its release. Lauren somehow managed to devour the entire thing in a single Sunday, whereas I only got three episodes in by the time we rocked around to recording. I know, I'm slow! The good news is I've finished the whole thing now, which means I'm primed and ready to talk about all the episodes with you lovely folk over on the PC Gamer forums. Go over there to peep our thread about the latest episode and chat with myself and Lauren.

Be warned there are some light spoilers for the show, but Lauren and Chris were lovely enough to not divulge any major story beats for my sake.

You can check out the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• YouTube Music
• Pocket Casts
• Podcast Addict
• Castbox
• Amazon Music
• iHeartRadio

And more!

If you prefer some faces to go with your voices, you can also check out the podcast over on YouTube:

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves.

RSS Feed | Apple Podcasts | Spotify 

Hey PC gamers, welcome back to the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast! Good week so far, I hope? I'm currently sick for the, uh, third time this year. Yeah, I don't know why, the beginning of the year is always a real illness magnet for me. Come May I'll be flying flu-free until 2025, when it'll start all over again. 

I usually try and do a neat clever segue into this week's topic, but my flued-up brain is defeating the teeny tiny part of my brain that's still sorta smart. So this week we're talking all about our white whale games. The games in your genre that are must-plays, touted as the blueprint for which all your favourite games were moulded from, the games that no matter how hard you try you just can't get your head around. 

Maybe you've had That One Game on your backlog for years now. You know the one, the game that you always go "I'm gonna play that today/tomorrow/this weekend/next week" over and over again until it's inevitably been 10 years and you've still barely clocked an hour of playtime. Maybe it's a game you've forced yourself to try and like to no avail.

Whatever your white whale situation is, come join myself and Lauren alongside this week's guest Tyler Colp. We'll be sharing our own white whale gaming stories, and you should totally share yours too. Head over to the PC Gamer forums! We'll have a thread set up for this week's episode. I would love to know which games you're still relentlessly pursuing to this day. Lauren and I will be lurking around in the post too, ready to join the discussion.

You can check out the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

1. Apple Podcasts
2. Spotify
3. Google Podcasts
4. Stitcher
5. Castbox
6. Amazon Music
7. iHeartRadio
8. Podcast Addict
9. And more!

If you prefer some faces to go with your voices, you can also check out the podcast over on YouTube:

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves.

RSS Feed | Apple Podcasts | Spotify 

Hiya PC gamers, welcome back to the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast! Hope everyone's week is going well. I've been doing a lot of decluttering lately, which means I've been doing an awful lot of staring at nostalgic possessions. Old teddy bears, school books and photographs have had me doing a lot of reminiscing recently, which make's this week's episode perfectly on-theme.

We're taking a trip down memory lane this week, talking about our childhood as mini-gamers. We're both fortunate enough to have been around games for as long as we can remember, playing both PC and console games since we were wee babies. We'll be talking about our favourite games as a kid, how those tastes have carried over into adulthood and how the way we game now differs. 

We'll be chatting a bit about stuff like edutainment and browser games as well, and while Lauren and I are fairly similar in age our geographical differences make for some interesting discrepancies in how we gamed growing up!

Maybe you've been gaming since the ZX Spectrum, maybe you didn't embrace gaming as a hobby until you were an adult. Whatever your experience with gaming was growing up (or not!) we would love to hear about your own memories. Head over to the PC Gamer forums, we'll have a thread set up for this week's episode. I'm really looking forward to hearing about all of your experiences! Lauren and I will be lurking around in the post too, ready to join the discussion.

You can check out the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

1. Apple Podcasts
2. Spotify
3. Google Podcasts
4. Stitcher
5. Castbox
6. Amazon Music
7. iHeartRadio
8. Podcast Addict
9. And more!

If you prefer some faces to go with your voices, you can also check out the podcast over on YouTube:

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves.

RSS Feed | Apple Podcasts | Spotify 

Hey there PC gamers, welcome to this week's episode of the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast! I hope you've all had a fantastic week so far, whether you've been climbing up a cyclops in Dragon's Dogma 2, or having your pawn go around telling everyone you're shagging people in Dragon's Dogma 2, or throwing people off a cliff in Dragon's Dogma 2...

Okay, so it's been a pretty Dragon's Dogma-heavy week for us here at PC Gamer. The sequel to Capcom's 2012 RPG is finally here, and a lot of folk on the team have been playing it. Hopefully you have too, because that's what we're talking about on the podcast this week.

Our Online Editor Fraser Brown was kind enough to sink a ton of hours into it for our Dragon's Dogma 2 review, which makes him the perfect guest to come on and chat about the game with us. We'll be talking about the classes we've been playing, what we like and don't like, and getting way too mad about one specific side quest.

It's a pretty spoiler-free one too, so if you're not too far into the game right now don't fret! You can still listen along to our thoughts as we've all put varying amounts of hours in. Don't forget to pop over to the PC Gamer forums too, where we'll have a thread set up for this week's episode for you all. We'll be popping in there ourselves to join the discussion!

