Hades 2 ได้เข้าสู่ช่วง Early Access บนแพลตฟอร์ม Steam แล้ว และในเวลาแค่เพียงหนึ่งวันก็ทำยอดผู้เล่นออนไลน์พร้อมกันพุ่งทะลุสองเท่าของยอดสูงสุดตลอดกาลของเกมภาคแรกไปเรียบร้อยแล้ว
อ้างอิงจากรายงานของ VGC การเปิดตัวเข้าสู่ช่วง Early Access ของ Hades 2 เมื่อคืนวันที่ 6 พฤษภาคมที่ผ่านมา ได้ทำยอดผู้เล่นพร้อมกันสูงสุดถึง 79,276 คน ภายใน 24 ชั่วโมง ตามข้อมูลของเว็บไซต์ติดตามผู้เล่นเกมบน Steam ส่วนภาคแรกเคยทำยอดผู้เล่นพร้อมกันสูงสุดไว้ที่ 37,749 คน หมายความว่าภาคต่อส…
การเก็บไอเทมต่าง ๆ เพื่อใช้ในการพัฒนาตัวละคร เป็นสิ่งที่จำเป็นอย่างมากภายในเกม Genshin Impact อย่างไรก็ตาม หากตัวละครที่เราชื่นชอบถูกพัฒนาจนสุดทางแล้ว ไอเทมที่มีไว้ก็อาจจจะกลายเป็นสิ่งของที่รกคลังไอเทมจนถึงขั้นต้องทำลายทิ้งไปเปล่า ๆ
ล่าสุดมีผู้เล่น Genshin Impact ที่ใช้ชื่อ Reddit ว่า Pkfire100 ได้ออกมาโชว์ภาพที่เผยให้เห็นการทำลายไอเทมนับ 70,000 ชิ้นภายในคลังไอเทม โดยไอเทมทั้งหมดเป็นวัสดุเสริมตัวละครและอาวุธ โดยไอเทมเหล่านั้นประกอบด้วย Recruit&#…
Bandai Namco Entertainment ได้เปิดตัว Battle Scars เวอร์ชั่น 2 ซึ่งเป็นการรวบรวมสถิติที่แสดงข้อมูลเชิงลึกที่น่าสนใจจากผู้เล่น Elden Ring รวมถึงข้อมูลที่เกี่ยวข้องกับตัวละคร Ranni ซึ่งการเปิดเผยข้อมูลนี้เกิดขึ้นพร้อมกับโปรโมชั่นใหม่ลดราคาเกม 30% นั่นเอง
Dark Moon Greatsword เป็นรางวัลสำหรับการทำภารกิจของ Ranni ให้สำเร็จ ซึ่งเควสดังกล่าวจะทำให้ผู้เล่นได้สวมแหวนแต่งงานให้กับ Ranni นั่นเอง ซึ่งอ้างอิงตามสถิติแล้วมีผู้เล่นจำนวน 11.7 ล้านคนได้รับอาวุธที่ทรงพลังนี้ อย่างไรก็�…
หากสังเกตให้ดีแล้ว Persona 3 Reload ได้นำเสนอแนวคิดเกมของภาคดั้งเดิมในรูปแบบที่สดใหม่ได้อย่างลงตัวพร้อมมาตรฐานที่สูงเทียบเท่าเกมภาคใหม่อย่าง 5 Royal แต่กระนั้นหลายคนก็อดสงสัยไม่ได้ว่าแล้วทำไม Kotone ตัวเอกหญิงที่เคยได้รับการเปิดตัวในภาค 3P หรือ Portable กลับไม่ได้มาให้ผู้เล่นใช้งานกัน เฝ้าแต่รอตั้งแต่การเปิดตัวเนื้อหาเสริมชุดแรกมาจนถึงตอนนี้ก็ปล่อยออกมาครบเสร็จสิ้นก็ไม่มีแม้แต่เงา
ล่าสุด ดูเหมือนว่าจะได้คำตอบกันแล้วเมื่อเว็บไซต�…
CD Projekt Red has laid off “roughly 9%” of its staff, with around 100 people losing their jobs over the next seven months.
