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

 

[Zed Clampet]

If Xbox is 'recommitting' to its console, what does that mean for its recent 'everything is an Xbox' strategy?

Divining meaning from the words of Microsoft Gaming's new CEO.

www.pcgamer.com

So instead of Elder Scrolls 6, we're going to go back to making ridiculous things with names like "Elder Scrolls World" that will be a sandbox for 8-year-old developers to make hide and seek games? I think I'd almost rather have AI slop.

I'm almost sure they won't actually do that to Elder Scrolls 6, but the games industry is horribly mismanaged, so you never know. If they do, in fact, start doing this, Xbox will enter into hospice care an all these great studios they purchased will either be bought out by Sony or just fade into history, which would be dire news for PC gaming.

 

[Colif]

and his replacement is an AI executive who joined Microsoft in 2024

Is the evecutive an AI itself
or
Just someone who is an executive in the AI area at Microsoft?

Article didn't seem to mention it. Guess it was on Phil but I am still left wondering

 

[Zed Clampet]

Players spent roughly 10,250,000,000 monthly hours in Roblox in 2025, analyst says—more than Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined

Roblox alone accounted for 67% of the games industry's growth outside of China in 2025.

www.pcgamer.com

Well, the bad news for Roblox is that countries are going to start wanting some sort of age gating. It's happening with everything, and I don't guess it will miss Roblox. Given that it could reasonably be considered interactive social media for children, they could have some serious difficulties ahead of them.

 

[Pifanjr]

If Xbox is 'recommitting' to its console, what does that mean for its recent 'everything is an Xbox' strategy?

Divining meaning from the words of Microsoft Gaming's new CEO.

www.pcgamer.com

So instead of Elder Scrolls 6, we're going to go back to making ridiculous things with names like "Elder Scrolls World" that will be a sandbox for 8-year-old developers to make hide and seek games? I think I'd almost rather have AI slop.

I'm almost sure they won't actually do that to Elder Scrolls 6, but the games industry is horribly mismanaged, so you never know. If they do, in fact, start doing this, Xbox will enter into hospice care an all these great studios they purchased will either be bought out by Sony or just fade into history, which would be dire news for PC gaming.

I have my doubts that any other company is going to be able to compete with Roblox and Fortnite. You need skilled creators to make the content, but those will only bother creating something if there are players to play their games. But players will only come if there's quality content, so you need a really good hook and a lot of luck to get the ball rolling.

Players spent roughly 10,250,000,000 monthly hours in Roblox in 2025, analyst says—more than Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined

Roblox alone accounted for 67% of the games industry's growth outside of China in 2025.

www.pcgamer.com

Well, the bad news for Roblox is that countries are going to start wanting some sort of age gating. It's happening with everything, and I don't guess it will miss Roblox. Given that it could reasonably be considered interactive social media for children, they could have some serious difficulties ahead of them.

Roblox already has some age gating, you need to verify your ID if you want to use chat features. Where Roblox fails is age gating and moderating the content itself, but I assume they should be able to figure that out. It's not like hosting user-generated content is a novel idea, YouTube has had to deal with people uploading inappropriate content and they're still around.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Is the evecutive an AI itself
or
Just someone who is an executive in the AI area at Microsoft?

Article didn't seem to mention it. Guess it was on Phil but I am still left wondering

It will be a cold day in Hell when upper executives start replacing themselves with AI.

I have my doubts that any other company is going to be able to compete with Roblox and Fortnite. You need skilled creators to make the content, but those will only bother creating something if there are players to play their games. But players will only come if there's quality content, so you need a really good hook and a lot of luck to get the ball rolling.



Roblox already has some age gating, you need to verify your ID if you want to use chat features. Where Roblox fails is age gating and moderating the content itself, but I assume they should be able to figure that out. It's not like hosting user-generated content is a novel idea, YouTube has had to deal with people uploading inappropriate content and they're still around.

Wasn't exactly my point, but I didn't make that very clear. A lot of the features of Roblox can be considered "social media", and in some countries this designation may be coming to online games as a whole. There are places putting hard age restrictions (like no one under 15) on anything "social media". And if Roblox gets dragged into that (probably unlikely) it could cause them problems. All it really takes is a politician wanting to "save the children" as an election approaches.

