Two weeks ago, the Helldivers 2 community was blindsided by a patch that sneakily added Gunships and gigantic AT-AT walkers to Automaton planets. It was a hectic 24 hours as players scrambled to react to the new threats and finally liberate Malevelon Creek. Super Earth prevailed, and while Gunships became a mainstay of Automaton missions, the walkers mysteriously vanished.

This morning, Arrowhead did it again. What was shared as a routine bug-fixing patch was actually a back door reintroduction of Factory Striders, four-legged “dreadnoughts” equipped with a top-mounted cannon, rotating front lasers, and a mobile factory that continuously spawns Devastators. Standing nearly as tall as a Bile Titan, Striders are by far the largest, most resilient enemy we’ve seen yet.

We have …

A year after putting on an Olympic esports event that didn’t include any actual esports games, the International Olympic Committee has joined up with the National Olympic Committee of Saudi Arabia to do it for real in the first-ever Olympic Esports Games, set to be held in 2025.

The Olympic Esports deal between the IOC and Saudi Arabia is planned to run for 12 years, with events held “regularly” over the duration.

“We are very fortunate to be able to work with the Saudi NOC on the Olympic Esports Games, because it has great—if not unique—expertise in the field of esports with all its stakeholders,” IOC president Thomas Bach said in the announcement (via Insider Gaming). “The Olympic Esports Games will greatly benefit from this experience.

“By partnering w…

If everything goes to plan, a nuclear reactor at the famous Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania—the site of a major accident in the ’70s—will be restarted by power company Constellation Energy to fulfill an agreement with Microsoft for carbon-free energy to power its data centers.

The reactor coming back online is not the one that had a partial meltdown in 1979, which has remained dormant since the accident. That was TMI-Unit 2. The adjacent reactor, TMI-Unit 1, went back into operation in 1985 and continued to operate until 2019, when it was shut down due to “poor economics,” according to Constellation.

After refurbishing it and obtaining the necessary federal and state approvals, Constellation hopes to have TMI-Unit 1 operating by 2028, and says tha…

The 2024 Steam Summer Sale is over, and that clears the way for the next big seasonal event in Steam’s lineup: The Team Fortress 2 2024 summer update.

Just like last year’s TF2 summer update, this one is chock full o’ stuff made not by Valve, but by the community: 10 new community maps (Embargo, Odyssey, Megaton, Cachoeira, Overgrown, Hadal, Applejack, Atom Smash, Canaveral, and Burghausen), 23 new “community-contributed items” in the Summer 2024 Cosmetic Case, four new community-created taunts, and 38 new community-made Unusual effects: 18 for hats and 20 for taunts.

Valve contributed to the effort too, of course. Somebody had to collect all this stuff together, ensure it complies with all requisite rules and regulations, and that it doesn’t actually break the game in any…

I’m beginning to worry that Hello Games can’t stop working on No Man’s Sky at this point. It just put out No Man’s Sky’s 163rd update—which it’s calling Fractal—bringing a new starship, a new expedition, a robotic companion, and other bits and bobs to its space-based exploration and survival game.

The update has been timed to coincide with the release of Sony’s PS VR2, so the game is getting a “virtual reality overhaul” on all platforms. That means the UI has “been completely remade for virtual reality,” and a bunch of in-game interactions have gotten “special VR-only options” like lifting up your cockpit by hand, grabbing objects in the world, or straight-up punching aliens you come across.

The new ship is the Utopia Speeder, a blocky, X-Wing-looking th…

A major factor reducing the appeal of AMD’s latest Ryzen 7000 series desktop CPUs is motherboard pricing. But a cheaper AMD chipset is rumoured to be in the works that could solve that problem and finally deliver on AMD’s promise, when the Ryzen 7000 launched, of $125 motherboards.

Motherboards with AMD’s existing chipsets for the new AM5 socket, the B650 and X670, currently kick off around $160. The problem is, you can grab a compatible motherboard for Intel’s killer Core i5-13400F for about 90 bucks.

The solution, according to the rumours (via Videocardz), is the new AMD A620 chipset. The A620 has been mooted for some time, but the latest rumours are fleshing out the details.

Apart from the lower price, the big question is what features you’ll be losing by going with…

Modern laptops are remarkably capable PCs but even the smallest and lightest of them aren’t especially portable. It’s not like you can stick one in a pocket, for example. One start-up in China, though, reckons it has the perfect solution by eschewing the display altogether and fitting a hinge in the keyboard, so the whole PC really can be stuffed down the back of your pants.

