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The latest official Helldivers 2 transmission on social media has been unusual, to say the least. And now Helldivers desperately want to know what’s going on. On April 10, the official Helldivers 2 X profile shared a post that was made only out of a binary code. When put into the binary translator, the text wrote: “WHERE IS KARL?” Because the post was in binary, many players immediately pointed their fingers at the Automatons, who recently made a comeback in the Galactic War, invading the galaxy with a massive fleet. View the full article

When Diablo 3 got its pre-Reaper of Souls expansion patch dubbed 'loot 2.0' in 2014, it was credited with turning Blizzard’s action role-playing game around. Critics and players called loot 2.0 a big improvement on Diablo 3, with changes that sparked renewed interest from a community that had dropped off following the base game’s 2012 release. Now, 10 years later, Blizzard is aiming to repeat the trick with Diablo 4 Season 4. For the first time, Blizzard launched a Public Test Realm (PTR) that let players get stuck into the sweeping changes to itemisation Season 4 will bring when it launches on May 14. ********* Diablo 4 fans who have stuck with the game despite its many ups and downs since last summer have positive things to say about Season 4, now the PTR has ended. You’ll see comments like, ‘Diablo 4 is good now’, ‘Season 4 is what Diablo 4 should have been at launch’, and ‘the Diablo 4 beta is over, Season 4 is 1.0.’ For Blizzard, though, the hope is Season 4 reinvigorates Diablo 4, brings back lapsed players, and maybe even attracts new players who might have found the game intimidating up to this point. All this comes after the launch of Diablo 4 on Game Pass — the first Blizzard game to do so following Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard last year. And it comes ahead of the hotly anticipated launch of Diablo 4’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, later in 2024. In short, these are busy times for Diablo 4 and for its development team. With all this in mind, IGN sat down with Diablo boss Rod Fergusson and art director John Mueller to find out more about Season 4, their thoughts on datamining and secrets, and how Game Pass has affected the player base. Diablo 4 is approaching its first year after launch. How would you assess how it’s gone so far? Rod Fergusson: It’s been going well. What I love about having a game that’s a live service is you’re able to iterate and learn. It’s not like one thing that just goes out and you’re living with that. I hope the players are seeing that with every season we’re working to make the game better, to make it more engaging, to offer more things to do. What we’re doing now with the PTR we did for Season 4 is a representation of that listening to our players. It was an opportunity to get feedback before the season came out, as opposed to hearing the feedback during the season and adjusting later. That just ended yesterday to a lot of really great positive sentiment. It’s a pretty fundamental change. Season 4 represents a complete rework about how our loot works, and what we call itemisation. The notion around how loot actually functions in the game has fundamentally changed, starting with Season 4 on May 14. Being able to get it out in front of the players, having so many people show up to try it, and then be able to give us that early feedback so we can now go back and iterate and polish going into Season 4, is exciting. But that’s been the cycle of what it is to be a live service. You have that opportunity to listen, watch, and respond. And that’s what we’ve been doing season over season. I assume your hope is that people who have dropped off Diablo 4 will be encouraged to come back to the game with Season 4 due to the positive feedback? Rod Fergusson: Yeah. We’ve even seen that in the PTR itself. There were some people who hadn’t participated in seasons who have participated in the PTR. So we know there’s something really exciting about the way we’re changing up that system. Part of the change is also to make it more approachable. When you got heavily into the itemisation or the loot of Diablo 4 it could be a little intimidating with all the different attributes and affixes. You speed up when running away from things that are chilled - there was a lot of conditional things that could get complicated. It was hard to know, is that thing that just fell on the ground, do I want to pick it up or not? That’s really what Season 4 is about addressing, making things much clearer, and that what you’re looking for on the ground, you know what you want right away, and then you go in and start crafting how you want to adjust it using the tempering system and the masterworking system. That idea you have ownership about how your loot progresses through the game really empowers the players. It’s the same thing with the codex. People would have this notion of, oh I found this pair of boots that have this attribute that I want to save for later. So I’m going to fill my stash, or I’m going to extract it and save that. Now it just all goes into your book. You just extract it and it goes into your book. The best one you extract is the one that’s in the book and you can apply it whenever you want. So this idea of, I’ve always got to fill my stash with two backups because I’m going to want one in Tier 3 and I need one in Tier 4, that kind of thing is not a part of Season 4 and the game moving forward. So there’s that kind of stuff where we’re freeing up your stash, simplifying how you think about your loot, and giving the player more ownership and accountability. Being able to go, I want a pair of gloves that does this, and I can go make it myself. John Mueller: When you get an item you like, it’s the start of the journey. Rod Fergusson: And you don’t have to look for three of them any more. The way you invest in your character, you can invest in your loot, which is nice. I’ve seen some people say that now the PTR is over, they’re going to struggle to go back to the live game, that they’re going to wait for Season 4 to come out before playing again. That’s a compliment, really. Rod Fergusson: It is for sure. In order to fully test things, we want things to get out of balance, and have things be overpowered to see where the limits are, to see where we’ve gone too far or not far enough. The hard work begins now for us, where we look