UHQBot
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A bitesize DLC for Crusader Kings 3 is on its way, but it's neither an expansion nor a flavour pack. This time, we're getting the Friends And Foes event pack, which will release on Steam on September 8. Rather unusually, for something that's out in a week, Paradox has not said what it will be charging for the DLC.
This is causing some consternation among strategy lovers, because the reveal of Friends And Foes comes hot on the heels of Paradox's recent announcement that CK3's flavour pack DLCs would soon be doubling in price. The Paradox community is more than a little worried that they're going to be paying through the nose for DLC generally, and what price point Paradox will put on these relatively minor expansions. Of course, they could just not buy it, but I'm in no position to criticise anyone for buying unnecessary Paradox DLC.
Friends And Foes promises over a hundred new unique 'events', those little choose-your-own adventure pop-ups that regularly appear in the course of a CK3 game, the effects of which range from "This person likes you a bit more" to "You have died spectacularly and without dignity".
The new events slot in all over the game: there are new ones that will crop up when you decide to try to befriend or romance another character, new scenarios for your character and their rivals, and events pertaining to the upcoming Bastion update's memory system, which will see your monarch reminisce about past events and experiences with other characters. There are also a few new tunes for the soundtrack tucked in there, just to pep things up while you plot and backstab.
The event pack concept marks a departure from Paradox's established DLC rhythm for CK3. Back when the game was released, Paradox said it would pursue a strategy of releasing major expansions—which would cost $30 and add weighty new layers to the game—interspersed with smaller flavour packs costing $7 that would focus on specific regional mechanics and cosmetics. The pandemic plus a cavalcade of issues at Paradox itself look to have put paid to that strategy, though, and DLCs like this one and more expensive flavour packs are the consequence.
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Valve hit a new milestone for the Steam Deck this week, revealing that it just passed 5,000 games that are Verified and Playable for its portable gaming handheld. Not bad, considering the Steam catalog has just over 50,000 games at the last count in 2021.
Games must pass four categories to be considered 'Verified' and receive that precious green checkmark. The four boxes that need to be checked are Input, Display, Seamlessness, and System Support. If a game hits anything less but can still be played with some caveats, then it's just considered 'Playable.'
'Playable' might mean that some in-game text might be too small to read or display non-Steam Deck controller icons in games. Valve has a more in-depth checklist that provides developers with everything they need before they submit their games for compatibility review. This process generally takes about a week from submission.
5,000 is a pretty impressive number to hit, considering the vast number of games on Steam. As more Steam Decks are getting shipped out, Valve has made it a point to have more Steam games become Verified or Playable, especially previously unsupported games.
Also, if you happen to be in Japan next month for the Tokyo Games Show, Valve's handing out copies of a neat little book about the Steam Deck's development, or you can just download it here. The book also gave away Valve's plans to continue building and improving on this portable PC, so we look forward to the Steam Deck 2.0. Valve isn't usually good at making 3s of anything, but maybe just this one time?
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Greetings Inheritors,
The game has been updated.[Content Updates]- There will be a new Guardian Scramble schedule.
- Improved the weekly quest progression speed for Ipnya Ridge.
- The archer NPC at the faction base of the Great Prairie of the West will now only spawn during war times.
- Improved the Plant Uproot skill.
Please check the link below for the details about the update.[Content Update][archeage.playkakaogames.com][New Products][archeage.playkakaogames.com][New Event][archeage.playkakaogames.com]
Thank you. - There will be a new Guardian Scramble schedule.
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A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.
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Greetings Inheritors!
We will be conducting scheduled maintenance at the following times:
Maintenance Start Time:
UTC: Sep 01 at 08:00 am
CEST: Sep 01 at 10:00 am
EDT: Sep 01 at 04:00 am
PDT: Sep 01 at 01:00 am
Maintenance End Time:
UTC: Sep 01 at 3:00 pm
CEST: Sep 01 at 5:00 pm
EDT: Sep 01 at 11:00 am
PDT: Sep 01 at 08:00 am
* Please note that the game will shut down before maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause.
Thank you for your understanding!
The ArcheAge Team -
A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.
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Yacht Club Games, developers of the excellent Shovel Knight and the upcoming Mina the Hollower, has announced the imminent arrival of Shovel Knight Dig. The 2D semi-roguelike arrives on September 23 and comes with a charming trailer featuring some of the developers playing dress-up, as well as plenty of footage from a title that has apparently been in the works for around four years.
Shovel Knight Dig will take players deep underground in pursuit of Drill Knight, who blew up Shovel Knight's campsite and stole all his stuff. But there's more going on than it first appears: As both knights soon discover, "this adventure goes much deeper than a simple heist."
The game also promises a big technological leap forward, with "glorious high color pixel graphics and sound," improved animation, and proprietary level generation tech that will enable "infinite replayability."
The 'Dig' here is about the roguelike aspect to the title, which has "thousands of pixel-perfect level chunks, which are procedurally stitched together to create infinite adventurous combinations."
So you go down a well, hit things with a shovel, keep going down, and it's different every time. Exactly how different remains to be seen, because getting a Spelunky-like balance of challenge and surprise is no mean feat, but given the quality of Shovel Knight games so far we can be optimistic.
Shovel Knight Dig also has an overarching upgrade structure around it. You acquire riches on each run, which can be used to permanently upgrade the Knight and his trusty shovel (among other equipment). I haven't gone back to the brilliant Dead Cells in a while, despite its regular pace of updates, so this may well be the new roguelike I'm looking for.
Shovel Knight Dig isn't yet listed on Steam, but will no doubt be there soon. (September 23 is only a few weeks away, after all.) When it does appear it will be with a 10% launch discount, and you can find out more about what's happening at yachtclubgames.com.
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Strike it big in the Season of Plunder(Image credit: Bungie)
Destiny 2 map fragments: How to get treasure maps
Destiny 2 Delicate Tomb: Grab this fusion rifle exotic
Destiny 2 Cryptic Quatrains: Solve the riddles
Destiny 2 Fortnite Armor: Get it for free
Destiny 2 Touch of Malice: How to get the raid exoticKing's Fall's red border weapons are used to extract patterns with which to make your very own crafted versions of the returning raid's most powerful guns. And there are some pretty strong perk combos available. The Zaouli's Bane hand cannon, for example, can roll Explosive Payload and Incandescent or Firefly, which rivals Fatebringer as a legendary weapon.
But as with Vow of the Disciple's hidden rooms, or the King's Fall secret chests, you're going to have to go a little out of your way in order to get them. If you complete the right steps, a guaranteed Deepsight weapon will be waiting in an extra chest after you defeat Oryx. Here, I'll explain what you need to do in order to get your weekly King's Fall red border weapon.
It's worth noting that King's Fall seems to be bugged right now. Some people report not getting the red border weapon chest despite following the correct method. Bungie hasn't confirmed the specific bug yet, but hopefully it gets fixed soon.
King's Fall red border weapons: How to unlock the chest
Similar to Vow of the Disciple, King's Fall requires you to do a little puzzling to unlock its guaranteed red border weapon chest. You're going to have to activate three symbols out of nine that are scattered throughout the activity, but you'll know which because the three you're looking for appear at the very start of the raid.
Once you enter King's Fall, go down the corridor with the statues, and head underneath the platform with the staircases on either side to see three symbols. Be sure to make a note of what they are, as these are the ones you'll have to activate.
Every symbol in order of when you find them. (Image credit: Skarrow9)The first person to detail this puzzle in-depth was Skarrow9, and you can see his video up above. He details where each symbol is located in the raid, and even provides this handy infographic showing the order you'll encounter them. Since the starting symbols are different each time, you're probably going to want to learn where they are, especially if you plan on running this raid a lot.
