Something has smelled a little off about this year’s Call of Duty since the earliest rumors of its development. For the first time in series history, CoD is going back to the sequel well after just one year with a new Modern Warfare 3. In another break in tradition, all multiplayer guns, cosmetics, and progression from Modern Warfare 2 (2022) will carry over into MW3.
You could look at the unconventional, Call of Duty smorgasbord-like makeup of Modern Warfare 3 and determine this is simply Activision tinkering with the CoD formula. Viewed under the lens of a 2022 Bloomberg report claiming a new Call of Duty game wouldn’t be done in time for 2023, the new Modern Warfare 3 takes on a new light. At the time, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier said the plan was to release more MW2 content to …
Read moreLast month, the MultiVersus rumour mill span itself into a frenzy over some stickers plastered in Belgian McDonalds, which appeared early—like some kind of hallucination you experience when you’re severely dehydrated, only the water in this case is a platform fighter most people had a good time with that randomly shut down for months.
As I mentioned back then, the fan community has been… coping. Back in December, I pointed out that there was a Josh Hutcherson fancam to ‘blow my whistle’ headlining the game’s subreddit with over 500 upvotes. Normal!
Well, turns out that the promotion is, in fact, real (thanks, TheGamer). If you go over to the McDonalds Belgium website, there’s an honest-to-god promotion conspicuously missing a “find out more” button. Clicki…
Read moreNvidia socialled up an image on its official GeForce X account earlier in the week that got tongues wagging. A large monolith-style graphics card obscuring the sun and tagged ‘Eclipse2024’? That’s clearly a portentous teaser for the RTX 5090 coming later this year, right?
No wait, it’s an RTX 4090 Ti, isn’t it? Or should that be an RTX 4090 Super? I mean, it’s definitely something that’s just about to launch and is so incredibly exciting it will literally eclipse the sun. And yet, almost certainly, it’s none of the above.
For starters, it’s a still image from a teaser video posted back in January and in the lead up to the roll out of the then new RTX 40 Super series cards, including the RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super.
So, it’s almost certainly not…
Read moreFree-to-play survival game Once Human launched on Steam today, and after playing the NetEase production for an hour, my main observation is that the feeling of uncertainty and discovery that the survival genre used to be all about has lately been replaced with tutorial screens and boring exposition—the price of popularity, I guess! It’s possible that Once Human opens up after you get past the copper ingot crafting lessons, and I’ve seen some cool monster designs so far, so that’s a positive. Some of them were even of my own making.
Character creators are such a wild card: Story-driven RPGs that are all about the characters sometimes give you a few dull presets and unattractive hairstyles, but then a game like Once Human comes along and lets you customize “mid lower-lip thick…
Read moreHot on the heels of reports that Nvidia could be working on a 16GB variant of the imminent RTX 4060 Ti comes news that the RTX 4070 could be getting a reworking, too.
This time, however, it’s not the VRAM allocation but the RTX 4070’s GPU die itself that’s rumoured to be the target of the changes. Long-time GPU soothsayer kopite7kimi (via Videocardz) says that Nvidia could release a new RTX 4070 variant based on the AD103 die.
That GPU, of course, is the chip you’ll find in the much more powerful RTX 4080 board. The RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti currently use the smaller, cheaper AD104 GPU.
Currently, the RTX 4070 runs 5,888 CUDA cores. However, the AD103 chip has fully 10,240 cores. That means Nvidia could disable nearly half the cores, allowing for chips with multiple man…
Read moreMay 4 is Star Wars day: It’s May the fourth, you see, a groan-inducing play on the famous Star Wars invocation, “May the Force be with you.” That date doesn’t actually get here until next week—one week from today, in fact—but that’s not stopping Steam and GOG from kicking off the Star Wars sales action right now.
