After launching Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice in August last year, developer Ninja Theory reported “better than expected” sales by October. Following his warm review, Leif Johnson explained why games like Hellblade are eroding the border between indie and triple-A. Hellblade has since earned a place on our coveted best stories in PC gaming list—all of which underscores its place on this platform. Antoniades adds: “We were so surprised that so many people played the game with mouse and keyboard, a

As Kotaku noticed and EA confirmed, the trait was recently renamed to “Erratic.” Kotaku actually called out the trait as problematic in a March opinion piece noting that while “insane” Sims behave randomly, real-life mental illness doesn’t work that way. “It’s toned down in [The Sims] 4, but in general Insane sims are more aggressive and less liked by other sims. The April 17 patch notes make no mention of the change, but EA confirmed in an email that the Insane trait was renamed to Erratic. The

Here’s a look at the full specs:Compared to the previous generation, the 970 Evo has a few noteworthy changes. Compared to the 960 Evo 500GB, the 970 Evo 500GB beats it by 17 percent in our overall performance metric. The 970 Evo (and 970 Pro, though I haven’t tested that yet) are the latest additions to the family, offering clear improvements in most aspects. The Samsung 970 Evo 1TB costs 80 percent more for the same capacity, and that can be a bitter pill to swallow. The Samsung 970 Pro only b

Shudderwock, the most talked about legendary card in Hearthstone’s newly released The Witchwood expansion, is getting a soft nerf and a much-needed fix in an upcoming update, Blizzard announced today. The number of Battlecries he can repeat is being capped at 20, and more importantly, the speed of his animations is being doubled. Likewise, the speed of Lifedrinker’s Battlecry, the linchpin in the Shudderwock burn combo, will also be sped up. It’s the kind of problem that shouldn’t exist regardle

To Leave isn’t shy about its themes. Its protagonist, Harm, is a young boy with bipolar disorder (the more modern term for manic-depression) who hopes to use his magic door to solve the world’s problems and his own. Harm’s ‘drive’ meter also sounds like an interesting way to express emotion in a game. To Leave is out on PS4 today, but the PC version is due at a later, currently undisclosed date. If you’re interested in discovering more games that deal with mental illness, have a look at the insi

“I wanted to make a AAA tower defense game, since the genre had only been in mods and flash games so far. I wanted to make Defense Grid because that’s a game I wanted to play.” Defense Grid: The Awakening was originally set to release on Xbox Live Arcade, through a publishing deal with Microsoft. “We wanted to Kickstart a Defense Grid expansion, and if it funded enough we could do Defense Grid 2. A decade later Defense Grid: The Awakening remains one of the most beloved tower defense games ever

With the big Destiny 2: Warmind reveal out of the way, Bungie dropped a horde of images showing some of the new Exotics coming to the game, plus many that are returning from D1, as well as shots of the new Warmind-themed armor and Frozen Hive enemies. The Suros Regime auto rifle and Claws of Ahamkara gloves, for instance, are both being brought in from the original Destiny. Destiny 2: Warmind – ExoticsImage 1 of 14 Image 2 of 14 Image 3 of 14 Image 4 of 14 Image 5 of 14 Image 6 of 14 Image 7 of

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire has big boots to fill when it releases next month, and will be bringing old and new tricks to the party-based RPG format of the highly-acclaimed Pillars of Eternity . Afterwards, area designers and narrative designers like Carrie sit down together to get on the same page before a narrative designer gets to work on the actual dialogue and descriptions. I asked Patel how narrative and area designers collaborate to create a culture, both in the characters and the loo

Just under two years after its successful 2016 Kickstarter, 16-bit 2D platformer Fox n Forests will launch next month on May 17, developer Bonus Level Entertainment announced today. You play as Rick the Fox, naturally, and team up with Patty the Partridge on a quest to prevent a mysterious evil from creating a ghastly fifth season. The devs cite old Castlevania and Zelda games as major inspirations, but while Fox n Forests features similar artwork and a classic good-versus-evil story, it’s built

This morning Bungie rolled open the giant steel blast doors on the upcoming Destiny 2 expansion Warmind. Expansion players will be able to dive into a new raid lair, but the surprise addition is a major new end-game activity called Hive Escalation Protocol. Ultimately players will square off against one of five unique bosses, who will rotate through the mode on a weekly basis. Changes to several exotic weapons were also showcased: Some, like Graviton Lance, we’ve already seen previously, but oth