Once you've found one the right symbols, all you need to do is shoot to activate it. Be aware that it is possible to activate symbols that aren't yours with splash damage, so be careful when shooting near them. When you've activated all three, you'll get a message saying "The runes accept your offering" and when you defeat Oryx, a second chest will appear to give you your random King's Fall red border weapon.
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One of the things about the modern internet, the part of it we tend to use most in our day-to-day lives, is that it's now a very curated space. There's more information and hashtag content out there than ever before, but the vast majority of it will never be seen by more than a few people, and what breaks the surface is a total crapshoot.
In the last few days a tweet went viral, featuring a short gameplay clip from a GZDoom mod called Simon's Destiny. This is a full remake of the first-ever Castlevania title on NES, and as you can see captures the look of the series perfectly.
This fan made game is so cool! Castlevania: Simon’s Destiny looks LIT! pic.twitter.com/01fMrJm8pvAugust 27, 2022
See moreThe more impressive aspects of Simon's Destiny are how it recreates the verticality of the 2D Castlevania games, with plenty of staircases and platform-hopping, and how well it translates the basic whip-cracking, holy water-chucking action into a snappy 3D combat system. All the iconic upgrades and castle elements are included, and it's just a great love letter to one classic series bound-up in another one. IT's also pretty tough!
Developer Batandy says the game "aims to reinvent the very first NES title of the franchise with a nostalgic yet brand new first person gameplay. All the levels from the classic NES era game have been reimagined like never before, experience the tale of Simon's fight against Dracula and his army of the night!"
It's hard to know how many people have come across Simon's Destiny since its release, though the itch.io page suggests it's always had a dribble of players coming though. I was blown away at having somehow missed this for years, particularly when you consider how desperate Castlevania fans are for some news, any news, and a future for the series beyond anime (albeit great anime) and NFTs. I'm still bitter that Lords of Shadow 2 screwed the pooch so badly.
Batandy's other work includes his own Nintendo-style Doom series, Golden Souls, and a full remake of P.T. in GZ Doom. Jeez, Konami should hire this guy.
When I first got online in the late 90s, part of my fascination was just how big it was, how I could just keep searching and keep finding more of anything I wanted: I'd follow connections from one thing to another and never reach an ending. Now we live in walled gardens so big we can't even see the walls but, every so often, you're reminded of just how much brilliance exists beyond your imaginings. Axe knights and fleamen and vampires: oh my.
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2K's golden goose is the Grand Theft Auto series, but in one of those quirks of fate the publisher also ended up eventually acquiring one of the only series that did a good job of offering an alternative. The original Mafia, released in 2002, was an early GTA competitor and many would say the best by a country mile: set in Illinois in the 1930s, the game followed the story of Tommy Angelo as he rose through the ranks of the Salieri mafia family.
Mafia always had a grittier tone than GTA, which in the same year was releasing the stupendously good but very neon Vice City, and it did a better job than those early 3D GTAs of telling a story. I don't want to oversell it here, because GTA was always the best game of this type around, but in a sea of competition this was one of the only sharks.
Publisher 2K has announced that, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the game's release, it will be making players an offer they can't refuse: Mafia will be free to all on Steam from September 1 to September 5.
In honor of #Mafia20 let's go back to where it all started 🏙Get the original Mafia (digital) for FREE on @Steam from Sept. 1 - 5 pic.twitter.com/ZdxSFZrLwhAugust 29, 2022
See moreThis is the original version of the game, not the Definitive Edition 2K released in 2020, but honestly I prefer the original. There are some issues with it, such as losing music due to copyright issues, but this is such a beloved title that it's well-served by its community and mod scene, to the extent there are detailed and useful guides on Steam to get the best out of it.
The freebie will be available from 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST on September 1, and will revert to its usual price at the same time on September 5. You really can't go wrong with this one. 2K doesn't think so either: after a long hiatus, it's announced that a Mafia 4 is in the works, even if it's "a few years" away.
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Intel is confident it has designed its upcoming A770 and A750 graphics cards to match Nvidia's RTX 30-series GPUs, or perhaps even surpass them, in ray tracing performance.
In the run-up to the release of Intel's Arc A770 and A750 graphics cards, I sat down with Ryan Shrout and Tom Petersen from the Intel Graphics team to talk performance and expectations for its upcoming cards. For the most part, Intel's expectation of performance to match Nvidia's RTX 3060 in games running DirectX 12, but you might be surprised to hear that Intel is also extremely confident in the efficiency of its first generation ray tracing acceleration units.
"The RTU [ray tracing unit] that we have is particularly well suited for delivering real ray tracing performance," Petersen says. "And you'll see that when you do ray tracing on comparisons with an [RTX] 3060 versus A750 or A770, we should fare very, very well."
Such a strong claim for a first-generation ray tracing solution is enough to grab my attention, and I push for a little further clarification on what sort of performance we're looking at.
"Yeah, we're definitely competitive or better than Nvidia with ray tracing hardware."
Well, okay. So that means Intel believes its ray tracing acceleration is capable of matching Nvidia's 2nd Generation RT Cores, at the very least. Quite a feat if Intel's solution can live up to the hype during testing. Though I would assume Petersen's comments should be taken as a comparison of like-for-like RT performance, meaning the A770 is competitive with the RTX 3060.
Nvidia's 2nd Gen RT Cores are the more impressive solution today and AMD's first generation Ray Tracing Accelerators aren't quite up to par—this would see Intel's RTU beating both gaming GPU goliaths' ray tracing acceleration from the get-go (or until their next-gen GPUs arrive).
The RTU that we have is particularly well suited for delivering real ray tracing performance.
Tom Petersen, IntelIt comes down to a few key technologies, Petersen tells me, though he's not supposed to divulge the information until a video explainer drops on the Intel Graphics YouTube channel later this week. He does, anyway.
I've only the CliffsNotes version and not a complete whitepaper, but one important puzzle piece to this touted performance is a BVH cache within the GPU. This is solely used to accelerate BVH traversal—BVH stands for bounding volume hierarchy and is a cornerstone of how modern ray tracing is implemented in real-time in games.
The other important piece is a thread sorting unit, though I'm lighter on the details on this one. Generally, it plays a big role in the processing hierarchy of how ray tracing functions on an Arc GPU.
3DMark's ray tracing benchmark will come in handy to put these claims to the test. (Image credit: UL)Petersen says both technologies help Intel put a strong foot forward in ray tracing performance, but there was another important consideration for ray tracing on Arc: making sure these technologies required little to no developer engagement in order to function. They have to be as plug and play as possible with what's already out there, essentially.
"We tried to make ours generic because we know that we're not the established GPU vendor, right. So all of our technology pretty much has to work with low dev rel (developer relations) or dev tech engagement. And so things like our cache structure and our hierarchy, you know, our thread sorting unit, which are the two techs that we're going to talk about in this video, they work without any dev rel or dev tech work."
When I asked Petersen about why Intel's graphics team felt ray tracing performance was so important to get right with the first generation, and how I'd perhaps expected this sort of surplus acceleration to lag behind rasterized rendering capability, his response was surprisingly candid.
Screen queens(Image credit: Future)Best gaming monitor: Pixel-perfect panels for your PC
Best high refresh rate monitor: Screaming quick screens
Best 4K monitor for gaming: When only high-res will do
Best 4K TV for gaming: Big-screen 4K PC gaming"I'm kind of torn on this one. Because to your point, there's some things that you would normally expect to lag. And the reason you would expect them to lag is because they're hard, and they need to come after you have a solid base. But for better or worse, we just said we need all these things. And so we did XeSS, we did RT, we did AV1, we kind of have a lot on the plate, right? I think we've learned that maybe, you know, in this case, we have a lot on the plate and we're gonna land all the planes, and that's taken us longer than we would have expected.
