Dorian the raven, to give the bird its proper name, isn't the first raven in Diablo 4. Druids have a spell that lets them summon a whole unkindness of ravens—yeah, that really is the proper collective noun for ravens—who can attack their enemies. But Dorian is a noncombat pet like the ridiculously cute tiger kitten everyone who forked out for the ultimate edition of Vessel of Hatred owns, only he looks like he's waiting for you to die so he can eat your delicious eyes.

As with all pets in Diablo 4, the raven can pick up crafting materials and currencies for you, sparing your finger the hassle of clicking on gold yourself. To unlock him you have to complete the entire seasonal journey with your freshly minted seasonal character, which means ticking off a checklist of objectives in return for Grim Favors—a currency I'd say ranks about a 6/10 on the Malfeasance Token scale.

As mentioned, the big-ticket feature of Season 7 is the witchcraft powers. There are 25 of them, including Poison Frog Servant, Firebat Servants, and the gloriously named Piranhado. Anyone who played the summoner-themed witch doctor class in Diablo 3 will find these powers familiar, and this season feels like a way of sneaking that class in via the back door, at least temporarily.

The Season of Witchcraft update also brings an armory that will let players save and swap between builds, something else Diablo 3 players will find familiar, and a new enemy type called the headrotten. It kicks off on January 21 at 10am PST.

Who would win in a word fight: three green letters, or me? I really thought it would be me. I had a flash of inspiration. This was it, this was my shining moment… so long as "shining moment" means "reveal two more grey letters". But being stumped like that actually worked to my advantage, as there was nothing left to try but today's winning word.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, January 15

This is a special skill, something you can just do really well. On a related note, if a door tends to jam unless you wiggle the handle just right, you have this for opening it.  

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Playing Wordle well is like achieving a small victory every day—who doesn't like a well-earned winning streak in a game you enjoy? If you're new to the daily word game, or just want a refresher, I'm going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success: 

• You want a balanced mix of unique consonants and vowels in your opening word. 
• A solid second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• The answer could contain letters more than once.

There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by the end of the day. If you're struggling to find the answer or a tactical word for your next guess, there's no harm in coming back to it later on. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Enjoy today's win. The answer to the January 15 (1306) Wordle is KNACK.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Knowing previous Wordle solutions can be helpful in eliminating current possibilities. It's unlikely a word will be repeated and you can find inspiration for guesses or starting words that may be eluding you. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• January 14: FANCY
• January 13: CLOAK
• January 12: TOTAL
• January 11: DINGY
• January 10: CRAWL
• January 9: WAFER
• January 8: DRAFT
• January 7: ATLAS
• January 6: SPRIG
• January 5: CYBER

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and it's your job to work out which five-letter word is hiding by eliminating or confirming the letters it contains.

Starting with a strong word like LEASH—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good place to start. Once you hit Enter, the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second go should compliment the starting word, using another "good" guess to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer.  After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS). 

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

Forest Reigns is an 'emergent' FPS set in a post-apocalyptic Paris not ravaged by war or radiation but plantlife. The City of Light has been reclaimed by nature: vines choke the lamp posts, greenery grows up the sides of buildings, grass covers the asphalt, and a massive, twisted tree trunk winds itself around La Tour Eiffel. Mother Nature is back and she seems pretty pissed off.

You're there too, with some high-tech weaponry and a few tricks to turn these weird sentient plants into your allies. In this gameplay trailer secured by IGN, we see a few brief firefights against enemy agents where the player uses all that invasive greenery to their advantage.

Popping a round into a giant root causes it to expand, giving the player cover to crouch behind while shooting. Glowing orange orbs also sprout from the trunk which, when shot, will explode, burning your enemies. Shooting another type of plant causes it to react by blasting out spores, which appears to be the only way to injure some of the heavily armored boars patrolling Paris' streets. We also see exploding fruit chucked like grenades, tangling vines ensnaring enemy soldiers, and other weird plant-based hijinx.

"It isn’t just part of the environment—it’s a conscious entity with its own desires and intentions. Interact with it to reveal its mysteries, use it for defeating enemies, or face its wrath as it reacts to your choices," says the Steam page. "Resources are scarce, and danger is constant. Craft, scavenge, and plan ahead. Adapt to this green new world or become natural selection's next victim."

It looks kinda trippy, like Atomic Heart meets Stalker, and the nature-ravaged city is beautifully imagined, from the Eiffel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe to several other French landmarks I should probably know the names of. There's no word on a release date for Forest Reigns, but here's the official website.

That update, 1.4.5, is currently holding as the final final Terraria update, but only because it's not actually finished yet. It was supposed to be out in 2023 but that didn't work, and neither did 2024. It's getting there, but the choice was to crunch to make a 2024 release, or to just let it go and get it out sometime in '25, which the studio eventually opted to do.

"We are sure that will not be welcome news for many—but we remain committed to being a quality-first studio, so we will take the time necessary for each update to feel 'just right'... and we think that once the update is out, everyone will appreciate that time and care," Re-Logic's Ted "Loki" Murphy wrote at the time. "Apologies for this one taking so long for sure, but it will be well worth it."

Ah, but there's another, secret reason Re-Logic won't stop working on Terraria: Life itself. "Terraria will never die as long as there is one last final update," lead developer Andrew 'Redigit' Spinks said on Bluesky (via GamesRadar).

He also revealed his ultimate long-term plan for Terraria, which isn't just to make a really great, unforgettable videogame, but to achieve immortality: "Before I die, I will upload my consciousness to Terraria, there I can troll the players for the rest of eternity."

Hey, it's good to have a goal, although I rather strongly suspect Spinks isn't being entirely serious here. He does, however, have a history of trolling Terraria fans: In 2022, for instance, nine years after announcing Terraria 2, Spinks changed the location on his Twitter bio to "Terraria 2 – A New Age," which caused a big stir among fans until Re-Logic confirmed that he (and a bunch of other people at the studio) were just having some "good fun" with fans.

Re-Logic gets away with it because it is all good fun, for one thing (Spinks also recently announced a new refund policy for Terraria: No questions asked as long as you can defeat him in single combat), but also because Terraria is a genuinely great game, holding an "overwhelmingly positive" rating across more than 1.3 million user reviews on Steam. That's a staggering number, and the fact that it continues to draw in thousands of concurrent players every day, 14 years after its initial release, is equally impressive.

The situation has become something of a running joke among the Terraria community over the years—Re-Logic just can't quit working on it—but I don't think that's an inherently bad thing, either. It's a lot like Eric Barone and Stardew Valley, really: We'd love to see them do something new, but if they want to keep hammering away on the old stuff until the sun goes cold and the mountains crumble to the sea, that'd be great too.

Unfortunately, Spinks offered no indication as to when Terraria's 1.4.5 update will go live. He did, however, commit to getting it done: "We are back to work tomorrow and I’ve got one single mission: releasing the final update. My game face is on."

This is Preface: Undiscovered World, a tech demo from PlayerUnknown Productions, that uses Melba, Greene's new game engine, to create an "Earth-scale world" using "machine learning agents." Preface is the first step in what Greene estimates could be a "five or 10 year journey" to create a massively multiplayer sandbox the size of a planet (and perhaps the metaverse, maybe).

While all these rocks and trees and hills appear to be perfectly sensible and normal, this planet-sized planet I'm trudging around on may be hiding a few anomalies, at least according to the team building the game engine that generated this world.

"We found that a lot of planet Earth is kind of dull, it's very flat," senior engine developer Leon Lubking told me when I visited PlayerUnknown Productions last year. "We could, for example, train [Preface] only on New Zealand, and then you would get much more extreme landscapes, or the Himalayas, or some some islands and tropical places, and then you get different results."

Training the engine on a specific part of the world doesn't mean there won't be some surprises, however, as machine learning (ML) occasionally will, as the Preface team calls it, have a "hallucination."

"We're using ML agents, which will generate things that you don't always know what it's going to be. Lubking said. "It's just gonna do stuff, and we don't really know. So in essence, we don't know what's gonna happen when people play it. And we don't know what to expect ourselves."

That means while the team has discovered a few anomalies on their own while testing it, there may be more hidden on the planet that they haven't seen yet. "The ML does what the ML will, and sometimes it does stuff that is not supposed to be there. So you get these precipices we had, like a black hole, or the naval thing, where we had one tiny little [gap] where it went all the way to the Earth's core," Lubking said. "It would create weird terraces. At some point we had some buildings, and it would put buildings up 100 meters in the sky on little poles."

"The ML is going crazy in generating these kinds of things," said Noel Lopez Gonzaga, lead ML researcher at PlayerUnknown Productions. "Of course, we tried to keep it more under control. But there's always going to be a little bit of hallucination."

While "hallucinations" is the marketing spin for "errors" that tech companies like OpenAI and Google have landed on to excuse their language models confidently stating incorrect facts and telling people to eat rocks, it seems somewhat fitting when applied to procedural environmental generation in a game. A few hallucinations in machine learning isn't necessarily a bad thing in this case, as Gonzaga added: "...sometimes it might create something [that] we don't want to constrain.

"We want to avoid obvious bugs," said technical director Laurent Gorga. "But we have to embrace anomaly as well. Because this is also part of the beauty. Some places on this real planet Earth look like total anomalies. And we don't want to avoid that."

"The sea urchin planet was interesting as well. There are some knobs and levers that you can turn on the ML, and they basically made the differences in elevation very extreme. [The planet] looked like sea urchins, they've got these spiky things," Lubking said, adding: "It's gonna be a weird place."

I haven't spotted any anomalies myself on my various sprints across the virtual planet, but I haven't been visiting for all that long yet, and it's a planet the size of Earth so it's gonna take quite a while to explore. If you want to hunt for a hallucination yourself, you can download Preface: Undiscovered World on Steam and take a stroll—and be sure to use the waypoint and postcard tools to mark the location of any sea urchins or a black holes you find.

That's evident after an announcement made today on Marvel Rivals' Steam page, where NetEase characterizes the use of keyboard or mouse adapters as a form of cheating.

"We believe that gaining an unjust advantage through such methods significantly impacts the gaming experience for our players. Therefore, whether on PC or console, we will take measures to vanquish this nefarious behavior," the post dramatically promises. "Penalties for users of keyboard and mouse adapters may include temporary or permanent account suspensions, removal from leaderboards, or other punishments depending on the circumstances."

Anyone playing on a gamepad in Marvel Rivals (including on PC) has access to aim assist, a feature built into the game that's adjustable through six specific settings. What NetEase implies in the above quote is that using one of these adapters allows an infringing console player access to the best of both worlds: the fine control of using a mouse and the use of aim assist, since to Marvel Rivals that mouse is masquerading as a controller.

The adapters in question are small boxes that sit between a console and a paired controller, designed to allow console players to use mice, keyboards, or other USB input devices on platforms not designed to accept them. Today's consoles like the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 do natively support keyboard and mouse connectivity, but support in games is left up to developers and still rare. Adapters cost $100-150 and are freely available through retailers like Amazon. One genuine appeal of these tools is that they allow players who strongly prefer a certain gamepad to use it on a platform that doesn't support it.

In its minor threat, NetEase went as far as to name names, manufacturers that it sees as enabling rulebreaking: XIM, Cronus Zen, Titan Two, KeyMander, and Brook Sniper, are examples of emulators that could lead to punishment if used. NetEase flaunts its ability to detect these devices—it's not unusual for a studio to project strength in order to discourage cheating—but what's surprising is that its method may rely on human moderators to some degree, saying "We have forged a strong detection tool and couple[d] with the keen judgment of our watchful human eyes to accurately identify those using keyboard and mouse adapters."

Players themselves can use Marvel Rivals' somewhat hidden replay tool to spot suspected cheaters; the game stores replays of many of your previous quick or competitive matches, allowing you to spectate from the perspective of any player and retroactively report them for misconduct. The existence of a replay tool is necessary infrastructure for many modern anti-cheat systems, and it could mean that player telemetry (like mouse movements) are being stored and analyzed in some fashion. Valve's been doing this in competitive FPSes with VACnet, a machine learning-driven system, for nearly a decade.

Though Marvel Rivals supports crossplay, the wall between console and PC players is higher than just hardware: console players cannot play competitive mode with PC players. Though you can queue with console friends in other modes of play, competitive crossplay is off limits.

On the FAQ section of the Cronus Zen kb/m adapter's website, the creators reassure that the device "does not 'hack' anything in the game or console," but admit that "it is always possible that you can be banned or blocked at any time without notice or warning" when using a third-party device while playing online games on a console. It also reassures players that because the Cronus Zen piggybacks on an official, connected controller to send inputs, "the console always believes that you are gaming with a controller meant for the console you are playing on."

Other competitive shooter studios have taken similar steps against input emulation devices. In 2023, Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2.0 cracked down on use of these devices (Call of Duty is notably one of the few shooters with official mouse and keyboard support on PlayStation). For Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft in 2023 introduced a system it called Mousetrap, not merely banning input emulation devices, but doing something much more cruel: introducing input lag against offending players, turning their advantage into a disadvantage.

Kojima's latest game, Death Stranding 2, doesn't have a release date yet, but it's slated to arrive sometime in 2025 and that apparently means it's time to crunch at Kojima Productions. "The most demanding period of game development—both physically and mentally—commonly known as 'crunch time'," Kojima wrote atop his initial "tired" post. "On top of mixing and Japanese voice recording, there’s an inevitable pile of other tasks: writing comments, explanations, essays, interviews, discussions, and non-game-related work. It’s incredibly tough."

That's no doubt true, and it's why a lot of game studios have taken steps to eliminate crunch in recent years, or at least talk about doing so in a reasonably convincing tone. Still, it's proven tough to avoid even when genuine best efforts are made, especially on large projects with big budgets, corporate overlords, antsy shareholders, and looming deadlines, and it seems Kojima is starting to feel the miles.

"At this age, I can’t help but think about how much longer I’ll be able to stay 'creative'," he wrote in another post. "I want to keep going for the rest of my life, but is it 10 more years? 20? Every day feels like I’m racing against the clock. Even now, at 87, Ridley Scott is still active. And back when he was past 60—my current stage in life—he created the masterpiece 'Gladiator'."