In a statement on CDPR’s website, CEO Adam Kiciński says the layoffs are part of “ongoing process of several deep transformations within the studio,” which he considers “key to making quality games, on time and without crunch.”
“To meet our own high expectations and ambitions to create the best role-playing games, we not only want to have the best people but also the right teams,” Kiciński says. “What we mean by that is having teams that are built around our projects’ needs; teams that are more agile and more effective. At this point in time, we’re certain that for CD Projekt Red to grow, we need to be consistent in implementing that approach.”
Kiciński continues: “There’s no easy way to say this, but today we are overstaffed. We have talented people on board who are finishing their tasks and—based on current and expected project needs—we already know we don’t have other opportunities for them in the next year.”
He clarifies that not everyone’s layoff will be immediate, adding “some …
Elon Musk has made several, uh, turbulent decisions since entering Twitter HQ with sink in tow—turning verification into a subscription service, baffling choices regarding ‘rate limits’ to allegedly combat bot spam, redundancies for thousands of staff, and challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight. Normal things to do when you buy a company.
Latest in his long list of choices: replacing Twitter’s classic blue bird with an X, which you might’ve noticed when logging onto the social media site today. Granted, we’ve seen this coming, as Musk elaborated that buying Twitter was just one step in his master plan to create “X, the everything app” back in October. It’s just official now.
The change was formally announced by Twitter’s current CEO, Linda Yaccarino, on Sunday. “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity—centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” says Yaccarino. She goes on to state that it would be “powered by AI” and will “connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.” That’s true, I am beginning to imagine it, though I might be stuck here …
The CD Projekt-owned PC gaming storefront GOG just released a “facts and figures” breakdown of 2022 in an official blog post. The upshot? GOG experienced steady growth in its user base and library while also turning a tidy $1.2 million profit. It’s a heartening turnaround to see as the service actually lost money—$1.15 million to be exact—the previous year.
GOG saw a near-20% expansion of its user base last year, though interestingly the number of active GOG Galaxy (the service’s desktop client) users merely remained steady. It’s tough getting around launcher fatigue these days, and GOG Galaxy is not a requirement to use the storefront—you can buy and download these games off the GOG website.
GOG shared a revenue chart that shows just how much of a lopsided banner year 2020 was for the service, an unprecedented and so far unmatched performance that GOG chalks up to the release of Cyberpunk 2077 and the general boom in the industry thanks to home-bound pandemic gaming. That being said, its revenue now is still significantly higher than before the pandemic.
Overall revenue for GOG looks to have stayed flat between 202…
An adorably baby dragon has many siblings—all yet unhatched—who have fallen into the Cavern of Dreams. Now the dragon must go down into the cave and find them, though the nature of the cave and its many strange environments means you’ll need to look high and low for them all.
That’s the pitch for Cavern of Dreams, an indie platformer with a demo that just hit Steam and looks like it could have fallen right out of the late ’90s era of collectathon platformers like Banjo-Kazooie: Games more focused on exploring and puzzle-solving using special powers than on fighting baddies.
Playing the demo took about thirty minutes—there’s a full playthrough on YouTube and I’ll embed it below. I liked how the movement was executed, not slavishly devoted to the sometimes-sluggish controls of the N64 era but not too crisp and modern either. There are also neat touches, like the rolling, that I thought felt particularly well-implemented. The camera could use some work, but what’s a ’90s 3D platformer without a bit of frustrating camera control?
Much like its clear inspirations, Cave of Dreams is really focused on a presenting a weird vibe and whimsical cre…
AMD has released its third quarter financial results. Although the company saw year-on-year growth in revenue, gross profit and earnings per share, the results were not viewed favorably by Wall Street, with AMD shares falling by nearly 5% before recovering later in the trading day. Revenue was up by 4% to $5.8 billion year-on-year, while gross profits rose by 17% to $2.75 billion. The four major Data Center, Client, Gaming and Embedded segments saw a mix of results.
