Our hint for today’s Wordle is a versatile thing. Use it early on as a springboard for your own ideas, ensuring your opening guess is as good as they get. Or save it for later, when you’re feeling a bit low on spare rows and green letters. Either way, it’ll help you win—and the April 30 (1411) answer is there to catch you no matter what.
I’d say I stumbled towards today’s answer, an embarrassing series of pratfalls and slip-ups that somehow still revealed fresh yellow and green letters as I went. Maybe that means it wasn’t such a bad game after all. Maybe it means I should’ve taken a minute to breathe before I crashed through the alphabet. Either way, a late win is still better than no win.
Today’s Wordle hint
(Image credit: Josh Wardle)
Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, April 30
From the outside they just look plain lazy, but on closer inspection these task-avoiding individuals are actually working very hard… to make sure they don’t work at all.
Is there a double letter in Wordle today?
No, there is not a double letter in today’s puzzle.
Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day
Playing Wordle well is like achieving a small victory every day—who doesn’t like a well-earned winning streak in a game you enjoy? If you’re new to the daily word game, or just want a refresher, I’m going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success:
You want a balanced mix of unique consonants and vowels in your opening word.
A solid second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
The answer could contain letters more than once.
There’s no time pressure beyond making sure it’s done by the end of the day. If you’re struggling to find the answer or a tactical word for your next guess, there’s no harm in coming back to it later on.
Today’s Wordle answer
(Image credit: Future)
What is today’s Wordle answer?
Here’s your midweek win. The answer to the April 30 (1411) Wordle is IDLER.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Previous Wordle answers
The last 10 Wordle answers
Knowing previous Wordle solutions can be helpful in eliminating current possibilities. It’s unlikely a word will be repeated and you can find inspiration for guesses or starting words that may be eluding you.
Here are some recent Wordle answers:
April 29: BLISS
April 28: DUMMY
April 27: WEEDY
April 26: CLASH
April 25: KNOWN
April 24: GENIE
April 23: OZONE
April 22: ARTSY
April 21: SPATE
April 20: PATCH
Learn more about Wordle
(Image credit: Nurphoto via Getty)
Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and it’s your job to work out which five-letter word is hiding by eliminating or confirming the letters it contains.
Starting with a strong word like LEASH—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good place to start. Once you hit Enter, the boxes will show you which letters you’ve got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn’t in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you’ve got the right letter in the right spot.
Your second go should compliment the starting word, using another “good” guess to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn’t present in today’s answer. After that, it’s just a case of using what you’ve learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there’s an E). Don’t forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).
If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you’d like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.
Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn’t long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.
In 2006 Final Fantasy 12 was a brand new PlayStation 2 game, the Xbox 360’s hard drive was at least in spirit still an optional extra, and horse armour DLC was the biggest corporate issue surrounding Oblivion’s launch. I didn’t play the game back then because I thought I didn’t need to—I had Morrowind, a smug sense of superiority, and no use for a sequel.
Need to know
What is it? The Oblivion you’ve always known and modded with a few tweaks and a fresh coat of polygons on top.
Expect to pay: £49.99 / $49.99
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios, Virtuos
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Reviewed on: Intel i9-13900HX, RTX 4090 (laptop), 32GB RAM
Although Oblivion’s tutorial-laden intro, starring the most obviously doomed MacGuffin-carrying Emperor who ever briefly lived, didn’t do a great job of convincing me otherwise. The only amazement I felt during this segment was that a game this ambitious seriously expected me to be thrilled with the sight of a rat-filled sewer, the most clichéd RPG environment of them all.Was this honestly the best opening they could come up with?
And then I escaped that boring place, and all of my grumbles were instantly forgotten.
This sunlit paradise doesn’t look like a game that came out when My Chemical Romance songs were in the top 10. Not even close. Dragonflies flit across the water, and butterflies lazily flap in the air as flowers gently sway in the breeze. I’m honestly taken aback by it all, and only alt+tab out of the game so I can hastily type ‘Oblivion photo mode’ into the nearest search bar. There isn’t one at the time of writing, and I’m offended on the game’s behalf because of it.
I immediately decide I’m going to walk, rather than fast travel, to the next conveniently marked story location just so I can spend more time taking in my gorgeous surroundings. But the path ahead isn’t quite as beautiful as the one I’m about to leave behind, and that makes me take one last look back and… hang on, is something glowing on that small island just across the water?