The new manufacturer, Ling Long, launched its seemingly unnamed new product on Bilibili (via Tom’s Hardware) by doing what I’ve just mentioned above—taking the PC out of a back pocket and unfolding it to show a compact, if somewhat chunky, keyboard. There’s no display and only has a tiny trackpad, so it’s certainly not a proper laptop. It’s not a handheld gaming PC, either, as there are no integ…

Penny’s Big Breakaway, an upcoming 3D platformer from several developers behind 2017’s well-received Sonic Mania, is set to release in early 2024. We got another glimpse of the game in action, as well as several of its main characters, in a new trailer shown during the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted.

It looks like Penny’s Big Breakaway will be taking more than a few notes from classic mascot platformers, casting you in the colorful pantaloons of the titular character to rollick around colorful worlds for collectibles. But its main draw is Penny’s semi-sentient yo-yo, which can be used as a weapon, swing rope, vehicle, or makeshift helicopter.

You’ll mainly be using that yo-yo to evade a small army of penguins that’s been sent your way by big …

GSC Game World’s long-awaited Stalker 2 has a new release date, and yes, it’s another delay. Instead of arriving in the first quarter of 2024 as planned, the studio announced today that a “final release date” has been set for September 5.

GSC acknowledged that the latest delay is disappointing, but said the need to push it back became clear after a public reveal at Gamescom in 2023 and various subsequent events. Based on feedback, the studio said two “key points” became clear: “It absolutely felt and played like a Stalker game,” which is good, but “on the technical side of things, the game apparently needed more time in the oven.”

“Throughout the frankly challenging development process, time was of the team’s main essence,” GSC said. “Seeing the scope of polishing and unders…

In the wake of E3’s demise, Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest has emerged as its self-appointed heir. SGF livestreams in years past have brought big reveals like 2021’s Elden Ring gameplay, and we should expect more of that kind of thing this year, according to Keighley: That is, trailers and announcements related to games we already know about, rather than earth-shattering reveals of unannounced games.

Keighley recently hopped onto a Twitch Q&A session for some “expectation setting” for this year’s presentation. According to Keighley, while the 2-hour showcase will have plenty of trailers to show, it’ll mostly consist of “existing games that have new updates for fans”—new content for released games, or trailers for games that have already been announced.

…

A new documentary from German games sites Game Two and GameStar has shed some more light on the disastrous development of The Day Before, and boy howdy, it’s worse than you thought. Game Two says it spoke to 16 former Fntastic employees, one of its former “volunteers,” and seven staff from The Day Before’s publisher Mytona. The picture they paint is, well, staggering.

Speaking anonymously, Game Two’s sources allege that working at Fntastic—The Day Before’s now-defunct development studio—was pure, megalomaniacal chaos. As they tell it, the game’s development was constantly buffeted by the changing whims of the Gotovtsev brothers, the studio’s founders, and the scope and style of the game would change whenever one of them got their hands on whatever the big game of the m…

Few videogame marketing terms are more aggravatingly ambiguous than “early access.” Most painfully, it can refer to two very different scenarios: Sometimes it means putting an in-development game on sale before it’s done, and other times it means offering access to a finished game early, typically as a deluxe edition preorder bonus. Starfield offered several days of “early access” with its Premium Edition, for instance.

Steam, the platform responsible for popularizing the first meaning of early access, has had enough. It’s now designating the latter scenario, when a developer offers pre-launch access to a completed game, “Advanced Access.”

“Unlike Early Access, Advanced Access is not a unique model of development for a game, it’s simply an opportunity to play a game before i…

Yesterday’s tease was true: Netflix has dropped the first official trailer for The Witcher season 3, and even better, announced the release dates. And yes, it’s dates, because the new season is coming in two parts.

Season 3 volume 1 will debut on June 29, according to the trailer, while volume 2 will land a month later, on July 27. Netflix clarified that the first volume will include five episodes while the second will have the last three, which is kind of a weird split—why not four and four?—but as someone who blazed through the first two seasons at maximum speed, I appreciate being given a mandatory break in the middle.

