Steam

Image: Razer Razer is launching a new Snap Tap mode for its Huntsman V3 Pro keyboards today that’s designed to appeal to competitive gamers. Snap Tap is very similar to Wooting’s promised Rappy Snappy feature and works by prioritizing the latest input between two selected keys to allow Counter-Strike 2 and Valorant players to counter-strafe more quickly. The Snap Tap mode means you don’t have to release the previous key when you’re strafing, so if you enable A and D for Snap Tap, then it makes strafing near instant, improving directional changes and movement in esports games. The difference is only a couple of milliseconds, but that’s enough to get a ***** quicker than your opponent. “Snap Tap Mode, integrated directly into the firmware, allows for... Continue reading… View the full article

Recently published sales data shows that Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 isn't faring too well commercially in the ******* States. The long-awaited follow-up to 2017's Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and the only Xbox first-party title released so far in 2024, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 launched for Xbox Series consoles and PC on May 21. View the full article

A new, minor update went live in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone today, full of bug fixes and minor tweaks. The major content is still a few weeks away in CoD, with season five set to begin on July 24. For now, Activision is focused on fixing current issues and changing up some of the game as it stands, so the update has little for most to truly get excited for. View the full article

Soulslike fans can look forward to the August 8 release of Deathbound, a unique party-based action RPG with a ghostly twist. Announced back in 2023, Deathbound most recently piqued the interest of longtime fans of the genre during its appearance at this year's Summer Game Fest, where developers unveiled a new trailer and teased its impending debut. Now, a concrete release date has finally been confirmed, and fans won't have to wait much longer to experience the party-based Soulslike for themselves on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. View the full article

Prolific fantasy author and number one Ranni stan (“I'll pick the ending where my character gets a waifu”) Brandon Sanderson has been thinking a lot about how to apply Elden Ring and the Souls games' signature storytelling approach to novels. During a recent playthrough on his YouTube channel, he was asked if he thinks there’s a way to replicate Souls-like descriptions in books. “I’ve wondered that. I really have,” Sanderson replies. Read more View the full article

