Month: October 2024

HBO’s The Last of Us has finally unveiled its Abby and it’s Kaitlyn Dever, the actor known for her roles in Booksmart, No One Will Save You, and that other Naughty Dog game you may have heard of, Uncharted 4.

“Our casting process for season two has been identical to season one: we look for world-class actors who embody the souls of the characters in the source material,” series co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann told Variety. “Nothing matters more than talent, and we’re thrilled to have an acclaimed performer like Kaitlyn join Pedro, Bella and the rest of our family.”

Season two of The Last of Us is expected to follow the events of The Last of Us 2, which is set five years after The Last of Us and features Abby in a pivotal role—sorry, no spoilers. How cl…

When it comes to PC hardware decisions, it doesn’t get more subjective than monitor choices. For some, only the highest resolutions will suffice, while for others it’s all about color reproduction. But for a chosen few, a high refresh rate is key. If you find yourself belonging to this happy tribe, and happen to be looking for a larger screen on a tight budget, then this Acer Nitro monitor may be just the thing you need.

The Acer Nitro XZ323QU X3 packs a multitude of features into a rather svelte 32-inch frame, including a 1440p resolution 31.5-inch panel, a 240Hz refresh rate, FreeSync Premium, Anti-glare coating and a 1000R curve. Quite a good feature set, we think you’ll agree, especially as Newegg currently has it listed for $300, a whopping $150 off its MSRP.

Round the …

Hackers are threatening to publish stolen data from a recent breach of Western Digital’s systems in March unless the company pays a hefty ransom. But the hard drive maker is not playing ball. 

Earlier this month, Western Digital revealed a “network security incident” where an “unauthorized third party gained access to a number of the Company’s systems.” WD also admitted that the attackers “obtained certain data from its systems” but didn’t release any additional information about the stolen data. 

According to this Techcrunch report, the hackers claim to have stolen at least 10TB of the company’s data, including customer information. The hackers shared some of the stolen data with Techcrunch so that it could independently verify that it was legit. They said t…

Every week for the past few months the developers at Paradox Tinto have been posting developer diaries and in-progress map screenshots from the game that everyone knows is Europa Universalis 5, but which for now they’re just calling Project Caesar.

This week was a big one, as yesterday’s Tinto  Maps post was the grand heart of early modern Europe: The Holy Roman Empire. Historical strategy fans long knew that this would be an immense undertaking at the level of fidelity which EU5 intends… but I don’t think anyone truly saw this coming.

The shockingly detailed detailed map shows just how absurd a patchwork of principalities, prince-electors, prince-bishoprics, free cities, prelates, archbishop-electors, and imperial peasant republics the incredibly complex Holy Roman E…

Inkblot Obra-Dinn-like adventure game The Collage Atlas originally released as an iOS exclusive in 2020, but when its Apple Arcade contract expired last year, the striking pen and ink game became unplayable. To keep it alive, its creator released a Steam version last month.

The architect of this post-modern duotone walking simulator, John Evelyn, began by creating renders of each game world object in Unity and then painstakingly drawing out each texture by hand. 

In an interview with The Verge, Evelyn discussed how he fell in love with pen and ink art: “I liked all the incidental details and the accidents that come out along the way,” he said, even though “sometimes it goes horribly wrong!” The inkblot visuals impart a rich depth of texture, something tactile and person…

CD Projekt Red’s two biggest RPG hits, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, are both known for big main quests and engaging characters, but more than anything you’ll hear people consistently bring up the little adventures they have between other stories. In an interview with PC Gamer at GDC this past week, Cyberpunk 2077 lead quest designer Pawel Sasko said that’s mostly because they’re thinking of lots of ideas and only using the best ones.

“A good designer has an acceptance ratio of their ideas of between five to 10%,” said Sasko, “If someone has 10%, this is probably one of the best people we have in the team.” “

Sasko emphasized that for CD Projekt the key to weeding out the bad ideas was in the process of having quest designers pitch all of their ideas to the team so that …

The Final Fantasy 14 x Fall Guys event has been in the pipeline for a while now, and we’ve just been treated to a full list of details, as outlined on the game’s official website. 

I’ve felt deeply conflicted about this whole thing. While FF14’s no stranger to crossovers—heck, there was an entire raid series that was just Nier Automata—they still fit into the game’s lore if you kinda squint. Etheirys and its shards already have ancient Allagan test tubes, spaceships, dragons that are aliens, and a VR fight where you battle against a train.

