It’s Lightfall day, and players are already finding new details in Destiny 2’s latest expansion. Those who visit the Tower before jetting off to Neomuna will notice some redecorating that has occurred in the time since the game went offline for maintenance. Near Zavala you’ll find the new Monument to Fellowship, and with it a memorial to a long-departed NPC.
Cayde-6 was the Nathan Fillion-voiced joker of the Vanguard—the de facto leaders of the Guardians. His death was the inciting incident of Destiny 2’s first expansion, Forsaken, and was teased heavily in the run-up to its release back in September 2018. It was a dramatic moment for fans: the first major on-screen character to die his final death in the fight against the Darkness.
The new memorial is a simple bust wi…
Read morePrepare to be smote. Smited. Smitten. Look, they’re making another Smite—Titan Forge’s godly and enduringly popular MOBA that first released in 2014—and it’s gearing up for an alpha test, should you wish to rage against the heavens as soon as possible.
Revealed at the Smite world championships, Titan Forge is pitching Smite 2 as “everything players love about Smite 1” in a sleeker, more modern, and prettier package. The announcement boasts of a “refined user interface, updated audio, clearer spell effects, and fresh physics-based abilities” for its various gods. You’re also getting “new God pantheons, kit refinements, gameplay changes, and overhauled Relic and Item systems for deeper strategy.
In other words, it sounds like the devs are keen to make the gam…
Read moreDublin. Filled to the brim with gigs, events, and nightlife, I often get a ping of nostalgia just looking at the spire—thanks to my years there spent chasing my degree. However, after looking at the crowds of people caught up waiting for a Halloween parade that would never come, I’m very glad I wasn’t back there this week.
Seemingly coming from an AI-generated website based out of Pakistan, thousands of people in Dublin, Ireland, crowded around O’Connell Street for a parade that would never come. The site claimed to have originated this parade is called “Myspirithalloween” and appears to have stolen that name from Spirit Halloween, the Halloween retailer that focuses specifically on costumes, decorations, and general festivities.
The attached Facebook page has since …
Read moreHelldivers 2’s story is mostly background dressing—told through galactic war events, NPC dialogue, and Super Earth broadcasts that are easy to miss. It does have one cinematic, though, and it’s such a specific brand of ’90s corny that it’s impossible to forget.
Now there’s a behind-the-scenes video of it, courtesy of the folks over at Goodbye Kansas Studios—letting you get an up-close-and-personal look at actor Craig Lee Thomas’s face as he collapses to his knees and screams for sweet liberty.
It’s honestly great to see how much of the cinematic’s excellently hammy facial expressions are 1:1 translations of Thomas chewing the scenery. The exact moment the patriotism drains from the Super Earth spokesperson’s face, replaced with abject horror in a fis…
Read moreIf you were out last Friday, you may have encountered some difficulty shopping, getting a coffee, or, god forbid, trying to catch a flight due to a bug that crashed 8.5 million Microsoft devices and messed up a few Linux-powered computers.
After realising that the core issue came from a configuration file in an update for CrowdStrike’s Falcom platform, the cybersecurity company has been working around the clock to fix the issue, and things seem mostly back to normal. As a partial apology for its huge error, Crowdstrike has been sending out $10 Uber Eats vouchers to its “teammates and partners” (via TechCrunch).
The email was sent out and also posted to X, though it has since been taken down: “To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or a late night snack is on us!…
Read moreLooking for some Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands Shift codes? Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands well underway and there are all-new Shift codes to redeem. There’s a big ol’ chest in Brighthoof, home of Queen Butt Stallion, and you’ll need a Skeleton Key to open it, which you’ll get from a Shift code. There’s no telling what loot is stashed away in the chest but rest assured, it’ll be some powerful stuff. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the latest Shift codes and how to redeem them.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands Shift codes
As of July 23, 2024, there is one current active limited-time Shift code for Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, which expires on July 25, 2024:
- SF6T3-CSWJ3-333JJ-TTTB3-CB3F5 – Three Skeleton Keys
New Shift codes typically appear weekly, o…
Read moreWhen V started coughing up blood during a conversation with Johnny Silverhand, I thought Cyberpunk 2077 was really trying to drive home the urgency of my ticking time bomb of a brain. Throughout the next quest, and the one after that, my entire field of vision kept pulsing with the glitchy blue effect that highlighted Johnny popping into a conversation. It felt like a bit much, but I was really getting into the roleplaying, so I figured heading home to V’s apartment for a night’s rest would set me right. When it didn’t, I asked my colleagues how they got rid of “Johnny vision” because clearly I’d missed something.
