UHQBot
-
Posts
39,331 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
25
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Downloads
Posts posted by UHQBot
-
-
Amidst the big celebration of the 25th anniversary of the original Fallout, Bethesda has announced that Fallout 4 is getting a free "next-gen update" in 2023—and yes, it's coming to PC.
Details are slim but the update will include "performance mode features for high frame rates, quality features for 4K resolution gameplay, bug fixes and even bonus Creation Club content," Bethesda said. It's also being released for the Xbox Series X-S and PlayStation 5 consoles.
Some Fallout fans may lament that Bethesda is putting effort into an incremental update of Fallout 4 for slightly newer technology rather than making Fallout 5, but look on the bright side: That's basically what Fallout 5 would be anyway, right? Somewhat more seriously, the upgrade will be a pretty big deal for anyone who hasn't played Fallout 4 yet. That's potentially quite a lot of people: Remember, it's seven years old now, which is an eon in videogame terms.
One thing Fallout fans have to be curious about is if (or, more likely, how) this update will impact Fallout 4 mods, of which there are very many. I've reached out to Bethesda to see if it's willing to share any insights on that front, and will update if I receive a reply.
Bethesda said today's announcement concludes its Fallout anniversary celebration, so I guess that means we won't be getting a surprise announcement of a new Obsidian-made Fallout game, which is unfortunate. There's still time to snag some of the other freebies, though, including rewards and bundles in Fallout 76 and Fallout 3 for free on the Epic Games Store.
The #Fallout25 celebration isn't over yet! Here's what we have going on this week: https://t.co/06H7C5dGeX pic.twitter.com/sGmS91UkOnOctober 24, 2022
See more -
Three former Blizzard and Blizzard North grandees gave a panel talk this past weekend at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, discussing the Diablo series and their respective roles in its history. Matt Householder was a producer, Matt Uelmen did music and sound design, while Jay Wilson had various roles before becoming lead designer on Diablo 3.
The timeline gets pretty interesting around the mid-2000s when, essentially, World of Warcraft is taking off and Blizzard North has just been closed (the studio's last day was August 1, 2005). It was around this period that Jay Wilson joined Blizzard, and the Diablo 3 that Blizzard North had been working on was moved "in-house" under his direction.
One of the areas Wilson discusses is the tradeable rune system that Diablo 3 had at one point, before switching to a more elective system with an element of player choice. "Blizzard at the time was, and this is less true now and I think for the better, so obsessed with perfect game design," says Wilson.
"I would describe it like… if you look at Ferrari, they will make a car unlivable in order that it goes round a corner 0.1 second faster. Lamborghini just wants the car to look cool and go fast. Sometimes that's better but we wanted that perfect design so, if we found a flaw, we got rid of it."
Wilson clearly retains a fondness for the older system, and this is where he finds the fault in that perfectionist mindset. He says Path of Exile is an example where it does "a great job with similar systems [and] it has problems but it's great fun so who cares."
Going, going…
Talk then moved onto Diablo 3's more controversial elements: the "always online" requirement, and the real money auction house.
"When I was at Blizzard the reason for doing the real money auction house was security," said Wilson. "It wasn't money, we didn't think we'd make that much money from it, [but] the biggest problem with Diablo 2 was item duping and duping hacks and all the gold sellers and all those things."
As Wilson succinctly puts it: "There's almost no way to fix that problem without somehow controlling the trading market. There's lots of good ways to do it, but that was our idea at the time. The trading market's in the game: we control it, so the hackers don't.
"Same with [always]-online," said Wilson. "As soon as you go offline you have to give out the client server and once you do that the hackers have got you. But I couldn't say those things because you do not poke hackers. You say "oh we're doing this for security reasons" and the hackers say [puts hands on hips] "oh really?""
The most interesting element of the auction house was that, when it was decided to get rid of it, Blizzard began to panic internally about something that seems relatively minor. It was on the box as a selling point.
"The short answer about the profit," said Wilson, "it made a little bit of money, nothing compared to WoW, we never expected it to be… we really thought of it as a courtesy to making the game more secure.
"If it made more than 10 or 15 million [dollars] I'd be surprised. It sounds like a lot of money but WoW probably made that every 10 seconds. It was not very popular."
Then, the delay between decision and action: "The reason we did not get rid of it right away when we saw it was a problem was legally we didn't think we could because it was advertised on the boxes…" said Wilson.
"So we actually took a long time to try and work out all the legal issues before we finally said ok we think it's worth trying it, if we get a lawsuit oh well."
It's fascinating to hear Wilson talking about Diablo 3 from this perspective because, at the time, his hands (and tongue) were understandably tied. It's easy to forget how white hot the debate raged around this game and the decisions Blizzard made: now "always online" is so common no-one would bat an eyelid, but then it was treated as a gross affront by some players. The auction house, too, split loyalties like never before: and one strain of this was players who saw it as straightforward profiteering. Next to some of what Blizzard itself does now in terms of monetisation, $10-15 million in lifetime profit seems quaint.
-
Fortnite haunted furniture might not be something you thought you'd ever have to worry about but you'll need to find and destroy seven pieces of it for one of the Fortnitemares quests. In this guide, I'll explain what you need to know.
Fortnite's Halloween event has been running for the last few weeks and you've had the chance to turn into a werewolf and take on the Inkquisitor boss as part of October's seasonal celebrations. If you're ready to start hunting down terrifying tables or spooky sofas, here's where to find haunted furniture in Fortnite and how to destroy it for the quest.
Fortnite haunted furniture: Where to find it
In most circumstances, you'd find furniture inside a home or building and that seems to be the case for the haunted variety too. Your best bet is to head to an area of the map with plenty of buildings, so somewhere like Greasy Grove, Tilted Towers, or even Grim Gables are good options for finding freaky furniture.
If you're wondering how you can tell if a piece of furniture is haunted or not, don't worry. The furniture will be floating off the ground and will have a slightly misty aura to it, so it's pretty easy to spot.
How to destroy haunted furniture
Once you've found haunted furniture, you need to destroy it for it to count towards the Fortnitemares quest. You can either use a tool like a pickaxe or else you can just shoot the item to destroy it. The former is probably the better option as you won't draw unwanted attention from other players who might also be in the area.
-
Voxel-based destruction sim Teardown got its 1.2 update today, and it promises to make the process of discovering mods even easier. The new featured mods list is curated by Teardown's devs at Tuxedo Labs, and highlights all sorts of "new maps, tools, vehicles, mini-games and more" to spare you the trouble of rummaging through the thousands of mods that already exist for the game.
The update's announcement calls out a few specific mods by name: a dog companion from DimasVoxel, the Montagna del Castello map from Klimber and Klumbart, and the AI-controlled T-Rex (or TeaREX) mod from tislericsm. Tuxedo Labs promises that the list will be updated regularly by the dev team, so you have a constant trickle of new things to obliterate.
We've said before that Teardown's vibrant mod scene is one of the best things about it, even deeming it a kind of spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, the previous player-made content king. Anything that makes it easier to sort through the teeming volumes of mods on Teardown's workshop sounds like a good idea to me.
The featured mods list isn't the only addition the 1.2 update makes. The patch also turns Teardown's Muratori Beach map into a freely-accessible sandbox level. Before now, the beach had only been reachable during certain sections of the game's campaign. And if there's one thing I've always said, it's that nature's pristine beaches need to be taught a violent lesson.
There's also a bit of Steam Deck love in the new update. 1.2 adds support for multiple controllers, which is handy for all sorts of people, but especially for anyone looking to use a separate gamepad while playing on a docked Deck. Beyond that, the patch promises bugfixes and mysterious, nameless "updates to the game's modding tools".
We're very fond of Teardown around these parts, and we've written more than a couple of pieces on the good times we've had laying absolute waste to its blocky, fragile world. It's even nabbed itself the coveted #25 spot on our Top 100 PC Games list. Here's hoping there are many more updates to come.
-
Former Bayonetta voice actress Hellena Taylor has clarified initial claims that she was only offered $4,000 for reprising her role in Bayonetta 3, while simultaneously damning reports that refuted her original allegations.
The whole thing kicked off earlier this month when Taylor released a series of videos on Twitter. In them, she said that she received a "final offer" of a flat sum of $4,000 to return as the voice of Bayonetta for this year's upcoming threequel. In a subsequent video, she implied that she had originally received a different offer which she called "insulting," ultimately declining the role.
She failed to mention whether that offer was higher or lower than the final one received, but a follow-up report by Bloomberg now claims Taylor was actually offered $15,000 for her voice work. According to sources, "Platinum Games sought to hire Taylor for at least five sessions, each paying $3,000 to $4,000 for four hours in the studio." The report continued to claim that she then asked for "a six-figure sum as well as residuals." Series creator Hideki Kamiya also called out Taylor, tweeting: "Sad and deplorable about the attitude of untruth."
Taylor bit back against the report, calling it "an absolute lie" and adding that Platinum Games was "trying to save their 'donkey' and the game." Then, Taylor went ahead and confirmed that at least part of the report was in fact true. A new series of tweets appeared on Monday morning with the actress saying "I feel the need to defend myself and my reputation in the industry."