But this is… this is just Fall Guys. There’s not been much of an attempt to make it Final Fantasy, save the occasional chocobo sign. The event rewards are also so garish I actually kinda love them—with the exc…

When Ghost of Tsushima launches on PC tomorrow, you won’t need a PlayStation Network account to play the game in singleplayer. But you will need one if you want to play Legends, the game’s online, crossplay-inclusive multiplayer mode. There is now a question as to whether you will need one permanently, however, as port developer Nixxes has revealed the mode will launch with a ‘beta’ label attached.

As reported by Eurogamer, when Nixxes shared the game’s system requirements last year, they simply stated that players “will be required to sign into [their] PlayStation Network account to access Legends mode.” However, an update to this post issued on May 14 states “At launch, cross play on Legends Mode will be in Beta”.

It adds that cross play between PS4, PS5, and PC “is suppor…

Hideo Kojima has relaunched the Hideo Kojima YouTube show ‘HideoTube’, a Hideo Kojima production starring Hideo Kojima. Okay I’ll stop with the obvious jokes, but this is a new episode (“The HideoTube 2024 special”, no less) in a series that stopped shortly after the creator’s acrimonious departure from Konami, and the first new entry in seven years. It’s an hourlong and wide-ranging chat between Kojima, host Risa Unai, and various talking heads involved with Kojima Productions’ work. 

I’m the biggest Kojima fan in the world, but I will admit the man is not shy about blowing his own horn. A whole bunch of the running time is Kojima and company re-watching the recent trailers for Death Stranding 2, OD and the Physint announcement and then talking about how…

Late last year, CD Projekt Red announced it would step back from development of its free-to-play collectible card game Gwent, with new cards continuing to be added in 2023, but the card pool be considered complete after that, and further balance changes left up to the players.

Update 11.10 is the final CD Projekt update, and as Molegion in the overview video explains, “This is the last handmade developer-prepared content update for Gwent, so after this we won’t be preparing changes to cards any more. Instead we will be using a system, you can see it in the main menu, it’s called balance council.”

The balance council allows players of at least Prestige 1, who have either won 25 ranked games in the current season or reached Rank 0, to vote on changes once per month. Each playe…

Stealth-horror immersive sim Gloomwood has development continuing apace, with the latest development preview bringing attention to extremely important—nay, vital—advances in rat-based gaming technology. A couple videos posted by developer Dillon Rogers over the past few weeks shows off some cheese-seeking AI behavior for Gloomwood’s rat NPCs, behavior that made its way into the January 30th update.

The critters will now sniff things out, eat them, and attack them. Also, rats can now navigate around through rat-only wall holes. You can also pick up dead rats if you are some kind of monster that has allowed a rat to die. What these changes herald, we do not know, but tinkering with little game systems for useful and unexpected outcomes is the heart of the immersive sim g…

A new narrative sci-fi adventure RPG called Sky of Tides will release later this year, having players explore a world called Numen where a looming war threatens to upend protagonist Rin’s life. It’s an atmospheric, isometric viewpoint world that seems to rely on both the tropes of classic isometric RPGs and the language of branching visual novels.

To me, though, Sky of Tides looks a bit like a visual novel got real high on Disco Elysium. Which is pretty welcome—I’m interested in seeing if the gameplay formula pioneered by Disco Elysium carries something interesting forward when divorced from its wildly original setting.

You’ll play as Rin D’Lorah, the daughter of a missing researcher who discovers a conspiracy. She’ll then go on an adventure to find her father and meet…

Just six months after laying off more than half its staff and pausing work on its current project, Armello and Solium Infernum developer League of Geeks has announced that the studio is going into “hibernation” for the foreseeable future, and may not return.

League of Geeks said in December 2023 that a confluence of factors including “rapidly rising operation costs, a weakening [Australian dollar], poor early access sales, and the unprecedented withdrawal of funding opportunities across the industry” had forced it to lay off more than 50% of its employees. The launch of the turn-based grand strategy game Solium Infernum, which came out in February 2024, was not impacted, but plans for a full release of League of Geeks’ next game, Jumplight Odyssey, were put on hold “indefinitely.”…

Ready Player One is a story about desperate people seeking escape from a collapsing society within the confines of a predatory digital world run by ultra-rich oligarchs who will do anything, including committing mass murder, in order to protect their positions of wealth and power. And now a company called Futureverse is teaming up with Warner Bros Discovery and author Ernest Cline to bring that particular Torment Nexus to life with the creation of the Readyverse, which aims to “to bring the promise of the open metaverse depicted in Cline’s Ready Player One novel and the blockbuster film adaptation into a tangible reality.”

