Vermintide 2's Versus mode is real, currently in open alpha

[Tyler Colp]

Sausage weapons are old news. Torches are finally in, thanks to cRPG Bro's latest creative Baldur's Gate 3 build.

The so-called "Torch Lord" build shares some methods with cRPG Bro's sausage build from last year: torches are a perfect vessel for stacks of elemental damage types. Add the Shillelagh cantrip from druids and a paladin's Smite, and you've got a character powerful enough to survive Honor mode, Baldur's Gate 3's most brutal difficulty setting, with just a pair of torches in your hands.

There are a number of key spells to pick up as you level up, which cRPG Bro explains in the video, but the most important ones enhance your flimsy torch damage way higher than its base 1d4 damage. A quick multiclass into druid gives you Shillelagh to double the torch's damage, and Divine Smite, from paladin, further buffs it.

Your elemental damage also comes from specific gear, like Broodmother's Revenge for poison damage, and the Strange Conduit Ring for psychic damage. Late-game armor, like the Dark Justiciar Gauntlets and the Helldusk Gloves, stack on even more.

The right choices will give you a torch that is almost barely a torch anymore, except for the fact that it still lights you up in the dark. Every hit with it will do chunks of elemental damage, boosted by the paladin's Savage Attacker feat for high attack rolls and capped out charisma for devastating smites. Your enemies will think you forgot your sword when you're actually carrying a weapon that inflicts every type of pain in the Forgotten Realms.

"Who would win? Ancient undead dragon or some asshole with a hot stick?" one YouTube commenter asks. cRPG Bro says this build is Honor mode-ready and I believe it. If this piece of wood can bonk enemies for over 90 damage, anything is possible.

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[Christopher Livingston]

When Josh Wardle's daily puzzle game Wordle arrived in 2021 it spawned two crazes: millions of people loved playing Wordle, and thousands of developers loved making games like Wordle. Variations quickly popped up like Nerdle (Wordle for math), Worldle (Wordle for geography), Heardle (Wordle for music), and even Taylordle (Wordle for Taylor Swift fans).

Along with lots of clever takes on the Wordle formula, there are plenty of Wordle-alikes that are pretty much just clones, offering up a nearly identical Wordle experience without variation (like Infinite Wordle, which is just a version of Wordle you can play more than once a day). The New York Times, who purchased Wordle from Wardle in 2022, is currently cracking down on a bunch of them.

As reported by Jason Koebler at 404, The New York Times has filed a DMCA notice against coder Chase Wackerfuss, who created a Wordle clone called Reactle and posted the code on GitHub. Where this begins to snowball is that the DMCA notice isn't just aimed at Reactle, but at all the Wordle clones that have "forked" off the open source Reactle repository—and the number of forks is a whopping 1,900 or so.

That's a lot of games to be covered in a single DMCA notice. It apparently even includes a clone where the answer to every single puzzle, every day, is always CHUNK.

Got a DMCA takedown notice for my github repo that's a wordle clone except every day the word is just "chunk"March 6, 2024

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"The Times’s Wordle copyright includes the unique elements of its immensely popular game, such as the 5x6 grid, green tiles to indicate correct guesses, yellow tiles to indicate the correct letter but the wrong place within the word, and the keyboard directly beneath the grid," the DMCA notice reads. "This gameplay is copied exactly in the repository, and the owner instructs others how to knock off the game and create an identical word game.

"I have reviewed dozens of the forked repositories," the DMCA notice continues. "Based on the representative number of forks I have reviewed, I believe that all or most of the forks are infringing to the same extent as the parent repository."

This isn't the first time the NYT has taken aim at Wordle clones. It murdered a pair of Wordle archive sites in 2022, which let users play previous Wordle puzzles, and according to 404, two additional GitHub repositories were DMCA'd in January.

"To me, Wordle is like Tetris or a deck of cards. It’s such a simple premise,” Wackerfuss told 404, and pointing to variations on the formula like the Taylor Swift version, said: "I’m not sure why they feel like we’re encroaching on their IP."

He still complied with the DMCA notice. "GitHub messaged me and I was just like, you know what, fuck this," Wackerfuss said. "I’m not going to get into a legal battle with The New York Times, so it wasn’t worth it to me and I just removed the game."

You can read the full story at 404.

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[PCGamer LATEST]

It’s safe to say Contra passed on its crown as run-and-gun royalty a long time ago. The last truly great entry was 2011’s Hard Corps: Uprising—an unrecognizable-as-Contra game which doesn’t even bear the series name—and even before that point, Contra had muddled through multiple halfhearted reinventions in between quality games. I approached Operation Galuga with embers of optimism: It's by WayForward, developers of 2007's exceptional Contra 4, but its insistence on new playable characters with special abilities, perks bought with in-game currency, and an overhauled 3D look had me wary of another misguided attempt to complicate a formula defined by its simplicity.

What I got with Operation Galuga was just the opposite: a rock-solid celebration of classic Contra with new ideas that remix and recontextualize, but never crowd out, the shooter’s foundational meat and potatoes.

These days Contra has stiffer competition than ever, with modern masterworks like Cuphead, Blazing Chrome, and Huntdown building out the run and gun formula with more extravagant setpieces and more varied combat. But even amidst those games Galuga has some novel ideas. My favorite is the new overload mechanic: You pick up special weapons as you go like in most other Contra games, and you can only carry and swap between two at a time. But you can now overload your active gun to destroy it in exchange for explosive benefits, like an actual explosion, a bullet-soaking shield, or the ability to stop time for a few seconds.

On top of this, you can pick up two guns of the same type to wield an ultra-powerful version of that weapon until you get hit. These additions threw an interesting wrench into my typical Contra game-plan—get the spread shot and hold onto it for dear life—and had me thinking about more than dodging bullets in the heat of the moment.

The perk store offers similarly powerful boons: character-specific special moves, extra lives, free weapon upgrades, extra hit points, and so on that you can buy with credits earned by playing. If you enjoy run-and-guns for the tough-as-nails difficulty, this might all sound like the sort of stuff you’d find on a Game Genie, but the customization goes both ways. From the very start you can up the difficulty, make every enemy attack a one-hit-kill, and even deactivate 360 degree aiming (making Galuga stress me out as much as the famously brutal Contra: Hard Corps). It’s all optional and easy enough to ignore entirely, but if you want to wring all the value you can out of the game, nabbing and toying with every one of these cheat codes will take more than a few pizza-fueled Friday nights.

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If you forgo any optional modifiers, Operation Galuga is "just" a souped-up, modernized retelling of the NES original—with so many new levels, setpieces and redesigned encounters that it’s unmistakably its own thing. Jumping feels snappy and precise, iconic arms like the homing shot and laser gun return alongside a few new ones, and double-jumps and airdashes make you a nimbler glass cannon than ever.

My only real gripe is with the story and dialog, which occasionally pipe up while I’m busy trying to shoot stuff. It’s not that the writing or acting is bad, it’s just that it’s devoid of much substance; shattering a run-and-gunner’s flow state so some evil robo-terrorist can remind me he’s an evil robo-terrorist is a sin most games are mindful enough to avoid. Cutscenes are skippable, but the fact that they trigger mid-level still brings the action to a screeching halt. Previous Contra stories had the good sense to either be hilariously zany or completely absent, so unless I’ve missed another secret ending where my G.I. marries a chimpanzee, I’m holding this one against you, Operation Galuga.

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The game’s eight stages make for a brisk playthrough assuming you don’t die as much as I did, but replayability is through the roof. Challenge mode, uh, challenges you to master specific guns, speedrun the game, get through levels without firing a shot, and so on. After 2 hours in Arcade mode with the difficulty options fully cranked, I'd nearly crawled nearly the halfway mark when I dropped my beloved spread shot and died to a one-hit-kill bullet. That's the old Contra torture that hurts so good.

And with Project Galuga’s high degree of customization, you can really dial in how you choose to self-flagellate. I’m not sure it reaches the eye-straining highs of the very best Contras, but it’s a thrilling return to form for a long-dormant titan, an accessible entry point to the genre it helped define, and a rich playground for veterans to test their mettle.

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[Tyler Colp]

The top-ranked players on Diablo 4's new leaderboards aren't all playing by the rules. A new exploit has skyrocketed people's scores and players are hoping Blizzard fixes it before week 2's leaderboards start tomorrow.

