Right, it's that time again. Get ready to slide back down the ladder of powerfulness, because mandatory wipeage is required to stick everyone back on the same trajectory ahead of [insert new thing here]. No, say the developers of shooter Arc Raiders. They will not bow before the mandatory wipe gods at this time, instead trying out a voluntary wipe system dubbed Projects.

Yep, rather than leaning on the same unavoidable resets which plenty of extraction shooters and survival games employ to ensure newbies aren't always guaranteed to run into folks with more levels someone playing a platformer in a regularly-stopping elevator to the sun, Embark Studios plan to do their own thing.

Read more

Earlier this week, a group of former ZeniMax developers revealed that they'd formed a new worker-owned studio in the aftermath of Microsoft's mass layoffs. It's called Sackbird Studios, and the logo's a bird with a sack. Following accusations that this bird looked like it could be AI-generated, the studio have responded that it isn't, but some of the images on their website were.

Read more

Battlefield 6 marks the first time, in all my years of hardwaring, that I have been summoned to someone’s house> in order to make a PC game work. I can’t offer this Jim’ll Fix It service to everyone, not least because IGN’s lawyers have issues with the name, so I’ll just say this: Enabling Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 is inconvenient, but not as fiddly as it sounds, and can be done with at most a couple of toggles in your BIOS/UEFI’s Security section.

As it turns out, that’s probably the worst of BF6’s hardware worries. I don’t know who forgot to tell DICE that all FPS blockbusters must now be callously demanding graphics card shin-kickers, but in both the campaign and multiplayer, this seems to run quite... well? Likely well enough that as long as you’re on any reasonably modern rig, you might not need to do much twiddling with the visual settings.

Still. Let’s have a go at it anyway.

Read more

Altruism is a funny concept. Most of us can agree that bestowing a generous gift of greening shelf-stable bread-like product on the local park pigeons is a nice thing to do, but what of the knowledge that moulders in the back of our minds all the while, telling us: keep this up long enough, and you'll definitely end up with a loyal army of skyborne scavengers willing to enact your every destructive whim at a mere flick of your wrist? Feed them the really good bread, they might even let you throw them at things. From super seeded, to superceding god. Here's the trailer for The Bench.

Read more

This week's Borderlands 4 patch has arrived, firing some gear balancing tweaks into the looter shooter's innards, then probably dropping a cringey catchphrase. Developers Gearbox have also revealed some of what's in store for the larger patch that's set to arrive next week, with performance fixes back on the menu alongside some more in-depth balancing that'll touch "those unintended interactions" folks have been relying on for overpowered builds.

It's all in the line with the nice rhythm the studio have settled into following an initial flurry of activity in response to the game running not goodly on PC out of the gate. Last week brought a big patch featuring the first round of vault hunter balancing tweaks, so this week sees a chaser precede the next shot.

Read more