Month: September 2024

I agree with Lauren Morten, who wrote that somehow the worst part of crafting games is the crafting. I’ve never interacted with a crafting bench and thought it was a worthwhile use of my time, and punching trees is boring. I noped right out of Valheim at the point where it expected me to care about making roof tiles that were the right shape to assemble over my drafty hovel.

And yet, looking over the recent explanation of the crafting rules in the 2024 Players Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons 5E, I think they might be good actually? Certainly an improvement over the previous downtime rules for making things in D&D, which required such a massive investment of time I could see the light in my players’ eyes die as I was explaining them.

Now anyone with a herbalism kit and the relevant proficiency will be able to craft, for instance, their own potions of healing. It’ll require “a full day’s work and 25 GP of raw magic goo” for each one, but that’s a much more interesting use of the tool proficiency than just being able to identify poison and find plants. (They can also make antitoxins, healer’s kits, and candles now.) 

As a sidebar, drinking those potio…

Joseph Staten, the head of creative on Halo Infinite and a former longtime writer at Bungie, is leaving Microsoft, the company confirmed to IGN. Staten left Bungie during the troubled development of Destiny and joined Microsoft in early 2014, helping Xbox Game Studios publish a variety of games. In 2020, after Halo Infinite’s infamous first showing and year-long delay, Staten joined 343 Industries to see the project to completion.

The initial positivity around Infinite’s release in 2021 quickly soured, leading to a rough first year for the game. Just as it seemed like Infinite was starting to find its footing, Microsoft announced it would be laying off 10,000 employees, including developers at 343. At the same time, Staten left 343 to return to Xbox publishing. That move has proven to be short-lived.

“We’re grateful for Joseph’s contributions to the Halo franchise and Xbox as a whole,” Microsoft said in a statement to IGN. “We wish him all the best in his new adventure.”

When Microsoft enacted its sweeping layoffs in March, one former 343 developer tweeted: “The layoffs at 343 shouldn’t have happened and Halo Infinite should be in a better state. The reas…

Never has a Bethesda game been released without at least a few bugs. We all know how it goes… we either cease to play Skyrim because our AI companions won’t stop running into traps, or we embrace the wonderful weirdness and turn it into streaming content. And it’s not just us players who feel the need to cut Bethesda games some slack for their shortcomings.

Likely in reference to all the talk around Starfield bugs, Bethesda’s Head of publishing Pete Hines recently spoke to Games Industry Biz, assuring them that “We embrace chaos” over at Bethesda HQ. If that means leaning into the little bugs that make the game a more freeing experience for players, then so be it. 

That’s how the company rolls, see.

“We could make a safer, less buggy, less risky game if we wanted to”, he continues. Sounds like a dream, Hines, so why didn’t you do just that? 

“What we try to lean into is player freedom. Yes, there’s going to be some little things here and there where your companion might stand a little too close to you sometimes, yet the freedom you get, and the things that happen becau…

Sons of the Forest players have found the line of code that dictates whether their favorite survival companions live or die.

Kelvin and Virginia, your two NPC allies in the game, can permanently die if you let them. And, trust me, you don’t want to. Kelvin may be accident prone, but he only wants to help. And Virginia is a great shot, even if she won’t listen to your direct commands.

In the event that one of them dies, or you are a heartless person that refused to help Kelvin after the opening helicopter crash, you can resurrect them with a fairly simple tweak.

Locate the folder where your Sons of the Forest save games are located. For most people, it will be in your App Data folder on your C: drive. The address should look like this: C:\User\[UserName]\AppData\LocalLow\Endnight\SonsOfTheForest\Saves. Alternatively, you can get close to it by hitting Windows key + R, type in “appdata,” and press OK. You’ll need to open and edit the GameStateSaveData.json file. I’d recommend saving a copy of the entire save folder as a backup just in case.

Then follow these steps:

1. Open the Saves folder in the game’s directory. 
2. Open…
   

Warner Bros. Discovery says sales of the superhero looter-shooter Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League did not meet the company’s expectations, a shortfall that’s put the company’s game division on track for a “tough” first quarter in its 2024 fiscal year.

