Ahead of the launch of the upcoming expansion, Destiny 2: Forsaken, Bungie has revealed all of the new super abilities heading to their game. There’s one new super for every subclass of Titans, Warlocks, and Hunters, meaning everyone has a brand new ability to use against the enemies that feature in the update.
Speaking of enemies, the update adds a new faction in the form of the Scorn. There’s also new exotic weapons, a new map for upcoming mode Gambit, and plenty more hidden away in the expansion, which is set to launch later this year.
Check out our list of the on PC.
Courtesy of (via ) we now know what exactly each of those nine new supers will do. They’re a pretty mad bunch, with fire tornadoes and void explosions and electricity bolts and all sorts. That’s not too surprising though - not only do you need something to help turn the tide in your fight against new enemies the Scorn, but Bungie need something to encourage some of Destiny’s lapsed players back to the game.
Anyway, on to those supers. Titan Strikers have Banner Shield, which absorbs enemy attacks. Sunbreakers get a siege hammer, creating a flaming maul that leaves flame tornadoes where it lands. Strikers get Thundercrash, allowing them to leap enormous distances and hit a targeted area like a missile strike.
Microsoft has brought back its old Intellimouse design after around ten years in the wilderness, releasing the new Classic Intellimouse. So, what’s changed? Design-wise... nothing. In fact Microsoft actually used the original Intellimouse 3.0 CAD files from 2002 to manufacture the brand new rodent.
It was the only way Microsoft could “really pay the right respect and build the right product,” Simon Dearsley, the devices design director at Microsoft, told me when I spoke to him about the new mouse. We also got to talk about what’s changed, and why now is the perfect time to bring back one of the most iconic old-school gaming mice from the beforetimes, the long, long ago.
Check out our pick of the on the planet right now.
“Actually, the only reason we stopped selling it sometime in the late 2000's,” explains Dearsley, “was because the original chipset supplier that supplies the sensor actually end-of-lifed the sensor platform. And, at the time, I think the company’s priorities were a little bit different and so we just decided to end-of-life the product.”
But with the huge interest in the Intellimouse design it’s now time to bring it back, most especially with the number of fans the mouse has in the Chinese gaming market.
“We did know that clones of it, and copies of it, are being sold in pretty large volumes in China, because there is a huge gaming market over there,” says Dearsley. “We just thought it was an interesting time for us to do something with our legacy and celebrate the technological changes that we've made in mice technology since then.”
Destiny 2 classes are the foundation of your character and campaign. Bungie’s solar system is home to three core classes: Titans, Warlocks, and Hunters. There are subclasses within these main roles, meaning there are both broad and fine strokes in regards to how you build your character. Want to know what those are? We’ve got the full lowdown on every subclass, plus details on the new Destiny 2 Forsaken supers and subclass paths.
Each subclass has three core abilities that will recharge over time: a grenade, a class ability, and a melee power (you'll always be able to make a melee attack, but it'll have an additional effect when your melee power is charged).
Lock and load with our favourite .
Each subclass also has a unique and devastating 'super' ability on a much longer cooldown, and a choice of two perk trees, which will further modify all these powers. Destiny 2 features three brand-new subclasses, which join three reworked ones returning from the original, and another three from The Taken King expansion. That's right - Stormcaller, Sunbreaker, and Nightstalker are all in Destiny 2.
The Destiny 2 classes are:
Josef Fares, game director of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and prison-break adventure A Way Out, has confirmed that he will once again partner with Electronic Arts for the development of his next game. Fares, who made headlines earlier this year for his expletive-filled speech at The Game Awards, says Hazelight Studios has been working on the new title for a few weeks.
A Way Out was published as part of EA Originals, the company’s indie program. It’s not entirely clear whether or not the new title will be published under that label, or the partnership has changed in the wake of Hazelight’s success with A Way Out.
Check out our list of the best on PC.
In an interview with , Fares stated that “yeah, we’re with EA. It’s no problem. It’s super-good support. I don’t care what publisher I work with, it’s going to be the same. This is how I work: I respect the economical aspect but nobody fucks with the vision - it’s very, very important. And they know it at EA now, and they’re super supportive.” Fares spoke recently about just , which likely helped this new partnership develop.
Fares announced that he was working on a new game on back in April. Understandably, that means that Hazelight are “just in the early pre-production stuff,” but should “go full production” later this summer. Don’t expect to see the new game anytime soon though, as Fares says “maybe in two or three years we [sic] show something.”