The May the 4th 2023 Sale on Steam has an array of Star Wars games marked down, some of them quite deeply. Star Wars: Squadrons is down to $6/£5/€6 (85% off), Battlefront 2 is $10/£9/€10 (75% off), and Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens is $5/£6/€5 (75%), or a little bit more if you want the deluxe edition, which includes the season pass. The KOTOR games, Dark Forces, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, and The Force Unleashed are all marked…
Read moreFSR 3 Frame Generation isn’t officially recommended for use on Nvidia GeForce GTX 10-series graphics cards but it turns out not does it work, it runs exactly as intended.
When AMD first announced FSR 3 back in November 2022, during the RDNA 3 architecture launch, there was plenty of gossip as to what it would all entail. Most people assumed it would be an entirely shader-based frame generation and, of course, that’s exactly what it turned out to be.
FSR 3 Frame Generation is currently only available in two games (Immortals of Aveum and Forespoken) but it works well in both of them. There are caveats to using it, though, such as it works best when the game is already running at 60 fps or faster.
The technology will increase the latency between frames updated by…
Read moreYou know, there comes a time when you wonder if the Old School RuneScape community isn’t just making fun of you. Like maybe they have a wheel of fortune somewhere they spin that spits out a collection of nouns, adjectives, and spurious reasons: “Player pickpockets half a million NPCs to get nothing much of value,” or “Player spends 149 hours obtaining a raccoon,” or even “Player catches a million terrible fish for reasons of inner peace.” Then they all agree to act like these acts of lunacy actually happened to intimidate newcomers who might ruin their favourite game.
Anyway, meet Limpwurt. Limpwurt just emerged from a 2,500-hour gardening scheme with a maxed construction skill and an abducted baby mole, having waged a near-ceaseless, Groundhog Day-style war against its parent whi…
Read more- Monitor: Asus TUF | 27-inch | 1080p |
$199.99$139.99 - Monitor: Acer Nitro | 27-inch | 1440p |
$249.99$169.99 - Keyboard: Roccat Magma |
$49.99$29.99 - Mouse: Logitech G203 |
$39.99$19.99 - Headset: Razer BlackShark V2 X | Wired |
$59.99$39.99 - Logitech G435 LIGHTSPEED | Wireless |
$79.99$47.49
So you’ve just grabbed yourself a great Cyber Monday deal, saving hundreds of dollars on your first ever budget gaming PC. Now you just need to finish off the whole setup …
Read moreCall of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s hyper-intense hardcore mode is set to stage a return in the game’s upcoming season 2 update, scheduled for February 15. In a tweet posted yesterday, Infinity Ward confirmed the return of the much-missed mode in a sparse tweet, announcing “No HUD? No problem. Hardcore is back!” before encouraging players to keep an eye on the studio’s blog for more season 2 details in the future.
Hardcore mode is exactly what it sounds like: A variant of Modern Warfare’s multiplayer that cuts out all that namby-pamby nonsense like ‘a HUD’ and makes bullets act like bullets—killing your enemies and friends stone-dead with only a shot or two. It’s certainly not for everyone, but it’s irreplaceable for players who like to live an inch from death at all times. It’…
Read moreApple has announced a new tool to translate games coded for Windows onto MacOS. It sounds a lot like Proton, Valve’s compatibility layer for the Steam Deck, or more generally Wine for Linux, and it’s already been used to run Diablo 4 and Cyberpunk 2077 on Apple’s in-house silicon.
Sure, Cyberpunk ran at 14fps, which isn’t particularly playable. But Diablo 4 worked great, and it’s all good progress.
A way to port games over to MacOS without actually porting games over to MacOS could be a big development for the macOS gaming scene, or what there is of one. Outside of mobile games and Apple Arcade, gaming has not been much of a focus for Apple. If anything, Apple’s recent shift to specialised ARM hardware of its own design in its machines has made gaming even more of a…
Read moreDiablo 4’s pre-Season 1 patch is live now, and it makes some big balance changes (sorry, Sorcerers) ahead of Thursday’s addition of the first seasonal realm and its new post-campaign questline and Malignant Hearts system.
