Month: October 2024

We all know by now that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a huge game, but weeks after release I’m still surprised not just by how much good stuff I’ve seen, but how equally much I’ve missed. It speaks to Larian’s confidence in its breadth of stories that it’s so easy to choose dialogue or take routes that lock off entire chunks of the game, not least of which the stories of its six core companions.

Note: Act 1 spoilers below.

For me, that was the Githyanki Creche. I took the Underdark and never looked back, and in taking that path I apparently missed the chance to witness this rare “Astarion being Astarion” moment, as shared by user gokkyun on the BG3 subreddit.

“What in the sweet hells were you THINKING activating that lance, I was right there!” Astarion …

One of the hotter demos out in this year’s Steam Next Fest is for Broken Arrow, a large-scale RTS set just about in right now, this moment, using cutting-edge military equipment and technology. It’s a setting often left to either less-realistic shooters or stodgy ultra-realistic but low fidelity wargames, but developer Steel Balalaika is giving it a convincing go that has me interested in the final product.

Broken Arrow is at its core a large-scale tactics game like the Wargame or Steel Division series, or recent RTS Warno, but whereas past games have focused on recently-gone or theoretical conflicts, Broken Arrow’s launching with factions based on modern United States and Russian forces. It’ll have more than 100 units per nation, with both land, air, and sea forces represented.

I have gazed upon the cards, and what do I see? Huh, two of wands, four of cups, and that one with lots of swords from the meme about buying too many swords. What could it mean? I was expecting to draw The Fool or Justice and almost certainly Death, what do I do with four cups? Shots, I guess. Apparently, the cards are trying to tell me this: The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood will be out on August 16.

It’s the new game from Deconstructeam, the Spanish indie studio responsible for cyberpunk bartending/hacking/pottery game The Red Strings Club and miserable-situation simulator Gods Will Be Watching. You play Fortuna, a witch who is exiled from her coven for centuries and banned from using tarot, which is why you have to covertly design a new deck of fortune-telling cards with the help of …

I 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…
  

Call of Duty, just like any competitive game that achieves success, has a cheating problem. Some players will always want to cheat, cheat sellers will always sell cheats, and developers fight to stop such behaviour ruining things for everyone else. So back in 2021 publisher Activision announced it was getting serious about anti-cheat: kernel-level serious.

The Ricochet anti-cheat software focuses on the PC audience, where cheats are more easily accessible, and ever-since has been updated with amusing new tactics to strip cheaters of their ability to disrupt the game. This past June it launched a new feature that takes cheating players’ weapons away (even their fists) and just leaves them at the mercy of legit players. And now it’s ready to go all Final Destination on…

Alan Wake 2 will never “go gold,” an old-fashioned phrase that refers to the creation of a master disc for duplication. No discs will have been burnt when the survival horror game comes out on October 17: Even the console versions won’t get physical editions and “there are currently no plans to release Alan Wake 2 on disc.”

Remedy and Epic Games say that the digital-only release has allowed them to keep the price down: Alan Wake 2 will be $60 on consoles as opposed to the new $70 normal for big budget games, and on PC, it’ll be a pleasant $50.

The Alan Wake 2 FAQ says that the digital-only decision was also influenced by the fact that fewer and fewer people buy physical media—both consoles have optical drive-less versions—and that Remedy didn’t want to sell a dis…

Watch On

The ever-growing genre of games that mimic the old top-down Zelda titles has another entry with Ogu and the Secret Forest. Releasing on Steam at the end of last month, Ogu has gotten a fairly positive reception from early players. The hand-drawn 2D art and characters are certainly pretty charming, as is little hat-wearing net-swinging platypus protagonist Ogu.

Gameplay emphasizes exploring the world to find puzzles, secrets, and mysteries in order to recover some magical doodads or other. Trailers and gifs show a pretty cool variety of puzzle types. I can see push-object puzzles sokoban style, some mazes made of gates that rise and fall in  patterns, even a match-the-tones style pattern puzzle using musical instruments.

Unlike some other entries in the genre, O…

Intel’s struggles have been going on for so long that this was kind of inevitable. But it’s still somewhat notable that it’s happened. The first somewhat substantive rumour that the company is giving serious thought to spinning off its chip production fabs has emerged.

Business news outlet Bloomberg is not a font of infallible wisdom. Not everything it reports always comes true. But it’s a major news outlet, and very well connected. 

