Ever been on the receiving end of a digital defeat, courtesy of a player whose nickname sounded like a bedtime story? But fear not, fellow gamers, for today, we embark on a humorous journey to boost your online masculinity to epic proportions. "Pwned by a 'FluffyKitten'? Nah, We Choose 'LordLumberjack'!" Choosing the perfect in-game nickname isn't just about typing random words and numbers; it's an art form, a declaration of your virtual identity. The right nickname can strike fear into your opp

Ever been on the receiving end of a digital defeat, courtesy of a player whose nickname sounded like a bedtime story? But fear not, fellow gamers, for today, we embark on a humorous journey to boost your online masculinity to epic proportions. "Pwned by a 'FluffyKitten'? Nah, We Choose 'LordLumberjack'!" Choosing the perfect in-game nickname isn't just about typing random words and numbers; it's an art form, a declaration of your virtual identity. The right nickname can strike fear into your opp

Welcome to the world of gaming, where innovation meets eccentricity. Gamers, much like any other subculture, have their fair share of trends and products that, while well-intentioned, often land on the cringe-worthy spectrum. In this blog post, we're diving headfirst into the top 5 cringe-worthy items that you might find in a gaming setup. From gaming gloves that look like you're about to perform open-heart surgery to energy drinks that promise to turn you into a gaming superhero, prepare for a

Ever been on the receiving end of a digital defeat, courtesy of a player whose nickname sounded like a bedtime story? But fear not, fellow gamers, for today, we embark on a humorous journey to boost your online masculinity to epic proportions. "Pwned by a 'FluffyKitten'? Nah, We Choose 'LordLumberjack'!" Choosing the perfect in-game nickname isn't just about typing random words and numbers; it's an art form, a declaration of your virtual identity. The right nickname can strike fear into your opp

Beloved robot friend simulator and first-person shooter Titanfall 2 has had a matchmaking problem for years. Even after its previous server issues were fixed, players would still be disconnected if they had to queue for any length of time. And, given that Titanfall 2 came out in 2016, it's pretty likely you'd be waiting in that lobby a while.

Surprisingly, an official update has appeared out of nowhere and got it working again. Players are now flooding back, with Titanfall 2 hitting a peak player count of 22,604 in the last 24 hours. What's more, the featured playlist rotation has started being updated again, and weapon loadouts in the 1v1 coliseum mode have changed.

Meanwhile, the patch notes for a recent Apex Legends update include a sly nod to its predecessor Titanfall. The patch notes for the Harbingers event conclude with the words "Incoming Transmission…. Subject: Nessie…." and three numbers: 1394521200, 1477638000, and 1549267200. Those numbers are the Unix timestamps for the release dates of Titanfall, Titanfall 2, and Apex Legends.

Does this mean we should expect a new announcement regarding the wider Titanfall/Apex universe? Since finding out that Respawn canceled Titanfall 3 in favor of going battle royale in Apex Legends, the Titanfall community has largely given up on there ever being another game in the series. That doesn't mean it isn't possible, but the odds of some kind of Titanfall-themed seasonal event crossover in Apex Legends seem more likely. Maybe they'll add wallrunning, or even titans?

Titanfall 2 is also on sale right now, going for 90% off on Steam.

The console versions of Jedi Survivor have always fared better than the disastrous PC port, but does the latest patch solve all the issues and give a great game the high quality PC version it deserves? Alex Battaglia revisits the game, finding that incremental improvements over the months have happened - but let's face facts, it's still unacceptably poor.

Apex Legends developer Respawn has banned over 2000 accounts for cheating as it gets set for next week's Harbingers Collection Event.

In a note posted to X/Twitter, the studio said it had identified and removed "2000+" cheaters and reminded players to "report any suspicious player activity through [its] in-game tools".

The Harbingers Collection Event – which sees our Legends "gear up to fight the end of the world" – launches on all platforms on 19th September and includes Living Shell Trios, World’s Edge After Dark, and the usual cosmetics.

Warhammer has dropped an all-new Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin teaser that details how it plans to "deliver a truly comprehensive RTS game at launch".

Not only do we get to see Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin's map editor in action, where you can use developer-like tools to craft your own multiplayer maps, but also the Army Livery, which lets you customise the colour palettes for each of your four factions with paints from Games Workshop's Citadel collection and "underlines Frontier’s efforts to create the most authentic game possible".