Gladiator is indeed a great film (although it's no Master and Commander) but it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, and even if you were inclined to view them as essentially equivalent in their fields, I don't think anyone would seriously say Kojima's contribution to videogames stands in any way inferior to Scott's impact on film.

But maybe Kojima's unfortunate case of auteur ennui will have a positive outcome: Perhaps, instead of wondering how long he can maintain the gruelling pace of crunch, he might realize that it's bad for everyone, and take some concrete steps to cut it out completely. And then who knows? Maybe in 25 years, he'll still be a "creative" too.

Many fields of inquiry have humble origins.

While I think we can all admire Lusty-Batch's initiative, it's produced an inadvertent poisoning of the collective knowledge pool. Luckily, thanks to the efforts of YouTuber Addypalooza, we finally have a measurement of Elden Ring's map with a bit more rigor behind it.

In a video detailing an Elden Ring geographic survey, Addypalooza outlined two main concerns with Lusty-Batch's measurement (neither of which involved the edible or the horse measurements). First, Lusty-Batch's 79 km² figure measures the entire Elden Ring map, the vast majority of which is water. Second, subtracting all that water still wouldn't account for the fact that much of the remaining geography isn't navigable for the player. Rather than an aerial measurement of the overall surface area of The Lands Between, Addypalooza wanted a measurement of Elden Ring's playable area.

To find that measurement, Addypalooza began by establishing a frame of reference for Elden Ring's illustrated in-game map. Conveniently, FromSoft's game maps are built using meters as a unit of measurement, so using map editor software to measure the precise length of an identifiable feature—in this case, the bridge to the Divine Tower of Limgrave—provided a "yard stick measurement" to determine the scale of the illustrated game map.

With that scale established, Addypalooza used image analysis software to manually trace the boundaries of player-navigable spaces in each Elden Ring region, allowing him to calculate the overall size of the game's playable area. Throughout the video, embedded above, Addypalooza provides interesting context and comparisons for notable bits of Elden Ring geography, like the fact that The Lands Between in their entirety can fit within the lagoon encircled by the main island of Tuvalu. The visual presentation is top-notch, too. It's definitely worth a watch.

Altogether, Addypalooza calculates the total playable area in Elden Ring as 13.48 km²—a much smaller figure than earlier edible-derived measurements. Worth noting is that the measurement doesn't include Elden Ring's many caves, catacombs, and castle interiors, but by Addypalooza's estimate, those areas are "little more than rounding errors compared to the vast open world."

In total, Addypalooza guesses they might combine to a generous 1.5 km², meaning the Elden Ring's overall playable area is around 15 km².

Of course, that leaves out Shadow of the Erdtree, but don't worry. Addypalooza took the same measuring stick to the Land of Shadow, too, measuring its explorable area as being around 5.5 km², providing a combined playable area of Elden Ring and the DLC at roughly 20.5 km².

Unfortunately, Addypalooza's measurements have almost three years of search engine dissemination to catch up on if we want to erase the long-standing asterisk on the Elden Ring map size that's been circulated since 2022. Hopefully, this story's a good start.

The biggest change, of course, is the addition of an offline mode that provides access to the main story campaign and all subsequent seasonal content without having to be online. Suicide Squad launched without an offline mode, which did it no favors: In December 2023, Rocksteady committed to adding one in a post-launch update, but the game's more immediate and pressing problems kept developers from getting to it in anything resembling a timely fashion.

Suicide Squad wasn't the five-alarm catastrophe some were expecting ahead of its release, but neither was it very good: "Flashes of greatness," PC Gamer's Morgan Park said in his 67% review, that are undone by a sub-par story mode, uninteresting loot, and an excess of busywork required to reach the good stuff. Concurrent player numbers cratered quickly, and publisher Warner Bros. said shortly after its release that sales of Suicide Squad had "fallen short of our expectations."

In June 2024, Warner committed to completing Suicide Squad's "currently announced roadmap" of future content releases, really just another way of saying that there would be nothing more beyond that, and the axe officially fell in December.

The good news for those still playing is that Suicide Squad's online features will continue to operate beyond this update, so you can still beat up the bad guys with your friends.

The full Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League season 4 episode 8 patch notes are below.

MEDIEVAL GENIUS

You’ll be able to explore more of the medieval Elseworld in Episode 8: Balance, with twists on familiar sights and new locations too. Take your quest to The Quarry, a fortified citadel you’ll have to besiege if you wish to triumph over the tyrant Brainiac. The Arena is the perfect place for jousting tournaments or interdimensional warfare, and the statues of King Jor-El and Queen Lara Lor-Van will be sure to inspire awe for this age of chivalry and honor.

LIBRA INFAMY SET 

The Infamy Set for Episode 8 is inspired by Libra, an incredibly dangerous DC Super-Villain obsessed with the idea of balance. This fascination with balance carries over to his Infamy Set, which applies stacks of Scales of Libra to enemies, increasing both the damage they deal andreceive by 50% for each stack. This makes it a high risk, high reward set that encourages a bold and dynamic playstyle.

NOTORIOUS WEAPONS

The perfect accompaniment to Libra’s Infamy Set is The Silencer’s Complete Silence. This set of weapons inspired by the deadly assassin The Silencer deals a bonus 200% damage to any enemy affected by stacks of Scales of Libra. The Alt-Fire is where this weapon truly shines, however, dealing 1,000% bonus damage and creating a Silencer Zone where the enemy was hit. Enemies standing in Silencer Zones have 100% reduced damage, making this a perfect crowd control tool while you and your squad dish out some major damage.

Doctor Sivana’s Magic Bullets is the perfect way to kill a lot of enemies really fast. Bullets from this weapon pierce through enemies, apply a stack of Scales of Libra and have a chance to electrify enemies hit. If you can position yourself cleverly to line up multiple enemies with one shot, this shocking weapon can devastate an entire army.

Chronos’ Equilibrium dials up the glass cannon playstyle to the max, dealing 25% bonus damage for every 1% of your Shield missing, encouraging a dangerous but incredibly powerful style of play where you’ll constantly be in the middle of the fray.

GAMEPLAY CHANGES 

• Reduced the duration of Deathstroke’s Suicide Strike against certain enemies, to be closer in line with other characters’. 
• The XP requirements for Squad Levels have been decreased, and rewards from previously earned XP are given retroactively. Players with profiles that have earned XP may notice an increase in Squad Levels, and that extra Squad Points are available to spend following the update to Episode 8.

BUG FIXES 

• Fixed a bug for players in the Japan region that caused LuthorCoin to expire prematurely. 
• Fixed a bug that prevented the Raising Hell Playlist from updating when playing in Episodes other than Episode 7. 
• Fixed a bug that prevented players from correctly receiving bonus XP from Critical Kills and from killing Infused enemies. 
• Fixed a bug that prevented B-Technology Resources from being rewarded upon completing certain missions. 
• Fixed a bug that prevented new personal bests in Killing Time from registering on the Leaderboards. 
• Fixed a bug in the Episode 7 Mayhem Mission that caused the kill counter to display incorrect values. 
• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused Lootinauts to disappear when killing the host they were hiding inside. 
• Fixed a bug during the Episode 7 Mayhem Mission that sometimes caused Green Lantern Constructs to immediately reappear after being destroyed. 
• Fixed a bug that caused Harley Quinn’s Shorten Rope Traversal Ability to not be usable while using the Trigger Happy controller layout. 
• Fixed a bug that caused Captain Boomerang’s ‘Captain On Deck TFX Pack’ to charge the wrong amount of LuthorCoin. 
• Fixed a bug that occurred upon purchasing the Joker Emote Bundle that caused one of the emotes to appear to not be owned. 
• Fixed a bug that caused Gorilla Grodd’s Tier 2 ‘Mind Over Matter’ Infamy Set to deal 500% bonus damage to non-Crazed enemies, instead of correctly requiring them to be Crazed. 
• Fixed a bug with Orphan’s Heartseeker whereby nearby enemies failed to receive 50% of Suicide Strike damage when performed on a Marked enemy. 
• Fixed a bug with Brain’s Teaser whereby killing a Burning enemy with the weapon’s Alt-Fire did not always apply burn to nearby enemies. 
• Fixed a bug that caused issues for players navigating around pikes in the Medieval Elseworld. 
• Various crash fixes. 
• Various UI fixes. 
• Various SFX fixes. 
• Various gameplay bug fixes. 
• Various performance improvements and fixes. 
• Various animation and cinematic fixes. 
• Various audio fixes. 
• Various environmental fixes. 
• Fixed several incorrect or untranslated text strings. 
• Fixed instances of enemies spawning incorrectly. 

KNOWN ISSUES

• When attempting Riddler challenges from an Episode other than the one currently selected, progress can sometimes be tracked incorrectly. To correct this, exit out of your current session back to the main menu. 

Remember that kinda weird, chibi-Sim Animal Crossing-adjacent spin-off game? I wouldn't blame you if you said "no," considering the original MySims is the only one in the series that ever made it to PC back in 2008. But now it's re-releasing on our humble desktops alongside MySims Kingdom, which puts a lil' medieval spin on the whole formula.

The bundle landed on the Switch back in November of last year, so this isn't exactly totally new even by re-release standards, but I'm always happy to see old games that didn't make it over to PC finally getting their much-deserved port.

PC Gamer spoke to Sims series VP of franchise creative Lyndsay Pearson earlier this month, and had the opportunity to ask her a little bit about MySims. "At its heart, it's still very, very Sims," she said. "It's the little characters that have a lot of really silly personalities, and you get to customise their world, meet their neighbours, make friends with them. And so I love that DNA of The Sims which comes through with such a different feel."

Pearson added that the spin-off series "scratches a very different itch than I get out of The Sims 4 or 3 or any of our other bigger, traditional HD offerings on PC. So it's fun to be able to sort of reintroduce a different flavour and give new audiences a chance."

Hey, it's me, I'm the new audience. I never actually got around to playing MySims as a kid—I loved The Sims and had a Wii, but it was more of a Mario Kart box than anything I actually remembered to buy games for. I'm excited to dive in and give the games a go, and who knows? Maybe if we're good we'll get a MySims Agents port somewhere down the line, too.

In an interview with Metro, Chen discussed the reception to the game's release and where NetEase's philosophy stands for game balancing and content updates going forward. When asked about the rate at which the studio is planning to add new heroes, Chen said we can expect to see newcomers on the Marvel Rivals roster as often as every month and a half.

"Every season, we'll be rolling out fresh seasonal stories, new maps, and new heroes. We'll actually be breaking down each season into two halves," Chen said. "The length of one season is three months. And for each half of the season, we will introduce a new hero."

If NetEase manages to maintain that cadence, Marvel Rivals could have more than 40 playable heroes by this time next year. It's a blistering tempo, to the point that I'm worried for the artists, designers, and programmers who'll have to pull it off. As a point of comparison, Overwatch 2 has only achieved a roster of 42 playable heroes after more than eight years of adding to the original selection of Overwatch characters.

NetEase does benefit from having the Marvel universe to work with. Adapting a comic book character's established power set into a playable set of abilities is a lighter lift than building a character concept from scratch. I wonder how sustainable that rapidly-expanding roster will be, though, especially as it relates to monetization and player investment. Cosmetics are the lifeblood of a free-to-play shooter, but will NetEase be able to pump out enough cool skins for its dozens of characters that players won't feel like their favorites are being overlooked?

As an added wrinkle: Even a universe as big as Marvel's only has so many recognizable A-listers in it. Despite how it might feel sometimes, there's a finite number of Avengers and X-men. At some point, NetEase will have to start digging deeper in the barrel, and those heroes might not have the same broad appeal. Still, if NetEase ever adds Beta Ray Bill, I'll be one of the dozens celebrating.

As for which types of heroes NetEase will prioritize, Chen says it'll depend on where the game's at. Asked how the studio will decide how to distribute new heroes between the Duelist, Vanguard, and Support roles, Chen said hero additions "will be guided by the overall gameplay experience or theme that we want to create for each season."

NCsoft is working on a "modern reinterpretation" of its Blade and Soul MMO called Blade and Soul Neo, a remaster that promises a range of visual enhancements, gameplay updates, and a way for fans to "re-live that pure MMO action fantasy experience they once knew."

Blade and Soul Neo will follow the storyline of the original game: Players will select from one of four races based on "animal lore"—dragon, qilin, phoenix, and turtle—and from seven classes including Assassin, Blade Dancer, Blade Master, Destroyer, Force Master, Kung Fu Master, and Summoner as they embark upon an adventure to "restore honor to their clan that's been wiped out by enemy forces."

Visually, though, the game has been upgraded considerably, with enhanced textures and lighting, better animations, and more environmental details. Combat customization has also been expanded to offer players more flexibility in building their own unique combat techniques. The "Windwalk" mechanic will also be changed: Originally limited by a stamina bar, Blade and Soul Neo will feature "infinite Windwalk" for both walking and sprinting so you can get where you need to go without an excess of fiddling around.

Blade and Soul didn't really knock our socks off when it finally made its way to western gamers in 2016, following its 2012 debut in Korea and 2014 release in Japan. The PvP combat was "excellent" but the game as a whole was "just the same grind that's already done much better in other games." That might not be an issue, except PvP gameplay is limited until you've "pushed through the dreadfully dull PvE and leveled your character up to the cap. While arena matches equalize gear, you won't have access to all of your abilities until you've unlocked them through leveling."

How exactly Blade and Soul Neo will go about changing up its combat mechanics remains to be seen, but the promise of "enhanced combat customization" could be a sign that level-based ability locks are being cut, which would be a big step in the right direction.

A release date for Blade and Soul Neo hasn't been announced but NCsoft says it's "coming soon." In the meantime, if you're curious you can pre-register for the remaster at bladeandsoul.com.

"You are modding naturals," Larian posted on X, above an image of an unexpectedly chesty Withers—and in case you might miss it, the "00" in 100 million is very strategically placed to draw the eye.

And just in case you miss that, Larian followed up with a direct link to the Withers Big Naturals mod, "Hot to go on PC, Mac, and consoles."