With that in mind, Bloomberg reports that Intel is currently weighing up the pros and cons of spinning off its fabs. In other words, Intel is considering whether it should sell the factories that make all of its CPUs (well, that used to make all of its CPUs before those fabs ran into troubles and Intel was forced to ask TSMC to make some of…

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Craig Lee Thomas, who you might know as the Super Earth spokesperson from the opening of Helldivers 2. Aside from the revelation that Arrowhead has an improvised Super Earth rap tucked away on a hard drive somewhere, Thomas also says he’s been playing the snot out of everyone’s new favourite shooter.

“I cannot get enough of this game,” Thomas writes. “I’ve been hopping on to squish bugs and stomp bots every chance I get.” Like many humble helldivers, he’s also been praying at the altar of the railgun—even in its diminished state. 

“I really dig it in Unsafe mode against Hulks and Bile Titans,” though that’s not his only trigger squeeze: “I have to say, I was sleeping on the Arc Thrower as a support, but against a charge…

If you ask me, we’re ramshackle contraptions designed to hunt, gather, and perish early from preventable disease, and this society stuff all started going downhill the second we got into agriculture. When we were young, hale, and nomadic, roaming the steppes and plains? Those were our glory days. At least we can relive them via a recent video from a streamer called boesthius, who undertook the Civilisation 6 “no settle: domination challenge” to win a match of Civ without founding any cities of his own.

For me, that’s already impossible, but boesthius decided to make life harder for himself by adding a few rules on top. Besides never settling cities, he also couldn’t seize any more than three cities from each of his AI opponents, and he couldn’t churn out any units beyond civilian …

For a brief, shining moment, the Epic Games Store had its very own SteamDB website called, appropriately enough, EpicDB. It’s gone now, but not before leaking what appears to be a database containing numerous unreleased games including Final Fantasy 9 and The Last of Us 2.

First spotted by the Famiboards forum (via TheGamer), the fun began when people realized EpicDB’s publisher search results were including unreleased titles along with games that are already live. Many of them were listed under codenames, but online sleuths were able to puzzle them out based on related listings, like the names of associated DLC.

Gematsu has a good breakdown: The links are all dead now, but Momo, for instance, is presumed to be Final Fantasy 9 Remake because of the presence of the Thief’s Kn…

One of the biggest crypto exchange platforms in the world, Coinbase, is undergoing a massive round of layoffs. Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong said that the company will reduce its operating expense by 25% and let go of 950 employees.

In a company email-turned-blog post (spotted by the Verge), Armstrong said that the crypto market has “trended downwards along with the broader macroeconomy” and that “fallout from unscrupulous actors in the industry” contributed to Coinbase’s decision to increase its present “operational efficiency” at the expense of jobs. 

One of the “unscrupulous actors” Armstrong is talking about is the founder of the now-collapsed FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, who has been charged with fraud. (Although 2022 saw many other crypto-related bad acto…

It took a decade and multiple development teams to get Dead Island 2 finished and out the door, but in the end it was worth the effort. In its year-end financial report, Embracer Group said that it is now the most successful game release in Deep Silver’s history.

Dead Island 2 didn’t knock our socks off, but it racked up one million sales in its launch weekend, a pretty solid success by any measure. One month later, it’s more than doubled that number.

“Dead Island 2, developed by internal studio Deep Silver Dambuster (Plaion), was released after the quarter, on April 21, by internal publisher Deep Silver (Plaion),” Embracer said in its Q4 financial report. “It has enjoyed a highly successful start, surpassing 1 million units sold within its first weekend (21-23 April). Curre…

Obsidian Entertainment has been celebrating its 20th anniversary, two decades in which the studio has created some of the most beloved and intricate adventure-slash-RPG titles ever made. Its current project is Avowed, a game that’s destined to be compared to Skyrim but is going for depth over breadth “where Obsidian really shines” and, in the fifth and final part of an anniversary documentary, the studio’s creatives reveal that for quite a while it had a multiplayer element.

“When I look back at 20 years, there’s decisions of mine that I feel really good about, and there’s decisions that I feel not so good about,” said Feargus Urquhart, Obsidian’s studio head (first spotted by GamesRadar+). “One of the things where I really pushed was that Avowed was going to be mult…

The first level of Doom 1993—E1M1—is of course legendary for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is because a whole, whole lot of people have played it over the years. Even more now that that new little collection of Doom and Doom 2 have released.

