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Humanity has become desperate, divided into factions. No one can be sure of who to trust. Regression has been marketed as progress as outdated modes of thinking return. People look to leaders for guidance but receive only empty platitudes. Resources are running scarce as greed runs rampant. This is the world of Prime Video’s Fallout, the new series from Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, based on Bethesda’s popular video game series which debuted in 1997. The show and the game take place in an alternate timeline in which nuclear power replaced fossil fuels, resulting in a retro-futuristic society, until said scarce resources lead to nuclear war. It’s a world that began as one similar to our own, caught in a cycle of war and corporate worship, but the trajectory of the world in Fallout is one we still have time to avoid in reality, at least as far as the series is concerned. While the series’ genre-bending narrative, infused with elements of science fiction, western, horror, and dark comedy, is something of a cautionary tale, the show itself is an invitation to peer through a bold new lens of video game adaptations. Welcome to the Wasteland.

If recent su…

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Star Wars Outlaws is almost here, and you know what that means: It’s nearly time to crouch-walk your way into saving the galaxy and—so says our own Morgan Park—actually have a pretty good time doing so.

But Star Wars Outlaws features a woman as its protagonist, which means it’s also time for the strangest corners of the internet to spin up some of the most baffling discourse they can. In this instance, a minority of very loud commentators have complained that devs have made Outlaws’ protagonist Kay Vess deliberately unattractive in order to further some kind of progressive political agenda. Somehow. Perhaps Ubisoft character designers are the engineers of the human soul.

It’s as bizarre a claim here as it was when certain segments of the internet were getting very heated about the appearance of Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West. More accurately, the appearance of Aloy in a screenshot taken at the most unflattering angle possible, which is then treated as representative of the character as a whole (which is also what’s being done to poor Kay Vess). Fortunately enough, Outlaws’ team has zero time for it. In a chat with The Washington Post, Star Wars Outlaws cr…

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In 2009, Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella were abruptly fired by the company’s owner Activision. West and Zampella had directed the original Call of Duty, and brought the series to superstardom through Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Their sacking just before the release of Modern Warfare 2 shocked the industry, and arguably changed the course of both Call of Duty and the FPS forever.

Now a developer who worked at Infinity Ward at the time has recalled the dramatic events of that day. Paul Sandler, who is currently Lead Designer at NetEase games, wrote am article on Linkedin detailing the day’s events. “Jason and Vince just got fired!” the article starts, in the words of a “lead artist” who broke the news to Sandler while riding a scooter around Infinity Ward’s office. “I just sat there in stunned silence with my eyes wide open,” Sandler recalls. “I stood up from my chair and sad: “What the fuck?…Why?”

Some of what Sandler recalls is familiar from articles written around the time. He writes that West and Zampella were fired for “insubordination” after a “series of executive-level meetings” and that following the firing Activision’s security guards …

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Red Hook has been hooked. The Darkest Dungeon dev has been acquired by Behaviour Interactive, the company behind Dead By Daylight.

Which would, in an ideal world, be good news: A mutually beneficial arrangement that gets Red Hook the support it needs to make new games and that gives Behaviour a stake in them. That’s certainly how the statements from each company’s execs are selling it, anyway. Behaviour CEO Remi Racine says it’s part of a plan to “make Behaviour synonymous with horror.” Red Hook co-founder Chris Bourassa says the deal will let the studio “[open] the door to new possibilities.”

All of which sounds good to me, but the problem is the context. Not only has Behaviour made a chunk of layoffs this year (which, to be fair, makes it far from unique—it’s been a terrible time in general to work in game dev), but this announcement comes a mere week after Behaviour closed down Midwinter Entertainment, the team behind ill-fated Dead By Daylight PvE spin-off Project T. Behaviour had acquired Midwinter back in 2022, but killed off the studio—and Project T—after an internal playtest of the game “yielded unsatisfactory overall results.”

So as…

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Dungeons & Dragons owner Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has put out a statement in response to the still-ongoing uproar over its handling of the Open Gaming Licence (OGL). A post by D&D executive producer Kyle Brink offers an apology for the way WotC has handled the controversy so far, and promises a more “open and transparent” approach to a new OGL that seeks to incorporate community feedback.