"So maybe next time we would have broken this up a little bit differently."
Nobody said creating a gaming graphics card would be easy, I suppose. And Intel will have to compete with a very complete and sleek product stack from Nvidia and AMD if it hopes to ever break into the lucrative GPU market. From drivers and upscaling to hardware-based acceleration, Intel needs to very swiftly master it all—if not only to try and outmatch Nvidia and AMD's GPUs today but also their next-generation GPUs, which could be only a matter of months away.
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FromSoftware parent company Kadokawa Corporation has announced that it's issuing 3179 new FromSoft shares to Sixjoy Hong Kong and Sony Interactive Entertainment. Sixjoy is a subsidiary brand of Tencent, whom you'll know from having a slice of seemingly every pie known to humankind, and Sony Interactive Entertainment is, well, Sony.
Once the shares are issued, Sixjoy will own 16.25% of FromSoft and Sony 14.09%. Kadokawa Corporation will remain the controller and majority owner of the company by a wide margin: it owns the full 69.66% of remaining shares.
A slight increase in share amount for two companies—even if they are Tencent and Sony—that confers no extra power or rights may not seem enormously interesting, but it's not necessarily the shares that are important here. Kadokawa and FromSoft are acquiring 36,399,550,000 yen (that's £225,677,210 or $262,268,221) off the back of this deal, which they intend to put to good use. In the release announcing the share allotment, Kadokawa says that the reason for the share sale is to use the funds for "the expansion of the scope of [FromSoft's] own publishing in the significantly growing global market".
In other words, the share allotment is all in service of gathering the funds FromSoft needs to start self-publishing its games across the world. FromSoft already publishes its own titles in Japan, but seeks out partners to help it publish in overseas territories. Kadokawa clearly thinks FromSoft has outgrown that kind of arrangement, pointing specifically to the success of games like Sekiro and Elden Ring as reasons that FromSoft is ready to branch out and start self-publishing in countries other than Japan.
The news will be of especial interest to Bandai Namco, which has enjoyed a fruitful partnership with the developer but crucially also has IP rights to certain FromSoft titles. The Souls series and particularly Elden Ring have been smash hits, and Bandai Namco will be looking at this wondering if the studio's next game will be called Aged Loop and cut it out completely.
As for Sony and Tencent (or Sixjoy), all they get from this deal are the potential (and significant) rewards of an investment in a games company that's going from strength to strength. The number of shares they own is still far too small to give them anything like a controlling say in how either Kadokawa or FromSoft do business, although it'll probably make any future discussions between the companies that little bit warmer. Regardless, despite appearances, it's still too early to file this one under the ever-expanding bracket of "videogame industry consolidation".
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There are two Intel Alchemist graphics cards readying for imminent battle with Nvidia and AMD: the Arc A750 and Arc A770. The chip giant is targeting the green team's popular RTX 3060 12GB with both of these cards, and during a chat with Intel's technical marketing brass, Tom Petersen and Ryan Shrout, I'm told it's doing all it can to price them competitively enough to tempt PC gamers.
First off, the little matter of PC performance for the A750 and A770, which have been hotly contested and much rumoured about since Intel first announced its intention to get into gaming graphics.
Both the A770 and A750 utilise the same G10 GPU die. However, whereas the A770 comes with 32 Xe Cores, the A750 comes with just 28. That's not a major reduction in cores for the A750 but expect a modicum more performance from the A770.
"When you have a title that is optimised for Intel, in the sense that it runs well on DX12, you're gonna get performance that's significantly above an [RTX] 3060," Petersen says.
"And this is A750 compared to a 3060, so 17%, 14%, 10%. It's going to vary of course based on the title."
Vulkan API performance on the A750 and A770 should follow suit with DX12, I'm told, with both Nvidia and Intel fighting for wins but in "normalising we win a little bit."
"We're going to be a little bit faster but depending on your game and depending on your settings, it's trading blows, and that's the A750. Obviously A770 is going to be a little bit faster," Petersen continues.
With DX11 games, the A770 and A750 are less able to compete with the performance of an RTX 3060, however. That's not all too surprising, as Petersen and Shrout had already tempered expectations in that department, though essentially the messaging remains that DX11 driver optimisations are slower to come together than DX12 and Vulkan ones.
"So when you add in DX11, you're gonna see our performance is a little less trading blows, and we're kind of behind in some cases, ahead in some cases, but more losses than wins at DX11."
DX9 performance is also now to be handed off to Microsoft to take care of with its DX9 to DX12 mapping layer.
Ultimately it does appear as though Intel's more powerful Alchemist GPUs have fallen a rung or two down the ladder in terms of their rumoured performance. There was a time when Intel was said to have been targeting RTX 3070 performance with its 175W to 225W GPUs. For the Arc A770 Limited Edition in front of me during my chat, which could be pushed to 225W through an Intel GPU tuning utility, however, that sounds an idealistic target. Petersen and Shrout were certainly not making any comparisons to the RTX 3070.
It's to be a very competitive perf per dollar entry.
Tom Petersen"I was hoping that we would be coming in with a little bit higher performance, but the truth is, this is where we are today," Petersen says candidly.
A750 and A770 performance will be subject to some degree of change over the coming months and years. At the very least in the terms of driver development and improvement on Intel's side, but also I suspect we'll get the best picture of these cards' true performance across a range of games once we get our hands on the card to benchmark for ourselves.
"The good news for consumers is that we're going to make sure that this product is very competitive."
There is an olive branch for gamers in what Intel deems a worthy price to charge for a card with, let's say, uneven performance depending on the game being played. Similarly, Intel appears aware that it needs to be doing something differently to drive sales away from the dominant companies in the market today in Nvidia and AMD.
"All of that is going to be factored into what is our introductory pricing," Petersen says.
"And so from my perspective, the gamer says, 'Okay, if I want to play DX12 right now, I'm gonna get an amazing value.' You're gonna get a card that's faster than 3060, at prices that are lower. If you think you're playing DX12 and DX11, and you're splitting it, you're still gonna get amazing value. Because we're gonna price it for the performance that we're delivering today.
(Image credit: Future)"It's to be a very competitive perf per dollar entry."
While Intel admits that it's not quite a match for Nvidia in performance per watt (A750 ~190 watts versus RTX 3060 ~170 watts), it does hope to more than make up for it in terms of pricing. Intel recognises it's a new entrant into the market, and customers need some incentive to roll the dice on its fledgling GPUs.
Petersen wouldn't unveil the price of either card just yet, but mentioned that the launch will happen "very, very soon." So keep your eyes peeled as we should hear about pricing and availability momentarily.
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 restI'm told the first A750 and A770 graphics cards to arrive will be the Limited Edition shroud, which despite the name isn't necessarily a limited edition. Intel will continue to make them as long as there is demand. Third-party cards are suspected to follow along afterwards, but I couldn't get confirmation of what sort of numbers, models, or even which manufacturers to look out for.
Petersen also notes that the prices are likely still to fluctuate before their official announcement, in line with the ever-changing GPU market.
Yet here's hoping Intel can make good on these promises and the A750 and A770 are worth picking up when the time comes. Nvidia and AMD do have some decent budget GPU options available today but prices aren't necessarily dropping as fast as we'd like. Yet there's nothing like some newfound competition to help send GPU prices into freefall.
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Strike it big in the Season of Plunder(Image credit: Bungie)
Destiny 2 map fragments: How to get treasure maps
Destiny 2 Delicate Tomb: Grab this fusion rifle exotic
Destiny 2 Cryptic Quatrains: Solve the riddles
Destiny 2 Fortnite Armor: Get it for free
Destiny 2 Touch of Malice: How to get the raid exoticKing's Fall's secret chests are a great way to get some extra weapons and armour from the returning raid, and to also grab mods for your raid armour that'll help make any subsequent run throughs a little bit easier. As with other raids, these chests are hidden between various encounters, and will require a little puzzling in order to open.
