Many Doors codes reward players with Knobs, the essential in-game currency that can be used during games to unlock life-saving items like lockpicks and vitamins. As you make your way through the daunting, eerie corridors of this deadly walking simulator, you'll need lockpicks, a flashlight, and other survival items, or you might not even make it past door 13.

Yes, you'll earn Knobs by making your way through as many doors as possible each time you take on this Roblox survival challenge, but buying items in the pre-game store can help you get further. That's why you should redeem the Doors codes below before your next run and spend them on some handy items, thus earning you even more Knobs in return.

If you're after some more general avatar rewards to use in all of your experiences, then we've got the current Roblox promo codes covered too.

All Doors codes

These are the Doors codes you can redeem right now:

• PROTOCOL - 20x Stardust
• ACCESS GRANTED - 150x Knobs
• ACCESS DENIED - 150x Knobs
• JUMP OVER THE BRICK - 1x Stardust
• PATHSWAP - 1x Stardust
• VOCAB HAVOC - 1x Stardust
• REPRESSED - 10x Stardust
• LAZYDEVS - 50x Knobs
• 3RD - 33x Knobs
• SCREECHSUCKS - 25x Knobs
• 8BITRYAN - 5x Knobs
• ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ - 5x Knobs
• BIJUU MIKE - 5x Knobs
• DANTDM - 5x Knobs
• FIND THE TROLLFACES - 5x Knobs
• ISHOWSPEED - 5x Knobs
• KREEKCRAFT - 5x Knobs
• KUBZ SCOUTS - 5x Knobs
• LORE - 5x Knobs
• PENGUINZ0 - 5x Knobs
• RAGDOLL MAYHEM - 5x Knobs
• RAGDOLL UNIVERSE - 5x Knobs
• THINKNOODLES - 5x Knobs
• W - 5x Knobs
• XQC - 5x Knobs
• 41 - 5x Knobs
• 54 - 5x Knobs
• 67 - 5x Knobs
• CHEDDAR BALLS - 1x Knobs
• /E FREE - 1x Knobs
• CRUSADERS - 5x Stardust

As you can see from the list of Doors codes above, all of the active promos are for Knobs or Stardust, since these are the two primary currencies in the game. Some last longer than others, and there's often no way of telling when codes will expire, so redeem new promos as soon as you see them.

How to redeem Doors codes

The easiest way to redeem Doors codes on Roblox is to click on the codes button from the bottom menu bar, which is indicated by three asterisks. You can also click on any of the menu buttons and scroll all the way to the end. Once on the codes screen, enter a code into the Enter Code Here box, then hit enter on your keyboard, A on Xbox, X on PlayStation, or touch the screen on mobile to claim your reward.

Doors codes aren't case-sensitive, so you only need to worry about getting the spelling right, but this in many cases includes spaces, so you should also make sure there are no stray spaces at the end of your code as this will prevent it from working.

Expired Doors codes

• TEST - 1x Knobs
• 100MVISITS - 100x Knobs, 1x Revive
• LOOKBEHINDYOU - 25x Knobs
• PSST - 25x Knobs
• 500MVISITS - 100x Knobs, 1x Revive
• ONEBILLIONVISITS - 100x Knobs, 1x Revive, 1x Knob Boost
• SORRYFORDELAY - 100x Knobs, 1x Revive
• SORRYBOUTTHAT- 100x Knobs, 1x Revive
• 2BILLIONVISITS - 100x Knobs, 1x Revive, 1x Knob Boost
• THREE - 133x Knobs, 1x Revive, 1x Knob Boost
• 4B - 144x Knobs, 1x Revive
• THEHUNT- 1x Revive
• 5B - 105x Knobs, 1x Revive
• SIX2025 - 100xKnobs, 1x Revive
• 1000 - 100x Knobs
• GULLIBLE - prank, no rewards
• 777- 7x Stardust, 777x Knobs, 1x Revive
• GRACE - 2x Knobs
• NO_DATA- 5x Knobs
• FE4R_RBX - 5x Knobs

Plenty of Doors codes have expired over the years the game has been live, and many more will surely follow, so be sure to redeem them as soon as you see them.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Palworld lead Bucky wants to make sure everyone knows that Side by Side is simply update 1.1, not a sequel or a new spinoff game.

Earlier this week, Palworld announced "Side by Side," which may sound like a subtitle for a sequel or spinoff, but it's actually just the name of the next update for the game, set to release in Winter 2026. It even came with mysterious key art that clearly had some people thinking it was something huge, prompting Pocketpair head of publishing and communications John "Bucky" Buckley to set the record straight.

Over on Twitter, Bucky notes, "Palworld Side by Side is v1.1 by the way." He continues, "I thought that was pretty clear, but it seems quite a few people thought it was a new game announcement." So if you were expecting "Palworld 2 with terrain modification and underwater biomes" like one (joking) response, I'm afraid that's not happening.

So what does it involve? While we don't yet know, speaking to MP1st recently, Bucky explains that "we’re not quite ready to start teasing it just yet." However, he did reveal one note about what to expect from Palworld Side by Side's 1.1 update, saying, "1.1 isn’t a massive update," but that "we do think players will be pretty happy with it."

One thing you can rule out is Palworld Side by Side adding "100 new Pals," as Bucky said in the same interview that Pocketpair developers "try to add Pals in a meaningful way." We got 72 new pals in the massive 1.0 patch a few months back, so I don't expect we'll see many new additions – if any – this time around.

Palworld picks spin-offs over a Fortnite-style metaverse because "maximizing revenue as quickly as possible isn’t what drives our creative decisions," says Pocketpair lead

Palworld is getting a new update called Side by Side, and it's due to release in Winter 2026.

That comes from a new press release by Pocketpair, which confirms the news without revealing much else. At the time of writing, all we have to share is an image with three different Pals blacked out. Pocketpair, meanwhile, asks you to "stay tuned for further updates on what this new content will bring."

Amusingly, in the same press release, Pocketpair also reveals the results of a recent popularity poll. I don't need to tell you who won that one, because I'd wager you already know, but for the sake of completeness, Sekmet came first, while Solene and Chillet came after. There were 280 Pals and in-game characters to vote on, and the resulting lists were split between Pals and non-Pals. If you're curious who the most popular non-Pals are, that'd be Zoe, Auri, and Saya, in that order.

While we know little else about what's to come for Palworld, head of publishing and communications John "Bucky" Buckley has been doing the media rounds of late to talk about the developer's overall approach to content. Just recently, he said that the team isn't going to "release 100 new Pals with the next update" as the belief at the studio is that "every Pal should have something" memorable. As such, I wouldn't expect Side by Side to feature heaps of new pocket pals. No wonder the image only features the three of 'em.

Oh, and if covering Palworld over the years has taught me anything, don't expect any underwater biome action. It isn't happening, as Bucky is often keen to stress.

Oh, and Palworld picks spin-offs over a Fortnite-style metaverse because "maximizing revenue as quickly as possible isn’t what drives our creative decisions," says Pocketpair lead.

You might not have heard of the town of Skövde, Sweden, but if you spend much time staying abreast of Steam's biggest hits, you've probably heard of some of the titles its improbably large game development community has built. The town of roughly 58,000 people has created so many viral hits – particularly in the survival genre – that it's now got its own Hollywood-inspired "Walk of Game" celebrating them all.

Skövde's Walk of Game is open to games that have sold at least 3 million copies (or reached 15 million downloads, for free titles) and had at least 50% of development hours completed in the town. The games enshrined in the city's sidewalks include Goat Simulator and Satisfactory from Coffee Stain Studios, V Rising from Stunlock Studios, Valheim from Iron Gate, and Raft from Redbeet Interactive.

The latest game to be enshrined in the Walk of Game is RV There Yet, a notable hit in the post-friendslop boom where you've got to work together with your buddies to get a massive RV home along an absurdly dangerous road. It was developed in under two months and sold over two million copies in the space of a week – another big win for Skövde's game dev community.

How does the town keep doing it? "The university offers a game dev course and an incubator helps the graduates start companies," the RV There Yet devs offer on Twitter. "That combo creates a mega-dense game dev-per-capita ratio!"

Whatever the reasons why, Skövde has clearly built a game dev hub worthy of celebration, and I'm looking forward to finding out what the next hit from its developers will look like.

These are the best survival games to play in 2026.

Palworld has seen its fair share of new Pals since Pocketpair first launched its Pokemon-like survival game into the wild, with 1.0 adding 72 just over the summer – but that doesn't mean that the developers are in a rush to add loads more.

Speaking in a new interview with MP1st, Pocketpair head of publishing and communications John "Bucky" Buckley explains as much when asked how the studio plans to keep the game's roster "fresh," so to speak.

"We try not to think of new Pals as simply adding another number to the roster," the lead admits. "Rather than saying, 'We need to release 100 new Pals with the next update,' we try to add Pals in a meaningful way."

The devs aren't trying to add new Pals willy-nilly. They want each Pal to be memorable, and that means giving each one's conception a good bit of thought.

"Ideally, every Pal should have something that gives players a reason to remember it," as Buckley says, "whether that is its design, abilities, work suitability, combat role, personality, or sometimes just something strange or funny about it."

Not to mention what more Pals means for the roster. With each new Pal comes an adjustment to the overall game's balance, if you think about it – they all bring new abilities to the table, after all.

As Buckley describes, "Of course, balance becomes more complicated as the roster grows, so we continue to look at player data and feedback every time we release new Pals." In other words, Pocketpair keeps a close eye on fans' thoughts following the addition of any Pals.

The last batch was quite a hefty one as well, and, yes, balance patches followed close behind. An update in early September saw various Pal adjustments, battle changes, item tweaks, and much more.

It's evident that the work for Pocketpair doesn't simply end at the addition of new Pals, and it's a more well-thought-out process, as Buckley details. Will I still wait around hoping for some pastel pink, fairy-themed Pals, though? Yes.

Palworld picks spin-offs over a Fortnite-style metaverse because "maximizing revenue as quickly as possible isn’t what drives our creative decisions," says Pocketpair lead

Vampire Life codes provide you with a serious advantage in this survival MMORPG, by boosting your XP earning rate for a period of time so you can level up much faster. As you explore the world and fight with enemies to grow stronger you're not just limited to being a vampire, as you can also become a devastating werewolf or a crafty spellcasting witch.

Using the promos available will increase the speed you earn experience by up to four times the usual rate, and with these rewards stacking you can rack up multiple hours of fast levelling in this bloodthirsty Roblox experience. If you're all set to strike fear into the hearts of your opponents, then here are the codes for Vampire Life and how to redeem them.

If you seek some promos that unlock more general rewards for use in every experience, then check out the latest Roblox promo codes.

All Vampire Life codes

The following Vampire Life codes can currently be used to claim rewards:

• THX14KLIKES – 30 minutes of 4x XP new!
• THX12KLIKES – 2 hours of Double XP, 400,000 Money
• 11KLIKESTHX – 2 hours of 4x XP
• UPDATEUIMOBILE – 1 hour of 3x XP
• THX10KLIKES26 – 30 minutes of 4x XP
• THX9KLIKES – 1 hour of 3x XP
• WITCHESFARMSER – 2 hours of Double XP
• WFEEDVAMPS – 1 hour of 4x XP
• KAISERTORTOYT – 2 hours of Double XP
• THANKYOU300 – 30 minutes of Double XP

There are a decent number of active codes for Vampire Life, which all give a boosted amount of XP for a set period of time, and these appear to stack up – a timer at the top of the screen will tell you your current XP boost and how long is remaining. Previous promos have also awarded Money, so that may return with future codes.

How to redeem Vampire Life codes

To redeem Vampire Life codes you just need to hit the Cog icon at the top of the screen, then scroll down the menu that appears and select the CODES option. That will bring up the REDEEM CODE window, so use the ENTER CODE text box to type in a promo and then tap the REDEEM button to collect your reward. Codes for Vampire Life are not case sensitive, so you only need to make sure you use the correct spelling.

Expired Vampire Life codes

• CRYHACKERSLOL – 30 minutes of 4x XP
• ILOVEALLVAMP – 30 minutes of 4x XP
• NEWCODUPDATE27 – 2 hours of Double XP, 5,000 Money
• NEWCODNEWNPC – 2 hours of Double XP
• SORRYILOVELALL – 30 minutes of 4x XP
• RESETPOINTUNK – Points reset
• SORRY2KL – 30 minutes of 3x XP, 20,000 Money
• THANKS1KL – 20 minutes of Double XP, 10 minutes of Double Money
• THANKS700L – 15 minutes of Double XP, 15 minutes of Double Money, 10,000 Money
• THANKS500 – 1 hour of Double XP, 5,000 Money
• OMG300LIKES – 30 minutes of Double XP, 30 minutes of Double Money
• SORRYBUGSADM – 30 minutes of 4x XP

There are already a fair number of expired Vampire Life codes, as many of the earlier promos had set expiry dates against them. More recently announced codes don't seem to have that, so hopefully they'll stick around for longer, but make sure you redeem them quickly just in case.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Dune: Awakening developer Funcom is pivoting to focus on its two ongoing online projects, Conan Exiles and the more recent survival MMO based on Frank Herbert's universe – a pivot that means reshuffling the team and, unfortunately, layoffs.

