Month: September 2024

“In Baldur’s Gate 3, when you wear shoes with metal on them, we wanted them to have a unique sound layer of metal clanks,” explains one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s sound designers, Glenn Goa, in a video demonstrating where he sourced the sound effect. “I made some sabatons in the forge (I learned blacksmithing) and recorded an hour session of walking on various surfaces with them loosely on.” 

Oh, of course, that makes perfect sense. The whisper-quiet flex of the parenthetical “(I learned blacksmithing)” may haunt me for the rest of my days. It certainly sounds like he’s saying he learned blacksmithing just to get the right sound for Baldur’s Gate 3’s many metal boots, though Goa may just be stating he learned to forge armor at some point in the past. 

You know what, call me crazy, but I do detect something familiar in the 20-second clip of Goa tap dancing in his sabatons, the ghost of hundreds of hours I’ve spent clomping along the Sword Coast in various states of armored dress.

The lengths Goa went to ensure our platemail poulaines make the perfect patter are definitely what stood out to me most from his YouTube uploads, but…

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Project Arroyo is another one of those hugely ambitious attempts by fans to remake a classic RPG in one of Bethesda’s newer engines, much like Skywind and Skyblivion, but with Fallout rather than the Elder Scrolls. Specifically, Arroyo takes aim at Black Isle’s Fallout 2, hoping to bring New California into the modern age by rebuilding the whole thing in Fallout 4’s engine.

The project has been underway for several years, but only glimpses of the team’s efforts have been unveiled in that time. Now Arroyo’s designers have released a two-minute trailer dedicated (mostly) to showing off the remake’s environments, and from a visual perspective at least, it’s shaping up to be quite the looker.

As with Bethesda’s Fallout games, Arroyo converts Fallout’s isometric 2D perspective to 3D first (and presumably third) person. The trailer shows off various key Fallout 2 locations like The Sacred Head of the Vault Dweller (visible above), and the interior of the Temple of Trials, all lovingly remade in real-time 3D with lush modern lighting effects.

While the leap in fidelity is dramatic, efforts have clearly been made to preserve as much of Fallout 2’s color and shape as po…

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What beats rock? Paper, correct! What beats paper? Scissors, correct! And what beats scissors? Yep, that’s right: Running. Or rust. Or bureaucratic inertia. Or the crushing ennui of post-industrial modernity.

Don’t look at me. I don’t make the rules. I’m just reporting the findings of What Beats Rock, the latest asteroid to impact productivity in the PC Gamer company Slack. Sorry if you guys were looking forward to articles about videogames today. We’re busy.

What Beats Rock is simple: It’s a nearly blank webpage that invites you to answer the question of, well, what beats rock? You can write anything: Paper, sure, but also erosion, or time, or a positive mental attitude, and the website’s large language model underpinnings will take a second to process your answer and decide if it wins or not. Then you decide what beats the thing you wrote, then what beats that, and so on, and so on, and so on.

So, yes, it’s an AI-powered game, with all the caveats and iffiness and soul-searching that implies, but I’m afraid it’s very fun indeed. Also, it’s intensely moreish. I’ll level with you, folks: This article took a lot longer to write than it should h…

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There’s some big news in the world of graphics cards today. Scott Herkelman, the head of AMD’s Radeon GPU business, has announced he will leave the company by the end of 2023. Herkelman has served as the senior VP and general manager of the Graphics Business Unit at AMD since 2016.

Herkelman tweeted: “May you continue to punch above your weight class and one day… beat the final boss.” The final boss is, of course, Nvidia. He oversaw the launch of three generations of Radeon products, beginning with RDNA1 (RX 5000-series) up to the latest RDNA3 based  RX 7000-series.

Herkelman didn’t reveal what his future plans entail, but a guy with his experience surely won’t have any trouble landing a senior role in the tech industry, whether it’s to do with graphics or anything else. He’s sure to be on a pretty good wage right now though, so we wouldn’t begrudge him some gardening leave before planning his next move.

AMD has yet to name a replacement, and with Herkelman staying on for a couple more months, AMD will have time to find a suitable replacement. 

Maybe Intel needs a new VP? It’s hard at work on its next generation Battlemage architecture, a…

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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is out Friday. I started playing it over a week ago, and while it’s undeniably a great game (read my review), it ran like crap on both PCs I tried it on. As Wes remarked earlier this year, we’re living in a new age of bad PC ports. Jedi: Survivor is just the latest of a string of releases that struggle to hit a minimum 60 fps mark and slow to a crawl at an alarming frequency.