It's also worth considering that secret raid chests only draw from your current loot pool, meaning that, excluding mods, you can only get stuff from them that you've already gotten from a raid's main encounters. So, if you're opening these on your first run, the loot might not be the best, depending on how lucky you've been with your drops.
These chests will also only give you rewards during your first run of the week with each character. As you've got three character slots, that means a maximum of three chances at each loot chest per week. That said, here's where to find each of the three King's Fall secret chests.
King's Fall secret chest 1
The first chest that you'll come across in King's Fall is after the initial encounter where you dunk the orbs into the statue, but before you arrive at the totems. There's a section where you ride on top of a Hive tombship towards a tall, narrow opening. Before you pass through it, look up to the left and you'll spot a sloping ledge you can jump to which leads to a small doorway with the chest inside. The door will only be open if you have people standing on the plates that move the ship. Once you've grabbed the chest, you can swap out with the plate people so they can grab it, too. You can see the exact location in the video by ThePhoenix above.
King's Fall secret chest 2
(Image credit: Blake Robinson)The second chest is located in Golgoroth's cellar, after the Warpriest encounter, and will require you to navigate the maze and for each player to stand on plates in a certain order. There's a really useful cellar map in the Destiny reddit created by Blake Robinson that lays out the area, what plates you need to stand on, and the obstacles you'll encounter trying to get to them. If you do all five correctly, you'll get a notification saying that a chest has appeared.
King's Fall secret chest 3
The third King's Fall secret chest is found during the jumping puzzle after Golgoroth with the traps that boop you off the edge to your death. With someone stepping on the first plate, look to the right and bring up your ghost to reveal some hidden platforms on the other side of the ravine. Use these to climb up underneath the archway and they'll lead to a doorway and the room with the chest. As with the first chest, someone will need to be standing on the plate, but after you've got the chest, you can swap out with them. The great guide by Fallout Plays above shows it in detail.
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If you're seeking Sims 4 mods to liven up your Sims' lives, you're in luck. Whether you want some more interaction options between your favorite Sims, or skip the mundane stuff and fully realize their magical destiny thanks to a modded sorcery suite, there are all sorts of Sims mods that can sculpt the game to fit your desired playstyle.
Get more out of Sims 4Despite it being nearly a decade since release, new Sims 4 mods still regularly appear on ModTheSims—which has long been the biggest platform for creators. You'll find everything from minor changes to total reworks. Some well-known modders, including LittleMsSam and KawaiiStacie, have even become so big they have their own websites for their collections of creations.
However, as expected for adding user-created mods to games, it can be tough to figure out which still work, and which might make your game upset. Not all of them receive regular updates, and so might not play nicely with the latest official additions from EA. Yeah, it's lovely that your teenage Sims get to enjoy a more fully realized existence, but every new high school gameplay mechanic is a potential landmine for an outdated mod.
To help you navigate what's on offer, here’s a lineup of the best Sims 4 mods, from the little tweaks, to the digital life-changers. Make sure to read the installation section, and double check for any conflicts to make sure you’re not running two that will butt heads.
How to install Sims 4 mods
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis)How do you install mods for The Sims 4? Luckily it's pretty simple, especially if you only want to make a couple tweaks.
To install Sims 4 mods, you can drag and drop the mod folders you've downloaded into your Sims 4 "Mods" folder. The game should automatically have created one for you after you start up the game for the first time.
Your mods folder is located in: Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/Mods.
Once you're in game, you'll also need to enable mods in your game settings by going to your Options menu under the Other tab. Make sure to check off "Enable Custom Content and Mods" and "Script Mods Allowed" depending on what you've chosen to install. You'll need to restart your game afterwards.
Always check out the installation instructions for any mod you download just to be sure there aren't any more additional steps. Most should just be a quick matter of copying files over. Do keep an eye out for any dependencies your mods have, such as meshes creates by other modders that you'll also need to install.
Create-A-Sim mods
New personality traits
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by Sresla)Download from: ModTheSims
Many of the best Sims 4 mods affect the ways Sims interact with each other. The Sims 4 has a long list of traits that change the way a Sim behaves, and because they’re relatively easy for modders to create you can quickly expand that list through custom content.
The Sweet Tooth trait, for example, makes your sims better at baking and adds new moodlets to help them express their love of cake, while the New Hobby Traits helps encourage you to have your sim engage in their favorite activities to stay stress-free. There are tonnes of traits available on ModTheSims in case you're looking for even more unusual choices to try out.
Want to try out several new traits at once? This mod lets you add more than three traits at a time: you just need to type a quick cheat code including the name of the desired trait to add it to your Sim. It’s all explained on the mod page.
Height Sliders
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by Godjul1)Download from: ModTheSims
With the new Create-a-Sim tool in The Sims 4, you can spawn Sims of many different widths, but you can't alter how tall they are. This height slider from GODJUL1 lets you adjust the height of your Sims so that the world looks more naturally varied: just click and drag their feet in Create-a-Sim to stretch or shrink them.
Automatic Beards
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by Flerb)Download from: ModTheSims
Technically this is actually a Live Mode mod, but because it affects your Sim's appearance we'll let it hang out in Create-A-Sim. With this mod, your sims will grow a beard over time. If you don't want to wait for nature, there's even a beard tonic to speed things up. Once it's too long, your Sim can shave and style their facial hair in the mirror. We all know The Sims 4 needs more personal chores, right?
Build and Buy Mode mods
OMSP Shelf
(Image credit: Amoebae)Download from: PictureAmoebae
This is a big must-have for players who like constructing intricate scenes. Placing clutter items naturally in The Sims 4 can be a bit of a headache. Even if you've gotten good at using your ALT key for free placement and the 0 or 9 keys to change an object's height, you can run into snapping nightmares. The OMSP shelf helps you add clutter to just about anything by acting as a placeholder surface while you clutter to your heart's desire.
Better Build/Buy
Download from: TwistedMexi's Patreon
For the pro builders in the room, TwistedMexi's Better Build/Buy mod relieves a lot of headaches. This mod expands the number of rows while browsing for objects and makes using filters easier too. The real biggie though is how easy it makes hunting for debug items—the neat items that exist in The Sims 4 but can usually only be revealed for use via cheats. Better Build/Buy lets you see them without cheats and gives them all names, making them much easier to find. Debug items have color swatches too.
Ravasheen's Bunk Beds
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by Ravasheen)Download from: Ravasheen
Ravasheen's working bunk beds made a real splash back before The Sims 4 added bunk beds of its own. Even though bunk beds are official now, Ravasheen's bunks are a great modular option for saving space. You can also put Ravasheen's miniature desks beneath a lofted bed and Sims are still able to use them, unlike a lot of base game items paired with standard Sims 4 bunk beds. You'll probably want to grab Ravasheen's bunk bed updates to go with the regular set as well.
Live Mode mods
Wonderful Whims
(Image credit: EA, Maxis/TURBODRIVER)Download from: ModTheSims
This Sims 4 mod is all about adding more complexity to character romance and interactions, letting you tweak the traits they find attractice in others, dating preferences, and even attitude towards birth control. Wonderful Whims adds a whole extra layer to the Sims 4 dating experience, giving it a little extra depth and less superficiality.
Life's Drama
Download from: SacrificialMods
Life's Drama adds a dash of controversy to every neighborhood, with 11 new dramatic scenarios for townie NPCs, some of which you can intervene in. Your Sims might peer out their window to see a couple embroiled in a huge argument, a robber trying to pick a pocket, or a bride running away from her wedding. You can cause some drama yourself via the new "Exposing A Loved One" action, which works on Sims that have partners. Drop the bombshell, and grab some popcorn.