“The future has arrived even more quickly than I imagined,” Cline said. “With Readyverse Studios, we have the opportunity to leverage the revolutionary te…

To celebrate its 25th birthday, Valve updated Half-Life and gave it away for free. At the same time, it released an hour-long documentary in which the original developers talked about making the influential FPS. In the documentary, Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell explained why game delays are OK, but also took some time to explain the theory of fun Valve came up with while developing the original Half-Life.

“We knew it was an ad hoc definition,” Newell said, “and it was the degrees to which the game recognizes and responded to the players’ choices and actions, right? In behavioral science, you would say we were explicitly talking about what were reinforcers and what the reinforcement schedules were. Right? At that point in time, that was a useful way of making design decisions.”Read more

While the outlines of Helldivers 2’s Galactic War are fairly clear, and the major orders give players a through-line to follow in the unfolding narrative, much of the game’s world-building is left to hints and lore snippets that players piece-together themselves. Some of this is quite serious and consequential stuff, such as whether the Automatons may be trying to communicate, or the Illuminate are behind Super Earth in the first place.

Other elements of the world… well, let’s just cut to the chase. Pretty much every hero of liberty has the hots for the unknown female pilot of Eagle-1, no doubt helped by the fact that she delivers 500KG payloads to any xeno-infested planetary surface on demand. This gets a little too in-depth at times, such as a line of text a…

One of the more unique and interesting deckbuilders to emerge in the last few years was Hellcard, a battler that put up to three characters against hordes of enemies coming from every direction—with nasty elites and bosses liberally sprinkled in for flavor. Developer Thing Trunk have now released the full game, with Hellcard exiting early access on February 1st.

Hellcard focuses on turn-based card combat of your party—up to three heroes in both singleplayer and co-op—against a horde of monsters. The two sides alternate between teams, with the heroes attempting to defeat enemies tactically based on their declared action for the next round.  Every playthrough is procedurally generated, in roguelite fashion. I’ve played several of these cooperative deckbuilders…

If it weren’t for fans, the little turbines of cool freshness that they are, the life of your gaming PC would be tragically short. Thankfully, if you walk around the Computex show floor, plenty of hardware manufacturers know what the clued-in, cool people want: to be blown away by fans. 

I’ve compiled a list of some of the best coolers and case fans the team spotted in Computex. 

The ones that stole the show were Lian Li’s UniFan TL LCD Series of premium case fans. RGB is old news: The new hotness is circular LCD displays that can play GIFs. The floor demo also had GIFs of Pac-Man ghosts ghosting around and even a short clip of a fighting game moving through each fan.

You can also display still images, so if you want your ugly mug on there, there’s no stoppin…

Helldivers 2 has proudly announced it’ll be asking the bravest question a game has ever asked—”yes, the flamethrower’s cool, but what if we added more flamethrowers?”

The upcoming premium Warbond, dubbed “Freedom’s Flame” features two new primary weapons, a new secondary weapon, a booster, two armour sets (with a new passive), a title, paint for your mech, hellpod and pelican, fresh capes and—most importantly—the ability to finally chest-bump your mates.

Here’s the full run down of the new kit when it comes to toasting bugs:

• The SG-451 Cookout, a pump-action shotty that fires “a burst of incendiary phosphorus pellets.”
• The FLAM-66 Torcher, a primary weapon that’s also a flamethrower—a type previously relegated to support we…
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Cyberpunk 2077’s biggest update ever is now live—and that’s saying something if you look back on some of the mega patches CD Projekt Red’s dropped for the game over the last two years. Instead of an endless list of bugfixes, the 2.0 patch is almost all deep, meaningful changes and additions to Cyberpunk’s core systems, including a long-awaited revamp of the police system, a do-over for skills and progression, and a wholly new approach to loot. 

We’ve known those changes were coming for ages, and we’ve been playing with them for the past week. Based on our time with 2.0, the police AI is a big improvement and cyberware is way cooler now. But today’s patch notes offer some new detail on exactly what’s been changed, including some smaller features that CD Projekt Red hasn’…

“It doesn’t get much worse for a multiplayer launch”, Fraser Brown wrote on the release of Helldivers 2, mentioning issues like “broken matchmaking, frequent crashes, and a kernel-level anti-cheat system that everyone hates.” The developers at Arrowhead have been working to rectify the issues, and according to an update from CEO Johan Pilestedt, three hotfixes deployed during a recent period of server maintenance have dealt with at least some of the problems.