That’s when I got the bad news from Phantom Liberty reviewer Ted Litchfield: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen before.”
Uh oh.
“Tha…
Read moreAt a games conference in Sofia, Bulgaria earlier this year, Larian gameplay scripter Mihail Kostov gave a presentation outlining the philosophies and strategies the studio employs to ensure games like Baldur’s Gate 3 stay playable even as players are actively tearing them apart. Recently made public on YouTube (via GamesRadar), Kostov’s talk explains how Larian addresses “edge cases”—times when “player action may push a system to the extreme”—with solutions that reward, rather than stifle, creativity.
We’ve written about the near-absurd depth of contingencies Baldur’s Gate 3 has in place to account for player chaos, like its roster of purpose-built backup NPCs who stand ready to replace any plot-relevant characters you might murder (and replacements for t…
Read moreElden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree has drawn some criticism for being too hard—spinning up the FromSoftware design discourse anew two entire years after the base game’s release. Its flavour feels different this time around, though, since even supposed souls superfans have been antsy about it, earning it a “mixed” user review score on Steam at the time of writing.
There’s a few culprits here. The new Scadutree Fragments scaling system has caught players off-guard, bosses are hyper aggressive with the longest combo strings Miyazaki’s devised yet, and a sadly choppy performance isn’t exactly helping people feel the flow.
While I think the DLC bumps against the ceiling of what FromSoftware can get away with right towards the end, I’m not really on the “it’s too hard” train.…
Read moreIt wouldn’t be a Call of Duty: Black Ops game without Zombies, now, would it? And it wouldn’t be Zombies without an incredibly well-hidden and complex easter egg that reveals the true story of each map. Though they were solved remarkably quickly, the Black Ops 6 Zombies easter eggs are among the most long-winded and challenging.
Zombies is far different from multiplayer, though you’ll be pleased to hear that your weapon progression and other unlocks carry over into Zombies. This means you can start both Liberty Falls and Terminus armed to the teeth. It will certainly help in the early stages of the easter egg but it will still be far from easy. To save you the trouble of figuring them out for yourself, here’s how to beat …
Read moreIn a statement more foreboding than its tone suggests, ChatGPT maker OpenAI is considering allowing its users to “generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts through the API and ChatGPT.” Creating AI-generated pornography, in other words, potentially opening up an enormous can of worms for the very popular AI, which is already the target of all kinds of scrutiny, criticism, and litigation.
The announcement that OpenAI is “exploring” the possibility of opening up its tools to explicit content came in the form of a brief aside in a long document about the development of its AI models.
Currently, OpenAI tools like ChatGPT are subject to content filters that are supposed to stop them from spitting out smut at unsuspecting users, and it’s important to stress that changing…
Read moreBe afraid of the Windows 11 KB5043145 optional update. Very afraid. For reports are in, claiming that it unleashes a borknado of problems if installed.
According to various sources, including HKEPC and Windows Latest, update KB5043145 for Windows 11 versions 23H2, and 22H2 is causing problems including outright bluescreen crashes, loss of keyboard and mouse functionality, USB ports on the blink, plus WSL 2 and Wi-Fi issues.
Windows Latest says that Microsoft has confirmed it is aware of the problem. However, there is no word on any official remedy, for now. As an optional update, KB5043145 is not supposed to download and install automatically, though some reports indicate that may be happening anyway.
Of course, losing your keyboard and mouse is particularly egregiou…
Read moreIf you thought the ongoing dip in PC sales that AMD is predicting will last into 2023 could mean falling prices of CPUs and particularly GPUs, we have some bad news. Turns out AMD has been intentionally limiting supply of its chips and plans to continue to do so.
As we reported earlier today, AMD just clung onto profitability at the end of 2022 thanks to booming server chip sales. Its PC processor and GPU sales are, according to AMD’s own numbers, tanking badly.
You might normally expect the dip in demand that implies to push prices down. Unfortunately, CEO Lisa Su says AMD is doing its best to restrict the supply side of the supply-and-demand equation.
During AMD’s most recent earnings call, Su explained how AMD was adjusting its output of PC CPUs and GPUs in light of…
Read moreAtari has today announced the purchase of the Intellivision brand alongside “certain games” from Intellivision Entertainment LLC. This is a melancholy coda to the early days of home consoles in the West, where in the US market especially the Atari 2600 dominated the late 1970s scene. Intellivision was one of Atari’s main rivals, almost entirely because the machine had the backing of Mattel (these were the days when videogames were sold in the toy section of stores), and launched its first console in 1979.
The concept of a “console war” didn’t really exist, but the competition was real. Mattel had been working on the Intellivision (the name is a portmanteau of “Intelligent Television”) since 1977 and launched with a big-money ad campaign directly comparing the system’s capab…
Read more2024 games: Upcoming releases
Best PC games: All-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best MMOs: Massive worlds
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that’s a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is relea…
Read moreI have no need for a $3,500 augmented reality headset that turns my regular computer screen into a virtual computer screen floating in the middle of my apartment, but I regret to say that Apple’s unmatched ability to hype up a gadget has worked on me: its new Vision Pro AR headset, which is releasing next year, looks cool, even if it costs more than a lot of OLED TVs.
Here are some of the Vison Pro features Apple revealed at its WWDC event today:
- Micro-OLED display with 23-million pixels across two “postage stamp”-sized panels, which allows it to display virtual 4K screens
- Hand and eye tracking without controllers or external sensors, plus voice control
- Downward-facing cameras so that you don’t have to hold your hands in front of your face…
Read more
As “the Brothers Hildebrandt”, Greg Hildebrandt and his twin Tim were legends of fantasy and science-fiction art. They became famous with their work on the official 1976 J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar, at the time the best-selling calendar ever released, and the warm light of their vision of Middle-earth accompanied many subsequent Tolkien calendars and books. That vision influenced other artists, and their depiction of hobbits having extra-large feet—something not mentioned in the books—became the default even in Peter Jackson’s movies decades later.
The Brothers Hildebrandt were chosen to illustrate Star Wars based on the popularity of their calendar work, hired at the last minute to replace a pre-release poster for the movie’s 1977 release the studio were unhappy with. G…
Read more2024 games: Upcoming releases
Best PC games: All-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best MMOs: Massive worlds
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that’s a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Ste…
Read moreArrowhead continues to lean into the Joel thing, with a brave studio member entering the containment unit where the Helldivers 2 game master is kept in order to capture footage of the strange and elusive creature.
In the footage, posted to X/Twitter, an Arrowhead “video team member” enters a glass-doored closet marked “J.O.E.L.” and catches footage of a figure, who looks like those hooded stock photos of hackers, clattering away at a keyboard with an array of monitors showing various views of Helldivers players in action. The strange creature does a breathy cackle while considering a button which apparently fires those mysterious blue beams at successful players. From there things get hectic, as the agitated Joel notices the filming employee and, you kn…
Read moreIt’s never too early to plan your penny-saving with a Steam Sale schedule. In times past, predicting Steam sales was more soothsaying than science, but we’re in a beautiful new world of predictable price cuts. Nowadays, Valve reveals Steam Sale dates well in advance, major seasonal sales serve as reliable quarterly landmarks, and—best of all—there’s no messy augury required. Still, with Steam now rolling out frequent genre-specific sales, it can be helpful to have someone keeping the calendar. That’s where we come in. We’re tracking all the confirmed Steam Sale dates as they’re announced, so you can focus on curating your wishlist. You’re welcome.
Another month, another set of results from Valve’s PC hardware survey. It’s comforting to know that some things never change but if you’re Nvidia, then it will be even more comforting to note that one thing has changed—in the space of 12 months, its RTX 40-series of desktop graphics cards and laptop GPUs have an 80% bigger share of all the surveyed machines.
In the October 2023 survey, Ada Lovelace graphics processors accounted for 10% of all the sampled machines, whereas in the latest figures reported, it’s climbed to 17%. While the number itself might not seem all that impressive, it’s a sizeable increase.
For something to increase in this survey, another thing needs to go down and in the case of Nvidia’s GPUs, the GTX 10-series (aka Pascal) saw the bigges…
Read moreThe huge hole in AMD’s graphics card lineup shouldn’t be too far away from being plugged. Just last week Powercolor erroneously set its RX 7800 XT Red Devil webpage online, giving us a look at the card and its near complete specifications. Details regarding the RX 7700 XT have been more elusive, but now we’ve got an indication that it is coming soon too.
A product listing was spotted by @momomo_us at the Eurasian Economic Commission (via VideoCardz). It reveals a list of ASRock graphics cards, two of which are RX 7800 XT 16GB models. They are joined by another three RX 7700 XT 12GB models. The five cards will make up part of ASRock’s Phantom Gaming, Steel Legend and Challenger sub-brands.
The RX 7700 XT cards carry a 12GO suffix. In ASRock parlance, that indicates 12GB of VR…
Read moreWe’ve all been there: right at the end of character creation in the latest big RPG, staring at our choice of character class and wondering which is best. The good news is that there is no best class for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. And I don’t mean that in the wishy washy “pick which class suits your playstyle way,” it’s more genuinely true than most other RPGs.
The Veilguard has done a lot to really cut down on the fundamental differences between warriors, rogues, and mages in The Veilguard. All three, even the mages, have survivability at close range, plenty of AOE, and status effect application. On top of that, your party members are all just AI helpers, and you’re almost always going to be the center of attention in a fight, meaning there’s way less emphasis on party compositi…
Read moreFirst reported by Vice, Colombian First Circuit Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia claims to have used ChatGPT in the process of deciding a case in the city of Cartagena. The judge attests to the tool’s use in a court document from January 30.
“What we are really looking for is to optimize the time spent drafting judgements after corroborating the information provided by AI,” Garcia explained in the court document (translated from the original Spanish). Garcia was hearing a case between a health insurance company and the family of an autistic child over the child’s medical coverage.
Garcia seems to have based his final decision in the case on the chatbot’s responses regarding legal precedents and jurisprudence, and asserts that all responses were fact checked in this case̼…
Read moreGoogle researchers claim that, in an experiment simulating what happens when you leave a bunch of code strings alone for millions of generations, they’ve observed the emergence of “self-replicators” from what began as non self-replicating code chunks. New Scientist rather implausibly claims this “could mirror—or at least shed light on—the emergence of actual biological life.”
Hm. This is one of those studies where the experiment and findings definitely feel consequential, but at the same time need some heavy caveating. Google has not somehow simulated the emergence of life as it happened on Earth. What its researchers may have possibly done is suggest a new theory for how non-living molecules could come together to form living molecules, ie, how biological life ever …
Read moreI will admit, an AI Rickrolling a human completely off its own digital back has a certain appeal, and I’m willing to suspend some disbelief in the hope that maybe this customer service chatbot really did decide to fake-out a user with an OG meme. Freaky as that thought might be.
But oh, sweet memories. Home from school, dinner’s cooking, and I’m browsing the forums. Someone’s explaining why I’m wrong to think a Frost-spec Death Knight can play DPS effectively, linking out to some previous WoW patch notes, a link I’m invested enough to click on. I anticipate a wall of text. But lo, before me, a boyish figure clicks his heels and swings his hips to hypnotic ’80s synth, singing words that teach me the simple beauty of love and commitment. What a wholesome and innocent game that’s b…
Read moreRecording gameplay clips on PC isn’t difficult: Software like OBS Studio or Nvidia Shadowplay actually makes it quite simple. But remembering to use it, and remembering to stop using it when you’re done, makes the whole process a pain in the ass. Whomst among us, I ask, hasn’t dropped an f-bomb 20 minutes into a 30-minute presentation because you forgot to record it, or discovered that your mysteriously missing drive space is the result of a 200-hour recording of your desktop?
Steam’s new Game Recording feature promises to reduce at least some of those headaches by building the whole thing into the client, and—this is big for people like me—automatically recording your gaming sessions in the background. Videos can be viewed directly through the Steam client or overla…
Read moreWe knew it was coming, but it’s still exciting to see Alienware announce its new 32-inch 4K OLED gaming panel, the Alienware 32 AW3225QF. Alienware has also pulled the wraps off a new 27-inch 1440p OLED monitor running at fully 360Hz.
But first, that new 32-inch beauty. As with previous Alienware OLED gaming monitors, it uses Samsung’s QD-OLED panel technology. So, the main novelty here is pixel density. At 140DPI, this new panel is much more dense than any existing OLED gaming monitor, which all currently max out at around 110DPI for various 34-inch ultrawide and 27-inch 1440p models, including Alienware’s own panels like the Alienware 34 AW3423DWF.
Alienware says the new AW3225QF will hit 1,000 nits of HDR brightness, but it’s not clear how this new high density OLED panel…
Read moreThis thing we made is so brilliant, we can’t risk releasing it to the general public. So Microsoft basically says about it’s latest speech generator, VALL-E 2. So, does that reflect genuine concerns? Or is it a clever marketing ruse designed to get some viral traction and online chins wagging?