Full installation instructions are here.
The Explore mod
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by KawaiiStacie)Download from: KawaiiStacieMods
This mod from KawaiiStacie adds a bunch of rabbit hole actions—activities your Sims can do on their own without you following—that activate buffs or improve your Sims' relationships with those closest to them.
Once your Sims have visited the DMV for a license or bus pass, you can send them exploring just by clicking on them, which brings up a radial wheel of options. You can send them shopping (they'll come back with new clothes), to dance classes, to local attractions, to gambling spots, to take on some part-time work, and more. Their skills and motives will change based on the activity you choose, and you can tell your Sim to "Explore With" another character if you want to improve relations.
Sims will also randomly explore if you don't intervene, which is neat. The mod works with the base game, but some options rely on specific packs: you can't send Sims for take-out ice cream if you don't own the Cool Kitchen Stuff pack, for example.
Meaningful Stories
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by roBurky)Download from: Roburky.itch.io
A mod pack containing some of prolific Sims 4 modder roBurky's best work, all aimed at making your Sims feel more human. If you've used Emotional Inertia or True Happiness—both previously on this list individually—then you'll attest to the quality of roBurky's work, and both of those mods are in the package alongside other must-haves.
Read moreMake sure your sims look awesome with the best gaming PCs right now.
Emotional Inertia, redesigned just for this collection, stops your Sims' moods flipping on and off like a light switch. In the base game, simply having a good meal in a well-decorated room fills them with joy for a few hours, but then the feeling vanishes. Emotional inertia makes moods less predictable, but more stable: they'll change less and last longer, making it more difficult to game the system. True Happiness, meanwhile, changes your Sims' default state from "happy" to "fine". Making them happy actually requires something special to happen, such as meeting a new partner, which will boost their mood considerably for a short time.
But Meaningful Stories is more than just these two well-liked mods. It also changes how the environment, such as paintings, impacts your Sims' moods. The effects are now more subtle and build up over time. It also stops extreme mood swings, so that instead of going from extreme happiness to sadness your sim will move through the natural, neutral in-between stages. Lastly, it creates more variable moodlets, meaning the same source of mood can give stronger or weaker effects at random.
Become a Sorcerer
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by Triplis)Download from: Triplis.github.io
Do you miss the magic of previous Sims games? Become a Sorcerer adds a hearty serving of the supernatural, letting your Sims sling magic spells that can either suck the sadness out of a friend or strike down an enemy with a bolt of lightning.
You just need to touch lump of clay, choose one of three rituals—they’ll determine which Needs are replaced with new magical ones—and get to casting. Using magic strengthens your powers and unlocks new spells, but it also depletes your “Magical Connection” (a mana bar, basically), and you’ll have to drain either yourself or another Sim to replenish it.
Depending on your choices, you’ll lean towards good or evil, which changes the type of spells you can cast. Do-gooders can eventually bring ghosts back to life, but if that doesn’t sound like fun, just set fire to a table instead. If you’re bored of your current playthrough, then this is bound to liven it up.
SimDa Dating App
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by LittleMsSam)Download from: LittleMsSam
This mod by LittleMsSam adds extra options for your romantically-inclined Sims. Using their phone, Sims can plan a date with another Sim at a particular neighborhood location. You can also choose to have one-night-stands and get calls for hook-ups from other NPC Sims. The main mod is pretty unrestricted in who it considers to be eligible for dates, including those in different age categories than your Sim and Sims already in relationships. To fine-tune your dating experience, check out the handful of optional addons available with the SimDa app.
Get a job
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by MesmericSimmer)Players are adding new careers to ModTheSims every week, so if you’re ever looking for inspiration on which direction to steer your Sim in, give it a browse. The imagination behind them is impressive, and most of them give you a fully-fleshed out path to follow.
Whether you want to become a tattoo artist , game developer, stock broker or zookeeper, you can now follow your dreams. We especially enjoy transforming our sim from a lowly PR assistant to the owner of a sports team in the sports agent career, which is a converted version of a career from The Sims 3: University Life.
A word of warning: these custom careers won’t work with most career overhaul mods, such as Turbo Careers—but don’t let that put you off.
Custom food interactions
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by TheFoodGroup)Need More Cheat Sheets?(Image credit: Rockstar Games)Fallout 4 cheats: Nuclear codes
Minecraft commands: Unblocked
RDR2 cheats: Most wanted
GTA 5 cheats: Phone it in
The Sims 4 cheats: Life hacks
Ark cheats: Expedited evolutionDownload from: ModTheSims
If you want more culinary creativity, then Custom Food Interactions is the only place you should start. It doesn’t add any ingredients or recipes to the game—it just adds new possible interactions to cooking equipment along with a framework that lets you craft a fridge-full of custom meals from other modders’ kitchens.
With it installed, you’ll want to head over to the ModTheSims custom food section and pick from the menu. You’ll find recipes for everything from Chinese dumplings to beignets, blueberry cheesecake to biriyani. Grab an optional bib to make sure you don’t accidentally salivate on your keyboard.
Have Some Personality Please!
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis)Download from: ModTheSims
This is one of our favourites on the best Sims 4 mods list. It's a huge overhaul of—as you can probably guess—the way Sims’ personalities work. It changes lots in the background (read the description on the mod page for an exhaustive list) but the best thing about it is that it eliminates all idle conversations. Never again will two Sims blab aimlessly to each other about nothing in particular: instead, they’ll be forced to choose an interaction, which is far more interesting.
Those interactions aren’t random, either: the mod will select them based on traits, moods and the existing relationships between the two Sims in question, which will give them a greater sense of autonomy than ever before. Expect more kisses from love interests—and more sucker punches from your enemies.
Turbo Careers
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by Zerbu )Download from: Zerbu
Another one from Zerbu, the Turbo Careers mod makes all adult (and two teen) careers function like the active careers from the Get to Work expansion. You can download work venues from the Gallery, including ones with a combined function, or make your own—just make sure they have the right objects for Sims to do their job.
The necessary activities for career progression are naturally related to the career—programming, cooking, exercising—and sometimes Sims will receive fieldwork. An athlete might have to go to the gym and show off her muscles, while a Sim who works in business might have to offer career advice to those running retail venues.
You can browse all available careers here and the venue requirements for every job here.
Replacement paintings
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by Daisy Tighfield / Artwork by Kathryn Hudson)Download from: ModTheSims
Once your artist Sim has churned out five paintings a day for a week you start to see the same images coming up again and again. This mod from DaisyTighfield replaces those default paintings across all categories with images from around the web, featuring lots of fanart from popular movies and video games.
If you like what you see, you can follow the links provided to find the original images on Deviantart or other sites. You can even create your own masterpieces for your Sims to paint in-game—the instructions are on the mod page.
Risky WooHoo
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis)Download from: ModTheSims
Another mod bringing The Sims closer to real life is one from PolarBearSims. It introduces a chance for Sims who are capable of getting pregnant to become so any time they Woohoo instead of just when purposefully using "Try for baby". The mod comes with a variety of different percentage risks and adjusts the chances based on where your Sims are getting it on as well as the traits they possess. It also reworks aspects of pregnancy, introducing complications and possible infertility for some Sims.
It should be noted that you can also manually adjust the chances of getting pregnant in MCCC. Risky WooHoo is compatible with that mod, but MCCC will overwrite the percentage chances.
If you’re looking to change the game even more, have a proper dig into the Create a Sim ‘custom gender settings’ in the base game. They were updated a while back and now provide you with more options, such as the ability to allow same-sex couples to fall pregnant.
And for even more control, check out arturlwww’s Pregnancy Mega Mod, which lets you do things like give birth to quintuplets.
