Destiny 2: Lightfall | Season of the Witch Launch Trailer – Brace Yourself for a Wicked Adventure!

Hey there, fellow Guardians! Grab your weapons, buckle up, and prepare for a jaw-dropping ride because Destiny 2 is about to drop its darkest and most spellbinding expansion to date. The highly anticipated Lightfall | Season of the Witch Launch Trailer promises to take us on a wild and magical adventure through a world full of witchcraft, sorcery, and supernatural beings. Strap in, my friends, and let’s delve into the excitement!

1: The Witching Hour Approaches – Lightfall Sneak Peek
Get ready to step into the shadows and witness firsthand the impending enthralling new chapter of Destiny 2. In this exhilarating season, the darkness has taken a wicked turn, with witches, warlocks, and other mystical creatures looming large. Bungie has outdone themselves in creating an immersive and captivating experience that’ll leave you spellbound.

Sub-heading 1: What to Expect from Lightfall
With Lightfall, Bungie is set to introduce a bevy of new gameplay features, storyline twists, and an arsenal of magical weapons that will make you feel like a true spell-slinger. From the moment you lay your eyes on the Season of the Witch Launch Trailer, it’s clear that Destiny 2 is about to walk on the dark and mysterious side.

2: Enter the World of Witchcraft and Sorcery

A Menacing New Foe
Prepare to face off against a powerful coven of witches who have unleashed chaos upon the universe. These dark enchantresses possess formidable magic and terrifying spells that will test your Guardian’s mettle like never before. Get ready to match their powers with your own cunning and might.

Supernatural Powers Awaken
As a Guardian, you’ll be able to harness new supernatural abilities, empowering you to employ dark magic against your foes. Tap into the ancient supernatural energy that courses through your veins and unleashes devastating spells to obliterate anything standing in your path.

3: An All-Star Cast

Meet the Witches
The Lightfall expansion introduces a cast of enchanting witches, each with their unique powers and personalities. Get ready to be captivated by the charming yet dangerous witches who will challenge your every move.

The Legendary Guardian – A Witch’s Ally
Amidst the chaos, a new ally takes center stage, a legendary Guardian with unmatched mystical prowess. Unleash your power alongside this captivating new character as you navigate through a world laden with ancient magic and tangled webs.

4: Unearth Hidden Treasures

Newly Discovered Realms
Lightfall introduces a series of newly discovered enchanting realms, each holding untold secrets and treasures. Venture into uncharted territories and uncover the long-forgotten knowledge that could reshape the world of Destiny 2.

Minds Unraveled – A Fascinating Storyline
Prepare to be enthralled by a captivating storyline that will unravel the mysteries and intrigues of the witching world. As you explore the depths of these arcane realms, unravel the webs of deceit and join forces with unexpected allies to unveil what lies beneath the surface.

5: The Epic Battle Begins!

Destiny vs. Darkness – The Ultimate Showdown
Suit up, Guardians, for a showdown of mythical proportions. Command your powers, rally your allies, and brace yourself for a battle where the line between light and darkness blurs. Destiny 2: Lightfall will push you to your limits and beyond, as you take on the formidable forces that stand in your way.

Conclusion:
Friends, the Lightfall | Season of the Witch Launch Trailer has cast a mesmerizing spell on us, promising an unforgettable journey into the realms of sorcery and witchcraft. Bungie has crafted an experience that will captivate our imaginations and push the boundaries of what we thought possible in the Destiny universe. Strap on your Guardian gear and get ready to embark on your most mystical adventure yet! Are you ready to wield the forces of magic and vanquish the darkness? Then hold onto your helmets and unleash your supernatural might as Destiny 2: Lightfall lights up our screens and our hearts!

Get Access Here!

