Anno 117: Pax Romana review

It wasn’t built in a day, famously. But this latest Anno in a long-running series of accessible and endearingly twee city builders doesn’t take that old adage overly to heart. There’s complexity to its supply chains and economy, but it takes a ruthless writers’ pen (quill?) to the systems-bloat and perplexing menu rabbit holes found…

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A few Redditors faked the recent Ryzen 7 9700X3D benchmark leaks and explain ‘why you can’t trust online bench databases’

Last week, a pretty special result showed up in a widely accessible benchmarking website. It seemingly suggested a new AMD Ryzen 7 9700X3D was on the way. If that sounds too good to be true, it’s because it was. Instead, it was a product of some techies “playing around with Linux.” Turns out they “accidentally…

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Todd Howard says that Fallout 4’s cinematic dialogue system ‘really did not resonate’ with players, even though Bethesda ‘spent forever’ working on it

It’s been a whole dang decade since Fallout 4 launched, so long that the world has slipped significantly closer to nuclear Armageddon than was the case when Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic RPG stepped out from Vault 111. The anniversary has got Bethesda creative chief Todd Howard in a reflective mood, and he’s revealed some interesting details about…

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‘He was scared s***less’: Baldur’s Gate director was so panicked after playing Final Fantasy 7 that it changed the entire shape of Baldur’s Gate 2 (and nearly every RPG since)

I might be a Baldur’s Gate 1 stan, but it’s undeniable that Baldur’s Gate 2 is the more important of BioWare’s original duo of games. Heck, it created a mould for RPG design that studios still embrace today, at least in part. Just look at recent RPGs like Avowed or The Outer Worlds 2, and…

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The Elder Scrolls 6 is ‘Still a long ways off’ says Todd Howard, but the slyboots says the Oblivion shadowdrop was ‘A test run’ and a select few have already played it

Bethesda has all sorts of irons in the fire right now. There’s the second season of the Fallout TV show on the horizon, a 10th-anniversary version of Fallout 4, whatever’s happening with Starfield, and Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online MMO stuff bubbling away contentedly in the background. But more likely than not, all you…

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