Along with those nerfs and buffs and a big list of bug fixes, the patch adds some treats for players in any realm: Six new Uniques and seven new Legendary Aspects. We’ll updating our guides to getting every Diablo 4 Unique item and the best Legendary Aspects soon, but for now, I’ve pasted the raw list of new items and Aspects below. (Find the full patch notes here.)
The first of the Unique items, the Ahavarion Spear of Lycander, is another one of the ultra rare “Uber Uniques” players have been chasing.
“We wish you luck in recovering it from the…
Read moreClippy was the worst. The little Office assistant would obnoxiously appear at the side of your screen while you were writing a Word document and have the gall to ask to help you out. Get a life, mate. Thankfully, Microsoft murdered Clippy in cold blood early on in the new Millennium.
Since then we’ve had Clippy unleashed on the desktop, known as Cortana, Microsoft’s attempt at a smarter assistant, and I loathed that nearly as much. At least you could mostly disable it. And even though that brand has largely been swept under the rug now, it’s seemingly being replaced by a new assistant, and this one is powered by AI.
Microsoft has announced a new thing called Windows Copilot, an AI assistant that lives on the desktop and will answer questions about Windows features and…
Read moreMusic’s at the heart of Final Fantasy 14—the game brims with bangers, sure, but it’s also an irreplaceable part of the game’s story.
I’ve teared up to the hopeful swells of Dynamis while playing Endwalker, been pumped up by the guitar riffs of Shadowbringers during its roaring climax. Countless leitmotifs course through the game’s soundscape like blood runs through a body’s veins. Don’t just take my word for it, though. Here’s over 200 musicians—organised by youtuber Husky by the Geek—playing the game’s greatest hits for 10 solid minutes.
This medley is a journey through each expansion, kicking off with the ripping Primal themes from A Realm Reborn before swooping into Heavensward, its mighty chanting replaced with electric guitar. “Brute Justice”&mda…
Read moreLayers of Fears was announced in 2022 as “a psychological horror chronicle built upon the foundations of the original Layers of Fear.” The title was kind of a play on words: The ‘new’ game is actually an updated and expanded compilation of Layers of Fear, the Inheritance DLC, Layers of Fear 2, and a new Final Note DLC—four Layers of Fear, thus Layers of Fears.
That was my assumption, anyway, but it doesn’t matter now because Bloober Team announced over the weekend that it has changed the name back to Layers of Fear, and that it will be out in June.
Why the name change? We described the Layers of Fears title not long after it was revealed as “ridiculous and good but not very search friendly,” and it seems that we were onto something—it was maybe just a bit t…
Read moreYou may have heard of various projects to back up the Earth’s best bits should anything catastrophic happen. The Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, for example, keeps a ‘backup’ of over a million seeds to prevent any from being eradicated. Just down the road lies another all-important backup: every active GitHub repository up to 2020, buried deep down in the permafrost.
Inspired by the Global Seed Vault, the Arctic World Archive (AWA) is a collection of containers stuffed with data in a decommissioned coal mine—between 250 and 300 metres down. Each container is stuffed with reels upon reels of data—like reels of film in an old theatre in appearance.
GitHub has 188 hardened film reels down the mine in what it calls the Arctic Code Vault. This contains every active rep…
Read moreThe plague of layoffs that’s gripped the videogame industry since the start of 2023 continued today as Ubisoft confirmed that 33 employees at its Toronto studio have been let go.
“Ubisoft Toronto has decided to conduct a targeted realignment to ensure it can deliver on its ambitious roadmap,” a company representative said in a statement provided to PC Gamer. “Unfortunately, this will impact the roles of 33 team members who will be leaving Ubisoft. We are committed to providing comprehensive support to them, including severance and career assistance, to help through this transition.”
The pursuit of “growth” or future ambitions is an unfortunate oxymoron that’s also become a common justification for putting people out of work. Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive de…
Read moreModern Warfare 2 now canonically features an indestructible dog named Merlin who lives on your belt-
Activision have truly let the dogs out with the reveal of their new operator, Arthur, who arrives to Warzone 2 and Modern Warfare 2 with the release of Season 5. He’s a gritty “warrior to the core” with no face, whose mysterious past is classified intel. I don’t care about Arthur, though, I care about the canonically indestructible dog he wears like a fanny pack on his belt.
