Hello folks. How was Baldur's Gate 3 August for you? Ready for Starfield September? I hope you are, because lemme tell you, it's coming all right. In truth, I was surprised (and somewhat saddened) by some of the comments we received around our Baldur's Gate 3 coverage. If you missed them, they were mostly in the vein of saying our increased volume of BG3-related posts felt like "spam", harking back to when we (and the internet at large) all went similarly bananas over Elden Ring last year. I know it can sometimes seem like writing about these games - particularly on RPS - feels like we're somehow neglecting everything else going on in PC gaming. But the truth is a little more complicated than that, so I wanted to take some time to talk a bit about this in this month's Letter From The Editor, because there are a number of reasons why this happens - and will probably continue to happen more generally as websites fight for survival.

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Oft' am I struck by the fact that video game homes belonging to characters in the depths of despair are nicer that all of the homes I've lived in myself. Granted, I'm a thirty-something in a country with a years-long housing crisis, so even the Baker House in Resident Evil 7 is of "I think I could just about afford that one day" status. But it comes to something when a 70s depresso-capsule at the bottom of the sea has more square footage and storage space than I do.

Under The Waves (which got patched today, and not before time because I've had one fatal error crash per play session since it came out last week so far) is about a deep sea diver called Stan, who is living and working at the bottom of a big wet metaphor for grief. You will know this because a) its Steam page says this up front, and b) it's not super subtle (this game is published by Quantic Dream). But, as newsman Edwin pointed out to me today, when was the last time the sea wasn't> a metaphor for grief? It's never a metaphor for enjoying a nice raspberry ripple ice cream. And despite Stan making reference to "what [he's] been through" half an hour in, I think it does a great job with its chthonic sadness. You float about in your tiny little sub in a great misty darkness, listen to the extremely melancholy music, and you start thinking about sad stuff in your own life. But you get into Stan's capsule living area and you think "this guy has a carpet and a book nook, what the hell?"

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Last time, you decided that interrupt attacks are better than a lore codex. Sanity prevailed, and I thank you. Though I realise I am now writing a lore codex entry about a great victory in the year 2023, so sorry about that. This week, I ask you to choose between upgraded movement or upgraded cardboard. What's better: Fast travel, or upgrading cards?

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Space. The medium frontier. These are the voyages of me, reviewing Bethesda's big space RPG Starfield. It's the company's first new IP in almost 30 years (a claim that contains in it an inherent threat for Starfield 2), and though Bethesda has copied some of their own homework for some themes and factions, Starfield is indeed a spacefaring adventure of epic scale and sometimes surprising beauty. It's this scale that makes Starfield feel unfortunately small and empty, a place that still has those fun little Bethesda side quests that escalate into something huge and absurd, but that can also swallow them whole in its cold, star-scattered grandeur.

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In the grim darkness of the far future, the galaxy is your oyster. Or at least it will be, once you've played 100 hours of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, an RPG from Pathfinder developer Owlcat in which you can buy planets, configure your genocidal Dark Eldar friend to strike ten times a turn, and gaze on ruefully as a demon explodes out of your Psyker's head.

An immediate and shameful disclaimer: I can't match Nic Reuben's deep knowledge of the 40K tabletop universe, which saw him ruminating upon the mysteries of the Koronus Expanse back in 2022, while holding Owlcat's feet to the fire over the absence of space dwarves. The nearest I got to playing 40K as a lad was its Battlefleet Gothic spin-off (which none of my friends were interested in, so when I say "playing", I mean that I sat in a room staring glumly at some unpainted Lunar-class Cruisers while other kids went out and climbed trees). The framing I'm working with instead, based on an hour of hands-off Rogue Trader gameplay, is that it's sort of Warhammer Mass Effect, but with XCOM-style turn- and grid-based combat, and while there are opportunities to be a compassionate hero, you fundamentally only have the option of playing Renegade. Let's dig in!

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One SteamOS patch and a reinstall later, and I’ve overcome my initial launching woes to properly play Starfield on the Steam Deck. Though perhaps it was better off breaking in the atmosphere, and while I’m enjoying Starfield’s spacey adventures in a general sense, its punishing technical requirements are making the Deck’s usually-plucky hardware look like a pile of Old Earth scrap.

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Lightyear Frontier is not the kind of game that fits neatly into a 30-minute Gamescom demo. There's so much to see and do in this laidback farming mech sim that by the time my demo ends, I barely feel like I've scratched the surface of it (and that's even with the assistance of some handy secret dev cheats to show me some of the structures and features they've got planned later on in the game). Rather, this is a game that's designed to unfurl slowly, bit by bit, over the course of several hours, and before we begin, developer Frame Break's CEO Joakim Hedström tells me they've shortened the game's opening sequence for this particular demo, just so they can get players right into the thick of things as quickly as possible.

But even on this whistlestop tour, there's plenty to dig into and delight in here - not least its gloriously bright and inviting colour palette (take that, Todd). I got to sample its farming, its wonderfully weighty mech exploration, and even indulge in a little bit of, well, powerwashing. Yep, PowerWash Simulator's influence was well and truly felt at this year's Gamescom, and I'm so very here for it.

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Sad news vis-a-vis playing Starfield on the Steam Deck: it runs like a slug, even on the lowest possible settings. And if you were planning to get it through PC Game Pass, that's another issue, as Game Pass games are locked down behind the fully Deck-incompatible Universal Windows Platform system. If the wonder of space depends on the it being a borderless infinity realm of endless possibilities, nobody told Microsoft.

There is a way, however, to sidestep both problems. Xbox Cloud Gaming will let you play Starfield on the Steam Deck at a steady (enough) 30fps, by streaming the game from Microsoft's cloud network direct to your screen - no Proton GE or Lutris launcher required. It still takes some setting up, but luckily, you’ve already clicked onto a step-by-step guide on how to do it.

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The name Nextorage might not mean much to you, but this storage company was founded by Sony Japan employees in 2019 and acquired by NVMe SSD controller manufacturer Phison in 2022 - making them well-placed to deliver some high-quality SSDs. Today, their flagship NEM-PA2TB 2TB SSD is down to $109.99 at Newegg, where you can even pick up a $10 gift card with the purchase - neat.

For context, that ties the best price we've seen for a 2TB NVMe SSD, although this option comes with a heatsink and is therefore a better choice for many PC and all PS5 owners.

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Want to build a small form factor PC based around Intel's 12th-gen, 13th-gen or even their mooted 14th-gen processors? You should know that one of the best Mini ITX motherboards available for Intel CPUs has dropped to $309.99 at Amazon, a high but fair(er) price for an extremely powerful SFF motherboard packed with features. That represents a $90 discount and the best price ever recorded for this model, so it's well worth reading more...

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