“We are lapping the release of Hogwarts Legacy in February last year, which saw the largest portion of its very positive financial impact in the first quarter,” Warner Bros. Discover chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels said during the company’s earnings call (via Seeking Alpha). 

“This year, Suicide Squad, one of our key videogame releases in 2024, has fallen short of our expectations since its release earlier in the quarter, setting our games business up for a tough year-over-year comp in Q1.”

Warner hasn’t released sales figures for Suicide Squad, but the game hasn’t performed especially well on Steam. The overall user rating is actually “very positive,” but after hitting a peak concurrent player count of 13,459 immediately after launch, the numbers quickly tailed off: Currently just 704 people are playing the game, which is not a good place to be for a live-service co-op shooter. The peak conc…

Financial analysts are expecting Intel to post a monster $3 billion loss when the company announces its numbers for the first quarter of this year later this week.

If that turns out to be about right, it will be the biggest loss in the chipmaker’s history. Overall, Intel’s sales are expected to be down by around 20% for the whole year compared to 2022. Ouch.

However, industry observers think this is rock bottom for Intel. From here, the only way is up. Marketwatch quotes multiple analysts predicting that the first quarter of this year will mark the low point for Intel, with the company returning to growth thereafter.

That chimes with broader analysis for the PC as a whole, with various research outfits predicting recovery in the second half of this year for the PC as a whole and for individual component classes.

Part of the problem, as we’ve noted before, is that people bought PCs and other digital devices in really silly numbers during the pandemic. Quarterly PC shipments jumped from 60 to 70 million units before the pandemic to around 80 to 90 million every quarter for the better part of two years.

So, there’s bound to be a bit of a lull following…

In the morning of March 12, STALKER developer GSC Game World uploaded a statement to Twitter describing a security breach at the company. GSC lays the blame at a “community from a Russian social network,” and warns of potential leaks and spoilers for the upcoming STALKER 2. As reported by GameRant, this seems to be in response to a post from the account Вестник «Того Самого Сталкера» (auto translate: “Herald of ‘The Same STALKER'”) on the Russian social media platform VK.

GSC says that an employee “account for a collective work-with-images application was hacked,” and alludes to previous cyberattacks on the company relating to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, where GSC is based. “Our unwavering commitment to supporting our country remains unchanged⁠—we will continue to do everything possible to support Ukraine, and this won’t change in the future under any circumstances.”

The developer goes on to caution fans about STALKER 2 leaks, and requests that they avoid disseminating such material:…

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 thought it would sell more, so we are not increasing our investment on VR at the moment because it needs to take off.

“We have been very impressed by what Apple came with, and we think it’s fantastic hardware. But we continue to look at this VR business as something that we have to look at but not invest too much in until it grows enough.”

The Apple hardware Guillemot referenced is pr…

Watch On

Piranha Bytes, creators of the Gothic, Risen, and Elex series, was recently closed by parent company Embracer. That’s a shame, but there’s still one studio out there carrying the torch for ambitiously janky mid-budget European RPGs, and that’s Spiders.

The French studio responsible for games like Steelrising, The Technomancer, Bound By Flame, and Mars: War Logs is currently developing a sequel to its 2019 RPG Greedfall, which was set in an 18th century-esque colonial fantasy world and was basically a Eurojank version of a BioWare game. Greedfall 2: The Dying World has just announced it will be coming out in early access on September 24.

Greedfall 2 is actually a prequel, beginning three years before the original game. This time, rather than playing a diplomat who stands apart from the setting’s factions, you’ll be playing a native of Teer Fradee who is torn from their home and transplanted to the war-torn and plague-ravaged lands of Gacane.

One complaint about Greedfall was that its quest design involved a lot of backtracking and fetching across areas that looked and felt quite samey, so hopefully the sequel can improve on that. And hopefully early acc…

I spend a little time every week looking for the best deals on graphics cards to drop into our cheap graphics card deals page. One trend I’ve come to notice during my weekly deals sesh is how infrequently the RTX 4070 is on offer. That card is just too popular to budge in price, it seems. And yet, today, I’ve found a darn good deal on one. Even better, it’s a Super variant.