“I think, in general, making games is really tough. Making open-world games is really, really tough. And making Star Wars open-world games is the next level of difficulty.” Julian Gerighty, creative director at Massive Entertainment, is up for a challenge. For the first time ever, we’re getting a fully open-world Star Wars video game. It’s been a long time coming, but after back-to-back successes with both The Division and The Division 2, Gerighty was in the mood to take a risk. “I think this is maybe just my approach, but even if it's scary, you've got to do it,” he says. “You've got to lean into it. What's the downside to pitching a Star Wars game in San Francisco at LucasFilm Games in George Lucas' old office? [...] If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but you still have that experience.” Fast forward several years after that meeting and Massive Entertainment is less than two months away from releasing Star Wars Outlaws, a fully realised version of the original pitch described in that office: an open world of dual ambitions – maintain the cinematic legacy of the films, and create immersive scoundrel gameplay that grants you the freedom of the galaxy. “I think it's taken this long to get an open-world Star Wars game because of how, excuse the pun, massive it is to build a game like this. There are only so many studios in the world who build games of this scale,” says Steve Blank, director of franchise content and strategy at Lucasfilm. “The door is then open for Massive to come to us and say, this is what we're interested in doing, this is the type of game design and gameplay we want. This is what we're thinking about in terms of an archetype.” There are only so many studios in the world who build games of this scale. “It's the outlaw player fantasy and it's open world, those were the two main pillars that we pitched,” explains Gerighty. “Why open world? Because the outlaw fantasy really needs that to live and breathe.” “It's a combination of our DNA as a studio, our background, when we think, ‘Okay, what do we have a lot of experience doing? What do we think we're good at?’ And this fantasy, this scoundrel in Star Wars begs for freedom,” adds game director Mathias Karlson. Massive was fully confident in its abilities to create engaging open worlds – The Division offered a bullet-filled action playground, while last year’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora displayed an ability to work well within a Disney license by building a near-unmatched visual paradise. But Star Wars was the new challenge that this team yearned for. Of course, locking down what kind of experience would live inside a Star Wars open world was the first thing that had to be decided. “We took a step back of course and thought, ‘Okay, Star Wars open world. What an opportunity. What does that naturally want to be?’” Karlson says. “It wants to be the full scale, from the very small to the very big, meaning sitting inside a cantina, playing Sabacc, being able to walk through the street, jump on your speeder or drive across the planet surface, literally park your bike in your own ship, take off into space seamlessly, and explore that region.” That vision of “full scale” helped secure a green light from Star Wars’ custodians. But getting LucasFilm’s blessing was just the key in the ignition. Translating the cinematic spectacle of the original Star Wars movie trilogy into an open-world game – set between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, two of the most iconic films of all-time – was the actual challenge. One that Massive set out to address in every aspect of Outlaws, from the way it looks and sounds, to the type of action-adventure gameplay it supplies. Making an Open World Cinematic “For us, the sort of cinematic ambition that we had was in presentation,” explains Gerighty. For that, he went straight to the source. “What we did was take a lot of inspiration from the original trilogy, but with today's technology, so very similar to what Rogue One did with its references to the production design of the original trilogy. [Its aim] was to replicate a lot of the filmic effects of those lenses in the 1970s. So you'll see barrel distortion on the sides, vignetting, film grain, chromatic aberration, and of course all wrapped up in an ultra-widescreen presentation.” You can expect that level of detail in Outlaws’ cutscenes. But Gerighty notes that making a game cinematic “doesn't mean cinematics necessarily. What I care the most about is the interactive part.” “I think it's a key point for open-world games at large, scaling does not always need to be grand, but it needs to be conscious,” Karlson theorises. “The scale of Tatooine needs, should, and does in our game feels very different. It breathes, it’s open sand dunes and long sightlines. It's easy to pick up any little anomaly on the horizon and there might be an opportunity for you, compared to the dense streets of Kijimi, which is a city in perpetual winter where people are trying to stay warm.” Scaling does not always need to be grand, but it needs to be conscious. Scale is something written into the very DNA of Star Wars, whether seen on the big or small screen. Greig Fraser, Rogue One’s director of photography, recently told IGN that “If you watch any Star Wars film, that's what it's all about. It's knowing how big a human is going into this massive Millennium Falcon, how big the Millennium Falcon is going to this massive ****** Star. It's scale upon scale upon scale.” It’s a philosophy Gerighty and the team at Massive took into Outlaws when crafting the introduction to its open world. “One of our intentions for the beginning of the game was to make it feel very small and then [get] ******* and ******* and ******* and *******,” explains Gerighty. “So [at the] beginning of the game, you start off in one room and it's claustrophobic and it's meant to make you feel a little bit trapped. You open up and it's city streets, but it's contained. And then you get into some narrative stuff and you steal a ship and you explode into the galaxy and all of a sudden you ****** land on this planet, which is a wide open world.” The aim here is to create a “sense of everything growing for you and not just the scale of the galaxy, but the scale of the possibilities for you as a character.” Outlaws’ campaign tells the tale of Kay Vess, a young scoundrel looking to build a team from across the stars in order to pull off one big space heist and remove the “****** mark” placed on her by the Zerek Besh ****** syndicate. It’s the basis of a story that evokes many other adventures from across both games and film. “I love Mass Effect 2. It’s one of my favourite games,” states Navid Khavari, Outlaws’ narrative director. “There were so many influences. I think you look at everything from Ocean’s 11 and Ocean’s 8 to Star Wars itself. The previous films and that heist feeling was always kind of in the fabric.” He also namechecks Kurosawa, the ********* director whose samurai stories were so influential on George Lucas’ original trilogy. Knowing what sort of story you want to tell is one thing. Telling an engaging story in an open-world setting is another task altogether, and one that Khavari is well aware of, having written for Far Cry 4, 5, and 6, as well as The Division. “It's one of the things you always have to keep in mind,” he says. “How are we going to weave a narrative and an open world together, so that we're telling the story, but also giving you the freedom to go wherever you'd like?” We knew early on that if you got distracted by curiosity, the world had to react to that. “We had a really clear approach on Outlaws,” he explains. ”There was Kay's journey[...] There were key points that we knew we wanted her to hit, and then that makes her story part of the wider Star Wars narrative. But between those moments, we knew early on that if you got distracted by curiosity, the world had to react to that. It had to expect that the player's going to go off the beaten path.” The things that lie off the beaten path are built in accordance to something Massive refers to as “the three-second rule,” where within a few blinks of an eye you can instantly understand the nature of a location or character and the story behind them. “Before you even put life in them, they need to visually tell a story about what kind of place it is, what's happened in the past, what type of life and events have taken place in them so that they get that lived-in feeling,” Karlson explains. “That lived-in, relatable, substantial feel, I think is a hallmark of any good open world, but also very Star Wars when you think about it.” Star Wars’ aesthetic has always been rooted in the idea of the “used future”, where everything from the largest spaceships to the tiniest droids have that instantly recognisable layer of grime. Those small details build up into authentic, cool, and bespoke spaces – something Massive has always managed to build into its own open worlds. The Division and its sequel are packed full of memorable levels ranging from New York landmarks to Washington DC museums, and that philosophy is being transferred to Outlaws’ many planets. Its main missions promise to take us to iconic locations such as Imperial bases and Jabba’s Palace. “We can lean into the virtual tourism aspect of, ‘Hey, what is the distance between the moisture farms and Mos Eisley and the cantina?” says Gerighty. “There is a linear roller coaster story, a golden path, if you will. And around that, of course, there's the open world.” That sort of connective tissue of planet or moon to space was crucial to our whole approach. “That's the dream I know I had as a ****,” Khavari adds. “That is what I've always wanted from a Star Wars game. That when I'm on a journey, when I'm entering into a quest, it might start on foot, it might start with me navigating a High Republic cruiser that's crashed, but I want to be able to jump into my speeder and blast off, [...], take off