It has come to my attention that some people are calling me a liar and golddigger. I feel the need to defend myself and my reputation in the industry. See thread #PlatinumGames #Nintendo #Bayonetta #Bayonetta3 #Bayonutters #Boycott #NintendoEurope #NintendoAmerica #NintendoJapanOctober 24, 2022
See moreTurns out that the initial "insulting" offer was $10,000, before being upped to $15,000 after Taylor wrote to Kamiya asking for what she was "worth." The $4,000 offer came almost a year after she turned down her role reprisal, which was to "voice some lines" for a cameo appearance. She then goes on to tangentially mention that she never asked for money for signatures, and the one time she did she "donated 100% of the signing fees to charity."
Taylor's particular bugbear seems to be the claim she asked for a six-figure pay packet, adding: "I am a team player. I was just asking for a fair, living wage in line with the value that I bring to this game." She went on to further slam the reports that rebutted her first videos. "There are people who are attempting to throw shade and discredit what I say. The industry is powerful, they have powerful journalists too," she concluded. "They are trying to save their asset. Don't fall for it!"
Appropriate pay in videogame voice acting is a problem. Despite this being a messy situation, it has helped pave the way to real conversation around VAs getting paid their worth. Detroit Become Human's Bryan Dechart recalled a time a "AAA game by a studio that has made MANY games" refused to register with performer union SAG-AFTRA, offering $4,000 "for the entire game." This saga has given more of a peek behind the curtain than most, though it's unclear where the blame lies between Platinum or Bayonetta herself. And it's hard to see how muddied statements and calls for boycotts help anyone.
-
World of Warcraft is gearing up for Dragonflight, the ninth expansion launching on November 28. A small mountain of game content hits this week in the first part of the pre-patch, with another set of goodies—including the Dracthyr—arriving in the second phase on November 15.
This means you've got about a month to get ready for the new zones, areas and questlines on launch day. So with that in mind, here are some of the things that are going away when World of Warcraft: Dragonflight arrives and the new things you'll want to get done before the new expansion launches.
Finish up your Fated raids
All of the raids from the Shadowlands were scaled up for Season 4 and put on a weekly rotation, offering better gear and new achievements. This week, all three raids will become available at the Fated difficulty all the time, so it's a little easier to wrap up some of those achievements or gear hunting you're looking to complete.
Kill every boss in each raid (Castle Nathria, Sanctum of Domination and Sepulcher of the First Ones) on Normal, Heroic or Mythic difficulties and you'll earn the Jigglesworth Sr. slime cat ground mount. Clear them on Heroic and you'll also get the Hero of Fate title; finish Mythic and you'll get portals to the raid locations. The mythic-difficulty-only mounts from Sylvanas and the Jailer, end bosses of Sanctum of Domination and Sepulcher of the First Ones, will become rare drops after the new expansion launches, so you'll want to grab them now if you can. The Carcizined Zerethsteed mechano-mount from killing the Jailer on Heroic difficulty won't be available at all.
On the gear front, you can still earn your rare Dinar coins if you haven't finished that quest, to buy selected weapons and trinkets from the raids before Dragonflight. The currency to upgrade those items to Heroic and Mythic difficulties will still drop from raids at those levels and because all three raids will be Fated, it will be much faster to accumulate the currency you need to max out your items. At this point, your focus should be on weapons that will allow you to speed through the levels in Dragonflight.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
Rank, mounts and titles for other content
For dungeon-runners who enjoy five-man content, you will no longer be able to get the Shrouded Hero title for ranking in the top 0.1% of Mythic Plus dungeon delvers. But Keystone Master and its accompanying Restoration Deathwalker mount are still available until Dragonflight launches. If you clear every dungeon in Shadowlands at Mythic-plus level 15 or higher on both Fortified and Tyrannical difficulties, you'll almost perfectly hit the cut-off.
If you feel like pushing a little higher, Keystone Hero achievements and the teleports they grant you to the dungeons this season will still be available for anyone clearing a +20 or higher until Dragonflight begins. The Great Vault and its weekly rewards for raiders, dungeon runners and PvPers will still be open as a way to fill out your chosen character's leveling gear.
Like the Shrouded Hero title, PvP titles and rank achievements will end this week with the pre-patch, as will progress toward Gladiator and its mount. But Vicious Mount and Saddle progress will continue until launch, and PvP Great Vault rewards will still drop.
The biggest meta-achievement of the expansion, Back from the Beyond, will end with the launch of Dragonflight. This hidden Feat of Strength awards the Veilstrider title and progress is account-wide. It consists of doing nearly every bit of content for all four of Shadowlands' covenants, plus activities in the Maw, Korthia, and Zereth Mortis zones.
(Image credit: Blizzard)There are a number of guides to getting Veilstrider, but you can also track it manually. A warning–if you haven't started yet, look at the Shadowlands Dilettante covenant achievements in detail, first. They're quite time-consuming, and if you haven't started all of them by now, it's probably too late. You'll need to complete the following achievements:
- Castle Nathria
- Chains of Domination
- Dead Men Tell Some Tales
- Fake It ‘Til You Make It
- From A to Zereth
- Many, Many Things
- Myths of the Shadowlands Dungeons
- On the Offensive
- Re-Re-Re-Renowned
- Sanctum Superior
- Sanctum of Domination
- Secrets of the First Ones
- Sepulcher of the First Ones
- Shadowlands Dilettante
- Tower Ranger
- Walking in Maw-mphis
Level in Dragonflight in style
With Dragonflight so close, most players' focus will be on things that last—that is, appearances and mounts that won't be worthless two levels into the new expansion. Shadowlands was loaded with transmog gear appearances, most from the four covenants that made up the expansion. Now that you can freely swap anima currency between covenants using an item purchased from the vendor next to the flight master in the capital city of Oribos, make sure you pick up the appearances from each covenant that you'd like to wear as you level.
Some "hidden" appearance sets require you to use specific features of the covenants' special buildings and events, such as using the mirror network in Revendreth for the Venthyr or defeating opponents in specialized ways in the Path of Ascension for the Kyrian. One of the toughest—and most dependent on random chance—is the Unity set for Necrolords, and it's about to get much more difficult to do.
(Image credit: Blizzard)The Unity set requires you to have the Unity construct with you, which requires a Level 5 Stitchyard to build. Every once in a great while, a world quest in the zone of Maldraxxus will award you with an appearance from the set—but only if you have Unity out when you complete it. The quest doesn't indicate in advance whether it'll drop a piece.
Right now, helpful folks in the Maldraxxian Unity Set Announcer Discord are doing sweeps of the world quests to flush out those rare pieces. After Dragonflight launches, the odds of that continuing at this level are small. Get them while they're hot!
New collector's items to pick up
Speaking of mounts and pets, a brand-new 500-mount achievement is being added this week, and it rewards the Otterworldly Ottuk Carrier, an adorable spectral otter mount. New pet collection achievements also come in at 1,250; 1,500; 1,750; and 2,000 pets.
For people who have been collecting the many different Soulshapes of the Night Fae covenant, don't miss your chance to take those shapes anytime you like in Dragonflight. Lady Muunn in the Heart of the Forest will sell the Seed of Renewed Souls this week, a toy that lets you use your favorite shapes.
(Image credit: Blizzard)Level those alts
Don't miss the opportunity to truly prepare your characters for leveling in Dragonflight, even if you haven't quite hit 60 yet. The Winds of Wisdom 50% XP buff will last until November 15, and a nerf to the amount of experience needed to get from zero to 60 will then reduce the overall leveling time by about two-thirds. Because of the way the levels are scaled, this means it'll likely be worth getting characters to roughly level 37 now, then leveling the rest of the way with the experience squish.
It's also easier to level with friends, as monsters are now individually tapped for loot and quest credit for up to five people, regardless of what faction they play. So if you party up with a Horde or Alliance friend while you play the other faction, you can both quest together without having to kill twice as many things. War Mode monsters are still faction-tapped, however.
Finally, if you plan on leveling Dragonflight's new Dracthyr dragonkin race or Evoker class, don't forget to pop into the Shadowlands Public Test Realm and try out the character customizations. There are literally tens of thousands of combos for Dracthyr, and you don't want to spend the first hours of the expansion feeling pressured to pick the perfect combo right away. To log into the PTR, open the Battle.net launcher and under "Game Version" where it typically says World of Warcraft, click the drop-down menu and select "Public Test Realm".
See you in Azeroth!
-
It was only a matter of time before someone combined Stable Diffusion AI image generator and Minecraft command-line. This is probably one of the best uses of AI image generators I've seen so far, essentially using a combination of Minecraft screenshots and text prompts to create highly detailed images each time the user makes changes to their design within the Minecraft game world.
Sean Simon, more commonly known as ThoseSixFaces (or Lozmosis on Reddit), posted the above video yesterday showing off a sped-up version of their scripts running live as they messed around in-game.
It works by taking screenshots from a specific angle as the game is played, resizing or cropping them to 512x512 pixels and saving them to a folder. Each frame is generated on "a fixed interval, or whenever the player places/removes a block." Using a version of InvokeAI that Sean modified, the model then goes about "targeting the latest image in the folder and outputting the Stable Diffusion image." Another script then displays the output image using tkinter.
Stable Diffusion is the main thing translating each frame into gorgeous AI generated images, however, which Sean explains "denoises on a random value between 0.47-0.5." So although Sean is able to use prompts to push the AI in the preferred direction using image2image, there's still a little leeway in how random the generated results can be.
As it stands right now, the process involves running several scripts, though Sean is "keen to compress this all into a single script."
