Category: Equipment

AMD’s FSR 3 upscaling technology is set to make its debut tomorrow, on September 29, or September 30 depending on where you live in the world. AMD’s Frank Azor, the chief architect of gaming solutions and marketing made the announcement today via Twitter (or X if you really must call it that). FSR 3, or FidelityFX Super Resolution, was announced by AMD back at the launch if the Radeon RX 7000-series in early November 2022. It’s been a long time coming, but the wait is almost over. 

Two games with FSR 3 support will be announced, though which two was not stated. The two likely contenders are Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum, which are the ones prominently mentioned on AMD’s website, though of course, more games with FSR 3 support are in development.

FSR 3 introduces what AMD calls Fluid Motion Frames, and it can be thought of as AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s DLSS 3. It uses a combination of super resolution temporal upscaling and frame generation to deliver major performance increases in games that support it.

For a very good explainer of FSR 3, do check out our man Jeremy’s comprehensive overview.

According to AMD, FSR 3 will be optimized for a broad rang…

It’s no secret that the Fallout show was a big success, with Amazon saying it was the streaming arm’s biggest hit since The Rings of Power, with 65 million viewers. It’s also no real secret that successful videogame shows make people want to play the games, but it is pretty cool to see how many go and do just that: This month’s little Valve survey of what people are playing on the Steam Deck shows all four modern Fallout games taking a top 20 spot for most-played by playtime.

Fallout 4 takes number two in the top 20, Fallout: New Vegas takes spot seven, Fallout 76 spot 10, and Fallout 3 snuck onto the list in 20th place. Prior to this month, only Fallout 4 had popped up on the list consistently

The whole situation isn’t without precedent or anything: Back when the Witcher TV series first debuted, Witcher 3 saw concurrent player counts higher than it ever had before with sales up some 554%. It’s a real lesson that you can bet big publishers are taking to heart: If you can get a TV series made you’ll drive older players back to your game and boost new sales.

It’s also a real point at a way you can expect these types of marquee series to stay in the public light a…

In the final Panel From Hell preview of Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian revealed the details of the game’s highest difficulty, Tactician. In addition to reprising features of the mode from Divinity: Original Sin 2 like increased enemy stats and more aggressive AI, Tactician will also include bespoke additions to many of the game’s combat encounters in order to tip the scales for your enemies.

“We have it in two layers: there’s the base layer that all the characters in the game are gonna get⁠—that’s the basics like just increasing HP or making it easier to hit you,” explained Larian senior combat designer Matt Holland. “Then there’s the local layer. We’ve gone through every single combat in our game and we’ve added little bits of spice to make that combat shine just a little bit hotter and be that much harder.”

To demonstrate, the Panel From Hell presenters went through the same combat encounter once on “Balanced” (read: normal) difficulty, and once on Tactician. On Balanced, a duo of Monks was able to get the better of a gaggle of goblins strewn throughout the town. The player characters had one KO, but otherwise took care of the fight pretty handily.

On Ta…

100% and any% speedruns are usually the biggest ticket speedrun categories in most games, but most games aren’t Baldur’s Gate 3. This steamy RPG’s copious coitus led speedrunners to see just how fast they could get it on in a given playthrough, leading to a lively sex% category (it’s even tracked by speedrun.com!)

First spotted by Eurogamer, one of the great maestros of BG3 speedrunning, who goes by Mae (or “maeeeeee”), already has a lock on the Gale-bombing, Shadowheart-boxing any% record, and they’ve now set a new world’s best in the sex% category they helped establish by banging in Baldur’s Gate 3 in under two minutes.

The basic contours of the run are similar to when Mae brought it under eight minutes back in August: Githyanki psionic buffs and oodles of strength give you big, beefy broad jumps to bypass combat and terrain alike. Mae’s chosen avatar for this historic occasion was an ugly Gith goofball dubbed “EXTREME COITUS HAVER.”

Everyone’s favorite freaky homeschool kid Lae’zel is the easiest bud to bed in Baldur’s Gate 3, but you still have to reach the Grove of Silvanus and let her cyberbully a Tiefling in real life to show her you’re …

Are you feeling anxious? Demotivated? Discombobulated, even? If the answer is yes, you may want to ask yourself one thing: How many browser tabs do you open right now?

