Blizzard is making a huge change to WoW: combat add-ons will be eliminated, with new features coming to replace them

World of Warcraft senior game director Ion Hazzikostas dropped a bomb in a Blizzard broadcast today, one that many suspected would someday hit: At an undetermined point in the future, WoW will stop allowing add-ons to read combat events or auras. Currently, WoW’s most popular mods, including all damage meters, boss encounter information systems such…

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Outraged Redditors discover they have been subject to a secret chatbot experiment that found AI posts were ‘three to six times more persuasive’ than humans

Outrage on a Reddit forum is hardly a novel concept. Outrage at AI is likewise not exactly a major newsflash. But in a new twist, the latest unrest is a direct result of Redditors being subject to an AI-powered experiment without their knowledge (via New Scientist). Reportedly, researchers from the University of Zurich have been…

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Randy Pitchford says Borderlands 4’s new release date ‘is literally 0% about any other product’s actual or theoretical launch date,’ and you know he’s talking about Grand Theft Auto 6

Game delays are a common part of life in videogames, but game advances—where a game’s release date is moved up instead of back? Not so much. It happens, but it’s a rarity—in most cases, developers are hammering away on games practically right up to the moment of their release. So eyebrows understandably went up yesterday…

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A murder-mystery horse MMO baffled me so much that I spoke to gaming’s resident horse expert—turns out they’ve been holding out for their Stardew Valley moment for years, and I’m on their side

Dear reader—and potentially, dear horse enthusiast—I want to clarify something. While I do like animals, I am nowhere near a ‘horse person’. The only experience I’ve had with one of humanity’s oldest animal friends is a very terrified stint on a farm in the rural south of England when I was very little. Which is…

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Ex-GTA dev says PC makes scads of cash now so hopefully GTA 6’s ‘PC version will be closer behind’ consoles—that is if ‘decision-day’ at Rockstar doesn’t give us a last-minute delay

Rockstar might have come down like a tonne of bricks on the personal blog of former Rockstar North dev Obbe Vermeij (who worked at the studio from 1995 to 2009), but apparently it can’t stop him from tweeting. To mark yesterday’s 17th anniversary of GTA 4’s release, Vermeij took to X to exposit on his…

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Intel is trying out on-chip water cooling too and I’m just happy I’m not the one having to place liquids so close to expensive electronics

If there’s one thing about the AI boom that doesn’t make my eyes roll or make me feel a disquieting sense of impending doom and existential dread, it’s the fact that many of the computing improvements for that industry will hopefully (emphasis on ‘hopefully’) trickle down into the PC gaming sphere. In-package liquid cooling seems…

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‘We were literally held hostage’: Overwatch 2 players are finding the matchmaking in Stadium tough, but the devs say they’re working on a couple of solutions

It’s been a couple of weeks since Blizzard launched Stadium in Overwatch 2, and since then, it’s been an enjoyable, albeit bumpy ride. Apparently, the new mode only uses internal MMR for matchmaking, but even still, players are encountering a bit of mismatch. “We were literally held hostage in Stadium,” one player says. “Got trapped…

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Eric Barone’s been playing lots of chess and reckons Elon Musk’s ‘tech tree’ idea isn’t awful: ‘What if someone did a Balatro treatment… a chess roguelike?’

PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon recently sat down with Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone to discuss everything from Jojamart to his next game, Haunted Chocolatier. One question was what Barone himself is playing, and the man is as old school as it comes. “Well recently I’ve been playing chess which is a great game,” says Barone….

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