Nope, no. Not happening. I mean, yes please, but I’ve got a magical plot device to deliver and I don’t want to get sidetracked straight away and then never recover. But… a little peek wouldn’t hurt seeing as I’m already here, would it?
Dungeon diving
The sheer variety of experiences keeps surprising me
One short swim later and I’m loot-deep in the Vilverin ruins, fighting bandits and poking my nose everywhere I shouldn’t. The tripwire across the entrance I spot just before I set it off may as well be an invitation—if these bandits want me to stay out that badly then there’s got to be something worth spending a little time searching for down here.
I’m quickly so enthralled by this mysterious place I don’t even realise I’ve jumped down into another area with no real idea how I can get back up, and I just shrug and carry on anyway. I’m actually a little disappointed when I notice the name ‘Bandit ringleader’ above someone’s health bar, assuming I’m done here when they finally drop dead.
Image 1 of 4
He’ll never see it coming Because he has no eyes.(Image credit: Bethesda)
I ain’t afraid of no ghosts. Honest.(Image credit: Bethesda)
Definitely not creepy. Nope, not a bit.(Image credit: Bethesda)
(Image credit: Bethesda)
My assumption was way, way off. I spot another mysterious door. Behind it lies a small area with not much in i—is that a pressure plate?
Instead of quickly finishing up and leaving the way I came, my improvised adventure spirals into a world of skeletons, underwater swims into the unknown, and swinging blade traps. I don’t even care how long I’ve been here and any urgency to get on with the ‘real’ story has long gone, because I’m having too much fun here and now. I eventually clear the dungeon, grab some shiny loot, then exit via a handy shortcut.
That sunset I left behind has transformed into a breathtaking canopy of stars. I’m in awe. I’ve done more than just clear a dungeon or complete a subquest, I’ve explored.
Story time
I’ve done so much, even though the game’s hardly begun.
Ploughing through Oblivion’s endless array of quests is simple thanks to a straightforward UI that makes it easy to activate and then follow one particular thread, helpfully keeps interesting side activities separate from main events, and never leaves me more than a click or two away from a large map with big red ‘GO HERE NEXT’ markers on it.
The sheer variety of experiences these markers can lead to keeps surprising me. I’ve sneaked around sleeping cultists. Stolen treasures from forbidden trap-filled labyrinths that had me thinking “I wish somebody would make a fantasy Tomb Raider” the whole time I was in them. In one memorable incident I found myself delicately balancing a temporary drug addiction with the need to push through a place crawling with monsters (I was not completely successful at managing the severe stat buffs that came with the withdrawal).
Even the parts of Oblivion where I can keep my weapons sheathed are intriguing. Every new town and oddball inn stuck in the middle of nowhere has someone worth talking to, or some locked room, suspicious well, or half-hidden hatch I know I shouldn’t enter but will poke around anyway.
The land is heaving with everything from harmless bookcases to unsettling secret murderholes, my curiosity a catalyst for anything from idle rummages around someone’s personal belongings to desperate dashes to safety, new memories made at every turn.
Faces are the worst kind of better—technically better. (Image credit: Bethesda)
It’s just a shame everyone I have to talk to looks so damned strange. The models used for these people, from plain old humans to the catlike khajiit, may be as overhauled as their remastered surroundings, but they’re wrong in every way that matters. Animations and expressions are simplistic and cartoonishly exaggerated, completely at odds with the new high resolution textures and additional details they’re contorting to accommodate.
They often spoil the mood; creating an unintentional disconnect between the intriguing adventures I’m offered, the hard work of the actors voicing the dialogue, and the visual comedy playing out before me.
I can’t even always catch what’s being said. As the original game had its bugs, Oblivion Remastered isn’t without issues: Subtitles are present, but tend to show up when they feel like it. I could somewhat understand if this was defined by my distance to the speaker, but I’ve had people I was rubbing shoulders with hold full back-and-forths without a single line being printed on screen. I’m not just missing out on key story moments when this happens, I’m missing out on the flavour that comes from random NPCs grousing amongst themselves as I stroll down a city street and the immersive, sometimes life-saving battlecries of my allies too.