But not all. As Pilestedt explains, “our services as well as our partner services have a rate limiter that denies connections beyond a volume per minute to prevent the entire system from failing.” As PlayStation’s biggest PC launch, Helldivers 2 hit that limit hard, which was responsible for multiple problems. That limit has …

While Google’s AI assistant Bard is currently available in 180 countries across the globe, the European Union and Canada still aren’t invited to the AI party. Almost two months after Google launched its friendly AI chatbot, Bard, the company is still withholding access to certain regions, but there’s no official statement on the matter.

The best guess is that Google may not see eye-to-eye with certain incoming regulations, not to mention that up against current GDPR rules, its processes may already be a little bit illegal.

The EU’s incoming AI Act is currently making its way through European Parliament in a bid to push current and would-be AI developers into making their products more transparent, and safer for the general public. Having spoken to some experts on th…

Persona 5 meets Street Fighter meets Genshin Impact. That’s one helluva mix—if miHoYo can get the balance right. More importantly, the game will need to run smoothly on our gaming PCs before all that. That shouldn’t be any issue, however, as the Zenless Zone Zero system requirements are going to be zero bother for most.

Set for full release on July 4, and available to preload today, Zenless Zone Zero should run perfectly fine on the majority of gaming PCs today.

The minimum system requirements are, quite frankly, absurdly low for a game in 2024. I’d guess that’s due to this game’s simultaneous mobile release—it’s set to launch on PC, PS5, iOS and Android. You’ll only need a 7th Gen or above Intel Core i5, 8 GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970. That’s a ten-ye…

Getty Images has begun legal proceedings against the creator of AI art tool Stable Diffusion. Filed this week in London’s High Court, Getty Images’ action claims that “Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright,” and used these images for its own commercial gain.

Getty Images and image library rights holders like it are set to be some of the most affected by AI image generation, and while some have embraced the technology, such as Shutterstock, others have largely rejected AI art. Getty Images falls into the latter category. Getty Images banned the upload and sale of AI images in September 2022, in a bid to keep itself safe from legal challenges.

Getty’s CEO, Craig Peters, had previously said that there are concerns for AI-created …

Blizzard’s reveal of Hearthstone’s Mercenaries mode in September 2021 was, as we put it not too delicately, “a masterclass in how not to announce a game.” Despite that inauspicious beginning, it actually turned out to have real potential: Hearthstone streamer and podcaster Ben “RidiculousHat” Goodman said that after a few days with it, “I feel the pull of the couch and just one more run.”

Unfortunately, it looks like his longer-term concerns about competition and economics were prophetic. Blizzard announced today that Mercenaries is getting one more big update in patch 25.4, after which there will be no further new content released.

The patch will add six new Mercenaries to the mode, described by Blizzard as “some of our most interesting Mercs yet,” which will push the total…

While others started with Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, or Tekken, my childhood fighting game obsession was 1993’s Eternal Champions. That series didn’t quite have the same longevity, as it turned out, but today I am vindicated: They’re making an Eternal Champions movie.

I’d forgive you if you’ve never heard of this particular Sega Megadrive (or Genesis) classic—to catch you up, it was basically a fighting game where characters from all throughout time came together to beat the stuffing out of each other. You could play a caveman against a 1920s mobster, or a bounty hunter from the future against a ninja from the ’90s. It was very much aping Mortal Kombat, outside of that twist—it had its own equivalent of fatalities, for example—but its weird roster and fun bac…

Blizzard is about to take a sledgehammer to the way Overwatch 2 is played. The change will take effect when season 9 launches later this month.

For the first time in the hero shooter’s history, every tank and DPS hero will heal themselves, loosening their reliance on support in a match. Through a new passive ability, tanks and DPS will gradually regain their health outside of active combat. It will be a “tuned-down version of the support self-healing passive,” game director Aaron Keller wrote in a blog post today. In addition to this, more changes to reduce “damage spikes in combat” will be detailed in another blog post closer to the season’s launch.

If I had to describe the current state of Overwatch 2’s balance in one word it would be turbulent. The most recent se…

Helldivers 2 just had its first balance update. While mechs are still en-route, this payload is certainly nothing to sniff at—especially since it’s still adding one major feature to the game: True to the game’s Starship Troopers inspiration, meteors are now a major concern for the hardworking patriots of Super Earth. I’m sure nothing bad will happen to Buenos Aires, though.