Your next upgrade(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the restIt's a fascinating project, and one my art teachers from college would be very excited to see working; they seemed to have an obsession with translating work into different mediums, then translating it back. On that note, one Reddit commenter jokingly suggests a reverse process to Sean, in which the AI would "turn arts into minecrafts."
Sean responds with, "I've started cooking something up," so it may not be too long before we see Minecraft worlds being generated using AI image prompts. Or indeed Minecraft worlds being translated into images, then back into Minecraft worlds.
Whew, what a world we live in.
Sadly, Sean's scripts are not yet available to download from Github, but do keep an eye on their Twitter for updates.
Now, we've seen Stable Diffusion being used in VR, and the CEO of Discord image bot Midjourney speculates that future consoles will have a "giant AI chip and all the games will be dreams." This Minecraft project is yet another addition to the exciting, AI-focussed narrative springing up in the gaming sphere right now.
-
A single chip has managed to transfer over a petabit-per-second by a team of scientists from universities in Denmark, Sweden, and Japan. That's over one million gigabits of data per second over a fibre optic cable, or basically the entire internet's worth of traffic.
The researchers—A. A. Jørgensen, D. Kong, L. K. Oxenløwe—and their team successfully showed a data transmission of 1.84 petabits over a 7.9km fibre cable using just a single chip. That's not quite as fast as some other alternatives with larger, bulkier systems, which have reached up to 10.66 petabits, but the key here is scale: the proposed system is very compact.
By splitting a data stream into 37 sections, one for each core of a fibre optic cable, and then further splitting each of those streams into 223 channels, the researchers were able to remove a great deal of interference that slows down optical systems and therefore deliver an internet's worth of data transmission using a single chip.
"You could say the average internet traffic in the world is about a petabit per second. What we transmit is two times that," Jørgensen says in a comment on New Scientist. "It’s an incredibly large amount of data that we’re sending through, essentially, less than a square millimetre [of cable]. It just goes to show that we can go so much further than we are today with internet connections."
The researchers also theorise that such a system could support speeds of up to 100 petabits-per-second in massively parallel systems.
The research paper relies on a bank of investigations into the concept of a single chip solution across multiple researchers and papers, including one by researchers in Australia called 'Ultra-dense optical data transmission over standard fibre with a single chip source'. Catchy.
Your next machine(Image credit: Future)Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines from the pros
Best gaming laptop: Perfect notebooks for mobile gamingEssentially, high-speed data transmission that often requires a fibre optic cable and bulky equipment is now being miniaturised into a smaller on-chip package. Instead of multiple lasers in parallel, which come with their own set of challenges, it's possible to shrink a good deal of this equipment to the silicon level. And with that even remove some of the difficulties in sending massive data packages long distances and at high speeds.
A big part of these new breakthroughs are microcombs, which are a way of generating constant and measurable frequencies of light. These are not only useful for shrinking down the requirements for a system such as this, but have also recently seen breakthroughs when added to CMOS chips.
In fact, a whole lot more could be added to a CMOS chip to make this whole system even more integrated, says Jørgensen. So if this seems fast and compact now, it's only a matter of time before an even more integrated, speedier version is developed. Stack up more of these devices into a single parallel system and you're talking mega-bandwidth from a single server rack.
Basically, the internet has a whole lot more room to grow.
-
Which thermal paste pattern is best? This is a hotly-debated question that I'm sure most PC builders have an opinion on. Personally, I'm a line guy, especially with the introduction of Intel's long LGA 1700 chips. But there's also the blob, the X, the circle, and many more you could probably make a decent argument for.
What about the Discord logo? Or a smiley face? Or the Half-Life logo? That's what Tiktok account MrYeester is attempting to prove with his latest round of PC experimentation, which includes seeing which known-brand logo is best for keeping your chip cool.
The best thermal paste pattern is all about coverage. You want to squish your cooler onto your chip and in doing so spread the thermal paste around to cover the chip's heat spreader in its entirety. To mimic this process, MyYeester has been trying out various thermal paste patterns and then squishing them down using a piece of glass, so we can see the end result.
@mryeester ♬ original sound - mryeester
@mryeester ♬ Sunroof - Nicky Youre & dazy
@mryeester ♬ original sound - Lonely Bunker
Perhaps unsurprisingly, lathering the Discord logo onto your chip offers a relatively decent coverage of the chip. Though admittedly the lower portion of his AMD AM4 processor wasn't properly covered in the end. The more surprising and likely useful testing was comparing the square and circle patterns, which showed that neither really covered the centre of your chip. That's probably the worst-case scenario, as the centre tends to be a hotspot for silicon.
I guess what it comes down to is time versus effectiveness, and let's be honest MrYeester was liberally lathering thermal paste for some of these designs. If you put half a tube of paste on your chip I'm sure it'll get good coverage no matter what pattern you go with.
Cooling off(Image credit: Cooler Master, EKWB)Best AIO cooler for CPUs: All-in-one, and one for all... components.
Best CPU air coolers: CPU fans that don't go brrr.But it's another fun 'what if?' from the channel, which I first discovered back when he attempted to connect as many RAM sticks using risers as his system would allow. He managed a leaning tower of five RAM sticks, by the way. And of course it made the PC absolutely worse in many ways.
The channel also once used a car tyre to apply thermal paste to a CPU. On the one hand, the CPU has thermal paste on it now. Yippee. On the other hand, it probably doesn't need it anymore.
If you're in need of actual thermal paste advice, generally it's better to have too much than too little. If you're a bit more generous with your paste, you'll probably be okay whichever way you apply it (within reason). Generally a line or X in the middle of your chip will suffice for most, and if it's a longer chip like Intel's 12th or 13th Gen, make sure to stretch your pattern out a little further to ensure full coverage.
-
Earlier this month, Martin Luiga—Studio ZA/UM founding member and developer on one of PC Gamer's all-time favourites Disco Elysium—announced the "dissolution of the ZA/UM Cultural Association." He said that the company as a cultural project "no longer represents the ethos it was founded on," adding that artist Aleksander Rostov, and writers Helen Hindpere and Robert Kurvitz, left "involuntarily." In a follow-up interview, Luiga said that the three were "fired on false premises," implying that legal action against ZA/UM was incoming.
Now, as reported by TechNewsSpace, that does indeed seem to be the case. As seen on the Estonian Ministry of Justice site Riigi Teataja, writer Kurvitz has filed against ZA/UM on behalf of his own company, Telomer OÜ.
The application is currently calling to "obtain information and review documents" from the Disco Elysium studio. It's not known exactly what the lawsuit entails right now, but could possibly be related to Luiga's earlier allegations of unfair dismissal. It could also be an attempt to regain the rights to Disco Elysium from shareholders, especially since Kurvitz has spent the better part of 10 years developing the Elysium universe.
https://t.co/1A00K8H6gBlaw-jawOctober 23, 2022
See moreThe whole thing seems to have been confirmed by Luiga, too. He posted a link to the TechNewsSpace story with a cheeky nod towards the game he helped create, simply writing "law-jaw." He also thanked a few fans in the replies, and when asked if any support could be offered he responded "I will let you know should such an opportunity arise."
The first hearing will take place on November 28, when we can hopefully discover some more details of the lawsuit. The court case may also open the doors on what went down at the end of 2021. ZA/UM offered a very vague no-comment-comment at the beginning of the month, while Luiga has claimed he's under an NDA and unable to dive into the finer details. Rostov and Hindpere have also been mighty quiet alongside Kurvitz, though Luiga did say that he thinks "the three will continue making games."
-
I don't recall which volume it was, but I'm pretty sure that somewhere in Capital it's written that industrial capitalism came into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with rhythm and beats". Evidently, no one is more aware of that than the folks at Paradox, who have seen fit to bless us with "Victoria 3: LoFi VicHop—tracks to chill or industrialise to" ahead of tomorrow's release of Victoria 3.
It's a riff on the world-historical Lofi Girl video, and exists mostly as another means of showcasing the (really rather good) 20-song soundtrack for Victoria 3 that you can already find on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. The advantage of this particular video, though, is that the tracks are accompanied by the visual of a studious suffragette occasionally glancing up from a notebook to the forest of smokestacks outside her window.
Someone at Paradox must be really into this style of video, because it was just last month that the company put out "Crusader Kings III: LoFi Queen—tracks to chill or conquer by". That one was slightly less wholesome: it featured a queen in a brazier-lit room scribbling a list of everyone she plans to murder, which was certainly very CK3.
Then again, the girl in the Victoria 3 video could very well be penning missives to a cadre of Nechaevist radicals set on overturning the new social order with blood and gunpowder. It's rare that anyone in a Paradox game just chills out, regardless of era.
We rather liked the ambitious societal simulator of Victoria 3 when we got our hands on it, praising its "breathtakingly ambitious simulation" of the political-economic struggles of the 19th century. As someone who has poured far too much of his life into Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis, I'm eager to finally get a chance to guide my people away from feudal parochialism and into the sunlit, soot-blackened uplands of capitalist modernity: a process which, historically, went very smoothly indeed, and caused no problems for anyone.
Victoria 3 releases tomorrow, October 25, on Steam.
-
You'll find fresh clues, handy hints, and even the answer to the October 24 (492) Wordle on this very page, alongside a range of general tips and links to further guides. Everything here has been made to make your daily puzzling go exactly the way you want it to, offering as much or as little help as you want to receive.