Dishing out DPS
(Image credit: Bethesda)
Some methods of dispatching whoever crosses my path are much more satisfying than others. Sneak-attacking enemies with a bow from afar never gets old, and neither does filling a monster full of arrows as they try to close the distance. Spellcasting is pleasantly frantic and messy, fireball flinging imagined as something athletic and imprecise. It’s a lot of fun—so long as I’m not using a controller. With a traditional KB+M setup I can freely switch between anything I’ve assigned to the 1-8 keys as I move around. Smoothly shifting from lightning lobbing to a quick heal and back again as I jump around couldn’t be easier. But on a controller I have to rely on a customisable radial menu to switch between spells, and for some reason opening this locks my character in place until it’s closed again. This practically guarantees the enemy will get some free hits in, and tarnishes a comfortable control method that otherwise works beautifully.
Surely almost 20 years is enough time to iron out basic issues with common quests
Even in Remastered form, melee combat is a disappointment no matter how I play. There’s a distinct lack of weight and meaningful reaction to my blows, and it never really looks like direct contact’s being made. I’m not swinging a sword or blocking an incoming attack, I’m pressing buttons as animations play out and health bars deplete.
This lack of reactivity is only exacerbated by the game’s AI, which, huh, seems to have been pulled directly out of 2006. I shouldn’t be able to kill an entire cult’s worth of weirdos by kiting them around their own altar, every last one politely chasing after me in an orderly fashion, and it’d be nice if monsters consistently noticed when their fellow fiends drop dead a few feet away.
(Image credit: Bethesda)
Other bugs pop up often, many of them quest-related. Key NPCs get stuck repeating the same lines and scripted sequences fail to correctly move on to the next state in the stack. These aren’t edge cases that only show up in minor quests most players never see, but early mainline scenarios. They drag the entire experience down, leaving me questioning everything I do. Did I succeed here because I was clever, lucky, or did another bug swing this fight in my favour? Have I missed something important, or has the game broken down again?
Yes, some jank is to be expected—is it even a real Bethesda RPG if there aren’t bugs?—but this is a brand new remaster. Surely almost 20 years is enough time to iron out basic issues with common quests.
And add some meaningful reactivity to them. The guild quests don’t shine quite so brightly in a post-Baldur’s Gate 3 landscape. A single arrow loosed at the wrong moment was all it took for the Dark Brotherhood’s messenger to gleefully declare me a cold-blooded killer, and in an astonishing lack of player agency I was forced to accept their quest and dagger. This quest line does lead to some fun moments—protecting someone from the irritated corpses of their dead relatives raised a smile—but it also lays bare how little RP resides in this RPG’s storytelling. I have no real choice but to do as I’m told or not engage at all, all paths leading to the same end. I’m always exactly as virtuous or vengeful as the latest quest giver needs me to be, and Oblivion felt smaller for it.
(Image credit: Bethesda)
But when it does work, and to be fair it usually does, I’m fully absorbed in this fantasy world. I can sit in a tavern—any tavern—and listen to NPCs strike up conversations with each other, or organically overhear something that adds a new topic to my conversations. I’m desperate to climb every mountain peak and dive into every deep lake I come across because I know there’s always something worthwhile waiting for me if I go exploring. Maybe not something I can use or sell, but at the very least I’ll get to watch the sun rise over the lands below, or perhaps discover a submerged cave entrance I had no idea existed. It’s worth spending a night walking from one town to the next, just to give myself a chance to get lost in the wilds—and probably find some previously unmarked location when I do.
My rigid quest list is all but abandoned, unchecked and uncompleted, and I only feel free. I am the author of my own grand adventure, and I decide what happens next.
Waiting for a missed skin to return in the Fortnite shop is, at times, a trying task. Even more so if you’re gunning for a collaboration—some return pretty regularly, while others disappear into the vault for hundreds or even thousands of days, often with no indication of when (or even if) they’ll return.
Take the Borderlands Psycho skin, for example. First introduced in August 2019—just before Borderlands 3 launched—it returned a handful of times before vanishing entirely after May 31, 2020. Now, after almost five years, it’s back in the store to purchase once more.
The Psycho bundle comes with the main man himself, plus a Claptrap back bling and some buzz axes to hack away with, and will set players back 2,000 V-bucks. Even as someone who isn’t a massive Borderlands head, it’s a pretty sweet-looking skin, and even sweeter that people who jumped on the Fortnite bandwagon in the last five years finally have the chance to pick it up themselves.
That hasn’t stopped some people being pissy about it, mind. Both the X and TikTok posts are flooded with folk asking for an OG version—usually an alternative colourway for original owners—and even complaints about Psycho’s return lowering people’s account value.