The news comes from GamesIndustry.biz alongside a direct statement from Funcom CEO Rui Casais, who says he's stepping down at the end of 2026 after 11 years as studio lead. Chief product officer Scott Junior will step into his role – but that's not the only change in the books for the team.

"Dune: Awakening has been the biggest project we have ever undertaken, requiring many years of significant development resources across our studios," Casais says. "Moving from full production into long-term post-launch development and operations requires a different organization."

In other words, layoffs.

"While we would have wanted everyone who helped build Dune: Awakening to continue with us, we cannot sustain the size and structure required during peak development as we move into this next phase."

As for how much of the team these layoffs will affect… Well, that remains uncertain.

Casais concludes, "My focus now is ensuring the process is as supportive as possible for everyone affected, and to treat our colleagues with the respect and transparency they deserve."

It's undeniably difficult news to take in, especially when considering how Dune: Awakening just saw the arrival of its single-player mode and console release – it's not a "dead" or dying game by any means, but I suppose that's not enough.

It's not the first round of layoffs Funcom developers have faced, either. Last October, the team lost "cherished colleagues" following a similar statement to GamesIndustry.biz.

Those previous redundancies also accompanied words on how Dune: Awakening "has already shown incredible potential" and was "the biggest release we've had in our 32-year long history of making great games."

Dune: Awakening boss reveals movie director Denis Villeneuve once feared the survival game's name "could be a little too close to Star Wars"

The Palworld universe is expanding quite a bit in the coming months. Developer and publisher Pocketpair has got a dating sim, a farming sim, and an MMO on the slate, and while you might think elements of these would make more sense as expansions of the main game, the team isn't keen on simply replicating Fortnite's metaverse-type model.

"I can certainly understand why some people might expect us to take Palworld in that direction," John 'Bucky' Buckley, the head of publishing and communications at Pocketpair, tells MP1st. "But for us, we just want to make fun games in our own way. I know it sounds a bit cliché, but while we obviously want our games to be successful, maximizing revenue as quickly as possible isn’t what drives our creative decisions."

Indeed, given the fervent community around Palworld, there's been plenty of opportunity to turn the game into a money-making machine through crossovers and microtransactions and whatever. But the biggest purchase remains simply buying the monster-collecting experience, and it's a model that's working for all involved thus far.

In keeping separate ideas just that and making them their own games, it allows Pocketpair to explore the mechanics involved and create disparate projects that may be more attractive to other players. "When it comes to Palworld, we feel that some ideas would be better served as standalone games, where we can fully design the gameplay systems, pacing, and overall experience around that specific concept," Buckley adds.

"Palfarm is a good example. Rather than trying to fit that experience into Palworld as just one mode, we believe making it a standalone title gives it more room to develop its own identity and become something special in its own right," he continues. "We don’t see this as one approach being better than the other. Different games and IPs will naturally benefit from different strategies."

The resistance to homogeneity is refreshing, and it's likely to be a real strength in years to come. It allows Palworld to exist in multiple different forms, so if one starts to wane for whatever reason, others are there to help hoist the overall property. The Fortnite model of having everything in the same platform places a lot of emphasis on one audience, a plan that could leave you high and dry one day.

On Twitter, just to double-down on his responses here, Buckley reiterated that Pocketpair is completely independent. "I understand that the astronomical success of Palworld has blurred the public’s perception of what Pocketpair actually is, but we are, in fact, still 100% self-owned and more importantly, 100% self-funded," he states.

"So our entire decision-making process is still simply, 'but is it fun?'," he finishes. Well, it's clearly working.

Palworld's cursed dating sim is a "little goofy thing" and not a proper spin-off, Pocketpair lead says: "I would only consider Palfarm the true spin-off"

Stop us if you've heard this before, but the No Man's Sky team has yet again been cookin' up a new release for its 2016 survival game – and this time, it's a mobile launch.

That's right, No Man's Sky is indeed coming to iOS over a decade after its initial release, with Hello Games planning an October 28 launch – but it hasn't come easy.

Sean Murrary says as much in a new letter regarding the exciting mobile launch, explaining that the developers first considered porting it over after bringing No Man's Sky to Mac in 2023. "Someone on the team said, 'I reckon I could get this running on an iPhone,'" as he recalls.

"I honestly didn't believe it until I played it myself for the first time," Murray continues. "A little like when we brought the game to VR or Nintendo Switch players, it started with a seemingly impossible technical challenge we wanted to disprove." And boy, did they do just that.

Witnessing No Man's Sky's universe generation working on a mobile phone remains a core memory for the studio lead – and how could it not?

"There was something magical about seeing that universe being generated on a tiny device," as he puts it.

Considering technical limitations, though, how will it work? Well, Murray assures "this is not No Man's Sky Lite."

It boasts the "full universe to explore," including the Cosmos update and every other major patch Hello Games has dropped over the years: "It even includes our most ambitious updates like Voyagers from last year."

The game won't have multiplayer or settlements day one, though, much like it didn't on the Switch at first – but it's all coming.

It'll be available on every iOS device from the iPhone 11 and third-generation iPad Air up. Hello Games hasn't cut corners here, either. Murray details how the studio has "rebuilt touch controls from the ground up to make No Man's Sky feel totally at home on mobile" and "put tons of work into battery life and thermodynamics."

And, if you can believe it, the file size of the mobile No Man's Sky is under 5GB – you hardly need any space on your phone, it seems. Pre-orders are live today, too, but you don't need to commit if you're not sure just yet. "In an effort to welcome as many new Travellers to the universe as possible, it'll be free to try at launch."

I personally can't wait to see how it runs on mobile devices myself, honestly… but knowing Hello Games, it'll be good.

Searching for more to look forward to this year and beyond? Browse through our roundup of the best new games coming to wishlist.

October 20, 2026: I removed an expired promo from our list, but there were no new Survive a Million Monkeys codes to add in its place.

Use the latest Survive a Million Monkeys codes for Gems so that you can save up for powerful weapons and skilful classes, to help you defeat even more angry monkeys as you're stranded on the island alone (or with a few teammates).

This popular Roblox game is a survival experience, so the goal is, obviously, to survive as long as possible. To do so, then, you're going to need to upgrade your gear as soon as possible, while different classes improve your stats like health and damage. All of these cost Gems, so redeem these generous Survive a Million Monkeys codes now.

If you're after some more general rewards that can be used in all of your experiences, then we've got the current Roblox promo codes covered too.

All Survive a Million Monkeys codes

These are the Survive a Million Monkeys codes you can redeem right now:

• 1MVISITS - 10,000x Gems

Survive a Million Monkeys codes are for Gems, with thousands up for grabs. Since you can also earn a lot by beating waves, you should have enough for the next best class or gun in no time.

It's worth noting that Survive a Million Monkeys promos aren't case-sensitive, so you only have to ensure you spell the codes right, but you can always copy and paste from above to be sure.

How to redeem Survive a Million Monkeys codes

To redeem Survive a Million Monkeys codes, simply click on the Codes button in the top-right hand corner of the screen, enter a code into the box, then hit the green check mark to claim your rewards.

The codes button appears in the lobby and the post-match screen, but you can't redeem codes during a match.

Expired Survive a Million Monkeys codes

• GORILLA - 25,000x Gems
• SURVIVE - 1,000x Gems
• MONKEYS - 1,000x Gems

The first Survive a Million Monkeys codes have started to expire now, and no doubt the rest will follow soon, so redeem them while you can and don't miss out.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The Palworld empire is expanding in the coming months. Besides the base game continuing to grow, there are other releases coming from Pocketpair that'll utilize the pals, including a dating sim and a Harvest Moon-like, but according to one lead, only the latter is a "true spin-off."

Over on the official Palworld Discord server, John 'Bucky' Buckley, head of communications and publishing at Pocketpair, commented on his view of the upcoming development slate. "Most gamers will consider a spin-off to be very in-line and thematically similar to the original Palworld with some notable twist or gimmick," he says.

"To that end, really I would only consider Palfarm the true spin-off," he adds. Calling all of these games spin-offs "would be pretty wrong," he says in another comment, because they're "fundamentally completely different."

Where Palfarm is a proper spin-off, More Than Just Pals is really "just a little goofy thing," apparently. Well, that "little goofy thing" looks pretty legit from the first trailer and Steam page, and I'm going to guess it'll have an appropriate price tag.

He does a little rumor control as well, stating "there are not four spin-offs in development." There's an MMO in the works, bringing the total known projects up to three, and Pocketpair's said there are plans for further expansion.

I disagree with Buckley's definition of what counts as a spin-off, because in my mind anything that's explicitly part of a franchise is one. Mario Paint is as much a spin-off of the Super Mario games as Luigi's Mansion, for instance. I'm dubious of any assertion of "most gamers" without corresponding data too - I'm sure lots of people would agree with him, but I also think many won't think about this that much.

These sound like internal definitions more than anything. Palfarm, a farming sim involving all your friendly pals, is probably a bigger project within Pocketpair than More Than Just Pals, which is essentially a meme writ large. Whatever you'd like to call them, both will do quite well given the install base for Palworld itself, regardless of how weird the latter turns out.

Palworld becoming the best-reviewed Steam game of 2026 is "nothing short of miraculous," says Pocketpair lead

Working on a licensed game is a double-edged sword. Yes, you could get to contribute to one of your favorite properties, be that Star Wars or Batman, but there are often hoops to jump through in terms of approval. In the case of Dune: Awakening, Funcom's had to build a reputation for being solid custodians of the 61-year-old sci-fi epic.

"We submit things to Jira, [Legendary] approve within a certain amount of time," Jon Bylos, chief creative officer at Funcom, tells gamesindustry.biz. "If they don't approve within a certain amount of time, we escalate to them: 'Hey, we need you to approve this'. Usually it's a pretty automated process. It runs pretty solidly."

You might think Jira is some fancy software, but it's actually a mundane project management interface. Among its potential uses is a ticketing system for transferring issues from one team to another, as described here.

Legendary is the license holder for the Dune movies, having produced both of Denis Villeneuve's films based on Frank Herbert's novels so far. Most of the time, Funcom can go straight there for a yes or no on the proposed addition, which is remarkably streamlined for a situation like this. Often, you have tedious meetings and phone calls with multiple stakeholders before getting the go-ahead, wasting valuable development time.

Occasionally, the devs are diverted to Herbert's estate, or the filmmaker himself for guidance or input. At one point, Villeneuve suggested the title Dune: Awakening "could be a little too close to Star Wars," but Funcom trudged forward anyway. Bylos mentions there's a strong collaboration at this point.

"When you've established that trust, the processes aren't necessarily as important: it's more about just knowing that the other people have the IP's back," he says. Dune: Awakening is now entering its second year, maintaining a community of people who enjoy riding sandworms around Arrakis. If all goes well, it'll continue growing well into the future. The spice must flow, as they say.

Dune: Awakening lead says the MMO can be "a really great" solo experience, but if players "expect it to be like The Last of Us, they're probably barking at the wrong tree"

Palworld recently got its long-awaited 1.0 update, an update with patch notes so long it's a bit mind-blowing – and it's safe to say that it has not stopped dominating the charts on PC since.

In fact, Palworld still sits nicely on the list of Steam's most played games globally, overtaking the likes of Overwatch and GTA 5.

It also just so happens to be the top-rated release of 2026, according to Steam250, sitting right in front of Valheim, another indie gem – and this has caught the eye of Palworld studio Pocketpair, as it's one heck of an achievement for the new (not counting its Early Access period, of course) survival title.

Head of Pocketpair publishing and communications John "Bucky" Buckley acknowledges it over on Twitter, writing, "Somehow… Palworld is apparently the highest reviewed game of the year on Steam according to Steam250!"

He continues, expressing how grateful he is: "To say the response to 1.0 has been overwhelming would be an understatement. Thank you to all the fans! The last few years have been a trip. Really… thank you!"

Buckley then references some of the controversy Palworld has stirred in the past – a reference he's made more than once, having just discussed the game's "manufactured dramas" in July.

"Obviously it's trendy and meta to shit on Palworld," he says in his follow-up comment, "but the facts speak for themselves. Raw massive and unparalleled sales aside… the player reception is nothing short of miraculous. That is really all you guys!"

He leaves another response, too, jesting, "Watch us get zero nominations at any awards btw," before concluding that Pocketpair "won't care because we just wanna make games but, I'll be salty as an individual!"