You can check out the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

1. Apple Podcasts
2. Spotify
3. Google Podcasts
4. Stitcher
5. Castbox
6. Amazon Music
7. iHeartRadio
8. Podcast Addict
9. And more!

If you prefer some faces to go with your voices, you can also check out the podcast over on YouTube:

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves.

RSS Feed | Apple Podcasts | Spotify 

Greetings goobers, goblins and gamers, welcome back to the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast! How's your week been so far? I am writing this from ~the past~ as I'm actually out of the office this week, enjoying some much-needed time off. Will I currently be doing all my errands I've been putting off, or sitting on my arse playing games? Only future Mollie knows.

If future Mollie is sat on her butt ignoring her responsibilities in favour of videogame pixel people, she's probably doing it from her Steam library. It's just one of the many game launchers vying for our attentions, yet it continues to dominate as most people's preferred choice. But what about the Epics of the world? The Ubisoft Connects, the EA Apps, and won't someone please think of the Amazon Games?

We'll be talking all about PC game launchers, and who better to talk about it with than the man who ranked a whole bunch of 'em earlier this year? Robin Valentine heroically stuffed his PC full of launchers and gave them all a whirl, slapping a percentage on each one. You should absolutely go and read his fantastic launcher ranking ASAP, but don't forget to come back and listen to us talk about it afterwards.

Are you a loyal, diehard Steam user? Perhaps all of the Epic freebies lured you in and now you don't dare use anything else, or you're one of the few who reliably and regularly resyncs their libraries to GOG for the ultimate centralised platform. Whatever you do, we'd love to hear about it. Make sure to head over to the PC Gamer forums, where we'll have a thread set up about this week's episode.

You can check out the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

1. Apple Podcasts
2. Spotify
3. Google Podcasts
4. Stitcher
5. Castbox
6. Amazon Music
7. iHeartRadio
8. Podcast Addict
9. And more!

If you prefer some faces to go with your voices, you can also check out the podcast over on YouTube:

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves.

RSS Feed | Apple Podcasts | Spotify 

Happy Thursday PC gamers, welcome back to the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast! Dang, we're officially at episode 52 which means it's been an entire year of the podcast. Well, we actually took a two-week break over December so our anniversary was on March 2, but you know. We won't tell anyone if you won't.

It's been a fantastic year of getting to host this podcast with Lauren. She really is the brains behind this whole operation, and there's no way we could get an episode out to all you lovely folk every week if it wasn't for her. Make sure to drop her a thanks over on the PC Gamer forums on this week's episode thread! Here's to many more episodes in the future, and the two of us cooking up plenty more PC podcasting shenanigans.

With those little celebrations out of the way, it's time for us to put on our wellies and wade into the discourse swamp. The whole "yellow paint on ledges" topic has come back into the spotlight in the last few weeks, so we've brought paint-hater Tyler Wilde along to discuss how we feel about its increasing inclusion in games.

Crate can be broken? Pop some yellow paint on it. Rocks on a cliff can be clambered up? Better throw some paint on there so people know. It's become a frequently-used form of communication in games, but not everyone is a huge fan of it. Just who is going around all these worlds with a paintbrush and a dream? Are there better ways to tackle visual communication in our beloved games? Would we all crumble without a bit of colour telling us where to go and what to do?

A lot of people have opinions about the yellow paint, and I'm sure you do too. After you're done thanking Lauren for all her lovely hard work, don't forget to drop your own thoughts on the debate on the forums. We love to reply to you all and see you joining the discussion!

You can check out the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

1. Apple Podcasts
2. Spotify
3. Google Podcasts
4. Stitcher
5. Castbox
6. Amazon Music
7. iHeartRadio
8. Podcast Addict
9. And more!

If you prefer some faces to go with your voices, you can also check out the podcast over on YouTube:

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves.

RSS Feed | Apple Podcasts | Spotify 

Wassup PC gamers, welcome back to the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast. I hope your week has been good so far. It's well and truly flu season for me, and I'm sick for the second time in a month which has cut my gaming time pretty drastically. How am I ever going to ascend past scrub status and git gud?

Well, do I even want to git gud? Is the art of mastering a videogame all it's cracked up to be? That's what we'll be talking about on the podcast this week, and we're joined by competitive shooter aficionado Morgan Park. He once wrote about his experience with getting good at Hunt: Showdown, and how it actually kind of killed the fun for him, making him the perfect guest for this episode.

We'll be talking about the games we've tried to take seriously, what we thought of that process and ultimately, whether we think getting good at a videogame is as fun as it sounds.

Whether you're sweating away in every ranked mode you come across or happily stick to the casual side of your favourite games, we'd love to hear what you think. Pop over to the PC Gamer forums, where we'll have a thread up about this week's episode. You can share your own experiences and thoughts about "gitting gud," and feel free to tell us if we're actually all a bunch of scrubs. I promise I'll only cry a little bit.

You can check out the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

1. Apple Podcasts
2. Spotify
3. Google Podcasts
4. Stitcher
5. Castbox
6. Amazon Music
7. iHeartRadio
8. Podcast Addict
9. And more!

If you prefer some faces to go with your voices, you can also check out the podcast over on YouTube:

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves.