Valve has banned roughly 40 CS:GO accounts for trading, with the result that more than $2 million worth of in-game items have been lost. Any account that receives a community ban can no longer trade items, and so their stockpiles of CS:GO skins, stickers, gloves, knives, and the like are now in limbo. Other traders are apparently taking this as a warning, and selling everything they’ve got.
Back in June, gambling site CSGOEmpire released a spreadsheet listing CS:GO traders they accused of being part of a scheme to launder cryptocurrency through CSGORoll, a rival gambling site. According to Dexerto, all but one of the accounts in that document were among those caught in this latest ban wave, and there has been speculation that Valve targeted them deliberately.
We’ve reached out to Valve to ask if these accounts were chosen because of their connection to CSGORoll, but have not received a reply. Without that confirmation there’s no way to know for sure if that’s why t…
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Soulslikes are generally solo affairs: It’s you against hordes of low-level flunkies and high-powered horrors in an endless grind of brutal combat until you finally avenge your family’s honor by reclaiming the Myrmidon of Loss, or whatever. (I’ve only played Elden Ring, so my grasp on the details is a little shaky.) Deathbound aims to do things a little differently, billing itself as a “one-of-a-kind party-based soulslike.” But that doesn’t mean you’ll be roaming the forbidden city of Akratya with friends: You’ll still be on your own out there.
Deathbound looks like a fairly straightforward soulslike at first glance, but what makes it different, according to developer Trialforge Studio, is its “unique four-hero system.” It’s not a party in the usual D&D sense, though. Instead, you’ll absorb the essence of fallen warriors as you travel through the game, essentially making them a part of you, and once you’ve bonded with them you’ll be able to transform between four …
Over 25 years after the first Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver launched, Crystal Dynamics has announced a remaster package collecting the first and second games in the series. The HD ports are the work of Aspyr, the studio responsible for the well-received remasters of the first three Tomb Raider games. The package was unveiled at Sony’s State of Play yesterday, but they’ve now been confirmed for PC.
Until recently the original versions of these games were available on Steam; they’ve since been removed, presumably to be replaced by their modernised versions. The trailer below shows what to expect: both games still look very much like late ’90s 3D action games, though they’ll enjoy sharper textures, smoother framerates, and upgraded models and visual effects.
Additions will include a photo mode, an “upgraded camera” and new control options. These games released for the original PlayStation at a time when analog sticks weren’t super popular, so the new controls and camera wil…
Cities: Skylines 2 didn’t have a great start last year. When it launched in October, the sequel to the best city builder around garnered a mountain of criticism thanks to its wonky simulation and significant performance issues. There were a plethora of great ideas buried inside it, but it definitely didn’t put its best foot forward. Improvements have been made since then, but this week’s launch of the first bit of post-launch DLC, Beach Properties, has just riled players up again.
Beach Properties is a weird DLC to lead with. It’s an asset pack, so it doesn’t introduce any new features, instead throwing a waterfront zone, a bunch of new growable buildings, six signature buildings and, erm, four trees into the mix. Despite the name, it doesn’t actually include beaches, and the assets have been criticised for mostly being a bunch of regular houses.
Granted, at $10/£8.49, this was not going to be a beefy expansion. And it’s probably better for Colossal Order to …
One of the smaller pleasant surprises at this year’s Game Awards was the announcement of a free, Dredge-themed crossover DLC for Dave the Diver. The two fishing games will collide when the update launches on December 15.
Things actually seem pretty friendly between the duelling fishing games of 2023—in a Mintrocked dev update, Dave the Diver director Jaeho Hwang and designer Nolan King cited a huge fan demand as the reason for the update, and explained that each team loved the other’s game.
The brief trailer shows a spooky red mist descending on the Blue Hole, as well as brief shots of Dave’s fishing boat exploring the lagoon in full 3D. Hwang and King describe this as a new minigame coming with the update, a fun nod to Dredge’s signature gameplay. The now-haunted Blue Hole has been infested with “aberrant” fish from Dredge, and these nasty boys serve as extra-challenging enemies with their unique sushi in demand among a special new clientele.
The DLC …
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The upcoming Dungeons and Kingdoms—which releases in early access on Steam soon—falls into the genre mashup category for me. Like Mount and Blade and Crypt of the Necrodancer, it takes two great tastes and sees if they taste great together. This time around we’ve got a medieval kingdom sim mashed up with soulslike dungeon delving, and it looks promising.
The first outing from Canadian solo dev Lincoln McCulloch, aka Uncle Grouch Gaming, Dungeons and Kingdoms will have you take a ragtag group of refugees from an “unlivable homeland” and build them a nice place, with tree chopping, crop planting, and all that good stuff. You can construct buildings on the fly from over 500 pieces and save your designs as blueprints you can share on Steam Workshop.
Dungeons and Kingdoms goes beyond city building and lets you transform the terrain around you. You can smooth out areas to facilitate farming, create a moat around your castle, even lift up a hill to stick an…
Canadian filmmaker James Cameron was catapulted to fame after directing and writing 1984’s The Terminator, a science fiction horror movie in which a cyborg is sent back in time by an AI defense network, Skynet, in order to eliminate the only threat it faces. In this case that means assassinating the mother of John Connor, the man who will one day lead the human resistance.
The Terminator is one of the all-time great blockbusters, and much of that is down to how it evokes the terror of being pursued by a machine with a machine’s purpose. “It can’t be bargained with,” Kyle Reese explains to Sarah Connor after the first encounter. “It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear.” The Terminator is a manifestation of Skynet itself, an AI designed to ensure humankind’s security, which long ago concluded that humankind itself was the problem.
Cameron would expand on the backstory of Skynet in Terminator 2: Judgement Day and, thanks to the peerless quali…
EA Sports is embarking on a huge re-branding exercise, with 2023 the first year it will release a football game without the FIFA imprimatur. The new-look EA Sports FC branding has been omnipresent at football matches and in coverage for a while now, but with EA ready to show off the game fans are finally getting a glimpse of what to expect. And it seems to be very bad faces.
The cover for the EA Sports FC 24 ultimate edition has been revealed, featuring 30 football greats from the present and past, and wow does this thing go hard on the uncanny valley effect. Both male and female players are represented, various leagues and national teams, and the idea is clearly to show that, hey, this may have a new look but we’ve got all the stars of the game here.
At first glance it might look alright, particularly as the focal point is Erling Haaland in the middle and EA seems to have done a decent job of his face. But look at the others a little closer and you’ll soon see jus…
Last Moon is a retro 1990s RPG reminiscent of the early Legend of Zelda games with maybe a little bit of Wonder Boy in Monster Land thrown in, developed by the independent French team at Sköll Studio. Its wacky setting is a world that exists on top of a giant called If, which has become covered in corrupted creatures after the moon was somehow destroyed by human greed. This situation calls for a plucky Lunar Knight to restore order, and guess what? That’s you, my guy.
After waking up inside a gem held by an overgrown vine—look, I told you it was wacky—you set out on a quest that’s definitely going to involve some block-pushing puzzles and returning to previously locked-off areas to gain access to them once you’ve gained the ability to, say, remove a wall of thorns preventing your progress. There’s also a day-and-night cycle, with certain areas only being accessible in the dark, though of course things also get more dangerous at night.
You improve as a Lu…
Pot Boys, Pot Friends, Clay Bros, Cauldron Cuzs, Living Jars… it doesn’t matter what you call them: they seem nice. They were among the first memes to spawn from Elden Ring and it’s little wonder, because they’re a species of sentient and occasionally violent pot. It’s like Hayao Miyazaki and Lewis Carroll collaborated, and then, I dunno, Eli Roth barged in. Or, to put laboured references aside, it’s like Hayataka Miyazaki having a normal one.
