Final Fantasy 14’s third and final Fan Festival of the Endwalker expansion just took place in Tokyo over the weekend. While there was a surprise lack of release date for upcoming expansion Dawntrail, we did get to see tons of neat stuff: female hrothgar, artsy class Pictomancer, and a bizarro cyberpunk world that has me wondering just what the hell the Warrior of Light is getting up to on his summer vacation.
Yet amongst all of the news, that somehow wasn’t the biggest surprise of the weekend. No, it was something far more strange, more sinister. By far one of the most talked about things was director and producer Naoki Yoshida turning up to the festival’s PvP tournament finals in a suit. Shirt, blazer, tie, the whole shebang.
It sounds like nothing—and really, it is—but it was a mighty uncharacteristic appearance for Yoshida, more commonly known as Yoshi-P by the community. After all, the man turned up to Dawntrail’s expansion reveal in a Teenage Mutant Ninj…
After 23 years of Terrorist vs. Counter-Terrorist battles over bombs, hostages, and the like, Counter-Strike 2 developers have finally perfected a piece of technology that had eluded them: Handedness. That’s right. Where once the left hand just kind of hovered impotently around at times, or was used to reload, or support a weapon, or perhaps in a pinch hold the other of your pair of pistols, the left hand can now take center stage as the one pulling the trigger.
As of a recent patch you can now swap between left and right hands in Counter-Strike 2. You can set a preferred handedness, as well, so that your little villain/hero/antihero will always have their gun in the right spot at match’s start. It’s even networked, so that anyone spectating you can see exactly where your gun is.
You can even swap handedness mid-round, letting you peek your gun around a corner in a different way: Simply press H, by default, on QWERTY US Keyboards. There’s even a little animation where yo…
It has been announced that ahead of the start of the first Counter-Strike 2 Major PGL has upgraded the setups for the PGL CS2 Major Copenhagen 2024, swapping in AMD’s Ryzen 7 7800X3D as the CPU of choice for gaming pros. It just so happens we agree, having stuck the red-team’s finest in as our choice for the best CPU for gaming, too.
Great minds, and all that.
The announcement of the change of PC setup (via HXL on X) is a change from the Ryzen 9 5950X that was previously used at the tournament, and given the power of the latest AMD chip, with its innovative 3D V-Cache design, it’s a good shout for a fast-paced game such as CS2.
The Ryzen 7 7800X3D delivers the absolute highest frame rates of any chip you put it up against across pretty much all of our testing. And when you’re running at the sort of low resolutions that most esports players will run their rigs at—with most opting for a 1280 by 960 output—it’s going to outstrip everything else by some mar…
It’s only been a week since Valve officially acknowledged Deadlock’s existence, and gaming’s least-closed beta test is already changing quite a bit. Yesterday, Deadlock got a hefty patch that added wall-jumping and more than a hundred hero balance tweaks, because the third person MOBA shooter wasn’t already complicated enough without elaborate parkour. Also included in the patch is a new profile screen, showing statistics from a player’s playtime with different heroes, which—as some eagle-eyed Deadlock enthusiasts noticed—included three heroes that we can’t yet select in-game: Holliday, Mirage, and Wrecker.
A hotfix arrived shortly afterwards that removed the unimplemented heroes from the profile statistics page, but players snagged some screenshots as proof. Better still, while those heroes might not be visible in in-game menus, it’s possible to try them out in Deadlock’s sandbox mode using a few console commands. It seems safe to assume these three will join the …
Dungeons & Dragons: Red Dragon’s Tale, D&D’s crossover with Lego, is now available. As I mentioned back when further details were announced, however, the full set’s a smidge pricey at $360.
In fairness you’re getting 3,745 bits of Lego for your buck—but still, it’s a dragon’s ransom unless you’re a hobbyist. Fortunately, you don’t actually have to buy the full set to play the adventure, which can be downloaded in PDF form for free on D&D Beyond. You’ll need to make an account to do so, however.