I had a nice and easy ride today; just the thing to get a chilly Monday morning off to a good start. The right letters kept popping up, the wrong ones were deconfirmed early on—what else was going to happen other than a quick win?
Wordle hint
Today's Wordle: A hint for Monday, October 24
Today's answer is used to most commonly describe a mistake the person in question is to blame for, but it can also refer to a flaw or problem in a design or system. It is also called out by the umpire in tennis matches when a player loses their serve.
Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day
If there's one thing better than playing Wordle, it's playing Wordle well, which is why I'm going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success:
- A good opener contains a balanced mix of unique vowels and consonants.
- A tactical second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
- The solution may contain repeat letters.
There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by midnight. So there's no reason to not treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank.
Wordle answer
(Image credit: Josh Wardle)What is the Wordle 492 answer?
Not sure? No problem. The answer to the October 24 (492) Wordle is FAULT.
Previous answers
Wordle archive: Which words have been used
The more past Wordle answers you can cram into your memory banks, the better your chances of guessing today's Wordle answer without accidentally picking a solution that's already been used. Past Wordle answers can also give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle solving fresh.
Here are some recent Wordle solutions:
- October 23: MUMMY
- October 22: SPIEL
- October 21: GROVE
- October 20: DENIM
- October 19: QUIRK
- October 18: EXIST
- October 17: STEIN
- October 16: SPADE
- October 15: CATCH
- October 14: FLOOR
Learn more about Wordle
Every day Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes, and it's up to you to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them.
You'll want to start with a strong word like ALERT—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters. Hit Enter and the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns
️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 
means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 
means you've got the right letter in the right spot.You'll want your second go to compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer.
After that it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).
If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you'll find those below.
Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.
-
Hello xgzoq007,
Welcome to UnityHQ Nolfseries Community. Please feel free to browse around and get to know the others. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.
xgzoq007 joined on the 10/24/2022.
-
In case you're having trouble telling them apart, Silent Hill Townfall is the new Silent Hill game being developed by Stories Untold studio No Code and published by Annapurna Interactive. Not the Silent Hill 2 remake or the prequel set in Japan called Silent Hill F. When Townfall was announced during Konami's Silent Hill transmission, creative director Jon McKellan said, "It's a real honor for us to bring a new title to this series that both respects the source material, but also does something a little bit different with it."
He concluded by saying, "So obviously the teaser trailer is just the beginning, we can't show you any more, [...] it might be worth watching that trailer again, and see what you might have missed." The internet took that as a challenge, and has already found some secrets buried inside it.
Most significantly, Redditor u/MilkManEX downloaded the trailer's audio as an m4a file, had a look at its spectrograph in Audacity, and found text that reads: "WHATEVER HEART THIS TOWN HAD HAS NOW STOPPED".
Pausing the flickering images that play across the pocket television also revealed text that says, "THY FLESH IS WEAK", as well as three dots, three dashes, and three dots: Morse code for S.O.S. That's not the only code fans have discovered. When developer No Code tweeted an image of a house, and publisher Annapurna Interactive tweeted a similar image, it was obvious they weren't identical pictures. Which is why @yApth0 subtracted one from the other and found more Morse code, which reads, "I DON'T KNOW HOW TO LEAVE".
Spooky. Other things rounded up by the Silent Hill subreddit may be more of a stretch, especially when they seem to be referencing the earlier games in the series. For instance, 33 seconds into the trailer when parts of a map are displayed, it sounds kind of like someone saying "Is that really Alessa?" in reference to the character from the first game. But it's real fuzzy audio, and probably wishful thinking.
As is the theory that the figure seen 45 seconds in is Valtiel, first seen in Silent Hill 3. The idea that the other creature seen sideways around 49 seconds in could be a Lying Figure from Silent Hill 2 is a little more convincing, given that it shares the awkward, shuffling posture and bodybag-plastic sheen.
(Image credit: Annapurna Interactive)Given McKellan's statement that Townfall "respects the source material, but also does something a little bit different with it" we probably shouldn't expect too many direct callbacks to the fan-favorite original Silent Hill games. The teaser's narrator, interviewing someone about why they're in Silent Hill, at first accepts the answer they're here to be punished—which is why most of the main characters in Silent Hill 2 are drawn to a destination unlikely to score high on Tripadvisor—but then says there's probably more to it than that. Maybe that's true of Townfall itself? Given how overused the iconography of Silent Hill 2 in particular became in later games, that sounds like a good thing to me.
If someone could piece together all the map fragments and figure out where they're from though, that would be ace.
-
Financially, times are tough for many, but that hasn't stopped well-heeled gamers from rushing out to buy Nvidia's RTX 4090. In fact, their popularity has led to a global shortage, and we're all too familiar with those. Newegg in the USA, Overclockers in the UK, and Mwave in Australia show one single model in stock between them at the time of writing.
You'd think at $1,599 / £1,699 / AU$2,959, Nvidia would be rushing to make as many AD102 GPUs as it can can to meet demand, but that might not be the case, as a new rumor suggests that Nvidia is reallocating its TSMC capacity over to much higher margin H100 Hopper enterprise GPUs.
The report comes from MyDrivers (via Tom’s Hardware). The RTX 4090 is a high margin product at $1,499, but compared to Hopper products the profit Nvidia makes for a single 4090 is a relative pittance. A fully enabled H100 GPU with 80GB of HBM3 sells for tens of thousands, and if tech companies wants to build exascale supercomputers with H100s, Nvidia will be happy to accommodate them.
As Nvidia's Ada Lovelace and Hopper series both make use of TSMC's 4N node, it's relatively easy for TSMC to switch production from one GPU to another, although the H100's packaging is a lot more complex.
Your next upgrade(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the restNext are the pending restrictions on China's access to advanced computing technologies. Big tech in China including the likes of Alibaba and Baidu have an insatiable appetite for high performance computing products, and Nvidia has reportedly ordered "super-hot runs" of its most lucrative chips before the final implementation of the ban.
What does this mean for us? It means finding an RTX 4090 might be difficult in the short term. The 4090 is a low-volume product, as is Hopper, at least compared to the AD103 and AD104 based RTX 4080 16GB and
RTX 4080 12GB(sorry, RTX 4070). Production of those chips will be taking up a big chunk of Nvidia's wafer starts. When they launch, they’ll be in higher demand than the 4090 and Nvidia will be wanting to have stocks to satisfy global demand into the peak Christmas buying season.So if you're after a 4090, you might want to get a pre-order in. I can't imagine we'll be facing anything like the scarcity and price-gouging induced by mining demand at its peak, but if Nvidia has to choose between making 10,000 4090s or 10,000 H100s it can sell at 10x the price or more, the choice is a logical and understandable one, even if its not great for us.
-
On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2022 games that are launching this year.
Lucy Dreaming
Steam page
Release: October 18
Developer: Tall Story Games Ltd
Launch price: $16.14 | £12.79 | AU$22.90Lucy Dreaming is a point and click adventure described as "a splendidly British comedy". It follows Lucy as she explores the small "run-down" town of Figgington, chatting with its amusing inhabitants, and investigating the mysteries of the town. But it's not just Figgington you'll be exploring, because you'll also be entering Lucy's mind, all the better to get to the bottom of some eerie nightmares she's been having. This is a heavily puzzle-oriented affair, so it's lucky the pixel art is so gorgeously detailed and varied, ranging from the small town humdrum through to the surreal. For the genre fanatics, it's worth noting that the voice actor behind Monkey Island's Guybrush Threepwood is involved in this.
Monster Prom 3: Monster Roadtrip
Steam page
Release: October 22
Developer: Beautiful Glitch
Launch price: $10.79 | £10.79 | AU$16.15The third instalment in the world's premier thirsty monster dating sim. But this time it's not all about dating, and if you're familiar with the first two instalments of this narrative adventure series, you'll note some big changes in this threequel. You see, this one has survival elements. It's a co-op game about surviving a hectic road trip with up to three friends (monsters), and in addition to managing resources, you'll also need to manage the kind of "wacky conflicts" that can emerge when four monsters have to share a vehicle for days on end. Don't worry, though: If you play your cards right, you can still score a date.
Faith: The Unholy Trinity
Steam page
Release: October 22
Developer: Airdorf Games
Launch price: $13.49 | £10.25 | AU$19.35Faith is a creepy 8-bit style horror game that has spawned two chapters since 2017. Faith: The Unholy Trinity packages those with the final, third instalment, which is apparently "twice as long" as the second. Complimenting the unheimlich, minimal art style is a very promising narrative setting: you play as a priest in a desolate rural area, tasked with exorcising the demonically possessed locale. It's not confined to the one house: expect to explore churches, forests and more. The last five years has seen a healthy blooming of indie horror games taking an conventional approach to mood-setting, and Faith has got to be right up there when it comes to terrifyingly unconventional presentation.
Fhtagn Simulator
Steam page
Release: October 21
Developer: 锁眼工作室
Launch price: $7.19 | £5.21 | AU$10.35Publisher INDIECN describes Fhtagn Simulator as a "Cthulhu roulette deckbuilder", but it's probably more useful to describe it as a Slay the Spire clone. I'm not complaining, especially in light of Fhtagn Simulator's brilliant art style, which carries a potent occult vibe not to dissimilar to the above-listed Faith. Indeed, that's probably the biggest selling point here: another fun and moreish roguelite deckbuilder, but with an art style that isn't boring to look at (sorry, Slay the Spire and Monster Train).