Over the weekend, a method to boost your score in The Gauntlet, Diablo 4's new eight-minute speedrun dungeon, quickly spread throughout the community. Players found that you can start your run with a powerful buff from shrines in the open world, giving you a massive advantage over players who start with nothing.

Success in The Gauntlet already relies on the shrine buffs you pick up inside it to kill enemies while you run through the map. The Artillery shrine, for example, causes every skill to launch holy arrows in all directions, which saves you the time it takes to run to every group of enemies. Shrines also make you run faster, so you want one going at all times.

The best players plan efficient routes through the dungeon so that they hit every shrine on the way, but the exploit completely upends their strategies. A player who can start with a shrine buff can not only follow a much faster route, they can even make a build based on having a specific buff active. Diablo 4 streamer Rob2628 showcased a sorcerer build that leaves a trail of Blizzard patches behind it with the power of the Channeling shrine's unlimited mana buff. Normal players, however, have to optimize their builds around not having a buff from the start.


Despite the exploit, sorcerer player Mekuna has maintained the highest score in the game. They tell me they don't use the exploit and will post footage of their best run tomorrow when The Gauntlet resets to a new layout. They, along with many other Diablo 4 players, want Blizzard to fix the exploit before week 2 and to disqualify cheaters from being immortalized on the permanent seasonal leaderboard.

A second exploit that allows players to enter the dungeon before it begins was recently found too, but the benefits from doing it aren't as strong as the shrine method.

Blizzard hasn't commented on the exploits, nor has it added any fixes to the notes for tomorrow's patch, which just has a list of unrelated bug fixes. If it's not fixed by tomorrow, the second week of The Gauntlet will be far less exciting to follow, and I'd expect some high-ranked players to quit until its competitive integrity is restored.

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[Ted Litchfield]

CoD Zombies-inspired wave survival shooter Hellbreach: Vegas is finally out in early access after a ton of previews and playtests, and the co-op shooter is a fantastic get for its $9 launch promotional price⁠—it's also a nice throwback in its business model too, with all cosmetics and unlockables in the game gated entirely by gameplay unlocks, with no paid skins or battle pass in sight.

The latest Call of Duty has a zombies mode, but it's not quite the CoD Zombies I played on a busted CRT from a sweaty couch in my dorm rec room, ya dig? The new, Warzone-adjacent MWZ looks cool, but the CoD Zombies I fell in love with had bounded, claustrophobic maps with simple, arcadey wave survival gameplay⁠—it's the sort of hyper niche genre ripe for its own indie take, perfect for formerly-hardcore, now casual geriatric millennials like myself to kill some time and catch up with their friends over.


And that's where Hellbreach: Vegas comes in, with an almost boomer shooter style answer to the classic CoD Zombies-shaped hole in the market. I've really enjoyed my time with its playtests⁠—it perfectly replicates the cramped, frantic wave shooter gameplay I remember, but with its own arsenal and an aesthetic fusing Norse demon enemies with a gaudy Las Vegas setting, the latter dovetailing quite nicely with the game's mechanics for gambling on guns and perks.

My favorite twist is definitely Hellbreach: Vegas' take on a kind of PvEvP gun game mode. The original Counter-Strike/CoD staple saw you killing other players to climb a ladder of set weapons, with the first to the end being the winner. Hellbreach has you killing 10 zombies per weapon, making for a sort of competitive co-op spin on one of my favorite FPS multiplayer modes ever.

And at a $10 price tag, Hellbreach is already great value in early access, with the promise of more maps, modes, and guns on the way. It'll be a buck off as a launch promotion until March 22, so it's a great time to hop into a 2011 FPS time capsule, ideally with some friends along for the ride. You can check out Hellbreach: Vegas for yourself over on Steam.

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[Andy Chalk]

Some Destiny 2 crossovers make sense. Mass Effect? Sure, it's a natural fit. The Witcher? Hey, some of Geralt's fashion works nicely with the Space Knight aesthetic. Assassin's Creed, okay, that one was a bit of a stretch but Hunters and cloaks, I guess. But Ghostbusters? I have to admit I struggle to see where that one came from, but yup, it's happening.

The Destiny 2 – Ghostbusters mashup was revealed today on the Destiny Twitter account:

(Image credit: Bungie)

So what are we looking at? Courtesy of Sony Pictures, "the collection of in-game items inspired by Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire will include a Slimer Guardian Ghost, a new Sparrow inspired by Garraka, and an Ecto-1-themed Ship." Garraka, for those not in the know (as I was until 30 seconds ago) is the villain in the next Ghostbusters film, Frozen Empire.

Anyone who springs for either the set or individual pieces will also be able to snag the "Bungie Rewards Slimer Ghost Shell papercraft mask" for free. Sorry, I don't have a picture of that.

Notably absent is any sort of new armor, which is usually the centerpiece of these crossovers. That's kind of disappointing, because after years of strapping on increasingly complex (and weird-looking) suits of high-tech armor, I think it'd be fun to zip up a simple set of coveralls before leaping into action against humanity's deadliest enemies. Maybe not thematically appropriate, but frankly I think that ship has sailed. There also isn't any sort of ghostly shader, which might have been tempting, especially as players have been begging for a Taken one since forever.

Pricing on this set hasn't been revealed at this point, but we do have a release date. The bustin' will begin on March 19, three days ahead of the theatrical debut of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Which also explains why this otherwise-inexplicable crossover is happening: Sony is distributing the film, and Sony owns Bungie. As my dear old grandpa used to say, just because it doesn't make sense doesn't mean there's not a reason.

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[Tyler Wilde]

Upcoming game Pools looks similar to other games based on "The Backrooms," the creepypasta notion that you can noclip out of normal reality and into mazes of "liminal spaces" that resemble '90s office buildings or unused meeting rooms at a Marriott. In this case, though, we're trapped in a pocket dimension of pools: all square tiles, plastic chairs, and chlorinated water.

"Poolrooms" aren't an original addition to internet paranormal lore, although Pools perhaps sets itself apart from other creepypasta games by leaving out hostile entities in favor of an experience that's solely about feeling a bit weird and isolated. Pools, which started as a "hobby/free time project," will feature six 10-30 minute long chapters, and Finnish developer Tensori describes it as an "experimental" game that's "like an art gallery where you walk around and feel the atmosphere."

"The main thing about the game is to look around and listen to the sounds," says the studio.

Experimental art that promotes what it isn't always risks having its claim of avant-gardeness judged as an excuse to take credit for abstract concepts—see John Cage's infamous 4'33", a musical composition performed by not playing musical instruments for its duration, for instance. Pools isn't that sparse, but the developer says "there are very few things to solve," and it contains no music, just the echoing sounds of the environment.

If Pools does attract some side-eye for its minimalism, it won't be nearly as much as it would've a decade ago. It's funny to think back to all the "but they're not real videogames!" hysteria that accompanied trendsetters like Dear Esther and Gone Home in the early 2010s. The walking simulators clearly won, and Tensori founder Antti Järvinen says he wants to see more risk-taking from today's game developers and publishers.

"I hope for a gaming industry that's less cautious and embraces boldness," said Järvinen in a statement provided by the studio. "As an enthusiast, it seems to me that a number of modern games are 'lost potential'—they lack distinctiveness and genuine passion. I also don't like sneaky ways of making money or broken, unfinished games."

Whether or not Pools itself turns out to be bold and distinct, it's easy to sympathize with Järvinen's point of view. It's easy for us to demand that big companies take more risks when we're not the ones who have to answer for the millions of dollars they spend on any given game, but with so much to play, I don't really have time for anything that doesn't take a big swing. The motto of the studio behind the current game of the moment, unforgiving co-op shooter Helldivers 2, sums up the sentiment well: "A game for everyone is a game for no one."

Pools will be out in April, and there's a demo on Steam if you want to find out whether or not it's a game for you. Personally, I'm not convinced disembodied wandering through poolrooms will captivate me, but they'll definitely look pleasant in the background of a random TikTok video I wind up watching later this year.

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[Tyler Wilde]

Peter Moore displaying his famous (and apparently real) Halo 2 release date tattoo at E3 2004. (Image credit: Susan Goldman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Have we reached the "last console generation"? Former Xbox boss Peter Moore doesn't claim to know for sure, but he thinks it's a question that current Xbox head Phil Spencer must be asking, and he doesn't sound very confident that consoles in their current form will last much longer.

