Ubisoft Montreal - the studio behind the likes of Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Far Cry 5 - has been accused of leaving staff in "turmoil" after it reportedly reneged on promises that "100% remote work would be possible", forcing all 4,000 of its workers back to the office for a "minimum" of two days a week, as of 11th September.

Back in June 2021, Ubisoft announced it would be adopting a "hybrid and tailored approach to work arrangements" where staff would be able "to balance in-office work with work from home". However, according to a new report by IGN, Ubisoft Montreal staff were repeatedly told they could remain 100% remote long-term, leading many to make significant life decision or accept jobs at the company based around these assurances.

"100% remote work will be possible depending on various criteria," reads an internal Ubisoft document seen by IGN and detailed in its report, "such as productivity and impact on the team, as well as the nature of the work being done."

It's common practice for PC games today to launch with Denuvo, a form of DRM designed to stop the spread of pirated copies of games, and it's also common practice for developers to remove Denuvo several months after launch as interest (and the risk of piracy) dwindles. Less common is a developer publicly announcing it's removing Denuvo from a game before it's even out, but that's the surprise Starbreeze pulled this Friday.

"Hello heisters, we want to inform you that Denuvo is no longer in Payday 3," the developer wrote in a post on Steam on Friday. That's pretty much the whole message—short and to the point, and seemingly a win on the good will front, with the Steam post racking up 524 thumbs up on Steam so far and another 10,000 or so on Twitter.

Payday 3 is less than a week away from its September 21 release, and Starbreeze is clearly looking to roll into the launch with an excited community behind it. Two months ago a thread on the r/paydaytheheist subreddit called out the inclusion of Denuvo and the responses were characteristically negative. This afternoon, one of the game's developers responded to that thread to highlight that Denuvo has been removed.

Denuvo has long had a reputation for hindering performance in games and bloating their executables, though the company behind it, Irdeto, insists that isn't the case. This summer it announced a plan to provide media outlets with two versions of games, one with Denuvo included and one without, to prove it has no impact on performance.

Display

• The default color rendering for Steam Deck has been adjusted to emulate the sRGB color gamut, resulting in a slightly warmer and more vibrant color appearance.
• Added Settings -> Adjust Display Colors, to tune the display's Color Vibrancy and Color Temperature. The settings can be tuned with a preview of a test image (above), or with your running game.
• Native: The native display color appearance (the color rendering for Steam Deck prior to this update).
• sRGB: Emulate the sRGB primaries, in a smooth manner that does not introduce gradient clipping.
• Boosted: Emulate a wider-gamut display appearance, resulting in increased apparent vibrance. May result in gradient clipping.
• HDR can now be enabled in Display Settings if supported by the external display.
• VRR can now be enabled in Display Settings if supported by the USB-C adapter.
• Reworked Quick-Access scaling settings to separate scaling from filtering. Added Stretch and Zoom scaling as new options to handle different aspect ratios.
• Fixed touchscreen orientation while external display is connected.
• Compositing is now avoided in additional scenarios, reducing latency and stutter in situation with multiple overlays on screen.
• Improved latency in certain situations where the application renders slower than the display's refresh rate.

General

• Fixed an issue where certain workloads would exhibit severe CPU performance issues unless SMT was manually disabled.
• External storage devices are now auto-mounted when connected to Steam Deck. To format or manage storage devices use the new device management interface in Settings->Storage.
• Updated graphics drivers, with many performance and functionality improvements. Improved performance for Starfield. Fixed viewmodel corruption in Amnesia: The Bunker and launch failures for Immortals of Aveum and Kaiju-A-GoGo.
• Improved Bluetooth connection stability, especially with multiple controllers
• Slightly improved sleep resume speed
• Implemented switching between controller bindings and mouse/keyboard desktop bindings by long-pressing Options in the Linux hid-steam driver, to match Steam's default Desktop configuration.
• Improved fade transitions between applications.
• The contents of the performance overlay can now be customized by creating a ~/.config/MangoHud/presets.conf configuration file.
• Fixed a bug where some games could appear stretched if their window size didn't match their swapchain size (eg. Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 4)
• Fixed Disgaea PC needing to be tapped on before input works
• Fixed physical dimensions reported to games, fixing some issues with an incorrect aspect ratio sometimes being detected (eg. Returnal)
• Worked around a problem where Allow Tearing could cause heavy stuttering if the Performance Overlay or other overlays appeared on screen. Tearing is now impossible in such situations, and the Performance Overlay should be disabled for best results.
• Fixed a problem where keyboard input would not be detected in Overwatch 2
• Controller firmware: fixed an issue where some thumbstick touch sensors would lose touch periodically

Firmware 116

• Added voltage offset settings.
• Improved robustness of the Firmware Settings Reset chord (Volume Down + Quick-Access + Power) against some boot hang scenarios.
• Fixed a rare issue that would set the processor TDP limit too low causing CPU and GPU frequencies to be stuck at 400 MHz and 200 MHz respectively.
• Fixed an issue when the charging light would turn back on when plugged in for a while after fully charged.
• Updated Arch Linux Base
• This update pulls in newer performance, security and stability fixes for the underlying packages that are the foundation for SteamOS
• Most notably, this includes recent changes to KDE Plasma, Steam Deck's Desktop Mode. Full notes on these updates can be found on KDE's website here. Here are a few of the highlights:

New window tiling system

• Updated Discover (app store / software manager) with a new homepage and improved search
• Discover can now perform system updates from the desktop
• Updated desktop widgets

The dark fantasy roguelite first-person shooter was revealed a long time ago at Geoff Keighley's 2017 The Game Awards. The small team went silent for over four years, announcing in January 2022 that Witchfire would launch in early access in late 2022. However, there was another delay to 2023, with the developers explaining that they would add open world-like areas to improve the game's exploration.