into space, maybe land in a space station and meet some characters that factor into my quest or journey along the way. And so that sort of connective tissue of planet or moon to space was crucial to our whole approach, right? Because that's kind of the fantasy that I think players are hoping for.” That fantasy and freedom is evidently at the core of Outlaws, and while all five planets and moons (Toshara, Tatooine, Akiva, Kijimi, and Cantonica) won’t be instantly available to hyperdrive between, Gerighty claims it won’t be long into Kay’s journey until the galaxy opens up. “There's a very structured intro that leads you to ****** land on Toshara, which is a moon that we created with LucasFilm Games,” he says. “And once you finish the sort of linear narrative on Toshara, the other planets open up and it becomes completely non-linear and you can choose to tackle those [worlds] in any order you want.” A Galaxy of Exploration Exploration of these worlds is highly encouraged, with maps that are not (at least initially) flooded with icons and points of interest because you’re seeing these places from a fresh perspective. “Kay hasn't seen the galaxy, she doesn't know everything,” Karlson explains. “The first time you come to Toshara you'll have a map where you can see mountains over there and stuff, but discovery is what gives you more information.” “You're going to have to take some risks,” says Gerighty. “You're going to have to go to a cantina [...] and you can eavesdrop and pick up on some conversations that will lead you to another location that reveals a location within the open world that you have to get on your speeder to go and find. And there will be a fog of war that you'll be able to clear up and that's really where your curiosity will open things up even more.” Each of Outlaws’ worlds vary in size. Toshara, Massive’s newly created moon, is around the same size as the jungle planet of Akiva, but a little smaller than the vast desert of Tatooine. *********'s Creed Odyssey has different zones on the map. Toshara is two or three of those put together. “It was less about how big, but more about how long in terms of traversal with the speeder it would be,” Gerighty reveals. “[Toshara takes] four or five minutes nonstop, which doesn't sound like a lot, but once you're committed it's a fairly large amount and you are always going to be distracted. *********'s Creed Odyssey, which was one of the games that we were looking at while creating this, you have different zones on the map [...][Toshara is] two or three of those put together.” And that doesn’t even take into account the vast areas of space that surround each planet and serve as entirely different areas of orbital exploration and opportunity. We’ll cover that, as well as the starship side of the game, in greater depth later on in this month’s IGN First. Experts, Reputation, and the Wanted System In terms of mission design, we’ve seen action ranging from stealth infiltrations, frantic dogfights, high-speed chases, and intense blaster battles, with some quests even evolving to include all of these elements at different stages. Star Wars Outlaws is thus perhaps better thought of as a single-player narrative action adventure in the wrappings of an open world – something more akin to Marvel’s Spider-Man than dense RPGs like The Witcher or Ubisoft’s recent *********’s Creed games. Its mixture of popcorn action and blockbuster narrative ambition is a departure from Massive’s gear-based experience on The Division. It is a new chapter in the continued evolution of a studio that started life as a real-time strategy developer. “I think if you look at the evolution of the open world, there's a life, a dynamism, a systemic quality to The Division 2 that we didn't have in The Division 1,” states Gerighty. “I'm not talking about the presentation, the soft values at all. I'm talking about pure gameplay experience, single-player or cooperative. That was very, very important to us to have as a living, breathing element that engages players while they're playing Outlaws.” It’s an evolution of what Massive has been doing in their games for years now – keeping worlds feeling bustling and alive, even when set against post-apocalyptic backdrops or in the midst of galactic wars. “We in both Division games, but especially in the second one, developed what we call ‘living world systems’,” explains Karlson. “So same thing here. We have systems that make sure that the world is always alive with movement, traffic, speeders, zipping around the Empire, patrolling syndicates have footholds out there, and these can cross paths. Also sometimes more substantial events happen and it's really up to you if you want to engage or not.” Perhaps Outlaws’ most interesting method of breathing life into its open world is its approach to character progression. There’s no levelling up or incremental stat boosts to drop experience points into. Instead, Kay’s abilities and equipment are linked to experts – people you’ll meet across the galaxy who’ll grant you upgrades in exchange for work. “They are full-on characters,” Karlson explains. “So they're spread out in the world and you don't know exactly who they are, what exactly they have to offer you and how to reach them from the very beginning. So there's this journey of discovery here as well. And once you reach them, there's a character there to interact with and an adventure to go on because they won’t instantly just, oh, here you go. And then they essentially open up a little regional progression for you where the nature of those things is also very tangible.” An upgrade definitely ties into Kay pulling off the heist, but it's also very much its own journey, which is in the Star Wars tradition as well. For example, after finding a Jawa by sourcing their location from overheard intel at a cantina, you can complete a mission for them in order to gain a new skill. In this case, it’s to venture into a ***** Sarlacc to find a pristine tooth from its second mouth, which you can then exchange for a laser turret for the Trailblazer, Kay’s starship. It’s a smart way of blending gameplay progression with a narrative befitting of the Star Wars ********* underbelly. “You can go on a journey with a character such as an expert who is going to teach Kay a new skill and give her a new upgrade to her blaster,” says Khavari. “Now, that skill, that upgrade definitely ties into Kay pulling off the heist, but it's also very much its own journey, which is in the Star Wars tradition as well.” Beyond the main missions, expert side missions, and the reputation system at the core of it all, many other snackable activities exist in Outlaws’ open world. These range from quick contracts such as smuggling and stealing, gambling in Sabacc (Star Wars poker), to playing asteroid field arcade shooter games and ******** on Canto Bight’s Fathier Racing. All of these activities bolster your ever-growing supply of credits which can be used to purchase new customisation and gear options for Kay, her ****-like alien companion Nix, and the Trailblazer. And yet, there’s more. Emergent events frequently take place throughout the open world, whether on land or in space. “Every two, three minutes there'll be something that's happening, whether it's an ambush or the empire arresting some civilians or getting into combat with some ********* syndicates. And it's up to you whether you want to engage or not,” Gerighty reveals. We don't want things to be just big for big sake. With so much to do in Star Wars Outlaws, how does Massive go about avoiding open-world “bloat”? With a near-endless galaxy of opportunity, there’s the worry that things may spiral, feature creep sets in, and everything just gets “too big”. The studio had a clear plan from the start, though, leading with variety over size – quality over quantity, if you will. “So we don't want things to be just big for big sake. We need it to be contained, always fun, always proposing different activities,” Gerighty confirms. “It's about calibrating size to substance,” adds Karlson. “When you see something that breaks pattern, that stands out for whatever reason, and you go there and look, there's something there to do, and that repeats frequently enough. [We also make sure] the quests, the bespoke content of the game, makes use of it so that it doesn't feel like a separate experience, but it's all one.” Of course, no matter how much there will be to do in Outlaws, one thing that can be expected is a healthy helping of nods to the larger Star Wars galaxy. Lando is set to make an appearance, and we’ve already seen a glimpse of Han Solo in carbonite, but it sounds like they might just be the tip of the iceberg. “What I would say is there are Easter eggs,” Khavari reveals. “There's characters that you'll meet along the way across the main quests and whether it's the experts or the wider stories you're going to stumble across. August 30th is a really great date. I recommend bookmarking it in your calendar.” August 30 is right around the corner, a short wait for many players for whom an open-world game set in a galaxy far, far away has been a long-held dream. I could feel a similar passion for Star Wars coming out of each person I spoke to at Massive, and for them, I can’t help but get the sense that the dream is a shared one. Making open world games is tough. And bringing open world to Star Wars may well bring an extra level of difficulty, but for Gerighty and the team it’s been a challenge worth taking on. “I'm getting to that point where I think I can count the number of games I can do until I'm put out to pasture on one hand,” Gerighty says. “And it becomes more and more important to me to choose what I do because it's really important for me to do quality work with people that I love working with. And Star Wars is definitely on the bucket list.” Simon Cardy once got kicked out of a school assembly for calling somebody Salacious Crumb. Follow him on Twitter at @CardySimon. View the full article