It also turns out that, for the last few years, codes for the Psycho bundle have been going for a ridiculous amount of money. A cursory Google search shows results for anywhere in the realm of £700 to £1000 ($900 to $1300) which is, quite frankly, a baffling sum to waste on an in-game cosmetic.
I’m sure some of those key sellers won’t be too happy about the re-run, but I’m all here for more cosmetics making a return. Virtual scarcity is silly, and I think we should be putting less stock in “rarity” of things that just happened to be in a paid shop when you were playing and someone else was not.
Psycho’s return now leaves Kratos as the rarest collaboration skin, last seen over 1,500 days ago in March 2021 according to third-party site Fortnite.gg. Keeping hope for all the God of War fans that he’ll make a return eventually—at least you’re not an Arcane fan being told Jinx and Vi aren’t coming back anytime soon.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/1745928985_Fortnites-rarest-collaboration-has-returned-to-the-store-after-a.jpg5631000Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2025-04-29 13:00:532025-04-29 13:00:53Fortnite’s rarest collaboration has returned to the store after a 1,794 day absence
Dark Souls 2 is widely considered the “worst” Dark Souls game, which is not only wrong (that distinction goes to the greatest hits listlessness of Dark Souls 3) but ignores the fact that it could have had a giant hermit crab with a castle tower as a shell.
As discovered by YouTuber Zullie the Witch, the Lost Bastille area was originally meant to have a big ‘ol crustacean boss battle, which would have marked the first appearance of a crab in a series that absolutely loves ’em. The one cut from Dark Souls 2 wasn’t just a typical giant crab either, but instead a crab wearing a portion of the Lost Bastille itself on its back.
The video speculates about how this boss battle could have played out. It’s possible that the giant tower-bearing crab could have been fought in the large arena in front of it, which is as boring as it is probably true. The other option is much more interesting: the player could have entered the castle tower itself in order to descend the spiral stairs and wack the poor decapod in the backside until it died, all the better to receive the Malformed Shell, which actually exists in Dark Souls 2 and was originally titled the two-handed hammer of the Hermit Crab (the Malformed Claw is also associated with this ditched boss). It’s also possible that the player could choose either option.
FromSoftware seemed pretty determined to get a crab into Dark Souls 2 for a while, which is pretty on brand. There’s a second crab-centric mockup in the game files, also in the Bastille area. This version had more legs, a rounder body, a big long head, and based on its design, might have been able to leave its tower shell—presumably offering the player a brief window in which to slash away at its underside thus causing massive damage.
Whatever was actually planned, it’s more proof that Dark Souls 2 had a lot of good ideas left on the cutting room floor, the most famous being its dynamic lighting system—which FromSoft actually showed off pre-launch, and which modders have since reinstated. Less quantifiable, but more pervasive, is the game’s austere sense of emptiness in some areas, like it was never given a final decorative coating. In this way, it kinda reminds me of all the PS2-era aping dungeon crawlers that are popular at the moment. Dark Souls 2 has a special vibe about it, something vague and indescribable, that I love.
Arguing about Dark Souls 2 is a sport around here. In 2020, James Davenport controversially brought attention to its brilliance, a fact that many simply will not countenance due to a lack of imagination. In 2022 Lincoln Carpenter saw fit to chronicle the difficulties and injustices experienced by Dark Souls 2 defenders. A year later, Sam Greer proclaimed that “time has redeemed Dark Souls 2” which is controversial only in the sense that—c’mon Sam—it didn’t need redeeming.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Dark-Souls-2-cut-content-includes-a-giant-enemy-crab.png8251289Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2025-04-29 02:56:272025-04-29 02:56:27Dark Souls 2 cut content includes a giant enemy crab wearing a castle tower as a shell which you could enter from above for massive damage
It is the year 2025 and Bethesda wants you to tell it how to improve Oblivion. Such is the strange and rich new world we’ve been plunged into by last week’s release of Oblivion Remastered, which fixed some parts of the original game’s jank, lovingly preserved others, and introduced some entirely new bits of its own.
Now Bethesda is calling on players to suggest where it (or at least, where developer Virtuos) goes from here. In a channel on its Discord called #oblivion-suggestions, players are pouring in with ideas, beliefs, opinions, and notions.
Some of them are things that, call me a pessimist, I don’t think are ever going to happen, like the few people asking if Bethesda could do them a solid and just wholesale port Skyrim’s combat system over to Oblivion. Others, though, seem like excellent ideas. Of the suggestions that people are making, one of the most popular is an adjustment to Oblivion Remastered’s difficulty, and I couldn’t agree more.
