PCG Article Discussion for February 2026

[Zed Clampet]

My own Hot take is that I think Starfield is better than No Man's Sky.

Maybe NMS gets better, but I got bored and annoyed with it in a mere 91 minutes according to Steam. I played nearly 90-hours of Starfield.

I do want to try NMS again, but it has some fundamental issues that make me annoyed with it and mean I'll probably never end-up sticking with it.

It's smart not to put specifics there or I'd be able to argue with you.

I only played a few hours of Starfield and over 200 in No Man's Sky.

 

[Zed Clampet]

XCOM designer Jake Solomon announces surprise closure of his studio alongside a first look at its canceled life sim, 'the game we poured our hearts into'

"Burbank" was set to be a life sim with dramatic storylines.

www.pcgamer.com

If I had to guess, the current AI rage mobs are probably the reason their funding dried up.

The responsible way to use AI for voicing lines is to record the voice actors saying non-generated lines, train the AI on their voices, and then pay the voice actors the same you always do, as though they voiced the whole game. There's no need for the usual AI outrage. Everyone still gets properly compensated. The only other solution would be to only use text. There's obviously no other way to handle AI generated lines.

 

[Zed Clampet]

You are right, both were lacking at launch. Apart from giving up on the game, the difference I was referring to is how many loading screens you get in each when you fly from one planet to another

Stafailed is instanced off, you load into new areas and have more menus to go through ... whereas NMS its mostly one seamless journey

Were you the person who said they used the wrong engine? That can't be emphasized enough. What they really needed to do was build a new engine just for this purpose, but I guess that would be too expensive for them. As slow as they are, it will be 2040 before we could expect a Starfield 2, probably later. They are the slowest damn people on the planet. It's going to be about 20 years in between Fallout 4 and Fallout 5.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Xbox boss Phil Spencer is retiring, and his replacement is an AI executive who joined Microsoft in 2024

Sarah Bond, who was widely expected to take the reins one day, has instead resigned from the company.

www.pcgamer.com

In this world, there is only one thing I'm truly exceptional at, and it's reading people. It's why I cleaned up in poker and why, when I held a sales job for a few years, I was the top salesman in the company every year.

And this is why I predicted last year that Spencer would leave Microsoft. Spencer would have never closed all those studios and laid off all those other developers in a year when they were making good money. He's a genuinely good person, and those orders came from over his head. That doesn't mean he didn't make mistakes, of course. It wouldn't surprise me if Game Pass didn't get shuttered soon. But I believe he truly wanted the best for his