This is a strange day, as not only is this Galax GeForce RTX 4070 Super OC 2X on offer for $560—little more than the price of some standard, non-Super RTX 4070 cards—it’s on offer at Amazon, no less. Amazon is really not the place to find excellent GPU deals most of the time, but today, I’m impressed.

That’s a saving of, apparently, $140. There’s no way this card is $700 usually, though. Even though the discount appears more generous than it probably is, it’s still a damn good price for an RTX 4070 Super—a card that carries a $599 MSRP.

The RTX 4070 Super is more closely related to the RTX 4070 Ti than the standard 4070. It comes with 7,168 CUDA cores, 21% more than the standard model, and the TDP is only marginally higher at 220 W to 200 W. 

That’s pret…

Need some help with Wordle today? Some days those yellows just don’t want to settle in, or they don’t until it’s too late. That’s where our daily Wordle help comes in. Keep on scrolling and you’ll find all sorts of tips for today’s game, as well as a helpful clue written just for the October 5 (838) puzzle, and the answer in plain text if you need it.

Wow, that was a slippery Wordle. I thought I had the answer every time—every available letter carefully considered, every possibility covered—only to find myself slightly less wrong than I was before. There was no doubt today’s winning word would turn up in time, but it always seemed closer in the moment than it actually was.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, October 5

The word you’re looking for is the name of a loose group, stack, or collective of similar items. Bananas, papers, even people can all be described like this. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you’re new to the daily Word…

Keep your Wordle win streak going straight through the weekend—today’s Wordle answer is waiting for you on this very page. Like to clear the daily puzzle in your own time? Then take a minute to browse our helpful tips and guides, or use the clue for the February 4 (595) Wordle below to nudge you in the right direction without giving the game away.

I turned up yellow after yellow until… ah, not quite. Luckily I had one last guess available, and that was just enough to see me through to a satisfying victory.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, February 4

The answer today refers to any room or area lacking light. This can either be because a light source is present but has been switched off or because there was never any light at all. You’ll need to uncover two vowels today. 

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Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If there’s one thing better than playing Wordle, it’s playing Wordle well, which is why I’m going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the…

A clue for today’s Wordle is waiting just below, alongside a wide range of tips, guides, and our archive, all designed to help make the April 12 (662) and every other Wordle just that little bit easier, and if you just need to secure that win, you’ll find the answer only a quick click or scroll away.

I didn’t so much solve Wordle today as much as make a desperate guess using the only letters I had left to try, and even then, I wasn’t sure it would work. Luckily for me, it turned out fine in the end, but I’m hoping for a Wordle answer that’s a little less “exciting” in the near future.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Wednesday, April 12

Today’s word is the name of a white crystalline salt with a wide variety of uses, including washing powder, soap, and enamel glazes. This substance is also known as sodium borate, and one of today’s three consonants is a letter you’d normally avoid.  

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

No letters are used twice in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Playing Wordle well is like achieving a small victory eve…

World of Warcraft’s next three expansions are a bold gambit from Blizzard. They’ll be a story told in three parts, and—judging by the trailer for The War Within—they’ll focus on character development and emotional storytelling over big dudes in armour calling you a pitiful mortal while revealing the next step of their master plan. It’s also about to receive, arguably, its first actual in-game story cinematics, and Blizzard’s given us a preview in advance.

For context, this isn’t actually a cinematic from the expansion itself—but it is from the expansion’s pre-patch The Dark Heart, which’ll be arriving early next week. It’s going to set a precedent for the game’s storytelling going forward. Watching it, I couldn’t shake the thought from my mind: Holy crap, they’re actually talking like people. 

Full disclosure—I’ve been playing WoW on and off since vanilla, but I’ve never been a big lore buff. My understanding of its worldbuilding has remained surface-level, due in part to most of that stuff being relegated to novels, secondary media, and quest text. I have, however, always been fascinated by the way WoW has tried to tell