Now, a modder going by Bloodshot1 has released a cute little remake of E1M1 using Doom Eternal and its Pistol Restoration mod. Here’s a full playthrough by a YouTube channel:

Watch On

Frankly… E1M1 holds up when you’re playing Doom—but ported into Doom Eternal’s modern graphics and engine and models it just looks kind of barebones and quaint. A very promising game design student’s first project with a boatload of assets from a free store—or something like it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a solid level…

Starting Wednesday July 24, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will hit Microsoft’s Game Pass service, including PC Game Pass. It’ll be the second big Activision Blizzard game to hit the service since Diablo 4 earlier this year. It’s the full game, including the singleplayer campaign, multiplayer mode, and the cooperative PvE zombies mode—which comes in extraction shooting flavor for Modern Warfare 3.

We’ve known that this year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 would hit Game Pass immediately, but the addition of Modern Warfare 3 to Game Pass was just announced on the Xbox website earlier today.

Game Pass has been in the news this month after a $2 price hike on PC was announced for September, along with a reorganization of how it’s structured for console players—which most…

Mac Walters, lead writer on Mass Effect 2 and 3 as well as creative director on Mass Effect: Andromeda, has departed BioWare after 19 years at the studio. Walters had been working as the production director for the upcoming Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, but it looks like that project will have to soldier on without him. Walters announced that he was leaving for new pastures in a post on LinkedIn last weekend (via Eurogamer).

“At the end of last year I decided to leave BioWare,” wrote Walters, even though “These past 19 years have been a life-changing experience […] and it made the choice to go very difficult”. But he left nevertheless, and his LinkedIn career history now lists him as departing his production director position after exactly one year in the role, from January 2022 to Jan…

As Amazon Games works to tweak, tune, and dig for a bigger audience for New World, it’s also continuing to enter into publishing agreements with other companies on delivering competing MMOs. The most recent addition to that lineup is NCSoft’s upcoming Throne and Liberty, which will be published in North and South America, Europe, and Japan—everywhere but Korea, basically—by Amazon.

“NCSoft has created some of the most popular and longest-running online games in the world, so it’s no surprise that Throne and Liberty is among today’s most anticipated MMOs,” Amazon Games vice president Christoph Hartmann said. “Publishing games that live and grow over time remains a critical piece of our strategy, and delivering games of the highest quality from the world&rsqu…

“You know I’ve been on some amazing movie sets,” drawls David Hasselhoff to the camera, “but my favourite set of all? Planet Earth.” Nailed it Hoff, makes ya think. Not content with his bit-part in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Baywatch and Knight Rider star now has his sights set on climate change and, specifically, getting us gamers off our behinds to do something about it.

Hasselhoff is the face of a new campaign called Make Green Tuesday Moves (MGTM), a “videogames climate change alliance”, which aims to offer unique DLC on the first Tuesday of every month using various celebrity endorsements. “MGTM will see proceeds from the sale of in-game items—which can comprise new and/or upcycled DLC goods such as characters, costumes and objects—invested into fully certif…

Counter-Strike pro player Adam “nbgee12” Zanzoul has been barred from IEM Dallas 2024 and permabanned from the FACEIT platform after being caught stealing SSDs from his fellow competitors (as first reported by Dust 2). Almost unbelievably, this comes around two months after the ESL had commuted a previous 100 year-ban imposed on Zanzoul thanks to new policies and, to stretch credulity even further, Zanzoul says it’s all down to the demon weed. 

The incident took place in the small hours on May 31st, after the 19 year-old Zanzoul gained entry to a backstage area containing other players’ equipment. Zanzoul helped himself to SSDs belonging to his fellow professionals Jake “Stewie2K” Yip, Nikola “NiKo” Kovač, and Guy “NertZ” Iluz.

Reports of the incident first …

In the lead-up to Diablo 4’s first season back in July, the game received a patch that was universally unpopular. That feels like an understatement—the community revolt was fierce enough to cause an honest-to-Lilith emergency broadcast where the devs stated: “we don’t plan on doing a patch like this ever again”. 

Far from repeating the mistakes of the past, it seems the Diablo team are slowly reversing them entirely. As spotted by Gamesradar, a hotfix has increased the experience gain for killing monsters in World Tier 3 by 5%, and 15% in World Tier 4. 

This goes some way to fixing the nerfs which had players up in arms—nerfs that crushed XP bonuses for killing higher level monsters (from 25% at three levels or higher to a piddly 15% at around ten level…

A  new demo for 4X strategy game Zephon is out this week, encouraging you to chose a path for humanity between eldritch horror and technological subordination as you reclaim an apocalyptic earth in flux. The mission-driven 4X looks pretty promising with interesting choices not just in technology and specialization but in how you choose and execute tactics with your units, heroes, and strategic abilities.