If it is all completely genuine, what does it say about Microsoft that it’s knowingly creating AI tools too dangerous to release? It’s a conundrum, to be sure.
Anyway, here are the basic facts of the situation. Microsoft says in a recent blog post (via Extremetech) that it’s latest neural codec language model for speech synthesis, known as VALL-E 2, achieves “human parity for the first time”.
More specifically, “VALL-E 2 can generate accurate, natural speech in the exact voice …
Read moreThe era of extravagant multi-hundred thousand dollar collector’s editions appears to have passed around a decade ago but one digging VR game has brought it back with a bang, or whatever noise excavators make.
Dig VR, as you might be able to imagine, is a VR game about digging. It releases November 14. Available as a preorder for £11 / $15, which goes up to £15 / $20 at launch, a new ludicrously over-the-top deluxe edition was just announced that can be all yours for a measly £500,000.
The main attraction here is two JCB 100c-2 excavators, each with unique wraps. One is a shiny yellow with Dig VR plastered on it, in lieu of the JCB logo, and another has Ashville Aggregates, an aggregate company on it. Delivery is not included in this price tag so you will …
Read moreAfter an epic 24-hour battle with Malenia and 1,700 deaths, Kai Cenat has finally beaten Elden Ring-
It took more than 165 hours of struggling and 1,700 brutal, sometimes funny, deaths, but Kai Cenat—one of the biggest streamers on Twitch—has finally beaten Elden Ring.
I became aware of Cenat’s Herculean effort last night, when a cryptic, single-line message appeared in my Twitter feed: “Kai Cenat has been fighting Malenia for 10 hours straight.”
What?
It was true. Not only that, he had been playing Elden Ring for nearly 130 hours by that point, and had died more than 1,400 times.
At one point during the epic battle, he thought he had her, only to find out that no, it wasn’t going to be quite that easy.
By the time he finally felled Elden Ring’s infamously difficult demigod, he was up to 148.5 hours and had died more than 200 times more. …
Read moreThe annual Warhammer Skulls event is always a fiesta of good news for Warhammer tragics, whether that’s announcements of whole new games like Mechanicus 2, expansions like Forges of Corruption for Boltgun, or additional details like the separate co-op campaign for Space Marine 2. But there’s usually a freebie to go along with it, and this year it’s Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Relics of War, which will be free to keep on Steam and Epic for the next week.
I wasn’t too hot on Gladius when it first launched in 2018, but the combat-focused Civ-like has seen a string of updates and expansions since then, and that’s done a lot for its scope and variety. These days it’s sitting on a respectable Mostly Positive user rating on Steam, and there’s DLC to let you play as factions like th…
Read moreWe Windows users are sometimes the butt of the joke when it comes to cybersecurity issues. Or at least, we often used to be. Still, if I receive one more lecture on why Linux or Mac systems are more secure, I’ll at least have this article to point to. Not always, I shall say. Not always.
Oligo Security’s research team has discovered a “0.0.0.0 Day” vulnerability that affects Google Chrome/Chromium, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari browsers, enabling websites to communicate with software running on MacOS and Linux systems (via The Hacker News).
The vulnerability means public websites using .com domains are able to communicate with services running on the local network by using the IP address 0.0.0.0 instead of localhost/127.0.0.1.
The good news, i…
Read moreAs we advised last week, three games are currently available free for Amazon Prime subscribers, on top of its usual rotating freebie selection. Claim them before the Prime Day sales event ends at midnight Pacific on Wednesday night, and they’re yours forever.
The games are:
- Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
- Rise of the Tomb Raider
- Chivalry 2
If you’re a Prime subscriber, you can grab the free games here. To take advantage of the offer, you have to link your Amazon and Epic Games Store accounts, and Epic’s launcher is where you’ll be able to access your new games.
- We’re curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here. Read more
Steam Next Fest is almost upon us, and while there are typically going to be quite a few fantastic games that make an appearance, the cosy building game Tiny Glade is already leading the pack with over 800,000 wishlists on Steam, a fact that’s not gone unnoticed..
Ex-PC Gamer editor Tom Francis, the creator of Heat Signature, Gunpoint, and Tactical Breach Wizards took to Twitter to explain what it’s like for developers releasing games this Steam Next Fest. “Next Fest hasn’t started yet, but there’s a way to preview the rankings, and I love that the juggernaut game we’re all dwarfed by, the baddest motherfucker in the room, is Tiny Glade. A delightful toy where you just draw a lovely little castle and admire it. It looks great.”
We can’t see these rankings yet, bu…
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