Best Buy has a deal on an Asus ROG Zephyrus 14 with an RTX 4060 and a 165Hz 1600p display for $1,400, a $200 reduction from its original price. It’s a great choice if you’re looking for a gaming laptop that’s easy to travel with and won’t take up much space.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus 14 is a 14-inch gaming laptop with an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS processor and an RTX 4060 graphics card offering midrange performance at 1080p and 1600p. It’s a good candidate for using DLSS 3 to get a big framerate boost in games like Cyberpunk 2077.

On the memory side, the 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD which is okay, though I would have loved to have seen a larger SSD since 512GB fills up pretty fast these days. However, the specific make or model of these components isn’t mentioned in the listin…

Folks, they’ve done it again. A loose-lipped ratings board (via Gematsu) has leaked the existence of likely PC ports of the recently announced remasters of Baten Kaitos 1 and Baten Kaitos Origins, meaning the pair of classic GameCube JRPGs can join the Teapot Dome Scandal and the Vela Incident in the list of ‘things governmental bodies have tried and failed to hide’. 

The real surprise is that it was South Africa’s ratings board that did it instead of South Korea’s. Though to be fair, I guess the latter is busy being razed to its foundations by angry fans of anime nudity. You can find the rating (as a downloadable spreadsheet) here. Note the sizeable tag that reads “PC Game” next to the Baten Kaitos entry. First Etrian Odyssey, now this? We’re being spoiled.

The Baten K…

Look, we’ve all missed a few big opportunities in our lives. Hindsight is 20-20, etc. That being said, Intel do seem to have made more than few boo-boos in the “long term vision” stakes over the past decade or so, and financially one of the biggest might have been spurning OpenAI.

According to Reuters, four sources have revealed that, over several months in 2017 and 2018, executives at Intel discussed various options for working with OpenAI, including buying a 15% stake in the company for $1 billion. 

Two of the sources also said that discussions included Intel potentially taking an additional 15% stake in OpenAI if it provided hardware for the company at cost.

Sources told Reuters that, at the time, then-CEO Bob Swan didn’t think generative AI models would make i…

A community Q&A organized across the Sons of the Forest Discord and Reddits has made its way to the developers, with a few answers giving an exciting look at Endnight’s plans for its smashing survival success. While the details given on Sons of the Forest’s future are pretty sparse, there are some very concrete bits about things Endnight can definitively confirm.

“We have big plans to keep adding tasks Kelvin can complete, some ideas in progress are having are having him help construct a wall around your base, or fortify/repair the base when needed. For Virginia, we plan to add more to her A.I. particularly giving her more bravery if she has a weapon, and also depending on how many mutants/cannibals she has killed,” said Endnight in a Q&A response about the popular compani…

Look, my experience with playing games competitively is minimal, but the one thing I do know is that losing can feel real bad. Thankfully, I only have a handful of friends and strangers to witness my poor performances. But when you’re a newly-formed team under a hugely popular streamer on a seven-loss streak in a major Valorant tournament, I’m sure those Ls hit a hell of a lot harder.

That’s the problem Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang has found himself in. The OfflineTV member decided to get into esports earlier this year, rounding up a team of pro Valorant players to tackle the game’s Challengers 2023 tournament under the moniker DSG. It’s a pretty strong team, too—a large chunk of the roster came from playing competitive CS:GO, with recent additions like Jacob “yay”…

Going into today’s livestream showcase of new gameplay from The Final Shape, most players were expecting a retread of the new Light subclass powers revealed last year, and maybe a walkthrough of a campaign mission.

What we just got was nothing like that. With Bungie’s backs against the wall amidst layoffs, pressure from Sony, and missed financial targets, the Destiny 2 studio needed to come out all guns blazing in order to reignite interest in the climactic expansion of its decades long saga. What it actually did was nuke expectations from orbit. Here’s what they just revealed:

1. The Final Shape will feature an entirely new subclass called Prismatic that combines Light and Dark abilities enabling incredibly OP synergies.
2. The game…
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The ’90s were weird, man. Nowadays our celebrity game devs leave the beef and drama to streamers, but things could get heated back in the day. One of PC Gamer’s very own “Game Gods” from the class of 2000, Cliff Bleszinski, recently dished a little on that heady time in an interview with IGN, particularly on how hard the former Epic developer was gunning for id and Ion Storm co-founder John Romero.

“I saw Romero as my enemy,” Bleszinski said flatly of the Doom co-creator, recalling a jealousy of id’s success and Romero’s “rock and roll” persona: “‘I’m going to take that guy down’. It goes back to, again, the whole ‘I had nothing and I wanted it, you had everything and you flaunted it.’ So we were gunning to try and defeat [Quake].”

At the time, Bleszinski was a game design w…

Update #3: As of 7 am PT—slightly later than predicted—a hotfix has been released to fix the issues that caused players to lose Seals, Triumphs, Medals and other achievements. Hotfix 6.3.0.6 is available now.