A brief appearance in the first Elden Ring gameplay video vastly undersold how very many Pot Friends there ended up being in the base game, which is no bad thing because one can never be under-equipped with ceramic vessels, sentient or not. Even the Pot Friends who attack us in Elden Ring are charming: their moveset is lumbering and predictable so that if a Pot Friend hurts you it’s definitely your own stupid fault. Pot Friends are hilarious, gorgeous, whimsical, bumbling treasures, are they not?
No: Pot Friends are ni…
If you happen to be a fan of multiplayer action in Crysis 3, Dead Space 2, Dante’s Inferno, or Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, you’re going to want to start squeezing in what you can, while you can, because Electronic Arts will be pulling the plug on all of them later this year.
The looming closures, first spotted by Pure Xbox, come as part of EA’s semi-regular housecleaning process for older games. “As games are replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the games that have been live for some time dwindles to a level—typically fewer than 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles—where it’s no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping the online services for these games up and running,” EA’s Online Service Shutdown page explains.
“We are also committed to constantly updating and improving the features and modes to keep in our games to ensure they remain exciting to play for as long as possible. T…
It’s been the better part of a year since the Elden Ring: Shadow of the Edrtree expansion was announced, and we’ve heard nothing of note about it since. The most recent financial report out of FromSoftware parent company Kadokawa brings both good news and bad on that front, which can be summed up in a single brief sentence: It’s coming along nicely.
“The release timing of DLC for Elden Ring has not yet been announced, but development is proceeding smoothly,” the report says. And that is the extent of it. For the true optimists hoping that a release target would be shared later in the report, as a sort of Columbo-style “just one more thing” surprise, I’m sorry to say that it’s not happening: In the Q&A section, Kadokawa repeats, “We are currently working hard on the development of DLC for Elden Ring but we have not announced a release date at this time.”
That presumably shoots down our assumption that Shadow of the Erdtree could be out in late 2023—it’s now Nove…
Pieces Interactive, the developer of the Alone in the Dark reboot that launched earlier this year, has been shut down by parent company Embracer Group.
Word of the closure came via Pieces Interactive’s Twitter feed, which posted an image containing the studio’s logo and the message “Pieces Interactive: 2007-2024. Thanks for playing with us.”
The studio’s website now carries the same image, as well as a longer message detailing the studio’s history since its founding in 2007. “In 2017, Pieces Interactive were acquired by Embracer Group after working with the expansion for Titan Quest, Titan Quest: Ragnarök and third expansion for Titan Quest, Titan Quest: Atlantis,” the message says. “Our last release was the reimagining of Alone in the Dark.”
Pieces Interactive’s Alone in the Dark reboot was good stuff. We called it “an intelligent reimagining of the 1992 classic” in our 76% review that, despite bugs and some occasional over-reliance on combat, delivered “th…
Epic Games and its CEO, Tim Sweeney, have been at war with Apple for years now. The present situation is this: Epic only wants to put Fortnite on iPhones and iPads if it can use its own store and payment processor instead of the official Apple App Store, which takes a 30% cut of revenue. Apple, meanwhile, would prefer it if Epic did not do that.
Epic didn’t get the ruling it wanted when it sued Apple over this issue in the US, but the story is different in Europe. The European Union’s 2022 Digital Markets Act now requires Apple to allow third-party marketplaces on iOS devices, which means that Epic can finally sell Fortnite V-bucks in Europe without paying Apple a cut for the privilege of accessing one of the world’s largest mobile device markets (except in the form of a brand new fee Apple has devised in response to the law, which Epic also takes issue with).
The time has finally come for the two companies to put the law into practice: Epic has announced that the Epic…
The recent success of TV shows inspired by games—Fallout, Cyberpunk, Halo, Castlevania—has prompted plenty of conversation about what other games might make for good television translations. Former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider is one of the many people with thoughts on the matter, but even more interesting than which games he thinks would make for good television are the ones he believes would not.