Lest there be any doubt, I am 100% serious about this:

Withers Big Naturals has (Or is it have? Because, well, you know) been available on PC since April 2024, when it (they?) were first uploaded to NexusMods. But console players have had to do without until the release of patch 7 in October, which among numerous other things finally brought mod support to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S players. PC Gamer big naturals appreciator Harvey Randall expressed some concern in November that console gamers would never have the opportunity to appreciate Withers' enhanced assets first hand, but with the official green light from Larian now in hand(s), that's clearly not a worry.

If you're just getting started on your Baldur's Gate 3 modding adventure, Larian's got a good roundup of resources that'll help get you off to a good start on YouTube.

"I think the reason The Sims continues to be so unique is we can offer this breadth of content through DLC and over the years," she said, adding that such a large scope is "really difficult to capture in a lot of experiences, because maybe it doesn't always make sense and it's a lot of things to get to work together."

Similarly to what ex-Sims head Rod Humble told PC Gamer last year while he was making the now-canned Life by You, Pearson pointed to the sheer complexity that making something on this scale entails. "How do you make all those sort of pushes and pulls on the simulation make some amount of sense? And there's this very fine balance between being too smart, and your characters don't need you at all, and not being smart enough where they don't do anything unpredictable," she said. "That is really hard to get right. Even The Sims has swung back and forth over the years, right? Like, you go back and play an old Sims game, it's hard to keep your Sims alive.

"So there's a balance to find there. And I think that all the teams that I've ever met that have been working in this space struggle to find that, which is partially why they end up going after this particular niche, because then you can really focus towards whatever that story is. So it's really that open canvas that is a little daunting."

But despite the challenges other developers have faced—Life by You's demise, Inzoi's delay into 2025, and even EA's own challenges with Project Rene, Pearson is ready for more contenders in the life sim space. "I'm excited to see more people trying, because I think we can learn from each other, and we can look at what's going on in the space and see what players are reacting to, which is always great," she said. "I like to be challenged and try new things."

I'm glad to see Pearson ready to welcome her life sim rivals with open arms, and I hope those challengers actually begin to manifest themselves this year. After all, we've got Inzoi on the way, hopefully launching into early access on March 28, which is probably the closest thing to The Sims we have in terms of scope. There's also the smaller Paralives, which continues to chug along with a vague 2025 window, and Sims creator Will Wright's recent revelation of his new bizarre-sounding AI-driven life sim Proxi.

League of Legends season 1 saw a bunch of new features and changes made, including a new thematic that revolves around Noxus, a change to ranked resets, and a more streamlined reward system. While the last change may seem like a smart idea, it's wound up causing more harm than good for some players.

"Over the years these systems have become needlessly complex, with an excessive number of currencies, unnecessary steps to craft and claim rewards, overlapping loot types, we could go on," developer Andrei Van Roon says in a dev update. "You've been given some key fragments that you then have to craft into a key that you pair with a chest, that you open up to get another key and a chest and some essence that you open up to get a skin shard then you pay for some orange essence or reroll to eventually get a random skin. That's sort of a level of unnecessary complexity going on."

Another problem with rewards in League of Legends was that everything was scattered throughout the client. It was needlessly hard to keep track of how to get rewards and where they ended up. So, to solve the issue of unorganised rewards, the developers decided to just put it all in one place: the battle pass.

"We're moving most of our scattered reward systems to the free track of those battle passes," Roon says. "So most rewards will now be in one place, with systems like Honor and Champion Mastery feeding into the pass. For example, having a higher Honor level will give a bonus to past experience earned.

"There will always be a battle pass active with both a free and a paid track, with the price the same as an Event Pass today. You'll get Pass rewards through the tracks, meaning we're removing the Event Tokens and Shop."

It seems that after this patch, it will take 882 hours to get a new hero for free。 from r/leagueoflegends

Unfortunately, streamlining rewards isn't the only consequence of these changes. Some players realised that this reliance on the battle pass now means level-up rewards are non-existent, making it harder for new players to unlock champions and skins.

"It seems that after this patch, it will take 882 hours to get a new hero for free," cpztpkqc says. "Right now, you can only get Blue Essence from the Battle Pass. After you grind through the first 50 levels, you need to play for 882 hours to unlock a single extra champion! Is League of Legends deliberately trying to shut out all newcomers?"

It used to be that players could get champion capsules after reaching a new level. Those provide champion shards and/or Blue Essence, which you could then use to unlock new champions. But you now have to get these entirely from the battle pass.

However, the battle pass will still provide some good incentives via free rewards for players to earn. "You can earn 12 skins per year with the free pass. Half of these skins will be themed to the season you unlock them in," Roon says. "We'll also be simplifying the loot and crafting system... Overall, we want the pass to be the core vessel for how you track and earn rewards. If you choose to buy the paid version, we also want it to be very clear what you're getting and how to make the most of it."

For the most part, players are angry on behalf of newcomers who won't have access to the 169 champions, and will now have to work even harder to unlock the roster. Or for casual players who don't want to invest a ton of time and money into League of Legends but still want to be rewarded for the effort they do put in.

"So, they have not only removed the weekly chests that kept the casual players that play very seldom in the game, [but also got] rid of the champion capsules once you level up, nerfing the pass and releasing deteriorated [skins] in terms of quality," one player says. "They really want to kill their own game by being anti-f2p."

League of Legends is 16 years old now, and has had a famously hard time when it comes to fostering new players. Last year, a senior Riot developer reported that the League of Legends playerbase is getting older: "Candidly, it's not the same situation it was 10 years ago."

Even after the success of Arcane, a report from Bloomberg suggested that Riot still couldn't retain the new players that it caught through the animated series. So making progression less rewarding may not be a step in the right direction for League of Legends, not if they want to encourage new players to withstand the onslaught of flaming from their angry teammates who, in my experience, zero in on newbs from miles away.

A user by the name of Dr. Mecha Kitten donated $43,690—more than my yearly salary—to Awesome Games Done Quick. This is, according to the site's own donation tracker, the most cash that a single person has given to the cause in one go—the Humble Bundle still takes the cake for highest overall donation at $51,578, but given that's, you know, a company? I'm willing to cut Mecha Kitten some slack.

The donation, which you can see clipped here, arrived during a race between speedrunners Vert and Storster to beat Super Mario World via a "96 exit run", where both players needed to find all 96 exits to every different level (the game has several secret exit doors).

The best part? Aside from a tremendously generous lump sum, Dr. Mecha Kitten's donation is also a shitpost. See, during Mario speedruns at the event, the audience began to yell whenever boos showed up on-screen because, y'know, ghosts are scary. This kind of charity-induced mania isn't at all uncommon for events like GDQ, by the way—it's part of what makes them so special. Like a dog playing baseball, or speedrunning Crazy Taxi with a live band.

As mentioned in the donation itself, the numbers 43690 are 0xAAAA in hexadecimal code—as in, "aaaa!" like the noise you might make when you stub your toe, or see a ghost.

Awesome Games Done Quick 2025 has now finished, as it ran from January 5 to January 12, but you can take a look at all the highlights over on the event's Twitch channel. Meanwhile, Summer Games Done Quick is slated to kick off July 6 this year, and I'm sure the unstoppable generosity of the gaming public—and their ability to meme with said generosity—is going to hold strong.

The Information (paywall, via Reuters) claims that overheating and other related "glitches" have caused customers to delay Blackwell orders or switch to Nvidia's earlier and presumably less problematic "Hopper" generation of AI-optimized GPUs.

Back in October, Nvidia's head honcho Jensen Huang has admitted that the new Blackwell series of AI GPUs had "design flaws" which was leading to delays in shipping AI racks to customers.

"The design flaw caused the yield to be low. It was 100% Nvidia's fault," Huang said. Now, those comments didn't directly refer to any overheating, instead talking about yields, which typically entails the number of functional chips that can be harvested from a larger wafer containing many GPU dies.

So, those flaws could be completely separate from whatever is causing the alleged overheating. Or they could be related on some level.

Indeed, overheating Blackwell GPU stories have been circulating since last November, with The Information reporting that Nvidia liquid-cooled racks containing 72 Blackwell GPUs had been redesigned several times in an attempt to solve the issue.

Whatever, what we can say for sure is that there's no reason to assume that any issues with Nvidia's AI GPUs will translate into problems for its new RTX 50 family of gaming chips just announced at CES.

Yes, those too are based on the Blackwell architecture and indeed built on the same TSMC N4 silicon. However, in terms of actual layout and also the number and balance of functional units, the gaming chips are totally different.

Admittedly, it's possible there's a problem, say, with the design of Blackwell's Tensor cores that might also map to the gaming GPUs. But the odds of that are probably pretty slim. Moreover, the workloads and software that runs on a gaming chip is completely different to training or inferencing an AI model.

It's also worth noting that it's the same source, namely The Information, pushing this overheating narrative again. Some wider confirmation would add weight to the story. Still, by Nvidia's own account, there have been problems with Blackwell.

We'll know soon enough just how fast and indeed how hot Nvidia's new RTX 50 gaming GPUs really. Watch this space for our full reviews.

Netflix's next animated venture into the world of The Witcher has just got a new debut trailer, and this time, Geralt is all grown up and back to his normal witcher antics of fighting monsters and trying to talk sense into bloodthirsty and fearful humans.

The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep is based on the short story A Little Sacrifice by The Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski. It sees Geralt and Dandelion travel to the port town of Bremervoord after a local prince, Agloval, hires them to help woo a mermaid, Sh'eenaz. Needless to say, the story goes awry once both lovers realise neither of them wants to give up their current comfy lifestyle to go live with the other, and a war almost breaks out between the two kingdoms.

We've already seen a couple of teaser trailers for Sirens of the Deep. But these have only confirmed what story it would follow, as well as the fact that Doug Cockle, the original voice of Geralt from The Witcher games, and not Henry Cavill, will be voicing Geralt in this upcoming film. But now, thanks to the release of the official debut trailer, we get to see even more about what this adventure will entail.

The best part of the trailer is all the new shots of the merfolk and the monsters that live under the water. There's giant four-legged fish, a whole battalion of armed warriors, and even a Kraken that makes a small guest appearance towards the end. The fights look as epic as always, and it'll be fun to see how Geralt manages to take on a bunch of mermaids and sea creatures while treading water out at sea.

But Sirens of the Deep isn't just about action and bloody monster fights, it also sees Geralt find another potential love interest: Essi, who we get to see more of in this new trailer. After venturing to Bremervoord to avoid running into Yennefer and all the complications that would bring, Geralt meets Essi while trying to hunt down the merfolk responsible for attacking some pearl divers. While she instantly falls for him, Geralt finds it harder to reciprocate her feelings. It's a bit of a messy will-they-won't-they, and while the outcome isn't very surprising, it's still a moving story and one that is really meaningful to Geralt's progression with Yennefer.

I'm quietly excited for Sirens of the Deep, especially after Nightmare of the Wolf. This animated Witcher film is still one of my favourites on Netflix and one that I even go back to every now and then just so I can witness all the magnificent sword fights, beautiful chaos magic, and young Vesemir. If the fights in Sirens of the Deep come anywhere close to being as good as the ones in Nightmare of the Wolf, I'll be very happy.

To add a little detail and context, the NFTs were linked to 19cm by 19cm plots on the courts at the Australian Open in Melbourne. At the time, Tennis Australia reportedly promised to update the metadata on the NFTs whenever a winning shot during a match landed on a given the plot.

What's more, Tennis Australia pitched the whole thing as being akin to an airline frequent flyers program, offering ground passes for finals weeks for NFT owners, so-called behind the scenes access along with tickets to matches the following year if their NFT court plot was linked to a match point. Oh, and a Discord channel for NFT owners was set up.

In 2023, Tennis Australia released a further 2,545 NFTs, again digitally depicting Australian Open tennis balls and linked to court plots, despite controversy springing from the perception of volatile cryptocurrency markets. When you add the two tranches of NFTs together, they sold for around $3 million AUD. Nice work if you can get it.

At the time, Ridley Plummer, senior manager of metaverse, NFTs, web3 and cryptocurrency at Tennis Australia, said the organization was commited to NFTs for the long term.

“We shouldn’t just put down our tools and walk away because the market’s having its challenges. There’s obviously a ton of external factors that come into play when you’re exploring a new technology like web3 and NFTs, and when you’re an innovative company like Tennis Australia and the AO there’s obviously challenges and and rewards that come with that as well,” Plummer said.

In 2024, it's thought Tennis Australia did not issue any further NFTs, though existing owners were given ground passes. For this year's tournament, currently running in Melbourne, it seems that the Australian Open isn't mentioning the NFT scheme at all or offering ground passes. The Guardian says that the Discord server has been shut down, the associated websites are "dormant" and that Tennis Australia isn't responding to "multiple requests for comment."

Thus it does rather seem that Tennis Australia and the Australian Open would rather the whole thing just disappeared. All we can say is that it doesn't seem surprising that something of little apparent value has indeed turned out to have little actual value, though in the interest of full transparency, this author doesn't get NFTs. At all.

There are about a dozen reasons you can cite as to why this was the case, but one that appears to be a reoccurring theme between former developers is the studio—or, rather, the studio's head honcho, Todd Howard—suffering from success. So sayeth Dennis Mejillones, a character artist who worked at Bethesda for over 12 years, including work on Starfield itself, during an interview with Kiwi Talkz.

While the comparison in the headline might not seem flattering at first blush, In the interest of fairness I want to highlight that Meijilones is, broadly speaking, very positive on his relationship with Howard: "I love Todd, I do. He's one of the greatest influences on my life … This man has been a mentor, a guide, he's been patient with me. So a lot of what I am, he's helped shape that.

"Is he perfect? No, does he call all the shots perfectly? No." Meijilones recounts a couple of times where he disagreed with Howard on key issues, and while he says he felt comfortable bringing them up if he "felt strongly", he does admit that "a lot of people were afraid to say no to Todd, and I think that hurt him."

Here's where the George Lucas comparison comes in. "It's like George Lucas—George Lucas, I think, is a genius. I think geniuses come up with terrible ideas, too, they're not gonna be hits. But if you don't have somebody to help you filter through these things, and give you an honest assessment, because they're afraid to tell you what they really think, it actually does hurt you."