at the results of the PTR and go, okay, how do we take what everybody’s finding really fun, but make it in a way that works in the game, that’s actually fun to be a part of? We saw all those clips of the ***** and Dust Devils, and they would fill the screen. For a crazy spectacle, it’s fun for a moment where you’re like, this is insane! But if you were in a party with that person or even as the player, and you can’t see the ground or the monsters because your screen’s entirely covered with ***** and Dust Devils, that’s not actually going to be that fun day in and day out. So you have to find the right balance between, I want that spectacle and that idea I’ve found a way to break the game, but at the same time, you have to be responsible to the other players in the game and to yourself. You don’t want to ruin it for yourself. Dust ****** Barb clearing the highest Tier 200 Pit with an insane amount of Twister in #DiabloIV. This Build is a ton of fun but it can be difficult to see your own character at times after min maxing it Do you think we need higher Tiers going forward? How do you like the new… [Hidden Content] — Rob2628 (@Rob_2628) April 3, 2024 I’ve seen some say that the changes are so significant that they’re viewing Season 4 as a 1.0 launch for Diablo 4. Is that a fair way of putting it? Do you see where they’re coming from? Rod Fergusson: I’ve seen that. I’ve seen other things some people have said, like this is Diablo 5 now, because it’s so fundamental. I think what they’re speaking to is the scope. It is a foundational change. Diablo is a game about getting loot. It is part of the core loop: ***** monster, get loot, become more powerful, ***** ******* monster, get better loot, become more powerful. It is an intrinsic part of our game loop. So that idea that we change one of those elements so fundamentally, I can see why it feels very different. And we wanted it to. We came out of the gates when we first launched wanting a certain level of depth and complexity to the system, and realized we overshot the mark. We saw that in Diablo 3 as well, ‘loot 2.0.’ What was funny is I actually went back and read an article on when Reaper of Souls came out, and they were saying, Reaper of Souls is now Diablo 4. Like, literally the same headline! ‘Diablo 4 is now Diablo 5,’ they were saying, ‘Diablo 3 is now Diablo 4 because of loot 2.0.’ "I’ve seen other things some people have said, like this is Diablo 5 now, because it’s so fundamental. I think what they’re speaking to is the scope. It is a foundational change. You have a goal you’re ********* for in terms of that depth and complexity and interest, and realize, oh, this is actually maybe too far, it’s too complicated, or it’s causing tensions around the amount of space in your stash. We get lots of like, ‘I need a loot filter!’ That’s a symptom, that’s not the problem. I could cure the symptom by giving you a loot filter. But we want to go after what the actual problem is, which is, loot is too complicated, and we want to make it cleaner for people to understand what’s good for them and what they can invest in and spend their time with. Right now, loot in early stages is disposable. You’re like, okay, this will carry me through World Tier 2, but I’m going to need a Sacred in World Tier 3, and I’m going to need an Ancestral in 4. So I’ll take it, wield it for 10 levels, and throw it away. Now, this notion of, I can start to build and invest in my loot the same way I build and invest in my character. So now it’s not disposable any more. In fact, you’re working to go, I can make it really custom by putting double movement affixes and I can move even faster than I could before because I can choose how to customize it. I guess it just took a bit of time for you to get to that point? The fact this is coming nearly a year after the game came out is a by-product of you reacting to feedback from previous seasons? Rod Fergusson: Yeah. To use the old saying, ‘it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.’ It’s that kind of feeling. We wanted to make sure what we delivered out of the gate was phenomenal. Having a 90-rated Metacritic campaign was what we wanted to be able to tell, like the best story we’ve ever told in a Diablo game, and having that return to darkness. My friend, the BAFTA-nominated art director for our artistic vision, for actually being able to deliver on those things! But having that notion of being a live service where you can see how people are playing, and seeing who’s showing up and how they want to show up, and what is interesting to them, that we can start to adapt as we go. I think you see that even with something as simple as Helltide. We did Helltide as an open-world event. As we started to lean into it with the vampire mode and it became the Blood Harvest, and people loved the density and they loved the ability to summon these huge waves of monsters. And then we leaned into it again with the arcane tremors we just did. And now you see in the PTR, with the worms coming up and spewing out stuff, and you build up threat. And even bringing Helltides to World Tier 1 and World Tier 2, so everybody can participate in that feature. That’s just Helltide becoming Helltide 1.0 and 2.0 and 3.0 and 4.0. That’s the joy of seasons. Seasons become this testbed where we know for roughly three-ish moments, we’ll try something and if it works… like Blood Harvest worked so well in Season 2 that we were just like, there are lots of things we could do with Helltide down this path. That’s what you’re seeing showing up now in Season 4, all that experimentation with Helltide. And it doesn’t come free. That’s the thing. It’s not like there’s some switch there where we’re just like, ‘no, more monsters!’ Click, and we’re done. Every time we improve the density of the monsters in the world to ******, to make it more action-packed, that’s a bunch of engineering and optimisation. John Mueller: There’s performance optimisation that has to go on for all the platforms we ship on. I saw a thread recently saying how stable the game is on multiple platforms, that no matter what you throw at it, it seems like it runs at a good frame-rate. That’s a by-product of all the engineers and tech artists. So when we do a change like that, there’s a whole engine that has to kick up to make sure it’s shippable and it’s fun for people. Rod Fergusson: Yeah, and that’s why it’s not like we’re just holding back density. Each time we increase the density there are a lot of people doing a lot of work to make sure the game can support that. When you look at our min spec for PC or you look at gen eight as a console that we support, we have to make those changes in a very structured way so we’re not destroying somebody trying to play on PS4 and not be able to play any more because, oh, we chose to turn up the density. So every time we do it there’s a whole team behind us making sure it still runs properly. To follow up on that, do you see a situation where you will have to make a difficult decision about bringing a new feature to Diablo 4 that isn’t viable on what is very old hardware at this point? Or are you committed to having a consistent experience across all platforms Diablo 4 launched on? Rod Fergusson: There’s always a time and a place for when maybe it’s time to no longer support a platform. I don’t think we’re at that time. But we have a long road for Diablo 4, and so we do talk about, ‘hey we have this idea for a feature, but maybe it’s not a feature our min spec or gen eight players can support, so it’s not something we can do today.’ But we keep pushing the boundaries on that. John Mueller: We’re pretty good at finding fallbacks. That’s how we think of it. We’ll figure out a way to do a fallback, like if there’s something really awesome we want to do. I don’t think we’ve been gated by it. We’ve generally leaned into it, and it’s been a creative challenge to figure out, okay, how do we accomplish that on gen eight? So the two things will look slightly different depending on the platform. We just got ray-tracing in, that was a huge feature we added. It scales up and down depending on whatever you’re playing it on. Rod Fergusson: It can be a good constraint. I’ve always found your min spec will make you do things that are better in the longer term, so that you can have that ability to turn stuff up. So, we’re looking at that. It’s part of the conversation, always. Like, we have this idea for a new feature, can we do it based on what we’re supporting today? Yes or no? And generally, as John was saying, we can. We find ways to do it. John Mueller: That’s why the PTR is so great. The Dust ****** thing is so insane from an overdraw standpoint, if we get into the technical part of it. But it’s also an exciting challenge to think, ‘okay, how can we do it in a way we can support it on all our platforms.’ Rod Fergusson: When Rob made that clip, he was saying, ‘I’m crashing the game.’ And the game doesn’t ******! And you’re like, ‘okay, that’s good.’ Of course, by releasing a PTR for Season 4 you’re letting dataminers do their thing ahead of release. What can you tell me about the Iron Wolves? Rod Fergusson: I can tell you nothing about Iron Wolves! I had a feeling you’d say that! Rod Fergusson: The hard part about it for me with PTRs is the idea we’re giving some of it away. As a game developer, we always want to surprise and delight, and one of the problems we run into is sometimes we have to give up the surprise in order to earn more of the delight. And so it's one of the things we've been not doing in PTRs, part of the reason is... Well, one is technically it's challenging, but two, the notion of, oh, they're going to know about the malignant, or oh, they're going to know about the vampires, or, oh, they're going to... And there's no, I showed up for the first day and I'm excited and surprised by whatever the season's going to be. And so we've always had this tug of war between surprise and getting feedback earlier. And so the notion of having the PTR go out and having dataminers find stuff or find old stuff or new stuff or whatever it may be, we have to live with that and go, you know what? The number of people who are going to read that Reddit thread is much smaller than the actual number of players who are going to show up for the season. So I'd rather get the feedback in some cases. But it's an ongoing conversation. The success of the PTR for Season 4 does point in the direction of something we'd want to continue to do. But no-one should take that as gospel that we're going to be doing PTRs for every season. Because there are times when we're still going to want to have the surprise be more meaningful than the feedback in that moment. And so every season we're going to have that conversation of, do we want to PTR this or not? And what we felt like, Season 4 being so fundamentally different and so foundational in its changes, like we're changing how the game literally plays, that we better get feedback early, and so that's why we had the PTR. People who played on the PTR did notice a change to the map. This isn't datamining, just a slight change, and of course, players discovered it: an abandoned camp by The Lost City of Ureh. Rod Fergusson: Oh! It's pointing towards maybe something happening there. Again, not datamining, this is just a change in the map that players have noticed. John Mueller: I'm sure it's a Lost City though! Rod Fergusson: It's so lost that we don't know what it is! Yeah, it's another thing that is going back to the surprise and delight. That's part of being in a testrun, is that we're taking a snapshot of where we were at a certain point in time. And so there's things that may or may not be there when Season 4 launches. It's hard to say… John Mueller: It's always fun to watch those things. It's like, what does that mean? Sometimes it's nothing, and sometimes there's something, and that's what's fun about people getting to... Just the excitement around the game. So you launched on Game Pass, which was a huge deal, obviously. How has that gone for you? How's it gone for the game? Rod Fergusson: It's gone really well. We're really excited to see lots of new players coming into the game and getting to experience Diablo 4 that hadn’t experienced it before. So yeah, we've been really happy with how that's gone. Our executive producer, Gavin, likes to say that every launch should be boring from an operational perspective. From an operational perspective, there should be no tension, no drama, no late nights, whatever. You want the game to be exciting, but you want the launch, the actual operational side of it or logistics to be boring. And that's what happened with Game Pass. Game Pass was this great coming together of Microsoft and Blizzard, and Battle.net and Game Pass to come together to make this all work for PC and console on Game Pass. And it went really, really smoothly. And so we've been