Though I’ve been enjoying the game, the fact is that Oblivion Remastered is, well, a little easy on its default difficulty setting of Adept. I hardly take damage from anything and I struggle to find an enemy I can’t kill with three arrows or a couple of fireballs. But if I knock the game up a notch, to Expert, it all gets a little too much. There’s no Goldilocks difficulty that feels good to play, and that seems to be a sentiment shared by a whole bunch of people on Bethesda’s Discord—over 5,000 of them, actually, judging by a quick search on my part, most of whom mentioned something about the gulf between Adept and Expert being too vast.
My suggestion: 100 more Oblivion gates, all compulsory. (Image credit: Bethesda)
But it’s not just difficulty that people are nattering about. There are all sorts of quality-of-life changes they want, too (and so do I). Sorting your inventory by type rather than just weight, value, or alphabetically? God, yes please. It’d make finding potions and ingredients much less of a chore. Selling multiple items at once? Absolutely. Showing your encumbrance in loot menus? Almost a necessity. Oh, and just as a personal favour, if someone at Bethesda or Virtuos could see their way to adding way more shortcut slots, I’d appreciate it. Eight just isn’t enough.
So if you have suggestions of your own, head on over to Bethesda’s Discord. I’m encouraged by this. The thing is, the channel is deliberately separate from the bug reports section. Bethesda doesn’t just want ideas for fixes, it’s open to making further changes to modernise Oblivion without compromising its mad soul. I’m very curious to see if these suggestions get adopted in future updates, and curious if it means we might see even bigger changes (new DLC?) later on down the line.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/1745856865_Bethesda-wants-you-to-suggest-ideas-for-Oblivion-Remastered-so.jpg14402560Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2025-04-28 17:10:482025-04-28 17:10:48Bethesda wants you to suggest ideas for Oblivion Remastered, so get over there and tell it to add more shortcut slots and a difficulty between Adept and Expert
Tear down the bunting, Tumblr users, it seems reports of 4chan’s demise were premature. Earlier in April, a hack of the infamous edgelord imageboard perpetrated by someone from a rival board called Soyjack.party forced 4chan offline and resulted in its anonymity being peeled away. Now it’s back, with a blog post explaining how the “catastrophic” damage was possible.
“While not all of our servers were breached, the most important one was, and it was due to simply not updating old operating systems and code in a timely fashion. Ultimately this problem was caused by having insufficient skilled man-hours available to update our code and infrastructure, and being starved of money for years by advertisers, payment providers, and service providers who had succumbed to external pressure campaigns.”
The hack involved a “bogus PDF upload” and so PDF uploading has been temporarily disabled on the revived 4chan. The feature will return, but something else won’t. “One slow but much beloved board, /f/ – Flash, will not be returning however, as there is no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files.”
There’s no mention made of the fact that 4chan Pass subscribers, who pay to skip CAPTCHA verification, had their personal information stolen. Which seems like a bigger problem for the site’s long-term health, given that anonymity is the whole point of 4chan. Still, the blog, hosted on 4chan’s hated enemy Tumblr, is treating its return as a victory: “4chan is back. No other website can replace it, or this community. No matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.”
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/1745820802_After-a-catastrophic-hack-4chan-has-risen-from-the-grave.jpg10801920Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2025-04-28 04:23:452025-04-28 04:23:45After a ‘catastrophic’ hack, 4chan has risen from the grave: ‘No other website can replace it, or this community’
Larian Studios is gearing up to develop two new projects at once, and based on CEO Swen Vincke’s remarks in a recent GameSpot interview, it sounds like further refining the studio’s already-lauded storytelling will be at the heart of the process.
“We’re trying to make the stories of our future games now so that we have a big backlog of stories available for us when we start on the next thing,” Vincke told GameSpot’s Tamoor Hussain.
Now that Baldur’s Gate 3 has gotten its final major patch, it sounds like Larian is all systems go on its upcoming project—or projects, as the studio has two irons in the fire for the first time since the early 2010s, when it was simultaneously developing the first Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Dragon Commander.
“We’re building a fairly large storytelling team to work together with our writing team,” Vincke said. As for the difference between this new team and the writers Larian has had all along? “The writers work on the games.
“Storytelling teams basically create stories in whatever form for future games and then obviously they work together with our teams on the current games also. But it’s really more of a forward-looking thing than a ‘today’ thing.”