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland recently studied the cause and effect of what they call ‘browsing clutter’ on people and the different ways they have of dealing with it. They surveyed 400 participants and interviewed over a dozen people who spent more than 10 hours a week online about their browsing habits and feelings once the tabs started piling up.  

So what counts as clutter? Most of the participants commonly have 1-3 windows open with around 5-10 tabs open in each window, so you’re talking about more than a dozen tabs open at once on average. Over half of the people who participated in the study consider browser clutter “a serious problem.”

Those who consider their excess tab usage a problem said it made them feel overwhelmed, anxious, frustrated and demotivated. And if that wasn’t enough, some said the visual overload resulted in decreased work efficiency, increased levels of distraction, and difficulty sorting through information.

Just think about when you’re shopping…

Ubisoft has announced the surprise delay of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Instead of launching on November 15 as planned, the game is now slated to come out on February 14, 2025.

“Assassin’s Creed Shadows will now be released on February 14, 2025,” Ubisoft said. “While the game is feature complete, the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title.

“This will enable the biggest entry in the franchise to fully deliver on its ambition, notably by fulfilling the promise of our dual protagonist adventure, with Naoe and Yasuke bringing two very different gameplay styles.”

Star Wars Outlaws, which came out on August 30, was generally well received but reportedly not a big sales hit. Ubisoft confirmed that in today’s statement, saying that “initial sales proved softer than expected.”

That under-performance may also be driving what appears to be a step back from its commitment to the Epic Games Store, as Ubisoft said Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be available on Steam on launch day.

The traditional season pass model is also out: “All players will be able to enjoy the game at the same time on F…

Designers of gaming gadgets have tried for years to make something that will take you to new heights of immersion. Spatial audio, VR, and haptic triggers will only take you so far, though, because there’s one sensory input that no game tackles: Your nose. Well not anymore gamers, because with the new GameScent unit, you’ll be able to literally smell grass as you roam the fields in Skyrim.

We picked up news of this…umm…thing over at Dexerto and the response around the office ranged from ‘Dear Lord, no thank you’ through to ‘We have to review one!’ Essentially, the GameScent appears to be an automated aromatherapy type of device, containing six scent injectors that blast a combination of smells into the air, depending on what’s happening in your game or movie.

It’s done by tracking the audio feed, sending it off to a server for analysis (“Powered by AI”), and then one or two seconds later: Poof! Your nose will join your eyes, ears, and hands in giving you a scent…sorry, sense…of what’s going on. Events that involve explosions, guns firing, vehicle racing, clean air, forests, and storms will activate the smell-o-feedback.

If th…

Larian Studios says it has been in contact with a localization company that failed to provide complete credits for the Brazilian translation of Baldur’s Gate 3, and promised that all missing credits will be added in a future hotfix.

The issue of the missing credits first came to light last week on Twitter. “Congratulations to the heroes who translated @larianstudios’ Baldur’s Gate 3!” @MittoVac tweeted. “Sorry you couldn’t get proper recognition, but ctrl+C/ctrl+V is still way too complex for @Altagram_Group.”

Some Altagram Group localization credits did make it into the game, but as @katrinaltrnsl8r noted in a separate tweet, they included only the names of company executives and leads, not the localizers who worked under them.

She also theorized—guaranteed, actually—that Altagram Group, and not Larian, was responsible for the apparently missing credits. “Larian Studios likely asked them for their credits, Altagram gave them their ‘full credits,’ intentionally omitting translators, and Larian trusted them without checking,” she tweeted. “After all, who doesn’t credit their writers?”

In a statement sent to Eurogamer, Larian di…

Baldur’s Gate 3‘s second act has a couple of very important decisions—so much so I wrote a whole dang guide on how to thread its particular narrative needle. Before I get stuck into it, spoilers for the game’s second act, in case the headline didn’t clue you in.

A Reddit thread optimistically titled “How to bamboozle Lady Shar” by rokamuda (thanks, Gamesradar) lays out how exactly this comedy of errors happened. “I made short work of Nightsong, saw the cutscene of Last Light Inn dome crumbling and got all of Lady Shar’s boons … as I exited through the portal I got the cutscene of Lady Shar cursing me for not completing my mission, being marked as the enemy, and Shadowheart asking forgiveness.”

