Year: 2024

Anthem was kind of baffling right from the start. Why would BioWare, a studio built almost exclusively on popular singleplayer RPGs—Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, let us not forget Jade Empire—suddenly dive into a multiplayer-focused looter shooter? It was weird, and the outcome, if not inevitable, was at least not entirely surprising: We called it “deeply flawed and frequently frustrating” in our 55% review, and just two years after it launched in 2019, BioWare pulled the plug, officially halting future development.

There’s an old adage that says you learn more from failure than success, and that may be the one upside to Anthem’s big bomb. In a new Edge magazine feature on BioWare’s upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard, creative director John Epler said the studio’s experience with Anthem taught it a tough but important lesson: Stick to what you know.

“We’re a studio that has always been built around digging deep on storytelling and roleplaying,” Epler said. “I’m proud of a lot of things on Anthem—I was on that project for a year and a half. But at the end of the day we were building a game focused on s…

A chair for your gaming setup, while necessary, can feel like a bit of an afterthought. They’re also not the easiest of choice, as you want something that can suit your own personal style and comfort. Not all chairs are made equal, plus they don’t tend to come cheap. It’s been a while since we’ve spied any deals on gaming chairs, but right now you can score up to $150 off a range of Vertagear chairs in its Spring Sale. 

The deals are currently active on the Vertagear website with discounts across the S-Line, P-Line, and include the new 800 series of gaming chairs. Each category has a few different seats to choose from coming in at different prices, and you can potentially grab extra discount by signing up to Vertagear’s mailing list and registering a student ID first. 

The 800 series can be found across most of Vertagear’s current lines of chairs, and signifies the brand’s most ergonomic focused range of chairs. They tend to be the more expensive ones on offer but given you’re going to be seated a fair amount of the time they might be the best choice. We’ve reviewed some Vertagear chairs but none have been the 800 series. While good in many ways, comfort an…

The sound of a crunching floppy disk drive may well be the soundtrack to a large part of my misspent youth. Please insert disk four of five. Oh you’ve lost it? No games for you, little Andy. No games for you.

Putting my childhood trauma aside for a moment, it turns out that floppy disks may not be quite as dead as we thought. Incredibly, San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency is still reliant on three 5.25-inch floppies to load the software required to run the central servers for its Muni Metro light rail line each morning, which in turn controls the system that allows trains to run in automatic mode while in the subway system. (via Ars Technica). Totally reasonable, that.

The good news is, the SFMTA is attempting to update the system to remove its reliance on decades old technology. The bad news, however, is the initial planning took place in 2018, and due to some covid-related delays, it’s planning on completing the project in, err, 2029-2030. 

Grand. Anyways, to the SFMTA’s credit, it’s been highlighting exactly why a floppy disk-based train control system is a bad idea in this modern day and age, which seems rather obvious but let’s go there a…

There was understandably much rejoicing in the Helldivers 2 community when Sony backed down on its controversial PlayStation Network account linking requirement, but there’s also been a curious snag: the game remains delisted from sale on Steam in a collection of 177 countries and territories that aren’t served by PSN.

When asked about this issue on the game’s official Discord (spotted by Helldivers Alerts on Twitter), Arrowhead Games CEO Johan Pilestedt revealed that this particular fight is still ongoing. “I’m speaking to our partners at PlayStation and Valve and pushing for it to be undone,” Pilestedt wrote. “Getting the account linking took a herculean effort⁠—but I won’t rest in my desire to have it available everywhere.”

From what Pilestedt said, I’m now curious how much the delisting was a Sony initiative versus a decision by Valve to protect Steam from any liability⁠—during the uproar, Steam had notably begun issuing refunds to players who had far exceeded the platform’s usual two-hour refund window. I have reached out to Sony for comment on the matter, and will update this story if I hear back.

While most Helldivers 2 players ar…

League of Legends game director Pu Liu has confirmed that not only does Riot have the capabilities to increase detection of soft inting, but it’s also looking at ways to punish transgressors. 

Soft inting is apparently “a large problem in the game,” Liu tweets as part of his announcement. This term covers players who don’t lose games on purpose but don’t contribute to a win. Instead of interacting with other players in a team fight or the objective, they tend to farm sidelanes and just generally switch off focus. Players can do this for various reasons. It may be that someone on their team made them angry, so they want to stop them from winning, or they just give up too quickly and can’t be bothered to try for the rest of the match. 