Better Babies & Toddlers
(Image credit: Electronic Arts, Maxis / Modded by Caradriel )Download from: Caradriel's Patreon
Simmers have been begging for better base game babies for years, but in the meantime modder Caradriel has given us lots more to do with our tiniest Sims. Bear in mind that this mod does require the Parenthood Stuff Pack DLC. Once you've got both, the Better Babies mod gives you all sorts of new moodlets and conversation topics related to raising tiny Sims.
Once your newborns age up, you'll have even more options available to their parents. Through the Better Toddlers menu, your Sims can attempt to teach their kids new words, ask them to say "mommy" or "daddy" and tell other adult Sims about those accomplishments too.
You'll need the Mood Pack mod in order to use Better Babies as well. Although it isn't required, you may also want to consider giving those worn out parents a break by pairing it with the Hire A Babysitter mod by LittleMsSam.
Utility mods
UI Cheats Extension
Hum alongEnjoy the Sims 4's wonderfully jaunty soundtrack with the best gaming headsets out there.
Download from: Weerbesu's Patreon
This handy mod by Weerbesu makes using Sims 4 cheats a breeze if you don't know the lot by heart. Right-clicking various parts of the normal Sims 4 interface will give you extra options for things like giving a household more money, promoting Sims in their careers, or changing the in-game time. You can find the full list of features by scrolling down a bit on the download page.
No death Murphy Beds
Download from: Icemunmun
When the Tiny Living stuff pack came out, fold-down Murphy beds seemed like a treat. That is until everyone realized that they seem to kill your Sims quite often. This mod may seem simple but it can save you from a real headache. No more Murphy bed deaths and cheating your Sims back to life after!
MC Command Center
Download from: Deaderpool-mccc
MCCC is a mega-mod that lets you tweak virtually aspect of your Sims’ lives, giving you godlike control over them and others in their world. You can blacklist certain clothing items, even on Sims you aren’t controlling. You can set employment rates for Sims of different ages, scan Sims to find out if they’re pregnant, or even terminate the pregnancy.
There are also lots of automatic settings geared towards letting non-controlled Sims live full lives without you, getting married and having babies of their own volition, and you can also use the mod to adjust the in-game time settings so your Sims don’t take half a day to shower and have breakfast. If you only grab one mod, make it this one.
Gender Preference mod
Download from: ModTheSims
The Gender Preference mod lets you change the preferences Sims have for romantic partners of particular genders (in The Sims 4 currently that’s just two, female and male). You can adjust the numbers to set your Sims to prefer one gender to the exclusion of the other, to prefer one but also like the other, or to like both equally. Romance away.
Daily Save Mod
Download from: ModTheSims
If you've ever lost a week of your Sim's life by forgetting to save, you'll want to think about this mod by Temptest that automatically saves your game every day at your chosen time. It also creates seven save slots so that you can roll back to a previous day if you really want to.
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Down in Austin, Texas yesterday, AMD's CEO Dr. Lisa Su took to the stage for some big announcements around the company's upcoming Zen 4 CPU architecture. Alongside it, we got a taster of the RDNA 3, which Su has confirmed will utilise a Ryzen-like chiplet design.
Back in June, AMD's product technology architect, Sam Neffziger, implied that the upcoming RDNA 3 design would be more like the Ryzen design with discrete compute and I/O chiplets, rather than AMD's Aldebaran which features a pair of large CDNA 2 chips with an interconnect between them. When asked about it, he said the chiplet design would be "a reasonable inference."
In so many words: "Yes, but I can't say anything about it." And now, those implications have been officially confirmed by the CEO herself.
"By combining our most advanced gaming architecture with five nanometer triplets, RDNA 3 GPUs will deliver more than 50% more performance per watt than our current generation Radeon GPUs."
We even got to see the pre-production RDNA 3 cards at work alongside the upcoming Ryzen 9 7950x CPU, smashing out the as-yet-unreleased and pretty graphically intensive Lies of P by Neowiz. It's looking pretty darn smooth in ultra settings at 4K resolution, though that was the final mention of anything RDNA related.
Screen queens(Image credit: Future)Best gaming monitor: Pixel-perfect panels for your PC
Best high refresh rate monitor: Screaming quick screens
Best 4K monitor for gaming: When only high-res will do
Best 4K TV for gaming: Big-screen 4K PC gamingAlthough we still have no idea about pricing, the use of a chiplet-based architecture is sure to give AMD an efficiency boost. The same approach allowed Ryzen CPUs to contain more cores via smaller chiplets with high yields, and at the same time they were much cheaper to produce than CPUs with monolithic chips and lower yields.
AMD has said there'll be some form of RDNA 3 launching this year, there's still a little way to go before we see the next generation of Radeon GPUs gracing our desktops, but we can at least say AMD is taking steps to ensure the efficiency of their gaming GPU architecture.
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NetEase, the Chinese games and tech company best known in the west for partnering with Blizzard to bring games like World of Warcraft and Diablo to China, has bought French studio Quantic Dream for an undisclosed amount.
NetEase isn't quite as omnipresent as more-recognisable Chinese titan Tencent, but its recent business efforts have seen it inching westward for a while now. In May this year, the company founded its first US-based studio in the form of Jackalope Games. The purchase of Quantic Dream—which makes the company NetEase's first European studio—follows on from a 2019 investment that NetEase made in the developer which made NetEase a minority stakeholder.
Quantic Dream, of course, is best known for its startlingly lifelike recreation of David Bowie in 1999's Omikron: The Nomad Soul. Oh, and games like Detroit: Become Human and Heavy Rain, I suppose. In a statement to VentureBeat, Quantic Dream founder and CEO David Cage said the company had considered a lot of options for investments and partnerships—including the possibility of taking the company public—but eventually settled on a NetEase acquisition to preserve Quantic Dream's "editorial independence", and because of the pre-existing relationship between the two companies.
Cage attributes the timing of the acquisition to the recent wave of consolidation that's overtaken the games industry. "Our industry is undergoing a profound mutation through a wave of acquisitions," Cage told VentureBeat, meaning that the "central position in the industry" of Quantic Dream and other developers "are now more correctly valued". In other words, it sounds like there's now so much money being thrown around in acquisition talks that Quantic Dream would have missed out if it had not accepted one offer or another.
In recent years, Quantic Dream and Cage specifically have come under fire for complaints made by Quantic Dream staff members about a toxic workplace culture at the company. Cage called those allegations "ridiculous, absurd, and grotesque" and Quantic Dream took some media outlets to court for their coverage of the story. It's perhaps no surprise, then, that the company dedicates space—in both its official announcement of the acquisition and in its statements to journalists—to emphasising the involvement of Quantic Dream staff in the acquisition. Staff at the company "are fully involved in this operation" and will "benefit directly financially", according to the official announcement post. We'll have to wait and see to find out how staff will be affected in the long-term, though.
Quantic Dream's next game is Star Wars Eclipse, which we glimpsed at The Game Awards last year, but it's also assisting in the development of Under The Waves, a diving game announced at Gamescom that might be a little on the nose. Whatever the company's next game, it'll probably involve famous actors, clunky dialogue, and provoke me to more than one sharp intake of breath through gritted teeth.
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At yesterday's VMware Explore 2022 conference in San Francisco, server giant VMWare announced the vSphere 8—a metaverse-ready data center platform with artificially intelligent security.
vSphere 8 combines recent Dell PowerEdge solutions, Nvidia BlueField-2 data processing units (or DPUs), and super high-end Nvidia server GPUs. All that tech is packaged together under the watchful eye of some boss-grade AI enterprise software known as NSX Intelligence, ZDnet reports.
In an age where cyberattacks are growing in scale and voracity, VMware has focused on security for the project, employing AI to stand at the firewall gates and uphold some serious, zero-trust policies. We can imagine a bunch of glowy blue Tron guys lined up to do battle against invaders with their little discs, but what does AI security actually mean?