In addition to the deployment, Bungie has rolled back player accounts to their state as of yesterday, January 24, at 8:20 am PT—just after the weekly reset. Likely this was necessary to actually restore the missing Triumphs. Bungie notes that any progress made between that time and the game being taken offline will now be lost.

It’s a small price to pay to restore the collective weight of player achievements over the years. Nevertheless, let us pour one out to this one player who earned Hierarchy of Needs in that timeframe—a rare…

Earlier this month, Polish game devs, including several from CD Projekt Red, formed the Polish Gamedev Workers Union (PGWU). This came in the wake of further layoffs at the company in July, to the tune of 9% of its workforce. At the time, CEO Adam Kiciński explained the move as something to help make the teams more “agile and effective”, but agile and effective doesn’t pay the rent.

“This event created a tremendous amount of stress and insecurity,” explains the union’s website, “affecting our mental health and leading to the creation of this union in response. Having a union means having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis.”

The devs at CD Projekt Red have shed more light on the situation during an interview with IGN, …

In August, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide developer Fatshark gave me an early look at an update that the studio didn’t think players were expecting: a complete change to the leveling system, adding RPG-style skill trees unique to each class. That update went live today, replacing the old, much simpler progression system with a more flexible array of abilities and bonuses. The patch also includes a list of balance changes so long it had to be split across two posts on the Darktide forums. 

Players on the Darktide subreddit, who were extremely down on the game at launch last November, seem delighted with the update, and Darktide has hit its highest concurrent player numbers since January. 

I spent some time playing with the new skill trees on my veteran and ogryn charact…

All the Wordle help you could possibly need is waiting for you on this very page. Improve every game with our handy tips and guides, read a clue written especially for the March 19 (638) game, or skip straight to the win with today’s Wordle answer—it’s entirely up to you.

The good thing about starting with a clean slate after a loss is there’s not much to lose, so I was perhaps a little braver today than I’d otherwise be. Thanks to a fantastic opener and an even better follow-up, I managed to solve today’s tricky Wordle in just three guesses.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Sunday, March 19

Today’s answer refers to a statement of belief, the principles that may guide someone’s actions and decisions. It’s also the name of a non-playable charac…

At a time when mass layoffs are rampant in the games industry, one company is talking about raises. Capcom announced to investors this week that it’s increasing its base starting salary for new hires in Japan, and giving current employees a raise of “over 5% on average” this year. 

It’s a moderate cost-of-living bump that might not have been notable if so many gaming companies weren’t aggressively cutting costs right now.

The starting salary for new graduates at Capcom Japan, which is headquartered in Osaka, is being raised from ¥235,000 per month to ¥300,000, which is about $2,014 USD a month at the current exchange rate, or $24,168 per year. It’s not a salary that would go far in a US city, which reflects the fact that wages are lower on average in Japan than …

At this year’s Gamescom event, two forthcoming games heavily feature ray tracing as the means for producing the best possible graphics. Star Wars Outlaws and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle both have graphics features, either exclusively developed by Nvidia or are so demanding that only high-end GeForce RTX cards can really handle it.

Nvidia was the first GPU vendor to bring real-time ray tracing hardware to the gaming masses at another Gamescom in 2018, with its GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards. But since then, AMD and Intel have both followed suit, and all new gaming PCs and consoles are more or less capable of ray tracing. Most PC gamers are well aware that Nvidia’s GPUs can do ray tracing faster than the competition but three games show that Nvidia is doing its best to …

Need a clue for today’s Wordle? The answer in a flash? Or perhaps you’d just like to read some general hints and tips designed to make the February 14 (605) game that little bit easier. Whatever Wordle help you’re after, you’re sure to find it here.

My opener slotted the first green neatly into place. My follow-up gave me the last green and a handy pair of yellows. And then it all came together beautifully on the third guess. Another victory: Wordle done. Time to celebrate with a chocolate biscuit and look forward to tomorrow’s puzzle.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Tuesday, February 14

Today’s answer concerns the act of creating audible vibrations: banging a drum, singing a song, etc. If something emits a noise or note it would make a _____, woul…

Valve seems to be gearing up to release its first new game in four years, and we already know way too much about it: We’ve seen dozens of Deadlock’s characters and their full movesets on YouTube, we can poke around in its file directories, it has a pretty popular subreddit, and, as reported by VG247, it hit 17,000 concurrent players this weekend, rising to over 18,000 today. Not bad for a game that hasn’t even been announced yet.

You can observe the fluctuations of Deadlock’s crypto-player base over on SteamDB. According to the utility’s creator, Pavel Djundik, a Steam key submission months ago made the details of Deadlock’s playtest available for public view, and Valve took no action to change that. It certainly looks like the studio has been ramping up the size of Deadlock’s pla…