For context, one often-cited reason for why the original Star Wars movies are considered space opera classics, while the prequels are considered, uh, not that, is that Lucas was given more and more direct power over them as time went on. For example, episodes four to six were extensively edited by his then-wife Marcia Lucas, who divorced George Lucas after episode six's release, and had little part in the following films.

Mind, George Lucas is sometimes described as stubborn—just ask, well, George Lucas, who said "I’m a stubborn guy and I didn’t want people to tell me how to make my movies." Whereas Howard, if the developers working under him are to be believed, is more a victim of circumstance. Back in October 2023, former lead designer on Skyrim Bruce Nesmith said that "he has tried really really hard to not be the 'last say' guy, [but] it hasn't worked out that way. That's not something he wants intellectually, I think it ends up being that way because he's somebody who has opinions and whose opinions are valuable."

Another interesting parallel here is how Meijilones says: "One of the reasons I kind of 'retired' is—I was like, I miss Todd, I miss working with him, he's running this big business [that] grew tremendously … His attention was very scattered. Some of the people who took his place, they're not Todd, it takes a lot to be Todd."

Nesmith also mirrored this back in October 2023, where he stated: "when you're running six different studios and you've got a dozen projects—although usually only one really big one—going on at a time, you know, he's only one man, he doesn't have the facetime to do that anymore!"

All of this paints the picture of a former auteur designer struggling to adjust to a studio ballooning in size and scope. Not that it's all been bad, mind. Bethesda's Indiana Jones game has been a downright smashing success, with our own Ted Litchfield scoring it a 86 in his Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review. PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon also chose it for his personal Game of the Year pick back in December. When it comes to RPGs, though? If Starfield's the future, then it looks like Bethesda has some work to do informing its employees that you can, in fact, disagree with your boss.

Innocn 49Q1R | 49-inch | 5120 x 1440p | 144 Hz | OLED | 1800R curved | $999.99 $799.99 at Amazon (save $200)
Though the sale on Amazon says this monitor retails for $999.99, Innocn's site says it retails at $1,199.99, so you might actually be getting an even better deal than we thought. Either way, getting an OLED 1440p 49-inch ultrawide monitor for this much is super solid, and it's pretty much the best deal on a monitor at this price point.

Price check: Innocn $999.99View Deal

I've been pining after a really nice second monitor to replace a pretty mediocre one for about a month but part of me thinks I may just be better off with one huge curved screen to rule them all do my daily work and gaming on. With over $200 off, Innocn might just have the best-priced choice out of its price range.

Over at Amazon right now, you can get the Innocn 49Q1R for $800, which is $200 cheaper than its retail price of $1,000. It has many standout features so let's start at the top of the list. This thing has an OLED panel capable of 5120 x 1440 resolution. OLED screens provide their own backlight, as opposed to LED, which makes them a more expensive bit of tech but also gives deeper blacks and a sharper contrast between colors.

This, paired with the panel being 5120 x 1440p means it should look crisp and sharp. With a refresh rate of 144 Hz and a super-fast 0.03 ms response time, it should also be plenty snappy for gaming.

The 1800R curvature of the screen will help the whole screen feel a bit more immersive, which combines with the major selling point: Ultrawide monitor allows you to cram more things on screen which is not only great for productivity but gives a new dimension to games you play. RPGs with strategy elements Like Baldur's Gate 3 and 4X games like Civilization 6 work particularly well, as they give you more information to look at, but so do first-person shooters like Cyberpunk2077.

The one major thing you have to watch out for with ultrawides is some games (especially older ones) don't always support the unique aspect ratio. There are programs like Flawless Widescreen, which are designed to run older titles, but it's still something you have to consider in a monitor like this.

Though we haven't tested this specific monitor, Dave's Innocn 40C1R Ultrawide review rates the value of its panel, as well as the big screen, and Type-C input. It needed a little customizing out of the box to get the best picture and has "questionable chassis quality" but otherwise looks great.

At 250 nits of brightness, this screen won't be hugely bright but will perform adequately in most forms of lighting. Maybe you'll have a bit of trouble with it facing a window on a sunny day but I can't think of any reasonable reason to do so.

If you don't care about your monitor being ultrawide or curved, you can get a good deal on a 4K monitor in the Gigabyte M28U at just $400 but you pay more for the two former attributes and may not even have the rig to really justify a 4K panel. Ultimately, though the price of this Innocn is solid, it's still enthusiast pricing and worth noting before you buy.

However, if this sounds like your thing, and you're looking for a real wide boy to slap on your desk, this maximises price to quality to a degree that is worth paying attention to. I've been thinking of making the switch and this price point is mighty tempting. I can finally fit the entire Baldur's Gate 3 party on a single screen.

Pierre-Loup Griffais is one of the Valve developers dedicated to SteamOS, and told French site Frandroid "we’ve come a long way behind the scenes”. He's been working on the project since its very beginnings, and says the focus at the moment is on compatibility: "All of this work is broadly applicable to the PC platform, and it’s going to continue to expand over time. Supporting multiple platforms, multiple chipsets, controllers for different machines that are out there and even ones that aren’t out yet."

Griffais acknowledges that the support on some platforms is still "very basic" but that, for example, it has four developers currently working on the NVIDIA open source driver: "It’s just that there’s a lot of work to do... But the beauty of this open source model is that a lot of the elements that we’ve put in place or that have been put in place by other players in the community are shared. A lot of work has already been done, and everyone is developing the same code base. It’s a pretty unique model.”

The flipside of this is that Valve can also take advantage of some open source elements itself: "We're not too interested in inventing our own sauce," says Griffais. "If something is already done and meets our standards of performance and functionality, we use it."

Valve's goal with the OS is to have it compatible with traditional PCs, laptops, portable consoles and any other formats. The open nature of it inevitably brings to mind Windows, the world's most popular operating system and a closed one: Gabe Newell once infamously described Windows 8 as a "catastrophe" for the PC ecosystem. But Griffais says they're not out to pick a fight with Redmond.

"I don't think the goal is to have a certain market share, or to push users away from Windows," says Griffais. "If a user has a good experience on Windows, there's no problem. I think it's interesting to develop a system that has different goals and priorities, and if it becomes a good alternative for a typical desktop user, that's great. It gives them choice. But it's not a goal in itself to convert users who already have a good experience."

Griffais says there's "not really" a roadmap for SteamOS's future, and comes out with one of those Valve lines: "It's when we have the time and we get there."

Following the success of Steam Deck, is there any chance we might see a comeback for Steam Machines? "Right now, we're focused on handhelds," says Griffais. "But as our work expands our ability to work on other platforms and have a good experience in different form factors... We've already done a lot to make these consoles connectable to screens, connectable to a controller… We're not there yet to give priority to a Steam Machine. But in collaboration or internally, it's an open door to the future."

It's easy to understate what an unusual project SteamOS is. It represents over a dozen years of work from some of the industry's finest, is funded by a private company, yet is open source and free for everyone to use. "I'm pretty happy that we've managed to find a balance that's beneficial to everyone, while still being able to help this PC ecosystem in this way," says Griffais. "I'm really happy about that."

This patch will mean players can now attempt endgame bosses more than once, and will ensure there are less deadly explosions that seemingly kill you out of nowhere. All of those things will be welcomed by players, but the biggest complaint remains the fact that you get one chance at endgame maps.

This element of Path of Exile 2 is unforgiving: Die and you're booted out of the map, losing XP and any loot drops you haven't yet grabbed. And while you can restart the map on the Atlas, you'll need a new waystone to enter it, and you'll lose any modifiers that it originally contained. In some ways that makes sense for a game of this nature, a genuinely high stakes looting challenge where it can all go wrong in an instant. But some just don't like sinking hours of time into something and losing it all like that.

"We did discuss quite a lot about whether we wanted to go back on one portal or not," says Rogers during an interview with streamers Darth Microtransaction and GhazzyTV discussing the patch. "I think it comes down to the fact that it would just not feel the same. The whole 'death actually mattering' thing is actually important.

"We were talking about the pinnacle boss and the discussion came up 'should we allow portals everywhere, should we be allowing checkpoints everywhere' and we ultimately decided we really don't want to go that way if possible. So first of all we try out this pinnacle stuff, make sure it's something where you have true economic value you have to preserve: It takes time to get there and that matters."

Rogers says that for the game to work "you have to have some level of failure being possible" and if players were allowed multiple opportunities you simply don't "fail in the same way… I'm not really a fan, I much prefer the whole 'one death' thing."

As for the XP penalty and whether that's too harsh, "part of the thinking around that is that it's keeping you in the place where you're supposed to be, as in if you're dying all the time then you're probably not ready to keep going up the power curve," says Rogers. "But maybe that's the wrong way of looking at it."

With all that said, GGG's Mark Roberts acknowledges that the endgame right now is not quite hitting that sweet spot of risk and reward the studio wants. “Right now there are too many penalty axes," says Roberts (thanks, Polygon), "so if you're dying all the time, you're not gonna get materials, and thus you're not going to go anywhere… and also an 'add insult to injury' thing [with the XP] where you're just not levelling.

"I think they’re just a bit too severe when all combined together, and I also think that the very start of maps is just too difficult, I think we should ease into that a little bit, bring that down a bit then ramp the difficulty up." Roberts says the rare monsters and the unusual combinations mean players are constantly having to adjust their tactics and the number of different combinations mean "there's nothing to really take from one map to another."

The devs say they're going to be watching how the new patch plays out and focus any bigger changes on the game's next league (season), which will come with more substantial changes. But it sounds like the "one death" principle is here to stay.

"It would be nice if you could just spin another map and still be able to do that content," says Rogers. "But unfortunately we can't do that because it would open up too many economic abuse things, where like you fail the map intentionally because you want to farm the items in the rest of the area. So it's very difficult for us to come up with a solution because I really would prefer that, honestly, if you could re-do a map without having all the problems that being able to re-run a map would actually cause."

"I personally want to keep the one portal and adjust the other axes and see how it plays out," ends Roberts, "before compromising on the one portal. But yeah, it's a bit tricky, it certainly is the case we've discussed it so many times before [PoE2] came out we knew 'people are definitely gonna complain about this' and we know and we haven't found a solution."

Still, that's small change compared to the onslaught of players during its launch. Palworld rose into viral stardom to the tune of 2 million concurrent players in January 2024—which is huge, with other games, such as Helldivers 2, buckling under comparatively smaller weights. In a recent interview with Polygon, John 'Bucky' Buckley, the game's community manager, paints a picture of panic at the studio.

The initial rumblings started at around 100,000 players, Buckley states, when "a couple of the developers had to go back to their desks because things started to get a bit shaky … Throughout the night it kept going. And there was a point, definitely after midnight (because a few of us had gone home who lived far away) that the servers broke. That was around a million."

You can actually see that meteoric climb if you consult the SteamDB charts—on Friday, January 19, Palworld was already gaining momentum with around 370,000 concurrents. Over the weekend, this shot up to 1.5 million. "All of our multiplayer capabilities started getting weird, going down and crashing. It was a lot of intense lag, but Epic was amazing. They super quickly allocated more resources to us and they helped out."

Buckley also adds that, at the time, there was just one guy defending the servers against this horde of newcomers. Buckley remarks that "he was trying his best." As for the rest of the team, he says "we definitely panicked more than we should have. Didn’t need to pull as many all-nighters as we did. And I wish I'd reached out to other people for advice sooner.

"You get caught up in it, especially when there’s a wind of negative sentiment from players, even if it’s 100% valid and they’re right. It’s very overwhelming when the comments are flooding in."

Despite my assertions that Palworld was just okay back in January—ones that, I realise, make me a small gust in that wind—I am rooting for it overall, especially since Nintendo has turned its gaze towards Pocketpair. I don't have to be a big Pal-head to consider the company's litigious behaviour as, well, troubling for videogames as a whole.

In an interview with website Chips and Cheese, AMD Senior Fellow Mahesh Subramony revealed some new details about Strix Halo's inner workings. Subramony says AMD "took four iterations" to get Strix Halo right.

That's perhaps not a huge surprise, given Strix Halo had been rumoured for some time and arrived a little later than initial expectations. What is news is that Strix Halo's CPU CCD dies might not be exactly what you expected.

When the APU was first revealed, it looked like AMD had taken a pair of its eight-core Zen 5 CPU CCD dies and crammed them into a package with a new I/O die contain that huge (for an APU) 40 CU iGPU.

Well, that's not the case. Strix Halo has its very own CPU CCDs. They're still Zen 5 based, but AMD has tweaked the CCDs to suit Strix Halo's mobile remit.

For starters, they have a new interconnect. Subramony says the existing interconnect AMD uses between the CCDs in its desktop Zen 5 chips like the Ryzen 9 9950X is fast but has limitations when it comes to power efficiency involving the range of power states that were supported.

The new interconnect for Strix Halo is said to be better in every way. "Low power, same high bandwidth, 32 bytes per cycle in both directions, lower latency," Subramony explains. He also says that switching power states is now "almost instant".

The downside? It's a little more expensive to fabricate than the desktop interconnect. However, Subramony also says that Strix Halo is a full-feature Zen 5 implementation, including the 512-bit FPU.

"I almost joke about it saying it's a Threadripper to put in the palm of your hands. So we didn't pull any punches. These have the 512 bit data path. It is a full desktop architecture," he says.

The only exception to that is clockspeed. "We have binned the parts for efficiency. So it might not hit the peak frequency that you would see on the desktop," Subramony explains.

He also says that the 32 MB of Infinity cache on the GPU die currently can't be directly accessed by the CPU, it's for the GPU, though that might change in future. "We change that with a flip of a bit but we don't see an application right now where we need to amplify CPU bandwidth," he says.

There are further details about Strix Halo's inner workings in the interview. But suffice to say that what was already one of the most interesting chips in recent years just got a bit more intriguing.

The effort AMD has clearly put into Strix Halo also bodes well for its performance an battery life. If anything, it was the latter that was the greatest unknown with Strix Halo. Could AMD really cram 16 Zen 5 cores and a huge GPU into a power-efficient package?