Honestly, I'm not sure he should speak so soon – Palworld is doing quite well, and its reception has only improved over time. It's got a solid "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam, so it's evident most folks like it a good bit.

I suppose only time will tell what this year's game awards ceremonies bring, though… but I wouldn't rule entries like Palworld out myself.

Palworld lead says survival game genre has "found its stride" with the likes of Valheim 1.0 and Dune: Awakening after being "plagued with 100 hit or miss games a year."

If there's one genre where players are spoilt for choice at the moment, it's survival games. There are just so many to pick from the minute, and one of the leads on Palworld believes the scene has truly come into its own after a few wilderness years where not many releases stood out.

"What a year for survival gaming," John 'Bucky' Buckley, the head of publishing and communications at Pocketpair, says on Twitter. "Valheim, Dragonwilds, Enshrouded, Dune, Core Keeper, Terraria! What was once a genre that was plagued with 100 hit or miss games a year has really found its stride."

The games he highlights make a strong argument. Valheim, the Viking-themed spin on resource-gathering and base-building, went 1.0 this year and continues to grow and flourish, while Dune: Awakening takes these ideas and applies them to the desert planet of Arrakis, if you've ever wanted to ride a sandworm. The latter just released on PS5 earlier this week, too.

RuneScape: Dragonwilds, then, is another exciting offshoot of the MMO staple. Enshrouded incorporates action RPG elements, for a bit more oomph if aimlessly roaming around isn't entirely your thing, and then you have Core Keeper and Terraria, both more retro-style approaches.

At this point, Terraria simply refuses to die. There have been several 'final updates', but the community continues to expand and really, more power to all involved. Buckley gives a nod to Palworld, of course, because it's now one of the dominant games in this side of the industry, and he mentions in the replies that he forgot about Windrose.

The pirate twist on survivalist antics came out in the first half of the year to a rousing reception. It's actually published by Pocketpair, too. Gone are the days where it seemed like every survival game was riffing on either Rust or The Forest with little in the way of identifiable factors. Long may it continue.

Palworld lead thought one of Pocketpair's most iconic Pals would "fade into the background" before it unexpectedly became the survival game's "mascot."

It's been over a year since Dune Awakening debuted on PC (you'll never guess in which month). Depending on who you ask, it was either a fantastic, atmospheric survival game, or a tedious desert trek even more boring than someone trying to explain Children of Dune to you unsolicited in a crowded bar. Now, alongside a big update on PC, it's arrived on PS5 and Xbox Series X, just in time to binge during the wait for Dune: Part Three.

Regardless of what you thought of it, there's no denying Funcom created an impressive open-world take on Arrakis, Dune's super-deadly desert planet. We called it a "true Dune love letter" in our Dune Awakening review. A beautiful recreation that nailed the look of Villeneuve's films, all made with a clear love for the source material and a clear hatred of onboarding anyone not familiar with said source material. Yeah, fair warning – if the words 'Bene Gesserit' are gibberish to you, do not start here.

DuneScape

The good news is it's still a visual treat on PS5. You can choose between lovely silky-smooth 60fps, which we all know is the mode a true Messiah would play. Or you can blaspheme and play at 30fps, which admittedly adds more visual detail and suffers less pop-in I suppose. As you've probably guessed, I'm a 60fps stan. The game feels far better to play, still looks terrific, and the pop-in is minimal enough to be a worthwhile compromise.

The setup; you're some nobody who's being shipped off to Arrakis to enjoy a life of endless slavery. But then your ship is blasted out of the sky, leaving you stranded in the middle of the desert (to be fair, Arrakis is basically all desert). The sun wants to burn you alive, water is seemingly scarcer than a first-party PlayStation game release, and a walk on open sands will likely end with you in the belly of a giant worm. Yikes.

It's a great hook for a survival game. My genre favourites, Subnautica and Grounded, love throwing you into a desperate situation, knowing that it'll be far more rewarding when you somehow survive against impossible odds. Considering Arrakis could only be more hostile if the ground was made out of freshly-unpinned grenades, Dune Awakening has the potential to be one of the best survival games and a true all-timer.

Except, over a year since release, this still feels like a game that's spread itself too thin without nailing the basics. It doesn't want to be seen as 'just' a survival MMO – it now even has a strictly single-player mode. It's also got stealth, shooting, climbing, flying, vehicle combat, and more. But, all those moving parts aren't as polished as they could be, meaning the core survival experience suffers.

Take the water system. Water is everything on Arrakis. It powers your base, your tech, your powers, and you quickly start to suffer when you run out. You can drink the dew from flower patches for some limited hydration, but it's clear from the disgusted bark your character makes that Dune Awakening considers this gross. That's why it encourages you to murder people and harvest water from their blood instead. OK then.

Forcing you to become a desert vampire is a wonderfully nasty idea, let down by the game's enemies being dumber than rocks. The smarter ones will hang back and shoot you, though they'll still rarely get into cover or do anything to avoid your gunshots. But they're practically MENSA members compared to the suicidally-stupid grunts who sprint towards you with knives, somehow oblivious to the fact I'm emptying my gun into them. By the time they reach me, they collapse dead at my feet, blood ready for the taking. Er, thanks, I guess?

In the world of Dune, characters have shield suits that make guns useless, forcing everyone to engage in close-quarters melee combat. Some characters in Awakening are wearing these, and the sight of one running towards you is properly tense, especially considering how much better the knife combat is than the utterly pedestrian gunplay. Knife combat is a little unwieldy, but that works here. A knife fight to the death in the desert should feel desperate and scrappy, after all.

But why are enemies who aren't wearing these shields – which is most of them, early on – also running towards me as if they are? One quest giver sent me to a testing facility and warned me that the people there had lost their minds. He described how they would run up to people and attack them senselessly. Buddy, that's half the idiots in this game!

Water shame

Because scavengers are so easily dispatched, that means the water they carry – which should be a precious resource – is easy to get, too. I set up my base near a camp where two scavengers reliably respawn, meaning I have two fresh water bags on tap. True, If you're playing single-player you can turn up the difficulty, but that doesn't stop enemies behaving mindlessly.

This did not go unnoticed in our three-star Dune Awakening verdict last year ("Both extremely compelling and extraordinarily boring, sometimes at the same time"). But it's elements like the "dull combat" that I was hoping would have been spruced up by now. Other potentially winning features still feel too janky, like its The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild-style climbing.

Like in Nintendo's classic, you can basically clamber up anything so long as you watch your stamina meter. Getting up a sheer cliff is mostly fine, but descending is still an imprecise chore, your character far too happy to fling themselves away from the cliff and take the quicker, more fatal way down. At least Link could survive a decent tumble, whereas in the early-game of Dune Awakening, your body is more fragile than games editor Oscar Taylor-Kent whenever I mildly criticize the Ocarina of Time remake.

Let's take a break from all this whining to talk about what Awakening does do well. The skill tree is full of great treats, including a terrific dash move for escaping Sandworms like a Looney Tunes character, and a hookshot that counters some of my complaints with the climbing. Its atmosphere and sense of place is spot-on. The power curve, though too stingy and slow, is rewarding if you persevere. Eventually you'll craft wearables that negate fall damage entirely which is somewhat a solution to the janky climbing.

And who doesn't like the idea of building their own awesome desert base? Me. I don't like it. Because I had to do it on PS5 with a DualSense, an experience about as friendly on the hands as sticking them in a couple of Pain Boxes, followed by an immediate vinegar bath.

Now obviously translating a complex PC game's UI to console is a nightmare. Baldur's Gate 3 managed it – just – whereas my recent Mistfall Hunter adventures showed how menus can come unstuck. But considering Dune Awakening's UI was a bit of a mess on PC, the poor PS5 version never really stood a chance.

Basic things you want are a chore to track down, buried in sub-menus within sub-menus. Open the pause screen and you can't see your objectives, which means by the time you do figure out which God-Emperor damn tab-menu-tab you need to be in, you've long forgotten what you were looking for anyway.

Over a year ago we said this game was "hindered by obtuse menus that make finding various projects on the tech trees and placebales an exercise in frustration." If that's been improved at all for this release, I shudder to think how bad it was before. Something's gone awry in your survival game when cold-blooded murder is a brain-off grind, but figuring out which menu the fabricator is hiding in has cost me what remains of my hair.

There's a decent Dune experience in here, but one I'd only recommend persevering with if you have a deep love of the source material. If you're more a casual fan of Timothée Chalamet movies, then I'm shocked to inform you that, unofficially, Lies of P is a far less stressful option you should consider playing instead.

Dune Awakening was played on PS5, with code provided by the publisher.

Awakening to more survival? 2,045 days later, Valheim's 1.0 launch proves its scope for epic journeys is still unbeatable, and if you want more we have great games like Valheim recommendations for you!

I didn't come to RuneScape: Dragonwilds as a complete RuneScape virgin, despite missing the boat on RuneScape back in the '00s. I've played a little bit of Old School RuneScape, and was incredibly absorbed in the Jagex-published Melvor Idle. I'm not exactly unfamiliar with how the game's sense of progression works, and it makes sense that a survival spin-off could have worked. Could.

Fundamentally, there's nothing egregiously wrong with RuneScape: Dragonwilds. It is paced much like other survival games, with clear influence taken from Valheim, which hit 1.0 earlier this month. There are many different skills for you to master, a range of biomes to explore, and enemies to hunt – but it all feels a bit joylessly functional.

After scrounging up the rocks and wood that you need to make an axe, you go to a tree and swing. And then you miss. Turns out, you need to be almost square to the tree to chop properly. Okay, no problem. Let's go mine some rock. Not that rock; that's a decorative rock. You need to go and mine those specific rocks over there. It's extremely rigid in the way that it wants you to do things, a point the game makes clear immediately by having you follow a pre-ordained set of tasks rather than just exploring and discovering things for yourself.

That rigidity extends all the way through the game, too. Take the spinning wheel that I needed to make, for example. To track down a character who'd gone missing, I needed antlers, but deer are hard to hunt with a dagger or a club. So, you need to make a bow. To make a bow, you need a coarse thread. To make coarse thread, you need a spinning wheel. The game doesn't tell you how to unlock this. It turns out that you need to pick up some flax to get the spinning wheel blueprint. If you aren't compulsively wandering around and picking up everything that you see, you're buggered, it seems. This is a game that you need to play with the wiki open, because some kind fan will likely have explained the game better than it explains itself.

Keep yourself alive

Let's get down to the basics of gameplay – survival. You need food and water to keep going, so you'll have to channel your great (x200) grandparent and become a hunter gatherer. That's fine, we all know what to expect when you need sustenance in a game. What we don't normally have to deal with is your character being such a terrible cook at low Cooking levels that your food can come out burned, and far less nutritious. This has knock-on effects, with burned food not efficiently helping you recover health, which, in turn, can make early combat encounters against goblins a real slog.

Why not let me take the food off the fire when it's ready? Why do all my efforts go to waste so that a number can tell me that I'm better at Cooking, rather than my character and I becoming better at in-game cooking? Water is a better system. You can collect dirty water anywhere, but to make it drinkable, you need to boil it. Simple, intuitive, and the game doesn't make you arbitrarily mess it up.

Most individual skill levels feel fairly fatuous. Leveling them gives you tiny stat increases most of the time, with meaningful upgrades arriving less frequently. There's none of the sense of achievement or progression that you are treated to in Melvor Idle, despite its deliberately streamlined and stripped-back nature.

The wild, grey yonder

More than anything, Dragonwilds feels like a game that struggles to express its reason for being, and one that's still underdone at 1.0. The sense of place is perhaps the biggest contributor. While hand-crafted, the world itself doesn't feel interesting to explore. There's no real sense of mystery, with one goblin-infested area looking much like another, and it's very easy to get turned around without realizing it because areas look broadly samey.

While I was playing Dragonwilds, I wondered why you'd choose to play it rather than any of the best survival games already on the market. This is particularly true when you compare it, once again, to Valheim, which feels like its clearest competitor. RuneScape gives you a huge world full of discoveries, while Melvor Idle offers its sense of progression in a highly-distilled form. What role does Dragonwilds play? After several hours, I still don't know.

10 years later, Old School RuneScape is still the best MMO I've ever played

Palworld is full of wildly popular but oddly-designed creatures to tame and train, but the popularity of one of the game's biggest mascots actually came as a surprise to Pockpair's head of communications and publishing, John 'Bucky' Buckley.

"For the record, this is my opinion," Buckley makes clear while chatting to Gaming World Interviews about the Pals who surprised him the most. "It's not the company's opinion. It's the opinion of me and me only. I never really thought Cattiva would be popular, like ever. Cattiva, Chikipi and Lamball were like the three-o in the beginning when you wake up on the beach."

Buckley goes on to say he was always "pretty confident" in Lamball, the adorably fluffy sheep-y creature who somehow looks even cuter holding a deadly weapon with a smile on its face. Chikipi and Cattiva, though? Buckley thought the duo would "fade into - not irrelevance, either - but fade into the background."