It can be hard to distinguish between players who are soft inting and those who are just not very good at the game, but the higher up the elos you climb, the more obvious it can become. This is why it was previously hard to ban accounts for soft inting as Riot’s security software Vanguard couldn’t distinguish between genuine players and soft inters. However, it looks like this is about to change.

“Now that we have machine…

The Fallout TV show is continuing to have an impressive ripple effect on its source material. Last week saw Fallout 76 hit its highest-ever concurrent player count on Steam, while Fallout Shelter saw a humble bump in player count and revenue. Unsurprisingly, the game reaping the biggest benefits from the show’s success is Fallout 4. Despite it being almost nine years old at this point, it’s technically the most recent mainline entry—one which was one of the most-played games on Steam this weekend.

The game’s been slowly climbing in concurrents this week, according to SteamDB, before peaking at a respectable 164,190 simultaneous Sole Survivors exploring the Wasteland on Sunday. It was the ninth most-played game on Steam, raking in more folk than Rainbow Six Siege, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Lost Ark. It’s also approximately 140,000 more concurrent players than Fallout 4 had prior to the TV show’s debut which, even without it topping the charts, is a significant number on its own.

Just what were more people playing than Fallout 4, you might ask? Well, it was narrowly beaten out by Stardew Valley—which had a peak of 177,618 over the weekend—followed …

Asus unveiled its first ROG NUC back at CES 2024. We got a look of the unit itself along with some launch specifications, but pricing and a release date were not revealed. We now have a pretty good idea of both thanks to a pre-order listing at European retailer Proshop (via NotebookCheck).

The listing reveals a launch price of €2,500. That’s for the high end version which comes with an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H CPU and RTX 4070 laptop GPU. This SKU comes with 2x16GB of DDR5 memory and a 1TB SSD. Proshop’s listing indicates a release date of April 10. 

€2,500 is a lot of money. At that price it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing this configuration topping bestseller lists. Thankfully, there’s at least one more affordable version coming. According to Asus’ product page, a variant with a Core Ultra 7 155H processor and RTX 4060 graphics will be available too.

As a dedicated fan of small form factor PCs, I’d be happy to own a ROG NUC, even if the €2,500 price makes it a tough purchase when you could build your own mini-ITX PC for a lot less. 

Price aside, the 2.5L ROG NUC looks like an impressive little piece of kit. The specs of the unit aren’…

Remember the whole GameStop stonks thing from a couple years ago? It’s kind of complicated and kind of stupid, and frankly I don’t think anyone is entirely sure exactly what happened, but the bottom line is that a guy on Reddit started talking about GameStop stocks, then Elon Musk tweeted about it, then everyone went nuts, and then—for a brief while—profit. The whole thing had a certain Wolf of Wall Street vibe to it (except that the wolf in this case was Roaring Kitty) and sure enough, work to bring the tale to film was soon underway.

Today Sony Pictures Entertainment unveiled the first trailer for its contribution to that cinematic effort: A flick called Dumb Money, “the insane true story of everyday people who flipped the script on Wall Street and got rich by turning GameStop (yes, the mall videogame store) into the world’s hottest company.”

“In the middle of everything is regular guy Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who starts it all by sinking his life savings into the stock and posting about it,” the YouTube listing states. “When his social posts start blowing up, so does his life and the lives of everyone following him. As a stock tip becomes a moveme…

The untimely death of Lance Reddick in 2023 was felt throughout the entertainment world. For Destiny 2 fans, the loss was especially acute: Reddick had provided the voice of Commander Zavala, Vanguard Commander of the Last City, since the release of the original Destiny in 2014. The character’s fate in the wake of Reddick’s passing was unclear at first, but Bungie opted to keep him around, with Keith David, another widely-respected character actor, stepping in to fill the role.

Eight months after David’s casting announcement, we’ve finally got our first look—or, more appropriately, listen—at his take on the character, and I have to say, it hits the spot.

I’m a very lapsed Destiny 2 player but even so, this clip lands just right. It’s Zavala—a little more gravelly, maybe a bit deeper, but with inflection and intonation close enough to the original that I don’t come away feeling like Bungie hired an imitator, they hired a new Zavala to carry on the role. And even though it’s not a reference to Reddick, the fact that Bungie chose this particular quote for David’s debut really comes off as a touching homage. 

The reaction from fans is widely …