Aww, it was looking so good for a second there; for the briefest moment it looked like Intel was going to make its Raptor Lake Refresh range of processors really count. Sadly, it seems like, aside from a barely relevant 200MHz clock speed bump on the upcoming 14th Gen chips, we’re not going to see the major re-spec of the new CPU lineup earlier rumours had promised.

We reported a few weeks ago on the supposedly leaked core counts of the new range of Intel processors which had been presented by a RedGamingTech video. It claimed the Raptor Lake Refresh was going to deliver higher core counts, almost across the entire CPU stack. 

And those promised extra cores weren’t supposed to be just the lower-rent Efficient cores either, with a selection of 14th Gen chips actually get…

Singularity 6, the studio behind the cosy MMO Palia, is the latest developer to suffer layoffs. Just under 50 developers, around one third of the company, have been let go according to Polygon reporter Nicole Carpenter.

Environmental artist Daphne Fiato tweeted “Whelp, I’ve been laid off,” following up with “49 people Thanos snapped”. Other Singularity 6 folk joined to reveal they’d also been laid off, including Brian Ernst who tweeted they’d been with the developer for five years. One developer revealed via LinkedIn that they’d been given the news while on vacation, according to MMORPG.com.

Singularity 6 is yet to publicly address the layoffs, with its last Twitter post happening on April 3, one day before they occurred. It’s the same situation for the official Palia accoun…

It’s another bump in the road for beleaguered heist-shooter Payday 3 as Starbreeze Studios has delayed an update that was expected to go live today and says it also needs to do yet more server maintenance.

“We’re extremely sorry for this, but we’ve chosen to delay today’s planned patch to ensure its stability,” Starbreeze tweeted. “The patch needs some changes that would require us to go through console certification again. We hope to be ready to deliver this one for mid-October.”

The update delay is the latest in a series of misfortunes and missteps that have plagued Payday 3 in its first two weeks since launch. Matchmaking problems made it difficult to get into the game, even for people who didn’t want to play online, thanks to the always-online requirement. That led to a …

There’s been whispers on the high seas about where World of Warcraft’s going after Dragonflight—with some theorists already loading up their cannons with hopes for a seafaring-themed expansion.

This was due to a few factors—several transmog sets seem to be hinting at an oceanic direction for WoW, such as the Waveborne Diplomat’s Regalia and the more recent Seafarer Pack. If this sounds a touch crackpot, Blizzard did do something similar before the announcement of Dragonflight with its Dragon Pack, which was released December 2021 before the expansion’s announcement in April 2022. 

There’ve also been some other in-game hints—the prevalence of pirate factions on the Forbidden Reach, as well as (courtesy of Youtube channel Taliesin & Evitel) an in-gam…

I’m sometimes asked why we don’t often recommend Gen 5 NVMe drives (although, to be fair, we do recommend one). Alright, I don’t get asked it that often I guess, but the answer remains the same as it was when they first came out—they’re very fast, but so are Gen 4 drives, at least for gaming. 

More than that, they’re pricey, again compared to Gen 4. And then there’s the kicker—they also have a tendency to run very, very hot.

Team Group’s Computex 2024 booth had some fresh examples of the speedy little drives, including a T-Force Pro SSD with a quoted 14,173 MB/s read and 12,757 write rate, apparently soon to be available in 8 TB configuration. I asked how much it might potentially cost, and one of the booth reps laughed knowingly, before shaking their head.<…

Few things seemed like more of a closed book to me than Vlambeer, the developer of Luftrausers, Nuclear Throne, and Ridiculous Fishing. A studio made up of Jan Nijman and Rami Ismail, Vlambeer shut its doors in September 2020 after 10 years in business, and announced “the end of Vlambeer” in a short, straightforward Twitter post. It was time for both its members to move onto new things.

Or not. Because in another post on Twitter yesterday, Nijman put out a “videogame company acquisition announcement” revealing that he now owns “100% of Vlambeer.” In a tweet around the same time, Ismail announced that he had “sold my 50% of my old games studio Vlambeer to co-founder [Nijman].” Vlambeer, it seems, is back from the dead, albeit without Ismail’s involvement.

