I wasn’t expecting Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida to directly call out World of Warcraft during a media Q&A at the MMO’s Berlin Fan Festival, but that’s exactly what happened. When asked about how the team plans to modernise Final Fantasy 14’s housing system—one which is regularly criticised for a lack of … Read more

A vulnerability in Meccha Chameleon, which has already been patched, allowed multiple Steam Workshop maps to distribute malware to players. As a post on Medium from user Feint discussed (via Kotaku), “A couple of my friends reported seeing a command prompt window briefly appear while Steam was downloading a custom workshop map … What I … Read more

I still remember the long ritual of installing World of Warcraft to my parents’ laptop as a young’un, mystified by the sheer number of discs it took to squeeze the game onto a hard drive. The more discs a game took to install, the better it must be, I figured—child me would be aghast at … Read more

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was not the series’ finest hour, but one aspect of the sequel that has gone down well with players is its experiments with matchmaking. For years, players have complained about the effects of skill-based matchmaking (SBMM), which is intended to level the playing field by sorting players into groups … Read more

One aspect of Helldivers 2 I’ve repeatedly lamented is how many of its new toys are locked away inside Warbonds, with too few new weapons, equipment and stratagems unlockable through regular play. Hence, it’s worth giving Arrowhead credit when they do let you unlock a new toy through spending requisition slips and nothing else. Such … Read more

H. R. Giger’s biomechanical nightmares have inspired plenty of videogames. If we go way back, his work was repurposed for baffling puzzle adventure Dark Seed, and more recently there was the fleshy horror of Scorn. Tormentum: Dark Sorrow was more in the vein of the former than the latter, a point-and-click adventure that took Giger’s … Read more

Larian Studios has reiterated that it is fully, 100%, without a doubt, donezo in the bunzo when it comes to new Baldur’s Gate-related projects. It’s latest statement was in response to a Dark Horse comics announcement that could have been interpreted as implying the studio’s involvement. On X, “The Everything App,” Dark Horse announced that … Read more

This year’s Gen Con event is one Wizards of the Coast has said it’s “pulling out all the stops for”, with a keynote to be hosted by Theo Solomon (who played Wyll in Baldur’s Gate 3) including a bunch of announcements about what’s coming up for Dungeons & Dragons. One release seems to have been … Read more

A new report from Reuters alleges that it took an alarmingly long time for OpenAI to respond to one of its prototype AI agents⁠—programs with the ability to act independently of specific prompts⁠—breaking containment and hacking another company. That company, Hugging Face, had reportedly neutralized the threat and contacted the FBI before ever being contacted … Read more

Fantasy RPGs have become too comfortable with delivering the expected gaggle of familiar character concepts. Archers, monks, paladins, you know the drill. I’ve seen it all before! Give me, I don’t know, a Viking that shoots triple-barreled laser guns out of its dual shields, which also have metal claws, you know? Final Fantasy 14 knows … Read more