5 years after it closed for good, Gearbox confirms that the hero shooter Gigantic is coming back for a ‘limited time throwback event’-
Gigantic is—or was—a free-to-play “strategic hero shooter” that went into full release in July 2017 and almost immediately fell into misfortune. In November 2017, developer Motiga was closed, and just a couple months later publisher Perfect World announced that the game would suffer the same fate in July 2018. But now, improbably and unexpectedly, it looks like it might be making a comeback: Gearbox has confirmed that invitations to a “limited time throwback event” are legit.
The event first came to light in the Gigantic subreddit, after numerous diehard fans shared an email that went out today inviting them to a three-day Gigantic play session, set to run October 5 to October 7. “Relive the good old days of playing this beloved strategic hero shooter” the email exclaimed.
Calling Gigantic “beloved” might be a bit of a stretch—its peak concurrent player count on Steam was 8,303, according to Steam Charts, but six months later that number was down …
MSI’s PBO Enhanced Modes take Ryzen 9000 series chips off the leash, giving you up to 15% extra performance-
AMD’s Ryzen 9000-series processors are out and about. In general, the family’s power efficiency is a highlight, and they’ve rightfully taken some places on our list of best CPUs, but there are those out there that wish for a little more on the performance side of things. Enabling AMD’s own PBO2 setting will give you a bit of a boost, but MSI’s engineers have been hard at work too, and the company is releasing new motherboard BIOSes with what it calls PBO Enhanced modes, which take things a step further.
MSI’s PBO Enhanced features three modes, simply named 1,2 and 3, with Mode 3 being the most aggressive. According to MSI, the Ryzen 9 9950X can gain nearly 10% in the Cinebench R23 multithreaded test when Mode 3 is enabled. Not a bad gain at all.
At default settings, the 65W Ryzen 7 9700X is the most power constrained chip in the Zen 5 lineup, and when it’s taken off the leash, it’s multithreaded performance jumps by an impressive 15%.
MSI didn’t release single thre…
Researchers create Dune-like pee-pants for the next generation of astronauts and maybe even wealthy, overly ‘dedicated’ gamers-
One of the coolest things about the tech world is when science fiction becomes science reality. A research team in the US has developed a system, in the form of a snug-fitting pair of pants, to collect urine and extract potable water from it. The Dune-like technology is aimed at replacing the diapers worn by astronauts during spacewalks and perhaps even PC gamers, too dedicated to their monitors for kill streak-breaking toilet trips.
Spacewalks, or extravehicular activities (EVAs) as they’re more correctly termed, are extremely challenging affairs. The spacesuits that the astronauts must wear not only have to combat the dangers of micrometeorites and extremes in temperatures, but they also need to sustain a person working non-stop for eight hours or more.
Toilet breaks aren’t feasible, as it takes many hours to get in or out of a spacesuit. So adult-sized diapers, called Maximum Absorbency Garments (MAGs), are used to collect any waste generated during the EVA.
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Rainbow Six Siege player hacks drone that hacks drones to somehow kill player with their own claymore-
There was a time when the most complicated device in Rainbow Six Siege was an iPad that detects heartbeats. I imagine all of the CS:GO players who bounced off of Siege after getting spotted through a wall in 2015 would run for the hills if they knew what was possible in 2023. Thanks to Siege’s newest attacker, Brava, you can’t even trust your own claymores not to kill you.
Case in point: this downright absurd clip from Reddit user DansomeWoja, in which they manage to kill an enemy without ever firing a gun or being in the same room as them. DansomeWoja, who is playing the defender Mozzie, kills the opposing Brava player with a drone. Except the drone itself doesn’t deal the killing blow: Mozzie uses it to hack and detonate a claymore. And that drone? It doesn’t even belong to Mozzie. That’s actually Brava’s drone!
a_bravas_worst_nightmare from r/Rainbow6
Rainbow Six Siege is wild, I’ll explain: The new piece of kit Brava …
Today’s Wordle answer for Monday, April 22-
Come take a look at a fresh hint for today’s Wordle, giving your guesses the guidance they need and turning those tricky yellow and grey letters into winning greens. Or is the bottom of the April 22 (1038) board feeling a little too close for comfort? Then click straight through to today’s answer instead.
Ah, that was just what I needed after the past few days. No drama, no last-minute twists, no strange surprises, just a short, straight line from my first guess to the answer to today’s Wordle. Is there a better way to start a Sunday? I don’t think so.
