Newegg Commerce, Inc., a global e-commerce leader for technology products, today announced the launch of Newegg's GPU Trade-In Program, allowing customers to trade in an eligible GPU device and receive a trade-in value credit toward the purchase of a new qualifying graphics card also known as a graphics processing unit (GPU).

Newegg's GPU Trade-In Program not only helps customers upgrade to a newer GPU model, the program also helps limit electronic waste. By offering a resource for customers to exchange their unwanted GPUs for new ones, the program simultaneously contributes to waste reduction and facilitates cost-effective PC upgrades.

Escape from Tarkov is a game that makes you feel amazing if you win, and awful if you lose. You're likely to feel terrible again and again if you play it, but the thrill when everything goes right makes up for all of that. And while it's hard to beat that feeling of pleasure, I imagine I'm not the only person who played Tarkov and felt the pain of its hardcore difficulty. Escape from Tarkov: Arena seems like a game that even these kinds of players can jump in and enjoy. Arena retains the original Tarkov's hardcore shootouts while being a fast-paced and much more easily-digested team shooter.

What makes Arena special is that despite the different rules, the game as a whole still feels like Tarkov, including the gunplay. Between its minimal HUD, lack of respawning, and wealth of equipment presets to choose from, you can tell that the game is still Tarkov at its roots. I had the opportunity to try Arena out at Tokyo Game Show 2023. While it was only for one match, I was also able to hear from Sergei Drozdov, game designer at Arena developer Battlestate Games.

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If you'd like to try it for yourself, Escape from Tarkov: Arena is scheduled for a closed beta test sometime before the end of the year.

The third patch for the game tried to ameliorate that a bit, implementing a new "Shared Stash" system that took important quest items away from party members when you dismissed them and placed them in your inventory. It's not much, but it does mean you don't lose track of your severed clown torso because you happened to dismiss the party member carrying it without thinking. But there's a problem.

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"My MC has low carrying capacity and she gets encumbered every time I send a party member back to camp," says Reddit user Blindspy4, lamenting that "At least one of my party members has a piece of armor that gets taken off every time I make him wait at camp too." Calling the experience "Very frustrating, borderline unplayable," the player says they now have to " spend several minutes trying to figure out what just happened" to their inventory every time they swap someone out.

Todd Howard agrees that it was a bit of a pain to get right, as he said in a recent interview with the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. "[Space combat] was way harder than we thought … We see a lot of space games where you're gonna have like, derelict ships or other things to fly around, just to get a sense of motion, so the smallest thing like 'what does the dust in space look like?' so you feel like you're moving and it's not too much, not too little."

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For Bethesda, the snags started happening when it came to designing enemy AI: "It's very easy … to make the enemies really really smart, forever we were just jousting [with them]. It turns out you have to make the AI really stupid. You have to have them fly, then they need to turn, basically like 'hey player, why don't you just shoot me for a while?' … [once we'd] settled on our pace, and how the enemies are gonna move, that's where it came together."

The creator of the paid Starfield DLSS 3 Frame Generation mod, PureDark, has said that he will be placing "hidden mines" in his future mods.

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In an interview with IGN, 'PureDark' has now commented on his mod being cracked, and has said that future "hidden" mines will cause future mods to sometimes work, fail, crash, and whatnot.

"It was expected since it was something I put together within a day or two, but I did get enough patrons so it's done its job", the modder told IGN. "So from now on I will place hidden mines in all my mods to make it harder for these people. They might be able to find and bypass some of them, but they will never know if they have found all of them. The cracked mods will sometimes work, sometimes fail, sometimes work but [be] very wonky, sometimes even crash and they won't even know if it's a bug or just them using the cracked version, and they will never have the support I've been always providing to my subscribers."

Vampire Survivors developer Poncle has said it's "investigating" the possibility of adding proper online multiplayer co-op to its conspicuously vampire-free minimalist survival RPG, although there's no guarantee it'll actually happen.