With mere days separating us from the September 20th launch of Witchfire on early access, we discussed with The Astronauts founder and CEO Adrian Chmielarz (also known as the project leader on 2004's Painkiller and the creative director on Bulletstorm) the reason for the long development phase and one-year Epic Games Store exclusivity, and the exciting performance results obtained with the implementation of NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 3.

We also confirmed with him that AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and Intel Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) will still be in the game on day one and received a preview of Witchfire's system specifications. Read on for the full chat.

An Apple "iPhone16,1" was put through the Geekbench 6.2 gauntlet earlier this week—according to database info this pre-release sample was running a build of iOS 17.0 (currently in preview) and its logic board goes under the "D83AP" moniker. It is interesting to see a 16-series unit hitting the test phase only a day after the unveiling of Apple's iPhone 15 Pro and Max models—the freshly benched candidate seems to house an A17 Pro SoC as well. The American tech giant has set lofty goals for said flagship chip, since it is "the industry's first 3-nanometer chip. Continuing Apple's leadership in smartphone silicon, A17 Pro brings improvements to the entire chip, including the biggest GPU redesign in Apple's history. The new CPU is up to 10 percent faster with microarchitectural and design improvements, and the Neural Engine is now up to 2x faster."

The US government may try to prosecute you for violating sites’ terms of service. But it won’t be handling its own actions the same way.

Instead, the government embraces fakery of all sorts, from fake colleges used to eject immigrants just trying to further their education to setting up fake drug stash houses to entrap people desperate to improve their personal financial situations. And then there’s the FBI’s 20 years of radicalizing people in terrorist stings where the government does all the conspiring and the “terrorists” it creates do all the jail time.

While it’s understood a certain amount of subterfuge is necessary to engage in law enforcement, social media services have made it clear not even the federal government is exempt from policies forbidding the creation of fake profiles. Not that it matters to the government. While it has considered this sort of behavior from mere citizens to be a criminal act, it treats willful violation of site policies as just another day at the office.

...

Facebook has repeatedly warned government entities that their employees are subject to the same “real name” policies that apply to regular people who wish to use the service. These warnings have been constantly ignored, which is definitely the expected outcome, but one that ensures the federal government can’t pretend it didn’t know it was violating policies if it ever comes to the point where someone within the government is willing to do anything about these routine violations.

...

The office is crucial for professional development. You can’t expect to grow in your career without spending time with your coworkers, learning by osmosis, picking up cues from observing your superiors, and bonding with your peers and managers.

That’s been the party line for the past three and a half years among CEOs who are insistent that remote work has no staying power—or that it shouldn’t, at least, among anyone with ambitions of climbing the corporate ladder.

...

“Well, I’m a remote worker. I’ve always been a remote worker my whole life. I don’t work well in an office,” Benioff said. “It just doesn’t work for my personality. I can’t tell you why. I do love to go in to visit customers, though. I’m on the road constantly visiting customers.”

All three Steam Deck models have joined Steam's 20th Anniversary sale, marking the third time Valve's handheld PCs have gone on sale—the first was back in March, and the second during the Steam Summer Sale a few months ago.

It's the same discount as last time: 20% off the 512GB version, which brings it to $519.20 ($129.80 off). That's the same price as one of Valve's certified refurbished 512GB Steam Decks, which are sold out at the moment. The 256GB and 64GB versions have received smaller 15% and 10% discounts for this sale, respectively.

Steamdeck page on Steam

What's on your playlist this weekend? Starfield? Still BG3? Something new?

researchers Samuel J. Lymbery, Bruce L. Webber and Raphael K. Didham use Age of Empires 2 to study how human shaping of the environment affects the balance of power between the indigenous Australian "meat ant", or Iridomyrmex purpureus, and the Argentine ant, or Linepithema humile, who are one of the world's more invasive ant species.

The paper takes inspiration from Lanchester's Laws, which I'm going to crudely summarise in the hope that no passing maths professor throws chalk at my head. Devised by M. Osipov and Frederick Lanchester before the First World War, these Laws set out to distil the likely tactical advantages and bodycount represented by new military technology down to a set of equations. Lanchester's Linear Law describes scenarios from the ambiguously defined ancient world, whereby soldiers with handheld weapons like spears can only fight one other soldier at once.

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Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on December 7. A new trailer for the game reveals further story details about the hero's journey and the clans they will meet as they explore the Western Frontier of Pandora to reconnect with their lost heritage. In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, you will play as a Na'vi who was abducted as an infant by the RDA and trained in The Ambassador Program (TAP) to serve human interests on Pandora. When the RDA evacuated Pandora during the Battle of the Hallelujah Mountains (as seen in the first Avatar movie), you were put into emergency cryosleep. You wake up 15 years later, finally free from the RDA, but lost and unfamiliar with your home world.

Story Trailer

Piranha Games revealed MechWarrior 5: Clans today, a new stand alone MechWarrior game coming to PC, Xbox and PlayStation consoles next year. MechWarrior 5: Clans, while retaining the MechWarrior 5 designation, represents a transformative step forward in the MechWarrior 5 franchise. MechWarrior 5: Clans linear campaign will be an evolution of gameplay and storytelling in the MechWarrior series, experienced from the perspective of Clan Smoke Jaguar in the pivotal conflict known as the Clan Invasion starting in the year 3050.

Teaser Trailer