Merlin, Arthur’s personal K9 unit, is a part of a new animal companion system coming to both Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2, as outlined in a news post on the official Call of Duty website.
“Operators will have the option to bring companions alongside them in Multiplayer, Battle Royale, and DMZ modes. This provides the unparalleled benefit of companionship along with a devastating Finishing Move.” …
Read moreWatch On
File this under “things we already knew but which are nice to have confirmed.” In a recent video for Fall Damage, Doug Cockle, the voice of Geralt in all of CD Projekt Red’s games, explained our favorite gruff monster-slaying dad guy will be back for the next game in the series.
“Witcher 4 has been announced,” he said. “I can’t say anything about it. What we know is that Geralt will be part of the game, we just don’t know how much, and the game won’t focus on Geralt. So it’s not about him this time. We don’t know who it’s about. I’m excited to find out. I want to know! I have not seen any script yet—I mean, I couldn’t tell you if I did. This is the thing, so I could be lying through my teeth. But I’m not. Or am I?”
Back in 2013 when CD Projekt Red was talking …
Read moreA few days ago we reported on news that Nvidia and MediaTek are set to release a new Arm-based chip for laptop PCs designed to cash in on the AI boom and compete with everything from traditional Intel and AMD APUs right through to the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. Well, now there’s a rumour that Nvidia and MediaTek are also cooking up a chip specifically designed for handheld gaming PCs.
Potentially, this is epic news. There’s absolutely no doubting the Arm instruction set makes for more efficient chips. Some recent leaked data from Dell indicates that its new laptops with the Arm-based Qualcomm X Plus chip will offer nearly double the battery life of their traditional x86 equivalents.
Without a doubt, one of the weakest aspects of current gaming handhelds is poor battery…
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I’ve been carefully tempering my expectations of Avowed—an upcoming RPG made by Obsidian, the creators of Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and The Outer Worlds.
I’m a fan of all of those games, though The Outer Worlds felt like it fell a smidge short of the studio’s usual CRPG pedigree—failing to get its hooks in me with its worldbuilding, characters, or RPG mechanics in the same way that Pillars did. I remember Aloth and Durance pretty vividly, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing about The Outer Worlds’ cast and crew from memory.
From what we’ve seen about Avowed, I was worried it might stumble into the same forgettable pitfalls. However, after seeing what Obsidian’s been working on during a 25-minute deep-dive that took place after the Xbox …
Read moreNvidia socialled up an image on its official GeForce X account earlier in the week that got tongues wagging. A large monolith-style graphics card obscuring the sun and tagged ‘Eclipse2024’? That’s clearly a portentous teaser for the RTX 5090 coming later this year, right?
No wait, it’s an RTX 4090 Ti, isn’t it? Or should that be an RTX 4090 Super? I mean, it’s definitely something that’s just about to launch and is so incredibly exciting it will literally eclipse the sun. And yet, almost certainly, it’s none of the above.
For starters, it’s a still image from a teaser video posted back in January and in the lead up to the roll out of the then new RTX 40 Super series cards, including the RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super.
So, it’s almost certainly not…
Read moreIf you’re looking to get comfy on a Prime Day gaming chair deal, we can certainly recommend the Corsair TC100 Relaxed, which is now on sale at Newegg for $239. This isn’t the best deal we’ve ever seen for this chair, but it’s our favorite budget gaming chair and we think it’s well worth its non-discounted MSRP anyway, so the discount is just a nice bonus.
- We’re curating the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.
Sure, a new gaming mouse or graphics card might make more of an immediate impact on your gaming experience, but spend all your gaming sessions on an awful gaming chair and you’ll quickly long for the comfort of a solid chair like this one.