Moore himself was asking the same question in 2007—a couple years after the Xbox 360 released—he said in a recent interview with IGN. Back then, Microsoft was wondering whether TVs would start to "come with chips that can play games," said Moore, or if a PC gaming renaissance was afoot (it was), and whether or not a new console generation was worth "hemorrhaging" cash to get into people's homes on the hope that game sales and Xbox Live subscriptions made up for it.

Microsoft obviously didn't stop making new Xboxes, but a lot has changed since then. Moore's observations on the habits of today's gamers are pretty typical—the kids these days want "snack-size stuff" like TikTok videos, he theorized, or they want to "gorge" on the limitless well of streaming TV, and single-purpose devices are old-fashioned—but he did characterize the past decade-and-a-half in a way I hadn't heard before: Entertainment has moved from the living room to the bedroom, said Moore, with the gaming audience leaving communal TV screens in favor of smartphones and PCs.

"And what are we doing? Well, we're not in the living room anymore," said Moore. "We're back in the bedroom with our YouTube influencers, our TikTok creators, and it's about content on demand … Gen Z is coming through and they're going, 'Why do I need to spend four or 500 bucks on a bespoke piece of gaming hardware when I've got my smartphone, or I got my PC or my Mac, and I can do things there with a pretty decent controller?'"

When the next set of consoles release, gamers might say, "I don't need this, times are tough," said Moore, reiterating that phones and PCs offer "plenty of games to play." That's especially true now that so many former console exclusive games now release on PC.

Moore wouldn't go so far as to predict that the end is definitely nigh for consoles. Silicon Valley is full of uncertainty, he said, noting the recent barrage of tech and games industry layoffs and the development of generative AI, but he thinks that the end of consoles is "a real serious question" being asked by Microsoft and Sony, among others.

"What I'm saying is the questions are being asked, as they have been for the last 20 years," said Moore. "Are we ready to gird our loins financially for battle and all of the cost of development, silicon development? What is it that PS6 can do that PS5 can't that would make people jump from PS5, or same with Xbox, same with Switch, right? God forbid it's just incremental.

"And I think that the companies are also looking at that. What can we do to extend this life cycle? And then if you're Microsoft and you're Phil Spencer, you've got Satya Nadella coming in and saying, alright, what is the future here and how does this play into the biggest strategy of cloud with Azure, with AI? What are we doing with AI game development? How do you make your games faster, cheaper, with less people? These are all the questions I think are being asked."

For more Moore thoughts on the future of gaming, check out the full interview over at IGN.

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[PCGamer LATEST]

There's a hint for today's Wordle waiting below, alongside a neat selection of tips designed to help you make the most out of every guess you ever make. And if you're running out of rows, or would just like a quick win, feel free to click your way straight to the March 12 (997) Wordle answer.

The yellow letter I found early on today did a fantastic job of tripping me up, its odd placement implying that it had to go there, even though I couldn't see any way that would work with the few greens that had turned up alongside it. As puzzled as I was for a while, I did enjoy yelling "Wait, I've got it" at my monitor once I'd finally figured out today's Wordle answer.

Today's Wordle hint​

(Image credit: Josh Wardle)

Wordle today: A hint for Tuesday, March 12​

Picking up, lifting, or lugging around something especially heavy could be described in this way, as could—sorry, I know this is unpleasant—that painful lurch in your stomach when you're about to be sick.

Is there a double letter in Wordle today?​

Yes, a letter is used twice in today's puzzle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day​

Looking to extend your Wordle winning streak? Perhaps you've just started playing the popular daily puzzle game and are looking for some pointers. Whatever the reason you're here, these quick tips can help push you in the right direction:

• Start with a word that has a mix of common vowels and consonants.
• The answer might repeat the same letter.
• Try not to use guesses that include letters you've already eliminated.

There's no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don't need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares.

Today's Wordle answer​

(Image credit: Future)

What is today's Wordle answer?​

Just the word you're looking for. The answer to the March 12 (997) Wordle is HEAVE.

Previous Wordle answers​

The last 10 Wordle answers​

Wordle solutions that have already been used can help eliminate answers for today's Wordle or give you inspiration for guesses to help uncover more of those greens. They can also give you some inspired ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• March 11: PESKY
• March 10: GRASP
• March 9: CHEER
• March 8: EARLY
• March 7: CLONE
• March 6: TEARY
• March 5: HUNCH
• March 4: FLAME
• March 3: STATE
• March 2: URBAN

Learn more about Wordle​

(Image credit: Nurphoto via Getty)

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and it's up to you to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the popular daily puzzle.

It's usually a good plan to start with a strong word like ALERT—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels—and you should be off to a flying start, with a little luck anyway. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don't waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you'll see 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.

Your second guess should compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don't forget to leave out 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 correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don't forget letters can repeat too (eg: 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 can scroll to the relevant section above.

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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[PCGamer LATEST]

For those wondering what it would be like to play the cancelled 2008 PS3 demo of TimeSplitters 4 developed by the British studio Free Radical—which is an oddly specific thought—you're in luck because it's currently available to check out.

One Reddit user has single-handedly brought the FPS game back from the dead after they posted a picture of a PS3 devkit that they found on eBay, which turned out to have a cancelled PS3 demo of Free Radical's TimeSplitters 4 on it.

"I asked the seller a lot of probing questions without giving it away; they indeed had a friend who worked at Free Radical until November 2008, a month before the studio shut down," Reddit user Flimsy-Zebra3775 explained in a comment under their original post. "They are going to boot the game up at the weekend to see what it is and send me a video; if it's legit, I'll buy it, and if someone who knows HDD dumping helps me, I'll upload the drive."

The seller ended up booting into it and discovering that this was, in fact, a prototype from the 2008 cancelled version of TimeSplitters 4. After spending $672 (£525) for the console, Flimsy-Zebra3775 uploaded the prototype to Hidden Palace for all to see and download. "History secured," they said.

If you scrolled through the Reddit thread, you'd see just how happy fans of the series were about this discovery. "At the very least, go on and take a bow," one user said. "(Gif with applauds coming your way from us and the community, and we’ll throw in some roses for the Heck of it.) Go on now, take that bow." Many others simply congratulated the buyer on making history and supporting video game preservation efforts.

David Doak, the founder and director of Free Radical, also responded to the rare find on Twitter. "This is exactly the kind of nonsense that wasn't interested in back in 2008."


You can see what the PS3 demo had in store for players for yourself, or you can check out some of the various videos that have been uploaded to YouTube since the discovery. One TimeSplitters 4 YouTube video just involves one player up against several bots. The match takes place in the courtyard of a gothic castle that is tangled in tree roots. Futuristic and strangely spooky music accompanies the fight. While it isn't the most captivating FPS game I've ever witnessed, it's certainly a cool project and one that is well worth preserving.

Free Radical first developed TimeSplitters 4 in 2008 as a bizarre take on the traditional FPS formula, including strange character designs, massive online multiplayer, and elemental powers. Unfortunately, Free Radical went into administration in mid-December 2008, after the failure of its PS3 shooter Haze. Crytek bought Free Radical and moved its remaining staff to another studio. It took more than a decade for Free Radical—and TimeSplitters—to get another shot at life when it was reformed under Embracer, with some of the key staff returning. Unfortunately, TimeSplitters 4 was just as doomed the second time around, as Embracer shut down Free Radical in November.

Coincidentally this fantastic find by Flimsy-Zebra3775 isn't the only buried TimeSplitters treasure to resurface this month. A former Free Radical Design developer recently showed off some footage of an in-progress TimeSplitters 2 remaster from July 2023, before Embracer closed the studio. But thanks to the closures, it looks like this odd PS3 TimeSplitters 4 demo from 2008 will be all fans can get a hold of for the time being.

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[PCGamer LATEST]

As promised, Helldivers 2 has finally called in pest control to take care of its tank infestation. That's via a patch that dropped this morning—which should prompt a great sigh of relief from the community.

In case you aren't acquainted with the game's creature culture, let me shed some light. At higher difficulties, Helldivers 2 has this nasty habit of spawning heavily-armoured creeps on top of you. Bile titans, chargers, hulks, annihilator tanks, the works. Because of the way armour functions, if you don't have the right equipment to deal with these guys, your only winning move is to run with your democratic tail tucked between your legs.