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We've got no stings to hold us down in this Lies of P stream archive. We played about an hour got some leveling up advice, beat a miniboss or two, and explored a Red Lobster. The point we played was about halfway through the game, but you won't see in any major spoilers.

When I sat down to play Pacific Drive at WASD, I mistook it for an atmospheric walking simulator. In reality, Ironwood Studio’s forest opus is something far more sinister. Part survival game, part narrative-led horror, you may recognise Pacific Drive as “that weird nightrider car game from E3”. Yet while the slightly beat up set of wheels took centre stage in all the trailers, this first-person project isn’t really a charming vehicle-first romp but an adventure where your car is the only thing keeping you from an early grave.

Ubisoft Montreal - the studio behind the likes of Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Far Cry 5 - has been accused of leaving staff in "turmoil" after it reportedly reneged on promises that "100% remote work would be possible", forcing all 4,000 of its workers back to the office for a "minimum" of two days a week, as of 11th September.

Back in June 2021, Ubisoft announced it would be adopting a "hybrid and tailored approach to work arrangements" where staff would be able "to balance in-office work with work from home". However, according to a new report by IGN, Ubisoft Montreal staff were repeatedly told they could remain 100% remote long-term, leading many to make significant life decision or accept jobs at the company based around these assurances.

"100% remote work will be possible depending on various criteria," reads an internal Ubisoft document seen by IGN and detailed in its report, "such as productivity and impact on the team, as well as the nature of the work being done."

It's common practice for PC games today to launch with Denuvo, a form of DRM designed to stop the spread of pirated copies of games, and it's also common practice for developers to remove Denuvo several months after launch as interest (and the risk of piracy) dwindles. Less common is a developer publicly announcing it's removing Denuvo from a game before it's even out, but that's the surprise Starbreeze pulled this Friday.

"Hello heisters, we want to inform you that Denuvo is no longer in Payday 3," the developer wrote in a post on Steam on Friday. That's pretty much the whole message—short and to the point, and seemingly a win on the good will front, with the Steam post racking up 524 thumbs up on Steam so far and another 10,000 or so on Twitter.

Payday 3 is less than a week away from its September 21 release, and Starbreeze is clearly looking to roll into the launch with an excited community behind it. Two months ago a thread on the r/paydaytheheist subreddit called out the inclusion of Denuvo and the responses were characteristically negative. This afternoon, one of the game's developers responded to that thread to highlight that Denuvo has been removed.

Denuvo has long had a reputation for hindering performance in games and bloating their executables, though the company behind it, Irdeto, insists that isn't the case. This summer it announced a plan to provide media outlets with two versions of games, one with Denuvo included and one without, to prove it has no impact on performance.

Display

• The default color rendering for Steam Deck has been adjusted to emulate the sRGB color gamut, resulting in a slightly warmer and more vibrant color appearance.
• Added Settings -> Adjust Display Colors, to tune the display's Color Vibrancy and Color Temperature. The settings can be tuned with a preview of a test image (above), or with your running game.
• Native: The native display color appearance (the color rendering for Steam Deck prior to this update).
• sRGB: Emulate the sRGB primaries, in a smooth manner that does not introduce gradient clipping.
• Boosted: Emulate a wider-gamut display appearance, resulting in increased apparent vibrance. May result in gradient clipping.
• HDR can now be enabled in Display Settings if supported by the external display.
• VRR can now be enabled in Display Settings if supported by the USB-C adapter.
• Reworked Quick-Access scaling settings to separate scaling from filtering. Added Stretch and Zoom scaling as new options to handle different aspect ratios.
• Fixed touchscreen orientation while external display is connected.
• Compositing is now avoided in additional scenarios, reducing latency and stutter in situation with multiple overlays on screen.
• Improved latency in certain situations where the application renders slower than the display's refresh rate.