And make no mistake, comfort is what you get with t…
Read moreI’ll be honest, Best Buy has kinda broken my heart. Just a few days ago it had the mother of all 14-inch gaming laptop deals, with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 OLED—our absolute favorite compact gaming laptop—on sale for just $1,100. Sadly, by Monday the Zephyrus G14 was back up to $1,600. That’s still not bad for such a gorgeous gaming laptop, one with a full unibody aluminum chassis, great performance, and striking looks. But it’s not great.
What is pretty great, however, is the number of other 14-inch Prime Day gaming laptop deals there are. The compact gaming laptop is the ultimate portable notebook that will still deliver high-end frame rates, and without any truly tangible downsides.
- We’re curating the best…
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Update: Having reached out to Zahid Khawaja, he gave a demonstration of ChatGPT Pro in action. He says, “I obviously subscribed as soon as I saw the button, because I was waiting for it for a while … later I found out they got rid of the options. It’s not even there anymore. So I guess whoever managed to subscribe within that one or two hour window, they just have access to it right now.”
Khawaja showed me the interface that clearly notes his account type as a Pro user, and explains “if it’s available for your account, you should just see it right there on the bottom left, it’ll have an upgrade button or something like that.”
It looks like we could soon be getting a paid version of ChatGPT that, according to apparent early adopters, is hella speedier than the …
Read moreThe question of when Baldur’s Gate 3 would release on Xbox, if ever, was uncertain until this week, not because of messy console exclusivity politics, but because of console gaming’s gradual transformation into a wonky kind of PC gaming.
The problem was that Microsoft requires Xbox games run on the Xbox Series S, a cheaper version of its flagship Xbox Series X with less-powerful hardware and no optical drive, and Larian was struggling to get Baldur’s Gate 3 split-screen co-op working to its standards on the console. The studio previously said that although it was working on a Baldur’s Gate 3 Xbox version, it wasn’t “confident enough” that it could solve the technical problem to announce it.
Today, however, Larian boss Swen Vincke announced that, after speaking to Xbox …
Read moreA Pokémon that has been absent from the Pokémon TCG for over two decades is finally returning, after illusionist Uri Geller (who claimed the Pokémon was based on his likeness) seemingly got a new perspective on life. Geller first sued Nintendo in 2000 after seeing an image of the Kadabra cards in Japan, which has the name “Yungerer” or “Yungeller”(a clear reference says Geller to his own name), demanding $60 million in damages. While the suit was dismissed in 2003 in America, Geller continued to pursue it in other regions.
Nintendo remained tight-lipped about the matter, though fans noted that Kadabra began to be used more sparingly outside of the games and, in the case of the cards, eventually not at all. The Pokémon was removed from the trading card g…
Read moreThe developers of Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu entered a surprise settlement with Nintendo on Monday, agreeing to pay the game company $2.4 million in damages and cease development and distribution of the emulator. Now, as a result of that settlement, Citra—a 3DS emulator that shared developers with Yuzu—has also been taken offline.
The Citra Twitter account posted a message that was originally shared in the Yuzu Discord, addressed to “Yuz-ers and Citra fans,” stating that “Yuzu and Yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.”
The Github repository holding Citra’s code has been shut down. In Yuzu’s settlement with Nintendo, the emulator developers agreed to “surrender, and permanently cease to use… any other website or system th…
Read moreAnalyst outfit IDC has just dropped a blinding thermonuclear glimpse of the blatantly obvious by predicting that 60% of PCs will have AI hardware by 2027.
The new IDC report forecasts that 167 million PCs containing hardware specifically designed to run generative AI will be sold in 2027, representing that 60% market share. Given that it’s expected pretty much all current-gen CPUs and APUs being sold by Intel and AMD at that point will contain some kind of NPU or Neural Processing Unit, the prediction isn’t much of a reach. Indeed it feels like kind of a low-ball figure if anything.