Robot Resistors
Steam page
Release: October 22
Developer: Crablacksmith Studios
Launch price: $5 | £4 | AU$7.50Speaking of clones, here's another game following in the footsteps of Vampire Survivors. There are differences, though: the obvious one is that you're obliterating hordes of robots rather than vampires. Robot Resistors also has a variety of playable characters, all with different abilities. The list goes on, including discrete procedurally generated level biomes with "different moods and objectives". Robot Resistors is an Early Access affair, and between now and mid-2023 the game will receive new characters, weapons, new stages, upgrades, and lots more.
-
The folks at Lego are getting into the spirit of Halloween by building a gaming PC so they can stay at home and not talk to anyone, just like the rest of us on PC Gamer dot com. Obviously, since they work at Lego, that means the build is inside a giant, hand-built haunted house made entirely of lego.
Just in time for Halloween
This monster, one-off, brick-built gaming PC is giving us the chills. pic.twitter.com/0PhL05ko8gOctober 23, 2022See moreLego posted a bass-heavy video of the build on Twitter and Instagram.
The massive build is constructed from some 20,000 lego bricks, and the nice people at the Lego group are very clear to note that it's a one-off, in case you were harboring the strange dream that you'd like to own one.
Either way the build is very impressive. From the little details that make up the haunted house, like the figures of witches and things, to the screen on the brick-themed performance monitor. Lego says it has an RTX 3090, Intel i9 12900KF processor, and a custom open-loop water cooling system.
All inside the big haunted mansion, of course, which is absolutely huge. It towers over a gaming chair and triple-monitor setup. I honestly do not envy whoever has to clean up
"And yes," ends the video, "it can run Crysis," proving that someone in PR at Lego is an immense dork.
We've seen some pretty sick custom and non-custom cases this year, like that one that's a chainsaw, or that impractical-yet-cool open-air design. The world of PC case modding gets ever-larger, I mean heck, we've now got the case mod world series to look forward to, with a lot of robot-themed entrants this year.
If this inspires you to up your own PC case game, perhaps in a less time-and-money-consuming way, check out our lists of the best PC cases, the best full-tower PC cases, the best mid-tower PC cases, and the best mini-ITX PC cases.
Or whatever, sink countless hours and thousands of dollars into a new hobby. I'm not your dad. (But I do want to see the cool PC you built so feel free to @ me.)
-
Plenty of the best horror games have come to our platform of choice in recent years, which makes sense because horror has a long history on PC. The first survival horror game was a Japanese homage to Alien called AX-2: Uchū Yusōsen Nostromo, released on the PC-6001 and Commodore PET all the way back in 1981. The ZX Spectrum made the early first-person graphics of 3D Monster Maze possible, and later technological advancements would be paired with games like Alone in the Dark and The 7th Guest.
Not every horror game on PC is about the latest in graphics, of course. Just like the best horror movies, the best horror games know that what they don't show can be as scary as what they do. Games from indie studios with shoestring budgets have terrified us just as much as those with piles of money behind them.
Whether you're into body horror, cosmic horror, folk horror, or just large men running after you with a chainsaw, PC gaming offers a wide variety of horror games that'll hopefully freak you the hell out.
The best survival horror games
Resident Evil 2
(Image credit: Capcom)Release date: 2019 | Developer: Capcom | Steam
Capcom's Resident Evil 2 remake did something that almost didn't seem possible after decades of survival horror games: it made zombies seem scary again. The shambling horde feels properly menacing—seemingly unstoppable lumps of slow, shambling flesh that beat down doors, spill through windows, and just keep coming. The remake is a return to the survival horror style that made Resident Evil famous, and a clever reimagining of one of its most iconic locations. It's a treat for those of us who played the original, but also an accomplished and clever horror game in its own right.
If you prefer your scares in first-person, Resident Evil 7 also remains a grisly delight—especially the creepy first half—and Resident Evil Village plays like a gothic homage to the highlights of the series. Don't go past the underrated Resident Evil Revelations 2 either, especially if you appreciate the goofiness of the early entries and the icon that is Barry Burton.
Read more: The making of Resident Evil 2 Remake's Raccoon City Police Department
Silent Hill 2
(Image credit: Konami)Release date: 2002 (PC) | Developer: Team Silent
Best of the best(Image credit: Paradox)2022 games: This year's launches
Best PC games: All-time favorites
Best free PC games: Freebie fest
Best laptop games: Low-specsSilent Hill 2 is the personal story of a psychologically damaged widower battling his way through a foggy purgatory populated by zombie-things, dog-things, and whatever the hell Pyramid Head was. It was the one of the first horror games to have a narrative that was subjective, fluid, and untrustworthy, with a story that invites interpretation and a semi-sentient setting that warps and shifts itself to fit the damaged psyches of its inhabitants.
While we wait to see how the Silent Hill 2 remake turns out, prices for the (extremely rare) retail copies of Silent Hill 2's original PC port can be pretty extortionate. Still, if you factor in mods and texture/resolution tweaks, this is probably the best way to play it these days. Silent Hill 2 Enhanced Edition will make it run on modern hardware at modern resolutions, as well as improving the graphics and sound and dealing with some of the remaining bugs.
Read more: Why I love the monsters of Silent Hill 2
The Evil Within 2
(Image credit: Bethesda)Release date: 2017 | Developer: Tango Gameworks | Steam, GOG
Not content with resting on the reputation of Shinji Mikami (director of the first Evil Within and producer of the second, he worked on many of the best Resident Evil games, as well as God Hand and Vanquish), The Evil Within 2 swaps the purer survival horror of the first game for a more open world full of grotesque and at times stomach-churning sights. This is a psychological horror game that aims to find terror away from pure jump scares. In fact, Shinji Mikami recommends playing The Evil Within 2 on the 'Casual' setting.
Whatever difficulty option you choose, it remains intense, often thrilling and definitely ambitious. Of course, if you want the more traditional approach, the 2014 original is also worth checking out.
The best multiplayer horror games
Left 4 Dead 2
(Image credit: Valve)Release date: 2009 | Developer: Valve | Steam
A horde of great four-player co-op shooters followed in the wake of Left 4 Dead, much like the hordes of zombies follow its protagonists. Some of those co-op shooters are great, and you'll find them over on our list of best FPS games, but Left 4 Dead 2 remains one of those games that's still worth keeping installed for whenever you and up to three friends feel like working together to push across a slice of zombie-infested America.
The rhythm of Left 4 Dead means it always tells a story. Both quiet moments and swarming attacks are punctuated by special enemies with attacks that force you to work together, and Left 4 Dead 2's survivors—Coach, Rochelle, Nick, and Ellis, as well as the returning characters from the original game—chat and banter with each other like a functioning unit in a way that encourages you to do the same.
Of course, you may well be playing with mods that replace those survivors with Hatsune Miku, Deadpool, Master Chief, and Juliet Starling from Lollipop Chainsaw, all fighting across Silent Hill or Helm's Deep. That's just another reason Left 4 Dead 2 keeps bringing us back 4 more.
Read more: Great moments in PC gaming: 'Don't startle the witch'
Phasmophobia
(Image credit: Kinetic Games)Release date: 2014 (early access) | Developer: Kinetic Games | Steam
TV shows like Ghost Hunters helped popularize a kind of pseudoscientific paranormal investigation, and Phasmophobia lets you and up to three friends become those kind of well-equipped spook-studiers. Each of you can only carry a handful of tools, which is why you need those friends to lighten the load. Technical tools from EMF readers to humble flashlights and cameras alongside supernatural tools like crucifixes might all be necessary.
Read moreNeed your horror games to look their best? Here are the best gaming PCs right now.
With those tools, you explore a haunted location, trying to find clues about what kind of ghost you're dealing with. Meanwhile, said ghost will start messing with you via poltergeist tricks while listening in on your panicked conversations thanks to Windows voice recognition so it knows when to ramp up the scares.
It's not all nightmares, though. Thanks to its early access state there's definitely some slapstick jankiness to it, and once you get familiar with its locations and tricks it can become a casual good time with friends. Or maybe we're being lulled into a false sense of security, and that's just what the ghosts want us to think.
Read more: Phasmophobia is the best ghost game ever made
Man of Medan
(Image credit: Supermassive Games)Release date: 2019 | Developer: Supermassive Games | Steam
Man of Medan, like most horror movies, is best experienced with mates. You control a group of friends stuck on a ghost ship, exploring and making split-second decisions that may very well end in death. It's a tricky ship where you can't trust your eyes, or your co-op partner, who might be seeing something entirely different. It's B-movie fare, but the jump scares are top quality and you'll be a paranoid wreck by the end.
Developer Supermassive moved on from singleplayer PlayStation-exclusive Until Dawn to specialize in this kind of eight-player interactive horror movie. You might also like The Quarry, a summer camp slasher, House of Ashes, which traps soldiers in an ancient Sumerian temple, or Little Hope, set in a small town with a history of witchcraft.
Read more: Man of Medan is a brilliant co-op horror experiment fuelled by paranoia
The best indie horror games
Anatomy
(Image credit: Kitty Horrorshow)Release date: 2016 | Developer: Kitty Horrorshow | itch.io
The horror cliché of "the call is coming from inside the house" works because we think of our home as protection. It keeps out the weather, and it keeps out the world. Anything could be happening out there on the street, but we're safe here inside our multi-bedroom suburban house. Removing that sense of safety is what Anatomy is all about.
