Spend enough time in any RPG and you’ll eventually run out of things to talk about with its characters. But what if they had a never-ending supply of dynamically generated anecdotes? What if you could ask them questions that weren’t listed on a menu in front of you? What if they could even remember the experiences they’ve had with you in the game, and could talk about them at length? Those are the questions modder Art From The Machine is trying to answer in Skyrim VR.

In the video below you can see some scenes from the work-in-progress mod, which uses OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT to generate responses, xVASynth for text-to-speech so the NPCs can be fully voiced, and Whisper for speech-to-text, so players can speak into their mic and the NPCs can understand them. 

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Pls help. We in the PC Gamer hardware den can’t agree on which of the gaming PC deals we spotted today is best. At Newegg, it’s $1,200 (save $500) for the Acer Predator Orion 3000, $1,650 (save $250) for the Skytech Eclipse Lite, or $930 (save $170) for the ABS Cyclone Aqua.

Just considering the deal prices, the Predator Orion 3000 has a bigger discount, of course—we’re talking a 29% off vs 13% off for the more expensive rigs. And the Orion is certainly a great deal in its own right. For just $1,200 you’re getting a veritable high-end setup featuring an RTX 4070, an Intel Core i7 13700F, and DDR5 RAM. Acer’s even throwing in a mouse and keyboard.

A natural choice, right? But, hear me out, $450 extra might well be worth it for the Eclipse Lite, primarily because it’s ju…

Chinese customs has uncovered someone trying to smuggle SSDs into the country inside an e-scooter. Now I know what you’re thinking, there’s not much space for anything inside an e-scooter’s compact frame, but you’d be wrong. And it’s that sort of thinking that the smugglers thought would get them across the border home-free. Alas, it didn’t.

Qingmao Customs seized a scooter with 84 M.2 SSDs stored in the upright between the scooter’s handlebars and front wheel, in an attempt to bypass Chinese import duty or restrictions at the Zhuhai-Macao Cross-Border Industrial Zone (via WCCFTech). The scooter was spotted as it was pushed through an X-ray scanner.

“At about 13:00 on March 3, a mainland passenger pushed an electric scooter to enter the country through the ‘non-decl…

In most city builders you need to think big by expanding your city and slowly covering the available land with houses and factories. But what if the land you’re building on is getting smaller and smaller while you’re trying to build bigger?

That’s the premise of ‘inverse city builder’ Flooded. The ocean is steadily rising and swallowing the island you’re building on, and you’ll need to rally your small group of hard-working miners to harvest the shrinking island’s resources. The plan is to eventually build an ark so you can escape the flood, but that’s not going to be easy: the longer you work and the more you build, the less land you have.

You begin on a procedurally generated island with a headquarters and few mining operations already working, but you need to quick…

Slay the Spire developer Mega Crit has released a new autobattler card game called Dancing Duelists. The game is available for free on itch.io and features a cast of different characters, all with their own decks, who you level up between dance-offs with new cards and abilities. It’s way better than it has any right to be. 

Don’t get me wrong: this comes from a three-week game jam, and so the core is there but there’s little wider structure, and I ran into one or two minor glitches over several runthroughs. But this is as good a proof-of-concept as you’ll play, featuring 10 characters with unique deck styles, a range of power-ups you apply as you progress through the dance-offs, and the delicious trick of letting you get overpowered as hell. 

My first attemp…

Oblivion’s rats are now as uncouth as they are unclean, thanks to a mod from creator DavaScript that imbues the game’s rodents with all the unbridled rage of early 2000s internet. The Swearing Rats mod uses clips from an infamous (and ancient) Ventrilo user meltdown to turn their squeaks and yelps into a barrage of inventive invective. There is no reason for it to exist and we should all be very thankful it does.

The mod is scarily effective. Hearing Oblivion’s rats—probably the weakest enemies in the whole game—threaten to tear off various of my appendages and find new homes for them in other parts of my body really does make them quite a bit more intimidating than they usually are. It’s like being pursued by a hundred four-legged versions of Malcolm Tucker; I can’t t…

Computex is an annual technology conference, where all the big vendors showcase new products, research, and forthcoming releases to the press and industry. Companies are invited to submit models or services for consideration in the Best Choice Award, a kind of ‘yeah this is pretty neat’ competition, and the 2024 winners are, perhaps unsurprisingly, mostly very expensive things.

You can see the full list of winners here (pdf warning) and it’s quite a mixed bag of things that have been selected. There are two graphics cards, for example, the Asus ROG Matrix Platinum RTX 4090 and the MSI RTX 4090 Suprim Fuzion—both of which are water-cooled, though bizarrely the latter has the radiator built into the card itself.

No prices exist yet for the latter but the Asus card costs …

Roberto is a dog. Roberto loves to carry around very long sticks, canes, poles, pipes, and other such extended, often cylindrical objects. This is Roberto’s calling in life.