“I imagine everyone would expect me to say Dragon Age, but that’d be a terrible idea,” Gaider said on Twitter. “I want to see a David Lynch-style (on acid) Disco Elysium. Or maybe Banishers.”
Gaider knows a thing or two about storytelling. He served as the lead writer on the Dragon Age games from Origin through Inquisition, has multiple Dragon Age-based novels to his name, and has design credits on Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, and Anthem. More recently he served as creative director on Stray Gods, a “genuinely thrilling, occasionally heartbrea…
Cooperative shooter Deep Rock Galactic will soon let players take its old seasons of stuff out of the closet and take them for a spin. That means the first four rounds of themed extra stuff to do in Deep Rock will be available as their own game modes alongside a separate Vanilla module that can spit out events and game modes from every season—and all of that’s coming as part of DRG season 5 this June.
As part of that, every single season’s tree of unlockables, their Performance Pass and Cosmetic Tree, will be put back in circulation as part of their own seasonal play mode. If you played that season before, you’ll get set back to where you were on that tree.
It’s an approach we’re seeing more and more limited-time-experience live service games adopt as time goes on: There’s a lot of game to play, so why restrict it to a limited amount of time when people might not be able to play it? With the notable exception of genre-leader Destiny 2, of course, which routinely re…
Sick of the sight of your keyboard? Well, you won’t be with the new Drop CSTM80 thanks to its novel quick-swap top case.
The CSTM80 is a tenkeyless board with a magnetic top case allowing for super-swift swaps. Simply pull the top case off and drop a different one on for a pretty comprehensive change in visual vibe. The standard fully-assembled CSTM80 comes with a black polycarbonate case for $149.
You can also choose from white, black, Laser Purple, Skiidata Orange, and Jasmine Green polycarbonate cases for $25 a pop. If you fancy something slightly more substantial, anodized silver and black aluminum top cases go for $59 each.
If the swappable top case is the main attraction, the rest of the package looks decent, too. Highlights include the gasket-mounted design, per-key RGB LEDs, custom ABS south-facing keycaps with shine-through side legends optimized for south-facing switches, PCBA mounted stabilizers, customizable weight and 5-pin switch support.
O…
EVO Japan 2023 took place from 31 March to 4 April, and was the first in-person Evo held in the country since 2020. Hosted at Tokyo Big Sight, the world’s premiere fighting game competition was coming home and hopes were high… but it all turned out to be a bit of a mess.
There were still plenty of great fights to be seen, eventually, but the problems were numerous. There were a lack of staff, the venue was cramped, disorganisation over brackets in certain games saw enormous downtime between matches, and many players complained about the game setups being laggy.
Some fans thought that players, rather unfairly, were being salty about losses, but Evo general manager Richard Thiher subsequently confirmed the technical issues. “It is important to confirm that Punk and others were right, the Evo Japan 2023 stage setup negatively impacted players,” said Thiher. “It is also necessary to confirm it was the stage and stream design itself, not the INZONE monitors. We …
Square Enix’s newest games aren’t doing so hot. Without any major releases in the three-month period from April to June, its net sales dropped by 18.4% from the same period last year. Overall, however, the company still made a 250.1% operating profit, largely due to its mobile and MMO games, which means Final Fantasy 14 is one of the main things keeping its “digital entertainment” financials positive.
In its latest earnings report, Square Enix says net sales and profits of its MMO games are one of the only things going up compared to the previous fiscal year. MMOs made up 68.4% of its operating profits, while its mobile games made up 31.1%. Interestingly, these numbers don’t even include FF14’s latest expansion, Dawntrail, which launched just last month. It seems like the usual lull before an expansion didn’t affect the 12-year-old MMO all that much and I wouldn’t be surprised if the next quarter sees the profits go up even higher.