Three of the five planets in Star Wars Outlaws can be crossed in four or five minutes while riding a speeder, Ubisoft has said. Speaking to IGN as part of a larger interview, creative director Julian Gerighty reiterated the planets — Tatooine, a Toshara moon, Akiva, Kijimi, and Cantonica — will be around the size of two or three zones in *********'s Creed Odyssey, and confirmed "Toshara is very close in size to Akiva and Tatooine; I think Tatooine may be a little bit larger." When then asked how long it would take protagonist Kay Vess to ride from one end of Tosharra to the other side on her speeder, Gerighty gave the four or five minute answer, which will seemingly apply to Akiva and Tatooine too since they're around the same size. "Four or five minutes nonstop, which doesn't sound like a lot, but once you're committed it's a fairly large amount, and you are always going to be distracted." It's unclear if the remaining two planets, Kijimi and Cantonica, are larger or smaller than these three. Ubisoft has said it's going for a quality over quantity approach with Star Wars Outlaws, however. "When we started thinking about how big we should make them, it was less about how big, but more about how long, in terms of traversal with the speeder, it would be," Gerighty said. "So we don't want things to be just big for big sake. We need it to be contained, always fun, always proposing different activities. So the traversal of the whole thing had to feel like a journey, a commitment when you get on your speeder and you want it to go from one end to the next." Star Wars Outlaws was revealed in 2023 as a scoundrel adventure set between Star Wars: Episode 5 - The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars: Episode 6 - Return of the Jedi. It stars Kay, her droid partner ND-5, and her beastie friend Nix as they attempt to carve out their own success during Star Wars' golden era of ********* activity. It arrives August 27, 2024 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC, with the $70 Standard Edition joined by a $110 Gold Edition, which comes with three days of early access alongside the Season Pass. An even more expensive, digital-only Ultimate Edition comes with both of these perks alongside cosmetics (the Rogue Infiltrator Bundle and the Sebacc Shark bundle) alongside a digital art book. Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day. View the full article