Turns out, that’s down to the Disguise Self spell. This first-level bit of trickery magic wraps you in the arcane guise of… well, anyone. Its scope is unfortunately a little limited in Baldur’s Gate 3, but it does change the context of a few scenes, letting you access different race’s dialogue options—some of which can get you into new areas, as long as you go in with a plan. It also lets you Speak with Dead to a corps…

The world of graphics cards can sometimes appear to be a bit ‘me too’. Adding a splash of RGB, a factory overclock or a funky shroud are a few ways to differentiate a card from the pack, but adding an M.2 SSD slot is something else. Asus has done exactly that. Its new Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti features a PCIe M.2 slot built right into the graphics card itself.

Though the card has been demonstrated before, it’s now showing up at a handful of European based retailers (via @momomo_us). As expected, the SSD slot equipped model comes with a markup compared to the regular Dual RTX 4060 Ti 8GB. The Multitronic listing shows a price of €559, compared to €470 for the non-SSD equipped Dual RTX 4060 Ti. Though there’s no doubt this solution introduces some complexity justifying a price premium, that’s a big markup.

The listing at Multitronic even includes some marketing information, which includes a line stating the slot is “capable of PCIe 5.0 speeds”. The RTX 4060 Ti only supports PCIe 4.0 though, so take that line with a grain of salt. The slot also includes Asus’ Q-Latch mechanism for easy installation.

On the GPU side of things, the RTX 4060 Ti is a well kno…

Launch weekend has seen Baldur’s Gate 3 break into the top 10 all-time concurrent player counts on Steam with 712,281 players here on on August 5th, 2023 at once according to SteamDB. That huge peak puts it above Goose Goose Duck, taking the 9th most-played spot, and pushing Apex Legends and its 624k peak into the 11th spot. The “you must be this tall to ride” bar for the top 10 is now firmly fixed at a peak of over 700,000.

Don’t feel bad for poor Apex Legends, in the merely prestigious 11th spot, as the free to play battle royale shooter can wipe its tears upon a giant pile of money and a current player count that the concrete, bounded experience of Baldur’s Gate surely won’t consistently have a year from now.

Baldur’s Gate 3 surpassed 500,000 players yesterday and nearly reached 600k, so this Saturday peak puts it a strong hundred thousand people up from that peak. Probably because not all of us can just play all day on a weekday and/or take off work for a game launch.

If you think that this peak will be the last for Baldur’s Gate 3, that could well be wrong. Monster hit Elden Ring didn’t hit its 953k peak concurrent player count until the weekend after laun…

Sometimes you watch a speedrun and just let it wash over you⁠—Mario backwards butt jumping until he clips into the stairs and flies away, I have no idea how it works and I don’t want to, it’s just a beautiful thing to behold. There’s a bit of that “Mario clipping into things” energy in speedrunner Mae’s blistering 4:15 Baldur’s Gate 3 Any%, all thanks to a particularly nasty new trick uncovered by the community. Spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 ahoy.

The run opts for Gale as the player avatar for reasons that we’ve reported on previously. Mae avoids all combat and doesn’t level up, instead opting for the level 1 spells Enhance Leap and Feather Fall to just jump like a moon man past every encounter. Loading into Act 1, they ignore every companion and quest and just make a break for the Mountain Pass.

Thanks to her story-critical Astral Prism needing to be along for the ride, Shadowheart helpfully shows up and joins the team even after being ignored till now. Speedy Gale then Olympic broad jumps his way past Rosymorn Monastery, ignoring the difficult Death Shepherd fight and leaping into Act 2.

Here’s where things get weird. Runners have …

Developers at Bethesda Game Studios have elected to unionize with the Communications Workers of America, a national labor organization that has also worked with Activision Blizzard employees on collective bargaining efforts.

Unlike some games industry unions whose membership is isolated to QA departments—ZeniMax QA workers unionized last year, for instance—this is a “wall-to-wall union,” says the CWA, and was formed by votes from 241 “artists, engineers, programmers, and designers” across three offices. It’s the first of its kind at a Microsoft-owned studio.

