2022’s best survival city builder will let you ‘customize your faith’ with a new religion system-

When survival city builder Farthest Frontier launched into early access in 2022, players noted a pretty big omission. City building games, especially those inspired by the medieval period, typically have religious buildings like churches or chapels that can be built near homes to provide a satisfaction or happiness bonus for citizens.

The lack of religious buildings in Farthest Frontier was deliberate. “If we ever incorporate a faith system of some kind, I think it would be best if it was a customizable system where you name the faith and decide its bonuses/features,” Crate Entertainment designer Zantai said at the time.

You can now dispel the “if” in that statement, because the new system is coming to Farthest Frontier in August, as revealed in a Twitch stream hosted by Zantai earlier today. In the 0.9 update, players will be able to build a massive temple in their city that will let you “customize your faith” by filling it with religious relics that give …

Narrative game studio Die Gute Fabrik has ‘halted production’ because it can’t find funding for a new project-

Indie studio Die Gute Fabrik, developer of the award-winning “mutant soap opera” Mutazione and the narrative adventure Saltsea Chronicles, has “halted production” due to an inability to find funding for its next project.

Die Gute Fabrik actually stopped work on February 19, according to the announcement, and used its “remaining runway” to give its employees a month of paid time “to catch their breaths.” The studio is still seeking funding so it can continue work, but made its situation public so employees can announce that they’re looking for new work.

“Die Gute Fabrik ApS will continue to operate to service our past IPs,” the studio said. “Production may resume under Nils Deneken as CEO should the company find funding in future years, and if so we hope to welcome back our excellent collaborators where possible.

“We’ve been making games since 2008, and are so proud of the work we’ve put out and the people we’ve made it with. Thank you for playing our games.”

Riot’s Project L fighting game finally gets a proper title, will hopefully be out sometime in 2025-

More than four years after it was first announced to the world, Riot’s League of Legends fighting game (previously known as Project L) has a proper title. It’s called 2XKO, and Riot aims to have it out in 2025.

Alongside “classic one-on-one competition,” 2XKO—which in my head is pronounced as “tooksko”—supports 2v2 co-op tag-team play, which Riot says will involve more than just calling in your partner when you’re eating a beatdown. 

The game’s Fuse system, for instance, will enable different pairs of fighters match up their abilities in different ways, providing them with unique combos in matches: Pairing ultimates, for example, or performing two assist actions back-to-back instead of just one.

Riot said 2XKO will offer “faster fun” through streamlined controls and mechanics, and that it will embrace “the values and ethos of the FGC with a grassroots approach to building and connecting players to the broader fighting game community.” As previously…

Reports of RTX 4090s being sold in China without GPUs scares the heck out of me-

If you’re in the market for a second hand RTX 4090, pay attention to who you are buying it from. And where. 

According to reports popping up on Chinese-language forums including Chiphell and HKEPC (Via Guru3D) some buyers are coughing up big money for Nvidia’s best gaming card, only to receive it without a GPU or memory.

Scammers are gonna scam, but there’s good reason to believe this particular one is linked with the ban on the sale of the RTX 4090 in China. It’s not a stretch to believe the AD102 GPUs of the cards in question have been removed and repurposed in order to meet some of the insatiable (and hence lucrative) demand for GPUs for AI and server applications.

A quick check over at Newegg shows the cheapest RTX 4090 is an MSI Gaming X Trio at $2,099. That makes the official RRP of $1,599 look like a bargain. And it’s all down to demand for AI GPUs and the China ban. Simply put, Nvidia can make more money from L40 and RTX 6000-series cards than it can f…

The return of Fortnite’s original map brings a record-setting 6M concurrent players to the battle royale island-

Fortnite has set a new all-time concurrent player record, with tracker fortnite.gg reporting 6.1 million concurrent players as the game’s all-time peak yesterday, November 4 2023. That new total of 6,172,463 people online at once might be chalked up to the Fortnite Chapter 4 release, Fortnite OG, which brings back the original island and weapons, along with some early gadgets, from the heady days of Fortnite’s 2018 success. As of press time, Fortnite is holding at just over 5.5 million players.

Fortnite’s OG season does clearly hold a lot of positive memories, then. The main mode, Battle Royale, peaked at 3.1 million players yesterday. There were also nearly a million people playing Ranked Battle Royale and Zero Build Battle Royale modes, respectively. So lots of desire for that original, unranked Fortnite experience, but more than a little curiosity for what could have been—the game definitely didn’t have a ranked mode back in 2018.