The new season of The Witcher on Netflix will follow Geralt, Yennfer, and Ciri as they attempt to escape “monarchs, mages, and beasts …

Nvidia really cannot keep a secret, can it? Yes, in a surprise to absolutely no-one, CES brings us the new GeForce RTX 40-series Super cards. The Ada Lovelace architecture refresh has been rumoured for a long while now, and here it is, either offering a little more performance for either the same sticker price, or in one particular case a fairly significant decrease.

The green team is launching three new Super cards, two of which are completely replacing their non-Super forebears and the third pushing the price down of its older Ada sibling. The first to launch this month is arguably the most interesting from a pure silicon standpoint—the RTX 4070 Super is the card getting the biggest GPU upgrade, which Nvidia is estimating will deliver up to 20% higher performance.

Fr…

Square Enix’s AI Division released an updated version of adventure game The Portopia Serial Murder Case as “an educational demonstration of Natural Language Processing (NLP), an AI technology,” according to its announcement. The original 1983 game was a significant influence on visual novels and graphical adventures in Japan, as well as inspiring a generation of game designers. The 2023 version, which is available for free on Steam, doesn’t seem likely to have the same effect. In fact, it currently has a user rating that’s 92% negative.

The NEC PC-6001 version would respond to typed input in text adventure style, with the usual limitations. As Square Enix put it when announcing the release, those old parser input controls “did come with one common source of frustration: players kn…

“Look, Arisen, a ladder! We should climb it, Arisen! I think, Arisen, there may be something to discover atop yon ladder, after we climb it, mayhaps?”

At first, I liked my main pawn. At least, after I changed her vocation from the entirely useless archer to the far more valuable mage. But then she and my other pawns told me, about six or seventeen times, that there was a treasure chest over there, did I see it? And a statue over there, perhaps we could climb it? And so many ladders, as if they were somehow the most important thing in Dragon’s Dogma 2. 

Maybe they are. I’ve stopped investigating them out of a sense of bloody-mindedness because I’m so sick of my pawns talking about them. There is, however, a solution. Well, there are two solutions. The first is to stop pl…

A group of over a hundred dedicated fans has completed a project to add voice acting to the entirety of Hollow Knight, Team Cherry’s beloved (and still sequel-less) Metroidvania whose NPCs have, up to now, been generally pretty quiet.

Spotted by TheGamer, Hallownest Vocalized has been in the works for a while now—its reveal trailer went up in August 2021—but it finally crossed the finish line last weekend. With the aid of a frankly unwieldy number of voice actors from the Hollow Knight fan community, it replaces the various warbles and meeps that constitute the sum total of standard Hollow Knight’s voicework with actual, fully-voiced dialogue. You can get a taste of it in the launch trailer above.

It doesn’t stop at NPC dialogue, though. The mad lads actually wen…

Now you’re here, all the help you need to win Wednesday’s Wordle is only a short scroll away. There’s a fresh clue for the June 12 (1089) puzzle if you want to get your guesses off to a great start, as well as today’s answer if you’re really stuck. Whatever you need, we’ve got it.

Pleasepleaseplease… the tension that comes from being one letter away from today’s Wordle answer, twice in a row, is unbearable. I’m just glad I had enough spare guesses left to find that final green letter. Not a bad game, but I’m hoping tomorrow’s doesn’t sail quite so close to the bottom of the board. 

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, June 12

Today’s answer means to prevent or put someone off doing something. A warning sign…

William Murray Hawkins III, better-known as Trip Hawkins, has had a long and incredibly impactful career in games. Hawkins founded Electronic Arts in 1982, and led the company through its trailblazing first decade, establishing certain specialities like sports that the publishing giant was built on. Then Hawkins went on to launch the ill-fated 3DO, a powerful console kneecapped by a high price, before founding Digital Chocolate and spending the 2000s in casual games (like Mafia Wars).

Now, Trip’s back! Don’t get excited. In a move that has strong 69-year-old executive vibes, Hawkins has announced he’s joining a Web3 startup as co-founder and strategy chief. Games for a Living (GFAL) is based in Barcelona and all about that crypto, aiming to create experiences that can compete with…

Vampire Survivors has gotten its second round of DLC, Tides of the Foscari, and like the first, Legacy of the Moonspell, there’s a lot to love here: more characters, maps, items, and secrets for 2022’s best roguelike, all for just two bucks. While the starting map, Lake Foscari, didn’t immediately light my fire, the continuation of Vampire Survivor’s signature secrets and unlocks really won me over.