Cat Chaos Granny Hell Prank Simulator Games

(20512)

$4.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Channels for HDHomeRun

(365226)

$39.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Blink Video Doorbell (newest model) – Head-to-toe HD view, two-year battery life, and simple setup. Sync Module Core included – System (Black)

(43512911)

$29.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Waterfall Clock Live Wallpaper

$0.00 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Escape from Prison: Run & Hide

(3558)

$12.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Auto Amazon Links

Did you ever get to the end of Wizard of Oz and have notes – the nagging intuition that you could have taken down all those pesky flying monkeys or handled the backstabbing intricacies of Munchkin guild politics more effectively than Dorothy and her band of misfits did in the books? Thanks to the new AI storytelling platform Hidden Door, which plops players into TTRPG-like adventures based on their favorite literary universes, you’ll soon have the chance to walk the Yellow Brick Road however you see fit.

What’s behind (hidden) door number one

Hidden Door is both the company and the game. Hidden Door, the company, was co-founded by Hilary Mason, who is also CEO, and Matt Brandwein in 2020 with a mission to “inspire creativity through play with narrative AI.” The staff is split nearly evenly between machine learning engineers and traditional game designers, Mason told Engadget.

Hidden Door, the game, is the company’s currently-in-development social roleplaying narrative AI project. “[We are] trying to take all the joys of a tabletop game and allow you to play it without all the friction [of having to do it physically], and AI is the technology enabling that,” Mason said.

Leveraging the capabilities of large language models and procedural generation systems, Hidden Door creates immersive RPG campaigns using the player’s preferred IP — it could be Wizard of Oz, as was released on Monday, or Star Trek, Old Man’s War, Dungeon Crawler Carl or Agatha Christie’s assembled murder mystery library. (Just so long as the IP owner agrees to license their proprietary universe for use, which the latter four have not, the former of which has been dead long enough for it to no longer matter.)

“We solve a fundamentally different, technical problem than what you would see if you were just plugging content into an LLM like ChatGPT,” Mason said. “There, what you do is take an unstructured text prompt and put it into a model which is largely a black box.”

“GPT-3 came out a few months into our project and it was clearly incredibly biased – uncontrollable and … not useful in doing something like keeping a story on the rails,” she explained. “The core of our design came from that initial desire to build a safe, controllable system for telling amazing stories.

“We realized that if we were able to accomplish our safety goals,” she continued, “we would also be able to create something controllable enough that authors would be comfortable allowing people to play in their worlds.”

The building blocks of a cursed village

Take The Wizard of Oz, for example – a public domain series originally written in 1904 by L. Frank Baum that spans 14 books in total. Hidden Door has adapted that corpus of text into an immersive in-game universe that the user, and up to three teammates, can explore. The system does so by taking unstructured inputs from the players and mapping them to the Hidden Door game state, “which is essentially a game engine that represents in a database the characters, locations, items, relationships, and their conditions,” Mason explained.

Each player starts out making a character sheet to establish their avatar’s stats and backstories. From there, the system will incorporate that data, as well as the users’ responses to in-game prompts to generate a story. Rather than create each scenario for each story from scratch every time, the story engine works on what are essentially pre-computed tropes, Mason explained, “We call them ‘story thread templates’ and they’re at the level of things like … a cursed village. Your objective for the scene is to figure out where the curse is coming from and resolve it.”

Hidden Door

The templates serve as the basic building blocks of the story, establishing the narrative, providing structure for the players to explore and interact with the scene, and ultimately helping define when the story ends. The village cursed, “You don’t know what it is,” Mason said. “You don’t know who has cursed the village or why, so it sets those things up and then it lets you loose so you explore, you interact, you set things up.”

Every template is either handwritten or generated and hand-edited by a person. The team has already created thousands of such templates. By stringing three or four such templates together, the game can create a compelling narrative arc that allows players to deeply explore these universes but while maintaining strong content and safety guardrails.

Safety (and inclusivity) first

We’ve already seen way too many examples of what goes wrong when you let a chatbot off its leash. Whether it’s spouting Nazi propaganda or making incorrect claims about space telescopes, today’s large language models are highly susceptible to veering unbidden into hate speech, “hallucinating” facts, and on occasion, bullying people into suicide. These are all issues you don’t want popping up in an all-ages game, so there are many things you cannot say while playing.

“You cannot submit anything you want,” Mason said. The system will generate suggested actions based on what the player writes, but will not accept the written input directly. The system will even give feedback and comment on what the player is suggesting, “it might say, ‘Oh, no one’s ever tried that before’ or ‘That’s gonna be really hard for you,’” she continued, but any action suggested by the system can be pre-approved.