The Pocketpair lead acknowledges Chikipi has kind of "faded away" anyway. "It's a chicken, right?" But Cattiva? The pink smirking feline who always looks like it knows a secret it definitely won't share. "Cattiva is like the mascot."

Buckley explains that Cattiva and Chillet have slowly become some of the survival game's most recognizable faces, but Cattiva in particular is apparently "everywhere" in China. "There is a bit of regional difference with the Pals." If Cattiva was such an unexpected surprise, perhaps Pocketpair should return to the "graveyard" of scrapped Pal designs it never got around to finishing in the first place. You never know - there might be another seemingly horrendous creature the fanbase falls in love with, for some reason.

As for 1.0 Pals, passion around Snock was a surprise to the lead dev. "Gamers are really into that snail or slug, whatever you want to call it."

Palworld Palfarm is less like Stardew Valley than you might expect, lead says, but it "is more on the cozier side" than Pocketpair's survival game

You can imagine anything Pokemon-like will have a litany of unused designs for its monsters. It's inherent to the concept, and Palworld is no exception, with an enormous amount of Pals that have been cast aside for various reasons. But by contrast, there was one that the devs knew was going to do well.

Speaking to Gaming World Interviews at Gamescom 2026, John 'Bucky' Buckley, the head of publishing and communications at Palworld developer Pocketpair, breaks down the process for designing pals. "We have a lot of 2D concept artists, and all they do all day is just make 2D sketches of Pal ideas, and we vote internally," he explains.

"We got a special channel in our Slack, and they'll post the concept art, and we'll put [one through five] ranking, everyone in the company will vote," he continues. "That process takes a long time, someone's then got to make a 3D art version, then sometimes 2D to 3D you're like, 'Oh this doesn't work,' and then you make the model, and there are so many cases where you make the model, and you go, 'You know what, it doesn't [work].'"

He mentions that Pals will sometimes be Frankensteined together from parts they like from other, unused creatures. There's an internal "graveyard," that contains "hundreds" of "rough Pals," and to be honest, that's what I'd expect from a game that's been updated as much as Palworld has been.

The democratic conceptualization process sounds pretty smooth and well-organized too. I'm sure there are bumps and wrinkles along the way, but it seems like there's a lot of trust across Pocketpair to make sure everyone stands behind every monster.

On the flipside, some of them get such a rousing reception internally, they're railroaded through into the game. "I think the fastest Pal to go from concept to design to modelling to rigging, was Sekhmet," Buckley says. "You've never seen reactions on a Slack move that much."

I'd have expected Chillet or Jetragon, given their standing in fan rankings, but Sekhmet works too. We'll have to check in a year to see if anything else has stood out across Pocketpair's voting, and to see how much bigger the pile of failed concepts is.

Palworld Palfarm is less like Stardew Valley than you might expect, lead says, but it "is more on the cozier side" than Pocketpair's survival game.

A dedicated community is a strong asset for any game, but it can also have drawbacks. In the case of Palworld, it's constant requests for features developer Pocketpair either can't make happen or would rather save for a sequel later on down the line.

Chatting to Gaming World Interviews, John 'Bucky' Buckley, head of publishing and communications at Pocketpair, spoke on the frustrations that stem from fan demands. "The things that wind me up the most are when people say, 'I want to be able to dig the terrain,' and you're like, what you're talking about is Palworld 2," he says.

"These things are impossible, it's not engine reworks, it's landscape reworks, the pathfinding rework would be years of development," he explains. "This stuff is just not feasible. Please don't ask for terrain digging, it's not happening."

He mentions that he sympathizes with fans in this regard, because there can be a gulf between how players understand a game and what's possible in the actual development. What can seem like a simple extension of existing ideas and mechanics could be months of tinkering behind-the-scenes.

Another example is in having underwater environments, a recurring request Buckley has had to be emphatic about shutting down for the same reasons. "You're talking about years of development, and do they want that?" he asks, rhetorically. "Do you want to wait three years for an update? Do we want to wait three years for an update?"

At risk of stating the obvious: no, we don't, and no, they likely don't. There's always Palworld 2 for these additions, and in the meantime, nobody seems too perturbed, since 1.0 saw the game get shy of one million players at once. And hey, we're getting a dating sim to boot.

Palworld lead worries Steam early access has "lost its meaning": players treat it like "a normal game" and the program has been "abused for a lot of reasons"

While these Bloxnote codes might not award you with anything that will provide a competitive advantage, it's always handy to have some fresh emotes to communicate how you're feeling or perhaps show off when you're playing well.

Inspired by Deathnote, Bloxnote is a social deduction game in which you have to figure out who's killing people as Kira - or play the notebook owner yourself as you try to avoid detection. Either way, you can see how emotes might come in handy. Most of these Bloxnote codes give Apples (iykyk), which you can use for emotes or titles in this Roblox Among-Us-like.

While you're not writing in the Bloxnote, check out our list of the current Roblox promo codes for more general rewards that can be used across all experiences.

All Bloxnote codes

These are the Bloxnote codes you can redeem right now:

• SORRYFORRESTART - 400x Apples new!
• 1millionvisits - 1,200x Apples
• ABASAIYANWALK500K - 1,000x Apples, Saiyan Walk Emote

As I've mentioned, and as you can see from the list above, most Bloxnote codes grant apples, with a few bonus codes sometimes offering special emotes. While you can spend apples on emotes and titles, you could also save up for the Rem skin if you're willing to put in the time.

Bloxnote codes aren't case-sensitive, so you only have to worry about spelling them correctly. You can always copy and paste them from above to be safe, since some codes are complex.

How to redeem Bloxnote codes

To redeem Bloxnote codes, click on the Settings button in the top left-hand corner of the screen, then scroll to the bottom of the Settings window to find the redemption box. Enter a code from above and click the green Redeem button to claim your rewards. You can do this during a game at any time other than in the meeting room - but you probably shouldn't.

Expired Bloxnote codes

• VISITS200K - 1,000x Apples
• SORRYFORSHUTDOWN - 600x Apples
• SRRYFORSHUTDOWN - 500x Apples
• RELEASE - 500x Apples

There are already some expired promos since Bloxnote launched in September 2026, so we can expect codes to come and go very quickly, meaning you should redeem any valid codes as soon as possible to avoid missing out.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Sometimes, developers like to have a little fun with cheaters. Valheim developer Iron Gate Studio has decided to throw people who use console commands a bone by still allowing them to log achievements – if they enter another, comically long cheat code, that is.

Prior to an update on September 11, players using developer commands in-game relegated them from getting any of Valheim's achievements. A simple, but effective way of accepting this is how some fans choose to play, and making ramifications clear.

Valheim recently entered 1.0, bringing 50 new awards people can gather, and what seems like a review of the community policies regarding those who use these exploits. Now, there's a way to re-enter the arena of in-game trophies, and it's hilariously on the nose.

If you have devcommands turned on, enter the following: "yesiuseddevcommandsbutiwantmyachievementsanyway". All that, no full stop or quotation marks, and you're back achievement hunting like normal.

I mean, what other phrase would you use? Might as well be straightforward about it. Funnily enough, I wouldn't guess this if I were trying to figure it out, because it seems too obvious, which just makes it more fun.

"The fixes include a function to let you opt into using achievements even though you have been blocked from doing so because of previous usage of devcommands," read the patch notes. "We will leave it to your own judgement whether or not to activate this function – Oden will surely know if you use it dishonourably."

Your path to Valhalla is in question here, just be cool and all will be well.

Palworld studio calls Valheim "an inspiration to everyone in the genre" as devs of the survival game drop their own 1.0 update.

October 22, 2026: I had a look for new Last Stop codes and added the latest Halloween promo to our list.

Last Stop codes are a great way to increase your chances of survival while you're on the road, fighting zombies and bandits in this apocalyptic experience. It's not only you that's need to be powered up with the best class, weapons, and gear, but you bus also needs to be kitted up to defend.

Fortunately, these Last Stop codes give you tickets to unlock new recipes, which can be used to buff your bus, making you stronger against the enemies you'll meet on the road in this Roblox game. Alternatively, you can spend them on a new class for your character. Whatever you want to spend your tickets on, here's the latest Last Stop codes.

If you'd prefer some more general rewards that can be used in all of your experiences, then we've got the current Roblox promo codes covered too.

All Last Stop codes

These are the Last Stop codes you can redeem in-game right now:

• SPOOKY - 100x Pumpkin Tokens, 500x Tickets, 2x Class Rerolls new!
• PUMPKIN - 500 Tickets
• ENDLESS - 400 Tickets
• HALLOWEEN - 300 Tickets
• HEADLESS - 500 Tickets
• WLASTSTOP - Tickets
• SHORTMODE - 600x Ticket
• WSAVEUPDATE - Tickets
• UPDATE4 - 1,000x Tickets
• WELOVEF2P - Ocean tokens
• 2XTICKETS - Ocean tokens

Last Stop tickets so far have generally rewarded players with Tickets, and these can be used to unlock crafting recipes or buy a new character class. You can only spend tickets in the lobby, so make sure you kit up before heading out on the road.

Codes aren't case-sensitive, so just make sure you've got the spelling right, or copy and paste from the list above.

How to redeem Last Stop codes

To redeem Last Stop codes, you must first reach level 5 by completing a few rounds and some quests. Once at the right level, you can redeem codes by clicking on the Codes button in the top-right corner of the screen. You can then enter a code from the list above into the box, then click on the green check mark to claim your rewards.

The codes box is at the bottom of the settings menu, so you can also navigate to the redemption box via the settings cog in the top left-hand corner.

Expired Last Stop codes

• OCEAN - Tickets
• UPDATE3 - 750x Tickets
• UPDATE2 - 750x Tickets
• FRED - 500x Tickets
• UPDATE1 - 250x Tickets

A few Last Stop codes have now expired, so I've moved them down here to prevent you trying to redeem promos that won't work. I'll continue to do so with other codes as they expire, so make sure you redeem them as soon as you see them.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

A shift in gaming culture has undermined Steam's early access program and stunted the perception of the games in it, worries Pocketpair and Palworld communications and publishing lead John Buckley.

Amidst Palworld's 1.0 early access graduation, Buckley discusses the work-in-progress approach with GamesRadar+. He maintains that Pocketpair is "quite confident in early access in general" and, when it comes time to make a new big thing, the studio will surely choose early access again. But that's despite what he sees as a big shift on Steam.

"Go back to the Steam Greenlight days, when Steam changed Greenlight to early access, there were a few years where it really was running and operating exactly the way I think Steam dreamed it," he says. "I think everyone knew what they were in for. The kind of people who were buying early access games knew what they were in for. They were the kind of gamers who want to be involved, they want to give feedback, they want to talk to devs. It was this really beautiful golden era."

Today, that outlook is less common, he suggests. "This continuing migration, I'll call it, of hyper-casual mobile culture, and hyper-casual gaming culture, and live service gaming culture is washing through Steam right now," Buckley notes. "Now the culture has changed and early access, essentially, has lost its meaning. People just buy an early access game like they buy a normal game and treat it like that's the game."

In Palworld's case, Buckley says players may buy the game in early access and play heavily for a week or two before arguing, "'These developers are not making new content. This game is dead.' And you're like, 'Well guys, see you in six months. We've got to make the game.'"

Buckley clarifies that he doesn't think "it's a bad thing that some gamers aren't interested" in how the sausage is made, even if quietly raising "the general knowledge level around game development" might help both sides. "You just want to enjoy a nice thing, and that's fair enough. No shade there." (In 2025, we spoke to dozens of game devs about things players get wrong about how games are made.)

Nonetheless, he says, "It's getting harder on Steam, sadly, because this culture has come through. I think consoles are where it struggles the most because console gamers aren't used to the concept of early access gameplay. Again, that's fine. You get less feedback from those players in general versus PC gamers, who love to drown you in bug reports. Look, all we can do is try to softly educate people. I think we do an okay job. I think we try to be quite transparent. 'Hey guys, the next update's a while away. It's not going to be content-heavy, it's going to be QOL-heavy.' We try to balance it."

Recently, Buckley has been shaping expectations for update 1.1, reiterating that Palworld will continue but is not due for another massive overhaul. Earlier in the year, he said he "wouldn't rule out a Palworld 2.0," but fans also shouldn't expect a No Man's Sky-style arrangement with 10 years of heavy support. (As it happens, we spoke to No Man's Sky boss Sean Murray about 10 years of support.)

Though Pocketpair has chosen early access multiple times and remain "big advocates" for it – Craftopia, its previous survival game, is approaching its own 1.0 update – Buckley agrees it's not right for every project.