The conceit is that you’re a group stumbling into a tavern called the “Inn Plain Sight”, which is famous for its delicious hot wings. Not everything is as it seems, though—evil lurks in the shadows, a cat is missing, and the food seems suspiciously reheated. If you’ve ever been to a chain pub in the UK—imagine that, but there’s an ancient crumbling tower slapped onto the side.
The adventure is designed by Christopher Perkins…
Improve your daily Wordle game with our general tips and tricks, sneak a peek at today’s answer if you need to (we won’t tell anyone), or find a little guidance with our clue for the May 26 (706) puzzle. However you want to play Wordle today, we’ve got it covered.
I had a great start to the Friday puzzle, the first line giving up some great letters and the second ruling out what could have been a game’s worth of bad guesses. I was just one green away from another win by the third go, and then four sealed the deal and gave me today’s Wordle answer with plenty of breathing room.
Today’s Wordle hint
A Wordle hint for Friday, May 26
The answer to today’s Wordle is an old-fashioned term for a pig, as well as a general impolite term for anyone you don’t really like. You may have encountered this word in the phrase “Like casting pearls before _____”. There are two vowels in this one.
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Is there a double letter in today’s W…
In Tokyo, a man has been arrested for stalking a woman using social media sites like LINE (a popular app in Japan) and Twitter—as well as the MMORPG Final Fantasy 14. As reported by Kobe News (and translated by Siliconera), the man reportedly sent over 22 messages via those apps trying to re-establish contact, while also threatening to tell her family about their past conversations.
In Final Fantasy 14, however, he was able to just follow her around. That’s down to an issue the MMO has had with its friends list system since its launch—if you blacklist someone, you’re not removed from their friends list.
This allows someone you’ve blocked to see when you’re online, as well as what zone you’re in. Bizarrely, they can also still leave messages in a message book—a player housing feature that lets visitors leave notes.
For some players, this is a huge problem. Even a quick temperature check on the game’s subreddit reveals—with posts l…
With more than a little braggadocio, Valve has announced that it’s permanently banned over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts for cheating. In a post to the official Dota 2 blog yesterday, the company revealed that it had constructed a cunning trap to catch thousands of players that were using “third-party software” to “access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn’t visible during normal gameplay,” lending them an unfair advantage in-game.
It worked like this: Once it became aware of the exploit, Valve released a patch that created “a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits”. Valve says that every single one of the accounts banned yesterday had read from that secret data, giving the company “extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved”.
Valve’s whole announcement has the air of a warlord mounting their enemies’ heads on spikes as a warning to the rest. The studi…
As a lifelong Warlock main since the launch of vanilla Destiny, I was delighted to log in at reset today and see that our class has won the 2023 Guardian Games. Let’s gooooooooo book club buddies, etc. I was also a little confused, because the event only began this week and it’s due to run until May 23. Even more bafflingly, another in-game pop up confirmed that Titans had actually deposited most medals and won the inaugural week. So, uh, shenanigans?
Before anyone starts accusing Bungie’s dev team of being stacked with cheating Warlocks (how else to explain Starfire Protocol having gone un-nerfed so long), it’s far more reasonable to assume that this is just another bug in a season that has at times resembled the insect enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. Guardian Games has previous form in this area, too. After 2021’s event, the Guardian Games statue in the tower featured a golden lion, indicating Titans had won, when it should have been Hunters’ snake instead. Hardly the most d…
Both the UK and US government have begun to circle warily around the recent emergence of powerful AI technologies, and are taking the first steps towards attempting to rein in the sector. The British Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), fresh from pulling the rug out from under Microsoft’s proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition, has begun a review of the underlying systems behind various AI tools. The U.S. government joined in by issuing a statement saying AI companies have a “fundamental responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are deployed or made public.”
This all comes shortly after Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes called “the Godfather of deep learning”, resigned from Google and warned that the industry needs to stop scaling AI technology and ask “whether they can control it.” Google is one of many seriously big tech companies, including Microsoft and OpenAI, that have invested enormously in AI technologies, and that investment may well b…