This was manageable initially because of the Railgun—an anti-tank gun so good it warranted a nerf. The only problem? There wasn't really anything to replace it. Its contemporaries (like the Recoilless Rifle) were all too slow to thin the herd, leading to plenty of screenshots with five-to-seven bile titans engaging in an impromptu vomit flash-mob. Mechs have been added to the game, however while they are rad as hell, their supplies of tank-busting rockets are severely limited. Budget cuts, what can you do?

This latest patch seeks to address that. "We have reduced the spawn rate of Chargers and Bile Titans on difficulties seven and up," the patch notes read. "In addition we have reduced the risk of spawn spikes of Chargers and Bile Titans … Please note that we have changed the distribution of enemy types, not reduced difficulty. Expect other enemy types to appear in greater numbers instead."

The notes also address the "leg meta". For most of the game's lifespan, taking out chargers involved blowing off their leg armour with an anti-tank weapon, then shredding the exposed flesh with normal bullets. The patch reads: "spending your heavy anti tank weapons on legs instead of the obvious weak point seems counter to expectation."

You can still bust some kneecaps if you'd like, but the charger's head health should be lower: "It should now be at a point where a well placed shot from a Recoilless Rifle or EAT-17 [Expendable Anti-Tank] instantly kills a charger."

It seems like Arrowhead wants the Recoilless Rifle and the EAT-17 to fill the niche of tank-busters—which does make a certain kind of sense. Plus, with the reduction in spawn rates, we might even see these unwieldy weapons keeping pace with those terrifying Terminid titans. You can read the full list of patch notes below:

Patch 1.000.102​

(Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

Good day citizens of Super Earth. A new patch to aid you in your efforts is coming in. May Super Earth give you courage

Overview

Today's patch is dealing with the spawn rate of heavily armored Terminid enemies as well as the possible play against them. It also contains some fixes to UI elements and crash fixes.

Balancing

Enemies:

• The amount of heavily armored targets that spawn on higher difficulties, especially for Terminids, have been a big discussion point online and internally. The intent is for groups to have to bring some form of anti-tank capability but not to the degree previously needed.
• To that end we have reduced the spawn rate of Chargers and Bile Titans on difficulties 7 and up. In addition we have reduced the risk of spawn spikes of Chargers and Bile Titans.
• Please note that we have changed the distribution of enemy types, not reduced difficulty. Expect other enemy types to appear in greater numbers instead.
• We are humbled by the community's ability to find things like Chargers “leg meta” in our game, however spending your heavy anti tank weapons on legs instead of the obvious weak point seems counter to expectation.
• We are not changing anything regarding the Charger’s legs, we are however lowering the health of the Charger’s head. It should now be at a point where a well placed shot from a Recoilless Rifle or EAT-17 instantly kills a charger.
• Together with the unfortunately undocumented change of last patch that increased the armor penetration ability of less well placed shots for EAT-17s and Recoilless Rifle shots, Chargers should now be easier to handle by well equipped groups.

Gameplay

• "Electronic Countermeasures" operation modifier, which had a chance of giving you a random stratagem instead of the one you input, has been removed in order to be reworked, and will be reintroduced in a future iteration. We found that this modifier wasn’t communicated clearly enough and overall caused more frustration than excitement with the way it was currently implemented. This change was made in 1.000.100 but was unintentionally omitted from the patch notes.

Fixes

• Fixed missing text on several HUD / UI elements.
• Fixed several subtitle / VO mismatches in the news videos.
• Fixed various crashes that occurred mid-gameplay and when deploying to missions.

Known Issues

• Game crashes when attempting to use a stim while inside an Exosuit.
• Pink artifacts may appear in the sky when setting off large explosions.
• Automaton Dropship seemingly disappears and slides in after being shot down.
• Shots from arc-based weapons may not count towards kills in post-mission stats.
• Players cannot unfriend other players befriended via friend code.
• Cross-platform friend invites might not show up in the friend requests tab.
• Players may be unable to select loadout or return to ship when joining a multiplayer game session via PS5 Activity Card.
• The Exosuit can destroy itself with rockets if it fires while turning.
• Text chat box display is obstructed by the cinematic letterboxing during extraction.

Release Captain Carlberg, out.

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Five years in, and Fallout: London is about ready to drop a bombshell. One of the most ambitious projects in the Fallout modding scene, FOLON (as it's known) is a "DLC-sized" attempt to transplant Fallout's familiar post-apocalypse from American shores to the bustling boroughs of London, complete with ghoul-ified bobbies and King's guards.

We called it the true best announcement of E3 all the way back in 2021, and now its cockney armageddon is so close you can taste the ashes. Its release is scheduled for April 23, after the team's Starfield-induced delay late last year. So, as I'm wont to do, I decided to knock on their door to see what working on the project has been like, and how they were feeling now that a half-decade of their life's work was about ready to bear fruit.

The answer? Nervous, excited, tired, energised. Like any development team on the cusp of releasing their baby out into the world, the FOLON team are stressed and apprehensive about just how fans will take to the project once it's freely available. But the team has an extra weight on its shoulders: If things go badly, this could end up killing the Fallout modding scene for good.

(Image credit: Team FOLON)

Mods and rockers​

Of all the things that make Fallout: London what it is, nothing surprises or impresses me more than its birthday. Anyone used to following modding projects of significant scope is used to lifespans measured in the decades: Tamriel Rebuilt recently celebrated its 23rd birthday, Skywind began 12 years ago, and it took Crowbar Collective 15 years to finish developing Black Mesa's Xen.

But FOLON has turned itself around in about five years—not bad for a modern game dev project and downright miraculous for a volunteer-made mod. Even more staggering, it managed it despite a complete reset partway through.

"It's not at all what it was originally," says Jordan "C3Delight" Albon, FOLON's lead 3D artist, "from management [to] technical, everything has been completely overhauled" since FOLON first got its start as Fallout: The Wall back in 2019.

(Image credit: Team FOLON)

Dean "Prilladog" Carter, FOLON's project lead, describes The Wall's previous approach like this: "It's someone who's a bit of an ideas guy: 'We're going to do this, this and this, I have no technical skill set, we're just going to plop things down from all the DLCs and try and make it look somewhat like London."

Unsurprisingly, that iteration of the project didn't last too long. Fallout: The Wall's lead "vanished off into the ether," according to Carter, some time in early 2020, leaving a vacuum of leadership he eventually stepped into. "We were just like, right, we need to start over. You can't work from that foundation."

Things began again, with Carter stepping in as project lead. In a perverse sense, the project had the good fortune to run smack-bang into the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic just as this leadership transition got underway. Fallout: The Wall had a new direction, a new vision, and eventually a new name, but now it also had a team of locked down devs with nothing better to do than sit and make mods all day.

"What do you do when you're stuck inside, other than play games? Well, let's make one."

Jordan "C3Delight" Albon

"Terrible time, everyone was hating it, but the project thrived," says Albon. "What do you do when you're stuck inside, other than play games? Well, let's make one… that was probably the biggest kind of saving grace for the project."

(Image credit: Team FOLON)

For FOLON's leadership, the team's response to lockdown is what sets it apart from other projects. "At the start of lockdown I got trapped in Morocco," says Carter, "I can sit there with a camel in one hand and then Discord in the other. Like, you just need to do these sacrifices to get stuff done. And I feel a lot of the community don't sacrifice or maybe don't work as hard to try and achieve something." A controversial statement, but it's hard to overstate FOLON's indefatigability.

Fetch the engine​

On top of the disappearance of its original leadership and the overnight transformation of the entire planet, Fallout: London had other problems to contend with over the course of its development.

Plenty of those troubles were technical, as you might expect from an engine as notoriously idiosyncratic as Bethesda's: Three weeks of testing to create a train that was an actual train, and not an NPC wearing a train hat; Carter's attempts to replicate the cherubic lampposts of Trafalgar Square that ended up producing a series of writhing cast-iron babies (tragically, these have been cut from the final release); or simply unravelling the spaghetti code that underpinned the mod's first iteration before it changed leadership.

(Image credit: Team FOLON)

In particular, events surrounding a toolkit called the Extended Dialogue Framework (XDI)—a bit of tech that lets Fallout 4 modders give the player more than four responses in dialogue—evoked a kind of shared trauma response among the team.

"I don't think any of us were prepared for… I think that was like three months of time that we didn't account for," says Callum "CallumJQuick" Quick, FOLON's lead writer

Carter cuts in, laughing: "It was because you wanted to use a fancy system that didn't work!"

