geosoco

As most PC gamers will have noticed right away when launching the game, there is no Starfield FOV (Field of View) slider in the game's settings. This is unfortunate since the default setting appears to be 75, which is lower than preferable, especially for those who experience motion sickness when playing in first-person view.

Thankfully, several mods are already starting to appear on Nexus, including some that allow players to increase the Starfield FOV value. User Hellstorm102 provided a downloadable StarfieldCustom.ini file that needs to be placed in the Documents/MyGames/Starfield folder to enable the increased Field of View. The provided file sets FOV to 100 for both first-person and third-person view, though any user can modify the .ini with different values as desired.

Likely, Bethesda will eventually add an in-game Starfield FOV slider at some point, but mods will have to do in the meantime.

...

Just after a judge granted an injunction against Texas’ adult content age verification law on 1st Amendment grounds, a judge in Arkansas did the same to that state’s social media age verification law. Trade organization NetChoice had challenged the law, and the court basically gave them a complete and total victory.

Just like the ruling in Texas, the opinion here is a good read. As with Texas, Arkansas relied on Tony Allen, who represents the age verification providers, to claim that the technology works great and the laws are fine. As in Texas, the court here is not convinced.

Also, as with Texas, the state in Arkansas had challenged the standing of the organization bringing the suit, and the court rejects that challenge. We’ll skip over the details because it’s just not that interesting. The important stuff is the 1st Amendment analysis.

First, the court looks to see if the law should be rejected on 1st Amendment grounds for being too vague (the Texas court talked about the vagueness issues, but didn’t rule on that point, only using the vague language to emphasize how the law was not narrowly tailored). Here, the court explains in detail how Arkansas’ law is way too vague:

...

Starfield Premium owners now have access to the game in full and are testing their internet download limits with its massive 120 GB file size, but a few hopeful gamers are going to have to wait regardless of how much they paid in advance. Intel Arc GPUs currently cannot play Starfield, with varying symptoms ranging from the game not starting to it taking 30-40 minutes before presenting the player with a jumbled cacophany of texture mayhem. Users report that the executable does launch in the background, and that during the half-hour that it's visible in Task Manager it can consume as much as 30 GB of system memory, before either crashing or finally presenting the game menu.

Lenovo is unveiling the Lenovo Legion Go, the company's first Windows gaming handheld device, to give gamers more freedom to game however—and wherever—they want. The Lenovo Legion Go is designed for gamers who will settle for nothing less than top-tier specs and visuals on their handheld device. Along with the micro-OLED-equipped new Lenovo Legion Glasses and new Lenovo Legion E510 7.1 RGB Gaming In-Ear Headphones, the debut of the Lenovo Legion Go is a marked expansion of the Lenovo Legion ecosystem of gaming devices, monitors, accessories, software, and services that empower gamers to immerse themselves in their games.

• The new Lenovo Legion Go brings Windows PC gaming power to a handheld mobile form factor, powered by AMD Ryzen Z1 Series processors that bring games to life on its 8.8-inch Lenovo PureSight Gaming Display.
• For gamers who want to take their Lenovo Legion Go portable gaming experience to the next level, the new Lenovo Legion Glasses leverage micro-OLED technology to provide a large screen viewing experience that fits in the pocket.
• For a truly immersive gaming experience, the new Lenovo Legion E510 7.1 RGB Gaming In-Ear Headphones offer hi-res 7.1 surround sound audio with a multifunction inline controller.

YouTube Trailer

SteamOS 3.4.9 has just been released to the Stable channel as an update to all Deck users. The update contains the following changes: Fixed a GPU driver crash with Starfield Fixed hangs on reboot when switching from upcoming Beta OS releases.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Unexplained Caribbean and European trips that cost taxpayers more than $90,000. A $600 sports coat paid for by an event organizer. A $45 office Christmas cake taken as his own.

These are among the perks that Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s former employees say he reveled in while using his office in ways that now have him facing a federal criminal investigation and potential ouster over allegations of corruption.

It's a stormy night. The lights are off. The doors are locked. Somewhere, a woman is singing. Somewhere else, a phone is ringing. The sinks are full of gunk and there are children hiding in the cupboards. Oh, and the darker stretches of floor are covered with writhing tentacles. This is Holstin, a Polish survival horror experience in which you merrily rove an isolated town that, based on 14 minutes of fumbling around in exactly one very unwelcoming house, already seems a match for Silent Hill in terms of existential squalor. A public playtest is underway, and I've got a trailer for you through the jump.

Among Holstin's highlights, if you can call them that, is its clever not-as-throwback-as-it-looks visual direction. At first you might take it for a 2D isometric pixelart game, but then you rotate the view and realise that these are 3D sets, with dynamic lighting and interactive objects sometimes hidden behind corners. Get into a shootout, and the view plunges to a nifty over-the-shoulder perspective.