In fact, Square Enix’s MMOs have been d…
Final Fantasy 16 on PC shows signs of life, with producer Yoshi-P saying it will run best on an SSD-
We finally got our first word on Final Fantasy 16’s promised PC port since its initial announcement in September. Speaking with Famitsu (spotted via Genki_JPN on Twitter), FF16 developers Hiroshi Takai, Takeo Kujiraoka, and Naoki Yoshida (affectionately called Yoshi-P by fans) briefly touched on the PC version in a long interview about the game.
“Details will be announced in due course,” Yoshida replied to a question about recommended PC specs for the game. “However, I would like you to prepare an SSD… In FF16, a game where loading speed is critical, an HDD would be difficult to use.
“Of course, we will do our best to optimize as much as possible, but we cannot overcome the hardware barrier alone, so please consider that an SSD is a must.”
That makes plenty of sense: fast storage and the war on load times has been one of this console generation’s genuine technological leaps, and fast, cheap, high capacity SSDs are everywhere now. I built my last PC with a 25…
Dave the Diver is one of PC Gamer’s favourite games of 2023, no small feat in a year as crammed with great releases as this one has been. In his review from July, Chris called it “easily the best game of 2023” saying “When I finished the final boss at 35 hours in, I felt like I’d been on a real adventure, and the ending gently, but genuinely, tugged on my heartstrings.” Granted, this was before Baldur’s Gate 3 blew everyone away, but still a score of 91 is nothing to sniff at.
Naturally, we were hugely excited by what colourful, charming adventure developer Mintrocket might conjure up next. The good news is that its next game is coming much sooner than you’d expect, with a planned release in 2024. The…interesting news is that it’s a PvPvE Zombie Survival game called Nakwon: Last Paradise.
Nakwon is basically Escape from Tarkov, but with zombies. It sees players venturing out from a safe zone into zombie-strewn Seoul, scavenging resources to help them survive…
In July 2022 Ruja Ignatova, the self-styled ‘Cryptoqueen’ behind a pyramid scheme called OneCoin, was placed on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted list. The Bulgarian-born Ignatova, accused of defrauding investors of billions, disappeared in 2017: the FBI reckons she travels with “armed guards” and “may have had plastic surgery”.
Believe it or not, the plastic surgery may be the least sensational aspect of this story. OneCoin appeared in 2014 and was essentially a multi-level marketing scam with crypto at the core. The exchange was closed in 2017 and, following Ignatova’s disappearance, she was subsequently charged with eight crimes in 2019, including wire fraud and securities fraud. The FBI added her to the most wanted list in 2022 with a $100,000 reward, later increasing it to $250,000. Now, it has increased that reward substantially: the question is why.
The reward for information leading to the arrest of Ruja Ignatova now stands at $5 million (£4 million). T…
There was an earlier time on the internet where it felt like there was a constant stream of little tchotchkes and gadgets to stumble upon and develop intense fixations over. I’m not sure what changed—learning firsthand how tight disposable income is probably had a part—but online trinkets don’t hit like they used to. Now, the only trinkets I see are what surfaces from the homogeneous soup of nerdy Etsy products and this one ad that inflicted me with the knowledge that there’s a niche market of dudes who want to buy beard straighteners. But today was different. Today, I found the Pixel Window.
The Pixel Window is an in-development project from monoli, a Japanese material designer and art student-turned-engineering Ph.D. who blends those backgrounds to, as a Google translation of monoli’s webshop puts it, create “a small laboratory you can wear.” Monoli’s made a series of wearable and handheld prisms, including color-diffracting cubes and the Pixel Mi…
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Each year’s slate of new pro sports games comes with a goofy set of new proper nouns to describe their cutting-edge animation and physics systems: Madden introduced “FieldSENSE” a few years ago, for instance, and now Madden NFL 25 promises “FieldSENSE powered by BOOM Tech.” You can’t make this stuff up, unless you’re EA of course, in which case you literally have.