really excited about how smoothly the rollout happened. And then watching all these players come in and watching how they are playing the game. And it's just been great to have that, see that audience show up. Sarah Bond recently said that after the Game Pass launch Xbox was the number one platform for Diablo 4 players, which surprised me because I associate Diablo with PC, and I assumed most people were on PC, even after the Game Pass launch. But with Sarah saying that Game Pass means more people are playing Diablo 4 on Xbox than any other platform, I thought that was really impressive. It must've meant that Game Pass launch really did have a significant impact. Rod Fergusson: The clarification there I think is we were talking from a daily active user perspective. In terms of total players across all the platforms, that's different than who shows up on that particular day. On those Game Pass launch days, Sarah's completely right, the Xbox group was the largest audience that were playing the game on that day. But you look at total players across all platforms, that Xbox isn't the number one across all of all time. But during that launch it definitely was. "On those Game Pass launch days, Sarah's completely right, the Xbox group was the largest audience that were playing the game on that day. PC Game Pass still requires Battle.net to play and there are no Xbox achievements. It's not a huge number of hoops to jump through, but do you plan to reduce the friction on PC Game Pass moving forward? Will it always require Battle.net? Do you feel the dream of a PC Game Pass player wanting to play Diablo and just pushing a button and they're in, do you think that's something that's feasible? How do you view it? Rod Fergusson: That's a tough one because it's a little bit about the future. And so the notion of always or never or the absolutes is hard to speak to. I know that we are really focused on trying to get people in quickly, and the quickest way to do that was to have this Battle.net step, which is what basically everybody else who wants to play the game has to have. To allow for cross progression and cross save we need a Battle.net account to tie it back to, to be the source of truth for all that. So that's why that was there. But I agree, I understand other services too when you go in and you have to create an account on the other one. But we were happy with how quickly people were able to go through that. And the thing is that if they fired up on console too, a bunch of those achievements will ding for you, that if you've gotten them on PC, but it hasn't shown up, just because there wasn't code in the PC code base that understood Xbox achievements at the time. And so that's one of the things we have. If you ***** up the game, some of those achievements will be granted to you from that. Obviously in an ideal world you want that to be the smoothest thing possible. Even when you played as a console player - forget about Game Pass - when you wanted to play on Xbox or on PlayStation, you had to go create a Battle.net account again to be the source of truth for the game. And so while we want to be able to do crossplay and cross-progression and having one source of truth for your character, you're going to need a Battle.net account. Wesley is the *** News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Diablo 4 launched summer 2023 across PC and console, including the last generation of PlayStation and Xbox consoles. That means it was built to run well on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, hardware now over a decade old. Although Blizzard has yet to release new features for Diablo 4 that leave the last generation of consoles, and indeed the current minimum specifications on PC, behind, Diablo boss Rod Fergusson told IGN in a recent interview that the time may well come for such a tough decision to be made. Right now, though, with the upcoming launch of Season 4 and, later this year, the game’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, Blizzard is maintaining parity. “There’s always a time and a place for when maybe it’s time to no longer support a platform,” Fergusson said. “I don’t think we’re at that time. But we have a long road for Diablo 4, and so we do talk about, ‘hey we have this idea for a feature, but maybe it’s not a feature our min spec or gen eight players can support, so it’s not something we can do today.’ But we keep pushing the boundaries on that.” Fergusson and Diablo art director John Mueller spoke to IGN about various features coming to Diablo 4 with Season 4 next month, including a significant increase in monster density to make the action role-playing game feel more action-packed. This density increase comes with associated performance demands, however, although Blizzard was able to make it work across all platforms while maintaining a solid frame-rate. Meanwhile, Blizzard just added ray tracing graphics technology to Diablo 4 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X. It is not available on Xbox Series S, Xbox One, or PS4. On console, in order not to compromise overall performance, this feature is locked at 30 frames per second. “We’re pretty good at finding fallbacks,” Mueller explained. “That’s how we think of it. We’ll figure out a way to do a fallback, like if there’s something really awesome we want to do. I don’t think we’ve been gated by it. We’ve generally leaned into it, and it’s been a creative challenge to figure out, okay, how do we accomplish that on gen eight? So the two things will look slightly different depending on the platform. We just got ray-tracing in, that was a huge feature we added. It scales up and down depending on whatever you’re playing it on.” By the time the Vessel of Hatred expansion launched later in 2024, the Xbox One and PS4 will be 11 years old. Plenty of developers have left these consoles behind to focus on the more powerful current generation, or Gen 9 as it’s called, but Blizzard isn’t ready to let go just yet. “We’re looking at that,” Fergusson said. “It’s part of the conversation, always. Like, we have this idea for a new feature, can we do it based on what we’re supporting today? Yes or no? And generally, as John was saying, we can. We find ways to do it.” For more on Diablo 4 Season 4, datamining and secrets, and the Game Pass launch, check out IGN’s interview in full. Wesley is the *** News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld. View the full article