In multiple publicly available documents Intel has confirmed the existence of 9000-series Coffee Lake desktop processors, but in a predictable fit of chronic shyness, it has either now nixed access to those pdfs or erased any mention of the new CPUs from them.
The new 9000-series Core i5 processors popped up in a new processor microcode update document, where it added five new chips (including one overclockable K-series CPU) in the product name section under the Coffee Lake S code name. Intel also published a secondary document detailing the identification information for all the Coffee Lake processors and added in a pair of new Core i3 chips to the mix too.
If you’re after a new chip now, these are the today.
Now, probably down to its general reluctance to talk openly about unreleased product, Intel has rid the world wide web of any reference to the 9000-series chips, at least from any official Intel source. Luckily there are a host of sites out there who snapshotted the docs so we don’t miss out.
is one such site and has both docs plain to see. Interestingly the official documents only reference the Core i5 and Core i3 versions of the upcoming refresh, but this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about the new processors.
When is the Cyberpunk 2077 release date? CD Projekt Red revealed loads of Cyberpunk 2077 trailers and gameplay info at E3 2018 - here are all the latest details.
For years we waited with no sign of a new Cyberpunk 2077 trailer and gameplay details, but CD Projekt Red has revealed masses of new details on the upcoming futuristic RPG, and all at once. Their huge E3 2018 demo showed that Cyberpunk 2077 is the answer to perhaps the biggest game development question of the decade: how do you follow up something like The Witcher 3? Polish RPG powerhouse CD Projekt Red is looking to replicate its successes with Eastern Europe’s beloved fantasy book series by turning its hand to the futuristic world of Cyberpunk 2077.
While we wait for CD Projekt Red’s next masterpiece, check out the adventures you could be having in the meantime with our list of the .
CD Projekt Red’s videogame is an adaptation of the Cyberpunk 2020 pen-and-paper game. It's a first-person RPG set in a gritty, vast future metropolis known as Night City. Like The Witcher 3, it is an adult story, touching on drugs, violence, and social politics. It’s almost certainly going to be the most talked about game of whatever year in which it finally releases. Here’s everything we know about Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk 2077 release date
Graphics card and ASIC miner orders are to see a sudden short-lived surge due to heavy flooding in the Sichuan province in China. As reported by Chinese-language news outlet, Economic Daily News, the area has been prime real estate for cryptocurrency miners, and is the location of 70% of China’s mining systems.
There have been constant reports over the last few months of graphics card shipments reducing due to lacklustre demand, and that has been great news for gamers finally being able to pick up graphics cards for even less than MSRP. That comes only months after prices skyrocketed due to ludicrously high cryptocurrency values and memory shortages.
GPU pricing seems pretty steady for the time being, and let’s hope it stays that way until new cards arrive. Here are the around.
Various graphics card manufacturers, MSI, TUL, and Gigabyte, all expected massive shipment drops month-on-month, roughly amounting to a . Gigabyte also told investors to expect large drops in demand and average selling price over the next quarter.
But that might be changing in the short-term if damage to mining operations is as serious as some reports make out. The flooding has reportedly damaged tens of thousands of mining systems, notes the report via , which has also caused the overall hashrate worldwide to drop considerably.
Update, May 24: We Happy Few will be sold in Australia, following an appeal to overturn a ban by the country's classification board.
We Happy Few's Australian sales ban has been overturned following a successful appeal by the game's publisher, Gearbox. The game was initially refused classification in Australia due to its portrayal of drug use - We Happy Few tasks you with surviving without use of the fictional hallucinogenic drug Joy, which NPCs take to attempt to forget a shared trauma.
In a statement, developer Compulsion said that the game "explores a range of modern themes," and offers a "social commentary no different than Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or Terry Gilliam's Brazil."
Not able to play We Happy Few? Here are what we think are the .
In their , the Australian Classification Board stated that a three-member panel had unanimously determined that the game can be classified as R18+, allowing it to be sold in the country. The panel determined that the game's interactive drug use did not exceed 'high' levels, and that the game will be sold with a consumer advice label confirming its "fantasy violence and interactive drug use."
