Alongside being a colossal sales success for Saber Interactive, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 has demonstrated an impressive amount of sticking power as a multiplayer game. Its most recent daily peak concurrent was over 21,000 players, higher than numerous big-swing multiplayer games released in the last 12 months like Dune Awakening and Marathon.

Not a bad performance for a game that led as a traditional linear action experience, and a large amount of credit must be given to Saber's impressive update schedule. Since the game's launch it has added tons of new missions, monsters and classes and more to its Left 4 Dead-style cooperative mode. It's the kind of update cadence you'd expect from a live-service game. Maybe Space Marine 2 deserves to be considered one.

Those updates show no signs of slowing, either. The recent Warhammer Skulls event brought another beefy patch for Space Marine 2. Patch 13.0 adds yet another mission to the game's Operations mode—Purgation—in which your squad must reclaim a Mechanicus facility located in the Kadaku swamps. It also adds a battle simulator where you can practice ripping apart enemies before heading out on missions for real, as well as the ability to swap perk loadouts during a session and expanded customisation options.

The biggest changes, however, are made to siege mode, the horde scenario added in June last year. Dubbed Siege 2.0, the patch implements a "major revamp" for the mode. For starters, it adds a new blessings and atonements system, which gives players extra perks every five waves while also throwing modifiers into the mix. The overall difficulty has been adjusted to make the experience more challenging, with new bosses cropping up every five waves.

Saber says the goal is "to make siege mode sessions quicker and more intense," while also "giving players more options for build crafting to make each run different". Given the extent of the changes, the patch also resets the number of completed waves in player save files. Sounds like you'll have to earn your bragging rights all over again.

The patch coincides with a new free trial for Space Marine 2, and a big old discount that knocks 70% off the asking price. The trial lets you play two campaign missions, three operations and all the PvP modes. If you like what you see, you can get the full game for $18 (£16.50). That discount ends on June 3.

For well over a decade, Unity has been one of, if not the primary engine for indie game development, and has powered some massively successful games like Hollow Knight, Among Us, and the original Subnautica. But over the last few years, a growing number of developers have switched to Godot, an open-source engine that is similar to Unity in its scope and functionality.

For those developers who have switched, the reasons have often been ethical or financial, with various shenanigans from Unity putting developers off using the company's tech. But placing that aside, how do the two engines compare as tools? One game developer decided to find out, by making exactly the same game in both engines.

That designer is Thomas Grové, who runs the Japanese co-production developer Studio Interrupt. Grové was making a survival horror game with his son, and decided to use the project to test out both engines.

"For a long time, I've really wanted to see a side-by-side, apples-to-apples comparison between the two engines, not like the same game made by different developers or whatever," Grové says in a YouTube video discussing the experiment (via Automaton). "I thought this was my chance to finally do that and decide whether I want to move forward with Godot or keep using Unity."

Grové starts out by listing the features of his game, which is clearly at a very early stage of development. Said features include a complete character controller, a camera transition system, a scene-transition system, a tri-planar dither shader and an interactable object system. He built and ran this game with all these features in both engines, before comparing how each engine fared during the project.

The results were intriguing. From a functionality perspective, Grové explained that the engines performed similarly, with each doing some minor things slightly better or worse than the other. However, he concluded that Godot was significantly more efficient in areas like compiling, launching, loading etc.

He notes that Godot is over five times faster at loading a project, 20 times faster at exporting a project, and a whopping 31 times faster at compiling a script, which could make a big difference considering you would perform some of these tasks hundreds of times when designing a game. On top of that, Godot is also a significantly smaller program in terms of file size, taking up just 164 megabytes compared to Unity's 20 gigabytes.

Ultimately, Grové says that "If we look at all the data, Godot beat Unity on every metric except for the final output FPS", with both exported projects running at a max framerate way about Grove's minimum of 60FPS anyway. As such, he concludes that "I'm probably going to continue using Godot for this project."

While this seems like a slam dunk for Godot, some of Grove's viewers point out that the experiment may not be entirely reflective of each engine's performance. "The scene was just too simple to stress any systems, as evidenced by the very high framerate," writes YouTube user WitchfellGame, while the startlingly named jakegenocide says "If you aren't using a full, complete, game project, you aren't going to know which one is right for your project once it scales up."

Building two entire games from scratch just to test the performance of game engines isn't especially viable, however. And while maybe you could stress test further, the consistency and scale of difference in Grové's results do suggest that, broadly, Godot is the more efficient engine of the two.

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.

I like pirate survival game Windrose a lot, but playing it mostly just made me pine for my favorite pirate game of all time: Sea of Thieves. It's been years since I played Rare's oceanic sandbox, so I dragged several of my PC Gamer associates back into it with me and we've been sailing together again a few times a month.

A lot has changed since we last set out to sea: new enemies, new factions, new systems, season passes, and more cosmetics than you could shake a peg leg at. As we've tried to come to grips with those changes, it's also been nice to see that some things haven't changed at all.

We were sailing along on a multipart quest, having visited several islands over the past couple of hours, and were headed back to an outpost to sell off our loot. Then one of our crew members abruptly got a notification. It was an achievement titled "This is Unacceptable!" which informed us that "Another crew took one of your chests and cashed it in."

It was a surprise: we'd definitely seen a couple of other players out on the seas that night, but as we were on a four-player galleon and they were on two-player sloops, they all kept their distance. Or so we thought. Apparently, at some point, one of them had got close enough to sneak aboard and pilfer one of our chests, then slipped away to sell it somewhere.

No salt. Just admiration. Stealing treasure from other players in Sea of Thieves is a thrill, and as this mysterious and bold pirate demonstrated, it doesn't always have to involve cannonballs and sabers. Best guess, they waited until we'd disembarked on one of the islands, swam or row-boated over (if they'd shot themselves out of a cannon I think we'd have heard it), climbed onto our ship, and absconded with a bit of our loot. By the time we knew about the crime it had already been committed. Well played.

In the early days of Sea of Thieves I stole my share of loot too, though I was rarely as surgical. My main strategy was to spot a ship in the midst of a mission and then head to the nearest outpost to wait for them. When they sailed over to drop off their loot, I'd have posted up with a couple of carefully placed explosive barrels, and when they ran down the dock with their arms full of treasure chests, I'd open up with my sniper rifle. Boom. Their treasure is mine now.

It wasn't exactly sporting, and quite often it wasn't even successful, but there's something to be said for letting some other industrious pirates do the hard work of finding the treasure and then taking it off their hands so you can sell it yourself.

It's so satisfying to steal from someone else that I don't even mind when it happens to us, like when that silent, slippery buccaneer made off with some of our loot. All you can do is tip your tricorn hat. We're pirates, after all. Stealing's the name of the game.