It's a simple game of exploring a house at night, looking for cassettes that play monologues about psychogeographical philosophy. The tapes are old and fuzzy, and so is the VHS static of your first-person viewpoint. Like House of Leaves, Anatomy is a work of domestic dread. The childhood fear of walking down a hallway with the light out or having to close a curtain when it's too dark to see what's outside until you're right next to the glass. It goes further than that, however, spreading beyond the walls to make you feel uncertain not just of your house, but of the PC you're sitting in front of.
Read more: Why I love the subtle domestic dread of Anatomy
IMSCARED
(Image credit: Ivan Zanotti's MyMadnessWorks)Release date: 2016 | Developer: Ivan Zanotti's MyMadnessWorks | Steam, itch.io
Don't be put off by IMSCARED's rather tedious tagline "A Pixelated Nightmare". It's easily one of the most unsettling games available today. But it's also a tough one to pitch, because much of its terror lies in the surprises that shouldn't be ruined by a meagre 140-word recommendation.
Know that it borrows from 1990s horror games via its aesthetic and fourth wall-breaking file-bothering makeup, and that it consistently strives to surprise and keep players guessing. Understand that it'll play with your emotions, and drop you into a confused and confusing world while incessantly goading you till its final breath. Don't expect jump scares, but do expect to be scared enough to jump out of your chair. If you think we're at all grandstanding here, please be our guest and give it a try. We'll be hiding behind the couch.
Read more: AAA publishers failed the horror genre, but that's fine: it belongs to the indies now
Oxenfree
(Image credit: Night School Studio)Release date: 2016 | Developer: Night School Studio | Steam, GOG, Epic, itch.io
Oxenfree stars a group of teens who wind up trapped on an island full of strange and mysterious happenings. Over time the island becomes more and more unnerving, and though the inexplicable radio phenomena can be unsettling, the real joy of Oxenfree is the banter between your friends (and grudging acquaintances), which mimics the fast-paced, witty dialogue of a good teen horror flick. And just like one of those, Oxenfree has plenty of clever tricks to hold your attention and keep you second-guessing all the way to the end of its ghostly yarn.
Read more: From 50 Cent: Bulletproof to Oxenfree, indie developer Sean Krankel has wild stories
The best psychological horror games
The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series
(Image credit: Skybound Games)Release date: 2012/2020 | Developer: Telltale/Skybound Games | Steam, GOG, Epic
Telltale's Walking Dead games come from the era when "big choices" were a great bit of videogame marketing. We were all about those weighty moral quandaries, decisions and consequences. Like most games about big choices though, in the end The Walking Dead's smaller choices added up to more.
In its zombie apocalypse you make plenty of spur-of-the-moment choices between two characters in peril, one of whom will die and one of whom will live—at least until the budget for recording two sets of dialogue for every scene they're in runs out. Meanwhile, you also have to weigh up the meager amount of food you've managed to scavenge and decide who in your band of desperate survivors to portion it out to. One of them is the child you've essentially adopted and promised to protect. If she gets a share and somebody else's kid doesn't, what will they think? If you don't give her a share to prove you're not playing favorites, is that fair to her? How many adults can afford not to eat so all the kids do, and how will that affect their ability to protect them?
Like a lot of zombie stories, The Walking Dead pulls the typical "man is the real monster" stuff. But what's best about it is how it makes you feel like a monster because you're failing at being a parent. In later seasons it turns the table to show you the difficulties of being the kid in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, then makes you a parent again so you realize that it doesn't get easier the second time you have to go through it.
Read more: The Best Writing of the Year 2012: The Walking Dead
Sylvio
(Image credit: Stroboskop)Release date: 2015 | Developer: Stroboskop | Steam, itch.io
Where the likes of Silent Hill and Fatal Frame rely on radios to warn players otherworldly adversaries are about to approach, Sylvio casts you as a ghost hunter who wants to hear the EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) that signal the presence of the dead. You search the static and conduct seances as you explore. A kind of singleplayer predecessor to Phasmophobia, Sylvio builds its entire gorgeously creepy world around the idea of listening to the dead.
You'll uncover bizarre plot twists, and insights into the unsettling unknown—all of which are backed up by some stellar voice acting. Generic first-person horror this ain't, and while it does occasionally force tedious combat set pieces on you, it thrives in quirky, idiosyncratic moments that are filled with atmosphere and character and dread.
Read more: Horror game clichés that need to stop
Pathologic 2
(Image credit: TinyBuild Games)Release date: 2019 | Developer: Ice-Pick Lodge | Steam, GOG
Pathologic 2 is nasty. It will sit on your hard-drive like a gangrenous limb in need of amputation. If this sounds like a criticism, it isn't. Beyond the dirty, putrefied atmosphere, Pathologic 2 is weird and theatrical, frequently breaking the fourth wall and questioning your role as the player.
You have 12 days to save a town afflicted by disease, paranoia, mob justice, and paranormal happenings. That ticking clock isn't just for show—events unfold in real time and you have to make difficult decisions about what you want to do and who you want to save. It's exhausting, yes. It's grueling, yes. But it's also unique and unforgettable.
Read more: Pathologic 2 is getting a difficulty slider but the developers don't want you to use it
The best RPG horror games
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
(Image credit: Activision)Release date: 2004 | Developer: Troika Games | Steam, GOG
Still the unchallenged prince of vampire games, Bloodlines was confident enough to give you free rein to use your vampiric abilities. You can pluck NPCs off the street to feed on, clamber over the environments as freely as you can in an immersive sim, throw burrowing beetles into your enemies' bodies, and overheat their blood until they explode. It lets vampires be cool, not just through their powers but also by making them witty, sexy, or mysterious, which makes it plain why people want to become one of them.
That's how it gets you, of course. Going right back to the original 1990s tabletop RPG, Vampire: The Masquerade has always said it's a game of personal horror. It's only after you give in to the mystique, start to think about how great it is to be a part of the bloodsucking elite, that it turns around, opens up, and shows you the cost and the consequence of that.
While infamously buggy at launch, today the problems with Bloodlines are easily fixed.
Read more: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has aged like fine wine
System Shock 2
(Image credit: Nightdive Studios)Release date: 1999 | Developer: Irrational Games | Steam, GOG
Before BioShock was BioShock, it was System Shock: an altogether freakier combination of RPG and FPS, and one that in its second (and best) iteration told the story of a rogue AI on a haunted spaceship—that rogue AI being the incomparably uppercase SHODAN.
The murderous artificial consciousness paved the way for GlaDOS of course, but it's the combination of meaningful character advancement, rewarding exploration, horrifying enemies and the (at the time) novel use of audio diaries that make System Shock 2 such a memorable horror game. It was essentially Deus Ex on a spaceship—if you've ever played Deus Ex, or been on a spaceship, you can imagine how delectable that sounds.
Read more: System Shock 2: How an underfunded and inexperienced team birthed a PC classic
The best stealth horror games
Alien Isolation
(Image credit: Sega)Release date: 2014 | Developer: Creative Assembly | Steam, GOG, Epic
The best Alien game ever, by a long way, Alien Isolation stars the smartest, scariest enemy in any game. The xenomorph's killer instinct is matched only by its curiosity. It learns more about the space station Sevastopol's nooks and crannies as it hunts you over the course of 12 hours, ripping doors off closets and peering under tables in search of its prey. Which is you.
The motion tracker can help you avoid the xenomorph's grasp, but the alien can hear the sound, and even see the gentle green light of its screen, making every glance at the device a risk. That's pretty scary, but when you're forced into the vents and can hear the creature in there with you, that's when Alien Isolation becomes one of the scariest games ever made.
Read more: The making of horror masterpiece Alien: Isolation: 'It was a giddy, exhausting, intense time'
Outlast 2
(Image credit: Red Barrels)Release date: 2017 | Developer: Red Barrels | Steam, GOG, Epic
As a trial-and-error stealth game Outlast 2 might not be for everyone, but thematically it's among the most interesting games on this list. A journalist searching for a missing woman in Arizona, your wife is kidnapped early on by a deranged cult, the origins of which are told through snippets of letters during the game. You navigate dark environments using the night vision mode of your camera, and it's just scary as heck, with a whole village wanting you dead and some of the most grueling imagery ever put into a game.
Read more: Outlast 2 has one of most intense endings of any horror game
The best VR horror games
Dagon
(Image credit: Bit Golem)Release date: 2021 | Developer: Bit Golem | Steam, GOG
There are plenty of horror games inspired by the works of Hugo Pertwee Lovecraft, but Dagon goes further than just sharing themes with his stories and having some tentacles in. It contains the entire text of Dagon, a short story Lovecraft wrote in 1917 that eventually saw publication in 1923, read aloud as you explore scenes from the story. It's essentially an audiobook you can walk around in.
While Dagon can be played on a regular monitor, it's best experienced as a VR game. A recurring theme of Harry Parry Lovecraft's work was the terror of scale, which in his later work took the shape of the infinite black gulfs between galaxies. (The fact the Milky Way was not the entire extent of the universe and other galaxies actually exist was only discovered in his lifetime). In Dagon it's the scale of the ocean, seen from the perspective of a stranded sailor who discovers and explores a putrid island that seems to have been vomited up from the ocean floor where it was hidden with good reason. VR puts you there, surrounded by dead and dying sea creatures, while listening to the words of Humbug Pagliacci Lovecraft himself.
