Month: December 2024

It’s been a rough couple of years for the games industry—and even laying it out like that feels like an understatement. Back in February, the number of layoffs and studio closures were already numerous enough to fit into a horrifying chart, and things haven’t exactly slowed down since.

One of the more high-profile recent shocks came from Microsoft, which shut down studios Arkane Austin—developers of Prey and Dishonoured—as well as Tango Gameworks, the studio behind surprise hit Hi-Fi Rush.

It was an especially messed-up situation because, as plenty of developers noted in the aftermath: A studio probably shouldn’t sink after a single flop like Redfall, but even if they do make an excellent game, that still won’t save them from the margin-fuelled man…

“Unemployed man” Hideki Kamiya continues to update his YouTube channel in the wake of his departure from Platinum, keeping the world at large updated on what he’s been cooking, his opinions on onsen, and the last time he visited an aquarium.

All of which is a treat, but Kamiya has been chatting about a few videogame-related things too, including the likelihood of him ever teaming up with other legendary devs like Yoko Taro and Hideo Kojima. In short? Kamiya reckons a team-up like that would just cause friction.

After a fan remarked that it’d be great if he ever made a game with Dead Or Alive creator Tomonobu Itagaki, Kamiya chuckled that he “[gets] this kind of comment a lot,” noting that people often get excited about the prospect of him working alongside Yoko Taro or Hideo…

Intel’s (very) public troubles have inevitably invited every tech commentator on the interwebs to posit a theory as to what should be done next with the troubled chipmaker. While Intel itself seems to be debating which bits to carve off to survive, several former executives have made their opinions known as to whether carving the company up is the best way forward, or whether that’s a terrible idea for both Intel and the US as a whole.

Four former Intel directors have written a column for Fortune, suggesting that Intel should be forced to split its chip design and foundry business by the US government (via Tom’s Hardware). They argue that, as Intel is the only large-scale American manufacturer of advanced semiconductors, it’s in the interests of the US government to leverage its…

The autobattling head-to-head RPG where you play inventory tetris to build your character, Bakcpack Battles, released its Early Access build this week. Each round you go up against a build made by another player before hitting up the shop to grab a new stuff with the gold you’ve won. It’s like PvP but without the stress of a real-time game—the person you’re “playing against” made that build hours ago, maybe.

Backpack Battles first got my attention last fall when its multiplayer demo got something like 7,000 concurrent players one weekend. It’s topping those numbers this weekend with a peak of nearly 20,000 concurrent players—19,775 to be exact.

The neat part of Backpack Battles is how you make your character: You sew on new parts and pouches to your backpack in o…

Amazon has laid off around a hundred employees in the latest of a series of severe cuts taking place at the company, Bloomberg reports. The affected employees were all part of Amazon’s gaming divisions, and were spread out across Prime Gaming, its San Diego games studio, and Game Growth. 

Execs are trying to pitch this as a realignment rather than a cutback. Christoph Hartmann, VP of Amazon Games, told employees that the company’s resources would be aligned to support its “focus on content,” and that it would keep investing in its “internal development efforts”. Hartmann even said that Amazon Games’ teams would “continue to grow” as its projects moved forward.

Meanwhile, Hartmann said, employees who survived this round of layoffs will “double down” on a project which ha…

For almost 20 years, Microsoft’s Xbox controllers have been the easiest gamepads to use on a PC. They’re just plug and play: we have the Xbox 360 controller to thank for making PC gaming with a pad convenient. Microsoft has kept that convenience streak going with each iteration of the Xbox, and keeps refining its controller design a little bit more every generation. It’s truly the “it just works” controller for PC.

The latest model, the Xbox Series controller, is definitely among the best PC controllers just on design alone—I love its textured grips, which have been slightly improved since the Xbox One, and I could listen to that clicky D-dad all day. (Okay, the D-pad is so loud it’s almost annoying, but it feels great).

After so many years and controller revisions i…

Ask yourself this: What could be dodgier than a radio station giving its human hosts the boot and replacing them with a cohort of three alarmingly photogenic Gen-Z AIs? If you answered ‘having those three zoomer AIs interview another AI, this one imitating a Nobel prize-winning writer who died 12 years ago,’ then congratulations, you may have a future ahead of you at Polish station Radio Kraków, which is in hot water for doing just that (via Onet.pl).

On Monday, Radio Kraków announced that it was overhauling its OFF station. Since 2015, the station had broadcast (all following quotes are machine-translated) “a playlist as well as original music programmes and a two-hour morning programme, in which the most time was devoted to cultural and social events in …

Even as a lover of RGB lighting, I admit that gamer lights have gotten kind of ridiculous, and it’s amazing. Sure you can use lighting to have a subtle splash of colour, but if I’m going to have an RGB lit battlestation then I want the works, and wow is Govee’s Evangelion themed kit exactly that.