“There is no word ever in one of those constructed sentences that’s not in our dictionary,” Mason said. “That gives us control, both for safety and for preventing inappropriate content – like, if you were to type in, ‘I joined the Nazis,’ it would reply with, ‘you get a bowl of nachos.’ We’re not gonna let you do that – and also, for keeping the story inside the bounds of believability for the in-game world.”

Hidden Door

The company’s adherence to inclusivity is also easily recognizable in the character-creation process. “We made a very deliberate decision to pull things out where we thought a model might inject bias [like a character’s pronouns],” Mason said, “such that they are essentially on a pre-computed distribution.”

That is, there is no machine learning associated with it, they’re hard-coded into the gameplay. “Things like roles are in no way coupled to your avatar, your skills, or anything like that. You decide your pronouns and they’re respected throughout the system,” she said. “There’s no machine learning model that is deciding that a doctor should be a he and a nurse should be a she. It’ll be randomly assigned.”

Go ahead, snoop around

Aside from committing war atrocities, telling aristocrats jokes, and other forms of mass violence, players can do almost anything they want once the game starts. In Oz, each instance starts at the same point in the story, right when Dorothy splatters the Wicked Witch of the East under her house. The players aren’t part of Dorothy’s direct story but exist in the same time and space. “It’s the moment most of us think about when we think about that world, which is why we chose it,” Mason said.

But from there, the player’s decisions and actions make the Land of Oz their own. ”We think of the world almost as its own character that is collectively growing as people play the story,” Mason said. “You’re discovering new locations that get generated as you’re playing these stories and the world grows.”

And nothing says that you have to follow the conventional “off to see the Wizard” storyline. If a player gets to the Munchkin village, looks around, and decides to declare themselves mayor, the game will absolutely adapt the story to those new conditions. Instead of completing quests of battling flying monkeys and tipping pails of water, players will be tasked with running political campaigns and winning support from key members of the community. But again, you wouldn’t be able to walk into town, declare yourself Warlord and begin summary dissident purges — because those words aren’t in Hidden Door’s dictionary.

“We have thread templates that would be, ‘you’re persuading a bunch of people to support you in a political race,’” Mason said, “And once you are a mayor, you would be able to tell stories that just start in a different place.”

Those decisions are also persistent within the game instance. Deciding to help (or not) an NPC will impact their opinion of the player and influence their future interactions, for example. What’s more, those generated NPCs will reappear in subsequent playthroughs as recurring characters within your specific game instance.

“You can play as many stories in the same world as you want,” Mason said, “and everybody’s version of the Wizard of Oz will be really different depending on how they play over time.” NPCs and other generated assets aren’t sharable between groups yet, but that is something the team might look at implementing in the future.

In order to prevent playthroughs from getting bogged down in side quests, the Hidden Door team has developed a design philosophy that Mason refers to as “Chekhov’s Armory.” It’s basically where the system keeps track of all of the player’s in-game decisions and their influences on other assets within the story. Whenever the system needs to move the plot forward or inject some additional drama to keep the players engaged, it can dip back into the Armory to pull out an earlier plot thread or previously wronged enemy. This also helps the system maintain the continuity of the overall storyline and prevent catch-22s from forming.

“The idea was to create this feeling of the story, where your choices matter, where you have that full agency, but also there are rails moving you forward,” Mason said. “That’s been one of our most frequent design challenges, to adjust how much freedom versus how much we should motivate the story forward.”

16 secret herbs and language models

Hidden Door’s LLM differs significantly from the likes of ChatGPT in that it is not a monolithic model but rather 16 individual ML algorithms, each specialized to address a specific sub-task within the larger generative task.