According to a statement provided to (the statement in its entirety contains some minor story spoilers), the ACB initially stated that "in the board's opinion, the game's drug-use mechanic making game progression less difficult constitutes an incentive or reward for drug-use and therefore, the game exceeds the R 18+ classification that states, 'drug use related to incentives and rewards is not permitted',
Update, July 4: The Fortnite rifts are growing. R.I.P. Tomato Town mascot
Fortnite fans will be acutely aware that there’s an enormous, reality-defying rift hovering in the sky above the game. Since it appeared on Saturday afternoon, that initial rift has grown, and a separate crack has splintered off from the main fissure.
But as well as those huge cracks in the sky, other, smaller rifts are appearing across Fortnite's map. One showed up at Motel, while another formed at Lonely Lodge, swallowing up the sign welcoming players to the rural site on the eastern edge of the map.
Check out our list of the on PC.
Now, a third rift has appeared, this time at Tomato Town. The small location is arguably most 'famous' for its enormous pizzeria, which I struggle to believe can have been a sustinable business. There's just one house in Tomato Town, but that building is serviced by a gas station, a Taco shop, and the biggest damn pizza place you've ever seen. On its roof, the restaurant features an enormous statue of its mascot, a smiling anthropomorphic tomato. Or at least, it used to.
The Rift has swallowed Tomatohead whole, leaving an empty plinth where the fruity mascot used to dwell. It's a sad sight, and one that players have quickly turned into a memorial, with several peaceful gatherings taking place overnight. You can check out a before and after of the restaurant in the tweet below.
Stealth games occupy a curious niche in PC gaming. Occasionally, the best stealth games are their own thing, a result of a developer channelling all of the mechanics of a game into the suspense and satisfaction of killing, stealing, and infiltrating unnoticed. Most of the time, though, stealth is just one of several means by which you can navigate a game, as you consciously opt for the path of the shadowy rogue or incisive assassin over more forceful approaches.
Any game that features stealth is eligible for our best stealth games list, but it needs to do it damn well (sorry Skyrim, you had your chance. Sorry Assassin’s Creed, you had about 20 chances).
For those moments when you get spotted and your impotent rage boils over, try the PC's .
The best stealth games highlight that neat joy of entering a space and leaving it unchanged except for the briefcase you were told to extract, or that one person who was your target now laying dead without anyone having noticed - the alarms going off at the precise moment you coolly walk away from the scene undetected. Nothing beats the thrill of doing things on the down-low.
Here are the ten best stealth games on PC:
League of Legends' next big content patch is 8.14, introducing a whole host of new skins. It does, however, look like things are quite quiet on the balance change front right now, so there are no tweaks to champions, items, or runes just yet. That should change soon though, as lead champion designer Meddler says a hotfix for the newly-reworked Aatrox should appear soon.
What we do have, however, is a grand total of seven new skins. As well as gemstone exclusive Hextech Poppy, adding to a generous roster of Hextech champions (although you can only access her throguh LoL's crafting system. There are also six skins celebrating Samsung Galaxy's victory at Worlds 2017, one for each player (including their sub). Particular highlights, in my opinion, are the Taliyah and Xayah skins, although I do particularly enjoy Mega Gnar scoffing noodles from out of the Summoner's Cup itself. Who needs chopsticks?
Want in? You'll need the .
Have a look below for all the information we've got, straight from the PBE.
LoL Patch 8.14 Release Date And Downtime
We don't know the exact release date for patch 8.14 yet, but patch 8.13 is a three-week patch, so expect 8.14 on Wednesday July 19. We'll update when Riot do, but keep an eye on the for the latest updates.
Overwatch characters are the backbone of Blizzard's ever-evolving... thing. This incredible team-based hero shooter has its own metagame, patch structure, test phases, and massive, massive community. 27 men, women, robots, heroes and every combination therein are available to play, and if you're just jumping in, or returning from an extended hiatus, it can be a bit confusing. In Blizzard style, most of the heroes are viable, but who are the best Overwatch characters? A few pointers will help you on your way to better scores, more kills and wins, wins, wins.
The roster won't be changing again until later in 2018 so now's the perfect time to start picking favourites. Below you'll find descriptions and videos for each hero, broken up by their role as offense, defense, support or tank, as well as recommendations for who to start as, an alternate choice just in case, and one to put your skills to the test and make flashy play of the games with.
As for what's coming next, here's everything we know about .
Like we previously mentioned, most heroes are viable to play, and so it’s very much a case of finding a hero who suits your playstyle, and then making the most of their skills in both quick play and competitive modes.