Vincke went on to explain that game writing is much more complex than most players realize, listing all the factors that a videogame writing team has to stay on top of:
“Narrative design, dialogue writing, making sure that you have all permutations covered, arcs over longer periods of time across multiple games, these are all different disciplines and they require specialization and so you need people that are used to doing these things.”
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
The storytelling team sounds like it will specialize in the first step of this process, the “blue sky” phase when developers are coming up with the more general ideas of the story their game will tell. Once that’s fleshed out, writers take on the finer details like the lines of dialogue you hear from NPCs or making sure that character arcs are consistent.
Vincke pointed out that writers and storytellers also need to be thinking about the player experience, commenting, “We are a company that iterates a lot and needs a lot of story because when you play our games and you decide to do something, you want your story to continue. So, somebody needs to have thought of this.”
One thing that really stood out to me as well: Vincke went into how different writing backgrounds can be better suited for various aspects of videogame storytelling, including how screenwriters for multi-season TV shows or movie trilogies would be well-prepared for handling choice and reactivity across multiple games. It certainly sounds like Mass Effect-style multi-game choices is something Larian is at least considering.
While we haven’t heard much yet about Larian’s next game, we know it will not be Baldur’s Gate 4, but instead a new RPG codenamed “Excalibur.” Regardless of what “Excalibur” ends up being, this news of a dedicated storytelling team is a really interesting development.
After Divinity: Original Sin 1 was criticized for its more whimsical, less character-driven story, Larian seriously boned up on that front for Original Sin 2. After blowing our expectations out of the water with writing and characters in Baldur’s Gate 3, the studio clearly wants to keep up that trajectory rather than resting on its laurels.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/1745784741_Stories-are-our-bread-and-butter-Larian-is-building-a.jpg10801920Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2025-04-27 20:58:152025-04-27 20:58:15‘Stories are our bread and butter’: Larian is building a special team to lay out the plot of its games years in advance
A clever little tower defense game released earlier this month, and the demo, at least, is damn good. In Gnomes, you’re put in charge of a little horde of angry bearded dudes in red hats who must build their beautiful little garden and then defend it from a goblin invasion. They are surprisingly vicious.
After each wave, the arena gets larger and the enemy spawn points change, and you’ve got to place money-generating crops alongside the little houses and trees you use to funnel goblins into killing fields. Gnomes, being clever gardeners, also know how to place useful weeds that benefit them and harm goblins foolish enough to break through them.
It’s a simple setup that generates enough complexity that Gnomes has sold more than 10,000 copies and holds a coveted 98% positive user review status on Steam with 563 reviews as of press time.
A few hours with the demo convinced me that this was something special, given that each playthrough blends both procedurally generated and predictable-if-vicious bespoke content. Each run has you choose a gnome guild, which determines your starting economy and gnome, but diverges wildly from there as a different set of relics, tools, plants, buildings, and new gnomes becomes available in the shop between each round.
I can’t speak highly enough of the randomized map, too. It’s just cool stuff that as the world expands it adds new terrain—thick little forests and patches of uncoverable swamp that goblins can traverse but you can’t. You can even get relics that alter the world on their own! I got one that turned every spot a gnome was placed into fertile soil by the next round, ready for fresh crops to be planted.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/1745748699_Heres-a-tower-defense-about-little-bloodthirsty-gnomes-in-little.jpg141262Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2025-04-27 07:00:302025-04-27 07:00:30Here’s a tower defense about little bloodthirsty gnomes in little red hats
From 2000 to 2010, one of the most important studios in videogames was making the kind of games you’d see dismissed off-hand today. If PopCap released Bejeweled out of the blue right now every YouTube comment would say “looks like a shit mobile game,” but instead we live in the reality where PopCap dominated the casual game market for an entire decade, and now almost everything on mobile looks like a shit PopCap game.
PopCap was so important there was a Peggle game in the Orange Box. Valve’s massive rectangular mic drop may be remembered for Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two, but it also contained Peggle Extreme—a crossover collaboration where Bjorn the unicorn had a headcrab and each of its 10 Peggle levels was themed around a Valve game. You’d clear a screen of orange pegs and hear the G-Man creepily utter, “Cleverly done.”