That tiny nugget of information comes via a new Ask me Anything (AMA) Q&A session, held earlier today on Reddit, in which Poncle occasionally had the opportunity to answer questions that weren't variations on 'Where the bloody hell are the vampires anyway, please?'.

One such question inquired if there were any multiplayer plans for Vampire Survivors beyond the four-player couch co-op mode introduced alongside the Switch release last month, to which Poncle replied in the affirmative.

Capcom's president and chief operating officer has said he thinks game prices should go up.Haruhiro Tsujimoto made the …

Why virtual reality makes a lot of us sick, and what we can do about it.

A small update has gone out for Starfield on Xbox Series X|S, Microsoft Store, and Steam. This update addresses some issues with performance and stability as well as a few general gameplay issues. We are continuing to work on a larger update that will add features and improvements that we noted in our last update notes. Thank you so much for your continued feedback and support of Starfield and we look forward to a future with you on this journey.

General

• Characters: Fixed an issue that could cause some characters to not be in their proper location.
• Star Stations: Fixed an issue where Star Stations would be labeled as a player-owned ship.
• Vendors: Addressed an issue that allowed for a vendor’s full inventory to be accessible.

Graphics

• AMD (PC): Resolved an issue that caused star lens flares not to appear correctly AMD GPUs.
• Graphics: Addressed an upscaling issue that could cause textures to become blurry.
• Graphics: Resolved an issue that could cause photosensitivity issues when scrolling through the inventory menu.

Performance and Stability

• Hand Scanner: Addressed an issue where the Hand Scanner caused hitching.
• Various stability and performance improvements to address crashing and freezes.

Ships

• Displays: Fixed an issue that would cause displayed items to disappear when applied to in-ship mannequins.
• Displays: Fixed an issue that would cause items stored in Razorleaf Storage Containers and Weapon Racks to disappear after commandeering another ship.

Hardware Busters put the new 12V-2x6 connector—which is part of the ATX v3.1 standard—to the test to see how it compares to the 12VHPWR connector and the results are very encouraging. Not only does the 12V-2x6 cables appear to run at much cooler temperature, even at a 55 Ampere load, although the setup that was tested had only been running at this load for around 30 minutes. Even so, the cable and connector was only reading a surface temperature of around 46 degrees, which is well within specs.

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YouTube Video - Hardware Busters

Celebrate our 15th anniversary with incredible discounts! Enjoy up to -90% off on a wide range of classic and newer games. Explore the deals now and level up your gaming experience!

Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption - Reawakened, the mod project to rebuild the first VtM videogame in Skyrim, has shown off new gameplay of its Prague early game. The original game, which follows the story of a crusader knight from the Middle Ages all the way to the modern day, is one of those hyper-ambitious, turn of the millennium RPGs that just doesn't come all the way together, and is a prime candidate for a fan revival.

We last checked in on Redemption - Reawakened a year ago. The mod team had shown off some of its later hub areas and more dungeony levels, but project lead Galejro's latest videos show off a significant portion of the early game in Prague.

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YouTube - Daytime & Silver Mines
YouTube - Nighttime

There's a long tradition of connections between Dungeons & Dragons and the videogames based on it. Pool of Radiance, the 1998 videogame that kicked off the Gold Box series, was also released as a pen-and-paper adventure called Ruins of Adventure in the same year. More recently, Baldur's Gate 3 incorporated parts of the adventure Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus—if you want to know more about why there are so many tiefling refugees fleeing Elturel, that book has your answer. (Wyll's dad shows up in it too.)

The next D&D supplement is Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse, and it includes at least a few things players of 1999's Planescape: Torment will recognize. For starters, one piece of official artwork shows the Smoldering Corpse Bar, which either still has Ignus the burning wizard on display or has found a replacement for him.

What's more, the supplement's adventure book, Turn of Fortune's Wheel, opens with a familiar scene. "You wake up in the mortuary," senior game designer F. Wesley Schneider said in a first look video. "I'm sorry to say that you've died. Morte, the snarky floating skull, greets you and you realize that there's a mystery. Your memories are fractured and every time that you come back from the dead, you come back a little different."