It's free, but if you enjoy it you can tip the developers by buying some DLC.
Read more: Where are all the Lovecraftian games?
The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners
(Image credit: Skydance Interactive)Release date: 2020 | Developer: Skydance | Steam
Clicking on a zombie's head to kill them in a game like Left 4 Dead can be plenty of fun, but The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners really rams home the brutality of the act. Its simulation of undead skulls and the difficulty of piercing them with knives, cleavers, axes, sawblades, or even a katana will make you think twice about wading into the hordes. There's a crafting system for when those weapons break, and it wouldn't be The Walking Dead without moral choices and living folks who can be just as dangerous as the dead ones. But it's really all about the physics-based impalement and decapitation, and wiggling a knife to get it back out of a walker's head.
Read more: The best VR games
The best free horror games
The Last Stand 2
(Image credit: Con Artist)Release date: 2008 | Developer: Con Artist | Kongregate
The Last Stand was a straightforward Flash game about standing behind barricades as the undead approached from screen left and learning when to switch to the chainsaw as they neared. Survive until dawn, and it ended. The Last Stand 2 added something to do in daylight hours: searching for survivors who will join you at the barricade, as well as more weapons and traps. (Watching a bear trap snag the legs of one of those fast zombies so you can lazily headshot them is a good time.) Any spare hours can be spent repairing the barricade.
But the real reason to search is to find supplies so you can travel to the next town. In 40 days the entire country's going to be quarantined and if you don't make it out by then, you never will. It's as simple, low-budget, and effective as the best movies about the living dead.
Read more: The Internet Archive's new Flash library is a nostalgic goldmine
Anchorhead
(Image credit: Michael Gentry)Release date: 1998 | Developer: Michael Gentry | The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction
Horror games owe a significant debt to Lovecraft, and not just because he's long dead and his work is out of copyright. Plenty of games have included little references to his brand of cosmic horror, but text adventure Anchorhead is more deeply inspired by Lovecraft than most, drawing from several of his novels and stories to tell the tale of a married couple who have inherited an old mansion in a creepy New England town. The sedate exploration of the game's opening segments eventually gives way to tense, turn-limited puzzles as you struggle to stop an ancient, possibly world-ending ritual from being completed. No pressure then.
The original, free version of Anchorhead can still be played online, but there's also an expanded and revised version with illustrations for sale on Steam and itch.io that was released 20 years after the original.
Read more: 1998 text adventure classic Anchorhead is an uncanny addition to 2018's lineup
-
Steam has broken its prior records, and today on Sunday, October 23rd has hit a total of 30,012,957 users online at the same time. This is courtesy of Steam's own charts, though SteamDB scores a bit higher: 30,032,005.
That's roughly the population of Ghana, the 48th most populous country in the world.
Steam has been rising for a long time, but exponentially so since 2020, when Covid lockdowns spiked numbers in big waves. While it's impossible to tell without a thorough study, those gaming habits have stuck with some far longer than might be expected. Steam's rapid growth in recent years far outstrips its past growth: For comparison, it took 14 years for Steam to grow to a 15 million concurrent user peak in 2017, but only 5 years for the next 15 million.
Back in January 2021 Steam broke past the 25 million mark following a year of spikes and new records. At the time I swore off writing more stories about Steam records, we'd been writing them all year and I was sick of it. It wasn't news anymore, just a given. "With this barrier cracked, it seems like Steam's numerical exploits are becoming more 'inevitability' than 'news.' I'll get back to you when Steam reaches something like 30 million players," I said.
True to my word, here I am. We're at 30 million after another few years of growing highs. (All reported by my colleagues, I note. If I sound sanctimonious that's because I am, and you would be too if you remembered to do that.)
And, well, there you have it. A remarkable new high for a section of our hobby.
(Image credit: Valve Software) -
Delightful tech makers and hackers at Adafruit have an important PSA for you this Halloween, asking you to be sure that someone hasn't gotten Doom running inside your childrens' Halloween candy. As proof of this danger they produce a Milky Way candy bar (that's a Mars, literal rest of the world) complete with functional screen running Doom.
If that confuses you, some context: As we do every year, American society is panicking about the infinitesimally small possibility that someone would put expensive and dangerous illegal substances inside children's Halloween candy. It's perhaps our favorite moral panic, and the attention must be great, because various scare news outlets call attention to it every year.
Running Doom on things is, of course, the highest tradition of gaming and hardware hacking. Its combination of open-source code and simplicity, combined with the very low by modern standards system requirements, have produced lots of strange results over the years.
This year alone we've seen someone running Doom inside the Notepad app, inside Doom itself, and played with a rotary telephone. Recent years have seen innovations like that Nintendo Game & Watch alarm clock, or my personal favorite: 100 pounds of moldy potatoes. Sadly, playing Doom's music on strange things is a trend that I was hoping would catch on, but didn't, following that time someone got E1M1 playing on PS5 DualSense haptics.
If you need more just trawl the archives of our Doom tag page. There are... a lot of them.
Adafruit is a maker crew out of New York City that builds all kind of neat stuff and supplies equipment to the broader maker community. In the past we've covered their construction of a working LEGO space computer and a wildly creative motion-enabled LED skirt.
-
Sometimes, when things are bad, all you can do is laugh.
So it is with Trombone Champ, comedically absurd rhythm game (and Chris' game of the year contender) which is apparently guaranteed to make us laugh no matter what we do with it. At first we were just laughing at silly charts of famous songs. Now we're laughing at world events.
Naturally, the trombone champ chart/disaster du jour is a of UK Prime Minister Liz Truss' resignation speech. Truss came into office on 6 September 2022 and will now resign, a little more than a month later, holding the dubious honor of becoming the shortest-tenured Prime Minister in the history of the UK.
Trombone Champ has given us some real delights in the past month. First we had rhythm game required-listening Megalovania, straight off the Undertale soundtrack. Then we had actual trombone professionals at the Philadelphia Orchestra being terrible at Trombone Champ. Most recently, we had the Final Fantasy legend rock-operatic bombast of One Winged Angel, but with trombone toots. Now we have Liz Truss.
I am reminded in many ways of a favorite Niels Bohr quote: "Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them." (The subject is trombones.)
Worth nothing that this video is AutoToot enabled, so it's not a human scoring all those perfecto notes. It is a robot. Just like Liz Truss, who I have on good authority was built by serpent people in a cavern deep beneath the Earth.
-
I've got everything you need to make your daily Wordle game a success right here. I can offer you hints and clues if you'd just like a little help, and if you're eager to keep your win streak on track you'll find the answer to the October 23 (491) puzzle only a short scroll or click away.
I was desperate to unearth absolutely any sort of clue to today's Wordle, as I seemed to get nothing but greys for far too long. I eventually scraped by with a win, mostly because of what wasn't there by the final guess rather than what was.
Wordle hint
Today's Wordle: A hint for Sunday, October 23
Today's answer is a word used to describe a classic bandaged-up horror movie monster, the common term for a wrapped-up body, and a British English kid's word for their mother. One consonant is used three times today.
Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day
If there's one thing better than playing Wordle, it's playing Wordle well, which is why I'm going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success:
- A good opener contains a balanced mix of unique vowels and consonants.
- A tactical second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
- The solution may contain repeat letters.
There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by midnight. So there's no reason to not treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank.
Wordle answer
(Image credit: Josh Wardle)What is the Wordle 491 answer?
I won't keep you any longer. The answer to the October 23 (491) Wordle is MUMMY.
Previous answers
Wordle archive: Which words have been used
The more past Wordle answers you can cram into your memory banks, the better your chances of guessing today's Wordle answer without accidentally picking a solution that's already been used. Past Wordle answers can also give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle solving fresh.
Here are some recent Wordle solutions:
- October 22: SPIEL
- October 21: GROVE
- October 20: DENIM
- October 19: QUIRK
- October 18: EXIST
- October 17: STEIN
- October 16: SPADE
- October 15: CATCH
- October 14: FLOOR
- October 13: EQUAL
Learn more about Wordle
Every day Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes, and it's up to you to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them.
You'll want to start with a strong word like ALERT—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters. Hit Enter and the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns
️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. means you've got the right letter in the right spot.You'll want your second go to compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer.
After that it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).
If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you'll find those below.
Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.
-
Bloober Team's upcoming remake of Silent Hill 2 seems to be following the 2001 original's plot, based on what little we've seen so far. Which is to say, a trailer (one that Bloober Team's CFO Tomasz Gawlikowski says is "in-engine UE5" and "what the game is meant to look like") that includes recreations of several scenes from the original game.
Jeremy Blaustein, who translated Silent Hill 2's script into English as well as directing the motion capture and voiceover production, responded to the remake being announced on Twitter. "Cool!" he wrote. "And they will, once again, use the SH2 English script that I wrote/translated (oh, directed too) completely by myself and I will get zero compensation for it and there will not be tens of thousands of people on Twitter outraged on my behalf."
In a follow-up tweet, Blaustein mentioned that he hadn't been told about the remake being made, writing that it "would have been nice to drop a message."
GamesRadar reached out to Blaustein for additional comment. "My duties on the original were as follows, irrespective of what my official crediting said," he replied. "I translated every single word of the Silent Hill 2 game. There were no other translators. I directed the voice over work. All of it. I arranged the auditions, led them, and was one of about four to five people who made the decisions on which actors to go with. My voice in those matters was generally agreed to since none of the Japanese staff were capable of judging the actors due to their lack of English ability. I directed the dramatic performances in the motion capture sessions.