Bethesda Game Studios, which was spun off from publisher Bethesda Softworks, is the company most people are referring to when they say “Bethesda”: The Todd Howard-led developer of the modern Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, as well as last year’s Starfield.

Microsoft acquired ZeniMax Media in 2021, a purchase which included not just the two Bethesdas, but also a number of other subsidiary studios, such as id Software. Earlier this year, Microsoft shuttered four of those studios, including Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks.

In the run-up to Microsoft’s other huge recent acquisition—it…

Activision-Blizzard’s transfer over to the growing empire of Microsoft has been a bit of a drama, to say the least—but it’s all over now, its curtains called with the departure of the company’s former CEO Bobby Kotick, exiting stage right.

Kotick has been a controversial figure in gaming, quickly building up a reputation as a ruthless capitalist—like when Activision-Blizzard sued Double Fine over Brutal Legend, prompting the studio’s founder Tim Schafer to call him a “total prick”. There was also a disastrous interview with Variety where he denied the allegations of sexual harassment problems at Blizzard as an “aggressive labour movement”—as well as a harrowing instance where he reportedly threatened an employee via voicemail in 2006. 

A spokesperson later told the WSJ that the voicemail was “obviously hyperbolic and inappropriate” and that he “deeply regrets the exaggeration and tone in his voice”. Still—he’s gone now. After 32 years, some former developers are singing ‘ding and dong’ with a side of ‘the witch is (metaphorically) dead’.

Andy Belford (a former senior manager in community development at Blizzard) took to Twitter a fe…

Back in March, not long after Diablo 4 concluded its second beta weekend, Blizzard put out a set of stats revealing that players had collectively spent about 7000 real-life years in the game over its six days of accessibility. Well, turns out those were rookie numbers, because the latest stats say we’ve now all cumulatively spent over 30,000 years—or 276 million hours—in Sanctuary since the game’s early access period began on June 1.

For reference, 30,000 years ago was the late Stone Age, when Diablo 1 was still in a pre-development phase and uttering the words ‘Halsey and Suga from BTS have collabed on a Lilith-themed music video’ would have got you clubbed to death by a less genteel forebear of Ötzi the Iceman. Going the other way—30,000 years into our future—of course puts us in the time of the Horus Heresy and the start of the downfall of the Imperium of Man.

It’s too much time, in short, and it’s not the only eye-popping number Blizzard is boasting about. In their 276 million hours in the game, players have slaughtered 276 billion monsters and died a mere 317 million times (5.8 million of which were served by The Butcher). That is, I…

The best gaming CPU is one of the most hotly contested titles in the industry, changing hands with each successive new generation of processors. Both Intel and AMD have some excellent CPU contenders in the mix, but on this hallowed page, we’ll reveal the very best.

AMD’s mega-cache X3D CPUs offer stiff competition for Intel andthe best gaming CPU is now the mighty AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. For a much more affordable option, the best budget CPU is the Intel Core i5 13400F, although as noted below, Intel chips come with a potential caveat as things currently stand. The AMD Ryzen 7 7700X is the best mid-range chip, thanks to its excellent all-round performance and reasonable price.

A note on Intel CPUs: Due to recent crashing issues with a number of Intel chips, we’ve changed our picks to reflect this. We’ve also added caveats to our remaining Intel CPU recommendations. A fix has now been issued by Intel and while it may prevent new chips from running into problems, processors already damaged may need to be replaced.

Managing Editor, Hardware

The quick list

The best gaming CPU

If …

Baldur’s Gate 3 has choices—oodles of ’em. Choices that Larian’s accounted for, for the most part. In my recent playthrough, instead of taking a certain character to a certain body for a story quest, I picked up the corpse and dumped it back in camp like a cat bringing their owner a dead bird. The dialogue still worked (though I had to have them in my party) besides one or two out-of-context lines. 

However, one player has found an edge-case scenario that the game doesn’t account for at all, and it’s honestly pretty reasonable when you break it down. Spoilers for Act 1 and Gale’s storyline to follow, as well as a minor Act 3 spoiler. 