We use a variety of models, some of them were built on open-source models, some of them are proprietary,” Mason explained. “It’s not just one big LLM, it’s decomposing it into an interpretable system where we can use the best [AI] at the right moment.” It also enables the team to quickly plug in and benchmark newly released AI models against the existing system to see if they can improve game quality. “Frankly, we design these engines so that game designers and narrative designers can be the ones to come in and tune it, which means we have to give them those knobs”

“One big question we worked on for a while was a plot-prediction algorithm,” Mason continued. “So, ‘what should happen next based on the series of actions that just happened?’” Interestingly the team quickly found that they could generate incredibly dull stories simply by consistently choosing the system’s top recommendation — because that choice is invariably, “the most obvious thing,” that could happen. Conversely, if the system works in too many twists and surprise reveals, the story quickly turns into chaos.

This granularity is what enables the designers to tweak the underlying game architecture to work for (example) a light-hearted Pride and Prejudice RPG as well as a grimdark Pride and Prejudice and Zombies version. “We think a lot about how our creative colleagues are going to be able to use this system to create the story experiences,” Mason said.

Gore and smooching are A-OK (but only if it’s canon)

While the game is designed to be family-friendly, Hidden Door’s target demographic is the 18-35 age range, and, as such, more mature themes are very much on the tabletop for designers, so long as they make sense within the existing story. For Wizard of Oz, violence is both ok and a major plot point.

“We work directly with authors and creators and can use as little, or as much, written material as they have,” Mason said. “We extract the characters, the types of plots, the vocabulary, the elements, the writing style, the locations.”

Hidden Door

The team also uses what it calls a “sub-genre-based model” that helps to generate the “formula” of the story. “The Wizard of Oz is largely fantasy that has a few additional rules to it, like animals can talk, but there are no dragons or other sort of fantastical creatures.” Essentially, the system takes a more general “fantasy tale” template and molds it into the specific form of the story, “down to the specific rules of the Wizard of Oz universe,” Mason said. Authors that license their works for use in the game will be able to dictate not just the initial starting plot points of the story, but the specific behaviors of NPCs and the inclusion of story arcs.

There is no “Adult” story module currently available but in-game physical affection is allowed. “You can make them kiss,” Mason said. “We have a very tasteful fade to black and then you’re on to the next scene. The NPC may also reject you if they don’t like you or you don’t have the kind of relationship. That is something that’s very tunable but we try to keep it at the level of relationship in the core material.”

The Future of interactive fandom

“It raises the floor for creation dramatically,” Mason said of generative AI’s broader promise to the game industry, “but it doesn’t raise the ceiling.” We’re just beginning to see gen AIs used for improving NPC dialog, Mason points out and could be as little as a year or two away from seeing a game “fully realized” using generative AI. “The brilliance of a human with a creative vision is not something we see generally out of these systems and that is in part because of what they are: a compression of a large amount of data and an aspiration to the median.”

“I do think there’s a lot of excitement in being able to raise the floor. I think it makes creativity more accessible to a large number of people who may then decide to pursue it in their own way or use it as a tool in their process,” she continued. “I also think it makes it possible for more people to be fans of things and to have some autonomy in the way they want to interact with creativity that we don’t currently have.”

If you want to try Hidden Door for yourself, you can sign up for the waitlist ahead of future test runs.

Old Movies - Hollywood classic movies

(4051412)

$7.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Air Burst: Balloon Blitz - Jade

$9.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Makeup Slime Simulator ASMR makeup artistry with ASMR relaxation and virtual models' beauty

(365219)

$9.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

ANDERY Only for iPhone Magsafe Car Mount Charger [15W Wireless Faster Charging, 78+LBS Strongest Suction, 2400gf Strongest Magnetic] 360° Adjustable, Phone Holders for Your Car, Charm Style Finish

(4752744)

$31.34 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Ragdoll Buddy Playground! Kick, Break & Fun

(29517)

$6.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Auto Amazon Links

You no longer have to live in one of a handful of countries to try the official option for Android games on Windows. The Google Play Games beta has expanded to over 40 European countries (including the UK) and New Zealand. The additions now make the platform available in 56 countries total, up from just 13 as of November.

Google Play Games currently offers more than 100 Android titles. You might not recognize all of them, but better-known releases like Asphalt 9, Homescapes, and Last Fortress are included. Google routinely adds new games to the service, and promises access in more countries “soon.”