Ubisoft is joining forces with Intel to promote both the upcoming Star Wars Outlaws and the latest line of Intel Core processors. Star Wars Outaws will take players into the seedy ********* underbelly of the Galaxy Far, Far Away in an open-world adventure from Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora developer Massive Entertainment. As aspiring smuggler Kay Vess, fans will be able to explore multiple Star Wars planets and complete tasks for infamous gangs like the Crimson Dawn and the Hutt family, all while avoiding the forces of the Galactic Empire at the height of its tyranny. View the full article

Blizzard announced back in November 2022 that the agreement with NetEase allowing it to publish games in mainland China since 2008 would expire on January 23, 2023, the result of the two parties failing to reach a deal to renew the license. Blizzard at the time said it could not... Read Entire Article View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

The Fallout TV series from Amazon Prime Video will be released on April 10. Usually, review embargoes are lifted a few days earlier before a show’s launch, but not in this case. Still, those who saw it so far are loving it. The review embargo for Jonathan Majors and Lisa Joy’s latest show lifted on April 10, a few hours before the series is available for everyone at 6pm PT. The reviewers enjoyed Fallout a lot, praising its ability to find silver lining between humor and apocalypse. Those who played the games said they immediately installed a few Fallout titles on their PCs and consoles after the show because they were eager for more post-apocalyptic fun. View the full article