Your job, in Stick to the Plan, is to help Roberto get his sticks from one point to another. It’s an adorably simple puzzle game from indie dev Dead Pixel Tales, and it focuses on funny new solutions to puzzles and weird twists rather than brain-burning difficulty. It’s what I’d call a relaxing puzzle game, one that delights you rather than frustrates you.

Stick to the Plan is about 70 levels long,  and comes with an environmental ambient soundtrack that sets the mood for a relaxing, wholesome puzzling experience. It also has accessibility options, like bright outlines for Roberto and the many, many…

TikTok owner ByteDance says it’s committed to its virtual reality arm, Pico, following a report that claimed it was intending to wind down the business.

A report from research firm EqualOcean had suggested that ByteDance’s founder Zhang Yiming told Pico’s bosses that they should prepare to gently let Pico disappear into the inky nothingness.

ByteDance has since formally rebuked that claim in a statement to Reuters.

“The report that we are shutting down Pico is not true. Pico is under normal operation and the company will continue to invest in the extended reality (XR) business over the long term,” the statement said.

Another separate report suggested ByteDance was preparing to shake up Pico’s strategy. In another statement, ByteDance rebuked this claim, too, sayi…

In the Total War: Warhammer games, some of your armies have procedurally generated lords with randomized names and perks, while others are led by Legendary Lords, bespoke characters often drawn from the setting’s history. At first the only heroes you could have roaming the land solo or embedded in those armies were randomized ones, leaving characters from the fiction who weren’t really generals absent excluding the occasional text event or temporary summoning.

Since then, a handful of Legendary Heroes have made their way into the games, most notably Felix and Gotrek from the popular series of books, but also the wood elf mage-queen Ariel, Venerable Lord Kroak on the lizardmen side, and several others. That trend is set to continue in Total War: Warhammer 3, according to Creative A…

Bethesda CEO Todd Howard recently granted an interview to YouTuber MrMattyPlays, in which among other things he addresses the controversy over Starfield’s DLC pricing and some of Bethesda’s future projects. But there’s also room for some chatter about the past and, with the TV series putting the post-apocalypse back on everyone’s minds, the original Fallout games, developed by Black Isle Studios but now owned by Bethesda. 

The big takeaway is that Bethesda has no plans to return to the first games in the series (Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout: Tactics) and remake them. “A main priority for us is to make sure they’re available and you can still play them on the PC,” says Howard of the early isometric games. “And making sure that they run OK. As far as beyond that, we’v…

World of Warcraft’s next three expansions are a bold gambit from Blizzard. They’ll be a story told in three parts, and—judging by the trailer for The War Within—they’ll focus on character development and emotional storytelling over big dudes in armour calling you a pitiful mortal while revealing the next step of their master plan. It’s also about to receive, arguably, its first actual in-game story cinematics, and Blizzard’s given us a preview in advance.

For context, this isn’t actually a cinematic from the expansion itself—but it is from the expansion’s pre-patch The Dark Heart, which’ll be arriving early next week. It’s going to set a precedent for the game’s storytelling going forward. Watching it, I couldn’t shake the thought from my mind: Holy crap, they’re…

You can spend a long time trying to nail down the exact parts required for a full custom loop build. In a way, that’s a part of it. You really come to appreciate the PC you’ve built by the end of the process, as it’s one you’ve created from the ground up. 

But if you’re less sentimental, you might just want someone else to put together a parts list for you. EZ PZ. That’s what EK does with its ‘Loop’ builds, and right now everything on its store is 24% off, which makes such a build that little bit more affordable.

Alright, affordable these builds ain’t, but every little helps when investing in something as expensive as a fully liquid-looped build. You’re looking at spending anything from $1,284 for the cheapest all-inclusive kit to around $2,628 for the so-called “Golden…

World of Warcraft Classic isn’t necessarily hard, it’s just punishing—requiring, as many old MMORPGs did, a huge amount of patience on behalf of the player. It’s easy to accidentally pull too many mobs or wipe on an ill-fated dungeon run, forcing you to make a long jog back to your corpse. Adding permadeath to that equation, though? Yeah, that’s scary.

Not scary enough for one player, though: A Twitch streamer by the name of Rudeism has, beyond all good sense, decided to tackle the harshest version of WoW armed with nothing but his feet and two DDR mats next to each other.

As spotted by Gamesradar, Rudeism began his two-stepping journey through Azeroth yesterday, making it to level 6 after nearly four hours of grooving. That’s despite the fact that, around 25 minutes a…

Solve today’s Wordle in a flash—the answer to the March 23 (642) game is only a quick click away. Or, if you’d rather take some time with it, why not read through our clues and tips, or give your guesses a little boost with today’s Wordle hint?

I experienced a real rollercoaster of emotions today, with two very productive opening guesses leading to… not quite today’s answer. The good news is I was just one of the right sort of letter off, so if it wasn’t that, then it had to be this—and it was. 

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Thursday, March 23

The word you need to find today is used to describe something or someone serious, stuffy, and reserved—to the point of being dull and overly restrict…