League of Legends’ Clash mode has been delayed until further notice. Clash, which was due to release earlier this year, underwent some pretty catastrophic errors during its launch weekend, and may not return in 2018.
According to a post by lead producer Riot New001, the issues with Clash’s launch stemmed from the fact that the League client was created quickly, and has had to scale up to the game’s size over time. When Clash launched, however, it became “the only experience in League that asks the platform to create a huge number of games simultaneously.”
Clash was a bit of a bump in the road for LoL, but it still makes our list of the s.
Riot had, of course, undergone several public betas in the run up to Clash, but, as is now abundantly clear, weren’t quite prepared for that level of demand. The company proceeded to roll out tests in smaller regions, but there were still problems in Vietnam, Turkey, and EU West.
Riot is working on fixing those issues, breaking down the entire game in an attempt to debug the game mode and make it work in the long run.
Rainbow Six Siege just got a new batch of cosmetic items, offering summer-appropriate attire perfect for staying cool through the hotter months - and look cool doing it. If you log in to Siege right now you’ll get two of the new Sunsplash for free, giving you a pair of cosmetics from the 12 item collection.
These packs - they bear a striking resemblance to Capri Suns, incidentally - offer the chance at items like Blue Hibiscus, which features Lesion in a Hawaiian shirt. Then there’s Scuba Six for Dokkaebi, an aptly named wetsuit, as well as our favourite, Summer Cool, which gives Lesion a popsicle stick to chew on.
Stay competitive by staying current with the .
You’ll also have a shot at some colourful weapon skins, and some nifty charms ranging from diving masks and flip flops to a very angry Tiki idol, on top of all the other skins in the package.
The full collection will cost 2700 R6 credits, or just over $20 USD. Not a terrible value, despite the relatively small selection of skins.
Legendary Sunsplash items
Easy Train - IQ headgear
Summer Cool - Lesion headgear
Epic Sunsplash items
Blue Hibiscus - Lesion uniform
AMD has won this battle, and Nvidia is going to have to step up its Battlefield 5 optimisations if it wants to win the war. In our testing the RX 580 massively outperforms the supposedly equivalent GTX 1060, despite BF5 now being a bought and paid for GeForce game.
The Battlefield 5 closed-alpha has just closed this very afternoon and we’ve spent a good while playing, killing, capturing, and testing graphics cards. It’s a tough life. The most interesting thing to come out of our closed alpha playtime, however, is just how differently the two mainstream GPUs from Nvidia and AMD perform.
If you want to know what the around is, you know where to come.
In general graphics testing the GTX 1060 and RX 580 regularly trade benchmark wins, but normally only by the slightest of margins. With the Battlefield 5 closed alpha, however, there is a sizeable disparity in performance, with the RX 580 some 33% faster in our tests. That’s not the only bad news for Nvidia either, as the DirectX 12 implementation in the game does its GPUs no favours either.
It does really look like all the efforts that AMD put into making sure its GPU architecture was catered for, with Battlefield 1 being a flagship Radeon Gaming title, are still paying off with Battlefield 5.
Nearly 80,000 Fortnite cheaters are in for a nasty surprise, as a bit of adware has been discovered inside a popular Fortnite hack. The fact that malicious software is, indeed, malicious should come as no surprise, but the breakdown of how it’s been distributed is still enlightening.
That breakdown comes courtesy of Andrew Sampson, CEO of game streaming platform Rainway. On June 26, the company found “hundreds of thousands of error reports to our tracker” coming in at once. Those errors all involved calls to various ad platforms, and were sudden enough to be an immediate cause of concern.
Get a non-infectious free ride with the .
The folks at Rainway found the one thing all the error-reporting users had in common was that they played Fortnite - so, with suspicions about the root of all this, they started looking up Fortnite hacks to find the particular culprit. Among hundreds of programs - many of them featuring their own malicious extras - they found the one causing the error.
After trawling YouTube for popular cheats, they found a hack that promised free V-Bucks and an aimbot as an alluring two-for-one deal. It installed a root certificate on their test device and altered Windows to route all web traffic through itself - as a cybersecurity specialist might call it, a successful man in the middle attack.
Rainway contacted the file hosts, who quickly took it down, though not before it had accumulated more than 78,000 downloads. Of the two ad networks they contacted in relation to the attack, SpringServe worked to help identify and remove the “abusive creatives,” while Adtelligent has not responded to those reports.