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 might be seven years old, but it's still getting free content updates. There's that long-awaited versus mode, of course, though that's still in testing—in the meantime, says Fatshark, here's a free map and a new ****** type, because why not?.. Read more.View the full article

With Battlefield 2042 entering its final season, DICE released a roadmap of content and events players can expect to see over the next few months. It has been a bittersweet week for fans of EA's Battlefield 2042, as the developer DICE not only releasing a seventh season, but confirming that the game is quickly approaching its end. With how bad the game's launch was in 2021, most fans probably didn't expect it to last as long as it did, but Battlefield 2042 improved over time, fixing the various issues and continued adding new features and content to help the game reach new heights while fostering a ******* community. View the full article

After a rocky launch thanks to sentiment around monetization and an always-online requirement, Monster Train developer Shiny Shoe has finally launched Inkbound in 1.0 on Steam. The turn-based co-op roguelike has come a long way, with Shiny Shoe reversing many of its decisions and continually building out the game. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Co-op roguelike Inkbound gets an upgrade as it reveals new 1.0 roadmap Steam indie hit goes against industry trends, removes all monetization View the full article

I'm a ******* for all things dark and eerie. As someone who keeps making Lasombra vampires for her Vampire: The Masquerade sessions and always chooses the stealth route in any videogame she plays, Ereban: Shadow Legacy looks like the perfect game for me. With colorful Cyberpunk 2077-style visuals, *********'s Creed's flashy assassinations, and the sci-fi stealth focus of Metal Gear Solid, this new Steam platformer is one you won't want to miss. Read the rest of the story... View the full article

Read the rest of the story... View the full article

Intel's next gen CPUs are coming to gaming PCs soon, and we've just been given our first glimpse of the socket that will be used by the chips and their supporting motherboards. The new lineup of Intel Arrow Lake CPUs are set to use the Intel LGA1851 socket, with the previous LGA1700 socket being retired for the next generation of CPUs after three solid years of service. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: This new Intel CPU bundle includes Star Wars Outlaws for free Intel Arc Battlemage GPUs to launch before ****** Friday, says report Intel's Core i5-13600KF just hit its lowest price ever View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: MTG Online sells 2,000 of the best Commander cards for $39 How to play Magic: The Gathering Nerdy actor Joe Manganiello is now a (proxy) MTG card View the full article

Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Warhammer 40k Ork Boyz are finally back on the menu Warhammer 40k Codex release dates Warhammer 40k Dark Angels guide View the full article

The cover art for Massive Entertainment's Star Wars Outlaws confirmed players with a physical disk will still need an internet connection to play the game. Star Wars Outlaws recently unveiled a new story trailer, which featured a sneak peek into Ubisoft's upcoming open-world adventure in a galaxy far, far away. However, some fans were displeased when images of the game's PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X box art confirmed its installation isn't as simple as slotting in a disk. View the full article

In the spirit of the first astronauts, Starfield allows players to pioneer and explore space, including building small bases on multiple planets. Like Fallout 4 settlements, Constellation explorers can establish elaborate trade and resource networks between bases. While these outposts offer an engaging level of gameplay for detail-oriented players, the clunkiness of Starfield's construction system often deters players from actually enjoying the resource management aspect of the game. View the full article

The new chip, which succeeds the Gaudi 2, combines two 5nm TSMC ***** and features 64 5th-gen Tensor cores, 128GB of HBM2e memory at 3.7Gbps, and 3.7TB bandwidth per second. The numbers suggest substantial improvements over the Gaudi 2, which came with 24 Tensor cores, 96GB of HBM2e memory at... Read Entire Article View the full article

Where is Archie in Destiny 2? Archie, the mechanical pooch, unlocks a timegated quest when you find him. Though he's already in Destiny 2, his destination could change in the future. Archie can be on Neomuna as part of the quest "Where in Neomuna is Archie?" You'll need to find him to unlock the new secret triumph in Destiny 2. However, this triumph isn't currently available just yet, but should unlock with the Destiny 2 The Final Shape release date, or perhaps even during the new Into the Light free expansion. Finding Archie does award you with a hidden shader, Blue Steel, so it's worth finding him before the quest unlocks anyway. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: New Destiny 2 subclass blends Dark and Light into one OP combination Destiny 2 The Final Shape release date, story, and latest Bungie news Destiny 2 new season release date, seasonal activity, latest news View the full article