Data Center segment revenue was flat year-on-year, with growth in EPYC sales offset by a fall in SoC sales. However AMD has big hopes for its next-gen MI300A and MI300X compute GPUs with deployments scheduled for HPC, cloud and AI customers.
The Client segment includes Ryzen desktop and mobile processors. It saw a big 42% rise in year-on-year revenue driven by higher sales of its Ryzen 7000-series mobile processors.
The Gaming segment was a weak point, recording an 8% year-on-year fall in revenue to $1.5 billion. That’s been attributed to a decline in semi-custom sales. It could have been worse, as AMD says its Radeon GPU sales increased over the last year. AMD didn’t specify a dollar amount t…
Lost Ark’s Witcher crossover event kicks off next week, bringing a bunch of themed items and cosmetics to the incredibly on-top Korean ARPG/MMO. It’ll also see characters like Geralt, Ciri, and other familiar Witchery faces make an appearance to help players on a new set of story and daily quests. Also, the announcement was accompanied by an image of a Lost Ark-ified Geralt and Ciri, from which I may never recover.
The event tasks players with solving the problem of a mysterious vortex that’s suddenly appeared on White Wolf Haven Island, which I’m choosing to believe just happened to be called that before Geralt and company showed up. Working through the island’s various quests will reward you with potions from the Witcher series, new Jukebox songs, a card set featuring Witcher characters, a new stronghold structure, and little bits and pieces like emoticons, selfie stickers and a title.
The event will also bring a new set of cosmetics you can pick up in the in-game store, consisting of pretty much what you’d expect. There’s new outfits, weapon skins, and hairstyles that you can use to Witcher-fy your Lost Ark character. If you’d rather not splash real cash, the even…
One baffling result of Baldur’s Gate 3’s latest patch—which arrived with plenty of bugs and subsequently a bunch of hotfixes—is, well, Astarion turning into the Grinch. It’s only happening under certain mysterious circumstances, but it is certainly happening. Act 3 and Astarion spoilers to follow.
This whole debacle kicked off after footage of Astarion’s new Act 3 epilogue scene (shared by skarsghardy on Twitter) caused a swathe of memes to surface about Larian’s new ‘Astarion Jumpscare’, wherein everyone’s favourite vampire watches you while you sleep, looking as if he’s been devising devious plans to steal Christmas.
Now, listen. There’s nothing wrong with a person just looking like that—it’s even sort of cute, but considering Astarion is typically a full-lipped princeling that looks like he belongs on the front of a smutty romance book (shirt optional), it is suspiciously glitchy. I’ve been trying to smile while folding my upper lip into my lower one for about five minutes, and I can’t get it to feel natural.
Enter one of my favourite mods so far for Baldur’s Gate 3: Astarion’s de-grinchifier by magnetuning on Nexus Mods. T…
Helldivers 2’s breakout success continues, with the game sitting pretty near the top of Steam’s top-selling and most-played games lists and boasting over 250,000 “very positive” reviews. Partly that’s because it’s a total blast, and the overarching galactic war is being played out beautifully, but not a little is down to the game’s willingness to stick to its guns when it comes to certain principles: for instance, friendly fire.
As any experienced Helldiver will know, the only thing more dangerous than bots and bugs is, err, other Helldivers. You crash down on these planets toting ludicrously powerful weapons, in addition to explosive stratagems that launch from orbit, and all of these things will disintegrate your fellow Helldivers when carelessly used. Thing is that the game’s so chaotic, and it can be so hard to track where your so-called buddies are, that friendly fire frequently has an impact.