The line includes two different kinds of anime aesthetic wall mount lights, as well as gaming light bars to splash colour all over your room. All together they create a package so over the top even Nerv would be jealous.

Each piece is available separately and comes in its own sealed black box with red imagery from Nerv, the company in the anime. Get past that and you get to the brighter purple packaging themed after Unit 01 with its vibrant green trimmings to match. Inside each se…

There’s nothing innately newsworthy about a technology boss promoting the benefits of their products but when the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT reckons that deep learning will lead humanity into a new Age, solve climate change, and discover all of physics then it’s certainly worth raising an eyebrow, at least.

I am, of course, talking about Sam Altman of OpenAI, who is perhaps the most vocal proponent of artificial intelligence at the moment. His latest musings (via The Verge), though, do read more like a piece of science fiction than a detailed breakdown of what the future holds for deep learning.

One expects a CEO to be ebullient about their product and make lofty but ambiguous claims, but Altman is taking things another step beyond all of that. “I believe the future…

The 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…

If I know anything about PC gaming, I know this: given an ounce of freedom, PC gamers will build a giant penis that spews fire. I’m frankly not even sure what else you’d build in Besiege, the most innately PC of freeform building games. A catapult or something? Boring. There’s no better evidence that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a sandbox PC game at heart than how quickly they crested the penis horizon.

With that milestone met, the natural question is: what next? In a typical Zelda game, the answer would be to head to the next dungeon. But in this one, Nintendo has introduced an absurdly flexible building system that lets you connect all sorts of parts together and then power them, creating sturdier weapons, traps for hapless bokoblins, or even freaking mechs. Face…

We 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…

2024 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…

Baldur’s Gate 3‘s latest patch—the third in two months—is out right now, and it’s a doozy. 

The two big headliners are things we knew about already, but just in case you missed them—Baldur’s Gate 3 is now on Mac, and there’s also now a magic mirror in your camp that’ll let you change your custom Tav’s appearance. 

These are both pretty huge inclusions which’d be worthy of a patch on their own, but Larian being Larian, the patch notes for bug fixes, combat tweaks, writing changes, and more are still big enough to break the Steam page. Guys, I know you’ve got a fancy 24-hour setup with teams in multiple time zones, but I really hope you’re getting some sleep.

It’d be impossible for me to summarise everything on this list in a …

The Genshin Impact 4.3 livestream runs through what to expect in the next chapter of the Traveler’s journey through the watery region of Fontaine. As an added bonus, those who tune in can grab livestream codes that they can redeem for Primogems, to use when wishing for new characters and reruns of older ones.

This time around, it looks like the rerun banners heavily favour Inazuma; Ayaka, Yoimiya, and the Raiden Shogun are all rumoured to be appearing. In terms of new characters, we have the geo five-star, Navia, and the pyro four-star, Chevreuse. I’ll add each livestream code below as it drops during the program, but since these generally expire within a day, make sure to redeem them while you can.

Genshin Impact codes: Al…

Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa, one of Twitch’s highest-profile streamers, has begun streaming on Twitch rival Kick. Siragusa announced the shift on her Twitter account last Sunday, barely two days after fellow streamer xQc announced he would begin streaming on Kick after inking a $100 million, non-exclusive deal with the platform.

In the announcement video she posted to Twitter, Siragusa is seen reading a New York Times report on xQc’s absolutely unbelievable deal before getting on the phone to her agent and obtaining one for herself, but I suspect this has been in the works for just a tad longer than the day and a bit between that article going up and Siragusa announcing her own move. Over on her personal Twitter, Siragusa laid out what she perceives as Twitch’s main “sin,” underm…

The Old School RuneScape look is iconic: Just a clatter of vaguely humanoid models running around a landscape of flat textures, accomplishing feats of grandiose heroism and sheer lunacy all the while. It’s a faithful reproduction (to my eyes, anyway) of original RuneScape’s graphics from the 2000s, a stunning example of how much you can do with six polygons and a dream.

But brace yourself, because those polygons are about to look better than ever. OSRS developer Jagex has announced the venerable MMO is getting an official HD mode, bringing a suite of lighting, effects, and texture improvements to the game later this year. 

It looks kind of great, if you ask me. From the image and video above, it manages to make OSRS look a whole lot better without messing with its trade…

Last week brought the news that the Russian state was preparing for a ban on Discord, the latest move in a wider purge of Western technology firms from the region. This crusade began following the various sanctions imposed on Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with the Putin regime seeking “digital sovereignty” through domestic tech companies that have no Western links.