The furore was originally sparked by a draft version of a new OGL which seemed to make the licence significantly less open, requiring royalties to WotC from successful creators and handing the company more control over third-party works produced under the licence. It would also have stopped creators from using the current, more open licence, in direct contradiction to previous promises from WotC that licensees would be able to use older OGL versions if new ones weren’t to their liking. But it now looks like the company is backpedalling from all of that.

“We are sorry. We got it wrong,” reads Brink’s post, before continuing to say that WotC’s draft OGL failed to “[protect and cultivate] an inclusive play environment,” and that the company’s silence over the matter had “hur…

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Manor Lords isn’t open for Early Access yet (that’s scheduled for next week, April 26), but some lucky players have gotten a first look at the city-building and management game through early playtests, and some have already figured out one way to break the game. 

The primary aim of Manor Lords is to raise a town and progress it into a bustling city for you to manage and watch grow—but while navigating social situations and waging war are quite important, nothing tops the need for money. One gaming YouTuber, P4wnyhof, decided to take this rule one step further and create an infinite money economy that would completely break the game, with the help of 112 sheep and 52 lambs. 

Sheep can technically produce an infinite amount of wool, and with the help of three shepherds, P4wnyhof was able to obtain a staggering 772 wool and counting from one single sheep farm. With the help of a couple of weavers’ workshops, which can create yarn and eventually clothes that sell for eight coins, the sheep farm was able to bring in an endless supply of money.  

You’d have to spend your first couple of upgrade points on trade logistics and better deals, as this …

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Update (January 31): It was initially unclear whether Pokimane was leaving streaming entirely, or just Twitch. That’s now clear: Pokimane has announced that she’s participating in her first YouTube stream on February 1.

On why she’s leaving Twitch, Pokimane said in a podcast episode that her exclusivity contract expired, and that any new deal she could sign wouldn’t be as lucrative as the deals being offered a few years ago. More to the point, though, the streamer said that she’s lost interest in Twitch streaming, which she feels has “regressed” politically in the past two years, and doesn’t want to be tied to any one platform.

“Months ago, I had already personally decided I don’t want to re-sign with Twitch, and I don’t want to re-sign exclusively with any streaming platform,” Pokimane said. “It’s time for me to be free as a bird.”

She does say, as an aside, that she’ll “still be on [Twitch] sometimes, though.”

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Original story: Popular streamer Imane “Pokimane” Anys says she’s done streaming on Twitch, where she has 9.3 million followers, calling it “the end of an era.”

“Twitch has been my home for a decade,” wr…

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It’s wild to think that Dead Island 2 may only be a few months away. A sequel to the 2011 holiday in someone else’s misery was first announced in 2014 with Yager at the helm, then in 2016 it was announced that Sumo Digital had taken over, and now Dambuster Studios will be bringing it over the finish line, having started development from scratch four years ago.

In a recent quickfire interview with Game Informer (via the NME), Dambuster’s lead narrative designer Khan and creative director James Worrall answered 86 questions about Dead Island 2, covering its Los Angeles location, attention-grabbing trailer, and how the skill system will work, among other things.

The original Dead Island had skill trees for each character, with three branches covering Combat, Survival, and Fury abilities. Asked if the sequel would also have a skill tree, Khan replied, “There’s a skill deck, which is even better.”

Expanding on that, Worrall described the skill deck as, “A collection of slots that represent all kinds of different abilities and you swap the cards in and out on the fly, however you want, whenever you want.” Don’t expect something like Midnight Suns then, where you’re r…

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Ten years ago, Nvidia was a successful graphics card company, with a pretty impressive market capitalisation of $10 billion. Now, thanks to huge revenue and profits, all driven by the tech world’s desire to have everything and everyone infused with AI, Nvidia’s share prices have reached such a point that its market cap is now an astonishing three trillion dollars—higher than Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Only Microsoft has a larger market cap, though the margins between it, Nvidia, and Apple are all very narrow. Well, if one can call tens of billions of dollars ‘narrow.’ For those unfamiliar with the term market capitalisation, it’s a relative measure of how valuable a company is on stock markets, with the figure determined by a simple multiplication of the number of company shares by the current share price.