As outlined by ThePawn08 on the game’s subreddit, reverse-pickpocketing a dead wizard onto the devil incarnate isn’t on the list of things Larian thought to program. For context: Gale of Waterdeep (ponderer of orbs and all-around dweeb) has a sphere of Netherese magic in his chest that’ll act like a nuke if he dies.

The range of it isn’t infinite, though, as he insists he’ll find a cosy, remote spot to go all nuclear should he become unable to con…

“How do I craft a backpack?” is typically the fifth question I ask when starting a new survival game, following “How do I craft an axe?” and “Where can I find water?” and “How do I make a campfire?” and the all-important “What the hell was that noise?” 

That’s because when carrying resources and food and tools and junk around in your pockets you tend to run out of room pretty quickly, so a backpack that gives you extra inventory slots is an essential early game survival staple.

Except in Rust, that is. The multiplayer survival game has been around for 10 long honkin’ years and it’s only now just getting around to adding backpacks. Which isn’t to say the concept just occurred to the developers: according to Rust guru Shadowfrax, backpacks were first proposed about six years ago, it just took a while for them to actually get here.

Better late than never! Facepunch Studios’ latest devblog says backpacks will arrive on February 1, but if you can’t wait that long they’ll be available for testing on Rust’s staging branch next week. Nice.

That’s not the only thing coming to Rust in 2024. Updates will include new monuments, a tutorial for new p…

In a fantastic turn of events, Remedy has lowered the PC system requirements for Alan Wake 2. This means you can now enjoy the beauty of Bright Falls and all the horrors that lie within without needing a beefy PC. 

The performance optimisation patch for Alan Wake 2 lowers the minimum GPU requirement to a GeForce GTX 1070 or Radeon RX 5600 XT. Previously, you needed to have at least an RTX 2060 GPU to even think about playing the horrifying yet beautiful game. More modern GPUs also received some improvements. According to Digital Foundry, the recent patch saw the RTX 4070 enjoy a 14% frame rate jump.

However, an Intel i5-7600K or the AMD equivalent is still a minimum requirement, along with a minimum of 16GB RAM and 90GB SSD storage. So double-check the specs before purchasing this fantastic horror game—don’t make the same mistake I did. 

When I first saw what the minimum requirements were for Alan Wake 2, I was a little shocked. Usually, I have no problem booting up whatever game I choose to play. However, I only just made the cut with my RTX 3070 if I wanted to use raytracing, and that still wasn’t enough as I didn’t have 1…

Update: The monkey king keeps on climbing. Since this piece went live, Wukong has become the second most-played game on Steam of all time, beating out the likes of Counter-Strike 2 and Palworld. You can find an updated version of this story here.

Original story: That sure didn’t take long.

The most-wishlisted game on Steam is now the most-played game on Steam going by current players. As of this writing, less than two hours after launch, more than 1,249,525 people are playing singleplayer action RPG Black Myth: Wukong, rocketing it into the hall of fame for all-time record Steam launches.

It’s already easily surpassed an elite list of powerhouse games including Hogwarts Legacy at 879,000, Elden Ring at 953,000, and Cyberpunk 2077 at 1.054 million, all according to SteamDB.

Next in its sights is Dota 2, which it will probably pass by the time this article makes it across the internet and into your eyeballs. The bigger question is whether Black Myth can take down the concurrent numbers of PUBG and Palworld, which set their records in January 2018 and January 2024, respectively, at 3.26 million and 2.1 million.

Tha…

It’s been a rough few days for Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead. Seemingly blindsided by Sony’s attempt to restore the requirement for Steam players to link their game to a PlayStation Network account (which was suspended at launch due to the game’s extensive technical issues), the studio has seen its game subject to a ferocious review bombing campaign, with its recent review score dropping to an “Overwhelmingly Negative” rating.

Now though, the crisis is over. Sony has walked back its plans to force PSN accounts onto Steam players, and those negative Steam reviews are slowly being flipped to positive (though the game’s recent review rating remains at “Mostly Negative”). It seems Arrowhead hasn’t lost its sense of humour over the debacle either. Following up a tweet about how “impressed” he was by the willpower of the Helldivers 2 community, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt shared an “accidental” cape design based on the game’s recent avalanche of negative reviews.