Discord is based in the communist hotbed of San Francisco, California, and is estimated to have between 30-40 million users worldwide, with around 4% of the platform’s traffic estimated to originate from Russia. The Russian state media regulator Roskomnadzor has been building the bureaucratic case against the platform, issuing five rulings relating to Discord since September 20, with Russian users …

The world of today is the result of every decision and accident that led to it, which is a disconcerting thought given how many things it’s possible to almost do in a lifetime. Case in point, according to a new book on the history of Blizzard, the Warcraft studio rejected a proposal to turn Battle.net into a third-party game store years before Steam launched.

It just released today, but we’ve already learned some interesting stuff from the book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment by long-time games industry reporter Jason Schreier. Blizzard may be trying once again to make a StarCraft shooter, and has reportedly rejected multiple proposals for new RTSes.

Making an expensive new RTS does seem risky, so I get it, but past rejections sure…

Sir Michael Parkinson was a broadcaster and interviewer best-known for presenting Parkinson, a BBC chat show that began in 1971 and had its final episode in 2007. Parkinson’s avuncular and warm style endeared him to both audiences and guests in the UK, and when he died at the age of 88 last year, the tributes from across the entertainment industry were numerous and fulsome.

It has now been announced that, with the backing of Parkinson’s family and estate, a new podcast series will use AI to recreate Michael Parkinson’s voice and interview various guests. Called Virtually Parkinson and produced by Deep Fusion Films, the show will run for an initial eight episodes, and the late broadcaster’s son is doing the rounds to defend it.

“[I] really wanted to it to be clear [t…

Near the top of the list of things you’re going to want to know about the first Dragon Age game in a decade is: just how long is The Veilguard? We all know that RPGs come in on the high end of the hour count it takes to complete a singleplayer campaign. So is this a full month of nights and weekends situation, or a “oh I really should have planned a staycation from work” kind of thing?

Don’t worry: The Veilguard will absolutely give you a long main storyline to chew through, but it’s not the absolute beefiest RPG you’ve ever had to devour. I’ve finished the game, and will give you my best estimates on play time and some tips on how to make your adventure shorter or longer.

How long is Dragon Age: The Veilguard?

A first playthrough of The Veilguard will likely take…

At 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…

The Spirits of the Dalish quest is available once you venture back to Arlathan Forest in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. You’ll have to recruit Lucanis and venture to Docktown with Neve, but once you’ve done that, you can get the Unfamiliar Sense quest from Harding and the Winding Ways quest that sees you finding a route back to the forest through the crossroads.

Once back in Arlathan, you’ll discover a restless spirit on a boat near to where you ventured to the blighted settlement earlier in the game. This quest involves finding five mementos, but it can be a little confusing knowing what to do after you’ve gathered them. Here I’ll run you through each step of the Spirits of the Dalish quest.

Spirits of the Dalish memento locations

I’m no fortune teller, but I can already pretty much guarantee a few of the features you’ll find in The Elder Scrolls 6. First up, picking up any item on any surface will cause every item surrounding it to levitate a few millimetres in the air. Second, your companion will at some point jumpscare you by offering you some trash in the middle of battle. Third, land swimming.

I know this because those kinds of minor bugs and weird behaviours have been a staple of Bethesda games from Oblivion onwards. They’ve all drawn criticism for it, too, and not just from us lot in the peanut gallery. In fact, Skyrim’s lead designer Bruce Nesmith is the most recent notable name to cop to Bethesda games’ jankiness in a chat with Videogamer.

“I will be the first person to say that Bethesda Ga…

Owlcat has revealed a trailer and release date for the first installment of its second season of DLC add-ons for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. The Last Sarkorians adds a new class, Shifter, as well as a Shifter companion and his associated questlines.

Shifters are all about, well, shapeshifting, with roots in the prestige class of the same name from Dungeons & Dragons third edition and mechanics that build off the Druid “wild shape” abilities. According to RPG YouTuber Mortismal, Shifter was a bit of a dud in tabletop Pathfinder, but we’re probably going to see some mechanical tweaks for Owlcat’s interpretation⁠—it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve fudged tabletop accuracy in favor of CRPG fun.

The DLC’s new companion is Ulbrig Olesk, one of the titula…

The latest twist in AMD’s unpredictable GPU strategy of late is reportedly a “new” Radeon RX 6750 GRE graphics card. Yup, that’s a new last-gen GPU, nearly three years after the Radeon RX 6000 Series was originally announced.

Tom’s Hardware reports that a Weibo post (since deleted) has released details of the card, indicating that the 6750 GRE will sell for $299, putting it head-on with Nvidia’s RTX 4060. However, its performance is said to be in line with the more expensive $399 RTX 4060 Ti.