I missed Moonspell on the first go-around, so I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect when I broke my long absence from Vampire Survivors and loaded into Foscari. If I have one complaint about the whole package, it’s that this primary new map just needed some more visual flair. It’s got a great layout with more distinct landmarks (including a cheeky hedge maze) than many of the base game’…

XDefiant had previously announced that it will not be using skill-based matchmaking to group players in casual queues, and  is now out to convince players that it won’t allow any pay-to-win features to intrude on the upcoming FPS game. 

XDefiant releases tomorrow, and Ubisoft has a new blog post explaining the decision not to include any pay-to-win routes in the game: “Any gameplay impacting content that is purchasable is also unlockable through challenges to ensure fair play amongst our community.” XDefiant will have its version of battle passes, but clearly, these will be focused on cosmetics. The game offers the usual: character skins, weapon skins, MVP player animations, player cards, and emoji packs.

“Our goal is to provide amazing customization options that r…

Following disappointing sales of Assassin’s Creed Nexus, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot says the publisher isn’t going to increase its investment into VR game development until demand for it “grows enough.”

Assassin’s Creed Nexus looked “genuinely cool” in the estimation of news writer Joshua Wolens, “if you can keep yourself from throwing up,” which in the context of VR games I think is a mostly-complimentary statement. It also holds a high user rating on the Meta Store, and an overall rating of 78/100 on Metacritic. Those are solid numbers, but they apparently didn’t translate into significant sales.

“We’ve been a bit disappointed by what we were able to achieve on VR with Assassin’s Creed,” Guillemot said during an investors call. “It did okay and it continues to sell, but we…

It is now official: In a farewell message to employees, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has confirmed that he will be leaving the company.

Kotick’s future with Activision Blizzard came into question almost as soon as Microsoft announced its intention to acquire the company back in January 2022. The decision appeared to be all but made after that deal was finally closed, as Kotick said Xbox boss Phil Spencer had asked him to stay on as CEO “through the end of 2023,” which isn’t generally the sort of timeline you announce if you’re expecting to stick around. But today’s message makes it a done deal.

“As my last day leading this company inches closer, I marvel at how far the talented people at our company have come toward realizing the great potential of games,” Kotick wro…

Quickly blaze a path to a magnificent Wordle win with today’s answer—it’s only a quick click away, after all. Or, if you’d rather take your time, feel free to spend a while pondering our helpful clue for the January 14 (939) puzzle. Whatever helps you win your daily game: the way you want to win it, is fine by us.

I was able to quickly rule out a lot of letters early on today, which is another way of saying “I had two rows that were almost entirely grey and had a little panic about it”. This soon turned out to be a pretty helpful situation, with today’s Wordle answer revealing itself with just a few more careful guesses.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, January 14

The answer today is used when someone is performing (or …

Conservative politicians and commentators in the US are complaining that Xbox game consoles are now “woke” following an announcement earlier this month that Xbox Series X/S machines will be updated with an “Energy Saver” mode that reduces their power consumption when enabled.

This particular descent into partisan madness started on January 11, when Microsoft announced that the Xbox would be “the first gaming console to offer carbon aware game downloads and updates.” Simply put, it means that Xbox consoles will be capable of scheduling updates for times when the electrical grid is making use of lower-carbon sources of power. 

It’s a smart idea—Microsoft said the new setting cuts power usage by up to 20 times compared to the regular sleep mode—and it’s actuall…

The answer to today’s Wordle is only a quick click away if you need a hand—go on, we promise we won’t tell. Prefer something a little less direct? You’ve got it. Keep scrolling and you’ll soon find our general tips and tricks, as well as a helpful hint for the November 11 (875) game.

Well, that was confusing. I didn’t have all that much to work with until I was halfway down the board today, and what I did have didn’t exactly cause today’s Wordle answer to leap out at me. I ended up having to experiment with the letters I had left, rearranging them in my mind until I finally found a valid word that fit around the few greens I did have.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, November 11

The answer today is a sweet alcoholic dr…

Thermometers are peaking, birds are chirping, and the air outside is hot and thick. You know what that means, folks, a new season (of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) is here, and it’s bringing all sorts of changes (to the maps and gameplay of the hit Activision-published FPS) with it. Bad news, though: If you’ve got dreams of completing Modern Warfare 2’s season 4 battle pass, you’ve got about two fewer weeks than you had last season to do it. Chop chop.