A group of former EA developers have left that technical arms race behind to make a different kind of sports game, one they think has been missing from the scene. Announced today, The Run: Got Next is a 3v3 arcade basketball game with quick matches for our hopelessly corroded attention spans (and no BOOM Tech). And unlike certain other sports games—EA’s new college football game comes to mind—it’s getting a PC release as a priority.
The NBA Street series is the most obvious point of comparison, and The Run’s creative director, Mike Young, worked on all of those games. He was also the Madden…
A new Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth trailer includes the most jacked horse you’ve ever seen, Cloud riding a Segway, and the PlayStation 5 release date: February 29, 2024.
We’ve been assuming that Rebirth, the second part of Square Enix’s FF7 remake trilogy, will come to PC around a year after the two-disc PS5 version releases. That’s what happened with the first part, which released on the Epic Games Store in December 2021 as Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade, a few months after the PS5 version and over a year-and-a-half after the PS4 version. But wait, there’s a little asterisk at the end of the new Rebirth trailer:
As you can see in the image above, Square Enix sneaked in a note which says: “Not available on other formats at least until 05.29.2024.” That doesn’t mean that the PC version of Rebirth will definitely release at the end of May 2024, but it feels reasonable to take the note as a hint that we should expect it around then. That’d be closer to the gap b…
Civilization and XCOM studio Firaxis has been struck by a round of layoffs, Axios reports. Around 30 developers at the company have lost their jobs so that Firaxis can perform a “sharpening of focus, enhancements of efficiencies, and an alignment of our talent against our highest priorities,” which I’m pretty certain is just a hyper-corporate way of saying ‘we need to spend less money’.
Naturally, Firaxis hasn’t blamed anything in particular for the round of layoffs, but it’s not hard to see what might have prompted the company to start reconsidering its focus and cutting costs. Marvel’s Midnight Suns—for all its superhero star power—was a commercial failure, and the studio recently lost one of its most recognisable creative leads with the departure of Jake Solomon, who headed that project.
So Firaxis is probably quite keen to shore itself up in the wake of Midnight Suns’ underwhelming performance, and it tells Axios that it “remains focused on developing cri…
Innocent, dew-eyed babe that I am, I had no idea that the heavily tatted criminal who makes a brief appearance in the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer looked like a real guy. But he does, and now I will live with that knowledge until my last days. He resembles Florida Joker—real name Lawrence Sullivan—a resident of, uh, Florida with face tattoos and hair inspired by Jared Leto’s portrayal of the Joker, who originally went viral for a 2017 mugshot.
Turns out the real Florida Joker might be less than thrilled about seemingly becoming a figure of fun in one of Rockstar’s trailers, because he’s taken to TikTok (via IGN) to tell the studio that he wants a word.
@lawrence.sullivan0 ♬ original sound – Lawrence Sullivan
“You might have seen that…
Final Fantasy 14’s new minion is so horrendously underpowered, players are wondering if it’s bugged-
Final Fantasy 14’s new seasonal Make it Rain Campaign event has dropped. The event lets players earn 50% more Manderville Gold Saucer Points (MGP) from the Gold Saucer for its duration, which can be used to buy a bunch of cool rewards including emotes, hairstyles, and a 4-seater airship. However, its quest reward has people scratching their heads on the game’s subreddit.
Some context: the Hildebrand Adventures questline is a slapstick saga pulling double-duty as a way for the animators to experiment with the game’s ageing engine. It’s less concerned with petty things like the laws of physics and common sense and more with mile-high piledriver suplexes, alien abductions, and most recently a cursed low-poly clone of its titular protagonist and superstar detective, Hildebrand Manderville.