Of course, you could argue that any PC with a modern discrete GPU has AI hardware. Indeed, if you’re serious about running AI image generation locally on your PC, you’re going to want access to a…
Read moreThis year Razer will be bringing us its first ever 18-inch gaming laptop, or desktop replacement to be more accurate, packing one of Intel’s 13th Gen Core i9 HX-series chips, along with Nvidia’s RTX 4090 mobile GPU. Razer has also announced that the new Razer Blade 16 will be packed into a much smaller chassis than anticipated. A little bit of min-maxing going on with these next-gen gaming laptops, then, and from what I’ve seen it’s an impressive feat at both ends of the spectrum.
Razer’s first installation to their 2023 gaming laptop lineup comes in the form of the Blade 16. Not only has Razer has managed to jam a 16-inch panel into a chassis that’s only a smidge bigger than the current Blade 15—alongside a 13th Gen Intel Core i9 HX-series CPU and Nvidia RTX 40-series mobil…
Read moreThe best thing about watching speedrunners is seeing just how far they’ll go to break their favourite games. No matter how old a game is, no matter how ‘solved’ its speedrun may seem, there’ll always be new surprises just around the corner.
Super Mario 64 has long been a favourite of the speedrunning community, and it’s just had another massive tech discovery that’ll likely be a part of any 120-star world records going forward, shaving off close to a minute of playtime.
That might not sound like a lot, but the more perfected a speedrun gets, the more impressive saves like this get. Even a few seconds is huge when you get to the big leagues, but a whole minute? That makes this tech basically mandatory.
There’s a level in Mario 64 called Rainbow Ride, whic…
Read moreOutside of a brief internet cafe dalliance back in the early 2000s, I haven’t played much RuneScape, either in its modern or old-school forms. But maybe I should, because Old School RuneScape continues to generate tales of triumph, tragedy, fantasy cop-befuddlement, and jaw-dropping luck.
Take, for example, the player who just became the second confirmed person ever (after someone named enneUni) to obtain the game’s rarest drop. As confirmed by GamesRadar, a player named Coti managed to get their hands on an uncut onyx from one of OSRS’ bags full of gems, essentially grab-bags of 40 assorted gems that players can purchase from certain in-game vendors.
Uncut Onyx from Bag Full of Gems! from r/2007scape
They work prett…
Read moreEndless Space and Humankind studio Amplitude is marking its 13th birthday, and to celebrate it’s giving out free Steam copies of Endless Legend, its underrated fantasy 4X that apparently released all the way back in 2014. So there’s a Friday morning confrontation with mortality for you.
You can pick the game up by heading over to the Amplitude Studios community website and then, well, going through a little bit of a rigamarole. You’ll need to make an account, verify your email, then head into your account settings and link the thing up with Steam. Once you’ve done that, just return to that page linked above and click on the Endless Legend image halfway down the page to get your free Steam key.
It’s a bit long-winded, or at least it was for me when I tried it out, but Endless…
Read moreThe benefits of AI can be debated. But one thing we’re all sure about is that massive server farms packed full of hundreds or thousands of high-end AI GPUs, each consuming hundreds of watts, soak up a lot of power. Right?
Not Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia whose catchphrase has become “the more you buy, the more you save”, in reference to his company’s stratospherically expensive AI chips. Perhaps inevitably, Huang has a similar take when it comes to the power consumption associated with the latest AI models, which mostly run on Nvidia hardware.
Speaking in a Q&A following his Computex keynote, Huang’s point is firstly that Nvidia’s GPUs do computations much faster and more efficiently than any alternative. As he puts it, you want to “accelerate everything”. That saves …
Read moreAMD’s new Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT graphics cards haven’t quite gone on sale. But they’re already having an impact on the graphics card market.
As we write these words, you can take your choice between at least two versions of the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti 16GB for $449 from Newegg. Both the ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Advanced Edition and the MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 4060 Ti are yours for this new lower price.
That’s $50 down on the $499 launch price of the 16GB version of the 4060 Ti. For starters, that now puts the 16GB 4060 Ti within $50 of the plain old RTX 4060 Ti 8GB card. More importantly, it also puts it bang on the launch price of the new AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT.
That makes for a very interesting comparison. The 7700 XT only has 12GB of VRAM, of course, but …
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