Wordle today: A hint
Wordle today: A hint for Monday, April 22
Technically today’s answer is an acronym, although most people treat it as a word. Either way, in science this is a device capable of emitting a powerful beam of light, and in sci-fi stories this is usually the coloured shot coming out the end of a futuristic gun.
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Is there a double letter in Wordle toda…
The guy who made Daggerfall Unity is working on his own original Daggerfall-style RPG with a custom engine-
It took nearly a decade of work, but Daggerfall Unity—the best version of Bethesda’s biggest RPG—finally crossed the finish line into a full 1.0 release in January. With that Herculean task complete, creator Gavin Clayton is moving on to a new project: Making a Daggerfall-style game of his own.
“I’ve already started working on a new game, but it’s going to be something of mine this time,” Clayton said in an interview with DualShockers. “I do genuinely love that old style of game. The thing I’m building is in the same vein. You’re talking big world, complex systems, mod support, that’s all of the stuff I want to explore, and I want to take that experience of Daggerfall Unity and put it in the new game.”
Clayton said he’s wanted to make games since he was very young, but the opportunities were very limited back in the 1980s and ’90s, and so he went into IT instead because it was “sensible and down to Earth,” and something he could make a proper living from.
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The launch of Star Citizen’s biggest update has been a shambles, and players are frustrated- ‘This is embarrassingly bad’-
The neverending development of Star Citizen continues, and just before the weekend Cloud Imperium Games pushed out an extremely meaty update that promised to nudge the game towards the level of persistence it’s been promising since the Kickstarter days.
“Alongside adding immersive careers, stunning locations, and thrilling gameplay, the latest patch holds the key to true in-game persistence—one of the biggest hurdles in the pursuit of a living universe that evolves alongside its inhabitants,” CIG said before the update’s arrival.
With Persistent Entity Streaming, the update promised to let players leave their mark on the universe, resulting in things like items remaining after death, cargo being represented by actual physical crates that can be moved around, and the introduction of the salvaging profession and its accompanying systems.
All welcome additions, at least for those players who could actually experience them. With so many people w…
DayZ’s just hit its highest-ever player count a decade after its standalone release-
The original DayZ mod was released in 2012 to near-instant popularity and, come December, it’ll be ten years since the standalone game entered early access on Steam. Originally launched in a pretty barebones state, the idea was always to build-out DayZ over the years to come and Bohemia Interactive has done just that: with a sizeable patch last week leading to the game’s largest number of concurrent players ever: 69,449, per Steamdb.
To briefly dig into the numbers, DayZ was hitting up to 45,000 concurrents back when it was first released, though from 2015 until late 2018 its player numbers seem to be in a managed decline (with a few odd spikes). But from 2019 onwards the game’s ongoing popularity with big streamers like Shroud, along with judicious use of free weekends and a couple of Humble Bundle appearances, has seen player counts rise and keep on rising: I believe the previous peak before this was on January 19, 2023, at around 63,000 players.
It’s har…
US announces $42 billion plan to make high-speed internet universal by 2030-
The White House today rolled out a plan outlining a road to universal high-speed internet access in the United States by 2030. The plan will draw on some $42 billion in funding from the $1 trillion 2021 infrastructure laws that Biden championed.
“It’s the biggest investment in high-speed internet ever. Because for today’s economy to work for everyone, internet access is just as important as electricity, or water, or other basic services,” said President Joe Biden at the White House on Monday.
The plan will be based on a Federal Communications Commission map, recently released, that highlights major gaps in access. Presumably it will also be based on the new broadband standard in the US of 100Mbps downstream, 20Mbps up.
News agency Reuters reports that the plan will most funding will hit larger states like Texas and California, as well as those with large underserved rural populations, like Virginia, Alabama, and Louisiana. It also includes money for US territories,…
Two more studios announce layoffs as 2024 continues to suck for game developers-
The seemingly endless litany of layoffs that’s plagued the game industry through 2023 and into 2024 continued today as two more studios have confirmed cuts to their workforces: Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive has let 40 employees go, while Lord of the Fallen publisher CI Games has reduced its workforce by 10%.
The CI Games layoffs reportedly came largely at the expense of the company’s marketing team, although a GamesIndustry report says its Hexworks and Underdog internal studios were also affected. CI Games CEO Marek Tymiński later confirmed the report, saying: “To preserve business strength and stability, CI Games has made the tough but necessary decision to implement a targeted round of redundancies, affecting approximately 10% of employees across the company.”
“We would like to thank each of them for the part they’ve played during their time with us,” Tymiński said. “Further business optimisations are being made to the organisation’s …