The fancy system that didn't work was the XDI: Although it worked flawlessly in gameplay, letting playtesters choose from a whole suite of options in a New Vegas-style dialogue box rather than Fallout 4's default wheel, it played havoc when it came time to export dialogue into a readable text format so voice actors could read their lines.

(Image credit: Team FOLON)

"In the export sheet, there's a before and after column for lines. So the voice actor knows what was said before and after," says Quick. "That was all wrong, so someone had to go in and manually do that." That meant checking and rearranging over 90,000 lines that needed to be recorded.

Building settlements​

But it wasn't really the technical issues that risked hobbling FOLON. It was people. Navigating a global team of volunteers, all highly creative people with their own ideas and visions for what the project should be, was a trickier needle to thread than laboriously poring over dialogue exports and version control software.

"The [problem] that's more real, and I think it's more fundamental, is actually working with so many different people," says Albon.

The whole team agreed with that statement. "Creative people have creative ideas," says Carter "and unfortunately they're not all gonna get in."

But it wasn't just the intra-team dynamics that could have blown everything apart if they got mishandled; the Fallout modding community is a tough thing to navigate, too.

(Image credit: Team FOLON)

"The Skyrim modding scene is very close-knit," says Carter, "They like talking to each other, they will share ideas to all create great projects." The same can't be said for Fallout. "The Fallout modding scene is a lot more toxic for reasons I'm not really sure on why… when people do come across things, they want to hold onto that knowledge and not share it out."

Combine that with a dearth of documentation for the Creation Kit—Albon laments that Bethesda's documentation for its tools is essentially nonexistent, making weeks of experimentation necessary whenever you want to try something new—and Fallout modding projects can feel like groping in the dark for years on end.

"The Fallout modding scene is a lot more toxic [than Skyrim's] for reasons I'm not really sure on why."

Dean "Prilladog" Carter

"So then you don't have this documentation at all," says Carter, "even from the community, because it's like, well, 'We're not going to share our toys' and vice versa."

Although Fallout modders guard their secrets jealously, FOLON feels like it's carrying the whole scene on its shoulders. When I asked how Carter, Albon, and Quick were feeling now that release was closing in, they all agreed they were stressed, but not just from a desire to put out a good game after years of work.

(Image credit: Bethesda / Folon)

"We've all seen how projects, when they release and they go badly, can be received," says Carter, likely referring to Fallout: The Frontier, a comparable and much-hyped project that messily crashed to Earth not long after release in 2021.

"There is a lot of stress that has been put on our shoulders to make sure that ours goes well," continues Carter, "because it has been stated more than once that ours could potentially kill the Fallout modding scene.

"If we are like the second one that comes out and it's badly received, and people are just going to lose all faith in the Fallout [modding] scene, it will kill it."

Bombs away​

That might sound like a project lead hyping up the significance of the thing he's dedicated the last several years of his life to, but it's not a baseless claim. Fallout: London has the weight of the post-apocalyptic world on its shoulders. On the one hand, it's billed as a "true" Fallout 5 by some fans: "The closest thing to Fallout 5 we get to see in probably more than a decade," says a popular Reddit thread. "Essentially Fallout 5," says another.

"I'm gonna continue working up until release. I'm just gonna keep going and just not pay attention to anything."

Callum "CallumJQuick" Quick

For other fans, the taste of Fallout: The Frontier still lingers. "I'm hyped, and it looks amazing, but remember Fallout: The Frontier," cautions one fan. "The Frontier is quite concerning for the future of Fallout mods in general," says another, "No big project will ever be completely clean, and if dirt is dug every time a new mod comes out, the mod community will revert to making smaller, one person mods."

(Image credit: Bethesda / The Folon Team)

So the team is stressed, burdened by expectations, and approaching deadline, but I'm not sure they'd have it any other way.

"I'm gonna continue working up until release," says Quick, soberly, "I'm just gonna keep going and just not pay attention to anything."

"We've all gone mad," says Albon, "there's two career paths that I've essentially shut down or turned away [because of FOLON]... I'd be earning way more than what I'm earning now… I don't care for that. I really wanted to get this project done, because I love it."

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Corvids are a family of birds that are known to be astonishingly accomplished at showing self-awareness and problem-solving via the use of tools. Such traits are generally considered to be extremely rare in the animal kingdom, as there's only ourselves and a handful of other species that can do all of this. However, you'd never think for one moment that any corvid is a human: We recognise the fact they are smart but not truly intelligent, or certainly not to the extent that we are.

And it's the same when it comes to artificial intelligence, the biggest topic in the world of computing and tech right now. While we've seen incredibly rapid progress in certain areas, such as generative AI video, nothing produced by the likes of ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, or Copilot gives us the impression that it's true, human-like intelligence. Typically classed as weak or narrow AI, such systems aren't self-aware nor are they problem-solving, as such; they're basically enormous probability calculators, heavily reliant on the datasets used to train them.

Pinning down exactly what is meant by the phrase human intelligence is something that the scientific community has battled over for centuries, but in general, we can say it's the ability to recognise information or infer it from various sources, and then use it to plan, create, or problem solve through logical reasoning or abstract thinking. We humans do all of this extremely well, and we can apply it in situations that we've not had experience or prior knowledge of.

Getting a computer to exhibit the same capabilities is the ultimate goal of researchers in the field of artificial general intelligence (AGI): Creating a system that is able to conduct cognitive tasks just as well as any human can, and hopefully, even better.

What is artificial general intelligence?

This is a computer system that can plan, organise, create, reason, and problem-solve just like a human can.


The scale of such a challenge is rather hard to comprehend because an AGI needs to be able to do more than simply crunch through numbers. Human intelligence relies on language, culture, emotions, and physical senses to understand problems, break them down, and produce solutions. The human mind is also fragile and manipulable and can make all kinds of mistakes when under stress.

Sometimes, though, such situations generate remarkable achievements. How many of us have pulled off great feats of intelligence during examinations, despite them being potentially stressful experiences? You may be thinking at this point that all of this is impossible to achieve and surely nobody can program a system to apply an understanding of culture, utilise sight or sound, or recall a traumatic event to solve a problem.

AGI will require far more computing power than what's in use today. (Image credit: Google)

It's a challenge that's being taken up by business and academic institutions around the world, with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Blue Brain Project, and the recently completed Human Brain Project being the most famous examples of work conducted in the field of AGI. And, of course, there's all the research being carried out in the technologies that will either support or ultimately form part of an AGI system: Deep learning, generative AI, neural language processing, computer vision and sound, and even robotics.

As to the potential benefits that AGI could offer, that's rather obvious. Medicine and education could both be improved, increasing the speed and accuracy of any diagnosis, and determining the best learning package for a given student. An AGI could make decisions in complex, multi-faceted situations, as found in economics and politics, that are rational and beneficial to all. It seems a little facile to shoehorn games into such a topic but imagine a future where you're battling against AGI systems that react and play just like a real person but with all of the positives (comradery, laughter, sportsmanship) and none of the negatives.

Not everyone is convinced that AGI is even possible. Philosopher John Searle wrote a paper many decades ago arguing that artificial intelligence can be of two forms, Strong AI and Weak AI, where the difference between them is that the former could be said to be consciousness whereas the latter only seems like it does. To the end user, there would be no visible difference, but the underlying system certainly isn't the same.


The way that AGI is currently progressing, in terms of research, puts it somewhere between the two, though it's more weak rather than strong. Although this may seem like it's just semantics, one could take the stance that if the computer only appears to have human-like intelligence, it can't be considered to be truly intelligent, ultimately lacking what we consider to be a mind.

AI critic Hubert Dreyfus argues that computers are only able to process information that's stored symbolically and human unconscious knowledge (things that we know about but never directly think about) can't be symbolically stored, thus a true AGI can never exist.

A fully-fledged AGI is not without risks, either. At the very least, the widespread application of them in specific sectors would result in significant unemployment. We have already seen cases where both large and small businesses have replaced human customer support roles with generative AI systems. Computers that can do the same tasks as a human mind could potentially replace managers, politicians, triage nurses, teachers, designers, musicians, authors, and so on.

Perhaps the biggest concern over AGI is how safe it would be. Current research in the field is split on the topic of safety, with some projects openly dismissive of it. One could argue that a truly artificial human mind, one that's highly intelligent, may see many of the problems that humanity faces as being trivial, in comparison to answering questions on existence and the universe itself.