Created by a community member, the cape ‘design’ is based upon the three red lines from Helldivers 2’s recent reviews graph, which, when isolated from the rest of the graph against Steam’s blueish background,…

Baldur’s Gate 3 is now available on PC and PlayStation 5, and an Xbox version is on the way too. And while you can’t currently play with your pals on other platforms, Larian director of publishing Michael Douse told Eurogamer that someday, you will.

“[Crossplay] was always in the planning, but we knew it wouldn’t be [ready] for launch,” Dowse said. “It’s in the roadmap, and though we have an idea of when we’d like to get it ready for, we don’t want to put a date on it until we’re sure.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 already supports cross-saves, which means that if you’ve been playing on PC and want to move to the PS5 for some reason, you can. Of course, it works the other way too, so if you’re starting out on PS5 and score yourself a sweet gaming PC for Christmas, you can switch your game over and treat yourself to the whole banana the way it was meant to be played. There are a couple of caveats, though: Only your five most recent saves will be synced, and if you’re using any Baldur’s Gate 3 mods your PC saves will not be compatible with the PS5 version.

But the implementation of crossplay is a whole different beast. Baldur’s Gate 3, like the first two game…

Cities: Skylines 2 was not in great shape when it launched in 2023. The underlying game was quite good but it was plagued with performance problems and missing a number of features, most notably an editor. That sparked a quick backlash on Steam, visible in the “mixed” user rating, but it also kicked off what Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen described as “a growing tendency of toxicity in our community.”

Hallikainen said the level of toxic behaviour that’s followed in the wake of Cities: Skylines 2 is “something we have not experienced to this extent before,” and it’s aimed not just at developers but players as well. That could have a negative impact on the game in the long run, she warned, as it discourages people from interacting with other members of the community: “In the long run, this will really hurt not only the mood and the happiness of community members but also discourage creativity and modding, something we would be very sad to see.”

“We have always treasured having the devs present on the different social platforms and having direct communication with the community, but our biggest responsibility will always be protecting the team and making sure th…

In an interview at last week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the developers behind indie sensations Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon said that the deal some small developers have come to rely on for funding in recent years—like Epic Game Store exclusives and Xbox Game Pass—are no longer what they once were.

“I talked to at least five small teams, like 35 [members] and under, during GDC, and they’re like: Cuts, cuts, cuts, funding canceled, talks that were going on for a year, canceled,” said Casey Yano, the co-founder of Slay the Spire studio Mega Crit. “It sounds like it’s shit. We’re definitely very privileged to be able to self-fund. [Otherwise] I’d be very, very, very scared right now.”

Slay the Spire launched to slow sales in Steam early access before eventually becoming a deckbuilding juggernaut. Darkest Dungeon was likewise a Steam early access success; both games are available on PC Game Pass, though DD director Chris Bourassa said that Microsoft’s deals for getting games on Game Pass have “come down in scope” since the subscription service began.

“Way down,” Yano added.

“So has Epic,” Bourassa said. “The Gold Rush is …

Goodness, hasn’t Animal Well done… well? Launching to almost universal acclaim, the breakout metroidvania looks like it’s teed itself up to become the next Hollow Knight. The game was funded by Bigmode, an outfit created by popular YouTuber Dunkey to, quote, “publish some of the very best games out there”. 

At the time there was plenty of cynicism, but I’ll be damned—he really did simply publish a game that’s good, not bad.  

The game’s success, though, is primarily down to Animal Well’s maestro of a solo dev Billy Basso who made the dang thing. As if making Animal Well wasn’t impressive enough, he also revealed in an interview with our friends over at Edge magazine (as part of their most recent issue) that he had a lot of rooms during the design phase that didn’t make it down the well.

“I think designing a Metroidvania is a lot harder than designing, say, a linear platformer where you can load the stages,” Basso tells Edge. “Just putting the new rooms into the map is the first step, and then it needs to go through probably five or six iterations of just playing through it and trying it … I will come up with a new item that has imp…

Give players free premium currency, and they will learn how to farm it. Helldivers 2 is set up like lots of other service games, with cosmetics and warbonds purchasable with premium Super Credits, but it’s unique in how easy it is to get its premium bucks for free. You’ll find Super Credits just lying around in underground bunkers or supply pods out in the field in 10 credit chunks.