The original spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars is apparently getting a remake, and originality is *****. There's been all sorts of trends in Hollywood since films started being big events rather than just experiments in what's possible with the medium. These days it's superhero films, though they might be on the way out. The '60s saw the arrival of the spaghetti western, a genre of film that gets its namesake for the fact that they were westerns produced in Europe, the spaghetti part coming from the fact a lot of them were made by Italian directors and producers. It was A Fistful of Dollars that kicked off the subgenre in 1964, an iconic film directed by Sergio Leone with the (now) curmudgeonly Clint Eastwood in the lead role. Despite a couple of attempts here and there, a remake has never materialised, but as reported by Deadline, it appears one is now in the works. Euro Gang Entertainment, a company founded by Gianni Nunnari (300_ and SImon Horsman (Magazine Dreams) is set to produce it alongside Enzo Sisti (Ripley) of FPC, as well as the Rome-based Jolly Film, the studio behind the original film. Details are reportedly under wraps for now, as it's still quite early in development, but the general assumption is that it will be an English-language film - a writer hasn't been revealed as of yet, nor has a cast or filming date. Read more View the full article

few months ago, a Baldur's Gate 3 fan artist with the handle XunHe1145, shared a project that would bring BG3 characters to the world of Stardew Valley in a mod named Baldur's Village. After a couple of months, we've finally got another update on the project, including a potential release window: "Although the release date has not been decided, there is a high probability that the first part will be released this fall or winter," Xun says in a tweet... Read more.View the full article

