Month: September 2024

Earlier this month, Nightingale developer Inflexion said it wanted to bring “more structure” to the game so players will have a better idea of where they’re going, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it, and also to help reduce the feeling of repetition between the game’s different realms. In an update posted today on Steam, the dev team offered a deeper insight into what it has in mind, including the introduction of new “handcrafted realms,” a new campaign, and—everyone’s favorite—boss fights.

“The Storied Realms are handcrafted Realms set within the existing biomes, each designed with its own theme, aesthetic, and challenges,” Inflexion explained in a new Steam update. “Storied Realms will be introduced as part of a new campaign that will arrive with the next update (more on that below). As you progress through the main questline, you’ll unlock unique Realm Cards—each leading to a new Storied Realm to discover and explore.”

The addition of handcrafted realms doesn’t spell the end of the procedurally generated realms that have thus far provided the backdrop for Nightingale. Procgen realms “will still play an important part…

Reports indicate that Intel has been asking for about €10 billion in increased government support to build its massive fabrication plant in Magdeburg, Germany. However, it seems as if the chipmaker will have to settle with the €6.8 billion it’s already due to receive.

In an interview, Germany’s finance minister Christian Lindner told the Financial Times that he is against the increased funding. “There is no more money available in the budget,” says Lindner. The nation is “trying to consolidate the budget right now, not expand it.”

Last year, Intel announced that it was building a €17 billion cutting-edge chipmaking fab in Germany. Intel’s plant would be the biggest foreign investment in postwar Germany. The EU aims to double its semiconductor market share by 2030, reducing its dependence on foreign suppliers. 

Lindner, a member of the Free Democrats Party, says he’s “no great fan of subsidies”, and is against any increase in financial support for Intel’s facility. However, others in the German government don’t agree with the finance minister, which has caused some internal bickering between officials as they try to work out next …

Honestly, it’s one of the best jobs in the world. I know I’m probably biased, but the chance to spend your days testing the latest PC gaming hardware and then getting to write about it for a dedicated audience of millions of like-minded enthusiasts… well, it was always a dream of mine.

And if that sounds like a career you’d want to pursue, then we want to hear from you. We’re recruiting for a new member of the dedicated PC Gamer Hardware team as a remote role within the US. That’s right, you get to stay at home. Or the coffee shop. Or, y’know, anywhere you can setup a test rig and benchmark hardware all day long.

You’ll be able to work to deadlines, and will be tackling news, attend events, write reviews, features, opinion pieces, buying guides, and cover deals. So I’m looking for someone with a talent for writing and a passion for PC gaming hardware. 

Check out the full listing at Workable to apply.

Experience that will put you ahead of the curve…

• Excellent knowledge of the PC gaming hardware sector
• Ability to explain complex subjects with clarity
Continue Reading

Just shy of two months after he finally confirmed the reason for his long-ago lifetime ban from Twitch—exchanging “inappropriate” text messages with a minor, if you hadn’t already heard—Guy Beahm, better known to gamers as Dr Disrespect, is teasing a comeback.

“Vacation is just too good right now,” Beahm tweeted. “We’ll be back soon though Champs. We have lots to talk about. Yayaya yayaya yayaya.”

He does indeed have a lot to talk about. Things unravelled quickly for Beahm after a former Twitch employee shared allegations that his ban from the platform was the result of inappropriately messaging a minor via the Twitch Whispers messaging system and attempting to set up a meeting at TwitchCon. Deadrop developer Midnight Society, the studio Beahm co-founded in 2021, fired him almost immediately; numerous other partners, including YouTube, 2K Games, Turtle Beach, and the NFL, pulled the plug a few days later, after Beahm admitted the allegations were true.

But that admission is one thing he apparently doesn’t want to talk about. Beahm first teased a return to streaming at the end of July with a goofy “you’re playing checkers, I’m playing chess”-style im…

The sequel to The Forest, the game that put the Survival in Survival Horror will still release on February 23rd, 2023, but it won’t be the finished game, says developer Endnight Games. Sons of the Forest will instead release into Early Access—not because the developers prefer it that way, but to avoid another major release date delay.

“It’s been a long journey since we first started ‘Sons of The Forest’ development and it’s grown into the biggest most complex game we have ever made,” said Endnight Games in a statement. “There is still so much more we want to add; items, new mechanics, gameplay balance and more. We didn’t want to delay again so have instead decided to involve the community in the continued development of this project and keep our February 23rd release date but instead release in Early Access.”

After several years marked by major delays in games of all kinds, it’s a different tack than most other developers have taken. It won’t be Endnight’s first go at Early Access, as The Forest was one of the first big Early Access successes. 

Sons of the Forest will be what Endnight calls a Survival Horror simulator, a…

Starfield was primed to go galactic in the steady countdown to its launch. It was the first big mainline Bethesda RPG in a while. It was big and ambitious—one small step for Bethesda as a studio, one giant leap for gamer kind. 

Post launch, though, and that hype’s cooled significantly. What we got was more Bethesda standing in place, while gamer kind just… shuffled around in a circle, wondering how the studio still hadn’t put together a good inventory system, again.

That’s not to say Starfield’s a bad game, or anything. It’s one of the more stable Bethesda launches by far. I enjoyed my couple dozen hours with it, and our own Christopher Livingston gave it a 74 in his Starfield review—meaning it’s a game we actively like. 

Still, it’s been left to drift in space at The Game Awards—only scoring one nomination among its 31 categories—which feels like it should be more of an upset than it actually is. After all, this was meant to be a genre-defining RPG. ‘Skyrim but in space’ sounds like prime GOTY material. But it never broke the atmosphere.