If you play a lot, those chunks naturally add up over time, but some players are utilizing an exploit with how Helldivers 2 generates a mission to farm the same Super Credit pickups over and over again. The process is slow, but reliable, and Arrowhead is catching on (as spotted by GamesRadar).

“We’re aware of this undemocratic behaviour,” Arrowhead community manager Twinbeard responded to Discord user CyberViper, who raised the alarm on Super Credit farming in the #troubleshooting channel. “Thanks for doing your sworn duty and reporting it, though. Hooah!”

I was curious how lucrative these farming methods going around actually are, so I tested the one in question. It’s not so much a bug or glitch, but an exploitation of Helldivers 2’s randomly generated points of interest. All you h…

Over the past few weeks we’ve been getting an inside look at some of the new features coming to Cities: Skylines 2, like the road and traffic tools, changes to public transportation, and more. Today, Paradox Interactive pulled back the curtain on city services, and some of the new features look impressive. Some of them are also depressingly real.

The good news first: the video above and accompanying devblog highlight improvements over the original Cities: Skylines when it comes to the services available to your growing city. For instance, rather than building additional schools and hospitals when your population outgrows them, you’ll be able to upgrade those buildings to create a wider circle of influence and cater to a larger population. That’s a relief for anyone who’s ever spammed a bunch of brand new elementary schools into a sprawling neighborhood in a desperate attempt to elicit a higher satisfaction score.

In addition to improvements on old features, completely new features are shown in the video, like the telecommunications service, which includes cell towers and server farms. It makes perfect sense—internet and phone service are in…

Even my crusty old heart has melted at seeing how much everyone loves Baldur’s Gate 3’s companion characters⁠—especially the actors who portrayed them. As reported by Polygon, after some reprised their roles for a High Rollers tabletop one-shot, many in the cast have been sharing playlists tailored to their characters.

Neil Newbon’s opted for quite a bit of David Bowie in his nearly 10-hour Astarion playlist, which makes sense as Astarion himself is a bit of a “Thin White Duke.” There’s quite a spread of stuff on there otherwise, but the dancier, early aughts stuff really screams “Astarion” to me.

Halsin’s playlist by actor Dave Jones really leans into that character’s romantic side, and I’m a fan of the double entendre in Bombay Bicycle Club’s “I Want To Be Your Only Pet” being on the Wild Shape master’s playlist. Samantha Béart’s Karlach playlist, meanwhile, has a healthy amount of dad rock in it, which really nails that character’s vibe. Gale of Waterdeep always struck me as a jazz cafe kind of guy, but Tim Downie’s Gale playlist still has a bit of that sense of sophistication⁠—and a few pun song titles, like The Ink Spots’ “I Don’t …

It’s been a hard July for Apex Legends.

We reported last week how players were resorting to review bombing to vent their frustrations with the Apex Legends’ new monetization scheme, which boils down to “Now there are two battle passes and you can’t pay for either of them with in-game currency.” Today, that bombing campaign continues unabated, with the free-to-play shooter racking up almost 30,000 negative Steam reviews in the last week alone.

The recent Steam review rating for Apex Legends currently sits at an uncomfortable “Overwhelmingly Negative.” While the overall rating remains a respectable “Mostly Positive,” only 15% of the reviews from the last 30 days have been favorable. And the rate of review bombing hasn’t slowed much either: At time of writing, players have left over 4,400 negative reviews in the last 24 hours.

Unsurprisingly, the most common complaints echoed throughout the wave of negative reviews are related to the battle pass changes. One reviewer asks, “Titanfall 2 had to die for this battlepass money grab bs?” Another says that they’ve “played from the first season and never had a break,” but after 2,650 hours of play time “this might …

George RR Martin might be too busy winning Golden Globes and owning a literal railroad to write The Winds of Winter (and fair play to him, honestly), but that doesn’t mean we can’t get our Game of Thrones fix elsewhere. AGOT, a highly popular Game of Thrones mod for the Crusader Kings games, is finally getting its CK3 edition, so you can just author your own conclusion to the A Song of Ice and Fire story.