Creative Assembly and ***** have slapped a release date on Total War: Pharaoh’s free Dynasties expansion, which outfits the historical strategy colossus with new Aegean and Mesopotamian regions and maps, new factions such as Troy and Babylon, and a glittering, bellowing host of new or reworked units, new mechanics, and new quality-of-life updates. That release date is 25th July 2024. Come stamp your feet and brandish your shields vigorously at the overview trailer below. Read more View the full article

This is only the second time Heritage Auctions has offered a Nintendo PlayStation prototype controller. | Image: Heritage Auctions In 2020, a rare prototype of the never-released Nintendo PlayStation console sold for $360,000 at auction. Another unit may never be found, but a second prototype controller from the ******* Nintendo and Sony collaboration is going up for auction in August. The Nintendo PlayStation was Sony’s first attempt to break into the gaming market. It was more or less a Super Nintendo console upgraded with a CD-ROM drive, allowing games to incorporate more multimedia content from Sony’s proprietary Super Disc format. The collaboration collapsed after Nintendo announced a partnership with Philips in 1991, and the 200 prototypes of the Nintendo PlayStation were thought to have all been destroyed — at least until one surfaced in 2015 and was... Continue reading… View the full article

The ********* Investigation Special Response Team is a vast group with many unique characters you can recruit in Zenless Zone Zero. One of these members is Seth, an upcoming playable unit you may be seeking the release date for. There are many different ZZZ characters arriving in the future and the list always keeps growing. Because of this, you need to know when Seth will be released in ZZZ to ensure you have the pulls needed to recruit him if you’re hoping to have him on your team. View the full article

One of the most beloved characters from Honkai: Star Rail may be the first to get a skin, according to a new Version 2.4 *****. For now, the characters in HoYoverses turn-based RPG are stuck with their regular outfits and are unable to use custom clothes like in other titles from the developer, such as Genshin Impact or Honkai Impact 3rd. For a while now, there have been rumors about leaked character skins in Honkai: Star Rail, though HoYoverse has shown little indication if that may become true. Now, rumors have started circulating again and these leaks may be true. View the full article

Elden Ring sales saw a massive boost in the *** last month coinciding with the release of the game’s first and only planned expansion. The launch of Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC helped sales of the base game (which is required to play the expansion) jump 467% month-on-month. That’s according to GSD data published by [Hidden Content], which tracks all physical sales plus digital sales from most major publishers, excluding Nintendo and 505 Games. Read More... View the full article

The final playtest for the extraction fantasy PvPvE game Dungeonborne is underway, and anyone can join in to try the game out for themselves if they know where to look. In Dungeonborne, you create a character to brave the dungeons to search for loot while ******** NPCs and other players to make a name for yourself. It’s a bit like Dark and Darker, with more abilities and combat options. View the full article

The first act of Destiny 2‘s Echoes episode came to a close, and fans are hungry for what’s next. Bungie is giving players a taste of what’s coming with Act Two on a livestream scheduled for July 9. Act Two is bound to bring more rewards when it kicks off on July 16, including new and coveted weapons and more story developments in a world after the Witness. The livestream will touch on some of those points, providing some ideas of what to expect from the next act. View the full article

