Oct 7, 2021
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Dota 2's The International is now underway. The group stages for Valve's wizard flinging esports tournament began today, with 18 teams competing to progress into the knockout stages.
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Dota 2's The International is now underway. The group stages for Valve's wizard flinging esports tournament began today, with 18 teams competing to progress into the knockout stages.
I'm not sure it's possible for my expectations to be lower than they are for any given Resident Evil movie project, but the subtitle "Welcome To Raccoon City" might just have lowered them further. Thankfully I've just watched the first official trailer, and hey, this looks fun! This looks competent>.
EA's FIFA games might not be called FIFA in future. That's what EA Sports say, eventually, in a blog post on the "future of football".
A whole host of Razer peripherals and streaming equipment has been discounted at Amazon UK today, including one of my favourite mice of all time - the Razer Viper Ultimate. Here are the links, then we'll get into the explanations of why these deals are worth considering!
The AMD Ryzen 7 5700G was released earlier this year for £330, but supply issues made it hard to find this processor with integrated graphics at all. Now, Ebuyer are selling the chip for £295, a £40 reduction from its recommended retail price of £330. That's a good deal for a CPU that outperforms AMD's already excellent Ryzen 3700X while also providing fast enough graphics performance for 1080p gaming. Oh, and it comes with a free, quite decent AMD Wraith CPU cooler - awesome.
The first thing I did in the early access version of Book Of Travels was wander aimlessly into a dangerous forest, get robbed by a Ruffian, refuse to hand over my meager starter items because I had given myself the 'stickler' personality trait, and completely flub the resulting combat encounter because I had no weapons.
Might And Delight's creative director Jakob Tuchten was quite apologetic about my fate, but a life is a small price for a surprise - the greatest gift to an old MMO player like me. I'm telling you this off the cuff because this is not, in fact, representative of my ten hours with Book Of Travels so far. Aside from my initial unwitting choice to spawn in a dangerous area, the Braided Shore is a serene world with a meditative pace. It's a fable in game form, with its painterly visuals and homely magic. If you are looking for danger though, it is out there waiting for you off the roads and far from city centers.
The studio behind the Deus Ex prequels, Guardians Of The Galaxy, and Shadow Of The Tomb Raider are taking a bold step in an industry known for overworking, and switching to a four-day workweek. Eidos Montreal say salaries and working conditions will remain the same, they'll just close the office on Fridays as everyone goes from 40-hour weeks to 32-hour weeks. The idea is that with more downtime to unwind and live their lives, people will work better during those reduced hours. Alright, everyone else do this too, thanks.
Microsoft’s chief product officer Panos Panay once said “If you’re a gamer, Windows 11 was made for you.” Unfortunately, a couple of days after launching, it’s turning out to be something of an unwanted gift. Besides being blamed for Far Cry 6 crashes and deterring an entire cloud gaming service, Windows 11 is now causing performance drops on AMD chips as well. That’s according to AMD themselves, who announced in a support post that updating to Windows 11 could cause a 3-5% performance drop in some applications as well as a 10-15% drop in “games commonly used for esports.”
What PvP modes are available in New World, and how do you take part in them? New World is an MMO, which means interaction with other players forms a big part of the game. While it's far from every-player-for-themself on the Isle of Aeternum — you're encouraged to join up with a Company (New World's version of Guilds, basically) to make the most of co-operative gameplay — there's naturally a PvP aspect involved as well.
Matthew once again has the temerity to be away, so this week for the Electronic Wireless Show Podcast Nate and I play another round of Sweeten The Deal (per a vote in the podcast Discord), in which, as Nate says, we both lose. On the upside, since this is the third game of Sweeten The Deal that we've played, we are both developing very distinct, high-level playstyles and also a theme song for it.
It does mean there isn't a whole lot of game chat this week, although we do discuss the very important developments in the case of The Zodiac Killer, as well as a very special Cavern Of Announcements.