At the time of writing, Microsoft’s shares sell for around $420, whereas Apple’s are roughly half that figure. Nvidia, though, is deemed so valuable right now that buying just one of its shares will set you back over $1,200. That’s almost enough to buy its best graphics card, the GeForce RTX 4090, though you’ll still be short by $40…

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One of the mechanics coming to Magic: The Gathering in the western-themed Outlaws of Thunder Junction set is called Crime. It’s a way of rewarding outlaw behavior, with Crime specifically defined as using your spells or abilities to directly target an opponent, anything they control, or even their discards. When you do so, that’s called committing a Crime, and it’ll trigger effects from all your other criminal-themed cards in play. 

For instance: Magda, the Hoardmaster pays you a treasure token if you commit a crime that turn, and will eventually let you spend three accumulated treasures to summon a 4/4 scorpion dragon. The Freestrider Lookout lets you scout out the top five cards of your deck when you commit a Crime, while the Hardbristle Bandit untaps, so you can use them to block after an attack if you’ve done Crime that turn.

It’s all about rewarding aggressive play. You’ve got to act boldly in a western, goshdarnit. Cowboys are supposed to shoot first, and Outlaws of Thunder Junction rewards them for doing so.

To make it easier to commit Crimes—and easier to realize when you have so you remember to collect your rewards—Outlaws of …

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Sonic, please forgive me for all the times I’ve poo-pooed your games. Because holy hell, you sure do make for a cool-ass Lego set.

Yep, the blue blur has teamed up with Lego to create four new sets that are due to release this August. It’s not the first time the two have collaborated—the toy brick brand released a Green Hill Zone set back in 2021. We’re actually getting another Green Hill Zone set with this new batch of releases, but if you ask me this new rendition is significantly cooler. The “Loop Challenge” set comes with—as the name suggests—a loop, as well as other pieces to create a course. A hamster-wheeled Sonic can be strapped to a spring catapult and launched across the kit and straight into a meched-up Dr. Eggman. 

It’s easily my favourite—and I imagine it’ll be the favourite of many others—but cool contraptions come at a price. It’s the most expensive of the four coming in at $99.99 / £94.99. It does come with a fair few character figures, though: Sonic can be freed from his hamster ball chamber, Dr. Eggman can be pulled from his mech, and Amy is included, too. It comes with a few creatures too, like a flicky, poc…

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The latest trailer for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader emphasizes choice and consequence, highlighting its equivalent of alignment—the conviction system. “While exploring you will be met with a great number of hard decisions,” the trailer says. “Do you try to save the population of a dying world? Or burn it all with the intent of containing heresy?”

Owlcat’s CRPG tracks your response to dilemmas like this on three axes, with five ranks to measure how far you go along each. The Imperialis conviction measures your fire-and-brimstone dedication to the God-Emperor, while Hereticus goes up when you prioritize power over morality and give in to the temptations of Chaos. Benevolentia increases if you act like individual human lives actually mean something—a controversial belief in the Imperium of Man. Ranking up convictions can unlock dialogue options, events, and abilities, as well as affecting how NPCs relate to you.

The trailer goes on to introduce Inquisitor Xavier Calcazar, who seems to be consequence personified. “All these decisions will affect the whole subsector, attracting the uncomfortable attention of Inquisitor Calcazar,” the trailer’s gruff narrator…

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With more than a little braggadocio, Valve has announced that it’s permanently banned over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts for cheating. In a post to the official Dota 2 blog yesterday, the company revealed that it had constructed a cunning trap to catch thousands of players that were using “third-party software” to “access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn’t visible during normal gameplay,” lending them an unfair advantage in-game.

It worked like this: Once it became aware of the exploit, Valve released a patch that created “a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits”. Valve says that every single one of the accounts banned yesterday had read from that secret data, giving the company “extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved”.