Rumors suggest Fortnite's next major collaboration will be with the highly anticipated new Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film Deadpool & Wolverine. This rumor stems from the fact that the two stars of the upcoming film, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, have been spotted visiting certain Fortnite content creators, potentially signaling a Deadpool & Wolverine crossover will hit the massively popular Battle Royale game this summer. View the full article

Semiconductor analyst Claus Assholm notes that if China invaded Taiwan, one of its goals could be to ******** TSMC's sophisticated chipmaking factories. Read Entire Article View the full article

The First Descendant has had a rocky two weeks since launch. After receiving a slew of negative reviews due to its aggressive monetization strategies, the game now also faces accusations of plagiarising Destiny 2‘s artwork and content. This relates to icons that have seemingly either been directly lifted from Destiny 2 or were implemented following light edits. While some of the icons in The First Descendant may appear merely similar, others leave little room for speculation as they appear to be one-to-one copies of those found in Destiny 2. However, the reason behind these supposed similarities might not be as sinister as some thought, and the root of the problem may lie in an icon database and its misuse of the Creative Commons license. View the full article

In advance of Concord's upcoming Early Access beta weekend, Firewalk Studios reveals the complete system requirements for PC players in order to reach various settings. After its reveal at Sony's May State of Play, Concord has had no shortage of criticism aimed at it from fans. The live service hero shooter revealed a big character-driven story trailer, giving many fans a Guardians of the Galaxy vibe, only for the following gameplay trailer to reveal a hero shooter. While not free-to-play like Valorant, Marvel Rivals, Overwatch 2, or the countless other games in this genre, Concord is attempting to add its own spin through adding weekly cinematic vignettes to push the game's narrative forward. View the full article

The first trailer for Gladiator 2 is finally here, after more than two decades since the original historical drama was released. You wouldn't think a film like Gladiator would ever receive a sequel, but if I've come to understand anything about this decade, it's that we're in the era of IP. You've got a pre-established brand with big names attached to it? Yeah, sure, you can have just a whole bunch of money! And here we are, 24 years after the original Gladiator, with a sequel, director Ridley Scott at the helm once more. The film has been a long time coming, having been announced in 2018, and today after all that time the first trailer for Gladiator 2 has been released, showing off Paul Mescal (Normal People) in all his buff, *******, sweaty glory. Gladiator 2 picks things up decades after the original film, with Mescal playing Lucius, a character that was actually in the original film - he's the son of Lucilla, and the nephew of Emperor Commodus, who was portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix back in the day (Lucius was played by Spencer Treat Clark at the time, with Mescal taking over the role). After spending some time in the northern ******** region of Numidia, Lucius finds himself back in Rome as a gladiator (like the name of the film!) where, as the trailer above will show you, he eventually faces off against the film industry's daddy, Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian). Read more View the full article

Pokemon Go Fest 2024: Global is the biggest event in the Go calendar, but it can be confusing as so much is happening. From July 13 to 14, trainers have a unique chance to catch various rare Pokémon, take part in equally engaging raids, and catch Legendary and Mythical Pokémon that aren’t available any other way. View the full article

One of the key members of the ********* Investigation Special Response Team is Qingyi, a strong Electric unit in Zenless Zone Zero. Qingyi is one of many upcoming characters you can recruit, which means you might want to know her release date to save for her arrival. If you’re hoping to add Qingyi to your roster, preparing for her arrival is key as it might take you many pulls to unlock her. Here’s when Qingyi will be released in ZZZ so you can be ready to recruit her. View the full article

Starfield players who have grown bored with the game's combat ought to check out this new mod which fundamentally changes battle to make those spontaneous fights more engaging. For a game all about discovery and mapping the unknown universe, there's still plenty of ********* to be found in Starfield and while most will agree it's Bethesda's best take on combat yet, it's still a little too simplistic for some. Fortunately, those who want something more grounded and realistic are in luck as the game's modding community has just the solution. View the full article

Diablo 4 Season 4 continues to chug along without any troubles, but that also means there isn’t always something exciting happening, or any major pitfall to complain about. But, Blizzard never stopped working on it, even as all eyes have now shifted to Season 5, following the recent PTR test for the upcoming season. The game’s next patch arrives tomorrow, and though it’s small, it does come with a number of welcome changes. Read more View the full article