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.

Diablo continues to be a huge deal, and I'm not just talking about the latest entry, even if it is Blizzard's fastest-selling game ever. Millions of people went straight back to Diablo 3, and as the series' lead producer Matthew Cederquist told Polygon in a recent interview, Diablo's 26-year-old sophomore release is still surprisingly active.

It makes sense that there's renewed interest in D2 given that it just got an additional class, the warlock, via its first new expansion in a quarter-century, but the extent of its popularity might surprise you. Polygon points out that players created 1.92 million warlocks between Feb. 11 and March 11. Players also collectively played the expansion for a whopping 93.4 million hours, suggesting that Diablo is pretty moreish no matter which decade it's from.

"There's so many fans that were just screaming at the top of the mountain to give them something," Cederquist told Polygon. "It was nice because players moved extremely quickly from, 'I can't believe Diablo 2 has a new class, oh my God,' to actually doing what players do best, which is digging into the game, testing builds, arguing about synergies, making build guides, and then preparing for the new ladder that came out with it."

With a potential future for the pre-expansion version of World of Warcraft on the horizon and Heroes of the Storm continuing to get balance updates years after it was shifted to maintenance mode, it's interesting to see Blizzard's approach to its older games shift with the times.

The studio is so gargantuan these days that it can keep several versions of the same game afloat and active simultaneously. Given how diverse the larger ARPG space is even outside of the big dogs—a paradigm PC Gamer contributor Russell Adderson called "a golden age" for the genre—it's hard not to feel spoiled for choice.

Jenova Chen - the designer of indie classics such as Flower and Journey - was partly inspired to begin making games in the first place after shedding a few tears over Final Fantasy 10, and who can blame him with a love story that tragic?

Final Fantasy is a series stuffed with emotional moments and scenes that feel like someone's squeezing onion juice over your eyes, but Final Fantasy 10 still features one of the strongest tearjerker endings in the entire franchise (and in all of gaming, according to Japanese gamers.) Tears generated by the game are so powerful, in fact, that they inadvertently led to the creation of a stone cold PS3 classic.

"If you look at the history of many of the movie makers, like Peter Jackson, why does he want to make films? His dad took him to watch King Kong when he was really young, and when he saw this giant ape climbing the Empire State Building, that was a really shocking experience," Chen explains in an interview with Edge Magazine. "Many artists decide to become artists because they were really shocked to their core when they saw something emotionally impactful."

For the founder and CEO of thatgamecompany, weeping at games isn't an unfamiliar experience, but one memory that sticks out to Chen happened while going through Tidus and Yuna's fight against a repeating, apocalyptic threat. "One day I woke up and I went to wash my face, and I thought about a character in that story, and I suddenly started to cry. I was thinking about what happened to that person. He made a sacrifice for the group. I was just moved by the act – it's so beautiful and it's so melancholy that I was crying."

"At film school, we say, with a mediocre film, when the film is over, everybody leaves the theatre talking to each other, smiling," he goes on. "When you have a really impactful film, everybody leaving the theatre is quiet. Their mind is totally blown away. That was me... And that's why I think a great piece of art usually gives me a new perspective on life, and it changes how I live my life. That's what made me realise I probably wanted to become an artist."

Running Final Fantasy 14 for 16 years means Square Enix knows live service, former exec says, but it's "used to being slow" and has "failed to bring its IP to a new generation"