“Many planets now have additional environmental challenges that will appear at random while you are deployed, from fire tornadoes to meteor showers and many more,” the patch notes state. Helldivers 2 actually already had fire tornadoes in the planet of Hellmire—but as far as I can tell they were just background dressing. Until now, that is.

Eradicate missions—which were previously used a…

In June, poncle announced that the reverse bullet hell Vampire Survivors will finally be getting a couch co-op mode in August. Today we got a closer look at how it will work, along with the surprise announcement of new Steam-specific features that are actually live today.

Co-op play in Vampire Survivors is quite straightforward overall: It’s the same as the singleplayer mode, but with more people. Naturally, some concessions have to be made to accommodate the crowd, and they were spelled out today on the Xbox News Wire. Each player in co-op mode must choose a different character—”Having 4 Poes, O’Soles or Sigmas on screen would simply make the universe implode,” poncle senior marketing manager Geo Morgan explained—and while weapons can be chosen at will, the numb…

Kerbal Space Program is a game where you assemble cool things out of neat parts and then eventually break them on accident. The Lego hobby is about literally the same thing. Understandably, there’s more than a bit of crossover.

A new proposal on Lego’s Ideas fan design site has achieved the 10,000 supporter goal needed to be considered by Lego, and creator Sam67c has assembled an absolutely lovely collection of bricks and parts to make just about any early game craft that players of Kerbal Space Program would be familiar with. There’s even a trailer showing the set off.

Just look at that. The perfectly stacked piles of rocket parts are immediately familiar from my time playing Kerbal. The rocket cockpit modules in both one- and two-kerbal sizes to the batteries, probe comput…

It’s been no secret that shipments of gaming PCs and GPUs have been on a downward slide these past few years. On the other hand, high refresh rate gaming monitors have bucked that trend and sold like hot cakes on a frosty morning. However, market analysts International Data Corporation (IDC) are forecasting some significant changes once this year is over, with the growth in performance GPU shipments outstripping mainstream chips and gaming PCs.

The report from IDC paints a somewhat underwhelming picture for 2024, with shipments of normal gaming monitors falling roughly 4% compared to last year and total gaming PC shipments only increasing by a few percent. Premium gaming monitors (i.e. those with fresh rates greater than 165 Hz) are expected to improve by more than 20%, so …

Hades 2 released into early access earlier this month—and it’s been doing gangbusters, unsurprisingly. Supergiant has a sterling reputation behind it, with so much industry heft to every step it takes that other indie devs have already leapt out of the way of the game’s early access, considered a quasi-‘shadow drop’. 

I’ve apparently already sunk close to 30 hours into this thing (I just checked the stats now, and I’m left wondering when exactly that happened). I’ve beat Chronos up enough to wonder how many lessons I have to teach an old man, and I’m pretty content with what I’ve seen so far. Supergiant, however, seems to feel it can improve the game’s baseline mechanics before it really gets cooking on new content.

“Our first patch should be coming later this mon…

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

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

Turns out, that’s down to the Disgu…

Hitman 3 was good enough to be our pick for the best stealth game of 2021, but the variety of different purchase options was also, as we noted in our newcomer’s guide, incredibly confusing. On January 26, that will change, as IO Interactive wraps the whole thing up into one big package called Hitman: World of Assassination.

Right now the Hitman 3 page on Steam offers the following:

• Hitman 3 Standard Edition 
• Hitman 3 Deluxe Edition – Includes Hitman 3 base game and Hitman 3 Deluxe Pack.
• Hitman Trilogy – Includes Hitman 3 base game, plus Access Pass DLC for Hitman 1 and Hitman 2.
• Hitman Trilogy Premium Add-Ons Bundle – Includes Hitman 3 Access Pass: Hitman 2 Expansion, Hitman…
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There’s something intriguing about islands floating way up in the clouds, especially if you can connect them with massive chains, pull them together, and build a city on top of them. That’s the idea in Myriads: Renaissance, a turn-based strategy game that’s got everything from city building to 4X to tower defense systems. There’s a free demo you can try now, and the full game is planning a Steam release on June 1.

I had a little go of the demo, which lets you play for 60 turns. Things went great for… well, about 50 of those turns. I began by building on the small collection of sky islands that comprised my airborne kingdom: a market to serve as my city center, a farm to generate food, a sawmill in the forest for wood, and a mine on a mountainous island to produce gol…