This Week In Gaming: Our Top Stories – June 19th

B550 Motherboards

This week saw the release of the new line of B550 motherboards. While AMD had promised that these new boards would be a great budget option for those not wanting to splash out on an X570, the initial pricing has left some PC building fans confused. Granted, with Coronavirus messing up production and distribution across the board, we understand why price points for new releases might be affected, but the B550s hit the market at a similar price to the X570s. Hardly the budget offering AMD had promised.

Best B550 Motherboards

B550 Vs. X570

B550 Motherboards – Where To Buy

Steam Games Festival

We also saw the Steam Games Festival in full swing this week with over 900 free demos of games available to play through on the Steam store. Obviously, 900 games is a lot to get through in just one week, but those who are powering through them all – we salute you. For those who want to save a bit of time, we’ve rounded up some of the games we think deserve your time so dive right in.

Steam Games Festival Demo Roundup

The Last Of Us 2 Release

More than one member of the WePC may have been burning the midnight oil playing through as much of The Last Of Us 2 as possible before the workday began. After large portions of the game being leaked in advance of the official release, we know we’re looking forward to what fans have to say now that the full story is available for everyone to experience.

Be sure to let us know what you think about this year’s most anticipated games in the comments below.

Star Wars: Squadron

The week was bookended with news on the upcoming Star Wars: Squadron game. At the start of the week, we got our first look at the game with the reveal trailer, pouring a great deal of excitement into fans of the franchise. Then, on Thursday night, thanks to EA Play live, we got our first glimpse of gameplay. We can definitely see hints of previous game titles like X Wing and TIE Fighter in the gameplay style – and that’s a good thing. Fan reception has been, on the whole, mostly positive and many are looking forward to this next installment in the Star Wars game-verse.

E3 Replacement Events Continue

Speaking of EA Play Live, we had more virtual E3-replacement events throughout the week to keep us entertained while we all stay safe and in our homes. This week alone, we’ve watched through IGN’s Summer Of Games, The Guerrilla Collective stream, The PC Gaming Show, EA Play Live, and The Future Games Show. We’ve lost count of how many trailers and reveals we’ve seen, which is why we set our newest member of the team, our News Editor Lewie, the task of rounding up the games we’re most excited about. You can check out our roundup below.

PC Games We Can’t Wait To Play

AMD 3000XT Announced

We also got an email from AMD hit our inboxes this week as they officially announced their new 3rd Gen ‘Zen 2’ 7nm Ryzen 3000XT series CPUs aimed firmly at the enthusiast market. After months of speculation and leaks, we finally got to see what these new chips were made of. They released details for three CPUs – the Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, and Ryzen 5 3600XT. You can read all about it below.

AMD 3000XT CPU Announcement