The Fridge

Discord is rolling out facial scanning and ID checks in March for everyone who doesn’t want to be locked into a ‘teen-appropriate experience’

“Eugh,” we said, back in 2025 when Discord began “an experiment” in which some users were asked to scan their faces or IDs in order to verify that they were old enough to access sensitive content. But experiments, generally speaking, are tests, and tests, generally speaking, are something you do in pursuit of a particular…

Read More

Hearthstone’s ‘year of change’ begins with a twist on one of WoW’s biggest expansions, and a bucket of free cards

Being set in the Warcraft universe lets Hearthstone’s developers do pretty much whatever they want with familiar moments in its history, so its next expansion puts a dark spin on a critical time in World of Warcraft. Hearthstone: Cataclysm is what would’ve happened if the big evil dragon, Deathwing, took over WoW in 2010 and…

Read More

Steam now lets early access devs show a 1.0 release date, then says eh, maybe leave it blank: ‘Just because this feature exists, does not mean you should or must use it’

If you want to make god laugh, tell him your plans. If you want to make Gabe Newell laugh, tell him your planned 1.0 launch date. Good news: that second one’s getting easier, because Steam has implemented a new feature that lets early access devs slap that date right there on the store page. But,…

Read More

Fallout 76’s design director is still defending its original absence of NPCs: ‘At the beginning, we wanted it all to be player-driven’

Fallout 76 has enjoyed a massive turnaround since its launch in 2018. What initially seemed like a folly, stripping away so much of what made Fallout such a long-lasting, beloved series, has, over the years, transformed into a quality sandbox prequel. The big improvements really began with the Wastelanders update, which reintroduced an essential part…

Read More

Fallout’s original creators say that Fallout 3 and 4 aren’t quite what they would’ve done, but ‘sales say people love what they did’

It might be an unpopular thing to observe—please do not throw tomatoes at me—but whether you like it or not, Bethesda has spun a huge success out of the Fallout franchise, even while shuffling further and further away from its classic RPG roots. Ow, ouch! I asked you nicely to not throw tomatoes at me!…

Read More