“It’s a little funny to think t…

This RTX 4070 gaming laptop has the best OLED display I’ve ever seen for the money-

In the vast ocean of Intel Raptor Lake-powered gaming laptops, it’s a rare sight to see one sporting the latest Meteor Lake processors. This 2024 edition Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 boasts a Core Ultra 9 185H chip, with six P-cores, eight E-cores, and 22 threads in total. With a max power consumption of 115 W, it’s easier to keep cool than the Raptor Lake laptop processors, too.

It would be nicer to have more P-cores, but they use lots of power, and six is enough for most games. There’s even a little NPU (neural processing unit) inside the CPU, to help with basic AI tasks like Microsoft’s Copilot, but it’s not powerful enough to meet the Copilot+ PC requirements.

Besides, most of the performance will be controlled by the RTX 4070 graphics chip and even though it’s limited to a maximum of 105 W, that’s fine for 1080p gaming.

Yes, the display has a resolution of 2560 x 1600, so you’re more likely to be playing at 1440p+ resolutions but don’t worry—the latest games su…

Grab an RX 7800 XT or RX 7700 XT and you can pick two games to keep from Lies of P, Avatar, Starfield and, my fav, CoH3-

We all like free games, right? Especially ones that normally have big price tags that have been squished right down to zero. Well, AMD has done precisely that by offering up to two complimentary games, when you buy a Radeon RX 7800 XT or Radeon RX 7700 XT from one of the quality retailers.

Okay, so spending several hundred dollars, pounds, or dollarydoos on a new graphics card is kind of stretching the realms of what ‘free’ actually means, but the choice of games on offer is well worth it. If you buy one of the aforementioned graphics cards from a qualifying retailer (check the list here), you can choose two from Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Starfield, Lies of P, and Company of Heroes 3.

That first one is a rather typical Ubisoft open-world affair but it’s a graphics tour de force and a perfect way to show off your new GPU’s capabilities. Starfield can look very pretty at times, too, but only if you like staring at the stark cold of space. Lies of P is pretty much Blood…

Today’s Wordle hint and answer #702- Monday, May 22-

Improve your daily Wordle game in just a few minutes with our helpful selection of tips and tricks, or get yourself out of a tricky spot with our freshly written clue for the May 22 (702) game. If you need to save your win streak, you’re in the right place because today’s Wordle answer is ready and waiting just below.

I had a really close call today. Lots of cases of the right letters in the wrong places, with most of my follow-up guesses leaving me in pretty much the exact same situation. The good news was by the time I really started to panic, I’d ruled out enough letters and valid spaces for the yellows I had floating around the board for it to all make sense and unearthed today’s Wordle answer through a process of elimination.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Monday, May 22

Wordle needs you to enter the name of a small domed hut or shelter made entirely from cut blocks of snow if you want to win today. Three of today’s five letters a…

Today’s Wordle answer for Sunday, August 11-

Your Sunday Wordle help is right here. Let our hint for the August 11 (1149) game guide your guesses, or go look at the answer to today’s puzzle if things aren’t going your way. Whether you’re enjoying the process or just want to take a look at the winning word, we have it covered.

Oh, I almost had that in two. Then I almost had it in three. Then I actually had it in four. I’m sure being one letter off the right word is worse than being nowhere near. I can’t help but feel like I was only a finger-slip away from a lightning-fast Wordle win there.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, August 11

This is a small, round, dense and unsweetened cake. It’s often split into two and eaten with jam and cream. Nobody can agree on the order of these items, or how to pronounce this word.  

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle h…

UL announces the 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark for you to punish your rig with-

UL Solutions, the makers of the ever popular 3DMark benchmarking software, has announced 3DMark Steel Nomad. It’s set to replace the now aging Time Spy benchmark, and it’s sure to bring even the best rigs to their knees, as any new 3Dmark software should!

Steel Nomad is a heavy non-ray tracing cross-platform benchmark. It will support DirectX 12 via Windows, but also macOS and iOS using Metal, Android using Vulkan, and Linux using Vulkan. So far, only three screenshots have been teased and they certainly look good. For now we don’t have any information on the structure of the test(s), though a CPU test would seem likely.

Why doesn’t Steel Nomad support ray tracing? Well, there are the Speed Way and Port Royal benchmarks for that. Despite the industry and Nvidia in particular shouting about ray tracing from the rooftops, enabling it still incurs a hefty performance hit, and mid-tier graphics cards don’t yet have the horsepower to run ray traced games consistently, particu…