Completing this questline will net you with a wind-up minion version of Hildebrand’s father, Godbert Manderville: goldsmith extraordinaire, owner of the Gold Saucer itself and also one of …
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I was a little hard on Life is Strange earlier this week, but it is still a game I overall liked—which is why it’s a shame to see Square Enix shooting itself in the foot with a publishing decision which, on the face of it, doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure is a direct sequel to the first game in the series, following Maxine Caulfield as she gains the ability to walk between parallel universes to solve the mystery of yet another dead best friend. The poor gal just can’t catch a break.
The game has, naturally, a Deluxe Edition and an Ultimate Edition. We can all probably agree that these are annoying inclusions, especially for a narrative-driven game, but at the very least the absence of a couple of outfits isn’t going to have a major impact on the story.
The base edition of the game costs around $50, the Deluxe edition is $60, and the Ultimate edition sits at a whopping $80—curiously enough, the only difference for t…
With plans to trim $10 billion from its budget, Intel is halting plans to build a cutting-edge foundry in the green fields of Magdeburg, Germany for around two years. The facility was originally intended to start construction in 2023, with production beginning in late 2027.
In a note sent to employees and later published, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced the decision: “We will pause our projects in Poland and Germany by approximately two years based on anticipated market demand.”
That would see the fab delayed until at least 2030. The construction of the foundry had already been pushed back by various historical mishaps, including landing on a 6,000 year-old neolithic burial site and having the very specific misfortune of too much soft soil. Intel had also been chasing the German government for more money, which was roundly denied.
Rumours that the fab may soon be cancelled altogether have been gathering, though that’s often true of almost any minutely delayed c…
Remember late last year when Epic took a scythe to its back-catalogue, delisting almost every single Unreal game? At the time, the blow was softened by the news that Unreal Tournament 3 would become Unreal Tournament 3 X, a free version of the classic with full crossplay between PC storefronts, zero microtransactions, and “no strings attached”.
It was never really announced by Epic, mind you. Fans got wind of it thanks to the Steam description for UT3 (visible in this archived version), which was updated around the time Epic was going on its delist spree to include a full description of the new version. I guess there was a reason Epic never made a big splash about it, though, because it now appears to have been memory-holed.
A recent update to the UT3 Steam page, spotted by Wario64 on Twitter, has purged all mention of Unreal Tournament 3 X: Its name, its features, even the date on its copyright has been reverted to 2007 from 2022. Instead, the page is now…
I was recently over in China, visiting MSI’s factory where it makes motherboards, graphics cards, monitors, etc, and at the event, the company launched several new products. One of which was its MEG AI1600T power supply unit, replete with RGB lighting, a host of high-end features, and oh yes—two 12V-2×6 sockets for Nvidia graphics cards.
The days of multi-GPU setups (aka SLI and CrossFire) are long dead and given that MSI specifically notes that the AI1600T is “ready for AI computing usage”, it’s clear that this PSU is aimed directly at folks wanting to do a spot of homebrew AI stuff. But a few of us at the event got to talking about how it could be for something else.
In passing, one of MSI’s engineers had said that its new PSUs were all ready for the next generation of graphics cards and that obviously refers to Nvidia’s RTX 50-series, as they’re the ones that seem next in line to appear (AMD’s RDNA 4 series look likely to launch much later on).
…
If you’ve ever heard the old radio dramas based on Sherlock Holmes stories you’ll know the joy of listening to actors crisply enunciate a conversation while accompanied by a soundscape of footsteps crunching on gravel. Expect something similar except with more arrows twanging and spells being whooshy in Dragon Age: Vows & Vengeance, an audio drama in podcast form being produced as part of the build-up to Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
A prequel to the game’s story, Vows & Vengeance is about a retired thief searching for her lover in the Fade, with seven of the series’ eight episodes also highlighting a guest star companion from the videogame. Harding, for instance, the much-loved dwarf scout from Inquisition, will co-star in episode two. Based on the teaser, we can expect to hear characters like Solas and Varric pop up as well.
It’s reassuring that BioWare is going hard on narrative support for The Veilguard, with this podcast joining the short story anthology Tevint…