Many players, myself included, find this a refreshing change of pace. It adds a delicious layer of consequence to all your decisions, particularly the ones involving the heaviest hardware, and means a teammate doing something stupid can completely turn…
There’s some new cause for optimism in the struggling CPU market. Just last week I wrote about a hopeful rebound following the release of data by Jon Peddie Research. Now new figures from Mercury Research further point to signs of a market recovery in the second quarter of 2023.
According to Mercury Research (via Venture Beat), Intel gained three percentage points of market share, coinciding with a three percentage point drop for AMD. This includes all CPU shipments, including IoT, SoCs and the custom chips found inside consoles. Overall, Intel still leads strongly, with 68.4% of the overall x86 market share, compared to AMD’s 31.6% share. If SoC and IoT shipments are excluded, Intel leads by a whopping 82.6% to AMD’s 17.4%.
A large part of the recent CPU market woes are a result of excess inventory. When you have warehouses full of the things, you don’t need to make as many. Mercury Research president Dean McCarron says the inventory induced downturn is “probably a thing of the past”.
Shipments of AMD’s console chips were forecast to decline, as the console shortage faded away, and expected seasonal buying patterns caused a drop in demand. However, it experien…
In the slew of Wordle imitators that emerged in the wake of its success last year, there are a few real standouts. There’s Nerdle, that challenges you to guess a maths equation; Worldle, which looks like a spelling error but is actually the one where you have to figure out a country from its silhouette; and, on the more intimidating end, there’s Quordle.
Quordle asks you to solve four Wordles simultaneously, all on one big grid. Every guess you make is applied to all four—even with a generous nine guesses, it’s still a nightmare of brain multitasking.
But clearly Merriam-Webster thinks it has a bright future ahead of it. The company, known primarily for its US dictionaries, has bought Quordle, according to the game’s official twitter account. The URL has already changed to reflect the acquisition, and Merriam-Webster has welcomed it to its “family” of word games and quizzes.
If you didn’t realise there was a family of word games and quizzes owned by a dictionary company, we’re in the same boat, but on their site you can enjoy such delights as Name That Thing, Spell It, What’s That From? and What Are You Wearing?. I’m now starting to wonder whe…
The Secure Boot feature on as many as 300 MSI motherboards reportedly doesn’t work as you might expect—or as the feature is intended. Specifically, the motherboards will allow unvalidated firmware and operating systems to load when Secure Boot is enabled.
Open source security researcher Dawid Potocki (via El Reg) first discovered the problem when attempting to set up Secure Boot on an MSI PRO Z790-A WIFI. “Unfortunately I found my firmware was accepting every OS image I gave it, no matter if it was trusted or not,” says Potocki.
That prompted him into checking other MSI motherboards and he found nearly 300 models had the same issue, including every AMD B650 and X670 and all Z790 and B760 Intel models. Yikes.
Secure Boot is technology designed to ensure that PCs only load software at boot that is trusted by the original manufacturer. More to the point, requiring Secure Boot to be enabled is increasingly a thing for PC games. FIFA 23 and Valorant are among titles that already require Secure Boot to be enabled.
MSI has responded to Potocki’s findings with a full explanation of the current configuration on MSI boards, plus some changes planned for a fut…
It’s been a while since my friends and I have played much Jackbox, in part because we’ve entirely lost track of which Party Pack games are where. And how could we not? Jackbox Games has made ten of the damn things. I can barely differentiate between Fibbage and Quiplash in my head, let alone remember whether Tee K.O. was in Party Pack 2 or 3. Thankfully, we’ll soon have a solution with The Jackbox Megapicker.
Arriving in July, The Jackbox Megapicker is a free launcher that will track all the Party Packs on your Steam account and present all the individual games within them as a sortable, filterable library. It’ll be simpler than ever to track down Civic Doodle, no matter what state you and your friends might find yourselves in after a few hours of your Discord hangout.