Graphics card prices are starting to inch down towards MSRP, but there is still a long way to go. If you’re thinking about buying a pre-assembled system, you can snag a budget gaming PC from Costco for $600. If you pop the hood on this desktop, you’ll find an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 processor paired with 16GB of DDR4-2400 RAM and a Radeon RX 560 graphics card. One possible angle to consider is if you’re in need of a new gaming PC, you could buy this now and upgrade the GPU later, once prices settle dow

Take a look at Reddit user Niels_Kooloos clips to see one of the celestial objects for yourself. In addition to the UFO stars, someone did some decorating on a rooftop at Tilted Towers. Reddit user colinix has a bird’s-eye of the scene here, and Reddit user mateybob took some screens of the signs strewn about the scene. One sign could be read as a prediction that the comet will hit tomorrow, but seeing that they scrawled out “Today” already, I wouldn’t take that sign as a guarantee. PvE players

The US Supreme Court voted 7-2 to uphold an administrative review process that has helped technology firms like Apple, Google, and Samsung to invalidate patents without taking the disputes to court, USA Today reports. At issue here is a reviews process that Congress created in 2011 to speed up patent disputes and deal with potentially questionable patents. While technology companies have an obviously vested interest in patent disputes and how they are handled, it was a legal squabble between two

Today the company announced the launch of its 970 Pro and 970 Evo SSDs, both of which ramp up performance over the previous generation drives. Samsung says the 970 Pro can deliver up to 3,500MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 2,700MB/s of sequential write performance. Meanwhile, the 970 Evo is capable of hitting the same read speed, and comes close in write performance, delivering speeds of up to 2,500MB/s. “The sequential write speeds represent an enhancement of up to 30 percent over

The most notable is a hard nerf for Lion, who has seen a near-100 percent pick rate throughout the Pro League since his release. The graphs map all the operators based on their pick rate and win rate to find anomalies that need correcting. On one end of the spectrum you have Tachanka, who has the lowest pick rate of any operator as well as the lowest win rate. On the other end sits an operator like Lion, who has an extremely high pick rate and win rate, and Ubisoft wants to do something about th

(Image: © Intel)It is no longer accurate to refer to Intel as the world’s top semiconductor player, at least in terms of sales and market share, according to Gartner. After 25 years on the throne, Intel’s reign has come to an end, yielding the semiconductor crown to Samsung amid a booming memory market. Norwood noted that two-thirds of Samsung’s semiconductor revenue growth in 2017 came from memory sales. Market share positioning does not have a direct impact on gaming, though indirectly, it’s c

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire will be supported by three post-release expansions, Obsidian announced today, with the first, a journey to the island home of a doomsday cult, set to arrive in July. Entitled Beast of Winter, the expansion will also open the doors to The Beyond, “a mysterious dimension populated by ancient souls and filled with devilish challenges.” Acknowledging my obvious preference for exploration and storytelling, I’d say that final part sounds a little more interesting than t

There have been plenty of sales on SATA SSDs recently, but not so much for NVMe/M.2 drives. They’re much faster, but also usually demand a much higher price than SATA models. If you’ve been looking for an M.2 drive, Corsair’s 128GB MP500 is only $64.99 right now. In real world testing, the MP500 achieves sequential read speeds of about 2,200 MB/s, and sequential write speeds of 1500 MB/s. You can read more about the performance of M.2 drives in our guide to the best NVMe SSD.

In January, despite some confusion, Bandai Namco assured us existing owners of the original Dark Souls would not receive money off its incoming Remastered edition. Now, the publisher has confirmed that they will. Billed as a “loyalty discount”, owners of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition can pick up Dark Souls: Remastered at half-price when it hits Steam on May 25, 2018. Moreover, the Prepare to Die Edition—which costs £20/$20 at present and comes with the base game’s DLC—will be removed from V

Revealed at last year’s E3, Rebellion’s Strange Brigade is a co-op shooter that’s filled with traps, puzzles and supernatural baddies. First, here’s that:Alongside up to three pals, Strange Brigade tasks players with taking on scores of “mythological menaces” as they uncover secret caves and buried treasures. The above trailer touches on much of what Strange Brigade is about, but the following eight minute-long, post-E3 2017, developer-led video provides a far better sense of how the game works