The requirements are relatively light. You’ll need a PC with at least Windows 10, a solid-state drive, 8GB of RAM, and a four-core CPU running Intel’s UHD 630 graphics (found in 8th- and 9th-gen Core chips) or its AMD equivalent. Google recommends a dedicated “gaming-class” GPU like NVIDIA’s GeForce MX450 and a CPU with eight logical cores (such as through hyperthreading). If your computer is no more than a few years old, you can likely give this a try.

This isn’t the only way to play Android games on Windows, of course. Windows 11 offers apps from Amazon’s store, while clients like BlueStacks have been available for years. However, Google Play Games may be enticing if you want Google’s full backing and don’t mind a limited catalog.

Amazon Kid-Friendly Case for Fire HD 10 tablet (Only compatible with 13th generation tablet, 2023 release) - Happy Day

(4651229)

$34.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Like-New Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (16 GB) – Our fastest Kindle ever, with new 7" glare-free display and weeks of battery life – Black

(475886)

$143.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

All-New, Made for Amazon Stand with USB-C charging ports for Echo Dot Max

(45543)

$39.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Black Monster Hole Eat Everything City Big Hole Attack & Swallow

(2753)

$14.98 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Amazon Echo Dot (newest model) - Vibrant sounding speaker with Alexa+ Early Access, Great for bedrooms, dining rooms and offices, Charcoal

(475178297)

$31.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Auto Amazon Links

If you’ve been anywhere near a gaming forum recently, you’ve probably seen something about the state of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on PC. Even in a year that has seen some abysmal PC releases – I’m looking at you, The Last of Us Part 1 — the latest from Respawn Entertainment stands out.

Performance is the big issue everyone is talking about, and it’s easy to see why. If you want to watch a deep dive into the game’s technical woes, check out some of the recent videos Digital Foundry and Daniel Owen have uploaded to their YouTube channels. However, the short version is Jedi: Survivor has all the issues that have plagued many a recent poor PC port.

Each time you launch the game, it puts you through a shader pre-compilation process that, frustratingly, doesn’t prevent stuttering. Jedi: Survivor also suffers from traversal hitching, meaning your frame rate will drop when you enter a new location. Annoyingly, these were issues that were present and never addressed in Jedi: Fallen Order. And unfortunately, there’s no amount of hardware that can fix those problems in Jedi: Survivor.

I’m playing the game on a PC with an AMD Ryzen 5600x and NVIDIA RTX 3070. My system is not bleeding edge but it’s also not a toaster. The thing is, there’s no combination of settings that leads to Jedi: Survivor producing a consistent frame rate due to how the game makes use of your system’s processor and available VRAM. Even players with RTX 4090 GPUs reported poor framerates at launch.

Adding to the performance issues is Jedi: Survivor’s status as an AMD-sponsored title. The game supports AMD’s FSR upscaling technology, but not DLSS and XESS. While it’s true you can use FSR with NVIDIA and Intel GPUs, Jedi: Survivor’s implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Even set to the “Quality” setting, the tech introduces distracting artifacts that take away from the game’s otherwise compelling presentation. FSR also does little to nothing to improve your framerate since the game is so CPU limited.

And then you have Jedi: Survivor’s settings menu. In short, the game features one of the least helpful settings menus I’ve seen in recent memory. It’s not properly coded for mouse navigation; none of the graphical options come with an explanation of what they do; and the game doesn’t even offer a hint of what kind of performance impact you can expect from tweaking specific settings. But the worst offender is Jedi: Survivor’s ray tracing options – or should I say, option, singular. Unlike nearly every other modern PC release, Jedi: Survivor bundles all of its RT features into a single toggle, meaning you can’t use less expensive ones like ray-traced ambient occlusion on their own.

What makes all these issues so frustrating is that things don’t have to be this way. In 2023, it’s not a secret what makes a great PC port, and there are plenty of examples studios can look to for inspiration. For instance, having played God of War 2018 on PlayStation 4 Pro, PS5, and PC, I think there’s an easy argument to be made that the PC version is the definitive way to play that game. In the case of Respawn, the studio doesn’t even need to look that far for an example of how to build a great PC port. In 2016, it released Titanfall 2: to this day, one of the best games you can play on PC.