These days Peggle Extreme is available free on Steam, where it stands as a glorious reminder of the days when PopCap ruled. It wasn’t the only crossover between the casual gaming upstart and a major developer. Gyromancer was the result of a collaboration with Square Enix that married match-3 gem-spinning right out of Bejeweled Twist with JRPG storytelling and Final Fantasy monsters. Gyromancer lacked the PopCap sense of humor, which is probably why it’s forgotten today, but it’s another sign of an era when PopCap was so culturally significant UNESCO should have slapped World Heritage status on it.
Some of PopCap’s games were endlessly replayable because they presented simple ideas wrapped in enough color and incident to keep them compelling. Chuzzle is a perfect example, another match-3 game but one where you dragged rows and columns of adorable fuzzballs and L-shaped combos were allowed. I still play it today, and my girlfriend laughs when she pokes her head into the study to see what hardcore PC strategy game I’m playing today only to find I’m Chuzzling again.
Best believe I’m still (playing) Bejeweled
The best of PopCap’s games took those simple ideas and wrung every drop of juice out of them across a mania of modes. Bejeweled 3 has classic mode, timed mode, puzzle mode, and the buck wild “Zen mode” where you play endless Bejeweled while being reminded of your breathing as ambient sounds and mantras reinforce your choice of positive thinking, self-confidence, or weight loss. Four more unlockable modes let you match gems to rescue butterflies, prevent ice from freezing your grid, dynamite a mine full of diamonds, or complete poker hands in what is basically a Bejeweled take on Balatro 14 years before Balatro was a thing.
(Image credit: EA)
And Bejeweled 3 didn’t even have one of the story modes where an entire campaign of whimsical oddness linked the levels together. Those really went above and beyond, with Bookworm Adventures having a plot about traveling through different genres of fiction and mythology you wouldn’t expect from a word-forming puzzle game. Even Heavy Weapon, a Flash-style arcade sidescrolling shooter, came with a thick parody of “Red Menace” propaganda.
The jewel in this particular crown was Plants vs. Zombies, which felt like the culmination of everything PopCap had been working toward for the prior decade. While the variety of vegetable defenders made it more complicated than something like Insaniquarium, its lane-based format kept it simpler than the other tower defense games of the time. The story mode was light-touch, told through Crazy Dave’s rants and barely literate letters from the undead, and unlocked an incredible variety of minigames and puzzle modes. As well as bowling and a zen garden and survival mode there were recreations of whole other PopCap games with undead theming, Insaniquarium appearing as Zombiquarium and Bejeweled as Beghouled.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
The traffic-cone zombies, even more shambling and pathetic than zombies usually are, were a perfect contrast with the bold-faced plants (whose almanac entries were written by cartoonist and PopCap regular Steve Notley, creator of Bob the Angry Flower). The climax of the game being a musical number with a singing sunflower performed by Laura Shigihara was the icing on the cake, but also feels like a relic of a distant time, a whole ‘nother era of internet—a relic of a less cynical internet age.
Zombies on Your Lawn MUSIC VIDEO (HD 60fps) – Plants vs. Zombies Ending Credits Song – YouTube
PopCap’s early games were often built on existing ideas, with Zuma a fairly blatant reskin of ’90s arcade game Puzz Loop, while Peggle drew inspiration from pachinko and pinball, and Bejeweled’s match-3 mechanics have been traced back to a Russian game called Shariki. But as casual games moved to Facebook and mobile, PopCap became the one to copy, with Candy Crush the most blatant example. When it joined them, trading the world of deluxe casual for freemium, it became just another crab in the bucket.
Apparently the studio was planning a shift to mobile and free-to-play games before being bought by EA, but that moment still marks a convenient line. Most of PopCap’s games stopped coming out on PC and were full of offputting compulsion mechanics, while Plants vs. Zombies became a skin to stretch over a series of middling multiplayer shooters.
Rather than end on a down note, let me point out that the spirit of PopCap is alive and well in idiosyncratic indie games that take one simple idea and rinse it, usually with an offbeat story mode thrown in. There’s Donut County, Octogeddon, Grey Alien’s Regency Solitaire series, Peglin (basically Peggle with goblins), and Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 (basically an imaginary Dino Crisis spin-off from a world where “survival horror match-3 metroidvania” is a valid genre).