"There are many real cases of early access just being a disaster for some games," he says. "I think it just depends on how receptive you want to be. Early access has now been abused for a lot of reasons. The biggest way it's abused now is just like, 'We'll release it now because we need money.' It's a way now to sidestep traditional funding means. It's almost become the new Kickstarter in some ways. Put out the build to get the money. But we're big fans of it."

Splashing some of its Palworld cash, Pocketpair's publishing arm has, like many other newly formed devs-turned-publishers, sought to find and fund promising games at a time of dire investment opportunities in the games industry.

Palworld studio calls Valheim "an inspiration to everyone in the genre" as devs of the survival game drop their own 1.0 update.

A true stalwart of survival games, Valheim, just went into 1.0. Yes, I know, I was a little surprised too, but despite being out for five years and having been a staple in all that time, the Viking-themed sandbox didn't cross that particular threshold until today, and even Palworld is spreading the good word.

On Twitter, Pocketpair, the studio behind Palworld, took to the game's official account to congratulate the devs at Iron Gate Studio on the momentous occasion. "Congratulations to Iron Gate Studio on their 1.0 release of Valheim," says the tweet.

"You are an inspiration to everyone in the genre!" the post continues. "Spinning up the Pocketpair server today!"

Included is some artwork of a pal wearing a helmet and sword common to jaunting around the wilderness of Valheim. It's always nice when companies and teams recognize each other like this, especially when Palworld could easily be considered a rival.

Valheim is at the forefront of the survival space. It managed to capitalize on ideas from Rust and The Forest, and merge them with Norse mythology to make something that feels grand, epic and fun, without losing touch with all the things people enjoy about these sorts of games.

You have satisfying base-building and resource management, worthwhile exploration, and a well-realized map to feel out. Indeed, the game's only gone from strength to strength since launching in early 2021, and now it should ascend to even greater heights.

Palworld update adds 2 new missions, makes fishing easier, improves combat, and brings plenty more to Pocketpair's survival game

I've got a theory about why people enjoy playing survival games. From Minecraft (or Unreal World if you're cool) all the way through to Valheim's 1.0 launch today after five years in Early Access, they all have something in common. Starting with nothing and building up to a mighty fortress is great, but what these games really offer is a sense of discovery – a journey into an unfamiliar world.

It's something Welsh poet Dylan Thomas explores in his poem Fern Hill. Here, he writes about being "green and carefree, famous among the barns" in "the sun that was young once only". That pretty much sums up my first few hours of Valheim: it's a game that nurtures and encourages a childlike sense of wonder.

Waxing poetical

Valheim's epic wonder is there from the jump. You arrive into the Tenth World in the clutches of a Valkyrie, with only a raven named Hugin for amenable company. Hugin provides you with some helpful tips as a new arrival in the peaceful Meadows – a world away from the moody, stormy lands you saw during your flight.

With almost nothing to your name, like a child angry about a lost kite, you start punching trees only to realize with sore hands that you're actually meant to gather branches from the ground.

From there, Valheim flows into the usual routine you'd expect from a survival game. I spend most of the time foraging rocks, flint, and becoming a kind of Genghis Khan figure to local wildlife. If the survival game loop was all that there was to Valheim, it'd be a fun, if somewhat disposable slice of Viking life. But one aspect that really makes the game stand apart is the sensory experience.

Valheim's late-PS1/early-PS2 aesthetic has some modern flourish hidden beneath its horned helmet. The lighting is one standout aspect, with night skies seeing countless stars spill across a firmament of pure black. Meanwhile the Meadows biome is underscored by a bucolic clarinet melody, caught somewhere between folk and soft jazz, that never fails to soothe. And it all links back to that poetic sense of expanse and wonder as penned by Thomas.

There's some entertainingly bouncy physics, too. My first death on day 1 isn't attributed to one of the goblin-like Greylings or an aggressive boar, but to gravity, a tree, and my own hubris. Chopping down a tree makes it fall. It's a very tricky concept to grasp, I know, and it turns out that chopping up a huge trunk also splits it in two. I'm standing downhill from one of the large logs as it falls to the ground, and thus begins my first corpse run.

Valheim is also a full-on RPG, which is a point I have used to sell it to my survival-skeptic friends. There are skills ranging from magic to cooking to wood-chopping, as well as a shockingly competent combat system, complete with a parry mechanic. All of these hang together to make exploration extremely fun, my character taking shape alongside the world around them as I learn more about myself and this strange new land.

Man of the land

Tracing the shoreline, venturing out on your first raft, building a simple homestead – it's easy to forget that there is more to this game than simply existing within it, green and carefree. And there is so much more, with each major biome culminating in a boss fight against a suitably fantastical enemy. After each boss, you move on to the next biome, building forward bases and exploring – ever exploring, like a true Erik the Red.

Despite my generally wonderful time with Valheim 1.0, my one sticking point is the building mechanics. Level ground prime for building is hard to come by in the Tenth World, even after setting-to it with a newly-crafted hoe.

This means that making your homestead look like a building rather than a load of panels that have been chucked together is a matter of some genuine skill. I was left with huge gaps that, if nothing else, let smoke trail out beautifully from my campfire. It holds some of the game's creative potential hostage, and I can't truly feel like the author of my own pastoral poem as a consequence.

Still, I have to hand it to developer Iron Gate Studios. The sun may be young once only, but if you ever want to wander, Valheim's near-endless scope for epic journeys is hard to beat. What a fantastic synchronicity there is to the fact that 1992's Unreal World, one of the first survival games ever, doubled as an RPG about surviving the Far North. Valheim 1.0's addition of the Deep North biome echoes it beautifully, calling forth the bravest souls who wish to venture further and marrying the RPG and survival genres in a genuinely fantastic way.

These games like Valheim offer stunning worlds to explore and survive, if you dare...

No Man's Sky Cosmos is Hello Games' latest update, and it's making enormous changes to space itself after 10 years.

Cosmos is out for free today, September 9, hot on the heels of the big 10th anniversary blowout.

"No Man’s Sky is often referred to as 'a Space Game', it’s a huge part of our game, but we’ve never really updated space since release," Hello Games says of the update.

Space has certainly changed now. Cosmos is headlined by space station ownership, which Hello Games says "must be our most requested feature since launch."

"Finally players can buy the space station for themselves! Build and decorate it both inside and externally, and some wild creativity is possible. You can create your own themed Station as your own clubhouse and have friends come and visit."

To help build your space station, you might want to pay a visit to "space hulks," which are basically big clusters of resources floating in space. With help from a gravity gun and "a new tractor beam fitted to your ship," you can strip these hulks for materials. The kicker is that too much structural damage to a hulk will cause it to melt down and explode, so you'll need to prioritize and work quickly.

These space hulks also show off "our new volumetric lighting tech," says Hello Games boss Sean Murray.

Luckily, you can enlist the help of new player alliances for the job. "As an alliance, you can work together to build a networked empire of different stations and rise the new leaderboards to compete for the largest, richest or most prominent alliance," Hello Games says.

That network will be easier to navigate thanks to a new star map that reveals points of interest, including "whole new strands of missions and exploration," whenever you warp to a system.

New points of interest introduced in Cosmos include outposts where you can trade with aliens, bio-wrecks to be "cleared out and reclaimed," asteroid belts with rare crystals, and orbital bases that "can be built ANYWHERE in space." You can even put a star base on a "rare" large asteroid if you want.

And you know what, screw it, while we're at it, go to the sun. "Finally players can try to undertake a perilous journey to reach the center of their own star system!" says Hello Games.

This is all bookended by a new Expedition that packs 10 years of No Man's Sky updates – a whopping 40 of 'em – into a playable museum. "It’s been a real joy to revisit some of those moments for us," the studio adds.

"This has been a wild undertaking for our team," Murray says in a Cosmos deep dive video. "So many things that we never thought we'd do. Having alliances of tens of thousands of players, real communities working together, claiming space stations. It's pretty cool, but it's been a lot of work."

A typically enthusiastic Murray says Cosmos "creates foundations for the future," making good on his threat to release free No Man's Sky content forever.

10 years of No Man's Sky: How Hello Games and Sean Murray keep getting away with it.

Light No Fire, the next massive survival game from Hello Games, makes a rare appearance in the overview for No Man's Sky's Cosmos update, which is out today, September 9.

Cosmos introduces sweeping changes and additions to space itself, from custom space stations to resource-rich "space hulks." It also adds player alliances that can fit thousands of allied players and stations across the stars. The bones of some of these features will carry over to Light No Fire, it seems.

Toward the end of the trailer, studio boss Sean Murray says "all of this is tech we get to test now, refine, and hopefully players will also experience on our other game, Light No Fire."

Some old Light No Fire footage played in the background shows a gathering of humanoid rabbit warriors, a brief shot of a dragon mount, and a very bemused ogre.

There's still a lot we don't know about Light No Fire, and that now includes just how much of this Cosmos update, along with the rest of No Man's Sky's systems, will carry over. Will player alliances work in the same way, and on the same scale? With just one Earth-sized planet to explore instead of a functionally infinite universe, how do points of interest have to evolve?

I get the impression that Murray wants to leverage what the team's created here. "So many things that we never thought we'd do," he says of Cosmos. "Having alliances of tens of thousands of players, real communities working together, claiming space stations. It's pretty cool, but it's been a lot of work."

Elsewhere in the Cosmos update video, Murray mentions "our new volumetric lighting tech," which does feel like a safe bet for Light No Fire. For years, Hello Games has described No Man's Sky as a handy test bed for its next game, which, Murray recently told us, has "between 12 and 20" people working on it at any given moment.

No Man's Sky lead planned to show more Light No Fire, but "why do any marketing" when it's already topping Steam wishlists.

There's another Palworld update out, and it's a big one. Besides a couple of fresh missions, fishing is now considerably easier, Pals make our life easier in combat, and Pocketpair's provided a wealth of quality-of-life improvements.

Right up top of Pocketpair's characteristically long patch notes for update 1.0.4, you can see the two added quests, both sub-missions. One comes from an NPC at Fisherman's Point, and the other is a follow-up to that first mission.

After those, we get into tweaks to help our Pals be more efficient when it comes to battles and completing missions. Pals and base Pals have been changed slightly to now prioritize moves that'll deal the most damage, a handy distinction when you're in a skirmish and don't want to micro-manage quite as much.

Pals and NPCs that are mission-critical, then, won't fall asleep on your either. Not a frequent occurrence, I don't think, but definitely something that sounds like a worthwhile change because I know if my playing was delayed because of someone having a nap, I'd be annoyed. (No disrespect to nappers, I'm of your kin, there's just a time and a place.)

In terms of casting out your line for a big catch, the baseline difficulty for fishing has changed for bodies of water around the World Tree and in Sunreach. Your rewards have been altered for every kind of bait, and there's now a sliding scale for fish behavior during minigames. That last one sounds, to me, like some people were having an unnecessarily hard time, and I'm glad Pocketpair's providing more options for players.

To round off the highlights, the fact that returned materials now go straight back into your inventory if you cancel something at a production facility is a real plus. You'll get everything back unless you have a weight limit set, at which point anything over your limit will sit at your feet instead.

Handy. As ever, it's worth scanning the full notes yourself to see if any niggling problems you were seeing have been addressed.

"Palworld's not finished": With update 1.1 coming, Pocketpair lead says "we're doing something players have been screaming at us to do" after the "soft prologue" of 1.0.

Dune: Awakening's new single-player mode could be a great way to experience the MMO-survival mashup's story by yourself, but don't jump in expecting a The Last of Us replacement.

Developer Funcom has been hard at work translating its beloved online game into a single-player context, with a new mode coming out alongside Dune: Awakening's console release later this month.

We asked chief creative officer Joel Bylos about what fans should expect from the new mode in an interview from Gamescom - and if would-be lone wolves will get what they're looking for in Arrakis.

"I think if people play the game [this month] and what they're looking for is a really great survival game experience that they can play single-player, that'll be no issue," Bylos tells us. "If they expect it to be like The Last of Us, they're probably barking at the wrong tree, right? So, I think, if their expectations are correct for what kind of genre it is and what type of game it is, they'll be perfectly satisfied."

The ability to journey through Funcom's adaptation of Frank Herbert's beloved novels has apparently been a long-requested feature from fans, but it's also a feature that's been quite hard to make. "Transforming a persistent, server-authoritative, open-world survival game with multiple maps into a smooth local experience is no small feat, and today, we want to talk about the technical work our team has done to enable solo survival on Arrakis," the studio wrote earlier this summer.

A blog post from the studio explained a little more about everything that has to change to accommodate for solo journeys. Translating multiplayer-centric features, balancing combat or resource harvest rates, and making your machines handle the "heavy lifting" are just a few of the changes Funcom had to make for solo sand lovers.

Dune: Awakening's new single-player mode fits perfectly in the MMO because of its strong story, lead says: "I think we have the best story in a survival game that exists"

Palworld update 1.1 is on the way, and while it won't be another 1.0-sized overhaul, Pocketpair comms and publishing lead John Buckley says the next big patch is doing "something that players have been screaming at us to do."