Now that other reviews are out, it’s clear I wasn’t alone: several reported generally poor performance on machines that would kick my PC’s butt, including broken cutscene audio and slowdowns into single-digit frames when using the galaxy map or loading into a new level.

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, German PC publication GameStar recorded some pretty disappointing stats in an 11-minute demonstration of Jedi: Survivor running on a 4090 and a top-shelf CPU: 30-40 fps at 1440p with occasional bumps up to 80-90 fps in enclosed areas. Even worse, the game devours up to 21GB of VRAM at times and only utilized around half of the 4090’s power. That’s more-or-less in line with how Star Wars ran for me with a 2080 Super and i9-9900KS CPU, except I played at a measly 1080p.

T…

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A recently discovered Starfield bug makes the argument that a spaceship can be anything, even a cockpit with nothing else attached to it.

When Reddit user Denubtheredditor flipped the switch to launch their ship into space, Starfield decided to tweak a few things before liftoff. The ship’s UI confirms that all systems are ready to go and the engines burn bright, but most of Denubtheredditor’s ship stays behind as the cockpit lifts up into the air and floats toward space. It’s as if they smashed the eject button by accident.

The short clip ends before the loading screen that sends you to space, so it’s unclear what happens to Denubtheredditor once they break through the planet’s atmosphere. In the comments, Dieser paints a picture of their experience: “I naturally couldn’t move anywhere, but I also found out that the cockpit itself doesn’t have a hitbox as the enemy ship kept hitting me but doing no damage. I could also activate boost and shoot weapons, but only the sounds would play and would not actually do anything.”

Kieranjames2 added that the bug also prevents you from moving at all. “You literally cannot move in space as your thrusters are still on the gro…

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More than a year after Blizzard did an Old Yeller to Heroes of the Storm—”the only good MOBA” in the eyes of our weekend editor Jody Macgregor—a new patch has appeared on the public test realm, and it’s got some fans hopeful for more to come.

The patch is a beefy one, but entirely a fixer-upper: There are some UI changes, a handful of balance tweaks, and a big pile of bug fixes. Blizzard thanked players “for providing insight and feedback for these changes,” and asked that anyone who runs into a bug during PTR testing report them on the appropriate forum.

The new update is in keeping with what Blizzard committed to when it formally ended Heroes of the Storm development. “Moving forward we will support Heroes in a manner similar to our other longstanding games, StarCraft and StarCraft II”, it said at the time. “In the future, we’ll continue seasonal rolls and hero rotations, and while the in-game shop will remain operational there are no plans for new for-purchase content to be added. Future patches will primarily focus on client sustainability and bug fixing, with balance updates coming as needed.”

Despite that, there is hope born anew amongst the d…

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This has been a great year for PC games and with so many sporting the latest graphics technology and techniques, this is an ideal starter or upgrade PC to enjoy them on.

Don’t be fooled by the fact that the CPU is a budget model. The Core i5 13400F has six P-cores and four E-cores, and with a maximum clock of 4.6GHz, you won’t feel much need to have anything better. One good thing about this PC is that the motherboard supports all 13th and 14th Gen Intel processors, so if you do want to upgrade in the future, you won’t need to change the motherboard and RAM.

The GeForce RTX 4070 is an excellent GPU and performs just as well as the previous gen RTX 3080 in most games. It fully supports every feature in Nvidia’s DLSS 3.5 so you’ll be able to activate upscaling and frame generation, in games that offer them, for higher frame rates.

For once, this is a prebuilt PC that sports dual channel RAM. With two sticks of 8GB DDR5-5600, the i5 13400F processor isn’t going to be short on memory bandwidth. At this price, you’d normally expect to see older DDR4 or just one stick of 16GB RAM.

It’s not a perfect gaming PC, though. The AIO CPU cooler is disappointing, as it …

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There aren’t many stories in the world of technology that could easily make it as a plot for a tense spy-thriller movie, but this one sure has all the right hallmarks for one. Last month, the US Justice Department carried out an authorised operation in which it neutralised a botnet, comprising hundreds of routers in homes and offices, that was used to carry out spearphishing and other credentials stealing. And it was achieved by using the very same malware as that by the botnet itself.

As reported by Ars Technica, the network was created by the officially titled GRU Military Unit 26165 (also known by the names Forest Blizzard, Fancy Bear, Sednit, and others), a state-sponsored hacking group that reported has direct ties to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU, for short).