General

• Fixed an issue where certain workloads would exhibit severe CPU performance issues unless SMT was manually disabled.
• External storage devices are now auto-mounted when connected to Steam Deck. To format or manage storage devices use the new device management interface in Settings->Storage.
• Updated graphics drivers, with many performance and functionality improvements. Improved performance for Starfield. Fixed viewmodel corruption in Amnesia: The Bunker and launch failures for Immortals of Aveum and Kaiju-A-GoGo.
• Improved Bluetooth connection stability, especially with multiple controllers
• Slightly improved sleep resume speed
• Implemented switching between controller bindings and mouse/keyboard desktop bindings by long-pressing Options in the Linux hid-steam driver, to match Steam's default Desktop configuration.
• Improved fade transitions between applications.
• The contents of the performance overlay can now be customized by creating a ~/.config/MangoHud/presets.conf configuration file.
• Fixed a bug where some games could appear stretched if their window size didn't match their swapchain size (eg. Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 4)
• Fixed Disgaea PC needing to be tapped on before input works
• Fixed physical dimensions reported to games, fixing some issues with an incorrect aspect ratio sometimes being detected (eg. Returnal)
• Worked around a problem where Allow Tearing could cause heavy stuttering if the Performance Overlay or other overlays appeared on screen. Tearing is now impossible in such situations, and the Performance Overlay should be disabled for best results.
• Fixed a problem where keyboard input would not be detected in Overwatch 2
• Controller firmware: fixed an issue where some thumbstick touch sensors would lose touch periodically

Firmware 116

• Added voltage offset settings.
• Improved robustness of the Firmware Settings Reset chord (Volume Down + Quick-Access + Power) against some boot hang scenarios.
• Fixed a rare issue that would set the processor TDP limit too low causing CPU and GPU frequencies to be stuck at 400 MHz and 200 MHz respectively.
• Fixed an issue when the charging light would turn back on when plugged in for a while after fully charged.
• Updated Arch Linux Base
• This update pulls in newer performance, security and stability fixes for the underlying packages that are the foundation for SteamOS
• Most notably, this includes recent changes to KDE Plasma, Steam Deck's Desktop Mode. Full notes on these updates can be found on KDE's website here. Here are a few of the highlights:

New window tiling system

• Updated Discover (app store / software manager) with a new homepage and improved search
• Discover can now perform system updates from the desktop
• Updated desktop widgets

The dark fantasy roguelite first-person shooter was revealed a long time ago at Geoff Keighley's 2017 The Game Awards. The small team went silent for over four years, announcing in January 2022 that Witchfire would launch in early access in late 2022. However, there was another delay to 2023, with the developers explaining that they would add open world-like areas to improve the game's exploration.

With mere days separating us from the September 20th launch of Witchfire on early access, we discussed with The Astronauts founder and CEO Adrian Chmielarz (also known as the project leader on 2004's Painkiller and the creative director on Bulletstorm) the reason for the long development phase and one-year Epic Games Store exclusivity, and the exciting performance results obtained with the implementation of NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 3.

We also confirmed with him that AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and Intel Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) will still be in the game on day one and received a preview of Witchfire's system specifications. Read on for the full chat.

All three Steam Deck models have joined Steam's 20th Anniversary sale, marking the third time Valve's handheld PCs have gone on sale—the first was back in March, and the second during the Steam Summer Sale a few months ago.

It's the same discount as last time: 20% off the 512GB version, which brings it to $519.20 ($129.80 off). That's the same price as one of Valve's certified refurbished 512GB Steam Decks, which are sold out at the moment. The 256GB and 64GB versions have received smaller 15% and 10% discounts for this sale, respectively.

Steamdeck page on Steam

What's on your playlist this weekend? Starfield? Still BG3? Something new?

researchers Samuel J. Lymbery, Bruce L. Webber and Raphael K. Didham use Age of Empires 2 to study how human shaping of the environment affects the balance of power between the indigenous Australian "meat ant", or Iridomyrmex purpureus, and the Argentine ant, or Linepithema humile, who are one of the world's more invasive ant species.

The paper takes inspiration from Lanchester's Laws, which I'm going to crudely summarise in the hope that no passing maths professor throws chalk at my head. Devised by M. Osipov and Frederick Lanchester before the First World War, these Laws set out to distil the likely tactical advantages and bodycount represented by new military technology down to a set of equations. Lanchester's Linear Law describes scenarios from the ambiguously defined ancient world, whereby soldiers with handheld weapons like spears can only fight one other soldier at once.