Per a blog …

The entire game industry is still reeling from yesterday’s bombshell announcement that Microsoft—hot on the heels of its $69 billion acquisition of Activision—would be laying off 1,900 employees across Activision-Blizzard and Xbox. Inevitably, Twitter is awash with reactions highlighting the human cost, both from dazed devs waking up in a world in which they no longer have jobs, and from others wondering what this all means for the months and years ahead.

The posts by former Blizzard devs are too many to count. “After years of applying,” wrote former QA learning specialist Cole McElwain in a much-retweeted post, “I finally secure a job at Blizzard. I move to California and am welcomed with an incredible team. I couldn’t be more excited to start…

“Four mont…

Somewhere in a filing cabinet is a contract. On that contract is my name and the name of my employer—PC Gamer’s publisher Future PLC—and a job title: “news writer”. And look, if someone assassinates the JFK of videogames* I’ll be there to break it down for you, but personally? I think my true job is telling you about tiny, mini, minute, trifling little mods that I find very amusing and intensely niche. And guess what, friends? I’ve got another one for ya.

ELAF Left Hand Shield Bash is a mod from a creator named—get this—ELAF, and it rectifies one of the venerable RPG’s most glaring oversights: that players and NPCs cannot use their unarmed left fist to absolutely batter interlopers who get within punching distance. In Todd Howard’s world, the left …

Creative Assembly has posted new bits of maps and a more details on the large, free update coming to Total War: Pharaoh, including a look at its revised and expanded map that will now include the Aegean and Mesopotamia, adding Assyria, Babylon, Mycenae, and Troy as playable cultures with about 150 new and reworked units between them.

With more than twice the factions (from 95 to 189!) and nearly double the provinces (from 181 to 349!) for a very respectable map size, Total War: Pharaoh is truly looking a lot more like what PC Gamer’s Fraser Brown called it on announcement. This may well be a proper “Total War: Bronze Age” by the time they’re finished.

“This expansion renders the world approximately 1.8 times larger than the current map, offering players a vast expanse to con…

The AI arms race is heating up. Adobe is bringing its generative art tool, Firefly, to Google Bard. This will allow Google’s experimental chatbot to generate images based on user prompts, much like OpenAI’s Dall-E tool. 

Adobe Firefly’s beta launched in March. Aside from being your typical text-to-image generator, it allows users to edit images on the fly. Also coming to Bard is Adobe Express, a free photo editing software that’s popular among mobile users because it comes with pre-made design templates you can use to make social posts.

This means that you can generate an image from text with Google Bard, then edit and save it in one place. According to the press release, Firefly will become the “premier generative AI partner for Bard, powering and highlighting text-to…

Blizzard’s new specialisation, the augmentation evoker, has continued to stir up the game’s meta in weird and interesting ways. It acts as a support DPS, with most of its damage coming from buffs to its allies—a completely new playstyle for an MMO approaching its 20th birthday.

It’s super powerful—nearly a must-have for high-level content. Yet it’s been causing spats in lower-level groups due to DPS meter weirdness and the inevitable baggage of a pick-up-group community used to their personal performance being priority number one.

This bumpy introduction continues with a zany experiment documented by WoWhead. Guide writer, evoker specialist, and streamer Jereico has been cooking up a hotfix-causing strat, bringing two death knights into a raid with 22 augmentatio…

Solve today’s Wordle in a flash with our wide range of hints, tips, and practical advice. Find guidance with the February 25 (616) clue, brush up on your general Wordle knowledge with our guides and archive of past answers, or skip straight to the good stuff and read today’s answer—it really is up to you.

A good guess that turns over five greys may be a lot of practical help, bringing focus to my Wordle and definitively ruling out several avenues of inquiry, but it doesn’t do a whole lot for my confidence, especially when it’s halfway down the board. 

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, February 25

Today’s answer is nice and straightforward. You’re looking for a multiple of five today, specifically one at the higher end of common s…

Need a hint for today’s Wordle? Then you’ve come to the right place. Scroll a little way down the page, and you’ll find a fresh clue to help with the March 15 (634) puzzle, and if you’re still stuck, the answer’s waiting just below that. 

Is there anything more cruel than carefully narrowing down the possibilities, entering what you’re sure is going to be the winning guess, and then seeing four, not five, letters turn green? I was in no danger of losing today’s Wordle because of this mis-guess, but it was frustrating to see it take an avoidable extra go. 

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Wednesday, March 15

The most common use of today’s answer is to describe the act of brushing a floor (or a chimney) to remove dirt and k…