Speaking with GamesRadar+ at Gamescom 2026, Buckley examines the shift in development at Pocketpair following the release of Palworld 1.0. He says the studio's overall process and outlook are "very, very different" today.

"It was a big sigh of relief that we got it out and it worked out," he begins. "We still have pools of feedback, we still have feed of bug reports and stuff. It is a weird vibe. We know we're gonna do something. Of course we are. Palworld's not finished. Of course we're gonna do something more with it.

"We announced 1.1 kind of indirectly," Bucky continues. In August, he clarified that update 1.1 won't be some grand, yearlong project after players, in response to a social media call for suggestions, proposed enormous additions like an entire new continent.

Mild Palworld 1.0 spoilers ahead.

"We teased, like, we're cooking something," he says. "Now what we're thinking of is, there's kind of two prongs to it. Narratively, Palworld 1.0 kind of wrapped up that thing. Players got to the tree, they figured out what was in the tree, they sorted that out. So it's hard to think about what we're going to do next.

"Internally, and I said it yesterday so I'm fine saying it, we're calling 1.0 kind of a soft prologue. You figured out what the tree was, and it crashed, and you landed on the beach. You wake up on the beach. Now let's show you what happens next."

And what does happen next? With Palworld 1.1, Buckley stresses that "it's not a huge thing, but we're doing something players have been screaming at us to do for a while. And we didn't want to do it for 1.0 because we didn't want it to get in the way of 1.0. We had so many things we wanted to do. And even though it's a big thing, a big specific feature we're doing for 1.1, we just didn't want it to take up space for 1.0. So now we feel more comfortable in that regard. Now we can do these other things that might not necessarily have been connected to what our vision of Palworld is."

People don't understand Steam player numbers, Palworld lead says: "Poor Marathon and stuff are getting dragged through the mud ... I'm sure our day's coming."

No Man's Sky and Hello Games lead Sean Murray is back on social media with more vague emoji-posting – this time in the form of a cocktail emote that sure looks a whole lot like it might be referencing the upcoming Cosmos update for the survival game.

You know, because of the drink, the cosmopolitan? Also known as a "cosmo" – and that's what folks think Murray is teasing here.

It all started with a post on X that included a single cocktail emoji. Then, the official Hello Games account responded with a few more cocktail emojis.

Understandably, fans immediately went wild with theories, ranging from martinis (which, just, why?) to, of course, cosmos.

Over on Reddit, the theorizing is running wild as well… much to nobody's surprise, ever. As one response to a screenshot of Murray's emojis reads, "There's a cocktail called a Cosmo. So multiple are 'Cosmos'… right?" Right, indeed, anon. Right, indeed.

Another jokes, "Cosmos update is actually just adding alcoholic drinks to the game." Honestly, at this point, it could be, seeing as we know next to nothing about the huge patch.

It exists, and it's coming – that's about all that Hello Games has confirmed thus far, aside from its name, and the developers have said absolutely zilch about it since they first unveiled it in August.

This isn't the first time Murray and the team have posted mysterious emojis, either. It's how they teased the Remnant update in February, which launched with a Garry's Mod-style gravity gun and more just days later.

It's also the way that The Swarm update, which brought a bit of Helldivers 2 flair to the survival game's mix, was hinted at in May… also shortly before it launched.

Then there were the stadium emojis, which were teasing the big Xeno Arena update that dropped earlier this year, introducing a fun Pokemon and Palworld-esque creature battling system that fans had been requesting for nearly two years – so, yeah.

Does this mean that the Cosmos update is coming sometime soon, perhaps within the next few days or weeks? Maybe – I know that I'd certainly recommend keeping an eye on the Hello Games social media accounts, personally.

No Man's Sky fan adds Nvidia's DLSS 5 to the game, Hello Games programmer worries the AI filter could ruin its "unique look and feel"

As Palworld continues its own post-1.0 journey following its long-awaited full release earlier this summer, Pocketpair prepares another full launch – one for its six-year-old survival game, Craftopia… yes, that Craftopia.

In case you don't know about Craftopia yourself, it's an open-world anime-style survival game that's been in limbo for… well, ever since its Early Access release over on Steam on September 4 back in 2020.

It's gotten some minor updates – and, honestly, I mean pretty dang minor, considering the timeline – here and there, but those of us with the game in our library have waited for a 1.0 launch for what feels like forever now.

And, thankfully, it's finally coming – and with it, hopefully some more positive reviews, too, seeing as it's got a "Mostly Negative" rating as it stands (yes, much of the feedback cites the game being "unfinished" and dubs Craftopia an "abandoned" title from Pocketpair).

As a new update from the developers reads, "Craftopia will leave Early Access and release into Version 1.0 in 2027."

What's another few months of waiting, eh?

With 1.0, Pocketpair says to expect "cleaning up and refining the existing experience, addressing outstanding issues, and making Craftopia as enjoyable and polished as possible for its full release" rather than "sheer content volume as some players might expect" – but, "there will still be new content arriving."

It's exciting, even if it's more minor than some would hope in terms of content, and the devs seem to think so as well.

Head of Pocketpair publishing and communications John "Bucky" Buckley responds to the news himself on X, writing, "Happy birthday to Craftopia, the game that Pocketpair would not exist without!" He also teases the Xbox release of the old survival gem, which is similarly set for 2027.

I'm intrigued to see the devs acknowledge their origins in Craftopia myself, personally, and as a player, too, I'm thrilled it's finally releasing.

Here's hoping that Craftopia 1.0 delivers on its promises to clean up the admittedly janky (at times, anyway) open-world game and also add a little bit of new content to it. I know I'll be looking forward to the release next year.

People don't understand Steam player numbers, Palworld lead says: "Poor Marathon and stuff are getting dragged through the mud ... I'm sure our day's coming"

People have been inflicting the cruel colors and harsh lines of Nvidia's DLSS 5 on games that were normal before they were forced to look like AI-enhanced Love Island, and Hello Games' stylized space explorer No Man's Sky is the latest victim. A popular fanmade clip showing No Man's Sky looking more unnaturally crisp than a hangnail reveals plenty of people actually want DLSS 5 – but that developer Hello Games probably won't give it to them.

The original post from Twitch streamer Oskar1up has over 6,000 likes and 1.8 million views on Twitter as comments commend the dramatic peach sunset and glassy ocean waves DLSS 5 gives the otherwise subtly beautiful game from 2016. The post ultimately caught Hello Games engine programmer Martin Griffiths' attention, but not for entirely innocent reasons.

Another Twitter user says of Oskar1up's DLSS 5 experiment, "No Man's Sky is like the perfect game for DLSS 5, no human faces so no weird uncanny valley, and tons of natural and space scenes can use the realism boost." But Griffiths doesn't seem convinced by this claim that DLSS 5 has no downsides when applied to environments.

"It would probably fall to me to implement DLSS 5 in No Man's Sky, since I coded our DLSS support," Griffiths writes on Twitter. "But adopting it isn’t really a technology decision – it's much more an art-direction choice."

On this note, GamesRadar+ learned during our early hands-on time with DLSS 5 at Gamescom 2026 that the tech that applies a 2D generative AI filter to images is "only" made for photorealistic games, as Nvidia insisted. So, it shouldn't apply to No Man's Sky, which was carefully crafted to be its own soft rainbow galaxy.

That said, Nvidia's intentions are irrelevant when it comes to the unruly desires of curious gamers, who've crafted their own DLSS 5 button with files from NBA 2K27. It's this bootleg that is making No Man's Sky look like it's been deflated and then stuffed with clear jelly.

Personally, I think it looks awful – generic and unmotivated. To add DLSS 5, Griffiths says, "The question isn't whether we can do it. It's whether it enhances the image, or starts to subtract from No Man's Sky's own unique look and feel."

So, could Hello Games litter their beloved game's universe with AI? Sure. Should the developer do so? I hope no one actually believes that.

Nvidia says it's only targeting "photorealistic" games with DLSS 5, but am I the only one who thinks "realistic" visuals are worse?

RuneScape developer Jagex is showing Dragonwilds players its appreciation by bucking one of the conventions of releasing a game out of early access. Instead of launching into 1.0 with a hefty price increase, as is the standard with early access games going into 1.0, RuneScape Dragonwilds will stay exactly the same price, £24.99 or $29.99, when it leaves early access on September 15.

According to Jagex, this is for no other reason than to express gratitude for a community of fans that has kept RuneScape in the gaming zeitgeist for 25 years.

"Since we launched into Early Access, we've been extremely proud of the amazing work that has gone into RuneScape: Dragonwilds," reads an update shared to the game's official website. "So many of you have taken the plunge into Ashenfall, and with every update we are humbled by the number of you trying out Dragonwilds, recommending it to friends and leaving reviews on Steam. The feedback has been incredible, and the game continues to improve with every update, guided and informed by our vision, and your feedback, working together in harmony.

"Dragonwilds' success is because of the invaluable participation of our Early Access players, but also thanks to the support and excitement shared by the countless number of fans waiting for Kuldra's Saga to be complete before you took the plunge with us. We hope this small gesture goes some way to showing our endless appreciation for your support and belief."

Jagex also confirms that Dragonwilds will continue getting monthly updates "as the game grows" in its post-early access life. And speaking of which, the next major update is coming sometime in the vague window of "Winter," and it'll be called Luminance. That, like the smaller updates, will be a free grab for players, although Jagex has yet to say a whole lot else about it.

"We'll share more about our 2027 plans once we've delivered our 1.0 release, and you can tune into our Summit at RuneFest to hear more about 2027 and the next Saga in Ashenfall's story," says the dev.

RuneScape: Dragonwilds 1.0 is just one of many upcoming launches on our big Fall Preview 2026 guide of our most wanted games.

The spice must flow, including in updates for Dune: Awakening. The Arrakis-set MMO is getting a single-player mode soon, and it'll provide more options for how much you want to get out of the experience compared to the more live-service way of playing.

At Camescom 2026, Joel Bylos, the chief creative office of developer Funcom, explained the logic to GamesRadar+. "The good thing about single-player is with the way that you can play the story and get into the story, you don't have to spend that 100 hours, right?" he says.

"You can get through the game in 50, maybe 80 hours if you change some of the settings and make it easier for yourself," he adds.

This is the thing - playing the single-player mode lets you curate the difficulty and other aspects to far greater depth than if you were partaking in the MMO side of things. Funcom handles a lot of that, because it needs to work as intended for a huge community, and there are expectations for events and the like.

"The multiplayer aspects of the game, where we built out this end game, I think people are complaining that it's a little too grindy, so we're going to work on some of that," Byblos comments. "In single-player, you can just change all of those settings yourself. So you have full control over the experience in single-player. Multiplayer, on the other hand, we control the experience a little more."

He mentions the devs are looking into updates to make it a little better for people," but to him, at least, "100 hours isn't bad" for how much people can get out of the project. That's definitely a good chunk of time, and a strong base for a game that's only been out just over a year.

Dune: Awakening has struggled a bit to retain players since launching in early access, but having more options for how people can join in should help remedy that. I know I'm more likely to get involved if I can turn off the live-service mechanics. Whether or not I get 100 hours out of it remains to be seen, all depends on how fond of the spice I become.

Dune: Awakening's players might be 80% PvE, but devs are considering ways to spice PvP up in the future with "faction versus faction" and more

Growing infatuation with Steam player numbers as a means to gauge a game's success or popularity has ultimately misled a lot of people, worries Palworld liaison and Pocketpair publishing lead John Buckley.

Because Steam is both the dominant platform for PC gaming and the only major platform that shares live, granular player data, Steam player counts, particularly concurrent users, are regularly used as a measuring stick, or just as often, a bludgeon. It could be Arc Raiders, Palworld, Peak, How to Fish, or Baldur's Gate 3; gamers will put you under the SteamDB or Steam Charts microscope.

Buckley's regularly pushed back on the "dead game" doomsaying chucked at Palworld and countless other games over the years, arguing that player falloff is normal and expected, and that numbers often described as dire are in fact quite healthy. In an interview at Gamescom 2026, he describes the Steam number chatter as part of a larger misunderstanding.

"The numbers are so distorted with Palworld," he says. "I so vividly remember the 2.1 million concurrent to half a million concurrent [period]. Some of the most viral posts at that time were, 'This is the biggest game dropoff of all time.' And I was like, half a million people playing a game at any one moment, it makes me want to be sick, how staggering that is."

Though Palworld was biggest on PC, it wasn't only on PC, and this is one problem with Steam math. We can estimate trends based on a game's Steam community, and Steam player numbers do have genuine value and applications, but we can't get a reliable picture of a multiplatform release. The factors driving spikes and dips in those numbers are also much more varied than whether a game is good or bad. Sales, update cadence, server downtime, time zones, and replayability can have a big impact.