Valve’s whole announcement has the air of a warlord mounting their enemies’ heads on spikes as a warning to the rest. The studio says that (and feel free to read this in Batman’s voice, if you prefer), “While the battle against cheaters and cheat developers often takes place in the shadows,” it wants “to make this example vis…

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It’s the tiniest of teases and opens up a whole trunk full of questions, but in a recent online interview, Mark Papermaster was asked what the year has in store for AMD. The CTO’s response was all focused on AI, naturally, but he also mentioned a curious little tidbit: its gaming devices are to get AI-based upscaling and 2024 is likely to be the year we’ll see it.

The discussion with YouTube channel No Priors (via Videocardz) is mostly about AMD’s position and thoughts on machine learning, cloud computing, and other big-money sectors. It’s a good chat between the hosts and Papermaster, although a little dry if you’re not interested in those specific topics.

However, the CTO’s closing remarks on AMD’s plans for 2024 are certainly of interest to gamers, all thanks to the brief comment on how the chip giant is bringing AI upscaling to its gaming devices.

“Well, this for us is a huge year because we have spent so many years developing our hardware and software capabilities for AI,” Papermaster begins. “We’ve just completed AI enabling our entire portfolio: Cloud, edge, PCs, embedded devices, our gaming devices. We’re enabling our gaming devices to upscale using AI …

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Back when it was first revealed, the hope was that Cyberpunk 2077 would revolutionize the genre, and maybe even gaming as a whole. That’s not quite what happened, in part because the launch had more bugs than Starship Troopers. Performance issues, cars running into stuff, getting softlocked in the tutorial, weird children. It was a mess.

Thankfully, the redemption arc for Cyberpunk is real. With multitudes of bug fixes, content updates, and the transformative patch 1.6 behind us, as well as the massive success of the Cyberpunk anime, it seems as though things are finally getting in order for the game. So it’s with a certain amount of tentative excitement I look toward CD Projekt’s only planned DLC, Phantom Liberty.

We haven’t heard much since a pretty sick trailer at the Game Awards last year, but the official Cyberpunk Twitter account revealed the “exciting news” today that we’ll learn more about Phantom Liberty in June.

Now an announcement of future announcements is kind of like your dad telling you he’ll tell you about something when you’re older—deeply unsatisfying, and only serves to make you more curious. It’s not exactly a big surprise that we won’…

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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 wrote. “You have transformed a hobbyist form of entertainment into the world’s most engaging medium. It has been the privilege of my lifetime to work alongside you as we broadened the appeal of games.

“Perhaps the most important part of my job has been to help bring talented people together, provide the best resources possible, and foster an environment that encourages inspiration, creati…

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Turn every game of Wordle into a winner with our help. We’ve got general tips to help you improve every guess you make, a clue written especially for the March 31 (650) puzzle, and the answer to today’s Wordle, only a quick click or scroll away.

That was tense. Every guess today seemed to throw up more problems than answers, my screen filling with grey boxes. The situation was looking grim: the few letters I had found just didn’t go together—until my next guess finally made sense of them. It was a close thing, but I finally, happily, stumbled into today’s Wordle answer.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Friday, March 31

This word describes all of the items or people in a particular group, or an event that occurs regularly: something that happens _____ Wednesday, for example. There’s just one vowel today. 

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

Yes, a vowel is used twice in today’s Wordle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you’ve got the basics, it’s m…

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Update 1/7/24: In the days following this story, Wizards of the Coast acknowledged that the Magic: The Gathering promo image was indeed made using AI tools. You can read our latest story on the controversy and its aftermath.

Original Story: In December, Wizards of the Coast committed to not using AI art in Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, saying it requires its artists, writers, and other creative contributors “to refrain from using AI generative tools” to create its products. Despite that, MtG fans are accusing the company of using AI to create the backdrop for a promotional image of new cards—something WotC flatly denies.

Wizards shared the image on Twitter on January 4, writing, “It’s positively shocking how good these lands look in retro frame.” And frankly, I think it does look pretty good: The Edison bulbs, the old-timey pressure gauge, the out-of-focus books and pipes and stuff on the walls in the background—there’s definitely a vibe going on, and I dig it.

An awful lot of other people feel differently, though. Almost as soon as the image was posted, people began questioning whether AI was used …

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