What's Coming To Xbox Game Pass

• Party Animals (Console, Cloud) - September 20
• Payday 3 (Console, PC, Cloud) - September 21
• Cocoon (Console, PC) - September 29
• Gotham Knights (Xbox Series X/S, PC, Cloud) - October 3 | Our Review
• The Lamplighter’s League (Xbox Series X/S, PC, Cloud) - October 3

What’s Leaving On September 30

• Beacon Pines (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Despot’s Game (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Last Call BBS (PC)
• Moonscars (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Outriders (Cloud, Console, and PC) | Our Review
• Prodeus (Cloud, Console, and PC)

GENERAL UPDATES

• We're implementing some updates to how we load your accessories, like gun buddies and weapons skins, so that it will reduce your load times. This will land mid-patch.

AGENT UPDATES

Sage

• We’ve updated Sage’s voice lines and added interaction lines with more Agents.

COMPETITIVE UPDATES

• There has been a wave of competitive rank boosting with bots and real players. In an effort to protect against this abuse, we have introduced restrictions where Ascendant players and higher can only invite players with Platinum rank and higher to their competitive party.
• We will continue to actively monitor botting abuse and ban any accounts suspicious of this behavior.
• For more information on our Gameplay Systems and our approach to combating disruptive behavior, check out our recent VALORANT Systems Health Series.

GAMEPLAY SYSTEMS UPDATES

• Made some back end updates for Combat Reports in order to fix instances where all the correct information wasn't showing. Please let us know if there are any weird behaviors—especially after death and pre-round start.

BUG FIXES

Gameplay Systems

• Fixed a rare bug where you would be revealed unintentionally in places that you shouldn’t be seen after purchasing a weapon.
• Fixed an issue where the Spike plant and defuse UI bar did not appear for minimal HUD observers.
• Fixed a bug where vision cones would flicker at the start of a round on Sunset.

"Dragon Age in the early days had its fair share of identity crises," Flynn says. "Was it going to be a tools-driven, modding-driven game like Neverwinter Nights? Was it going to be a big singleplayer RPG like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion?"

"Dragon Age on PC shipped with the toolset, so we did do that," Flynn says.

Dragon Age: Origins does have a quite prolific modding community that's created new party members, tons of hairstyles and armor sets, combat mods, and more. The output for Dragon Age 2 was noticeably smaller. Then BioWare switched to DICE's Frostbite Engine, notoriously difficult for modders to use, especially without official tools, and Dragon Age: Inquisition's modding community was hamstrung.

"I wish we'd kept that up and stuck to that," Flynn says of shipping Dragon Age games with modding tools. "Unfortunately we got, I'd say, a little too homogenous between Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I wish we would have kept more of a PC-centric, Neverwinter-like identity for Dragon Age."

Flynn describes the move to Frostbite as a push to standardize tools internally across BioWare's then-growing studios. "We had so many different engines for so long at BioWare," Flynn says, explaining that the studio hoped to create a more common vocabulary across teams who could share what they'd built with one another's projects.

A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google's position leading up to Stadia's closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.

"For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one platform over another. That research showed that the primary reasons why gamers choose a game platform are (1) content catalog (breadth and depth) and (2) network effects (where their friends play).

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"However, Stadia never had access to the extensive library of games available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. More importantly, these competing services offered a wider selection of AAA games than Stadia," Zimring says.

According to the statement, Google would also offer to pay some, or all, of the costs associated with porting a game to Stadia's Linux-based streaming platform to try and get more games on the platform. Still, in Google's eyes, this wasn't enough to compete with easier platforms to develop for, such as Nvidia's GeForce Now.

In the lead-up to Diablo 4's first season back in July, the game received a patch that was universally unpopular. That feels like an understatement—the community revolt was fierce enough to cause an honest-to-Lilith emergency broadcast where the devs stated: "we don't plan on doing a patch like this ever again".

Far from repeating the mistakes of the past, it seems the Diablo team are slowly reversing them entirely. As spotted by Gamesradar, a hotfix has increased the experience gain for killing monsters in World Tier 3 by 5%, and 15% in World Tier 4.