In a similar vein, Buckley looks at what concurrent Steam users can and can't tell us.

"And not to dog on SteamDB, because I love those guys, but I think of how public these numbers have become in recent years," he says. "People really love pulling these numbers up recently. Now we know why consoles don't like to share them."

As it happens, Sony recently began testing a tiny PS5 widget which, in some way, offers a snapshot of game activity not too far removed from Steam Charts. And even that small glimpse into the console black box seems to come with huge obfuscation.

"People look at these, and I think that's all really misunderstood now," Buckley continues. "I think people think 500,000 CCU one hour and 400,000 CCU one hour means 100,000 people stopped playing. That's not what it means, because any second two could log on and two could log off.

"I think we need to start sharing DAU [daily active users]. I wouldn't be against making DAUs public – the amount of actual people who played a game in one day. Because I think a lot of people would be shocked how different these numbers are. You know, a game that has 1,000 CCU could have 20,000 DAU. The numbers are quite different."

Buckley, like Warframe boss Rebecca Ford, worries the blood sport that Steam math has become can poison discussion and critique.

"It's hard to deal with those numbers," Buckley adds. "Everyone's getting it. No one's immune to this anymore. Poor Marathon and stuff are getting dragged through the mud with this right now, and I'm sure our day's coming a few weeks from now. I'm sure people will say Palworld's dropped under 100,000. And oh no, under 100,000. It's coming."

Pocketpair lead thought if Palworld 1.0 hit 200k concurrent players, "that'd be party time" – then it passed 900k on Steam alone.

Dune: Awakening is finally coming to consoles next month, but that's not all – Funcom is also preparing to integrate the long-requested single-player mode.

So, how does that work in what's essentially an MMO and survival game mashup? Well, as chief creative officer Joel Bylos tells GamesRadar+ at Gamescom 2026, it just does – and that's all thanks to the strong story acting as Dune: Awakening's foundation… the very same that acts as an alternate timeline to its source material's own in Frank Herbert's beloved sci-fi book series.

In fact, integrating single-player hasn't been too difficult. The only challenge that has come is balancing Dune: Awakening's obvious multiplayer aspects (think combat, difficulty, etc.).

"We did a major balance pass across the game for the solo experience to make sure that people didn't get bogged down in the parts where later on in the group experience you would need a group of people. So, it's a lot smoother to play through from a progression perspective." And, again, the story helps… a lot.

"I think the story of the game works really well for a single-player game," as Bylos says. "It's just perfectly fine. People will really enjoy it."

That checks out – many of my own favorite moments in Dune: Awakening were spent enjoying the various missions and the storyline, especially as it differs from the Dune I was already familiar with. A solid story isn't easy to find in most survival games, either, which sets Funcom's apart.

As the lead puts it, "I think we have the best story in a survival game that exists." That's quite a bold statement, but I suppose it makes sense. The genre doesn't exactly boast much, erm, story-focused content, thinking of giants like Minecraft and Terraria.
Dune: Awakening is quite unique, and with its single-player mode's release on September 22, it seems this will shine through all the more.

And, as long as people are "looking for a really great survival game experience that they can play as a single player," Dune: Awakening's big launch next month should go well. As a big fan of solo experiences and Funcom's game myself, I've got my fingers crossed.

Dune: Awakening dev knows everyone wants crossplay for the upcoming console release, but it's "technically and operationally complex to implement"

After recovering from the "supernatural" success of Palworld's early access launch, Pocketpair comms and publishing lead John Buckley had more modest expectations for the 1.0 update.

If the game had hit 200,000 concurrent players with 1.0, less than 10% of Palworld's launch peak, "that'd be party time," he says. Instead, Palworld 1.0 rocketed straight to 960,000 concurrents on Steam alone, and about five times Buckley's expectations globally. Before 1.0, the game was hovering around the 45,000 CCU mark on Steam.

Speaking with GamesRadar+ at Gamescom, Buckley examines the "huge success" of Palworld 1.0. "Thank you, gamers," he says. "As cliche as it might sound, we didn't expect it to go that well. Genuinely. 900,000 CCU, insane amount of sales yet again. We're really, really happy. Again, very life changing for the studio."

When we spoke to Buckley earlier in the year at GDC, he described Palworld's launch as an anomaly that he couldn't explain. So, the folks at Pocketpair didn't want to bank on lightning striking twice.

He still seems perplexed by it. "The early access release was supernatural," he reiterates. "It's the only word you can use. It shouldn't exist, that kind of level."

Buckley says Pocketpair was confident that update 1.0 would see a healthy wave of returning players who "haven't played in two years" coming back to check out the new stuff. What he and the team didn't expect was for the wave of players buying and playing the game for the first time to be so large.

"I really don't want to use the word market cap because it sounds awful, but you do at some point think Palworld's kind of reached the audience now," he reasons. "We expected it to go quite well. Personally, I was like, if we can hit about 200k, it's a crazy CCU. 200k, that'd be party time. And again, it's five times that."

Buckley examines the Palworld audience in a little more detail, with Pocketpair actively expanding into spinoffs and other genres like cuter farm sim Palfarm and a third-party Palworld MMO. "I think the end goal is not that there's a Palworld for everyone, but a Palworld for lots of people," he says. "If there's peoples' ideal version of Palworld.

"The reason we're making the farming game [Palfarm] is because one of the very, very earliest things people were asking for was Palworld but just a bit cozier. Palworld with a bit less of the guns or making bases and stuff. 'I don't want to grind resources, I just want to hang out with my Pals.' That's Palfarm. That's the intention of Palfarm. I think if we can start doing things like this, Palworld can become its own thing."

Palworld devs "not planning to spend a year" making a "massive" 1.1 update, publishing lead clarifies.

Earlier this year, Terraria saw the release of its long-awaited 1.4.5 update (known also as by its official name, Bigger and Boulder) – but developer Re-Logic has still been working since to patch things up.

The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and the latest serving of pudding is 1.4.5.7 – a handy, seemingly little new "hotfix" that is actually anything but little.

As outlined in the patch notes on Steam, this version of Terraria sees a plethora of additions, adjustments, and reworks land, with some including changes I (and many other fans, judging by circulating discussions online) have spent the last 10 or so years waiting to see come to fruition.

First and foremost, we've got a bunch of new items to look forward to in 1.4.5.7, from staves to accessories, and even materials like the Kinship Peach. There are also "two new secret seeds," as per Re-Logic's patch notes… which I can't wait to explore.

The real excitement (for me, anyway), though, comes from the tweaks the so-called hotfix – which truly does feel like an update – brings. Let's start with the respawn timer.

You know how when you die, you annoyingly have to wait to respawn? Well, not anymore – as long as there's "no great danger around," anyway.

And yoyos, the weapons that have arguably been universally hated and seen as, well, useless since 2015? As one fan so eloquently puts it in a post over on Twitter, they're "not ass" anymore, with buffs and specific yoyo changes like one to the Eye of Cthulhu that spawns an, erm, Eye of Cthulhu upon hitting an enemy.

There are changes across the board to classes and weapons, however, so I'd advise taking a look at the full patch notes – especially if you like playing with magic, like me.

Bosses are different now, too, with nerfs to some (thankfully, the Empress of Light is one of these), and adjustments to many. The Moon Lord, for example, has better-telegraphed attacks in 1.4.5.7, making the fight a bit less painful. The Deerclops' attacks better line up visibly as well.

All in all, it's a downright loaded hotfix, and apparently the "last" to come for the Bigger and Boulder update.

There's genuinely too much to cover here, so again, I'd recommend reading through Re-Logic's roundup – but I personally can't wait to see what's next.

Terraria's biggest mod, Calamity, is shutting down after 10 years over what the makers call a "troubled past" and "irrecoverably tainted reputation."

I love a good cozy game, and I love a good zombie game, but I'm not sure I've ever played a hybrid of the two. There's something inherently stressful about being surrounded by hordes of undead intent on eating your brains, but new "cozy post-apocalyptic survival game" aims to make that experience much more relaxing.

From two-person indie studio Cosmic Tofu, In the Van is marketed toward people who "play Project Zomboid like it's Stardew Valley," or in other words, people who cast zombies aside as an irksome afterthought while they hang out in their cabins, cook food, and harvest crops. So, why not just play Project Zomboid? Well, the answer's right there in the title. In the Van gives you a mobile cabin to turn into your personal chill space and protect yourself from the perils of the outside, post-apocalyptic world.

"Scavenge by day, drive back before dark, and spend the night cooking, farming, and cracking open phones recovered from the dead to find out what happened to the world," reads the official description. Essentially, it sounds like a more forgiving, cozy focused Project Zomboid but instead of a cabin, your home is a customizable van, which sounds like a delightful spin.

Cosmic Tofu says you'll find your zen in the game when you "master the survival routine" by balancing exploration, item crafting, and survival elements "at your own pace," and if that sounds challenging amidst a zombie apocalypse, In the Van's reveal trailer (above) makes it pretty clear that this specific variety of zombie isn't particularly hard to kill. You'll even be able to plow through zombie clusters with the van itself, which I suppose can be cozy depending on your tolerance for blood.

Speaking of which, Cosmic Tofu has done its best to appease cozy gamers who might be turned off by the whole zombie apocalypse thing, calling the game's undead walkers "cute little Stardew-ish pixel zombie friends" and begging moderators not to mark the post NSFW after an earlier post was marked as sensitive for "setting a zombie on fire."

There's no release date for In the Van yet, but Cosmic Tofu says a closed playtest is coming soon.

Here are the best relaxing games to unwind with right now.

At a time when making and supporting a live service game is rightly seen as an arduous, dangerous challenge, Hello Games boss Sean Murray feels "lucky that we've been allowed to" make No Man's Sky content for 10 years.

Speaking with GamesRadar+ and reflecting on 10 years of No Man's Sky, Murray examines how the small team at Hello Games has reached an equilibrium that allows for this kind of long-term support. No Man's Sky isn't a conventional live service game – everything is free, for one, and it's a single-player experience for many fans – but very few games get 10 years of updates.

"Honestly, if people weren't playing No Man's Sky, I don't think we would want to do updates," Murray says. "I don't think the motivation would be there. Obviously, if no one's playing your game, it's sort of pointless, right?"

Murray points to the "early days" of No Man's Sky, back when Hello Games was more concerned with addressing feedback than adding content. His advice to the team was to picture the person who would love the game and make it "better for them."

"So I think the team does have that attitude, but you need some people to be playing the game, and we've been very lucky in that lots of people play the game," Murray adds.

10 years after launch, No Man's Sky still hangs out in the top 100 to 150 games on Steam (the only platform with such readily available player stats), which is an enviable position for almost any game. Another 10 years from now, there's no guarantee that Hello Games will still be pumping out No Man's Sky updates on the same schedule, or of the same scope, but Murray reckons it would be hard to put the game down for good.

"I could imagine us stopping doing updates for No Man's Sky at some point, and then 10 years later, I'm like, 'Let's do an update for No Man's Sky,'" he says. "I think stuff like that is great. We are in a mindset right now, in the industry, of games just being very consumable. Onto the next one. But I personally really love going back to some of my favorite games and just replaying them when they come to a new platform or something. There's a real beauty in keeping those things alive."

Palworld and No Man's Sky leads pour more fuel on the potential collab fire and fans are convinced it's finally happening: "My 2 favorite games together? Yes please."

Subnautica 2 continues to truck along in early access, and one of the biggest updates promised in the Subnautica 2 roadmap is upon us. The newly released patch adds a host of features aimed at making the co-op experience better, but if you're a solo player, there's no need to worry – the devs at Unknown Worlds promise the bigger update with a new region and story content is still on the way.

Officially titled the Buddy System update, the headline addition here is proximity chat. "You'll be able to talk locally with each other and then as you get further away, you'll hear it switch to sort of a radio sounding voice, that'll progressively break up as you get further away," creative director Anthony Gallegos explains in an update vlog. "I think it definitely adds to the tension of it."

There's also a tracking tag that functions as a "short-range beacon," according to the official patch notes, and you can even place it inside containers to track their locations, too. There are a bunch of fresh emotes now selectable from a new emote menu, and several new options for customizing your character.

"We also have player revives," Gallegos says. "So if your friend gets downed, whether it's by a smaller shark or maybe they run out of food and they die from that or they run out of oxygen, there's going to be a timer that will elapse, where you can swim out to them, share some oxygen with them, bring them back to life and sort of save the day."

The original Subnautica was strictly a single-player affair, and if you check the comment sections around this update you'll find a small but vocal handful of solo players who feel a bit burned by this multiplayer-first update. But Gallegos is quick to address those concerns in the vlog: "Of course, alongside all of this, we're continuing to work on the EA2 update that's going to add the new region with the new story and new progression, new vehicles, all those things."

Check out our guides on how to get the Bioscanner in Subnautica 2 or how to craft Subnautica 2 ingots if you need some help.