Building an AGI for the benefit of humanity isn't the goal of every project at the moment.

Your next machine

(Image credit: Future)

Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.
Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.


Despite the incredible advances in the fields of deep learning and generative AI in recent years, we're still a long way off from having a system that computer scientists and philosophers universally agree on having artificial general intelligence. Current AI models are restricted to very narrow domains, and cannot automatically apply what they have learned into other areas.

Generative AI tools cannot express themselves freely through art, music, and writing: They simply produce an output from a given input, based on probability maps created through trained association.

Whether the outcome turns out to be SkyNet or HAL9000, Jarvis or Tars, AGIs are still far from being a reality, and may never do so in our lifetimes. That may well be a huge relief to many people, but it's also a source of frustration for countless others, and the race is well and truly on to make it happen. If you've been impressed or dismayed by the current level of generative AI, you've seen nothing yet.

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Destiny 2 players have been experiencing an increasing number of crashes in the last week and it looks like all fingers are pointed at the new Skimmer, but unfortunately, there's also an unknowing accomplice: You.

Yesterday, Destiny Bulletin sent out a warning to all enjoying their time with Destiny 2's new hoverboard, the Skimmer. "If you enter a new load zone while grinding on the Skimmer (spamming the left/right boosts), it can crash the game for those in the previous load zone," the tweet read. "Avoid using the Skimmer when entering new load zones."

One YouTuber, Cheese Forever, decided to test this theory out for himself. The video explains how players have—hopefully accidentally—been crashing others by spamming the side boost while using the Skimmer. If you perform sick tricks on your Skimmer while travelling through a load zone, then it's very likely that the game will crash for any players left in the previous area. Cheese Forever's final message is simply: "Spread the word so you can stop crashing people."

Other players have also been trying to spread the message of the killer Skimmers. "It can be other people's skimmers causing the issue, so kinda just sucks to suck right now," one Redditor explained in a thread. It's also more likely that you'll cause crashes while racing about in a public area, private areas and activities like Vow of the Disciple or Vault of Grass have seen a much lower rate of disturbance.

But it's not all bad news—if you've spent the better half of last week with your head in your hands, wondering where it's all gone wrong, then you're not alone. One player was overjoyed at the prospect that they aren't the only one experiencing problems: "Oh thank f*** I'm not the only one; l thought my console was dying, I've been doing prophecy all week and now l know why l crash so much after rainbow road, l appreciate the post." Hopefully, everything should be resolved shortly in the next patch.

In all honesty, I wouldn't bet on every player putting down the Skimmer in the name of server solidarity just because, well, it's a hoverboard and way cooler than the old Sparrow. If I were presented with this dilemma, I hope I'd do the honourable thing and refrain from using the Skimmer while crossing zones, but honestly, I'm not sure that my self-restraint is that strong.

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World of Warcraft's latest Hearthstone event is receiving some mixed feedback. Mostly because it's a little confusing, but also because of its chaotic world bosses. In case you're unfamiliar, here's the rundown:

In three major cities (Stormwind, Orgrimmar, and Valdrakken) there are hotspots with Hearthstone tables in 'em. Well. Table singular, unless you go to a shady merchant and get a special Hearthstone Wild Card—which'll let you right-click the item to, uh, play a card near a table. This gives you the vague suggestion of having fun while also letting you complete the quest. If you or one of your mates has the Hearthstone Game Table toy, you can put one down, but it does seem like a bizarre choice from the get-go.

That's not even the main problem players have been having, though. Every so often, a gnome by the name of Whizbang will tear open a portal and huck a bunch of monsters at the festivities. This has resulted in a great deal of lag. While I was able to log in and complete one of these just for testing's sake (snagging myself an on-brand belt in the process), I did so in the middle of the day GMT, and my frames still tanked.

On roleplay servers, the problem's been multiplied tenfold:

Argent Dawn chooses violence today in World of Warcraft for the Hearthstone event pic.twitter.com/kI4jVJr96aMarch 11, 2024

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Here's the issue. Typically, World of Warcraft splits populated zones into shards. As fully explained during some Season of Discovery drama by senior game producer Tom Ellis, sharding came into use during Warlords of Draenor's catastrophic launch, and while "it made the game feel less cohesive", it also "meant the realm cap and zone capacity were now disconnected entirely."

In simple terms—pre-sharding, if you wanted to split populations up to handle heavy loads, you had to do it for everybody. Post-sharding, you could apply it to select zones.

But there was a problem: In roleplay servers, places like Stormwind have become major hubs where players will run in-character events, socialise, and have overdramatic duels to the death while rattling off their tragic backstories. Presumably while the guards stand and watch. Can't blame them, they probably don't even get dental.

Sharding, however, splits these communities up at random. You can't stumble into organic and public roleplay with somebody who just isn't there. Blizzard started turning sharding on and off for roleplay realms, even targeting atypical zones to facilitate large-scale events.

(Image credit: @WarcraftDevs on Twitter/X.)

Despite this, it seems as if said sharding tech was, ah, not enabled in Stormwind to help Argent Dawn handle the Hearthstone event. Whenever a portal spawns, a tide of loot-hungry players—all in the same shard—rush to kick Whizbang's gaggle of monsters, and all Fel breaks loose. A thread that hit the WoW subreddit yesterday opens a window into the utter chaos:

"We've been fighting this Hearthstone anniversary boss for 40 minutes because we only do abilities collectively three times a minute," writes user IAmRoofstone, who coincidentally posted the lovely slideshow at the top of this article on Twitter. She adds that everyone was "on the same shard clogging it up with like 500 AoE casts, trying desperately to get a tag on the boss. The server did not appreciate this behaviour."

While I'd expect a temporary hotfix to come soon—Blizzard has temporarily re-enabled sharding on roleplay servers before, after all—this whole debacle is a great example of how straightforward changes to a game can be anything but. At the same time, this event offers transmog, pets, and mounts—and you should never underestimate how thirsty players often are for all three, regardless of the MMO.

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Elon Musk has a chatbot. An edgy chatbot, no less. It's called Grok and it's set to go open-source sometime this week. Which bits of the bot will be open to the scrutiny of others isn't entirely clear yet, as Musk has only published his plans in a seven-word post on X. However, the move does appear to have been spurred by Musk's tumultuous relationship with the creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI.

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but his role has diminished over time. Last week, Musk filed a lawsuit against the company and its CEO, Sam Altman. In it, he claimed that OpenAI breached its original charter when it signed up to a multi-billion dollar deal with Microsoft and that the company, famed for ChatGPT, is no longer open—a claim Musk is seemingly referencing in a recent reply to a user on X that reads "OpenAI is a lie".

The lawsuit claims that Musk, Altman, and now president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, had agreed that the founding agreement of OpenAI would be to offer a counterweight to commercial artificial general intelligence (AGI), which allegedly both Musk and Altman shared similar views on being a serious threat to humanity. The lawsuit states the three went as far as to memorialise their aims in the company's Certificate of Incorporation, noting "resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person."

Musk claims the company has departed from that founding agreement in seeking profit and its ties with Microsoft.

"To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI 'benefits all of humanity.' In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft," the lawsuit alleges.

This week, @xAI will open source GrokMarch 11, 2024

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Meanwhile, OpenAI has rebuffed these claims in a blog post, which includes emails from Musk wishing to merge OpenAI into Tesla and to be CEO of a then-planned for-profit entity. Musk later decided to leave OpenAI and make his own AGI, through Tesla, which brings us on to xAI and Grok.

Grok is not AGI, but it's also locked behind a subscription to X, which means less have come into contact with it than world-famous ChatGPT. It's a chatbot that's been designed to "answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor", as the xAI website states. It's still in its early stages, and admittedly reeks of teenage cringe, but it works with real-time information and is reportedly going open-source—the latter being the most developed area for Musk, at this time.

AI, explained

(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

What is artificial general intelligence?: We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.


Open-source systems are often cited as the preferable option for any form of software, at least in my books, and Musk definitely isn't alone in chasing a more open form of AI, either. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has also announced that it is focusing on building AGI and that it will be open-source.

"This technology is so important, and the opportunities are so great, that we should open-source and make it as widely available as we responsibly can. So that way everyone can benefit," Zuckerberg said in a Threads video.

Google's Gemini AI which competes with ChatGPT is a closed ecosystem, though the company has released another open-source model called Gemma.