PopCap spent a decade coming up with new ways for us to match three things, whether we spun them in a circle or shot them out of a frog’s mouth, and that level of creativity is still with us even if it’s spread over a bunch of indie developers. I haven’t seen anyone follow up on Bookworm Adventures, but fortunately that one did end up with de facto World Heritage status because you can still find it on the Internet Archive.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/1745712616_I-miss-old-PopCap-like-you-miss-old-BioWare.jpg10801920Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2025-04-26 23:04:032025-04-26 23:04:03I miss old PopCap like you miss old BioWare
The internet creates a very strange kind of closeness, doesn’t it? There are, on my Steam friends list, numerous people who just dropped off the Earth one day. One guy has been gone for a year. Another, 3646 days. If these were people I knew in real life, this kind of thing would have me filing a police report. The distance of a computer screen means that these people I used to see and perhaps speak to every day are just gone now. I hope they return.
But it happens outside the confines of my Steam friends list, too. Two years ago games YouTuber/Bethesda shitposter Micky D uploaded a Fallout video and promptly vanished, only rearing his head again a few days ago to celebrate the Oblivion remaster before dropping an unhinged new video: Can You Play Daggerfall Without Leaving Daggerfall?
Can You Play Daggerfall Without Leaving Daggerfall? – YouTube
The premise is simple enough: fire up The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, sprint out of the opening dungeon, make your way across the game’s absurdly enormous map (literally the size of Great Britain) to the titular city, then lock yourself inside and never come out. The goal is to somehow amass a million gold—enough to buy the most expensive house in town—without ever stepping outside. This is a painful process. I am glad I did not have to do it but instead just watched a very amusing video about it.
Micky D eventually accomplished his happy task, although he ended up trapped in his new home’s loft by a disappearing staircase bug that feels like some kind of message from god.
But the experience sent me down a rabbit hole of challenge videos for Elder Scrolls games that I’ve not thought about in a very long time. Like the guys who play the first part of Morrowind without being able to see, or without walking, or who try to literally kill god at level 1.
I love this stuff, even though it’s not the kind of thing I would ever do myself (well, maybe for content). It feels like a kind of stress testing: forcing a game into an entirely new shape and seeing if it holds up, and at the same time revealing entirely new qualities in it that you might not even have noticed before.
For instance, that if you have a good enough knowledge of the layout of Morrowind’s opening level, you can finagle your way out of it blind by paying attention to where the directional audio cues come from (or, well, almost. Our hero eventually had to write out the necessary keystrokes step-by-step, but the principle is sound).
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
(Image credit: Bethesda)
It’s a testament to the flexibility and, well, admirable brokenness of these classic Elder Scrolls games, and that’s before you get into adding in mods that let you do things like make everyone in the game a zombie. You’re not meant to be able to murder a god at level 1 and you’re not meant to be able to spend your entire life amassing a fortune in a single town in a map the size of Britain, but these games’ systems are so slippery, so strange, and so unrestricted that it becomes doable anyway.
I imagine wiser developers might never put a set of arrows in that could kill literally anything in one hit, nor would they let you permanently kill someone integral to the main plot. But the fact that they did, in a fit of youthful indiscretion, means players are still layering on absolutely baffling challenges atop the game the devs actually meant to make two decades (or more) after they came out. I can’t help but love those imperfections.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/1745676552_My-favourite-Elder-Scrolls-YouTuber-returned-after-2-years-and.jpg13862438Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2025-04-26 13:00:002025-04-26 13:00:00My favourite Elder Scrolls YouTuber returned after 2 years, and it’s made me fall in love with ridiculous challenge runs all over again
We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.
Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.
Essential Website Cookies
These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.
Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the website, refusing them will have impact how our site functions. You always can block or delete cookies by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website. But this will always prompt you to accept/refuse cookies when revisiting our site.
We fully respect if you want to refuse cookies but to avoid asking you again and again kindly allow us to store a cookie for that. You are free to opt out any time or opt in for other cookies to get a better experience. If you refuse cookies we will remove all set cookies in our domain.
We provide you with a list of stored cookies on your computer in our domain so you can check what we stored. Due to security reasons we are not able to show or modify cookies from other domains. You can check these in your browser security settings.
Google Analytics Cookies
These cookies collect information that is used either in aggregate form to help us understand how our website is being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are, or to help us customize our website and application for you in order to enhance your experience.
If you do not want that we track your visit to our site you can disable tracking in your browser here:
Other external services
We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers. Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.
Google Webfont Settings:
Google Map Settings:
Google reCaptcha Settings:
Vimeo and Youtube video embeds:
Other cookies
The following cookies are also needed - You can choose if you want to allow them:
Privacy Policy
You can read about our cookies and privacy settings in detail on our Privacy Policy Page.