"With this package, we are protecting workloads with next-generation firewalls. Now you will see firewalls in every single server. So we are no longer confined to how previous data centers were built," says VMware's vice-president of security engineering, Brad Doctor.
Switching from the conventional singular, external firewall solution to having VMware's NSX firewall (PDF warning) on every server will mean better security across the board. As Nvidia's Head of computing, Manuvir Das notes, isolation is the name of the game here.
"Security has always been a focus of VMware NSX platform, and now hosting that on the Bluefield gives us a new layer of isolation between the application processing domain and the infrastructure processing domain."
Essentially, it'll be easier to enable intrusion detection and protection to keep the server safe, and in turn the metaverse, as we move into an increasingly digital age.
"Security has always been a focus of VMware NSX platform, and now hosting that on the Bluefield gives us a new layer of isolation between the application processing domain and the infrastructure processing domain."
Essentially, it'll be easier to enable intrusion detection and protection to keep the server safe, and in turn the metaverse, as we move into an increasingly digital age.
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 restThe AI can even go as far as recognising when a password is being typed in too slowly—an indicator of the presence of a potential hacker. We all know AI doesn't always know best, though, and someone's sure to get a shock being locked out after logging in one henpecked letter at a time.
On a more serious note: AMD, Dell, HPE, Intel, Nvidia and Lenovo have all given statements in support vSphere 8, with Nvidia's Das noting that “AI and zero-trust security are pushing the boundaries of computing and networking for enterprise data centers."
So comes another step in the process of making the world more AI-centric. Let's hope when the machines turn, our meatbag metaverse owners don't automatically get locked out for being human.
I'm sorry, Zuck. I'm afraid I can't do that.
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Fine margins can make big differences in gaming. It's the reason us PC gamers are so obsessed with optimising the settings before we jump into an online shooter - ramping up that FoV to get it as high as possible without distortion, or tweaking graphics settings to find that perfect balance between frame rate and visual fidelity.
Another one of those fine margins is your own energy level. Whether you're down to the last couple of teams in a battle royale match or delivering an hours-long stream to your loyal audience of Twitch followers, keeping yourself sharp and nourished for those big moments is essential. It's in these moments that a Sneak Energy drink could prove to be a vital item in your inventory.
What distinguishes Sneak from other gamer-oriented energy drinks is that it has zero sugar, replacing the unhealthy short-term stimulant with natural energisers like Vitamins B6, B12, Amino Acids, and Ginseng Extract. It means that instead of setting yourself up for a sugar crash, you're in fact providing your body with key nutrients to bolster your energy levels both throughout your game, and over the long term. While Sneak's branding is all cosmic neons and street art stylings, the drinks themselves only use natural colouring - no electric blue or glow-in-the-dark liquids here!
(Image credit: Sneak)All you caffeine addicts enthusiasts needn't worry however, as each serving still packs 150mg of Caffeine and 1250mg of Taurine to give you the sharpness and clarity you need without any of the jitters.
Having sampled some of their flavours, we can vouch for their taste, which miraculously maintain a zingy sweetness despite having zero sugar and five calories (which you'll easily burn off in a round of Apex). Flavours include classic combos like Strawberry and Watermelon, Blue Raspberry, and Electric Mango. If you want a dessert-like dopamine kick, try Bubblegum Millions and Rhubarb & Custard. Or venture into the unknown with mystery flavours like Purple Storm, Tropikilla, and the stripped-back 'Natural'. To taste the whole rainbow of Sneak's offerings, you can create your own Starter Pack, and select nine sachets of the flavours you want.
You can buy Sneak as a clean, powdered energy formula in tubs and sachets, or in cool carbonated cans of drink for those days when you're feeling the heat of battle, or the heat of your gaming rig pumping out those searing framerates. The latest perk in Sneak's loadout is the Breakfast Collection [scheduled to launch 31st August, not to be shared until launch date of 31st August], containing a freshly-squeezed tub of Breakfast Orange, nostalgic Sneak-Os cereal, a Hugh Hefner-inspired vinyl toy of their bunny mascot, ‘Cereal Killer’ branded hoodies and shaker, and a t-shirt packed up in a ‘90s style milk carton.
(Image credit: Sneak)Whatever you go for, your nutritional energising needs are covered without the consequences of sugar crashes and excess calories.
Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, Sneak has some lit graffiti-inspired branding, so if you fancy getting a hoodie or T sporting their badass bunny logo, head over to the merch section of the Sneak site.
Sneak Energy is the quintessential gamer's drink, as attested to by its 20,000 followers across Facebook, Twitch, Tik Tok, Discord, and other platforms. Join Sneak's ever-growing community and you'll be in with a chance to win exclusive products, prizes, and more!
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Whether you're looking for the answer to today's Wordle or you'd just like to read a few tips to set you in the right direction, you'll find all of that as well as links to our helpful Wordle guides just a short scroll away.
It's the end of the month and that means it's more or less the end of the summer in my part of the world too. How has the season treated your Wordle score? Has the hot weather fired up your imagination or fried your puzzle-solving mind? Whatever's happened, I hope you've had fun.
Wordle hint
Today's Wordle: A hint for Wednesday, August 31
From local raffles to international challenges, competition winners usually receive today's word for their efforts in the form of cash, trophies, medals, or any other desirable item. These can also be awarded for effort or excellence too, for example, the best book of the year in a chosen category. There's an uncommon consonant in the answer, so be brave.
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 438 answer?
Are you ready to win? The answer to the August 31 (438) Wordle is PRIZE.
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:
- August 30: ONSET
- August 29: CHIEF
- August 28: GAUZE
- August 27: RUDER
- August 26: IRONY
- August 25: CLOWN
- August 24: NEEDY
- August 23: WOVEN
- August 22: MERIT
- August 21: WASTE
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.
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Hello alexcatalin,
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.
alexcatalin joined on the 08/31/2022.
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Indie beat 'em up Brok the InvestiGator, released this week on Steam, wasn't on my radar until its official Twitter account pointed out something strange about the reviews coming in from Steam curators. In a thread posted on Sunday, developer Cowcat claimed that it was targeted by fraudulent curators who wrote bogus reviews after not even playing the game.
After looking it over, the studio's reasoning is sound. Of the 150 user reviews of Brok the InvestiGator published as of this writing, 99% of them are positive. As of yesterday morning, the only negative reviews had come from Steam curators. In the case of several of these curators, Brok is the only negative review the account has ever given out of hundreds of games. It sure looks like a handful of Steam curator reviews, possibly posted by the same person, were written in retaliation to the developer. A day after Cowcat's thread was posted, Brok's negative curator reviews had turned into positive ones. Here's how it all went down:
Prior to Brok's release, Cowcat said it received "tons and tons" of requests from Steam curators asking for a review code. This is a standard practice for legitimate curator pages, streamers, and gaming sites alike, but it also opens the door to scammers hoping to score a free Steam code they can resell on gray market sites like G2A.
Of 204 games reviewed by this curator at the time, Brok was the only negative score. (Image credit: Cowcat Games)Cowcat hoped to weed out the scammers with a clever workaround. Instead of sending codes for the full game, it sent codes for Brok the InvestiGator's free prequel chapter, the idea being that legit curators would redeem the code and follow-up to ask for the full game while scammers would unknowingly sell the useless code on the gray market. Cowcat reckons this might have worked a little too well. According to the dev, "very few" reached out wondering why they'd been sent a code for a demo, suggesting that "most of those emails are from scammers who did not even activate those keys on their account before posting a review."
