Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the upcoming new addition to BioWare’s long-running fantasy RPG series that used to have a much cooler title, will include an array of combat difficulty options—including one that disables death, and its attendant downsides, entirely.

A new Game Informer preview has a closer look at Veilguard’s difficulty options, which at the most basic level include three broad settings: Storyteller, for those who are into it for the narrative; Adventurer, which is presumably a more challenging balance between story and combat; and Nightmare, which is self-explanatory. Players can switch between Storyteller and Adventure mode at will, but Nightmare is a permanent choice, so make that move at your peril.

For those who like to fiddle, there’s also an Unbound mode, which enables individual adjustment of features like wayfinding, aim assist, combat timing (to make parrying easier or more difficult), enemy health, and how much damage they put out. A full-on auto-aim option is available, as is one  that prevents death from occurring outright.

Game director Corinne Busche told the site that none of those options are cheats: “It’s an option to ma…

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Baldur’s Gate 3 had a long early access period—opening its doors in October 2020 before finally dropping in August 2023, almost three years (1,031 days, to be exact) later. It was a vastly different game to what it is now. For instance, I remember my inner D&D rules lawyer being very upset that firebolt made a damaging surface—that misstep, as well as a few others, were corrected for the better, producing what I’ll happily call one of the strongest RPGs we’ll see this decade.

The success of those fixes stem from Larian’s approach to early access, which is rooted strongly in player feedback, adjustment, and constant maintenance. While attending BAFTA’s “An Evening with Baldur’s Gate 3”, Larian Studios co-founder and CEO Swen Vincke, writing director Adam Smith, and lead writer Chrystal Ding were asked by interviewer Jane Douglas whether they believed in early access as the future of game development.

“I don’t think [early access] is the future of, because you never know what the future will bring,” Vincke answers. “For us, it’s been really good—I heartily recommend it, but you really have to mean it when you go in there. You hav…

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I have good news and bad news for Grand Theft Auto fans eager to get their hands on the next game in the series: Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive confirmed in its latest quarterly financial report that Grand Theft Auto 6 is still on track for release in the fall of 2025.

The latest all-is-well update comes as part of Take-Two’s Q1 FY2025 earnings release, which includes a list of the company’s current future releases:

So that’s the good news: The fall 2025 release window, which was first revealed in May as part of Take-Two’s 2024 year-end financial report, remains intact. The bad news is that, as you may have noticed, there’s still no indication of a PC release. GTA6 is obviously going to come to PC at some point, but based on the series’ history we may have a longer wait for it. Grand Theft Auto 5, for instance, launched for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in September 2013, but didn’t come our way until April 2015.

Unfortunately, Take-Two is a little, let’s say, reluctant to share any further information about Grand Theft Auto 6 at this point. When asked about the current state of development during the Q&A portion of today’s investors call, an…

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Prepare yourselves for a 24-core laptop processor. Over at CES 2023, Intel has revealed its next-generation mobile chips based on the Raptor Lake architecture. Among them, its new high-performance 55W parts named the HX-series. 

The tippy top of the HX-series is the Core i9 13980HX, a 24-core, 5.6GHz mobile part that looks to be even more overkill than the last.

This Core i9 is basically ripped right out of a Raptor Lake desktop processor. It’s been resocketed with the laptop-friendly BGA socket (and a bloody massive footprint versus the slimmer U-series) yet otherwise the specs scream desktop-grade processor. It offers 24 cores in total, that’s eight Performance-cores (P-cores) and 16 Efficient-cores (E-cores), and puts it on a level-footing with the Core i9 13900K we’ve familiarised ourselves with on the desktop.

If it already sounds like overkill, there’s more. The Core i9 13980HX will run up to 5.6GHz Max Turbo P-core clock. That’s only 200MHz shy of the Core i9 13900K. Consider the Core i9 13980HX’s 55W power envelope and it makes you wonder if the extra 200MHz was really worth the 253W that the Core i9 13900K is known to pull from the wall. …

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Arrowhead Games has said time and time again as of late that, when it comes to Helldivers 2 patches, it’d be slowing down its cadence to deliver more on quality—and assuming there’s not some catastrophic bug lurking in the shadows, it’s clear by this latest patch that the studio meant it.