Going by the less-than-catchy title CK3AGOT (Crusader Kings 3: A Game of Thrones), the mod will launch into open beta tomorrow, April 14. The details the creators have already put out look great: expect a detailed recreation of Westeros in the CK3 engine, with all sorts of opportunities for intrigue, skulduggery, and crimes against gods and men alike. So all the things you usually do in a game of CK3, but Ned Stark is there.

Although the CK2 version of mod offers a huge swathe of Westeros’ history to play around in—you can start anywhere from 300 years before Aegon’s Conquest right up to the beginning of the fourth book, A Feast For Crows—CK3AGOT will restrict you to starting at Robert’s Rebellion for now.

You’ll also only have access to the contin…

Update: A Polish-speaking reader reached out on Twitter to add a bit of context to the original Bankier.pl interview. Gehirknipsulat clarified that “the word ‘technically’ in Polish doesn’t have this particular meaning as it does in English, It only means “on a technical/mechanical level, relating to technology”. So, while Google wasn’t completely off-base when it translated the phrase “technicznie gotowy” to “technically ready,” that translation adds a shade of meaning in English—that the game is ‘pretty much done’—that’s absent in Polish. 

They also noted that Babieno follows up that statement by saying “It doesn’t mean the game is finished, but we’re close”.

Original story: Bloober Team has poked its head up to let us all know that no, actually, the Silent Hill 2 remake isn’t on the verge of release mere months after its official announcement back in October. In a post to Twitter, the studio behind the upcoming SH2 remake said that some of its recent comments had been “taken out of context” and subject to “inaccurate translations,” and that it did not, in fact, say Silent Hill 2 was “ready for release”.

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ฉลองครบรอบ 20 ปีของ World of Warcraft ด้วยการรวมพลังจากอาณาจักร Azeroth และโลกอนาคตของ Future Earth ในกิจกรรมครอสโอเวอร์ครั้งยิ่งใหญ่! ตั้งแต่วันที่ 17-30 กันยายน เตรียมพบกับการปะทะกันของสองโลก เมื่อเหล่าฮีโร่จาก Overwatch 2 ให้เกียรติตัวละครไอคอนจาก World of Warcraft เข้าสู่สนามรบด้วยสกินระดับตำนานอย่าง Sylvanas Windrunner Widowmaker, Lich King Reinhardt, Thrall Zenyatta และ Diamond Magni Torbjorn ที่ถูกออกแบบมาอย่างประณีตเพื่อสะท้อนเอกลักษณ์ของทั้งสองโลก

Sylvanas Windrunner Widowmaker แสดงถึงความเย็นชาและแม่นยำของธนูแห่งความมืดของรา�…

ดูเหมือนว่าการใช้ AI ที่ชื่อว่า ChatGPT ในการสร้างโครงเรื่องต่าง ๆ จะกลายเป็นสิ่งที่น่าสนใจมากขึ้นไปเรื่อย ๆ โดยก่อนหน้านี้ก็มีข่าวมาว่าอ.โอดะ ใช้ AI ตัวเดียวกันคิดตอนใหม่ของ ONE PIECE จนกลายเป็นเนื้อเรื่องที่น่าสนใจ(อ่านข่าว)ล่าสุดคุณเต๋อ นวพลนักเขียนบทภาพยนตร์ นักเขียน และผู้กำกับภาพยนตร์ชื่อดังก็ได้ทดลองใช้ ChatGPT คิดบทหนังฮาวทูทิ้ง ภาค 2 ซึ่งผลที่ออกมาคุณเต๋อยังเอ่ยปากเลยว่า “หรือจะสร้างจริงดีวะ!”

“ผลปรากฎคือไอ้ AI มึงจะเ�…

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โหมดสำรวจ TV ใน Zenless Zone Zero กำลังจะหายไปคำพูดจาก คาสิโนออนไลน์ที่ดีที่สุดในทวีปเอเชีย

หากใครยังไม่ทราบต้องบอกก่อนว่า Zenless Zone Zero จะใช้โหมด TV ในการพาผู้เล่นเดินทางผ่านฉากต่าง ๆ ในรูปแบบของหน้าจอทีวี เพื่อแก้ปริศนา…