Sage is one of the new jobs coming to Final Fantasy 14 as part of the Endwalker expansion, a healer class that fights with four floating blades called nouliths. Its icon represents those four weapons, and the MMO's designers probably weren't expecting it to receive as strong a reaction as it did.

It's a big deal for Halo that Halo Infinite's multiplayer includes bots. It's a first for the 20-year-old series, aside from the PvE Firefight mode that debuted with Halo ODST and the bots in a single game mode in Halo 5 called Warzone that was cool in theory, but also saddled with microtransactions. Bots being available in every multiplayer mode means Halo newcomers can practice against easier opponents, and players who love Capture the Flag but don't want to deal with other human beings online can just jam by themselves. I expected all of this going into Infinite's technical test, but I didn't expect the bot names to make me laugh out loud.

The needler never gets the respect it deserves. Halo fans have always raved about the Halo 1 pistol and the battle rifle, or the plasma sword or the Halo Reach grenade launcher or even the Covenant carbine, but dammit: I love the needler. And it looks like the combat designers for Halo Infinite do, too, because after a couple hours of hands-on with the multiplayer technical test, I think this might be the strongest the needler's ever been.

Get ready to dodge spoilers for the next four months, because Halo Infinite story details have already started to leak. Players checking out the first technical test flight for Halo Infinite on PC and Xbox have datamined a slew of story details from the multiplayer-exclusive preview build, and they're already starting to appear online.

I'm not sure why a hex map is so instantly appealing to me, honestly—maybe it's a reminder of old D&D campaigns from my teen years where world maps were drawn on hexagonal graph paper instead of on a square grid. Hex maps just have an extra bit of wonder and mystery to them, I think. 

Valve has not had great luck making hardware. The Steam Controller failed to revolutionize the controller scene despite its innovative design, the Steam Link worked well but was muscled out by a less-impressive app, and the ballyhooed Steam Machines basically faceplanted right out of the gate. The Index is an impressive unit, but hasn't sparked a meaningful uptick in VR adoption since its release.

Horizon Forbidden West has not yet been announced for PC, but we're confident it's going to happen—eventually anyway. Sony has made no secret of its commitment to bringing first-party games our way, including Death Stranding, Days Gone, and Forbidden West's predecessor, Horizon Zero Dawn. Even the famously PlayStation-exclusive Uncharted is apparently headed for PC at some point. Which is why it's worth noting that the PlayStation release of Forbidden West has reportedly been delayed into early 2022, inevitably pushing the PC arrival even further off. 

There aren't many games that leap immediately to mind as being more different than Two Point Hospital, a hospital building and management simulator, and Sonic the Hedgehog, a sidescrolling platformer about a blue rodent who can run really fast. Yet somehow, like the proverbial chocolate and peanut butter, they have been mashed together into a strange digital confection.

Co-op Viking survival game Valheim has been a bit quiet lately. The last small update to tweak monster AI arrived on July 1, and there hasn't been a peep from the developers since. But Iron Gate Studios is back from summer break with some new information to share about the upcoming Valheim Hearth and Home update, as well as some news about the studio itself.

The Ascent is a cyberpunk action RPG with ray tracing and DLSS. Sometimes. Sometimes it's a cyberpunk action RPG with ray tracing and no DLSS. Sometimes that ray tracing implementation may not work at all. And whether you get those Nvidia settings all depends on where you access the PC version from.