Youtube Trailer

Officially unveiled at this week's Panic Games Showcase, Arco is a triptych of revenge stories set across the deserts, plains and forests of a fantastical, South American-style landscape. It's a part of the world we don't often get to see in games, and its stunning pixel art (and tiny cute little llamas) instantly caught my eye when I got to play an early mission from it at last week's Gamescom. Made by four developers spread across the globe, the official genres listed on its Steam page describe it as a tactical turn-based action adventure RPG where you guide four separate heroes in their fight against the ominous sounding Red Company. But just saying it's turn-based is doing Arco a disservice, I think, as it's also a little bit real-time, a little bit simultaneous turns, and all pretty brilliant, if you ask me. Here are some very early impressions of it.

When it launches next year, Arco will be split across three separate storylines, which all meet up at the end, artist Franek Nowotniak explains. Each character will have their own abilities and specific playstyles to get to grips with, but my demo session was focused on tribal warrior Itzae who had a mean dagger stab and whirling sword swing. We meet her trying to take a shortcut through a forest, where she stumbles upon an old temple ruin guarded by a fierce demon. The boss itself is one of those classic treasure chest mimics - you know the sort, with the sharp, toothy grins and lashing tongues - but that's jumping ahead a little bit.

Trailer Link

Starfield's pressurized doors are open for Twitch streamers a few hours before its early access release and it's already shot to the top of the concurrent viewer charts on the platform.

Bethesda's sci-fi RPG is currently holding onto around 350,000 viewers
(with a 500K peak), which places it right under the Just Chatting category. Top streamers, like Shroud, CohhCarnage, and AnnieFuchsia, already made their characters and are off completing missions and combing rooms for resources.

Starfield is here, and after dozens of hours floating in space our reviewer Chris Livingston liked it—but didn't love it. "Starfield is Bethesda's biggest RPG ever, and it shares even more DNA with Skyrim and Fallout 4 than I expected—but it ultimately falls far short of the greatness of both of those games," he wrote in his 75% Starfield review.

As one of the most anticipated games of the year, there are unsurprisingly already tons of Starfield reviews online from other publications that have been playing the game for the last week. Although there are some notable exceptions: Bethesda didn't provide early review code to UK-based publications Eurogamer, The Guardian, and our sister magazine Edge until shortly before or just after today's embargo. That means there are still more reviews to come—but with 97 reviews already collected on OpenCritic, there's already a wide spread of reactions, from "this could be one of the most ambitious games ever made" to "a mile wide, but an inch deep."

Here's what the critics are saying.

We’ve been talking a lot by the rush of states to push for age verification laws all over the world, despite basically every expert noting that age verification technology is inherently a problem for privacy and security, and the laws mandating it are terrible. So far, it seems that only the Australian government has decided to buck the trend and push back on implementing such laws. But, much of the rest of the world is moving forward with them, while a bunch of censorial prudes cheer these laws on despite the many concerns about them.

The Free Speech Coalition, the trade group representing the adult content industry, has sued to block the age verification laws in the US that specifically target their websites. We reported on how their case in Utah was dismissed on procedural grounds, because that law is a bounty-type law with a private right of action, so there was no one in the government that could be sued. However, the similar law in Texas did not include that setup (even as Texas really popularized that method with its anti-abortion law). The Free Speech Coalition sued over the law to block it from going into effect.

Judge David Alan Ezra (who is technically a federal judge in Hawaii, but is hearing Texas cases because the Texas courts are overwhelmed) has issued a pretty sweeping smackdown of these kinds of laws, noting that they violate the 1st Amendment and that they’re barred by Section 230.

We’ve been talking a lot by the rush of states to push for age verification laws all over the world, despite basically every expert noting that age verification technology is inherently a problem for privacy and security, and the laws mandating it are terrible. So far, it seems that only the Australian government has decided to buck the trend and push back on implementing such laws. But, much of the rest of the world is moving forward with them, while a bunch of censorial prudes cheer these laws on despite the many concerns about them.

The Free Speech Coalition, the trade group representing the adult content industry, has sued to block the age verification laws in the US that specifically target their websites. We reported on how their case in Utah was dismissed on procedural grounds, because that law is a bounty-type law with a private right of action, so there was no one in the government that could be sued. However, the similar law in Texas did not include that setup (even as Texas really popularized that method with its anti-abortion law). The Free Speech Coalition sued over the law to block it from going into effect.

Judge David Alan Ezra (who is technically a federal judge in Hawaii, but is hearing Texas cases because the Texas courts are overwhelmed) has issued a pretty sweeping smackdown of these kinds of laws, noting that they violate the 1st Amendment and that they’re barred by Section 230.