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is a preem spy thriller adventure. However, if your V really isn't that interested in working with government types, you can choose not to sign on to a life of martinis shaken, not stirred.

Only issue is, choosing to do so locks you out of the questline—and from what I've tested, it's permanent. At minimum it'll delay your progression through the DLC's story substantially, but I don't get the sense Reed's gonna call me back.

Here's the mostly spoiler-free rundown: at the end of a mission called Lucretia My Reflection, you'll be given a choice to stay or go. If you go, you really do go—you fail the mission, and are roadblocked from proceeding.

You can still run around Dogtown, but there'll be no suit and tie galas with Mr. Elba, which is a crime in itself. Just make sure to play ball with your new friends, and you'll be golden. If you're really worried about accidentally dropping the new DLC, here's the specifics.

"Dominion of Darkness” is a strategy/RPG text game in which the player takes on the role of a Sauron-style Lord of Darkness with the goal of conquering the world. He will carry out his plans by making various decisions. He will build his army and send it into battles, weave intrigues and deceptions, create secret spy networks and sectarian cults, recruit agents and commanders, corrupt representatives of Free Peoples and sow discord among them, collect magical artifacts and perform sinister plots.Note – one game takes about 1 hour, but the premise is that the game can be approached several times, each time making different decisions, getting different results and discovering something new. Feedback is very much welcome. Very, very much. Altough game is playable and winnable now, I am still working on improving it, so all suggestions are appreciated.

Here is the game: https://adeptus7.itch.io/dominion

And here are reviews:

• Indie Sampler (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM6f4UCEgWU

• Dad's Game Review (podcast): https://www.dadsgamereview.com/blog/

• [BOKC] BlancoKix (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgNpSKToOSg

PS. If You like my writing and tales with villain protagonists, You can also read my not-so-short dark fantasy/horror story: https://adeptusrpg.wordpress.com/2022/12/14/tale-of-the-necromancer/ or listen to its audio version: https://adeptusrpg.wordpress.com/2022/12/14/tale-of-the-necromancer/

According to the voice of Astarion himself, there's a whole two hour section of Baldur's Gate 3 no one has played yet.

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"There's even something I know about that you can't get to unless you do something that I don't think anyone's going to work out," Newborn said in the livestream, which you can see him talk about in a clip above. "I was told this in confidence and I think I'm one of the few people who knows about it as well." In the stream Newborn was even asked if he could tell the person he was talking to what it is, but noted "it's one of those few things I cannot friend-DA." Just to clarify, Newborn will have signed an NDA to work on this project, unsurprisingly, but people are people and they do tell their friends things, but this seems like something so secretive he can't even do that.

Update: Sounds like this article is old and it has been found

You can already guess the third sentence: the servers have been a disaster at launch, with players forced to queue for long periods just to play alone, if they can manage to play at all. It currently sits "Mostly Negative" reviews on Steam - that's 31% positive after almost 19,000 reviews.

"Online only was a huge mistake," says one review. "Imagine waiting for an hour and ten minutes and still not being able to get into a private game," says the one underneath. "this game makes me feel the developers made this game just so they could pull off the biggest heist of all time. robbing us of an offline mode," says another. There are hundreds more like this.

The official Payday X (formerly Twitter) account has been tracking the issues, noting "slow matchmaking" on September 21st, and an outright "matchmaking outage" yesterday on September 22nd. As of twelve hours ago, the account posted that they're "seeing players being able to create lobbies again," but that there "still might have a few issues" that they're working on. Throughout it all, the account has been getting roasted by players who can't play, or who simply want an offline mode.

Recently revealed Project Crawl is calling itself "an immersive first-person PvPvE dungeon crawler" and is planning an alpha playtest on Steam next week. (September 27-29)

In a series of community Q&As, Mithril Studio also explains that Project Crawl will feature various races (elves and humans and so on) and classes to choose from, "environmental interaction systems," and will eventually launch into early access after playtesting. Current party size is three players, though Mithril Studio suggests other game modes and team sizes could possibly be options in the future.