I was doubtful, for sure. But after learning more about the technology AMD has put into Strix Halo, I can't wait to see just how good AMD's uber APU really is.

Exo Labs, an outfit with the mission statement of democratising access to AI, such as large language models, has lifted the lid on its latest project: a modified version of Meta's Llama 2 running on a Windows 98 Pentium II machine (via Hackaday). Though not the latest Llama model, it's no less head-turning—even for me, a frequent AI-naysayer.

To be fair, when it comes to big tech's hold over AI, Exo Labs and I seem to be of a similarly wary mind. So, setting aside my own AI-scepticism for the moment, this is undoubtedly an impressive project chiefly because it doesn't rely on a power-hungry, very much environmentally-unfriendly middleman datacenter to run.

The journey to Llama running on ancient-though-local hardware enjoys some twists and turns; after securing the second hand machine, Exo Labs had to contend with finding compatible PS/2 peripherals, and then figure out how they'd even transfer the necessary files onto the decades-old machine. Did you know FTP over an ethernet cable was backwards compatible to this degree? I certainly didn't!

Don't be fooled though—I'm making it sound way easier than it was. Even before FTP finagling was figured out, Exo Labs had to find a way to compile modern code for a pre-Pentium Pro machine. Longer story short-ish, the team went with Borland C++ 5.02, a "26-year-old [integrated development environment] and compiler that ran directly on Windows 98." However, compatibility issues persisted with the programming language C++, so the team had to use the older incarnation of C and deal with declaring variables at the start of every function. Oof.

Then, there's the hardware at the heart of this project. For those needing a refresher, the Pentium II machine sports an itty bitty 128 MB of RAM, while a full size Llama 2 LLM boasts 70 billion parameters. Managing all of these hefty constraints, the results are even more interesting.

Unsurprisingly, Exo Labs had to craft a comparatively svelte version of Llama for this project, now available to tool around with yourself via GitHub. As a result of everything aforementioned, the retrofitted LLM features 1 billion parameters and spits out 0.0093 Tokens per second—hardly blistering, but the headline take here really is that it works at all.

For me, today's Wordle was a fantastic demonstration of just how easy it is to get so close to the answer and then wander off for a bit. Now I know what I was supposed to find, it's almost embarrassing to see the way I expertly dodged the right word for two whole rows. Better late than never, right?

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Tuesday, January 14

Anything unusually elaborate or heavily decorated could be this. A flight of today's answer is an imaginative, but silly, idea. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is not a double letter in today's puzzle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Looking to extend your Wordle winning streak? Perhaps you've just started playing the popular daily puzzle game and are looking for some pointers. Whatever the reason you're here, these quick tips can help push you in the right direction: 

• Start with a word that has a mix of common vowels and consonants. 
• The answer might repeat the same letter.
• Try not to use guesses that include letters you've already eliminated. 

There's no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don't need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Here's your winning word. The answer to the January 14 (1305) Wordle is FANCY.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Wordle solutions that have already been used can help eliminate answers for today's Wordle or give you inspiration for guesses to help uncover more of those greens. They can also give you some inspired ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• January 13: CLOAK
• January 12: TOTAL
• January 11: DINGY
• January 10: CRAWL
• January 9: WAFER
• January 8: DRAFT
• January 7: ATLAS
• January 6: SPRIG
• January 5: CYBER
• January 4: RELAX

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and it's up to you to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the popular daily puzzle.

It's usually a good plan to start with a strong word like ALERT—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels—and you should be off to a flying start, with a little luck anyway. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don't waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you'll see which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don't forget to leave out any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don't forget letters can repeat too (eg: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

That was not the case with Reddit user ciaranxy's lengthy post on the Marvel Rivals subreddit called "Everything You Need to Know About Marvel Rivals' Secret Quickplay Bots." They were not crying bot, but laying out the results of over a week of testing. ciaranxy determined that Rivals is more than happy to throw losing players a bone by giving them some easy bots to stomp on, but only under certain conditions:

• Bots only appear in Quickplay not Competitive
• After two consecutive losses, your chances of being put into a bot lobby in Quickplay are very high.
• If put into a bot lobby, it will be 4 human teammates + 2 bot teammates vs. 6 bot opponents.
• You will be penalized for leaving these bot lobbies.
• All bots are Account Level 1.
• All bot profiles have "restricted access" (as opposed to "limited access" for human profiles).

Invisible Woman Hidden OP New Tech Discovered from r/marvelrivals

It's those guidelines that got me curious. I've seen enough questionable clips of "human" Rivals players online to suspect NetEase is throwing bots into the mix sometimes, but is it really serving up entire bot lobbies to boost engagement? If all it takes is going on a losing streak, I could just try it for myself.

So I played a few normal matches, making sure to watch enemy and team behavior for anything sus. After every game I checked my match history and viewed every player's career profile to check against ciaranxy's description of bots: Most real profiles were public, some had set their privacy set to Limited, and none were Restricted. Checking account level was a bit trickier. Public profiles show the number, but if I wanted a peek at a private account level, I had to get killed by them and check their nametag on the killcam. All accounts I saw were past level one.

Despite being pretty ass at Rivals, I was having trouble going on a losing streak, so I did the only thing I could do to sabotage our team while still trying to win: Play my first three matches as Spider-Man. I went one match with only a single kill, a couple of teammates politely asked me to switch off Duelist (sorry, can't), and a Rocket Racoon player rubbed it in my face when they successfully 1v1'ed me three times.

It was a bloodbath, but the job got done. I lost two matches in a row. After the third match, another loss, I examined the lobby. Still no bots, but ciaranxy did say it can take more than two losses. So I jumped into one more match, and I could quickly smell something funky going on:

🚩 For the first time today, there were no console players on the enemy team
🚩 Their account names were generic or cheesy, like "DieForMe" or "LanettMa"
🚩 I was actually getting kills as Spider-Man (should've been all the evidence needed, really)
🚩 I watched every killcam and noticed four accounts were level one (I never saw the other two)
🚩 After we won, I clicked on their profiles to find all six marked "Restricted"

It was exactly as ciaranxy described. Two bots on my team and six on the other. I'd lost three times in a row against confirmed real players, and then suddenly got nothing but bots. Their playstyles reminded me of the fill-in bot teammates you get in Counter-Strike: impossibly aware, but really bad at finishing a kill. One time the Reed Richards bot (who again, is supposed to be a level one player trying Rivals for the first time) had such an impressive command of his abilities that he yanked me out of the sky mid-Spidey swing. He then proceeded to barely attack.

This sucks no matter which way you slice it. This is bad for the community, who now have to deal with NetEase misleading them with bogus wins. It's bad for the competitive integrity of Rivals, whose default mode of play regularly serves invalid matches. It's even bad for the average player, who might take the wrong lessons out of a bot match they believed was real (though I wager NetEase only does this because its data says bot matches keep folks playing longer).

And fundamentally, it sucks that the goal of this seemingly intentional measure is to lie to us—to insult our intelligence by trying to pass off an obviously phony product as legitimate in the hopes that we don't notice the bots every time, take the victory at face value, and stay glued to Rivals just a bit longer. The live service "package" surrounding the 6v6 shooter that is Marvel Rivals is already one massive, multi-layered engagement trap. Can't this one aspect of Rivals, the core competition, just be pure?

PC Gamer has reached out to NetEase for comment and will update this story if a response arrives.

Since then, however, we've heard less and less about Ark 2. The sequel to Ark: Survival Evolved was originally announced with a 2023 release date, which was scuttled and then re-announced for the end of 2024. But as 2024 ended, Ark 2 wasn't released. There wasn't any explanation about another delay from Studio Wildcard (at least none I've seen), no announcement in the official Discord, and no revised release date.

Delays are nothing weird, but not announcing or explaining a delay is unusual, especially for a game that not only starred Vin Diesel but involved him on the development side of things: If you recall, Diesel was named Studio Wildcard's "President of Creative Convergence" as well as executive producer of the dino-sequel.

Which doesn't mean Studio Wildcard hasn't been busy. Ark: Survival Ascended, a remaster of Ark: Survival Evolved, was launched into early access in 2023, right about the time Ark 2 was delayed until 2024. That remaster is still going full speed ahead: while there hasn't been word about Ark 2, Studio Wildcard has unveiled a roadmap that takes us to the deep end of 2026. Some of that involves Lost Colony, an expansion for Ark: Survival Ascended. (It's worth noting that the remaster was supposed to leave early access at the end of 2024, so it also missed its date.)

The roadmap includes an update to Unreal Engine 5.5, new creatures like bison, and a remaster of the Ragnarok map, which will be free, in March and April. In June, a new premium map will arrive, and in August, the free remaster of the Valguero map. The following year, Ark: Survival Ascended will get more remastered content like Genesis and Bob's True Tales in April and August 2026, plus the remastered Fjordur map in December 2026.

That's a big, long look ahead for Ark: Survival Ascended. As for when we'll see Vin Diesel riding a dinosaur, we'll let you know if we hear anything. You can check out the roadmap for yourself here.

Free Our Feed opens with a strong denouncement of Facebook and X in their current forms, calling Mark Zuckerberg's recent moves to ditch fact checkers and ease up on restrictions on hate speech "going full Musk."

The open letter picks up the mission statement from there. "We are determined to free social media from billionaire control," it states. "We know it will take three things: community, capital, control. And for the first time ever there is a pathway to secure the future of social media in the public interest. The Bluesky team has built an incredible foundation for this vision of social media that gives power and choice back to people through individual control and customization, sparking creativity and bringing joy back into connecting online.

"However, they remain a commercial company, and despite their best intentions they will come under the same pressures all businesses face: to maximise return to their investors. We know that to ultimately build out a social network ecosystem that will remain free from venture capital and billionaire capture it will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars—and much like when we first started towns, we made the first roads, and over time we built out a network, all operating as part of a social contract where people get to the share the benefits of access to those roads."

The roads in the letter's analogy are the AT Protocol, the open source infrastructure that powers Bluesky and could theoretically be used to build a new wave of interconnected social platforms, offering non-corporate alternatives to the likes of Facebook and Linkedin. Free Our Feeds' goal is to create a "public interest foundation that will work to support making Bluesky's underlying tech fully resistant to billionaire capture." That will involve offering funds to developers to build "a wealth of social applications on top of open protocols to make social media a healthier and happier place."

The open letter's references to Bluesky's creators eventually falling victim to the whims of venture capital may sound like a dig—and there's ample mistrust online around Bluesky thanks to its former connection to Jack Dorsey and investment from a company called Blockchain Capital—but it's actually in-line with Bluesky's mission statement since the beginning.

"One of Bluesky's mottos is 'the company is a future adversary,'" explained Bluesky developer Emily Liu in 2023. In recent months CEO Jay Graber has also called the social network's open source design "billionaire-proof," and endorsed Free Our Feeds on Monday.

The Free Our Feeds website says the foundation should be "up and running by the end of 2025," but it's already collecting donations via a GoFundMe, with a goal of $4 million "to create the foundation and get critical infrastructure up and running."

When Rebel Wolves teased its first project back in 2022, PC Gamer's Rich Stanton said it gave him "strong vampire vibes." When the studio revealed the game's title and some new concept art in 2024, I said it gave me "very strong vampire vibes." Today we got a look at Dawnwalker's debut cinematic trailer, and it pleases me greatly to say, we were right.

The Blood of Dawnwalker, as the game is now called, is set in 14th century Europe, amidst relentless warfare and the Black Death—not a great time for humanity. Sensing opportunity, the vampires make their move to take over, leading other "creatures of the night" to do the same. One of those creatures is you, a young man named Coen who's been turned into a Dawnwalker, but who may not be ready to fully embrace the lifestyle.

"Fight for your humanity or embrace the cursed powers to save your family," the website at dawnwalkergame.com says. "Whatever your choice, the question stands: is your soul worth the lives of those you love?"

Ah, but that doesn't necessarily mean all vampires are all bad: "Face your foes—be they human, monster, or the ticking clock itself. But remember—the real evil may bask in the sun's light, and the most loyal of allies could lurk under the cover of night."

Rebel Wolves is headed up by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, who previously served as game director on The Witcher 3 and head of production on Cyberpunk 2077—and before that, as lead quest designer on The Witcher 2 and story designer on The Witcher. That background really shows through in this cinematic, which could very easily be a Witcher trailer; Coen himself appears to be essentially a young Geralt, granted great powers through unpleasant supernatural rituals that robbed him of much of his humanity—or, maybe not!

The implied moral ambiguity—evil in the daylight, friends in the darkness—is obviously not unique to The Witcher but certainly a central part of it: One of Geralt's best friends, recall, is a higher vampire who wouldn't be at all out of place munching on the poor soldiers in this video. Even the line "the world needs what it fears" is a knockoff of Andrzej Sapkowski's fantasy stories, set in a realm that needs witchers but sure doesn't like 'em.

But even if The Blood of Dawnwalker doesn't look like it's going to set new standards for original ideas, I dig the concept and I'm eager to learn more about how it's actually going to play. For that, however, we'll have to wait: Rebel Wolves said in a reveal livestream today that a gameplay reveal will happen sometime this summer.

Each faction has five cards that can be played across all the classes of that faction, along with three class-specific cards per class, and of course one Legendary Hero card to serve as leader. The Zerg, led by Sarah Kerrigan, have the Death Knight, Demon Hunter, Hunter, and Warlock classes, and excel at generating minions to overwhelm enemies.

Artanis leads the Protoss, who claim the Druid, Mage, Priest, and Rogue classes, and specialize in powerful, high-cost cards.

Jim Raynor heads up the Terran forces, made up of Paladin, Shaman, and Warrior classes, with special "Starship synergies" that enable them to launch multiple Starships each game.

Blizzard actually revealed that this crossover was incoming back in November 2024, but now we've got a first look at the cards. As expected, the Zerg look to be a brutally efficient board swarm archetype. The Zergling minion will also benefit hard from hand buffing effects. Meanwhile, Protoss is the Mana cheat—no surprise it contains the Druid and Rogue classes—with an emphasis on playing expensive minions that pack a big punch. Finally, Terrans are the all-rounders, with a Mech theme for flavour and new Starship cards to play with.