As we all know by now, Fallout 76 is going full multiplayer, which leaves a whole bunch of questions in the air about how servers are going to work. Bethesda’s kept a lot of the nitty gritty details vague, and it seems that’s partly because they haven’t decided how it’s all going to work - and that includes, for the moment, parts of how server synchronization will work.
Todd Howard says that players will see synchronization at the server level, with players seeing the same conditions at the same time. But the team hasn’t decided how far that will go across that server’s digital West Virginia, as there are “benefits” in not having the entire server synced.
Keep an eye on all the biggest .
That info comes to us via , with a machine-translated version of an interview conducted by Italian outlet - hence why the detail is a bit fuzzy, on top of Howard’s reticence to provide more.
Some of those details will be ironed out in the upcoming beta, but this vagueness may be by design. Bethesda wants the online experience to be largely seamless, without server browsers to look at, and with simple migrations of your camp to new instances whenever you log in. Of course, those of you who are more particular about your multiplayer experience will be waiting a bit longer for fo.
The is coming up fast, and it appears there’s plenty of details left to finalize before that day comes.
Update, July 3: Another restriction on Fallout 76 griefers has been revealed - a protection for low-level players.
You won’t have to worry about getting griefed when you’re making your exploratory steps in Fallout 76, because you’re safe from other players up until level five. That’s one of many precautions against griefing Todd Howard mentions in a new interview.
The rule against killing low level players may change, Howard says, but Bethesda’s aware that everyone’s worried about aggressive players ruining the experience for everyone. With those precautions in place, the team wants to allow players the freedom to either engage in PvP or avoid fights if that’s their preference.
Perhaps Fallout 76 will make it into our list of the on PC.
There’s little detail on how the level restriction works beyond that, and we are working through the oddities of Google Translate - the original interview comes through Italian outlet , as brought to attention on . Even with the limitations of machine translation in mind, the gist of the answer is clear enough.
As mentioned in on the making of Fallout 76, aggressive players will be given a wanted level. Another griefing protection is that the game's PvP system is more like a challenge system than an all-out brawl.
According to a tweet from Bethesda's senior vice president Pete Hines, "PvP is kinda like issuing a challenge [sic] to someone." You can check that tweet out below:
There’s a new Destiny game coming this September, and if you’re reading this you probably won’t be playing it. Titled Destiny: Guardians, this edition of the game is exclusive to South Korea, with separate servers and a new version of the Eververse - complete with a new shopkeeper at its helm.
Tess Everiss has been replaced by Yuna, perhaps in an effort to entice prospective buyers with a slightly more anime-like aesthetic. (Something that would work just as well in the West as in South Korea, I imagine.) There’s been some suggestion that this version of the Eververse might offer goods with more competitive advantages than in Destiny 2, though that could be coming from a translation quibble.
Take aim at the .
Aside from the Eververse alterations, this is pretty much Destiny 2 as you already know it. Guardians will feature all the game’s content up through Forsaken when it launches on September 5. Future content will launch simultaneously on both versions of the game. The news first came up through Korean esports outlet .
The extra point of interest for Western Destiny players, as notes, is that the presentation announcing this game also mentioned Festival of the Lost, the Halloween event that’s yet to make a return in the second game. With content launches scheduled simultaneously across both versions of the game, we’ll likely see the event’s return in Destiny 2 this October.
Update, July 3: Phoenix Point's new backer build is out, and you can get 15% off of your purchase.
Phoenix Point’s second backer build is out today, giving early purchasers a playable taste of the upcoming strategy game from X-COM creator Julian Gollop. If you can’t wait for the game’s full release next year, you can buy into early access with the Luxury Digital Edition, and get 15% off by using the promo code LUX15.
We’re not sure how long that promo code will last, so if you want into the current backer beta you might want to jump on the opportunity before it expires.
Check out our list of the .
You can prepurchase at the official . The LUX15 promo code can be entered at checkout.
The first of the new features in the newly released build is the game’s fourth class, the Technician. The new character comes with a deployable turret, as well as a brutal melee attack - he can use the mechanical arms on his back to damage and stun nearby enemies. For a more conventional approach, the Technician can also use his Assault Rifle and grenades.
Phoenix Point Backer Build Two also brings The Armadillo to the game. The new addition is an armored vehicle with a roof-mounted turret, and is the first drivable vehicle to be added to the game. Characters can access it through a rear hatch, and proceed to drive it around the map, although its sheer size means that there will be a few places it can’t reach.