Some games just leap off the screen. It only takes a single image to recognize the original Half-Life, for example, or the blood-soaked, pixelated textures of ***** and Quake. A mix of survival and surrealism, one of 2024's most intriguing new FPS games is also one of the most eye-catching; its vivid, sickly neon greens arresting your eyes the second they meet the monitor. It's a little bit BioShock, a little bit Sons of the Forest, and there's maybe a little Stalker in there, too. Nevertheless, this one has a unique visual flair and a clever mechanical gimmick, and you'll be able to play it yourself real soon. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: The Witcher's next game is Sons of the Forest meets Bioshock The Forest meets BioShock in upcoming survival game Serum View the full article

What are the best Content Warning mods? Shortly after its release on April Fool's Day 2024, the hilarious and chaotic Content Warning took the world by storm as thousands descended into the terrifying Old World to seek out creepy creatures and internet fame. As with most memetic games these days, of course, modders set about upping the ante almost immediately. You might have already heard about mods increasing lobby capacity in the multiplayer game, but there are plenty of others to choose from as well. We have fully tested each of the mods in this list to ensure that they work, but more importantly that they are safe to download. We have omitted others from our list for this reason, so take care when downloading Content Warning mods - or any mods, for that matter. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Content Warning now has more weird freaky things to film Free giveaway gambit pays off for Steam's newest co-op horror darling All Content Warning monsters and how to beat them View the full article

What are the Multiversus system requirements? This Smash Bros-inspired brawler will soon be back from hiatus, so we're taking a look at its PC requirements to see what we can expect. Luckily, you won't need a super modern gaming PC or laptop to get good performance, but anything you can do to increase your fps will be key. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Is Multiversus Steam Deck compatible? Infamous free-to-play fighting game announces final launch date Current Multiversus free characters May 2023 View the full article

In the face of continuous Zen 5 leaks, AMD has kept the finer details of its plans for upcoming Ryzen processors close to its chest. However, the company has begun to let slip some details on its next chips, with the name of the new CPU series now getting a surprise confirmation. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Acer graphics cards finally got interesting, thanks to two new GPUs The price of AMD's Ryzen 5 7600X just plummeted by 40% New AMD Radeon ***** suggests RDNA 4 GPUs may be just what we need View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Developer Arrowhead Game Studios has announced its plans to overhaul the Helldivers 2 reward system in response to players' reports of delayed and missing medal payouts. The statement also confirms that efforts are underway to rectify the current issues with medals in Helldivers 2. View the full article

Drop Bear Bytes, the studio behind post-apocalyptic RPG Broken Roads, are named after Australia’s deadliest creature. The Drop Bear might look like a normal koala, but they’re actually dangerous predators, fond of jumping from trees to maul unsuspecting chumps who forget to take adequate precautions, like urinating on themselves. Really, the story is a wind-up the aussies like to blag tourists with. If it looks like a koala, it’s just a koala. But it’s this sort of character, inspired by love for Australia’s unique landscape, culture and good-natured mick-taking, that forms the heart of the best bits in Broken Roads. I say ‘best bits’, but I should probably say ‘the only bits that I actually enjoyed’, unfortunately. ****** wiped out 80% of Australia’s population, and left the remaining nail-hard Nancys and tough Tobiases to fend for themselves in a world short of resources, but shockingly plentiful in both guns and pre-made Vegemite sarnies. You’ll pick one of four character classes - I went with ‘Jackaroo’ (cattle hand), because it was called ‘Jackaroo’ - before tackling a short tutorial section. You'll then be thrust into some events, where you’ll meet the rest of your starting party and kick off the game proper. Read more View the full article

Last week I went to a screening of Amazon and Bethesda's Fallout TV show, a spin-off yarn starring Ella Purnell (who voiced Jinx in the Arcane Netflix adaptation) as a recently surfaced Vault Dweller, scouring the irradiated wastelands for [SPOILERS REDACTED]. It's early days, but the show's first two episodes didn't make a massive impression on me, though I will concede that the sight of Amazon's branding on Fallout's infamous Please Stand By emergency broadcast titlecard makes a dangerous amount of sense. Read more View the full article