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If you want in extra early on the next contender for fantasy dungeon extraction, there's a survey to fill out to enter yourself in consideration for the alpha playtest running next week from September 27-29.

Steam Page
Alpha Playtest Signup Survey
YouTube PlayTest Teaser

AMD used to release new AMDVLK Vulkan driver updates on a near weekly basis for Linux users but that has slowed down for a while. We are approaching the end of Q3 and now AMDVLK 2023.Q3.2 has been published as their first new open-source driver release since early August.

With the time that has passed since the prior release, AMDVLK 2023.Q3.2 is at least on the heavier side for changes. AMDVLK 2023.Q3.2 brings support for quadbuffer stereo, Quake 2 RTX ray-tracing performance tuning, reducing the RS64 vs. FP32 mode overhead, reducing the AMDVLK binary size, and other optimizations.

[New features and improvement]

• Update Khronos Vulkan Headers to 1.3.261
• Support Quadbuffer Stereo
• Performance tuning for Quake2 RTX RT
• Reduce RS64 vs F32 mode overhead
• Add a setting to allow changing PWS mode
• Reduce amdvlk binary size
• Optimize the clear to single shaders
• Support dynamic sample buffer info for Extended_dynamic_state3 extension

[Issues fixed]

• Driver still reports HDR formats even when HDR mode is disabled
• CTS failure in dEQP-VK.pipeline.monolithic.executable_properties.graphics.vertex_stage*
• vkCreateRenderPass2 Crash
• Debug markers missing in RGD

Happy Friday! What are folks going to be playing this weekend?

At EVE Fanfest 2023, CCP Games unveiled EVE Vanguard, an Unreal Engine 5 powered sandbox multiplayer FPS 'module' for EVE Online.

Today, CCP Games unveiled EVE Vanguard, its next attempt at a first-person multiplayer shooter game integrated with EVE Online. Some players may still remember Dust 514, which attempted something similar but largely failed as a PlayStation 3 exclusive. CCP didn't stop trying and came up with the so-called Project Nova, though that one didn't even make it to launch.

EVE Vanguard is different in several ways, though. Firstly, it's being labeled an EVE Online 'module' and will be free for Omega subscribers; it's currently unclear whether the game can be purchased or accessed without the Omega subscription to EVE Online. Secondly, it's specifically targeting the PC platform.

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YouTube Trailer

The Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol.1 is setting out to be a rather disappointing collection on PC, as resolution and framerate will be locked at low values in all games.

A recent update of the collection's official website confirmed the output resolutions and maximum framerates of all included games. On PC, all games will have a maximum resolution of 1080p, a 30 FPS cap for the original Metal Gear Solid, and a 60 FPS cap for the second and third entry in the series. Needless to say, this is extremely disappointing and a missed opportunity to update some of the best games ever released.

It's been a clear decade since the last entry in this co-op crimeathon FPS series, so I was interested to play Payday 3. Payday is exactly the sort of online multiplayer I can get behind: PvE with clear but theoretically malleable goals (theft!). But although compared to Crime Boss: Rockay City it's a crushing 60st monster truck tyre, Payday 3 isn't really reinventing the Payday 2 wheel. In some respects you might think it's rolling backwards, and while dedicated Payday 2 players may well switch over to the current gen iteration, you get the sense they'll be complaining about things the whole time.

If you enjoy tower defence, video games presented as fake PC desktop environments, and big sexy mouths in Hell, cast your innumerable unblinking eyes over Heretic's Fork. The deck-building tower defence game casts you as an employee of Hell tasked with punishing sinners by building towers and deploying troops using a demonic computer system. I've played a few hours since Heretic's Fork launched yesterday and while it hasn't quite enraptured my hellbound heart, I am enjoying figuring it out—and seeing what my paperclip helper will do next.

Launch Trailer
Steam Page