Battlefield 6 marks the first time, in all my years of hardwaring, that I have been summoned to someone’s house> in order to make a PC game work. I can’t offer this Jim’ll Fix It service to everyone, not least because IGN’s lawyers have issues with the name, so I’ll just say this: Enabling Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 is inconvenient, but not as fiddly as it sounds, and can be done with at most a couple of toggles in your BIOS/UEFI’s Security section.

As it turns out, that’s probably the worst of BF6’s hardware worries. I don’t know who forgot to tell DICE that all FPS blockbusters must now be callously demanding graphics card shin-kickers, but in both the campaign and multiplayer, this seems to run quite... well? Likely well enough that as long as you’re on any reasonably modern rig, you might not need to do much twiddling with the visual settings.

Still. Let’s have a go at it anyway.

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Altruism is a funny concept. Most of us can agree that bestowing a generous gift of greening shelf-stable bread-like product on the local park pigeons is a nice thing to do, but what of the knowledge that moulders in the back of our minds all the while, telling us: keep this up long enough, and you'll definitely end up with a loyal army of skyborne scavengers willing to enact your every destructive whim at a mere flick of your wrist? Feed them the really good bread, they might even let you throw them at things. From super seeded, to superceding god. Here's the trailer for The Bench.

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This week's Borderlands 4 patch has arrived, firing some gear balancing tweaks into the looter shooter's innards, then probably dropping a cringey catchphrase. Developers Gearbox have also revealed some of what's in store for the larger patch that's set to arrive next week, with performance fixes back on the menu alongside some more in-depth balancing that'll touch "those unintended interactions" folks have been relying on for overpowered builds.

It's all in the line with the nice rhythm the studio have settled into following an initial flurry of activity in response to the game running not goodly on PC out of the gate. Last week brought a big patch featuring the first round of vault hunter balancing tweaks, so this week sees a chaser precede the next shot.

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Battlefield 6's launch day patch was promised to be a big one, and EA weren't lying. The full notes have just arrived ahead of the shooter's launch tomorrow, October 10th. They're over 2700 words long. That's about double the length of my last feature, but solely dedicated to stuff like recoil and times to murderdeath.

If you played the beta, is there anything left you'll actually recognise when you fire up the full version? I've no idea, to be honest, they could have hidden a line about swapping every character model for Mr Bean in here and I'd likely have struggled to clock it.

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All hail the Battlefools! They fan out efficiently from spawn and are instantly massacred in a hail of rifle fire and grenades. Arguments erupt in the chat. Who's watching the flanks? Were you watching the flanks? I'm> not supposed to watch flanks, I'm an engineer - my two defining passions are blowing tanks up and fixing them, a clash of loyalties that routinely gets me run over. You're> a recon - shouldn't you be reconnoitring? Blame gives way to frantic improvisation as the attackers turn defender. People switch classes, get cut down, switch classes again. Support players plant lines of barricades that somehow avail them nothing against the snipers. Squad leaders ping the objective icon furiously, like babies banging the arms of their prams. One squad tries crawling behind a line of parked cars and is promptly squished by hammer-wielding exterminators.

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Hyper Light Breaker, 3D prequel to action-RPG Hyper Light Drifter, won't make it out of early access. Developers Heart Machine have announced that its development is ending, with an unspecified number of layoffs at the studio having been announced at the same time.

It's a depressingly rapid downward trajectory for the follow-up to a game which generally received strong and positive reception, tempered by some criticism of elements such as how it handled communicating the best way to keep making forward progress.

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The word choom gets on my nerves a bit, to be honest. Probably because it feels like it's said every five minutes in Cyberpunk 2077. There's now a mod which might persuade me to reverse my stance, though. It's called Gonkle and allows the game to serve you daily Wordle-style puzzles which might improve your Cyberpunk vocabulary.

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Following Microsoft's mass layoffs earlier this year, a group of former ZeniMax developers have formed a worker-owned studio dubbed Sackbird. Made up of folks who worked on The Elder Scrolls Online and a cancelled MMO codenamed Blackbird, the studio have confirmed they're working on an unnamed original game that'll hit PC and consoles.

Zenimax's Blackbird project was one of numerous games cancelled as Microsoft laid of around 9,000 staff in July, with the ZeniMax Online Studios United union left fighting for the jobs of members affected. Bloomberg subsequently reported that Blackbird was a sci-fi noir-ish third-person shooter with looty bits and lots of vertical movement.

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You might remember that a little while ago, Bethesda announced an auction which'd see the winner given the chance to design a character in The Elder Scrolls 6. Bids were donations to the charity Make-A-Wish, and narrowly missing out on top spot was one from the folks behind the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, the series' long-running and very good independent wiki. The good news is that those folks how now met with Bethesda and had the chance to design their NPC, which'll be a memorial to a forum user whose roleplaying has crossed paths with official Elder Scrolls lore.

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The code Bandai Namco were kind enough to send me for puzzle platformer Little Nightmares 3 included a swathe of bonus costumes resembling characters and monsters from the previous games. Another way to phrase this would be that, before I'd had a chance to get to know this game's duo of very brave, very doomed children, the game offered me a way to paint over their identities with something I recognised from a time I enjoyed myself in the past.

Hmmmmm, thought I. Then I thought it again. But longer.

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