After months of teasing, both Hello Games' boss and John 'Bucky' Buckley, the head of publishing and communications at Palworld developer Pocketpair, are throwing more fuel on the fire of a potential collaboration between it and No Man's Sky.

Back in April, Hello Games lead Sean Murray was teasing the Pokemon-style update for No Man's Sky which caught the attention of Bucky, saying he had a "fun collab idea" for the two games. This was furthered in July when Bucky said he wants to crossover with No Man's Sky specifically, should the collab make sense logistically. And following the Terraria update and collab with indie FPS Ultrakill, fans are speculating what's next to come.

Earlier this week, Bucky revealed that people "do not realize the sheer number of collabs we've rejected or scrapped," which caused Murray to quote tweet a news post about it, tagging Bucky and saying "bro." This was swiftly responded to by Bucky, who quotes Eminem's Stan back to Murray, with lines like "I wrote you, but you still ain't callin'," and "I hope you get this, man, hit me back, just to chat."

While this could easily just be a bit of banter between the two, given the history between them, some fans are seeing this as confirmation that the long-teased collab could be in the works. One response reads "YES MY TWO FAVORITE WORLDS KISS AND MAKE ME A BEAUTIFUL COLAB," while another says, "My two favorite games together? Yes please." Others simply put out there, "Ohh it's happening."

At this point it definitely does feel like a "when" more than "if," but it all comes down to how the teams can make it work and make sense, which will likely be the real challenge.

Palworld devs "not planning to spend a year" making a "massive" 1.1 update, publishing lead clarifies after quickly regretting asking fans for ideas.

Palworld gets tons of collaboration pitches that are destined to fail, but Pocketpair's publishing lead John "Bucky" Buckley says the creature catcher isn't the only game surrounded by suitors. Apparently, this is simply the way life goes for games as mega-popular as Palworld, whose recent 1.0 launch helped it earn $700 million in total revenue since 2024.

Buckley explained his view on collaborations in a set of messages in the official Pocketpair Discord server on August 14, reacting to his unexpected admission last week that fans "do not realize the sheer number of collabs we've rejected or scrapped" for not completely meshing with Palworld's survival game ethos. Buckley elaborates on Discord, "I don't think that's unique to Palworld at all btw. I reckon almost every popular game is getting collab offers all the time."

When a fan asks Buckley what type of collaboration proposals got rejected, imagining "something like 'PALWORLD X MR. CLEAN!!!'" – which I'd actually like to hear more about – the publishing head says, "Loads but is that really so surprising?"

He doesn't go into detail, and fans note that Palworld has already had some unexpected collaborations, like its 2025 Ultrakill crossover that was actually instigated by Palworld; apparently, Pocketpair asked for a collaboration since its weapon designer loves the face-melting FPS Ultrakill, and Buckley said at the time on Twitter, "It's really as shrimple as that."

But as far as unsolicited pitches go, Buckley says on Discord, "Many people offered us their games but obviously we don't want to just shove random things in." So Pocketpair would like to hear back from Fortnite, and it would be glad to work with fellow survival games like No Man's Sky and Ark, but don't start getting any ideas about a Five Nights at Palworld situation, or The Elder Scrolls 7: Palworld. Pocketpair needs to be at least a little discerning, and so does every other popular game on the planet.

Palworld devs "not planning to spend a year" making a "massive" 1.1 update, publishing lead clarifies after quickly regretting asking fans for ideas.

After a decade of solid updates and player numbers that would make most games blush, No Man's Sky lead Sean Murray says the best part of the journey has actually been watching the team work together.

We caught up with Hello Games' Sean Murray to talk about 10 years of No Man's Sky, a journey that's included some low lows and spacey highs. Asked about the best moments of that decade, Murray says the easy answer would be "when we hit the highest plater numbers since launch with [the Voyagers update]" or when the team won awards at BAFTA and The Game Awards.

But, really, player numbers and gold trophies pale next to the "more boring, slightly difficult answer." Murray recalls moments where the team would play the Voyagers update together for the first time before its release, or the pretty transformative third-person camera option, or the player hub of The Space Anomaly, or... you get the gist. Coming together as a team to play something really exciting that "no one's seen" before is "the real sort of development high." (Just don't ruin it by telling him how much No Man's Sky DLC would've made.)

"Those have been a buzz," Murray explains. "That's when I'm going home and I'm just buzzing about it. And you're like, 'People are gonna love this.'"

Another example came when Hello Games put put the Beyond update, which was plagued with all sorts of bugs and problems. "We just worked really, really hard and I think we put out something ridiculous like 27 hot fixes in a week or something crazy." Being able to work together so quickly was only possible thanks to "systems that we'd been building for years", but the highlight was simply "the team just meshing together" and "solving problems just really quickly."

"You know, so those moments are a real buzz," he adds.

Sean Murray says a "weight had lifted" when No Man's Sky players were finally talking more about its new content than its controversial launch

No Man's Sky had one of the most controversial game launches and high-profile comebacks of the decade - you likely don't need me to remind you - but lead developer Sean Murray says the weight of its botched launch didn't lift until about three years later.

"We used to have a little running joke in the studio," Murray says in an interview with GamesRadar+ to mark the space exploration sim's 10th anniversary. Hello Games' inside joke was that the team would put out one of their famously transformative updates, and each time, online coverage "would always [mention] the disastrous launch of No Man's Sky" first. "Like that would be their opener, and then talk about the update."

Rain or shine, Hello Games kept pumping out huge, free updates that added everything from new features (base-building, a proper narrative, multiplayer, etc) to general improvements to the game's graphics or procedural generation, say. (Although, Murray still has fun playing No Man's Sky's original version.)

"I think it was about three years in and we had one article, and it never mentioned the launch. It just talked about the update, and honestly, I felt like a weight had lifted," Murray continues. "Until that point, it felt like we were really trying to like, you know, update the game and maybe no one really wanted it or something like that."

Before then, Hello Games felt like it was "fighting this real uphill battle" and releasing updates to an audience that sometimes received them with hostility. Things only became much clearer when the studio realized "that there's a community who really loves the game."

"But there was two or three years where it was a battle, where every time you posted about the game, every reply was laced with some slightly mean things and stuff like that," he adds. "You felt like you were doing it almost against some people's wishes or something… But over time, that changes, and… you learn who your community is and who your player base is."

"There is probably some end" to No Man's Sky, says Hello Games boss, but he'll probably come back 10 years later for a surprise update anyway

Palworld publishing lead John "Bucky" Buckley should've known better when he asked his Twitter followers for suggestions on new content following the game's 1.0 release last month. Specifically, he should've known they would all lay out their wildest hopes and dreams on virtual paper instead of submitting reasonable requests, and now he's paying the price.

On Thursday, Buckley took to Twitter to thank players for a successful Palworld 1.0 launch, which is a lovely gesture. But where he went wrong was teasing future content and asking players for "suggestions" as the devs get back to work on whatever's next for the game.

"Shot myself in the foot here, 1.7k comments later," reads a follow-up tweet from Buckley sent out the next day. "Things like 'add a new continent', 'add 20 more levels' and similarly massive undertakings are not really what we want to do with v1.1.

"Open to ideas but, we're not planning to spend a year making a massive update for 1.1."

For those wondering about the scope of feedback Buckley and Pocketpair are requesting, I'll point you to a recent Palworld patch that made building bases over water a lot easier and let you earn World Tree Holy Water through expeditions rather than just farming. That's probably a much more realistic idea of the types of additions Pocketpair is planning for 1.1. If and when something like a Palworld 2.0 comes out, that's when you'll see much bigger adds like new continents and levels.

In the meantime, it's not unreasonable to hold out hope for a new Palworld collab, although Buckley himself recently made it very clear just how selective Pocketpair is about who is collaborates with.

Palworld TCG devs "sincerely apologize" as unprecedented demand and scalpers make enjoying the Pokemon rival next to impossible

Somehow, it's been ten years since No Man's Sky launched. 2016 was certainly a simpler time, and looking back on the space exploration sim, Hello Games managing director Sean Murray has some sage words for his younger self.

"I would tell that guy, don't do all the press and stuff like that that you're doing," he tells GamesRadar+. "Guess what? You never wanted to do press and be a sort of frontman. You don't enjoy it, you won't enjoy it, and you also won't be very good at it."

He points out this is going back further than 12 years, to 2014, when the press for No Man's Sky started to ramp up. The game was a regular at showcases and trade shows, usually with Murray in tow, who did plenty of interviews across print, online, and television.

Hello Games enjoyed the double-edged sword of producing a game that captured people's imaginations, and then having to go out and publicly represent it. Promotion can be exhausting, and Murray believes he was always better served at his desk.

"Just avoid that whole thing and stick to just making games and coding," he says. Coming back to the present, he points out that Hello Games has become a much more mysterious entity. Very little is actually known about upcoming release Light No Fire, and that's a result of lessons learned from No Man's Sky

"We've lived that over the ten years since, right? That has been a big change in my life, right? Where I haven't chatted to any press in like four, four or five years or something," he says. "The most communication we do now is the occasional emoji or whatever, and that suits me just fine. I'm much better at just sticking to development.

Don't expect those vague teases to end any time soon. To be fair, when your game is the second most-wishlisted on Steam, you can take a chill pill.

"There is probably some end" to No Man's Sky, says Hello Games boss, but he'll probably come back 10 years later for a surprise update anyway

The devs behind Palworld have never been shy about collaborations in their monster collector. Valheim, Ultrakill, and Terraria are just three notable partnerships Pocketpair's orchestrated. But the latter drew some ire lately, prompting an explanation on Palworld's collabs from the company's ever-present head of publishing and communications, John "Bucky" Buckley.

"I think the Terraria collab in Palworld was pretty great!" Buckley said on Twitter. "Completely understand some people would prefer a more lore-first approach but we've been very open about our fun-first approach since day one!"

That much is hard to argue against. Palworld's been a joyful, upbeat, anarchic game since the moment it was announced. The "Pokemon, but with guns" first impression gave way to a boisterous blend of survival mechanics and good old fashioned rounding up of cute critters.

Each collaboration has been predicated on increasing the laughter therein – I mean, why else does a game with cute animals work with a game called Ultrakill? On the back of this statement, Buckley then points out that Pocketpair's actually extremely picky about who gets near the massive fantasy adventure.

"If it really doesn’t make sense then obviously we would never go ahead with it," he adds. "You guys simply do not realize the sheer number of collabs we've rejected or scrapped for that reason."

He doesn't provide any further details – why would he? – but given Palworld's huge numbers, especially since launching 1.0, I can easily believe him.

Palworld has a reputation to uphold, and it's admirable Pocketpair's not done anything purely for what'd be an obvious payday, or a higher profile. It just makes the community seem all the more special. I mean, when you're able to do your own weirdo dating sim, what can anyone else offer you, really?

New Palworld patch makes building bases over water much easier, and finally lets you earn World Tree Holy Water through expeditions rather than just farming.

Obsidian Entertainment has just put out an early access roadmap for Grounded 2's Year 2, promising everything from an expanded map to new weapons and bosses, but there are still a few secret things the developer's keeping a tight lid on.

Just a few days ago, Grounded 2 enjoyed its meaty new Into the Abyss update, which included a brand new area, overhauls to swimming and underwater exploration, plenty of new backyard critters to fend off, the surprise addition of fast travel, and much more.

But Obsidian wasted no time in letting folks know what else to expect from their shrunk-down survival game, via an updated roadmap. New SCA.B Flavor Schemes (colors for your HUD), a rotting wood pile area, and a new potato beetle mount are headlining an unnamed update due this fall.

More new buildings, building materials, buggies, bosses and creatures, and Tier 4 Omni-tools are due in the winter update. And then the ability to move your entire base is promised in the roadmap's more vague "future plans" section, alongside more of the things you'd expect.

The famed studio isn't revealing its full hand as the Year 2 roadmap has plenty of upcoming features spray-painted over. From what we can tell, the devs really don't want to ruin the surprise of one particular enemy type, two incoming areas, and a community-requested building feature. Alright then, Obsidian, keep your secrets.

Obsidian's silence hasn't stopped the community from crafting their own theories, however. "I'm guessing the next major area in the Winter update will be the Sandbox area," one fan writes over on Reddit. "The last update in the roadmap includes an expansion to the Abyss, so I'm assuming it'll be the Explosion area south of the Pond."

The other elephant (or wolf spider, in this instance) in the roadmap is Grounded 2's 1.0 release window, which isn't mentioned here at all. "We aren’t locking ourselves into a hard date just yet; it'll really depend on how things go and how much we add based on your feedback," the game's Steam page notes. "We'll keep you posted along the way!"

Fallout: New Vegas studio Obsidian reportedly working on a new Fallout RPG after forced pivot from Xbox kills Avowed 2 and other games