Blizzard also announced a release date and pricing: Heroes of StarCraft will launch on January 21, and will be available for $20 or 2,500 gold—or if you're the mood to drop some big bucks, you can snag an All-Golden version of the Mini-Set for $80 or 12,000 gold. Full details are up at hearthstone.blizzard.com.

And here's a closer look at that zerg card art from up above. Quite the looker, eh?

I already have several active quests in this high-flying city builder from developer Wandering Band: I need to eradicate an island of pirates, deliver food to several friendly outposts, and help a scientist identify sea creatures. But I'll be honest: my real quest, my personal quest in Airborne Empire, is to balance my city so it's 100% level.

You can join me in obsessing over how level your own city is: Airborne Empire launched into early access on Steam today. It's the sequel to 2022's Airborne Kingdom, but there's a much, much bigger world to explore and now there's combat to consider, too: the realm is full of enemy airplanes, ground-based bandit colonies, and other hostile flying structures. Somehow, the game still pulls off a mostly chill and cozy vibe—except when something goes wrong and my flying city starts plummeting toward the ground.

The placement of new buildings is important in most city builders, but in Airborne Empire it's especially critical because you need to distribute weight evenly. If your city leans too much to one side, citizens will become unhappy (understandable, it makes me unhappy too) and if the tilt gets too pronounced they'll abandon you by walking to the edge of your city, hopping off, and parachuting to the ground (sad to watch, but also kind of adorable).

There's also lift to consider. Carefully consider. You know in an urban city builder when you plop down some new structure and suddenly the power goes out because you're now using more electricity than you produce? Imagine that, except your city is flying, and suddenly it weighs more than the lift you're producing. You haven't experienced panic until you've ordered your citizens to quickly construct a new fan or balloon to keep your city in the air while it's in freefall.

So, how do your citizens gather resources like wood, coal, and food while you're cruising around hundreds of feet above the places these things appear? With little bitty airplanes, of course. Build airplane hangars and you can dispatch pilots to the ground to do some gathering.

Later on, once sky pirates become a problem, you can weaponize your planes for battle, along with other combat options like auto-firing defensive towers, cannons you can use for manual bombardment of ground targets, and other weapons like flamethrowers and tesla coils.

I'm only a few hours in but Airborne Empire has been a solid challenge for my balancing skills: and not just literally balancing my city so it's not flying around lopsided. There are also lots of elements to consider when it comes to progression. What would benefit me most? More efficient engines so I burn less coal to stay airborne? More powerful propellers so I can fly across the world more swiftly? Better defenses to keep the pirates at bay?

Every time I have to choose a new research goal it takes a ton of thought, and that's a great sign for a new city builder. You'll find Airborne Empire on Steam, where it's 10% off for the next two weeks.

In Path of Exile 2, hardcore characters only last until their first death, at which point they're booted into the pool of standard characters. If those characters are ranked highly enough on the global hardcore ladder, a leaderboard tracking the total experience earned by the top 1000 hardcore characters, their deaths are announced in-game to all players. Percy_Verence's moment of death was captured in a screenshot by redditor JRoyales. At time of death, the level 97 Invoker had been Rank 7 on the ladder.

Elon just died at rank 7 from r/PathOfExile2

As a fun coincidence, JRoyale also captured the automated, in-chat captions the game provides for character combat barks. In this case, in Percy_Verence's final moments, JRoyale's warrior happened to be yelling "Weakling!" and "Meet your maker!" Happy accidents.

Musk first revealed the existence of Percy_Verence on January 5 via his alternate X account, @cyb3rgam3r420, so named because the weed number is funny. At the time, the character was already level 87, which was enough to earn it a placement on the PoE 2 hardcore ladder. Considering the difficulty of getting a hardcore character unscathed to higher levels—that was quite the achievement.

After Musk livestreamed an hour and a half of gameplay with the character on January 7, however, PoE 2 players were convinced the achievement belonged to someone else. During the stream, Musk seemed unfamiliar with basic components of how the game works as he repeatedly tried to enter inaccessible map nodes, neglected to collect valuable items, failed to notice his empty mana gauge for prolonged periods, and demonstrated a basic misunderstanding of PoE 2 itemization by calling his set of immaculate gear low level.

As an illustration of how cutthroat the competition is for top-tier placement on the hardcore ladder, in the three days since Percy_Verence's death, the character's experience tally has already fallen from Rank 7 to Rank 13 as other high-level PoE 2 players race to outlevel each other. For experienced PoE players, the gameplay Musk showed during his stream seemed insufficient by orders of magnitude for the execution demands of hardcore ladder placement, leading many convinced that Musk was taking credit for a character that someone else had leveled.

You could also be forgiven for thinking that the stash tab named "Elon's map" seemed like a red flag.

Unsurprisingly, the death of Percy_Verence was met with a chorus of jeers and widespread gravedancing. "Clearly it's his level 52 gloves that held him back," one redditor said, referencing Musk's assessment that his gear—including his unique, build-defining, best in slot gloves—"could be better."

"Probably got triggered by all the laughing and actually tried to play the character for 5 mins," said Tateybread, another reddit user. "F. He can just buy another one."

First things first, we do know a little bit about Larian's next project, which are actually projects, plural—the studio apparently has two things on the go simultaneously—neither of which are a new Baldur's Gate, or D&D in general. Larian boss Swen Vincke has previously promised they'll be "big," which will come as no surprise if you've played any Larian game ever, and some of the studio's "best work ever," which is setting the bar very high. One of those projects even has a known codename, Excalibur, and a cryptic warning that "it's not what you think." Although it is an RPG, which you probably were thinking, so make of it what you will.

Anyway, while all this is going on, Larian has also been unable to stop fiddling around with Baldur's Gate 3. Despite being more than a year old now, developers are still releasing beefy updates for it, including one coming a little later this year that will introduce 12 new subclasses, crossplay, and a photo mode. You might reasonably wonder, then: Is Larian pulling a Haunted Chocolatier on us?

Apparently not. "Swen and the team[‘s]… full attention is focused on crafting their next title," a studio rep told VideoGamer. Unfortunately, we likely won't be hearing much more about it for a good while to come because Larian has also apparently moved into a "media blackout," meaning we'll all be waiting patiently and watching closely for someone to accidentally blab on social media—or perhaps in an awards acceptance speech, as the case may be.

Whatever happens next, Vincke remains committed to his "best is yet to come" belief about Larian's work, writing on X that "the story ain't over yet. Stay tuned."

"I am sorry to let you know that we won't be continuing support of Powerwash Simulator VR," FuturLab CEO Kirstey Rigden said in a message posted to Bluesky. "We absolutely love and believe in VR, so this doesn't mean we won't support it in the future but we aren't able to continue with support right now.

"We have been faced with a crossroads: We have a truly excellent and kind VR team who were working on a platform which costs us more than it makes, while also having a list of job openings that were looking to be filled on other projects. We took the decision to redeploy our VR team into those other projects/roles. Whilst I would love to live in a world where we could support Powerwash Simulator on every platform going, I will always choose job security for my team."

It's undoubtedly disappointing for VR supporters, but not all that terribly surprising. VR remains extremely niche—Steam users with VR headsets continue to hover around 2%, according to the latest hardware and software survey numbers, which isn't universal but certainly a barometer—and Powerwash Simulator VR may have suffered further from being a Meta Quest exclusive, meaning no VR on Steam.

Even so, Rigden is earning some praise on social media for being frank about the reason for the end of Powerwash Simulator VR support—no money in it—and for reassigning developers to other projects rather than simply cutting the VR team loose.

FuturLab clarified in a followup post that the base game and currently released DLC will remain available for purchase and play, there just won't be any further support or new content for it.

There's an new king of the HWBot overclocking hill and it's the Intel Core i9 14900KF. Actually, the 14900KF has held the frequency record for CPUs before. But a Chinese overclocker going by the name "wytiwx" just upped the ante to a new world record for any CPU ever of 9.12161 GHz.

Yup, once again it's an older Raptor Lake Intel CPU that's marginally increased on the previous record, the 9.11775 GHz achieved by a 14900KS in March last year. In other words, Intel's latest Arrow Lake CPUs, including the Core Ultra 9 285K, are nowhere to be seen in the top echelons of overclocking.

Is that because of Arrow Lake's architecture? Or is TSMC's 3N silicon as used for Arrow Lake's CPU cores not actually as good as Raptor Lake's Intel 7 node (the node formerly known as 10nm) at overclocking?

It's possibly a bit of both. But despite Intel's well-publicised difficulties when it comes to chip manufacturing technology in recent years, there's no doubting that Big Blue has a great track record when it comes to achieving top frequencies.

Intel is due to move back to its own 18A node for high performance desktop CPU manufacturing with Panther Lake. So it will be interesting to see if Intel's new 18A deskto CPUs can beat these old Raptor Lake chips and edge us closer to the magic 10 GHz.

Anywho, wytiwx used an ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Apex motherboard and, inevitably, liquid helium for cooling to achieve -258 degrees C. Chilly.

If you're wondering, the fastest ever AMD CPU is the Bulldozer-based AMD FX 8370, which hit 8.7228 GHz over 10 years ago. It's also interesting to note how the top frequency achieved with a PC processor has levelled off in recent years.

Between 1996 and 2007, it shot up from just 233 MHz to just over 8 GHz. But it took a further 15 years from there to top 9 GHz in 2022, and another two years or so to go from 9.008 GHz to today's 9.12-and-a-bit GHz.

Way back in the year 2000, Intel predicted it might hit 10 GHz by 2005. Of course, back then Intel was all about clockspeed. Its Netburst Pentium 4 chips were designed for raw frequency above all else and the assumption was that improved CPU performance hinged largely on operating frequencies going up.

Shortly afterward, Intel hit something of a clockspeed wall and the whole industry switched tack in favour of more cores running rather slower than 10 GHz. Then again, with improvements in transistor density also levelling off, perhaps we'll see a return to an emphasis on frequency and that 10 GHz barrier might finally be breached. Watch this space, peeps.

During the season, you'll be able to unlock a bounty of Hatsune Miku-related rewards through the Music Pass, such as a Miku outfit, themed instruments, and a handful of Jam Tracks. Though some of them are locked behind the premium paid pass. If you already have this pass unlocked, you'll immediately get the Neko Hatsune Miku outfit as a reward, and you can work your way towards the Brite Hatsune Miku Style skin and the M@GICAL☆CURE! LOVE ♥ SHOT! Jam Track available toward the end of the pass.

The skins paired with the matching instruments you can take to the stage are enough to justify the cost of 1,400 V-Bucks to me, which I loathe to admit. You couldn't really ask for more from the collaboration, so everything else just feels like a bonus. Plus, each instrument comes with a very sweet leek charm which I particularly adore.

But if you don't want to pay the pass fee upfront, the rewards will probably be made available in the shop at a later date too. I'm just relieved if I don't seize the opportunity to become a beast at Fortnite Festival now I'll still get the chance to soothe my Miku obsession later down the line. A number of Hatsune Miku rewards will be available in the shop too, in case the pass rewards weren't enough. Throughout the season you'll be able to get ahold of the following:

• Hatsune Miku Outfit
• Pack-sune Miku Back Bling
• Miku Live Emote
• Miku Miku Beam Emote
• Miku Light Contrail
• Hatsune’s Mic-u
• Miku’s Beat Drums
• “Miku” Jam Track by Anamanaguchi, Hatsune Miku

But Hatsune Miku isn't the only selling point of the season, and there are some additional features coming in v33.20. Four new battle stage modes are being added, so you can get an extra layer of challenge to test your skills with certain instruments. Lead Only, Drums Only, Vocals Only, and Bass Only are the four game modes designed to let you compete with others on a more even playing field rather than with the support of a band, but these modes could also be a great way to practise if you're only confident in limited instruments.

Fortnite Festival Season 7 will come to a close on April 8, so there's plenty of time for you to practise and perfect your Hatsune Miku Jam Tracks and cash out every possible reward on the Music Pass before then. I'm more than ready to accept the fact that this is the thing that is going to get me really into Fortnite Festival. I just hope I don't blow it the second I step foot on stage and feel too embarrassed to play again after pouring everything from my wallet into cute skins.

Obviously, as revealed by game director Jeremy Crawford and principal game designer Wesley Schneider earlier this month, the Tarrasque is getting some "fighting buddies". The amount of high-CR BBEGs here is, in truth, honestly kind of impressive—with promises to add a bunch of "apex threats" like the Elemental Cataclysm, a multi-headed beast with varyingly-flavoured maws of doom doing their best Tiamat impression.

Other big bads included the Animal Lords, CR20 demigods with different abilities based on your flavour of furry, as well as a Haunted House Revenant. My favourite by far is the Blob of Annihilation, a cataclysmic ooze with the skull of a dead god inside it. One which hosts its own demiplane that can draw you and your compatriots inside, which presents a problem—since killing it would collapse the demiplane and eject its inhabitants into the Astral Sea (that's 'outer space' in nerdspeak).

My immediate thought upon regarding this thing wasn't to use it as a CR20 battle, but instead as a plot hook for a Spelljammer campaign—why start in a tavern when you can be a gaggle of unassuming nobodies sucked into a giant ooze and shot into space after a group of high-level murderhobos kill it without regard for your safety?

And that, really, seems to be the major draw of this book. More impressive than the 80+ new creatures and the Tarrasque being able to blow up buildings now is the renewed emphasis on providing stories for fledgling DMs. For instance, there's more NPC-style blocks, like an entire crew of pirates to throw into your campaign, as well as a set of cultists for different types of worship. Not all cults sacrifice with the same brush, as they say.

But the real draw is how almost every type of monster—not all of them, but damn near close—comes with its own set of random tables to help gestate ideas within your mind. As Schneider describes, there's been a deliberate move away from didactic loredumps and into suggestions: "For us, these monsters are not about 'here's the lore, here's the only way to play a gargoyle' … every monster is a whole host of adventures."