This morning’s update for Helldivers 2 is absolutely massive—so massive, in fact, that I’m not going to be able to cover everything here, though you can always head to the Steam news page and rifle through it yourself. Until then, here’s your quick debriefing, soldier.

At a glance, the largest change here is an across-the-board set of pseudo-armour penetration buffs to the game’s higher-calibre guns—as explained in a follow-up blog from former CEO, now-CCO Johan Pilestedt.

According to Pilestedt, “durable” body parts (which he characterises as big, chunky bits of the model that nonetheless have “non-vital organs”) were taking roughly the same amount of damage from both small arms fire and heavier calibre rifles. This led to bigger guns such as rifles and machine guns feeling like pea-shooters, which is something that should now be addressed.

R…

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There’s a prevailing narrative among Call of Duty fans that the standard, 6v6 Call of Duty doesn’t get as much attention from Activision as its free-to-play battle royale cousin, Warzone 2. While Warzone players enjoy map updates, franchise crossover modes, and frequent balancing changes, those playing Call of Duty the old fashioned way (and pay $70 to do so) settle for the occasional new map, gun, and playlist update.

For once, it’s traditional 6v6 Call of Duty getting more love on patch day. Modern Warfare 2’s Season 2 Reloaded patch, out today, is packing a new “core” multiplayer map, the next episode of MW2’s co-op raid, a new DMR based on the M4, and the second drop of party modes to lighten the mood after a night of ranked.

Here’s the rundown:

  • New map: Himmelmatt Expo
  • New gun: Tempus Torrent Marksman Rifle (also usable in Warzone)
  • Atomgrad co-op raid episode 2
  • Party modes: One in the Chamber, All or Nothing, Drop Zone
  • Warzone anniversary camos
  • Path of the Ronin event camo challenges
  • Party queue feature

Activision surprised Modern Warfare 2 players last month when, in a likely bid to soothe c…

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Epic combat, fantastical spells, nail-bitingly tense stealth: these are all fine, I guess, but I want to hear about your RPG’s fishing minigame. Thankfully, in the upcoming, solo-developed action RPG Mortal Crux, you get all of the above and then some. We got a peek at fishing and some of Mortal Crux’s other new features in a fresh trailer at the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted showcase.

Mortal Crux is a weird gem of a game I’ve been looking forward to for almost two years now, ever since its Resident Evil-style fixed camera interiors and Soulslike take on overhead, hack ‘n slash combat first caught my eye. Solo developer Jesse Walker has only shown more and more since that time, and Mortal Crux is shaping up to be quite the kitchen sink RPG.

There’s a real Larian quality to its attention to detail and focus on systems: fire propagates in a realistic manner, frozen enemies can be shattered for an instant kill, and you can even block spells in midair with a well-timed thrown weapon (and vice versa).

Mortal Crux’s addition of fishing is definitely a crowd pleaser, but I felt a real sick thrill at the reveal of a stealth system in this new trailer. I’m a b…

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Nvidia is reportedly abandoning its MX entry-level mobile graphics chips. This is very much in the realm of rumour, but this one predicting the death of Nvidia’s weakest notebook chip does make a lot of sense.

The MX line has been not only Nvidia’s cheapest and lowest-performing series of GPUs for laptops but also its lowest power option. However, with both Intel and AMD increasing the performance of their integrated graphics over successive generations, the MX is being pinched. From below and above.

At the other end of the scale, Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 4050 mobile chip is expected to maintain its RTX 3050 predecessor’s minimum 35W power profile. Factor in both those APUs and a 35W RTX 4050 and the result is a very narrow window in which any Nvidia MX chip can operate.

Currently, the MX line tops out with the MX570. It’s based on the GA107 GPU and sports 2,048 CUDA cores, a 1,155MHz boost clock, and a rather skinny 64-bit memory bus. Its peak 4.7 TFLOPS shader performance represents a pretty yawning shortfall versus the 8.9 TFLOPS of the fastest Radeon 780M integrated graphics in AMD’s latest Ryzen 7040 Series APUs for laptops.

While the MX570 at 25W is lo…

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