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Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on December 7. A new trailer for the game reveals further story details about the hero's journey and the clans they will meet as they explore the Western Frontier of Pandora to reconnect with their lost heritage. In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, you will play as a Na'vi who was abducted as an infant by the RDA and trained in The Ambassador Program (TAP) to serve human interests on Pandora. When the RDA evacuated Pandora during the Battle of the Hallelujah Mountains (as seen in the first Avatar movie), you were put into emergency cryosleep. You wake up 15 years later, finally free from the RDA, but lost and unfamiliar with your home world.

Story Trailer

Piranha Games revealed MechWarrior 5: Clans today, a new stand alone MechWarrior game coming to PC, Xbox and PlayStation consoles next year. MechWarrior 5: Clans, while retaining the MechWarrior 5 designation, represents a transformative step forward in the MechWarrior 5 franchise. MechWarrior 5: Clans linear campaign will be an evolution of gameplay and storytelling in the MechWarrior series, experienced from the perspective of Clan Smoke Jaguar in the pivotal conflict known as the Clan Invasion starting in the year 3050.

Teaser Trailer

American Truck Simulator has, by my count, now added eleven extra states as DLC over and above the two it launched with. That means there's a long way to go before it completely unites the states as one country under 18-wheels, but SCS Software are continuing their efforts with the announcement of a third in-development expansion: Arkansas.

Riot Forge have been quietly building up quite the catalogue of League Of Legends side story games over the last couple of years. In November 2021, they launched the double whammy of rhythm runner Hextech Mayhem and turn-based RPG Ruined King, and this year alone we've already had action RPG The Mageseeker and narrative platformer Conv/rgence. As you can probably tell, they're all focused on different genres, different League heroes, and have all come from different developers - and soon they'll be joined by Song Of Nunu, the next game from Rime developers Tequila Works.

I got to play a very small slice of it at Gamescom last month, and yep, if you've been craving another low stakes adventure that's all but guaranteed to wrench at your heartstrings and wibble your tear ducts, Song Of Nunu will almost certainly fill that Rime-shaped hole in your life when it comes to PC on November 1st.

I've only played an hour or so of Frictional's horror sequel Amnesia: The Bunker, partly because 2023 is stacked with huge games, but also because I find it incredibly intense. Its ingenious combination of, player-driven objectives, self-induced time pressure and a big, nasty something that stalks you dynamically through its First World War bunker setting, makes for a dreadful experience in the truest sense of the word. It's so unrelenting that I struggle to muster the courage to leave the game's central safe room.

Fortunately, Frictional's planned Hallowe'en update to the game has a solution. Of sorts. As reported by RPS, The Bunker is soon to receive a new difficulty mode called Shellshocked, introducing an array of changes designed to make the experience even more horrible. Foremost among these is how it removes the obstacles that make your safe room safe, which on the plus side means you no longer have to worry about leaving it.

Surprise! Like a dual-wielding rogue pouncing from the shadows, Digital Eclipse has simultaneously revealed and launched a remake of the original Wizardry.

To afford the game its full title, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was one of the first computer RPGs, and the first to feature party-based play. Released in 1981,Wizardry spawned a series ran for twenty years, with the final entry thus far, Wizardry 8, releasing back in 2001.

In a press release, Digital Eclipse explains the remake has been in development for two years, and is "built directly on top of the original Apple II game's code." While structurally faithful, the remake is nonetheless a full overhaul, with completely modernised visual presentation, a redesigned interface, a new method of party management, and changes to navigation, spellcasting, and combat.

YouTube Video
Steam Page

Mirage brings players to 9th Century Baghdad during the city's Golden Age. Here's how Ubisoft recreated it.

Sala says the team looked at writings of people documenting the Mongol invasion, writing about their travel to Baghdad in years past, and understanding their descriptions of this city. He says the team doesn't have physical material of this Golden Age Baghdad, but a lot of literature on it (and much of that literature was scattered around the office on various bookshelves and desks). With him leading the visual charge of Mirag's Baghdad, he also pulled a lot on his time living in the region.

YouTube Video

Bungie has announced in its latest Destiny 2 this Week at Bungie blog a major change to the game's economy. Legendary Shards, one of the game's many, many currencies is going away.

Bungie will be removing the currency entirely from the game with the launch of the next expansion, The Final Shape. However, changes will start taking place at the launch of Season 23, which is kicking off at the end of November.

Bungie Blog Link