But rather than using its own malware, or anything developed by the GRU, the group used a piece of malware called Moobot that’s been used before to insecure routers. In this instance, it infected the operating system on certain Ubiquiti Edge routers that were still using the default, publicly-known admin passwords

Once up and…

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There’s a helpful clue for today’s Wordle below—just the thing to turn a tough game around, especially when paired with our usual batch of universal tips and tricks. Failing that, the answer for the October 26 (859) game’s only a quick click away if you need to save an impossible puzzle.

Today’s Wordle was almost—but thankfully not quite—a complete disaster for me. One yellow took too many attempts to turn green, and when it finally did I felt almost as clueless as I did at the beginning. After much fumbling in the dark I found myself with one guess left, and two words that’d fit perfectly in the strange gap I’d uncovered. I’m glad I made it, but I hope I don’t come that close to losing for a while.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, October 26

A fascinating conversation, an unusual subject, or anything at all catches someone’s attention or curiosity could _____ their interest. Today’s answer is often misspelt. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every da…

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Need a little help with today’s Wordle? Then you’re in the right place. We can offer you anything from general game-winning hints and tips to a daily clue, and if you’re really stuck—or would rather skip straight to the part where you win—you’ll find the answer to the February 27 (618) Wordle just below.

I had no greens at all after two guesses today… but I did have four yellows to rearrange into a winning combination, and today that turned out to be more than enough help, even so early on in the game. I’ll happily start my Wordle week like that.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Monday, February 27

Today’s answer is the negative outcome of what can sometimes be a well-intentioned act—such as an amateur artist trying to restore an ancient painting to disastrous effect. To put it more simply: the opposite of making something better would be to make it  _____. 

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Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

There are no double letters in today’s Wordle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you’ve decided to play Wordle but you’re not sur…

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The FCC has announced that it will vote on a proposal to restore net neutrality on April 25, a move that, if approved, it says will “bring back a national standard for broadband reliability, security, and consumer protection.”

Back in 2017, we explained why net neutrality matters—and why we think PC gamers should support it—and the basic facts remain the same today. Simply put, net neutrality requires that all data is treated equally, and forbids ISPs from throttling speeds or blocking access to content based on the nature of the content being delivered. It was enshrined into US law by the Obama administration in 2015 under the Open Internet Order, but then dismantled just a couple years later by the Trump administration.

It wasn’t a popular move. The vote to dismantle regulations broke along party lines—three Republicans voted in favor, two Democrats against—and there was significant opposition from the public and organizations including the ACLU, EFF, and even Google. The effort to restore regulation began in 2021 with an executive order from US president Biden, and the process began in earnest in September 2023.

“The pandemic proved o…

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If you’re struggling with today’s Wordle you’ll find a helpful clue below, as well as a range of general tips designed to make the most of every guess. And if you’re more than a bit struggling and would just like someone to tell you the answer to the October 15 (848) puzzle, please? I’ve got your back.

A nice, simple, win in three was just what I needed after all the frantic fun I seem to have had the rest of this Wordle week. I may not be able to boast about any fantastic turnarounds or sudden sparks of inspiration with this one, but at least I had one day where my eyebrows didn’t repeatedly crash into each other as I scoured my previous guesses for clues to today’s Wordle answer.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, October 15

Anything that can’t keep whatever liquids it was supposed to hold on the inside could be described in this way. Think of dripping pipes or a bucket with a tiny hole just below the waterline. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day …

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There is the suggestion going around that the green team is testing out a chiplet version of its top GeForce graphics card for the future Nvidia Blackwell GPU generation. This comes hot on the heels of another rumour stating explicitly that the Blackwell architecture is going to be used for data center silicon, too, and that this successor to Hopper will definitely be a multi-chip module GPU.

We’re at least a year out from the release of the Nvidia RTX 5090, but that’s not going to stop the rumour mill going into overdrive every time there’s the faintest whiff of next-gen silicon in the air. And that means we have to take every rumour with the requisite measure of salt given that at this point it’s all largely guesswork, conjecture, and hearsay.

The idea of Nvidia finally making the switch over to a chiplet design for its server-level GPUs doesn’t surprise, and indeed sounds like a smart plan. The sort of compute-based workloads necessary in data centers can be fairly straightforward to run across multiple graphics cards, so the idea that they could run on multiple compute chiplets within a single GPU package would make sense.

There are also some guessed-at pot…

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