The 50-turn demo for Zephon is pretty neat, if a bit short for those who—like me—enjoy diving headfirst into the long-term strategies of a 4X. The diversity of early units was interesting, with an immediate branch into the humanity, eldrtich, and technological paths for advancement giving meaningful and interesting choices first thing. The promise of a full ten te…

In our cultural quest to simulate all possible jobs, gigs, and hobbies, we inevitably landed on Drug Dealer Simulator and, soon, Drug Dealer Simulator 2. The sequel turned up to today’s PC Gaming Show with a quick clip to remind us of its June 20 release date and, if you’re so inclined, a demo that’s available now.

“Welcome to the early 2000s! You are Eddie, and a lifestyle of bad choices made you an outlaw seeking refuge,” says DDS2’s developer Byterunners. “Don’t worry tho, Isla Sombra is the perfect place for fugitives like you.” It comes with such staples of 2000s nostalgia as brick phones, parkour, and weed being edgy.

DDS2 sports improvements over its predecessor such as a much bigger world map, tropical weather of Isla Sombra, expanding and decorating your drug lab, a…

FaZe Clan’s share price currently sits at 18 cents on the Nasdaq: which is a problem, and come September 19 will become a catastrophe. In March this year the Nasdaq issued a notice of delisting to the lifestyle-slash-esports company because its share price had fallen below the $1 minimum bid for 30 days in a row. FaZe was given six months to get it back to that level for a minimum of ten days and, so far, has failed.

Check back in soon if you want to see a car crash, but if you’re wondering why such an omnipresent and seemingly successful brand is in such financial dire straits, Bloomberg has a new report going over some of the company’s history in recent years, and it lists some eye-popping decisions and expenditures.

It begins with a July 2022 event featuring the ra…

Bungie composer Ella Feingold, who has been orchestrating Destiny since 2015, has posted an image on Instagram of a score sheet with a notable name on it: P. McCartney (spotted by VGC). The title of the composition has been obscured, while the orchestration is credited to Feingold and Jordan Cox, and lest there were any doubt, Feingold’s caption reads “Yeah that P. McCartney. That’s all I can say for now.” 

Paul McCartney is one of the most prolific and influential songwriters and performers of our time, and best-known for being the driving force of The Beatles. He composed several tracks and motifs that went into shaping the original Destiny’s soundtrack, with credits on five of the eight tracks that feature in The Music of Destiny: Volume 1, and various other credits…

As part of IGN’s 2023 Fan Fest, Blizzard unveiled the opening cutscene of Diablo 4 while also dropping the date of its upcoming closed and open betas. Players who pre-order Diablo 4 will be able to test it out the weekend of March 17-19, while the rest of us plebs will have to wait an extra week for the weekend of March 24-26.

The cutscene itself is full-on classic Diablo, even if it doesn’t reveal much. I found it really reminiscent of the story FMVs from Diablo 2 with its presentation of a lone warrior wandering a desolate landscape, this time your player character instead of the afflicted Diablo 1 warrior.  IGN’s description of the trailer indicates that in-game cutscenes will feature your custom-designed player character, so we’ll be able to get our Monster Facto…

Did you beat the world boss Ashava in the Diablo 4 “Server Slam” beta? The answer’s important: it will decide your standing in the upcoming game’s social order.

Beating the level 25 monster at the beta’s level cap of 20 was no easy feat. It required a decent group of other players, some grinding for legendaries to beef up your character, and, most of all, lots of time and patience. The boss only spawned every three hours and could take as long as 15 minutes to kill. 

But if you did manage to slay her, your reward was the Cry of Ashava—a golden horn that, when the full game releases, you can hang on your horse’s bum.

It wasn’t a spectacular incentive on its own, but apparently it did come with online clout. Some of those who did earn it are now lording it ove…

Billionaire and full-time troll Elon Musk has trailed his latest idea for X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and it’s an absolute doozy. To briefly set the scene, Musk bought Twitter for roughly $44 billion in 2022, following a protracted saga that threatened to end up in court. Following the purchase Musk laid off a ton of staff, made verification a paid-for service, and has presided over a notable influx of bot activity (replies on the site are an utter mess).