Here's a couple page examples shared with me by Wizards of the Coast—the Gargoyle and the Gelatinous Cube:

Gargoyles, an otherwise throwaway construct, get two tables. One with suggestions for what kind of sculptures they can be, and another for where they're hiding. While some of these are your bog-standard gargoyle activities, others—such as the suggestion to place them amongst a graveyard of Medusa victims—are super good encounter ideas.

The Gelatinous Cube also has some winners, with its random table being dedicated to the debris you might find inside—such as the sadistic choice to put a mimic inside one like some kind of monster turducken, or an indestructible tablet in an ancient language.

These little touches are small, but if the Monster Manual is full of them, it means that Wizard's transformed it into something more than its predecessor—it's not just a book of numbers, it's a book of plot hooks. Coupled with some of the stuff that the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is doing, any new DM to these revised rulesets is going to have a bounty of ideas to help them put together their first homebrew campaign.

The art helps sell this visually, too. They really kinda pulled out all the stops here—if the Monster Manual keeps hucking high-quality scenes into its pages, this will be one of the prettier books that Wizards of the Coast has made.

Mind, lofty promises are one thing, proof is another. These high praises I'm singing will only stick if those tables are constantly applied throughout the book with the same generosity, and not once every five pages. That's to say nothing of the larger mechanical implications of this book, like whether the CR system will actually work now—and that'll have to come out in the wash after hours of actual play. What I can say is that this effort to douse every critter in flavour is an extremely welcome one.

The revised Monster Manual will arrive February 18 for most people, though D&D Beyond's doing some early access on February 4 for "Master Tier" subscribers and February 11 for Hero Tier subscribers—which I'm only sharing here for informational purposes, not because I think early access periods for D&D is a good thing.

The reality of mounting e-waste is just one more thing that keeps me up at night—though every now and then, such a nightmare spits out a real gem. One Reddit user shared that after recently moving, they went rummaging through a bin full of junked computer parts, and pulled out not just a surprisingly decent graphics card, but something genuinely special.

Over the years, we've reported on the graphical powerhouse that never was, the Nvidia RTX 4090 Ti. Reportedly cancelled, one lucky poster apparently saved a prototype model from landfill back in November 2024 (via VideoCardz). You know what they say, one person's trash is another's GPU—wait, haven't we been here before? I'm about to go full Danny DeVito and debut my refuse-themed, musical wrestling persona, the Queen of Slop.

Jokes aside, what surfaced on Reddit last year appeared to be a mostly complete prototype, with both the MASSIVE cooler plus the card itself. I say 'appeared' because the Reddit post including the original photo uploads of the prototype, has since been scrubbed. But fear not! This is far from the final twist in the tale.

Enter tech testing YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, who have more recently got their hands on the fabled GPU. After plenty of partial sightings like some kind of cryptid, Gamers Nexus not only benchmarked the prototype of what is thought to be the long lost RTX 4090 Ti, but also shared a teardown of the funky, chunky card.

Gamers Nexus first highlighted the hefty GPU's somewhat unusual construction, drawing attention to the front, back, and middle fan placements. This not only sucks airflow straight through the card, but also necessitates a more discretely placed PCB. The board in question is a hefty bit of kit too, running along the belly of this absolute beast—and it is a beast, measuring 80 mm in width. Getting up close and personal with the PCB reveals a densely packed hotbed of tech, with the central GPU crowded by memory and multiple layers of VRAM.

The otherwise pretty unwieldy cooler impressed during thermal benchmarking, keeping the GPU at around 46 °C, and more than 20 degrees cooler than the actually released Founder's Edition RTX 4090.

But let's get to what we're all really here for—the gaming test. The prototype averaged 62 fps for Black Myth: Wukong at 4K with FSR Quality and ray tracing enabled. This was comparable to the retail card Gamers Nexus also tested, the Nvidia RTX 4090 Cybertank, which averaged 65 fps. The gap between the two cards soon widened though; in Dying Light 2 at 4K, the prototype averaged 82.3 fps while the retail model averaged 91.6, and in Dragon's Dogma 2 at 4K with ray tracing at max settings, the prototype averaged 76.3 fps while the retail model averaged 84.5.

Though not an awful performance by any means, it's an unsurprising performance gap for a somewhat unrefined prototype graphics card—especialy without easily accessible, specific drivers to get the most out of the hardware.

It's always interesting to glimpse a road not taken in tech, though the big question mark remains why Nvidia never pushed this prototype into full production. Was the cooler simply too thick for this world? Who can say. What I do know for certain is that time marches on, e-waste is still not a solved problem, and that the reign of the comparatively svelte RTX 5090 is upon us.

Oops! With Bitcoin's price having risen spectacularly since those days, it is estimated that the hard drive now contains $598 million worth of Bitcoin, with Howells claiming it could be worth as much as $1 billion next year.

Howells has been pursuing Newport City Council, which operates the tip site, since 2013. After initially trying to outright sue for access to the site, in recent years he's also tried a more softly-softly approach, offering the council 25% of the haul's value if they'd let him look for it.

In the latest hearing, Newport council asked the High Court to strike out Howells' legal action, which demanded he be given the right to access the landfill or receive £495 million ($601 million) in compensation. But Judge Keyser KC shut it all down, saying the claim had no "reasonable grounds" and there was "no realistic prospect of succeeding if it went to trial."

Howells told the BBC he was "very upset." He went on to say that he'd "been trying to engage with Newport City Council in every way which is humanly possible for the past 12 years" and this was "a kick in the teeth." Then he got a bit conspiratorial and woe-is-me about the whole thing.

"It's not about greed, I'm happy to share the proceeds but nobody in a position of power will have a decent conversation with me," said Howells. "This ruling has taken everything from me and left me with nothing. It's the great British injustice system striking again."

While it's hard not to feel a small pang of sympathy for Howells, he was trying to set a pretty crazy legal precedent: That something disposed of as trash in a landfill remained his property, and it was Newport Council's responsibility to help him find it. Representing the council, James Goudie KC argued that under existing laws the hard drive became the council's property when it entered the landfill, and Howell's inducements were just trying to get the council to "play fast and loose" by "signing up for a share of the action."

Goudie also pointed out the environmental impact of excavating 11 years of putrescent waste, allowing millions of tons of methane and CO2 to escape into the atmosphere, and breaching the council's obligations in this area.

The landfill in question holds more than 1.4m tonnes of waste, though Howells reckons he's narrowed the hard drive's location to an area consisting of 100,000 tonnes. But even then, the chances of this thing surviving in any usable form where the Bitcoin could be recovered seems remote at absolute best: It's in all likelihood a hunk of corroded metal, and has been for years.

Finkle's blog post is borderline brutal in its dismissal of the new rules being imposed in the dying days of the Biden administration.

"The Biden Administration now seeks to restrict access to mainstream computing applications with its unprecedented and misguided 'AI Diffusion' rule, which threatens to derail innovation and economic growth worldwide," Finkle said, describing the new rules as a "200+ page regulatory morass, drafted in secret and without proper legislative review." Ouch.

He also claimed this "sweeping overreach" was an attempt to "rig market outcomes and stifle competition." Moreover, Finkle says the rules, which are designed to prevent America's adversaries from acquiring advanced AI technology, won't work anyway.

"Rather than mitigate any threat, the new Biden rules would only weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that has kept the U.S. ahead," he claimed.

For the record, the new rules are indeed pretty sweeping. They impose quotas on sales of AI GPUs to most countries in the world, the idea being to block Chinese efforts to circumvent earlier export controls on GPUs into China specifically. No question, this would all have a direct and substantial impact on Nvidia.

But Nvidia isn't the only big tech entity upset by the new rules. Oracle Executive Vice President Ken Glueck said the new export regime “does more to achieve extreme regulatory overreach than protect US interests and those of our partners and allies,” adding that it, "practically enshrines the law of intended consequences and will cost the US critical technology leadership.”

For its part, the Biden administration has emphasized that 18 key US allies, including Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, are subject to no restrictions at all and that, "chip orders with collective computation power up to roughly 1,700 advanced GPUs do not require a license and do not count against national chip caps."

We also can't help noticing how the blog post seemed to court favour with incoming President Donald Trump.

"The first Trump Administration laid the foundation for America’s current strength and success in AI, fostering an environment where U.S. industry could compete and win on merit without compromising national security. As a result, mainstream AI has become an integral part of every new application, driving economic growth, promoting U.S. interests and ensuring American leadership in cutting-edge technology," Finkle said.

The vituperative language used by Finkle, particularly his accusation that the Biden administration is attempting to "rig" the market and calling the document itself a "morass" likewise feel like they're straight out of the Donald Trump playbook of hyperbolic criticism, as opposed to the sort of measured critique of government policy you might normally expect from a major corporate entity.

The cynical interpretation here is that Nvidia is attempting to play on the perception that Trump is easily flattered. By giving Trump the credit for the current AI boom and also throwing in some Biden trash talking sweeteners, this interpretation would say, Nvidia hopes that Trump will go easy on any new import restrictions and maybe even immediately repeal these Biden rules.

After all, if Trump thinks he is responsible for the AI boom, he won't want to kill it, right? And anything imposed by the Biden administration is bound to be something he's opposed to? It's a no brainer, no?

Perhaps. But whatever Nvidia's actual intentions and motivations, this is a pretty eye-popping blog post and certainly not the usual bland, corporate fare. It will be fascinating to see how this all plays out, if the Trump administration does cancel these new rules and what, if anything, they're replaced with.

Anywho, our immediate take on the new rules is that they won't have much impact on gaming GPUs as opposed to AI chips, with the exception of the new RTX 5090 and the existing RTX 4090. We think everything below those cards should fall outside the rules, but we'll update if that turns out not to be the case.

iBuyPower Y40 | Ryzen 9 7900X | Radeon RX 7900 XT | 32 GB DDR5-6000 | 2 TB SSD | $1,899.99 $1,649 at Walmart (save $250.99)
This iBuyPower build is an all-AMD powerhouse that isn't slack in a single department. The 7900 XT isn't quite as powerful as an RTX 4080 Super, but it has heaps of VRAM and is great for 1440p gaming. Throw in the Ryzen 9 CPU, 32 GB of fast DDR5 RAM, and 2 TB of storage, and you have a fantastic build here for less than $1,700.View Deal

If you're an AMD fan-person, this iBuyPower gaming PC might be right up your alley, however you feel about the imminent new generation of graphics cards. The iBuyPower Y40 has been a favorite of ours over the past few months, frequently offering up stellar prices for some serious gaming horsepower (a moment of silence for the $999 RTX 4070 build that popped up briefly in December before selling out). The latest Y40 discount to catch my eye, though, is this all-AMD one for just $1,649 at Walmart.

Why did it catch my eye? Well, apart from the fact that any build sporting an AMD GPU catches it, there's the fact that its so well-rounded in specs and that these components are packaged in a Y40 build that we rate quite highly.

You can check our Jacob Ridley's iBuyPower RDY Y40 Valorant VCTA R003 review to see the nitty gritty of the sort of system iBuyPower can build around the chassis, but essentially the Y40 is a very pleasantly crafted bit of kit. Decent cooling, good cable management, solid parts, a nice chassis, and all for a reasonable price. The version I'm highlighting here has different specs, of course, but the core build quality should remain.

But let's get down to brass tacks, and that's the specs themselves. At the centre of this build are the dual 7900 hand-cannons, the 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and 20 GB Radeon RX 7900 XT. (Yes, that's 20 GB on the GPU—none of Nvidia's stinginess, here.)

This combo, despite the CPU being a little older and the GPU being just weeks away from being outshined by a whole new generation, is more than enough for basic productivity tasks, and of course gaming. And regarding the latter, the RX 7900 XT is ideal for high refresh rate 1440p gaming or 4K gaming in all but the most demanding titles. Sure, it's not quite at the level of the RX 7900 XTX or RTX 4080 Super, but you're not paying RTX 4080 Super prices, here.

And for the price tag, you're also getting a pretty solid all-round system: 32 GB of DDR5 RAM—fast DDR5 RAM, at that—and 2 TB of storage. (Hopefully system builders are starting to get the message that game installs can be big, these days.)

Plus, vertical GPU mounts just look lovely, don't they? If you're proud of your all-AMD build, why not show it off?

This build should serve as a good platform to upgrade from in future, too. 32 GB of fast DDR5 RAM and a Ryzen 9 7900X should get you by even through to the RTX 60-series generation of GPUs (and whatever AMD decides to call its post-9070 generation), so if you decide to upgrade your graphics card down the line, you should be in good stead. And if you wanted more on the CPU front, the AM5 socket will let you slap in a newer X3D chip, too.

All in all, this all-AMD build is a pretty good for this $250 saving, I'd say.

That, as per SteamDB's leaderboards, puts it at a downright respectful number 14 at the time of writing, placing it below other such videogame giants as Baldur's Gate 3 (which had around 40.6% more players at its peak) and above heavy hitters like Path of Exile 2, Valheim, and Helldivers 2.

That's more than enough to be classified as a phenomenon, considering Arrowhead's flagship shooter pulled in 458,700 bug-shooting super patriots at launch. And that's not taking into account its players on other platforms such as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

As to why? Well, Season 1's here, for starters. And it's free, obviously—which is bound to account for a lot of the 'eh, screw it, let's give it a shot' crowd. Of which I am one, to be fair. I'd never have typically tried something like Marvel Rivals for a premium, but its zany overpowered nonsense has absolutely hooked me. Even our own Fraser Brown, who was initially down on the game, came around on it in time for Christmas.

But there's also the fact that NetEase has put together something that's just downright solid and a good bit of fun, marrying that competence up with recognisable characters. Let's face it, the star power of Marvel is a huge power up to any marketing efforts. Everyone wants to get a teamwipe as their favourite hero, and you get to enjoy learning more about the comics, too—in other words, players are coming for Spider-Man, and staying for Jeff the Land Shark. Sure, the monetisation ain't great, but it's also cosmetics only, so you can just sort of close your eyes and ignore it.

Whether it keeps the momentum of its opening web swing is another thing entirely. 2024 was not a great year for live service shooters, making Marvel Rivals a notable outlier among its newcomer brethren. X-Defiant, Concord, and Suicide Squad all launched and flopped—I'd even given up hope that a new kid on the block could even make a dent.