I’m curious to see how the Megapicker will work in action. Will it be a new repackaging of all the existing Party Pack games in a single piece of software, and it’ll just read the Party Packs on your Steam account to determine which ones you can launch? Or will it transition out of the Megapicker and launch the respective Party Pack executable for the game selected? However it works, it’ll almost certa…
Right now, Intel’s Magdeburg mega-fab in Germany is little more than a field with a few holes in it. Though those holes are of significant historical importance. Within them, archaeologists from the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt have discovered the remains of multiple burial mounds, including a chariot burial, which date back to the Neolithic period.
The burial sites discovered at the site are believed to be around 6,000 years old.
“Two approximately 6,000-year-old monumental mounds that covered wooden grave chambers, each containing several burials, were located 200 m away from each other,” Dr. Oliver Dietrich said of the findings (via CBS News). “The landscape obviously remained important for prehistoric people over a long period of time. Around 1000 years later, the corridor in between the mounds was used as a processional route where cattle were sacrificed and people buried.”
Archaeologists have been looking into the site just outside of Magdeburg, Germany since 2023. It’s where Intel plans to build its biggest European facility, what it calls the “Silicon Junction”—a semiconductor plant that’ll pump out some of th…
Less than a week into Diablo 4’s full release, Sorcerers have taken the lead as the most popular class.
Maybe it’s the giant fire snake they can wrap around groups of enemies or the bliss of teleporting in and out of the fray. Sorcerers are one of Diablo 4’s OG classes, all the way back to 1996’s Diablo 1, so it’s not particularly surprising that everyone wants to play them.
These element-bending spellcasters have one of the most creative skill trees in Blizzard’s new action RPG. Their most effective builds make use of every school of magic in their arsenal and the Enchantment Slot system lets you equip spells for a passive benefit on top of everything else. If you want a class that paints the screen with fire, lightning, and ice, the Sorcerer is the perfect class to play.
As far as their power in Diablo 4’s most brutal dungeons and open world activities, they fall a little behind the other four classes. Barbarians and Druids struggle in the early parts of the game where melee classes lack the damage output and positional benefits of a ranged class, but they eventually evolve into the most devastating classes for the game’s endgame grind. Sorcerers, however, fa…
Back in January, Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone promised that the long-awaited 1.6 update will “absolutely” be out sometime in 2024. And he wasn’t kidding: Barone revealed today—the eighth anniversary of Stardew Valley’s release, by the way—that the update will arrive on PC on March 19.
“It’s the 8th anniversary of Stardew Valley,” Barone tweeted. “Thank you for all the support over the years! Today I am announcing the PC release date for the 1.6 update: –March 19th–. Console & Mobile will follow as soon as possible.”
It’s been a long time coming, to put it mildly. Barone revealed the 1.6 update in November 2022 with a warning that it was mostly for the benefit of modders and “won’t be huge,” but then it got huge anyway: New content will include three new in-game festivals, a new kind of farm, new items and crafting recipes, more than 100 new lines of dialogue, support for eight-person multiplayer on PC, “new late-game content, which expands on each of the skill areas,” and more—plus all the stuff for modders that this update was supposed to be about in the first place.
In theory at least, the completion of the 1.6 update should sign…
Ever since it first warped onto the scene, Star Citizen has been infamous for its rapacious monetisation. The game’s development seems never-ending but, long before you could play it in any form, Roberts Space Industries would sell you all sorts of space-things: Like this mine-laying ship that cost over $600 before mine-laying was even a feature in the game.
Here’s the thing about Star Citizen, though. Its devotees are fiercely loyal to Chris Roberts’ vision and will loudly defend the game’s monetisation, its protracted development, and whatever else the detractors take aim at. Those same detractors meanwhile, just point and laugh at folk who spaff $30,000 on virtual spaceships.
But this time Star Citizen has truly outdone itself, with what surely has to be the single most expensive DLC in history. Yes, they warned us that this was the next step after horse armour, and Roberts Space Industries has delivered: Star Citizen now offers a $48,000 Legatus bundle containing every ship in the game (you’d hope so, too). The description of the bundle is as follows:
PACKAGE – LEGATUS 2953
Ahead of all others, this defini…