What’s more, no-one even seems all that surprised—least of all the peop…

Remember that one-of-a-kind Magic: The Gathering card that was unveiled in March as part of the Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth crossover set? If you’ve got it, Dave and Adam’s Card World wants it, and they’re prepared to give you $1 million for it.

This particular Magic card is literally as unique as it gets. Only a single copy of the 1 of 1 Ring, as it’s known, will be printed; it will then be tucked away inside an English-language Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth collector booster pack, and fired off into the world. That means whoever finds the card will be the only person on the entire planet to own the card.

That extreme rarity gives it a certain inherent value, particularly to collectors—collectors such as, for instance, Dave and Adam’s, a collectibles company that deals in cards, comics, and “autographed memorabilia,” which is offering a $1 million bounty on the card. Simply put, if you find the card, Dave and Adam’s will give you a million bucks for it.

Of course, Dave and Adam’s deals in Magic cards, and all of this is a ploy to sell them. And holy cow, they are expensive: “Booster Boxes” of the Tales of Middle-earth set—12…

It might be easy to forget the rocky road that led AMD to its current steadfast and comfortable position in the server and gaming CPU markets. Well, if we needed a reminder, the senior director of OEM consumer and gaming client business for AMD, Renato Fragale, has us covered. First spotted by X user Bogorad222 (via Wccftech), Fragale’s LinkedIn profile states the team he managed oversaw product development for the PS4, which is viewed “as one of the most successful launches in AMD history helping AMD to avoid bankruptcy.”

A quick crash course on AMD history for those who have forgotten—or have perhaps blocked out—its tumultuous past. While some of the best gaming CPUs around today derive from AMD’s Zen architecture, and while AMD’s EPYC server CPU line-ups have been a massive success, between 2011-2017, there were the God-awful Bulldozer-based processors (Bulldozer, Piledriver, Steamroller, and Excavator line-ups). 

These years were certainly far from zen for the red team. Stock prices stuck to the floor as processor architectures missed the mark for various reasons, such as the bizarre decision to optimise for parallelism while somehow making Bulld…

Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory is a CRPG set in an Orwellian nightmare, a sci-fi society overrun by bureaucracy. At one point while playing it I tried to get a broken door fixed so I could get through, and after bouncing back and forth between various repair departments I eventually learned there was a final form I needed to fill out, and that form happened to be on the other side of the broken door. When Paranoia was mysteriously removed from sale weeks after its release with no explanation I tried to find out why, a quest that was just as frustrating as my attempt to get past that broken door.

And now it’s back, just as mysteriously. Paranoia is available on Epic again, where it was exclusively released in December of 2019, and on Steam, which it’s never been available on before. There’s no press release accompanying this, and no explanation on the official Facebook or Twitter account, neither of which has been updated for years. It’s just here, as suddenly as it was taken away.

Court documents eventually offered an explanation for why Paranoia vanished. Two of the creators of the original tabletop RPG the videogame was based on had issued a DMCA takedown, which …

Frogwares is finally ready to slap a release date on its remake of Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. After multiple delays caused by the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Kyiv-based studio has put out a new trailer and announced a release date of April 11, about five weeks from now. The game will (re)tell the tale of Holmes and Watson’s attempt to foil a nefarious Lovecraftian cult bent on, well, all the things nefarious Lovecraftian cults traditionally get up to. Human sacrifice, god summoning, portent uttering, things of that nature.

The original Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened was one of Frogwares’ first games as a studio, and the idea of revisiting it was brought about by circumstance as much as anything else. A full-on, years-long development cycle on a wholly new game is a difficult commitment to make in the tumult of a literal wartime situation, but renewing something old isn’t as big of an ask. Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened’s plot is already written and Frogwares can adopt gameplay mechanics from their last game—Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One—to make it feel like a refreshed, modern experience.

We’ve actually had a bit of time with this one ahead of its releas…

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League flopped badly when it launched earlier this year, and it hasn’t shown any signs of turning things around. At the moment, SteamDB indicates that 161 people are currently playing the game on Steam, and while that isn’t the whole picture—Suicide Squad is also available on Xbox and PlayStation—it’s sure not a sign of good things happening.

The persistently near-subterranean player counts has led to worries that WB Games might do a Redfall and pull the plug on planned future updates—although hopefully without pulling the plug on the entire development studio in the process. From a business perspective, it’s not an unreasonable suggestion: Why put however much money a full year of content takes to create (presumably a lot) for the benefit of a few hundred (or even a few thousand) diehards?

But that is apparently the plan: A WB Games representative has confirmed with Kotaku that “Suicide Squad will complete its currently announced roadmap.”

That roadmap includes three more post-launch seasons (the first season, featuring The Joker, is already live) with three new playable characters, three new environments, and …

Baldur’s Gate 3 tracks so many decisions and items that, last week, Larian had to remove a size cap on save files to keep completionists from breaking them. Even if you aren’t filling up save files by picking up every skull and tin plate you encounter, though, you might be filling up your C: drive by shamelessly save scumming like me.

I just checked, and I’ve got over 3GB worth of Baldur’s Gate 3 save files… I’m only in the second act.

If you maintain a relatively small primary Windows install partition and put most of your data on a secondary SSD, a few unexpected gigs is significant cargo. I haven’t found a way to tell Baldur’s Gate 3 to use a different save directory, but you can archive save files on another drive if you want to clear up space on your main drive without deleting them altogether. 

You can also share Baldur’s Gate 3 saves with other people if you want to give them a peek into your campaign, or let someone else take over the hosting of co-op sessions. I explain how to do that in more detail in my guide to sharing Baldur’s Gate 3 save files, but it’s not complicated. 

You’ll find your saves in:

• C:\Users…
  Continue Reading