Well, I'm eating humble pie now. Both because I was wrong, and because I keep getting my ass kicked when I dive into the backline as Spider-Man, along with everyone else. At least its developers are staying humble, too, with its game director admitting that there's really no basic formula to success: "It's really hard to tell ahead of time." That makes me feel better about my faltering powers of prophecy, at least.

The New Year has brought forth a new "Letter from the Chairman" to Star Citizen's devotees, in which Chris Roberts hits a few familiar notes before introducing 2025's big theme for the game: Playability. Stop sniggering at the back. We'll get to the actual content that CIG hopes will make a difference soon, but as Roberts acknowledges performance and stability remain sizeable issues for the game:

"The sentiment many of you have shared—and one we wholeheartedly agree with—is that if the current game, as it stands today, ran smoothly with fewer obstacles and bugs, it would provide an unparalleled experience."

Roberts says they've tried various approaches over the years to improving things, but have struggled to balance this with introducing new features and technology to the game, and have on occasion ended up with "unintended ripple effects—creating instability, hindering performance, and impacting overall gameplay."

So the new approach is to hive-off feature development entirely from the ongoing work of content creation and general fixes. New features that require testing will get their own experimental and isolated channel and won't be integrated with the full game until "fully greenlit." Roberts claims, and this did rather raise an eyebrow, that the developer has in the past "frequently been held hostage by tech or feature work that has taken longer than anticipated."

Roberts then goes on a rather unconvincing rant about big publishers which, a dozen years after he made more money than Croesus from a game he hasn't delivered yet, feels a little bit off.

"Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are two games that would never have been greenlit by any of the big publishers," says Roberts. "They are both too ambitious, and in a genre that up until recently was viewed as niche. They require patience and investment that I doubt any publisher would have the stomach for. Yet here we are, thanks to all of you!"

I'm fairly sure that publishers have in fact greenlit various space MMOs and FPSs, but whatever: People are so far in the hole on this one that I suppose it needs to feel special. But naysaying like that is exactly what this project thrives on. "Server Meshing is no longer a question mark, but a reality," says Roberts, "and seeing the results of a more densely populated universe, as well as better performance and stability—we are closer than ever to realizing a dream many have said is impossible."

Roberts is here referring to 4.0's new "server meshing" backend, which now sees players "navigating seamlessly through a mesh of servers that encompasses the entire game. Each planet, landing zone, or major station is now covered by different game servers. Thanks to this technology, server boundaries are effectively invisible, even at our high levels of fidelity, ensuring smooth, uninterrupted gameplay." Roberts lists further benefits such as crashes being localised to small regions, and improved performance thanks to each server simulating fewer entities. The main benefit to players is that each server can now handle 500 players at once, as opposed to 100.

This all comes alongside some substantial additions in 4.0, primarily the new Pyro star system, which is made up of six planets plus dozens of outposts and bases. But notably absent from Roberts' letter, beyond a fleeting reference to the roadmap, is Star Citizen 1.0: The full release of the game.

Roberts previously claimed server meshing was the last big technological hurdle and, once it was in place, the team was setting sail "for Star Citizen's own finish line… Star Citizen 1.0 is what we consider the features and content set to represent 'commercial' release. This means that the game is welcoming to new players, stable, and polished with enough gameplay and content to engage players continuously. In other words, it is no longer Alpha or Early Access."

Those words are from March 2024. Almost a year on, Star Citizen remains in alpha and early access. But I'm sure 1.0 is coming soon.

That's as per a recent interview with streamers Darth Microtransaction and GhazzyTV. When asked whether there was data breach at Grinding Gear Games, game director Jonathan Rogers states that "there has been a situation where someone got access to an admin account," but that the full extent is yet to be seen.

"We now understand how that happened—we don't fully understand the scope of everything that occurred here, but we're sort of in the process of looking at logs, and so on … there were a few really shitty things that occurred here that I'm very unhappy about."

As Rogers puts it, the hacker in question managed to pry open access to the admin account through a bit of social engineering—which, when referring to cyber security, means the practice of sneakily getting secondary information via human interaction to achieve a hack, rather than hacking directly. The weak point in GGG's armour here was an old Steam account that the admin was no longer using, but that was nonetheless linked.

"[The person who] had it attached didn't really consider the fact that this old Steam account they weren't using anymore was attached to their admin account … that got compromised through Steam support." While Rogers doesn't know the exact details, he states that the hacker must've had some personal details such as credit card information.

Steam's "proof of ownership" page, for instance, will let you use a Visa credit card's name, billing address, and last four digits to reset a password to an account—all things a malicious actor could obtain via social engineering.

This was then made worse by a bug on GGG's end. When it came time to investigate, it was revealed that the studio's software was registering password resets for Path of Exile 2 accounts as "notes" rather than an "audit event", meaning that someone with admin permissions—the hacker, for instance—could go in and delete them, covering their tracks.

"It was really not obvious to us what was going on there. I don't have the full information yet about the extent of everything that happened, but what I can tell you is that 66 notes were deleted, so that would imply that 66 accounts were compromised," though Rogers notes they only have audit logs going back 30 days due to privacy regulations.

This meant that investigations into the issue—and whether it was a data breach or not—took a lot longer than they otherwise would have. "We initially had no idea, right, so we were like—ah shit, what the hell is going on here."

GGG is determined to patch up this vulnerability, though, as Rogers states: "Since then we've added a bunch of extra security stuff that, honestly, should've already been in place around this to sort this out, so, all of that is to say that we totally fucked up here, with security stuff on this account. We're certainly not gonna have any Steam accounts linked to [admins], we're gonna make sure there's no Steam accounts linked to customer service accounts any longer."

Obviously this kind of security breach is no joke—especially in an age where catastrophic data breaches seem downright commonplace (this is a reminder to go and change your old passwords). Still, studios are large and complex machines, and social engineering is downright hard to spot unless you're jumping at shadows. I hope GGG's able to close ranks around these weak spots soon.

NetEase considers modding a no-go. Despite a whole host of mods being available for players to use and download, it is a bannable offense alongside botting or cheating as it also uses unauthorised third-party software. So it was only a matter of time before NetEase got wise to all the Marvel Rivals mods available on Nexus Mods. But it turns out there is a way to bring your favourite mods back if you're willing to put everything on the line.

Instead of just putting your files into a mod manager and loading them into Marvel Rivals, now you need direct access to the game's .pak files. One player has even put together a helpful tutorial in case you need some guidance with this (via Dexerto). Some people may use this to just mod Luffy into the game as Mister Fantastic or so they can wear Jeff's skin when playing Iron Fist, but those aren't the only reasons to use mods.

A few players found that using mods to help with optimisation was a game-changer. While Marvel Rivals has improved a lot since its launch, it's still a little patchy in some areas. I've experienced some annoying FPS drops, enemy players randomly turning invisible, and cluttered maps breaking my games. One mod for performance-boosting fixed stuttering and helped your game look cleaner at lower resolutions. Unfortunately, while that may have worked to help game performance before NetEase effectively disabled mods, it will probably only make things worse now.

Another way to get around the modding ban is with another mod that effectively lets files be read as pre-unpacked. However, one of the side effects of using this is that the process could hurt your SSD and make your performance even worse in Marvel Rivals. The mod even recommends that you only use this for audio files—character models could really mess up your PC.

There's also a risk of getting banned by NetEase if you end up using mods. While it doesn't seem like NetEase has dished out any permabans to players using mods so far, the devs have warned against using any, just in case. "It is not recommended to modify any game files, as doing so carries the risk of getting banned," NetEase said in a statement to IGN.

Right now, I honestly don't think modding is worth the risk of borking your PC or getting banned. While it's a shame that a ton of creative mods have now been rendered obsolete, this was really only a matter of time and was an expected next step for NetEase to take. It also seems like Marvel Rivals' performance is getting better with every update, and there are plenty of skins already in the game for players to pick from and dress up with. While that does rule out Luffy or Goku from appearing in your Marvel Rivals games, that's probably not the worst outcome possible.

To be more precise, LG told YouTube channel HDTVTest that OLED now has 22% of the PC gaming monitor market. LG notes that market share has been achieved within just two years of the launch of its first OLED-based PC gaming monitor.

Meanwhile, it might surprise you to learn that OLED only currently represents 18% of the TV market, and that despite the fact that LG released its first OLED TV way back in 2013.

Of course, the very first OLED gaming monitor was actually the Alienware 34 AW3423DW, which was launched nearly three years ago and was based on Samsung QD-OLED technology. LG's first OLED monitor came a little later. But the overall gist here is clear enough. OLED adoption rate on the PC is much, much faster than with TVs.

As much as I'm a card-carrying fan of OLED technology and despite the fact that there is now a wide array of OLED gaming monitors to choose from in all kinds of shapes, sizes and resolutions, I find that surprising.

Mainly, that's because OLED monitors remain very expensive. You're looking at MSRPs of at least $600 for an entry-level 27-inch 1440p model from a recognisable brand, while most models are $800 and upwards. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if the average price of an OLED gaming monitor from the bigger brands right now is in the region of $1,000.

To my mind, that ought to make them pretty niche. And, OK, LCD still makes up the hefty majority of the market. But over one in five gaming monitors being bought right now is OLED and presumably that market share is still increasing. It'll probably be at least a third in a couple of years.

Hopefully that continued increase in market share will reflect lower prices. It's always been slightly baffling how expensive OLED monitors have been compared to TVs. When the first 27-inch 1440p OLEDs came out, they were about the same price as a 42-inch 4K OLED TV. It made no sense at all.

Since then, prices have generally come down. Like I said, those 27 inchers start nearer $600 and both 34-inch ultrawides like the Alienware 34 AW3423DWF and 32-inch 4k models including the MSI MPG 321URX are in the region of $800 and up.

But those are still pretty hefty prices when you consider that $200 or so will net you an LCD-based 27-inch 1440p gaming panel and $250 and up will bag a 34-inch ultrawide.

So, personally, I'd like to see OLED prices come down still further. I think $500 for a 32-inch 4K model and a little less than that for the 27-inch 1440p and 34-inch ultrawides would be about right. At least, it would be at about those price levels that I'd be happy to recommend them without major caveats.

Speaking of caveats, it's worth pointing out that one of the very last that applies to OLED tech on PC gaming monitors aside from price seems like it might be history. As I reported last week, both Samsung and LG announced new OLED panel tech at CES with much higher claimed full-screen brightness.

In theory, we could see as much as 400 nits full screen, which for my money would mean the brightness "problem" with OLEDs is solved and I expect models with at least 350 nits full screen will appear later this year based on this new technology. Hope such monitors won't come at a major price premium.

But even if they do, I expect those prices will come down pretty rapidly, as will OLED prices generally. Give it a couple of years and the sub-$500 OLED monitor capable of 400 nits full-screen brightness will probably be a thing. The only slight snag is that the OLED I really want, LG's new 5K2K Ultragear 45GX950A is a $2,000 monster. Sadly, it'll be a while yet before a panel like that is truly affordable.

I quickly found a nice cluster of green letters today, I just had to work out what on earth I needed to do with them. My earlier guesses had already ruled out a lot of the most obvious responses, although that did mean I spent a lot of time going "It's got to be… ah, no." as I poked at the puzzle. Finally revealing today's answer felt great. 

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, January 13

This is a sleeveless garment worn instead of a coat. Generally it'd fasten around the neck, and then hang down someone's back and shoulders. It can also mean to conceal or cover. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is not a double letter in today's puzzle 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you've decided to play Wordle but you're not sure where to start, I'll help set you on the path to your first winning streak. Make all your guesses count and become a Wordle winner with these quick tips: 

• A good opener has a mix of common vowels and consonants. 
• The answer could contain the same letter, repeated.
• Avoid words that include letters you've already eliminated. 

You're not racing against the clock so there's no reason to rush. In fact, it's not a bad idea to treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Sometimes stepping away for a while means you can come back with a fresh perspective. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

One win, coming up. The answer to the January 13 (1304) Wordle is CLOAK.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Previous Wordle solutions can help to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer isn't likely to be repeated. They can also give you some solid ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• January 12: TOTAL
• January 11: DINGY
• January 10: CRAWL
• January 9: WAFER
• January 8: DRAFT
• January 7: ATLAS
• January 6: SPRIG
• January 5: CYBER
• January 4: RELAX
• January 3: CHEAP

Learn more about Wordle 

There are six rows of five boxes presented to you by Wordle each day, and you'll need to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the daily puzzle.

Start with a strong word like ALIVE—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don't waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you've typed your guess and hit Enter, you'll see which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don't forget to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don't forget letters can repeat too (eg: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

As our Harvey Randall wrote, we're all still playing Baldur's Gate 3 more than a year after its release because there's so much to find in it. Gale can write a sad resignation letter if you ignore him long enough, and there's a game over just for people who go out of their way to lose a plot-critical item. When I was playing I triggered an ambush by Astarion's vampire-spawn siblings by long-resting repeatedly in the Lower City, something that apparently a lot of other players didn't experience. Even I didn't notice what happens if you let Astarion get vamp-napped, however.

As documented on the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit by Soft_Stage_446, Astarion gets taken to his master's torture kennel to be punished by a skeletal interrogator called Godey. An entire scene you'd otherwise never see plays out from Astarion's point of view, whether or not you chose to play him as your origin character. And then you've got the opportunity to escape as Astarion, or switch over to the rest of your party and launch a rescue attempt. There's even dialogue for various companions' reaction to Astarion's abduction.

It's not a sequence you're likely to see by accident, even if you're a habitual long-rester like me. The vampire spawn aren't a challenging fight, so you have to go out of your way to let them down Astarion and then make off with him. And you have to have him in your party when the attack happens. If you don't he'll still participate, but not helpfully. (When tested, he spent 15 rounds throwing fireworks instead of attacking.) And if defeated, in this case he'll simply die.

In terms of rarity, this is right up there with the conversation you can only experience by choosing to be the Dark Urge, and trying to collect your inheritance from the Counting House. Or the ending you can only unlock by playing as evil Lae'zel, and doing it badly. Only 34 players had found that when we wrote about it, but those 34 people had a great story to tell.