If there's one thing that Blizzard nailed with World of Warcraft: Forever, it's the atmosphere. There's nothing quite like walking under the moonlight in Tirisfal Glades listening to distant howls and flapping wings on the way to your next quest. But many players familiar with the era of WoW it's based on felt like it was missing something.

"I miss running through Dun Morogh hearing the iconic music with a massive snowstorm lowering my view distance on my Dwarf hunter, picking up quests from the dwarf next to the fire [and] restoring my inventory," Reddit user Darthbobz wrote in a post pleading Blizzard to bring WoW's old weather effects to WoW: Forever.

It's not that it doesn't rain or snow in WoW: Forever, it's that it doesn't rain and snow enough. People like Darthbobz want to be blinded by the amount of weather on screen, not surrounded by the suggestion of a storm.

Blizzard even says the core pillars of WoW: Forever are that the world is the main character and that the journey is more important than the destination. For the most part that's true: Over half of the experience involves running around forests and deserts rather than flying across them on a mount like you do in the modern version of the MMO. But the diet weather effects in the beta clash with the rest of Blizzard's commitment to adding friction back into the MMO.

It turns out, Blizzard agrees, and will be cranking the weather effects up to 10 in "certain" WoW: Forever beta zones, according to a teaser video for the next patch. The video is an ASMR-style montage of a rainstorm in Elwynn Forest. The screen is so thick with rain and fog it's hard to see past the trees bordering the town of Goldshire. It's a real storm that makes you instinctively want to duck into the inn to stay dry.

The beta's level cap is 20, so when Blizzard says "certain" zones will have the increased weather effects I assume it's because most of the game isn't available yet. It also might mean that snowstorms and sandstorms aren't quite ready to go live, but we won't know until the patch notes are out later this week.

I honestly didn't expect intense weather effects to come back within the first few weeks of the beta. Blizzard's quick turnaround has me curious if we'll see more updates based on player feedback that are more substantial than some balance tweaks and bug fixes. WoW: Forever is already in a really good spot judging from the flood of praise people have given it in the last week. That's promising for a game that's going to be here in just a few months on November 4.

The Witcher 3 Remastered is coming to all players as a free update on September 29, and new footage from developer CD Projekt Red suggests you'll want to take a close look at what settings you have enabled, because I fear some details and atmosphere may be lost in translation.

CDPR posted a new side-by-side comparison for The Witcher 3 and its upcoming remaster on its channels, and boy has it stoked some conversation. The clip sees Geralt torching a group of Drowners in a swamp with a flame spell, both pre- and post-remaster.

I hate to say it, and I'm surprised to say it given how good the remaster has appeared in footage until now, but the new version looks worse to me. With zero hyperbole, I had the "before" and "after" clips mixed up for several seconds, to the point that I checked CDPR's YouTube and Twitter to make sure the studio hadn't made a mistake in the labels.

The caveat here is that we don't know the exact graphics settings or hardware environment that were used for these side-by-side clips. Maybe some elements were disabled to emphasize others. The video also comes with a disclaimer: "Work in progress. Does not represent the final look of the game." But we are just days away from the remaster's launch, so I don't know how much work is left.

A few changes stand out. The skin and muscle of the Drowners feels less detailed, not necessarily because it is – you can see the same creases and patterns if you look close, though they do seem scalier in the original – but perhaps because of the bizarrely glossy, metallic shine they have in the remastered clip. Either these are rare Chrome Drowners or GPUs have gone too far.

The fire effect lingering on the Drowners arguably looks more realistic in the new version, but it feels less powerful to me – artificial, less like an inferno and more like a torch. In the new version, it looks like there is fire on them; in the OG, they look to be on fire. The remastered clip also doesn't have the same fiery, scarlet reflections in the water, which is strange given how gorgeous the updated water is otherwise. The lighting on the plants, which are certainly lush, also seems less affected by the fire itself in the remaster.

Maybe this is a function of when during the in-game day these clips were recorded, but the original Witcher 3 has more noticeable fog and a rich, dusky atmosphere with a warm redness to it, while the remaster feels almost sterile in its path traced brightness. Combined with the missing fire reflections, the new version feels a bit washed out, and this is worryingly close to the color shortage and vibrancy famine that we've seen in some other remasters as well as modern AAA games.

I look at this clip and I feel a clash of contrast. A lot of individual components might look better up close in the remaster, but when you pull back and see the whole canvas, the original game looks more cohesive to me, not to mention more saturated. Maybe that will change when I'm actually in, and accustomed to, the remastered game world, but a lot of these differences feel pretty empirical. I have a pretty beefy PC, so I would definitely throw this remaster under the microscope when we get it in our hands.

Many other people seem to feel the same. "Why removing the colours and the fog?" replies one Twitter user. "Hope you add those sparkles and reflection you did a great job," says a YouTube viewer. "Lighting and Clarity in the latest looks great , but I really liked the red glow/filter (idk) in the before," agrees another.

CD Projekt Red has now moved on from its in-house REDengine and adopted Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4, but co-CEO Michał Nowakowski says that wasn't due to the technical issues that Cyberpunk 2077 ran into.

What's new in The Witcher 3 Remastered?

What happened

• On September 22, Studio Minus—the developer of ragdoll torture sandbox People Playground—posted a Steam news update saying it had disabled the game's Steam Workshop support "due to yet another malicious mod," which the developer said was "especially bad"
• The developer has since released a new build of People Playground that prevents mods from running, saying on its Discord that Workshop and mod support will only return if "mods are fundamentally safe to run," which "might never happen"
• A redditor who inspected the malicious Workshop mod claims the mod hijacks the user's Steam account to republish itself on the Workshop along with the user's personal information, destroys files for People Playground and other installed Steam games, and sends slurs to the user's Steam friends
• Despite initially claiming that the infected mod "does not steal passwords" or other credentials, Studio Minus is urging People Playground users to change their Discord passwords as soon as possible, as well as "the passwords of all your important accounts"
• This is People Playground's second Workshop malware incident this year: Studio Minus previously disabled the game's Workshop after a similar outbreak of self-replicating malware in February

At this point, you're playing People Playground at your own risk

And Studio Minus seems to agree. In a blog post from last month, zooi—People Playground's primary developer—called the game a "technical hellscape," which makes it "technically impossible to properly sandbox mods in their current state." While the studio claims that the software has measures in place to prevent malicious mod activity, zooi called it a "hopeless arms race."

When a studio's developer doesn't seem confident about the viability of their project's security measures, you shouldn't either. But while People Playground seems like a particularly intense dumpster fire, 2026 hasn't inspired much confidence in the safety of Steam Workshop overall.

Since the year started, we've seen at least three other cases of Workshop-related malware incidents: first malicious Project Zomboid mods surfaced in April, then virus-laden anime ladies emerged in Wallpaper Engine in June, and then malware-infested Meccha Chameleon maps led to its Discord getting hacked in July.

It's the double-edged sword of Steam's relatively open publishing platform. We get to enjoy a bounty of games from small developers—but they can't always offer the same expectation of software security as their more established counterparts.