Month: September 2024

Ark 2 has been delayed until late 2024, according to a post on the dinosaur survival game’s official site. While a specific date for the sequel to Ark: Survival Evolved has never been announced by Studio Wildcard, it was planned for sometime this year.

“After careful consideration, we have decided to delay the sequel’s launch to the end of 2024, when it will still launch exclusively on Xbox, Game Pass, and Windows distribution platforms,” the post reads. “We’ve put much thought into delaying ARK 2 for the betterment of the final product and the team’s well-being. This news will be disappointing to many—we feel it too—but we’re confident this heavy decision is the right one.”

Reasons for the delay include the complications of using the relatively new U…

If you’re here ready to debate my declaration of “the best-named game of all time,” I’m going to suggest you’ve never played Satisfactory, because it embodies its name perfectly. It’s the kind of pun you write on a white board to cause an entire room to spontaneously groan, because everyone wants to roll their eyes but also knows they’ll never better it. When the developers at Coffee Stain were first working on Satisfactory, though, they weren’t all in agreement that the name was destined. In fact, it was a bit of a fight.

“This was before I worked at Coffee Stain, but I know the story,” community manager Snutt Treptow said in a recent interview with PC Gamer. “When we were brainstorming we had a bunch of ideas, a bunch of different names. Satisfactory ended up being on…

You hear that? That’s the sound of people everywhere saying ‘they can do that?’ after reading how researchers used imaging, computer vision, and machine learning to read ancient Roman text within what most would think amounts to little more than a stick of charcoal by looking at it.

The 2000-year-old scroll is one of more than 800 discovered in the ruins of Herculaneum, a Roman city buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Carbonised by the eruption, each scroll is incredibly fragile, and any attempt to open one up to see if it’s in any way legible has ended in a crumbling mess. Yet researchers have been keen to unlock the secrets stored in these scrolls, and it looks like machine learning might have proven the key to doing so.

Firstly, the scroll read by researche…

First reported by Japanese site 4Gamer.net and shared in English by Genki_JPN on Twitter, on November 16, NieR creator Yoko Taro and producer Yosuke Saito gave a presentation about the series as part of the South Korean G-Star conference. At the end, Saito promised that the series would continue as long as Yoko Taro was still alive and kicking, but they had nothing concrete to share at the moment.

The talk largely focused on the development of NieR: Automata, with intriguing anecdotes like how the game’s distinctive character art was targeting a Japanese audience, with hopes that it would capture a “niche” market elsewhere. The two also dished on what they see as the competing, yet also complimentary demands of a game’s producer versus a creative lead.

Operating off multiple…

Payday 3 is rapidly approaching its September 21 launch date and Starbreeze has revealed two new characters joining the team for the delightful heists to come. They’ve also announced their roadmap for the first entire year of DLC, focusing on the four expansions that will comprise the Year 1 – The Bad Apple releases. These being the ones you get some of or all of for the more expensive Silver and Gold versions of the game.

Besides the DLCs Payday 3 will have releases of seasonal events, playable characters, new enemy weapons, an upgrade to Unreal Engine 5, cosmetics to wear, and the general updates to quality of life you’d expect from an always-online game. It’ll also gain nebulous “new features.”

For now all we really know are some themes for releases, as names are “yet to …

You know what makes a gaming keyboard great? Lubed switches. That might not have been what you thought I’d say, but when you get going on a board with such slick switches, it’s typing bliss. That’s why I love the Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless—it offers all the important features for a PC gamer with the added benefit of lubed switches. 

The Strix II 96 is also $144.99 over at Amazon for Black Friday right now.

I waxed lyrical about how great a set of finely lubed mechanical switches are in my Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless review, but I’ll give you the skinny here, too. A drop of lube inside each switch makes for a much smoother actuation and a satisfying clack. Each switch is responsive, smooth, and you can happily glide between them for work involving …