Meta says it'll ramp up to 350,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of the year, with other GPUs contributing further compute resources too. That's the other story here: Nvidia looks to be the company most set to gain from the race to more powerful AI models. AMD, too, has plenty of interest in its Instinct line-up of compute chips, which some favour for supporting a more open ecosystem than Nvidia's mostly closed-off CUDA library.

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Team Fortress 2 was released in 2007 and since then has had a unique afterlife. Partly that's down to the sheer quality of the game which, post-launch tweaks and additions aside, arrived perfectly formed, with an ageless aesthetic and an anarchically funny approach to world-building. Each of its nine characters is composed of their look, a handful of voice lines, and a 'Meet the Team' vignette. But from these elements, Valve's designers and the actors involved have crafted ornery archetypes that stood the test of time.

In recent years some of the TF2 voice cast has been meeting up to reprise their roles in various sketches and videos. But nothing will quite prepare you for this. At an event called Meet the Mercs held earlier this month, hosted at Boxley's Jazz Club, members of the TF2 voice cast premiered the newest addition to TF2 lore: a track called Sandvich Blues.

The song and its lyrics are composed by John Lowrie (the Sniper), who alongside Robin Atkin Downes (Medic) is on guitar and vocals. Also on vocals we have Gary Schwartz (Heavy, Demoman) and Dennis Bateman (Spy), while on piano is Ellen McLain (the Administrator). The song details, in Lowrie's words, "the TF2 Mercs' struggle to find the Sandvich for Heavy."

Yes this does all seem a bit like a fever dream. But it's real:


For those who haven't played TF2, the Sandvich is an iconic item that the Heavy can eat during a match to regain health. Ideally in full view of the enemy team. Selected lyrics:

Woke up this mornin', the Sandvich was gone.

Didn’t leave no note. Nothin' to go on.

Looked under the covers, under the sheet,

Now Heavy’s broken hearted, he’s got nothin' to eat!

We got the Sandvich Blues way down in our soul.

We got the Sandvich Blues way down in our soul.

This can’t be happnin', things are outta control.

Doc’s halucinatin', things are getting worse.

Spy is cogitatin', maybe it’s a curse!

Admin’s intimidatin', she’s nobody’s nurse!

If we don’t find the sandvich Heavy’s gonna need a hearse!

---

The Sandvich saga​

The Sandvich Blues can be seen as something of a culmination for the rather bizarre journey these TF2 voice actors have been on in recent years, which began with joint convention appearances. They then started working with TF2 youtuber Shork, launching the "Where is sandvich?" saga, where the voice cast basically haunted America's small towns and delis in the search for the Sandvich. They even did an ABBA parody because why the hell not.

It all culminated in the TF2 voice cast playing TF2 for what was apparently the first time, the highlight of which was undoubtedly Sniper getting various things wrong while his wife Ellen McLain (the Administrator, and also GLaDOS) sat next to him chuckling and occasionally booming out "you've failed" in those immaculately clipped tones.


As far as I can tell, before this the TF2 community was largely amusing itself with a Sniper meme where the character becomes a Samsung fridge and various other objects (I have no idea). Even this lot have been stunned by the fact that, yes, the voice actors pay them more attention than Daddy Valve, and their gratitude is that of a child whose puppy has been returned.

"Protect them at all costs," says PLConqueror. "It brings a tear to my eyes," says Verch63, before Alphamoonman points out they're a Demoman main and should really say "Awe, it brings a tear to me naked eye." Dangerous_jacket_129 thinks "This is the most precious thing" while ChesseburgerMK8 gets straight to the economic implications: "this is fucking worth more than a gold pan." Perhaps 8Champi8 sums up the stunned gratitude of the true believers: "wholesome people."

Valve supported Team Fortress 2 for over a decade before essentially handing the game over to the community (and releasing tools to help). TF2 still gets updates, but it's all community content curated by Valve, and the developer has to be extra careful not to use the wrong words, or everyone gets way too excited and thinks Team Fortress 3 on Source 2 is releasing tomorrow. That is, at least, more sane than trying to "meme a character into existence."

The Sandvich, it is fair to say, fills a hole in the Heavy's soul. Without it he is not just hungry, but is not even any type of Heavy at all. Its absence brings longing, and a search for what is lost. So no wonder the song lands with TF2 players: they've had the Sandvich blues for years.

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[PCGamer LATEST]

RTX Remix enables modders to breathe new life into beloved videogames. The platform, created by Nvidia, replaces the very core of classic games to take advantage of advanced modern features, such as path-traced lighting, enhanced assets, and upscaling.

What's most exciting about RTX Remix, however, is how it appears to have motivated the modding community worldwide to take on grand new projects. I've spoken to developers working on the most popular ones today to find out why that is.

What is RTX Remix?​

Take a look at the basic components of RTX Remix and how it replaces the original game rendering pipeline. (Image credit: Future)

RTX Remix is a collection of software that allows games mainly built on DirectX 8/9 to support modern lighting methods and assets. To do that, it replaces entire chunks of a classic game to form a new rendering pipeline almost entirely removed from the one that shipped with the original game.

"The main thing that Remix does is that it introduces a brand new rendering engine…" says Traggey, a developer and modder working on multiple RTX Remix projects. "It allows us to mod the game in a way that pushes it to a quality level where it's actually comparable to modern triple-A releases."

RTX Remix is made up of two main parts:

• Runtime—Includes the Bridge, which handles the conversion of the old runtime, and the Renderer, which offers access to a Physically Based Rendering (PBR) pipeline including an open-source path tracer. It can also 'capture' game assets in Universal Scene Description (USD) format.
• Creator Toolkit—The RTX Remix application for manipulating and replacing USD assets.

It's best to see RTX Remix in action. In the video embedded below, an Nvidia employee replaces an asset in Half-Life 2 using the Toolkit in under three minutes.

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♬ original sound - PC Gamer

Though born out of Nvidia's internal projects, such as Quake 2 RTX and Portal RTX, the platform is now available to anyone in beta and is already being used far and wide. It's most famously attracted some of the biggest Half-Life 2 modders to take on a massively ambitious project: a complete remaster of one of the best PC games ever made.

Reimagining Half-Life 2 with RTX Remix​

"It is a very, very big project. I might even venture as far as to say probably one of the biggest modding projects, considering how long Half-Life 2 itself took to develop," says Orbifold Studios founder Chris "MDDBULLDOGG" Workman.

Orbifold Studios is a collective of developers working on Half-Life 2 RTX, a third-party remake of the game built using RTX Remix. If you're familiar with the Black Mesa remake for the original Half-Life and think this sounds like a similar sized project for Half-Life 2, you wouldn't be far off. Though that's mostly where the similarities end.

"We're not necessarily working with Source on Half-Life 2 RTX. We're working with Remix," Workman says.

RTX Remix stands in for parts of the Source engine used in Half-Life 2. It replaces them with more modern elements and that alone is a huge boon to a community project. RTX Remix enables the use of industry standard file types and workflows, allowing Orbifold Studios to open its doors to industry veterans with loads of experience, even if not necessarily with the Source engine.

According to Workman, "Remix is the great equaliser." It levels the playing field in such a way that a Half-Life 2 mod is no longer a job solely for Half-Life 2 modders.


"The game you're actually seeing on screen is a Vulkan game," says Nyle Usmani, project manager at Nvidia for RTX Remix, referring to Half-Life 2 RTX.

Vulkan is a modern graphics API that many devs will have plenty of experience with. As does Nvidia, as a member of the consortium that produces it and contributing to large chunks of it, such as its ray tracing extensions. It's confident in the open-source path tracer included with RTX Remix, too.

"The path tracer here is just as powerful as any path tracer in any modern videogame, which is something we're really proud of," Usmani says.

"We're essentially scrutinising every single pixel."

Chris "MDDBULLDOGG" Workman

But before it can work its magic on Half-Life 2, Orbifold Studios must recreate the game's assets to play nice with the PBR pipeline.

"Each and every asset we're taking the time to make sure we get right and that is time consuming," Workman says. "We have a backlog of several thousand assets to be done for Half-Life 2."

Even the smallest details are in the process of being recreated by Orbifold Studios. (Image credit: Future)

RTX Remix also includes generative AI capable of upscaling textures without having to do it by hand. I'm surprised to hear that Orbifold Studios isn't using them, working so closely with AI darling Nvidia, but Workman offers good reason why not.