MW2’s season 4 patch dropped yesterday, introducing, well, too much to go through bit-by-bit. I’ll link the full notes below, but the stuff that leaps out at me is the new maps, new operators, and the changes to the game’s extraction shooter DMZ mode. Oh, and the fact that this season will only last 48 days, a big drop from the 63…

We’re reaching the business end of Microsoft’s huge heave to get its proposed $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard approved, and earlier this week it took a big step forward when the EU Commission approved the deal. The EU regulator noted many of the same concerns about the nascent cloud gaming market as the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which has said it will block the deal, but was ultimately persuaded by the remedies Microsoft proposed.

Microsoft offered the following commitments, all with a 10-year duration:

• A free license to consumers in the EEA that would allow them to stream, via any cloud game streaming services of their choice, all current and future Activision Blizzard PC and console games for which they have a license…
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The answer to today’s Wordle is only a quick click away if you need a hand—go on, we promise we won’t tell. Prefer something a little less direct? You’ve got it. Keep scrolling and you’ll soon find our general tips and tricks, as well as a helpful hint for the November 11 (875) game.

Well, that was confusing. I didn’t have all that much to work with until I was halfway down the board today, and what I did have didn’t exactly cause today’s Wordle answer to leap out at me. I ended up having to experiment with the letters I had left, rearranging them in my mind until I finally found a valid word that fit around the few greens I did have.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, November 11

The answer today is a sweet alcoholic dr…

Sqword is a word game where you try to make as many words as you can in a five-by-five square grid, earning more points for longer words. It was made by Josh C. Simmons and his friends, and is freely available at sqword.com. However, it’s also been picked up by multiple browser game portals, who took it without permission and ran it behind their own ads for profit.

As reported by 404, Simmons found out Sqword was being monetized by sites that were simply embedding it with iFrame, and decided to do something about it. “The mature and responsible thing to do would have been to add a content security policy to the page”, he wrote. “I am not mature so instead what I decided to do was render the early 2000s internet shock image Goatse with a nice message superimposed over it in place o…

First reported by Ars Technica, ResetEra user delete12345 has made an interesting discovery about Steam libraries: we’re not allowed to bequeath them to our loved ones in the event of our untimely passing.

Delete12345 asked Steam Support about the hypothetical scenario, and got a clear, professional, but very disappointing response. “Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable,” the support rep explained. “Steam Support can’t provide someone else with access to the account or merge its access to another account.

“I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will.”

Now, I was going to suggest that you can just give your designated heir the Steam login and password without getting lawyers involved⁠—barri…

Alright, here’s something I barely clocked after 30 hours with Phantom Liberty and now can’t unsee: they gave Johnny Silverhand a got dang reverse facelift. Digital Keanu Reeves is just that much more craggy and aged now, looking less like a Keanu Reeves mannequin and more like the man himself.

I thought I detected something a little more wolfish in my brain boy companion as I made my way through Phantom Liberty, but the difference really pops in those rare scenes where Johnny takes off those big ole’ aviator glasses of his, especially in a side-by-side comparison like this one from SynthPotato on Twitter. 

Doesn’t pre-2.0 Johnny look a little… smooth? PC Gamer hardware editor Jorge Jimenez suggested the OG model looks like a really good RPG character cr…

Quickly blaze a path to a magnificent Wordle win with today’s answer—it’s only a quick click away, after all. Or, if you’d rather take your time, feel free to spend a while pondering our helpful clue for the January 14 (939) puzzle. Whatever helps you win your daily game: the way you want to win it, is fine by us.

I was able to quickly rule out a lot of letters early on today, which is another way of saying “I had two rows that were almost entirely grey and had a little panic about it”. This soon turned out to be a pretty helpful situation, with today’s Wordle answer revealing itself with just a few more careful guesses.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, January 14

The answer today is used when someone is performing (or …

Pokémon Card Game—not to be confused with the Pokémon Trading Card Game—isn’t a real game. It’s malware disguised as a Pokémon NFT game that’s designed to fool unsuspecting Pocket Monster fans into clicking on a compromising link. This malicious Fakémon installs remote control software on infected computers, which hackers can then use to access private user data and make your PC susceptible to more malicious attacks.

According to cybersecurity analysts at ASEC, via bleepingcomputer, hackers went as far as creating a pretty convincing fake website for their fake game and even a fake marketplace where you can claim and mint Pokémon Card NFTs. The fake site offers no real Pokémon NFTs, however, just headaches. 

Clicking…