No specifications have been mooted, however the report implies that the 6750 GRE will be “beefed up” compared to the existing Radeon RX 6750 XT. That obviously isn’t in line with the only existing “GRE” edition card from AMD, the 7900 GRE, which is has reduced specification compared to …

Tool up, gang. We’re mounting a daring raid to find and secure the Dragon Age uber-plot document, a thing which is apparently real and which details the entire series’ meta-narrative, culminating in some kind of explosive denouement that would render any more games in the series impossible.

How do I know this? Because former BioWare dev and Dragon Age lore creator David Gaider told Eurogamer that such a thing is out there. It’s been out there since before Dragon Age: Origins, in fact. “There was, back when we made the world, an overarching plan,” said Gaider.

His approach to worldbuilding was to “seed plots in various parts of the world that could be part of a game, a single game,” but to also layer in “the overall uber-plot, which I didn’t know for certain that we would e…

As some hockey player once said, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”. Or in Intel’s case, you miss out on buying a company that’s currently sitting second on the list of most valuable companies in the world, back when it was worth relatively little.

That’s according to a report from the New York Times, detailing how Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive from 2005 to 2013, presented the board with an idea to buy a little computer graphics company called Nvidia. This wasn’t long after he’d taken the position, and the board apparently put up a significant amount of resistance, as (at a $20 billion value at the time), it would easily have been Intel’s most expensive acquisition to date.

As a result, Otellini backed away from defending the purchase. One attendee at the…

Remember that time three days ago when Atlus leaked its own Persona game announcements? Me too, and you’ll never guess: today they in fact did the official announcement for those games.

Persona 3 Reload, a remake of Persona 3, will bring the 2007 game which established the style of modern Persona to audiences in early 2024 on both PC and via Xbox Game Pass. Meanwhile, the Persona 5 mines are clearly not barren yet, as a tactics game set in that world and prominently featuring the Phantom Thieves is on the way in the form of Persona 5 Tactica on November 17, 2023—for the same platforms.

For its part, Persona 3 Reload looks to be an extremely stylish remake—featuring the dynamic graphic design of menus and text that has drawn so many fans to the Persona series with…

Johan Pilestedt, the CEO of Arrowhead Games, made a visit to the Helldivers 2’s Discord recently. He answered a deluge of questions before needing to “do [his] part as a husband and watch ‘The Boys'”, though one answer in particular leapt out at me—turns out, helmets were originally meant to actually do something.

As you might be aware, helmets in Helldivers 2 are purely cosmetic. However, they have their own section in the Armoury with stat readouts and a window dedicated to showing off their bonuses—of which there are none. 

It always struck me as particularly strange. That’s a lot of UI elements dedicated to conveying the same information—every helmet is “Standard Issue” and provides 100 armour rating, speed, and stamina regen. So why make …

If you own or run a website and don’t want AI bots crawling through your work to train its dataset—and who does?—Cloudflare has launched the ability to “block all AI bots in one click”, with even more interesting features coming down the pipeline in the future.

According to a new Cloudflare blog, as spotted by Ars Technica, the cloud-based content delivery and management service has enabled a whole host of tools to better manage concerns around AI from the sites it supports.

The new AI functions, labelled “AI Audit”, are split into three main actions. The first is that Cloudflare users can control bots’ access to websites. In the blog post, it said: “Many small sites don’t have the skills or bandwidth to manually block AI bots. The ability to block all AI…

After years of waiting, Rockstar says it’s finally going to bring the PC version of Grand Theft Auto Online to parity with the “enhanced” edition that’s been available for consoles for the past two years.

GTA Online came to Xbox Series X-S and PlayStation 5 in March 2022 with a variety of “technical and graphical improvements.” That version of the game has received several exclusive upgrades since, including ray tracing and the GTA+ subscription service, which offers players a range of monthly cash and content drops—all of it unavailable on PC. As we said last year, it felt like PC players were being left in the dust because… well, we were.

The first real sign that PC players might finally be brought up to speed came to light in September when Rocksta…

If you’re a Linux gamer and use an AMD Radeon graphics card, you might be aware that there are all kinds of limitations and bugs when trying to run at high resolutions with high refresh rates, when using the HDMI port. AMD’s software engineers had been working on a solution to it all, by implementing parts of the HDMI 2.1 specification into the code, but sadly had to shelve the whole project because the HDMI Forum rejected the project.

The disappointing news was reported by Phoronix, who spotted a brief explanation of the problem by one of AMD’s Linux engineers. If you try to run something like a 4K, 120 Hz display on a Radeon RX 6000/7000 series graphics card, via its HDMI ports, you’ll run into problems when using Linux. You wouldn’t expect this to happen, because AMD clearly ad…