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Apple has reportedly slashed production volumes of the Vision Pro mixed reality headset by nearly half. So says analyst and leading Apple soothsayer Ming-Chi Kuo.

Kuo reckons the original plan was for up to 800,000 units of the headset in 2024. This has now been cut to 400,000 to 450,000. He also notes that Apple has made the call to reduce production before the headset has even gone on sale in markets outside the US.

That suggests demand in the US has been much lower than expected. What’s more, Kuo says the poor performance of the Vision Pro could mean that a planned update to the headset in 2025 may be cancelled.

It’s tempting to conclude that once the initial flurry of sales to YouTubers and influencers died down, the underlying demand from real-world users was alwa…

In what is surely the apex of both Baldur’s Gate 3 modding and my news writing career, a creator named Estgamers has developed the foulest fanmade BG3 spell yet: the foul hex of Testicular Torsion (warning: that link may not be work-safe depending on how cool your work is with both the concept of testicular torsion and medical diagrams of it in action).

Created by a modder named Estgamers, the Testicular Torsion Spell Mod is, well, a testicular torsion spell mod. It adds a new level 1 transmutation spell to the game that gets your enemies all twisted up in a way that’s both comical and intensely painful, dealing 1d4 of force damage. So long as they have testicles, anyway.

If you’re (mercifully) unaware of just what testicular torsion is, it’s basically the medical name for l…

Atomic Heart is currently sitting pretty on Steam with over 5,000 reviews rating the game ‘very positive’, despite the wider controversy about the game’s origins. The top review at the moment, however, summarises something that every player of Atomic Heart has to confront. Recommending the game after around 90 hours played, Matt_KPLS’s review says only: “BRB, i’m going to the kitchen to f*ck the fridge.”

One of the most bizarre elements of Atomic Heart is a vending machine called Nora that the player has to interact with after being attacked by it in a cutscene. With the aid of your glove, the attack is fought off, the appliance is beaten, and… things take a turn for the very weird. In some sort of transplant of a sub/dom fetish onto an appliance, the machine begins to trea…

Neopets is kicking off its new era by returning to an old one: The company’s newly-independent leadership has announced the creation of a trading card game called Neopets Battledome, harkening back to the original Neopets Trading Card Game from the early 2000s. I never played that one myself, but I bet there are a lot of 20- and 30-somethings out there who experience a kind of full-body time travel whenever someone reminds them of it.

Unlike the original Neopets TCG, which was made by Wizards of the Coast, the new card game is being made by Upper Deck. That’s the same company taking rival game-maker Ravensburger to court over upcoming CCG Disney Lorcana, if the name sounds familiar.

Neopets Battledome is set to hit in 2024, just in time for Neopets’ 25th anniversary. It’ll b…

Larian Studios announced on Monday that Jim Southworth, who led the Baldur’s Gate 3 cinematic animation team, has died. He was 56 years old, and had been diagnosed with cancer at the end of 2022.

“Jim was always ready to join in the fun,” said Larian UK studio head James Austin in a statement sent to PC Gamer. “Friends with everyone in the team. Eager to be with his animators yet old enough to be their father. He loved making games, and we loved making them with him. We will miss him greatly.”

Among Southworth’s other credits in his multi-decade career are sandbox MMO Boundless, multiple PlayStation EyeToy games and the early PSVR development, and ’90s animated series The Animals of Farthing Wood. He worked on Baldur’s Gate 3 for five years, starting in 2019.

Earlier t…

In the company’s This Week at Bungie or TWAB update, the Destiny developer clarified the series of events that led to a number of players missing in-game titles, a bug that required a rollback of player progress and 20 hours of downtime for the popular looter shooter/MMO/Guardian-em-up game (credit to Massively Overpowered for the spot).

On January 24, a number of Destiny players logged in to find the unthinkable had happened: their triumphs were gone! All those achievements, precious ‘cheevos, lost to time, like tears in rain. All jokes aside, this is a major bummer in a game where some triumphs and seals require absolutely herculean trials to earn, while others are tied to legacy content and can no longer be acquired.

The bug ultimately required a rollback of player accoun…

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, the aggressively retro and also just plain aggressive-looking first-person shooter from Auroch Digital, now has a release date. It’s been revealed via a trailer showing off a variety of the 41st millennium’s monsters in the pixelated-sprite style of the late 20th century, which we’ll be pretend-murdering right here in the 21st century. Specifically, from May 23, 2023.

Those enemies include heretic cultists and a pick-and-mix bag of daemons who serve the 40K setting’s Chaos Gods. The little mucus-colored guys are Nurglings who work for Nurgle, god of pestilence, as do their bigger cousin the Great Unclean One seen being purged 20 seconds in and the horned amphibian with the tongue attack, which is a plague toad. The blue bird who looks like a skeksis from…

Baldur’s Gate 3‘s next major patch is on its way—scheduled to release this week, according to Larian Studios’ director of publishing, Michael Douse. Announced in a Twitter post yesterday, Douse reassures players: “we caught the nasty bug causing slowdowns and the good news is: it’s fixed in Patch 5!”

For context, Patch 4 tackled a few things, adding colourblind filters, fixing storyline hiccups, and tweaking kiss scenes, leading to some adorable head-bumps with Karlach while leaving poor Astarion lovers feeling like they were about to be broken up with whenever they went in for a smooch. 