EA had been somewhat dismissive of player complaints, suggesting that only a “percentage” of PC players are experiencing performance issues and that some of those issues are due to people using high-end CPUs with Windows 10. In any case, EA said Respawn was doing its best to fix the game.

Sure enough, on the Monday after Jedi: Survivor’s Friday release, Respawn released a patch that promised performance improvements. I found the update increased my average frame rates but did nothing to address the game’s stuttering. The latest patch, released partway through last week, was supposed to address that issue, but I find the game will still slow down when I enter new areas. Respawn has promised additional updates are on the way that will supposedly further improve performance.

So how did we get here, and, who, if anyone, is to blame for the state of PC ports in 2023? Those are questions I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few days. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.

From a technical standpoint, there’s a reason PC ports were more competent during the eighth generation of consoles than at almost any other time in the past: it was easy. Or, at least, easier. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One saw the switch to x86 processors that were effectively less-powerful versions of what PC gamers had in their towers. It was also one of the longest generations in recent memory. It’s only in the last year or so that we’ve seen publishers like EA abandon cross-gen releases in favor of current-gen exclusives. On PC, that stability meant you could get away with using your components for longer. I bought an Intel Core i5 6600K in 2015 and only upgraded in 2021 after Red Dead Redemption 2 was too much for that processor’s four-thread architecture.

With the transition to PS5 and Xbox Series X, more care and attention needs to be given to PC ports. Current consoles are laser-focused on gaming and don’t need to run Windows in the background. Then there’s the fact that, for the first time in a long while, the average gaming PC isn’t as powerful as a current-gen console. If you don’t believe me, look at Steam’s most recent hardware survey. The most popular GPU is the nearly four-year-old GTX 1650. Moreover, six- and four-core processors make up the majority of CPUs in use by Steam players, with eight-core ones represented in less than 20 percent of all systems. Put all this together and it becomes obvious that lazy ports just won’t cut it anymore.

As more current-gen games are released and those titles take advantage of everything the PS5 and Xbox Series X have to offer, I think we’re going to see more shoddy PC ports.

But a technological shift is only one part of it. Publishers are not blameless in this. Two of the worst PC ports released this year, Jedi: Survivor and The Last of Us Part 1, were pushed back to give their developers more time for polish. In the case of Jedi: Survivor, Respawn specifically called out the game’s performance as one of the reasons for the delay. EA decided against further delaying the game, knowing full well the state of the product it was about to release. In fact, EA even warned fans the game was coming in hot, tweeting two days before Jedi: Survivor’s release that a day one patch was the first of many updates it had planned. The publisher said future patches would fix bugs, improve performance and add more accessibility features.

Unfortunately, it is now business as usual for publishers to release an unfinished game and promise to fix it later. And for the most part, they’re rewarded for doing so, because there’s nothing the gaming community loves more than a good redemption story. Think of a game like No Man’s Sky or, better yet, EA’s own Star Wars: Battlefront II and Battlefield 4. All three were poorly received at release, but after months and years of hard work from the studios that created them, they’re now highly regarded.

I wish I could say things will get better soon, but in the short term, I don’t think we’ll see many improvements. It’s not impossible for a studio to release a technically competent PC port, but it takes time, resources, and a publisher willing to make a game’s PC fanbase a priority. A fundamental change in how game publishers do business is needed, and that will take time.

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. All prices are correct at the time of publishing.

Blink Mini 2K+ (newest model) – Plug-in Home & Pet Security Camera with 2K video resolution, color night vision, enhanced audio, motion detection – 2 cameras (White)

(435523)

$44.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Turbo Drift Race – Extreme Speed Challenge

$19.78 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

iPhone Charger Fast Charging 2 Pack Type C Wall Charger Block with 2 Pack [6FT&10FT] Long USB C to Lightning Cable for iPhone 14/13/12/12 Pro Max/11/Xs Max/XR/X,AirPods Pro

(44540281)

$9.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Colorsoft Case, Lightweight and Water-Safe, Foldable Protective Cover - Fabric

(4758600)

$36.99 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

TNT Zombie Zone Survival

(2254)

$18.00 (as of December 9, 2025 05:34 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)

Auto Amazon Links