The bots are really the most notable thing because, while Twitter’s always had problems, the uptick in bot activity over the last couple of years has notably impacted the site’s user experience. Ironically enough, one of Musk’s big reasons for buying the platform was to annihilate the bots, but under …

Guy Beahm, the streamer better known as Dr Disrespect, says he “didn’t do anything wrong” and that he isn’t going to comment further on an allegation made by an ex-Twitch employee who claims that Beahm’s lifetime ban from Twitch was a consequence of sexual DMs with a minor. 

Beahm was one of the biggest streamers on Twitch when he was suspended from the platform in June 2020. A reason for the ban was not provided—Twitch said only that it takes “appropriate action” when it has “evidence that a streamer has acted in violation of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service”—and at the time even Beahm claimed to not know why he’d been given the boot.

He was eventually informed of the reason, something he acknowledged a year later when he announced he was taking…

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive launched on 21 August, 2012, and on 11 February 2023 it has just surpassed its all-time record of concurrent players: At the time of writing, 1,320,219 players are in-game, while the previous record was 1,308,963 players around three years ago.

Counter-Strike dates back to 1999, and began as a mod for Half-Life that became popular enough for Valve to take notice, and make one of the best decisions in its history. It bought the rights and hired the co-creators to work on making it into a standalone release. Counter-Strike 1.0 is now 23 years old.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the latest iteration of what the official twitter account, quite rightly, calls “your favourite first-person shooter’s favourite first-person shooter.” It has featu…

Like many PC gamers across the world, I was appalled when I heard about the shuttering of Arkane Austin by Microsoft. Despite the studio’s recent woe with Redfall, a game described by some commentators as one where ‘executives ruined everything’, I’d presumed that its previously stellar track record and new ownership by a financial juggernaut would insulate it from the tsunami of gaming industry job losses we’ve witnessed over the last year.

But no, Arkane Austin, the studio that made the immersive sim masterpiece that is Prey, as well as contributed to probably my favourite gaming series of the past 15 years, Dishonored, is now gone, leaving nothing but a trail of ‘fury and heartbreak’ throughout the gaming community. Personally, I feel much of that discontentment comes …

Anthem was kind of baffling right from the start. Why would BioWare, a studio built almost exclusively on popular singleplayer RPGs—Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, let us not forget Jade Empire—suddenly dive into a multiplayer-focused looter shooter? It was weird, and the outcome, if not inevitable, was at least not entirely surprising: We called it “deeply flawed and frequently frustrating” in our 55% review, and just two years after it launched in 2019, BioWare pulled the plug, officially halting future development.

There’s an old adage that says you learn more from failure than success, and that may be the one upside to Anthem’s big bomb. In a new Edge magazine feature on BioWare’s upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard, creative direc…

A month ago we reported that EA CEO Andrew Wilson is champing at the bit to increase the efficiency of EA’s studios using generative AI tools, and he returned to the topic this week on a call with investors, saying that EA’s developers themselves have a “hunger” to put AI to work on their projects.

“We’ve done analysis across all of our development processes, and right now, based on our early assessment, we believe that more than 50% of our development processes will be positively impacted by the advances in generative AI,” said Wilson in response to a question about the technology. “And we’ve got teams across the company really looking to execute against that.”

Wilson thinks that, with 40 years worth of proprietary data to “feed into” generative AI models (in some unspecifi…

Since Dungeons of Hinterberg is a game about a vacation, it’s fittingly also a game about tourism. People flock to the imaginary Austrian village not to ski or sightsee but to explore dungeons, fight monsters, and use magic, which appeared seemingly randomly in Hinterberg a few years before the beginning of the game. Protagonist Luisa comes to Hinterberg to destress and have some fun, but by the end of the game she is knee-deep in questions about the impact the commercialization of magic has had on the city.

“It was for sure an angle that we wanted to explore, right from the start,” said Phillipp Seifried, cofounder of Microbird, in an interview with PC Gamer. “There’s this huge debate about tourism going on in places like Barcelona, which gets millions of tourists a year.”

<…

A Reddit thread by user zerger45 is swearing that Diablo 4’s rats will lead you to legendary loot, which wouldn’t on its own be news, except for the fact that over 8,000 people seem to agree with them. That, or they’re just throwing their voices into the new rat cult for kicks, hoping some rodent genuflection might result in one of Diablo 4’s mega-rare loot drops. Either way, I’m concerned we have another cow-level pipedream on our hands.

“Okay this is going to sound really bizarre, but you need to follow the rats for good loot. Don’t follow the predetermined path in any dungeon, instead, just follow the rats. The rats smell the cheese! I’m telling you it’s real,” types zerger45 in a somewhat religious trance. “I found multiple legendaries doing this within a spa…