It also introduced a game-breaking bug that caused some massive slowdowns in Act 3, as highlighted in this thread from the game’s subreddit. “Companions do…

The new Apex Legends battle pass scheme isn’t going over well.

Respawn announced this week that Apex will now get two short battle passes per season instead of one long one. Whether that part of the news is strictly a bad thing is debatable: Respawn says the new 60-tier half-season passes will still contain the same number of legendary skins as the old 110-tier passes, but with less filler. 

What is obviously bad for players, however, is that they can no longer save up the Apex Coins they earn from battle passes and use them to unlock the premium tiers in future passes. The premium tracks will now require direct payment of $9.99 USD to unlock, no substituting in-game currency.

The only reasonable explanation for that change is the obvious one—that someone th…

Serial and somewhat hit-and-miss YouTube ‘leak’ channel, Moore’s Law is Dead, has unloaded some technical details and performance expectations for AMD’s upcoming Zen 5 and 6 CPU architectures. The headline takeaway is arguably that it involves more modest performance gains than previous rumours.

Just in case you’ve forgotten, AMD’s current Ryzen 7000 CPUs use the Zen 4 architecture. That was seen as a relatively modest improvement over Zen 3, offering as it did 13% performance gains on average over Zen 3 in terms of IPC, or instructions per clock.

In other words, for a single software thread running on a single CPU core at the same clock speed on both architectures, Zen 4 is on average 13% faster. 

So, what can we expect from Zen 5 and 6? According to MLID, Zen 5 …

สิงคโปร์, 8 ธันวาคม 2023 – HoYoverse ผู้พัฒนาและเผยแพร่สื่อบันเทิงอินเตอร์แอ็กทีฟระดับโลกได้นำเซอร์ไพรส์ส่งท้ายปีมาให้กับแฟน ๆ และเหล่าผู้เล่นด้วยการประกาศว่า Genshin Concert 2023: Melodies of an Endless Journey จะออกอากาศในวันที่ 22 ธันวาคม 2023 เวลา 19.00 น. (UTC+8) ฟรีบน YouTube, Twitch, TikTok และ X (เดิมคือ Twitter) สำหรับ Genshin Concert ในปีนี้ได้ยกระดับไปอีกขั้น�…

ในเดือนมีนาคมนี้ ผู้เล่นจะได้ปลดปล่อยความคิดสร้างสรรค์ให้โลดแล่นด้วยCrayola Adventuresที่มอบประสบการณ์การเล่าเรื่องแบบปลายเปิดรูปแบบใหม่สำหรับสมาชิกทุกคนในครอบครัว ต่อสู้เพื่อชิงชัยการป้องกันปราการในBloons TD Battles 2+และสร้างอารยธรรมในแบบของตัวเองกับThe Battle of Polytopia+เกมกลยุทธ์ชื่อด�…

Baldur’s Gate 3 was our 2023 Game of the Year and highest-scoring review in over a decade and a half for a whole host of reasons, but its open-ended player freedom and attending reactivity to all of our potential choices is certainly up there. A year out from release, Proxy Gate Tactician on YouTube has uncovered a particularly absurd edge case reaction involving the Netherstones and late-game Iron Throne and Steel Watch Foundry dungeons.

The Netherstones are Baldur’s Gate 3’s Triforce-y magical McGuffin, and you need all three to progress to the end of the game. Larian’s not in the business of restricting player control with unkillable NPCs or undroppable items, so you’re free to take the stones in and out of your inventory. To avoid a potential soft lock on losing the stones f…

It has been a terrible month for Escape from Tarkov. The hardcore extraction shooter, developed by Battlestate Games, has had some ups and downs over the eight years since it was first released into beta, and is one of those where the most devoted players seem to love and hate it in equal measure. It can sometimes be hard, as a Tarkov-watcher, to know when something’s gone badly wrong (as it occasionally does), or when people are just blowing off steam before heading back in for another round.

But this time is different, and it’s an entirely self-inflicted disaster from BSG. In late April the developer announced a new package, Escape from Tarkov: Unheard Edition, that cost $250 and included access to a long-awaited PvE mode with co-op and persistent progress (the main game in Tark…

If I didn’t have years of prior experience playing World of Warcraft, I imagine my first hour in The War Within alpha would’ve gone much worse. WoW immediately buries you in buckets of spells and items and quests that even had me gasping for air trying to make sense of it all. The new and returning player experience is rough, and Blizzard is willing to admit as much, according to a recent interview with Windows Central.

“We know that we have a lot of work to do on new player acquisition, but we hadn’t been focusing there, we were focused on retention,” vice president and executive producer Holly Longdale said.

And it shows: In a recent Activision Blizzard financial report, the company noted that Dragonflight has kept more people subscribed to WoW than recent expansions. Typi…

A few years ago we cheekily declared that the PC had won the console war, and it’s also true that I’ve spent the past couple decades gently mocking Sony and Microsoft for their 30 fps games and their Kinectimals, but now the PlayStation and Xbox are really looking quite pale and I’m starting to feel bad. I was just razzin’, but as we head into the summer showcases, confidence in the consoles feels lower than ever and I don’t know if they’ll ever get their old glow back.

It’s not just vibes: Console sales are down. Circana analyst Mat Piscatella marked a 26% decline in spending on current-generation consoles this April compared to last April. Xbox hardware in particular is struggling to sell: Microsoft reported a 30% decline in Xbox hardware revenue between the first few months o…

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. 

…

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…