By the way, I meant to mention above that most of this traffic is on mobile, and there are places, like the UK, who are actively trying to ban mobile phone use by people below age 16, and most of Europe is considering similar phone and/or social media bans for people under certain ages. I'm not predicting a doom and gloom future for Roblox, but it's certainly conceivable. No phones would equal no Roblox for many children.

 

[Colif]

It will be a cold day in Hell when upper executives start replacing themselves with AI.

maybe they have too much management already so lower AI management can be AI, as will most of the staff eventually. Microsoft started as a few people in a garage, way AI is leading they may be able to shrink back to that again. But make way more money.

 

[Zed Clampet]

maybe they have too much management already so lower AI management can be AI, as will most of the staff eventually. Microsoft started as a few people in a garage, way AI is leading they may be able to shrink back to that again. But make way more money.

Maybe if they replace the people responsible for Windows it will stop being hot garbage that 50 percent of gamers will replace with desktop SteamOS the second it becomes available. 50 percent is wildly optimistic, but I have to have my hopes and dreams...

 

[Colif]

I like windows, beats learning a new OS after using it for 30 years.

 

[Zloth]

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.

What if they could train it off the player's voice? Is that feasible yet?

 

[Zed Clampet]

What if they could train it off the player's voice? Is that feasible yet?

Yeah. It doesn't take that long to train. On a decent machine acceptable voice training can be done in just a minute or two. One potential hang-up is that it needs to have extremely clear sound to train from. What normally comes across from people's headphones probably wouldn't be good enough, so you would have to run it through something to try to improve the clarity and get rid of any other noise.

Another problem might be people trying to upload someone else's voice. A game company might consider it too much of a legal risk. Maybe not. Just speculating. But if you could upload the voices of your favorite actors, I'm guessing the actors would want some money for that. You could always allow actors to submit samples that would let the AI reject them, but now we're closing in on the "too much trouble" designation. Again, that's all just speculation. It may not actually be a problem.

 

[Zloth]

Another problem might be people trying to upload someone else's voice. A game company might consider it too much of a legal risk.

Oh, and lip syncing would be a big pain, too, unless AI can do that as well. Maybe someday...

 

[Pifanjr]

Oh, and lip syncing would be a big pain, too, unless AI can do that as well. Maybe someday...

AI can definitely do lip syncing. I saw a video the other day of a model holding up a product with her mouth closed and a monitor where you saw the AI filter that added an AI generated voice and made it look like she was actually talking.

 

[Zed Clampet]

A Grok update was apparently delayed because Elon Musk wanted it to be better at answering questions about Baldur's Gate

He wants it to be able to play League of Legends as well.

www.pcgamer.com

Apparently the Chinese kid who plays Musk's games for him is having difficulty using the BG3 wiki.

 

[neogunhero]

You can finally get FSR 4 on Vulkan games with OptiScaler

AMD hasn't implemented official support, yet.

www.pcgamer.com

It's somewhat of a point of contention with many AMD gamers that the GPU manufacturer hasn't done more to actually implement its latest and greatest features, such as FSR 4 and Redstone, into games, leaving gamers to use OptiScaler instead.

My RX 9060 XT is the first AMD GPU I've bought in close to 15 years. I was very happy when FSR Redstone was finally announced last December but I was also shocked at the small amount of games that fully supported it. Even plain FSR4 support is quite limited. I don't know if this is a resource issue at AMD or what. They create this tech that keeps getting very close to DLSS in terms of quality and performance, yet the support for it is just not there. I had no idea it didn't support Vulkan games until I read this article and that partially explains the reason why support is so limited.

I'll have to give Optiscaler a shot. I've heard about it many times since I got this card, just haven't tried it yet.

 

[neogunhero]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/get-7-serious-shooters-for-just-usd17-or-4-hidden-gems-for-a-fiver-in-a-pair-of-packages-from-new-game-bundle-seller-digiphile/

Awesome new bundle seller website over at digiphile.co . I checked them out from this article and I gotta say, what a cool site. The bundles seem to be much better curated than Humble Bundle, and less shovelware crap like Fanatic.

There is another bundle mentioned in the article called Boomer Shooter Indie Spotlight. While most boomer shooters can be considered indie, this particular bundle focused and much lesser known boomshoots. I haven't heard of a single one of them, but they all look fantastic with high Steam ratings. Will be keeping an eye out on that website for sure.