"We're essentially scrutinising every single pixel to make sure we're hitting the exact same notes that the original designer intended on certain assets and certain materials."

The intense attention to detail comes from both the team's respect for Half-Life 2 and a desire to stay true to the original feeling of the game. There's a fine line to tread here and the team remains vigilant in sticking to it.

"Everybody remembers it in their own way," Workman says.

"We want to capture that feeling of playing the original, but I don't think we're trying to replace it. Both need to exist," Usmani follows up.

Ravenholm's dingy streets and broken down homes are great for showing off the new lighting system. (Image credit: Orbifold Studios, Valve)

Nvidia has been closely collaborating with Orbifold Studios on Half-Life 2 RTX from the get-go. Meanwhile, the game's original creator, Valve, knows about the project but has no official involvement. But I'm still curious as to why Nvidia created the Remix platform in the first place, and I'm told it came out of both its own internal tests and how modders were messing around with other RTX remakes from Nvidia's Lightspeed Studios.

Usmani says it "comes down to us wanting to make sure modders have the best tools possible to make the coolest, most graphically impressive mods and making sure that classic games don't get left behind along the way."

Under the hood of Need For Speed Underground 2 RTX​

Half-Life may be the most recognisable Remix project but there are hundreds ongoing today. One of the more popular work-in-progress mods is for Need For Speed Underground 2.

Take a look at the mod in action and its popularity should come as no surprise. Yet it did for the mod's original creator, Uncle Burrito, who tells me they never expected it to get big. They're now joined by a global team chipping away at the project when they can, including Traggey, E-man, Adam Player, HellRaven EXP, CountBuggula and Hemry. I caught up with a few to see how this project differs from one like Half-Life 2 RTX.

"Some games aren't that moddable and others are extremely moddable."

Traggey

"Some games aren't that moddable and others are extremely moddable," Traggey says. "You'll look at stuff like Half-life 2, for example, where you have actual level editors and that kind of thing… there is no level editor for Need For Speed.

"There's no way for us to break into the core files and change things on that end, which is bringing a lot of complications for us to deal with that we have to solve in a very different way from the Half-Life 2 team."

A settings menu can be accessed directly in a game running an RTX Remix mod, which includes settings for DLSS and path tracing. (Image credit: EA)

I'm told every game has its own set of issues to deal with. For NFSU2, one such issue is car customisation.

"If you change your car in the game, you modify it, change the colour, put on a different body part, the car will have a completely different unique texture and material assigned to it," Uncle Burrito says.

A major headache with the number of car customisation options in the game. Another headache is culling: once an object disappears from the screen, the engine gets rid entirely. What was once a smart way to save resources in 2004 becomes a problem to mitigate with a path-traced lighting system in 2024, meaning street lights flicker out of existing as you zoom by. There are ways to mitigate this effect even without deeper access to the game's files, but I'm told it's not easy work.


The NFSU2 team knows how important it is to remake a game while retaining what made it special, too. The clever way the team is approaching this is by using the game's original inspiration for its own asset creation: neon-lit streets, urban highway infrastructure, and, of course, the early Fast & Furious movies.

"Matching that vibe is a challenge in itself," Uncle Burrito says.

Getting started with RTX Remix​

You can boot the RTX Remix app and get started through the Omniverse launcher. (Image credit: Nvidia)

If there's one clear thread from speaking with those working with RTX Remix today, it's that it takes all manner of skill to get up-and-running. The fundamental process of modding may have been simplified but full remakes are not light work.

"There's a lot of hard work that goes into it," Usmani says.

"You rely on the community to help get you where you need to be."

Chris "MDDBULLDOGG" Workman

Workman likens modding Half-Life 2 with Remix to creating an actual game. Uncle Burrito tells me people often underestimate what goes into these mods. Everyone speaks of users that expect to load up RTX Remix and press a one-click remaster button that does all the work for them. They all assure me that's absolutely not the case, but that's evident enough from my discussions with them. It's clear just how much time and effort goes into these community projects.

That's not to ward anyone off getting involved with RTX Remix. Remakes are built by communities of volunteers and everyone I spoke to recommends joining the official Discord channel to get involved.

"You rely on the community to help get you where you need to be," Workman says. "And there are people out there who will help. You ask those questions, you get going, and before you know it, you have a team making a game."

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[PCGamer LATEST]

The best modders are people of singular vision, absolute purpose, and indefatigable ambition. Promethean thought leaders who—unbound by the petty mores of polite society and the dictates of the market—use every tool they have at hand to forge new frontiers in technology and culture.

Anyway, here's Aerith Gainsbro and Beefa.

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(Image credit: FudgeX02 / Square Enix)
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(Image credit: FudgeX02 / Square Enxis)

Eagle-eyed readers might notice that these modded-up iterations of the classic Final Fantasy 7 characters are a little more muscular than usual. In fact, they're positively jacked. A pair of protein-swilling, dumbbell-curling muscle queens whose Seventh Heaven is a seven-foot barbell.

Is this technically someone's fetish content I'm writing up on this massively popular gaming website? Almost certainly, but I'm so impressed by both the models and the puns that I frankly think it's worth it to drag you all down to this level for 350 words or so.

The mods come from an author named FudgeX02, a person of particular skills and, ah, inclinations, and are actually part of an alarmingly large suite of mods that turn various videogame women into basically John Cena. Alongside Miss Gainsbro and Beefa, we've got swole Ada Wong, various even more outlandishly muscular Street Fighter ladies, and—saving the best for last—Buffie, which prosaically describes itself as a mod which "Turns Yuffie into a bodybuilder." It sure does, gang. It sure does.

(Image credit: FudgeX02 / Square Enix)

Anyway, now that I've tricked you into hosting those images in your brain until the day you die, I have to say it's the names, rather than the models themselves, that truly push me into thinking these are some of the greatest artworks of the modern era. Beefa and Buffie are, frankly, hilarious. But Aerith Gains Bro? You can't teach patter like that. Flawless work, FudgeX02, it's my privilege to live at the same time as you and your immortal art.

If you can't bear to live a second longer without shredded Aerith in your life, you can find FudgeX02's entire oeuvre on Nexus Mods. I've gone through them and, while none of the pictures are necessarily risqué, they probably would be difficult to explain to your boss unless you work in the coolest office on Earth. Some people just can't handle strong women.

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[PCGamer LATEST]

Just when I thought I couldn't get more invested in the adorably bloody roguelike world of Cult of the Lamb, developer Devolver Digital teamed up with comic book publisher Oni Press to launch a new comic series, Cult of the Lamb: The First Verse, written by Alex Paknadel and drawn by Troy Little.

As someone who has only just begun their descent into a cult (thanks to some very enthusiastic pestering from a friend), this comic series looks like a brilliant way to get to know all the creatures that I'll eventually encounter in Cult of the Lamb. The series will also follow the star of the show, The Lamb, as they forge ahead on their path of recruiting new followers and expanding their religious cult.

It's clear that I'm not the only one excited by this prospect. With 30 days to go until the all-or-nothing deadline of April 12, Cult of the Lamb: The First Verse reached its goal of £7,800 in just six minutes—now the pledges are sitting at $89,500/£70,000 and counting at the time of writing this story.

But the fun doesn't end here. There are a couple of day-one deals that really caught my eye. Usually, when it comes to Kickstarter campaigns, I get ready to throw my wallet out the window to protect myself from reckless spending. But these day-one deals are actually pretty affordable and include some fantastic rewards, which would be a great addition to a physical game collection if that's your style. These perks include:

• The complete series in DRM-FREE pdf for $10
• Issue #1 Blood Red Foil variant for $15
• Exclusive softcover featuring cover art by Troy Little for $20
• All four issues featuring exclusive interlocking cover art by Troy Little for $25
• Exclusive hardcover featuring cover art by Juan Gedeoni for $30

Tiers five to 10 range from $40 to $2000, with the final tier including an "infinite access set" that offers up all the goodies from previous sets plus a $100 Oni gift certificate, an original art page from Troy Little, and the privilege of getting sacrificed in an upcoming Cult of the Lamb comic release.

But the best reward, the one that will rule them all, is locked away and won't be available unless the donations pass some pretty pricey milestones. However, if, by some miracle, the pledges reach $666,666, then Cult of the Lamb: The First Verse will include sex in the campaign rewards. I'm not sure how set in stone this is as the fine print only reads, "shhh, we'll figure it out," but it's a small price to pay if you ask me.

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