If that is the case, these scammers might've had to issue refunds after reselling the code, and then proceeded to write curator reviews with generic criticisms like "broken gameplay" and "lack of polish" to get back at Cowcat. It's circumstantial evidence, but it all started to sound less far-fetched after reading Reddit user darklinkpower's analysis of the Steam curators in question. They point out that the nine curators who left negative reviews share some pretty suspicious similarities:
- All of the curators share a common admin user who can control what's posted
- All were created on or near the same day
- All share a similar number of followers (averaging 23,000)
- All had just one or two negative reviews (including, at the time, Brok the InvestiGator)
It wasn't long after Cowcat and darklinkpower's posts gained traction that the curators edited their negative reviews to be positive. The same curator who previously stated Brok "lacks polish in all areas" apparently now believes Brok is a "wonderful cartoony detective adventure" with "perfectly integrated beat 'em up mechanics." Cowcat said it has reported the curators in question to Valve.
It strikes me as strange that this practice of revenge reviewing is even, in theory, possible. Individual Steam users can't actually publish reviews unless they own and have played the game in question, but curator pages don't have that limitation. That sounds like a loophole that should be filled, though it's worth noting that curator reviews don't seem to be weighed as heavily by Valve as user reviews. Curator reviews are actually sectioned off from user reviews with a small link that I'd never noticed until today and don't appear to factor into the overall score visible at the top of store pages.
Here are all the curator reviews for the game and you can notice there's a good chunk of "suspicious" negative reviews. https://t.co/E2AkLggKWe(1/16) pic.twitter.com/Bu0R1qymvBAugust 28, 2022
See moreCowcat is similarly skeptical of how much curator reviews ultimately matter, but thinks Valve could take steps to mitigate scammers. For one, Cowcat suggests Valve "stop forcing us to rely on keys and instead open Curator Connect for everything."
Curator Connect is a feature on Steam's backend that allows devs to send games directly to trusted Steam curators. Currently, devs can only send up to 100 copies of their game out. That, and the fact that curators have no way to request codes from devs, limits its usefulness.
I've reached out to Valve for comment and will update if I receive a response.
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Earlier this year, Zachtronics, the indie studio dedicated to making puzzle games that teach you programming languages or entire new ways of thinking, announced it was making its final new game. That game was Last Call BBS, an anthology that includes an excellent model-robot-assembly simulator and another of the Solitaire variants that have become the studio's hallmark. Although Zachtronics isn't backing down on the "no more new games" part of the deal, the studio always planned to follow Last Call BBS with a compilation of all its Solitaire variants as a kind of epilogue. It's now announced The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection will be released on Steam next week.
There's a trailer to accompany the announcement, embedded above, and it's the most thrilling trailer for Solitaire I've ever seen. It's probably the only trailer for Solitaire I've ever seen, but that's beside the point. "Inside you'll find all seven of our solitaire games," Zach Barth of Zachtronics says, "remastered with 4K graphics, in addition to a brand new Tarot-themed game that is my new favorite of them all." Helpfully, the YouTube algorithm has declared the trailer to be a video of the Microsoft Solitaire Collection.
The games included are:
- Shenzhen Solitaire: A FreeCell-inspired solitaire variant with a three-color deck based on mahjong tiles
- Sigmar's Garden: A tile-matching game using the alchemical symbols from Opus Magnum
- Proletariat's Patience: An asymmetric solitaire variant where some cards are grouped by suit while others are stacked by alternating colors
- Kabufuda Solitaire: A challenging Solitaire variant using Japanese kabufuda cards where additional free cells are unlocked by making sets
- Cluj Solitaire: An original Solitaire variant where you can "cheat" by placing cards wherever you want, so long as you're careful
- Cribbage Solitaire: A score-based solitaire variant using modified Cribbage rules and an actual Cold War aircraft recognition deck
- Sawayama Solitaire: A reimagined version of Klondike that is faster, more strategic, and more often winnable than the original
- Fortune's Foundation: A brand new and extra-challenging solitaire variant using a deck of Tarot cards that presents a fortune when you win
The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection will be available on Steam from September 6. Meanwhile, Last Call BBS quietly snuck out of Steam Early Access on August 3 and is now available on GOG and itch.io as well.
Intel says it's fully committed to discrete graphics as it shifts focus onto next-gen GPUs
in Gaming News
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In recent weeks there has been a lot of hearsay and speculation on whether Intel's graphics division, AXG, would end up getting canned. It's not something I personally considered likely to happen but admittedly one of today's top analysts did fear the worst. We still don't exactly know what's going on behind closed doors, nor will we likely get that sort of insight, but speaking to Intel this week I'm told it remains as dedicated as ever to its graphics roadmap—and that includes gaming graphics cards.
"We're not going anywhere on our discrete business. And our discrete business is the basic technology development that goes both into the data centre and integrated GPUs," Intel's Tom Petersen says.
I ask Petersen if that's the message Intel wants to get across, and I receive an effusive "Yeah, we're not going anywhere."
"I feel like there's a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) out there. I'd just like to be clear: we're not going anywhere," he continues.
"The thing I happen to believe—Pat, and I, and Roger, and Lisa, and Ryan, everybody is aligned on the idea—that graphics is a critical technology to the client, is a critical technology to the data centre, and we want to start competing in the mainstream area where our competitors are making a tonne of money. So all three of those things are critically important for Intel."
As I mentioned, this isn't necessarily a promise that nothing will ever change in Intel's approach to graphics, gaming, or otherwise. Still, those most closely aligned to its gaming graphics products are as committed as ever. Considering Intel has confirmed at least three more generations of Arc GPU on its roadmap—Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid—that's good news.
Battlemage development has already kicked off, Petersen confirms, with the majority of Arc graphics engineers now turning their attention to the second generation. Some engineers are even looking into early Celestial "technology proof points."
"Most of our ASIC team is on Battlemage," Petersen says. "A small portion of it is on our future, which is Celestial. And then there's a very small portion on Alchemist today, but they're kind of different function sets. So like a board and, what I'll call, chip teams are on Alchemist right now. Kind of think of it as getting our board just right, getting our BIOS just right, making all the final tuning. But the bulk of our design team is on Battlemage.
Though Intel does have a lot of work to do with its drivers, not just working on its not-so-great DX11 support but also continuing to support new and upcoming games on DX12 and Vulkan.
"The bulk of the driver team is on Alchemist, but there's a small portion of the driver team, and it's the same people it's just like a portion of their time, working on Battlemage doing emulation, doing simulation, doing pre-silicon work. So that we have high confidence that we bring Battlemage to market more quickly with less surprises. With less growing pains."
And Intel confirms that it remains dedicated to competing at the high-end with later generations of Arc, which so far its first generation has been unable to achieve.
"Our plan is to start here. And then we add on top and then we add on top. And it's not a really hard strategy to understand because we're starting with the volume segment of the market, and then we'll grow into more high-performance segments over time."
Best CPU cooler: keep your chip chilled in style
Best PC fans: super-silent and plastered in RGB
Best PC cases: big, little, and everything in-between.
Though I also wondered if the delays to Alchemist's response would have repercussions for Battlemage and a delayed release, yet both Petersen and colleague Ryan Shrout appeared confident in sticking to Intel's plan for that. Ultimately Intel hasn't released particularly specific dates for Battlemage on its current roadmaps, with only the loose promise of a 2023–24 window. So I'm not sure we can glean all that much as to Battlemage's release date just yet, anyways.
Celestial is marked down for a 2024+ release window, which is about as vague as it could be. Druid hasn't made much of an appearance past Intel's Architecture Day slides from over a year ago, which never specified a launch year.
Basically: Intel has plenty of leeway for delivery of these graphics cards. We'll see Nvidia and AMD turn the crank of another sure-to-be exciting GPU generation between now and then, too, so it's absolutely likely some plans will change as a result.
For now, Intel is focusing on releasing its Alchemist 1st Gen cards, with the A770 and A750 expected imminently.
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