"I collaborated with the [Silent Hill] team and [scenario writer Hiroyuki Owaku] in particular on a near-daily basis during the translation," Blaustein went on. "As you know, there was no Japanese VO because it was mostly aimed for a Western audience. That testifies to the importance of the script that I wrote."
Blaustein told GamesRadar that he's not seeking further financial compensation for his work, but said, "I do strongly feel that giving me appropriate credit for my role is the right thing to do." The 2012 Silent Hill HD Collection, containing both Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 (which he also translated), listed Blaustein only under "Konami Special Thanks" in its credits.
One thing the Silent Hill 2 remake is changing is the combat, which Bloober Team has said it's "rebuilding" along with "certain setpieces". Additionally, the fixed-camera perspective is being traded for a third-person camera. Though no release date has been announced, the remake has a Steam page and some steep system requirements.
-
I'm not interested in complaints about the number of Warhammer 40,000 games being made today. Back when THQ was the sole license owner there were a lot of years when all we'd get is an expansion for the latest Dawn of War if we were lucky, and no amount of "please sir, can I have some more" made a difference.
And now that anyone can rock up to the skull-knocker I imagine on the door at Games Workshop HQ and hand over their pitch for a videogame to the blank-eyed cyberzombie who deals with visitors, we've seen enough quality releases to make this approach worthwhile. Recent highlights have included Battlesector and Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, and we've got Darktide, Rogue Trader, and Space Marine 2 to look forward to.
Even so, I gotta say I wasn't holding my breath for Shootas, Blood & Teef. It's a run-and-gun sidescroller from Rogueside, a studio previously responsible for a couple of similar-looking 2D action-platformers about mobsters called Guns, Gore & Cannoli. In Rogueside's latest you're not a tommygun-toting Italian-American stereotype who shoots zombies for some reason, but rather a bolter-toting Cockney stereotype whose favorite word is "WAAAAAGH!"
You're fighting your way across the war-torn Imperial world of Luteus on a quest to get back your hair. Well, the fungal creature called a squig that used to live on your head and serve for hair. To do that, you blast your way through the Imperial Guard, genestealers, your fellow orks, and eventually space marines alone or with up to three friends. It's a kind of 40K Metal Slug, or maybe a faster-paced, green Commander Keen.
There's a lot of jumping up and down levels, pausing to either clear a room whose exit won't unlock until you wipe out several waves, or maybe turn a valve to open a new area, or fight a boss. When your health is low you hunt for a health squig to eat (they wear mirrors strapped to their heads like old-timey physicians), and when your grenades are low you hunt for a crate of ammo. There are also boxes of teeth scattered around that serve as currency, letting you buy new guns as well as purely cosmetic hats, which you also earn as rewards for killing certain bosses. Which is why my ork is currently wearing a pirate bicorn.
There are four classes, my favorite being the Beast Snagga Boy who can throw an exploding spear, and whose grenade is a squig with dynamite strapped round its head like a barrister's wig that runs up to enemies, bites them, and explodes.
(Image credit: Rogueside)Every checkpoint is a Mek Shop where you can tweak your loadout or spend teeth on guns. I'm partial to the Double Barrel Boomstikk shotgun, the Bolta, and the Killsaw, which is a gun that's actually just a chainsaw. Everything is of course written and shouted in orkish, and as with Dakka Squdron, the game where you're an ork fighter pilot in a junkyard WWII-looking bomber, you'll need a tolerance for cutscenes where people shout "WAAAAGH!" I wish they'd throw in the occasional chorus of "'Ere we go!" but it's pretty much all "WAAAAGH" apart from the odd "DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA!"
The art style makes everyone look rectangular, like characters from one of the Warhammer webcomics or maybe old plastic miniatures. It's not a look I'm used to in 40K videogames, but as soon as I saw an Imperial commissar get so angry his peaked cap spontaneously left his head, did a little flip, and returned to its position I was sold. It's cartoonish and a bit primitive, just like an ork.
(Image credit: Rogueside)One of the only complaints I was planning to make is that a boss fight against a tank called the Bastion of Valor dragged on a bit long, but the first patch has already rebalanced that. However, Shootas, Blood & Teef did crash a few times in the 2.7 hours Steam says I've been playing for, so hopefully the next patch can address the stability.
In that time I've made it pretty close to the end of the story mode, but there's still a couple of guns and a lot of hats left to unlock. (I'm tempted by the one that looks like a servo-skull has landed on your head.) If you're the kind of player who always replays the campaign on Hard and tries to get all the achievements it'll be better value, but if you're a 'one and done' kind of player who uninstalls a game the instant credits roll you should be aware it's a bit short. If you play with friends you'll get more value out of it that way too.
Warhammer 40,000: Shootas, Blood & Teef is out now on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store.
Don't bend 600W RTX 4090 power cable to reduce risk of overheating says CableMod
in Gaming News
Posted
It's not advisable to bend the 12VHPWR connector currently in use by Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards, and included within the ATX 3.0 spec, in any way during installation or use.
Manufacturer of high-end cables, CableMod, has warned users that any odd bends or turns in the cable could put extra pressure on the connector and maybe even increase the risk of overheating. The company warns against vertical bends and horizontal bends, which essentially means users should aim to keep cables perfectly aligned and straight or risk malfunction.
Anyone who's ever built a PC will understand that this isn't always possible.
The 12VHPWR connector was introduced as a part of the ATX 3.0 specification, published by Intel, and is intended to reduce the power footprint for connectors on a PCB and deliver up to 600W of power. So far it has only been adopted for use with the RTX 4090, however, other graphics cards are expected to follow suit.
"This new connector can deliver the power required for these power-hungry cards, but also comes with some caveats that users need to be aware of," CableMod says in a post on its website from September 25.
"The 12VHPWR connector and the terminals used in it are much smaller than the previous generation. Through our extensive testing, it appears that bending the wires too close to the connector could result in some of the terminals coming loose or misaligning within the connector itself.
"This may lead to an uneven load across the other wires, increasing the risk of overheating damage. The risk of this is substantially higher if the bend is done horizontally in relation to the connector orientation (left to right)," CableMod notes.
Cablemod also states that any bend on the 12VHPWR cable should occur 35mm from the connector itself—easier said than done.
The reason I'm highlighting this post from the company today is due to a post earlier today from a user on Reddit showing the 12VHPWR cable connecting their RTX 4090 to the power supply had completely failed, melting in the process.
The unfortunate PC builder believes their setup was suitably straightforward, and that they didn't have too aggressive a bend in place. Images provided by the user do show a slight bend, and one likely more aggressive than Cablemod's 35mm recommendation, but certainly nothing that I would look at and consider incorrect or abnormal by PC building standards.
If you didn't know one major cable firm advised against that sort of bend, you wouldn't think anything bad of it.
"I don't know why it happened. I think my adapter cable is faulty. Welp I guess RMA it is EDIT Card was attached vertically. Bend was not that aggressive. Sure there was bend still this should not happen on a 2k Euro GPU PSU Corsair RMX 1000," the user reggie_gakil says in the forum thread.
We can't link this single failure to bending or any other cause at this time—sometimes things do fail rather dramatically. And while it's not as though I hear many stories of PCIe cables melting, old or new, I would dare say this isn't the first time it has happened.
However, this new 12VHPWR connector is not also without its critics.
Overclocker and PCB analyser Buildzoid has already published a scathing review of the connector called "The 12VHPWR connector sucks", citing their concerns with the fewer pins in place for the 600W power delivery versus the older PCIe power connectors and the need for the change in power adapter in the first place.
WCCFTech also previously reported that PCI-SIG, the group in charge of managing the PCI standard, told its members to be cautious about some implementations of 12VHPWR and thermal variance when using adapters to non-ATX 3.0 spec PSUs, which could lead to safety issues.
"We recommend members work closely with their connector vendors and exercise due diligence in using high-power connections, particularly where safety concerns may exist," PCI-SIG said in a communication with members.
However, Nvidia has already made an attempt to ease owners' concerns about this statement from PCI-SIG. In a response to the question: "Why did PCI-SIG issue the warning and how does this affect NVIDIA’s new products?", Nvidia said a month ago:
"It does not affect NVIDIA’s new products. During early development and testing we identified a potential issue with a prototype connector manufactured from a sole supplier. As a PCI-SIG member, we informed the supplier, asked them to fix it (which they did), and shared our findings to help suppliers who are implementing the new standard. The PCI-SIG was passing along those learnings to other suppliers."
Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest
So, from an official perspective, at least of the GPU manufacturer, all is well with the connector. Though that may only do a little to ease concerns of other RTX 4090 owners—the image posted to Reddit of what could go wrong with the cable, should a malfunction occur, is not a pretty sight. But we can only consider this so far as an isolated incident today.
I would like to think that the ratification of this connector across GPU manufacturers, Intel, Nvidia, and PCI-SIG would be sufficient to ensure that mere bending of a cable planned to be used by many thousands of people wouldn't cause it to combust. Fire risks should not be taken lightly. That said, I would also personally be inclined to follow Cablemod's advice if I were using this cable within my own PC today.
In light of that, and the growing disquiet among some PC builders regarding the cable's safety, I also foresee some attempt to be made to quell any further concerns by the aforementioned companies. At the very least to restore faith in the safety of the connector.
View the full article