This goes some way to fixing the nerfs which had players up in arms—nerfs that crushed XP bonuses for killing higher level monsters (from 25% at three levels or higher to a piddly 15% at around ten levels higher) alongside the World Tier bonuses they're just now u-turning on.

While this is technically good news, it looks like plenty of players would prefer these missteps were never made in the first place. In a post on the game's subreddit, players took the hotfix less like a kind gift and more like an overdue admission the devs had messed up. The top-rated comment by user SQRTLURFACE reads: "Classic Blizzard. Reduce XP, then Give XP back, call it a hotfix/patch."

Intel has released the latest version of Arc GPU Graphics Drivers, Version 101.4826 Beta, which bring Game On driver support on Intel Arc A-series Graphics for Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Payday 3, Lies of P, and Party Animals games. New drivers as improve performance in Hitman Absolution and Bioshock Infinite under DirectX 11.

The driver fixes some issues in Trackmania (DX11) game, which experienced application crash during launch, as well as some an issue with Intel Arc Control, which may consume higher than expected system memory. There is still an extensive list of known issues, and we are still waiting for further Starfield fixes, as there are still plenty of issues with textures and instability.

The GPU stress test and benchmarking tool is set to receive its first major upgrade (public release) since 2007, although a beta version has been made available to download since December 2022—accessible via the Geeks3D Discord group. A late August update had the beta reaching a new milestone in version 2.0.10—fixing various bugs, expanding GPU support and adding more resolution options.

The new version of FurMark supports OpenGL or Vulkan graphics APIs, and its three preset benchmark options include 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p resolutions. Users can also customize parameters for different graphical and resolution settings. A results database is already active, but Tom's Hardware notes that it consists of data submitted by beta users, thus it does not log: "results from the previous version of the app." The development team has teased a loose later this month launch window for FurMark 2.0 in public form.

Grand Theft Auto 6 has yet to be announced, but last year, we managed to get a glimpse at the sixth main entry in the series by Rockstar Games thanks to some leaked videos. While there's been nothing since, official or otherwise, some dedicated fans have provided something new on the highly anticipated game this week.

The GTA VI document, which can be found here, is a 60-page document going over characters, interface, weapons, vehicles, and pretty much every little detail that could be gleaned from last year's leaked videos, making the document an incredibly interesting read for all fans of the series.

Very little is currently known about Grand Theft Auto 6 other than the fact that it is in the works. A few months back, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick commented on Rockstar Games' approach to development, saying that each new game of theirs needs to be "something you've never seen before on the one hand, and it needs to reflect the feeling we have about Grand Theft Auto." This was a very interesting statement, considering that, on the surface, the new entry in the series didn't look that different from its predecessors, although that could be due to the fact that the footage was captured from an early version of the game.

Today we are taking a look at what can really only be best described
as an absolutely absurd product that makes no sense if you look at it from a value perspective -- at least the kind of value that we normally talk about you know cost per frame that sort of stuff.

As part of the recent Microsoft leaks, a slate of Bethesda games - including several unannounced titles - have been revealed.

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According to this now potentially-outdated leak, a new Doom game called Doom Year Zero was planned for sometime during the current financial year. This game is slated to have additional DLC released the same year, as well as another DLC planned for next financial year.

Another title that's yet to be announced is Dishonored 3. This was listed as coming sometime during next financial year (April 2024 to March 2025). This is reportedly the same year that Bethesda also has plans to release a sequel to 2022's Ghostwire: Tokyo.

The list also states that players can expect remasters of previous Bethesda titles, such as Oblivion and Fallout 3.

Former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani is being sued for allegedly owing a law firm nearly $1.4 million, according to a Monday court filing.

The lawsuit comes from firm Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, which alleges Giuliani failed to pay them for legal services related to his defense in the Georgia election interference case and in the criminal investigation into the Jan. 6 attack.

The state’s public land leasing commission is still on track to approve drilling under parks and wildlife before year’s end, despite claims that more than 150 people’s identities were fraudulently attached to pro-fracking public comments.