In an interesting development of Arc Raiders unexpectedly polite solo raiding culture, some players have decided one way to tell if someone’s secretly plotting to fill your back with lead is to judge their outfit. Are you wearing the Ryder skin in its black and orange styling? Well, you might be shot on sight. “Pro…
“Demonschool is 100% human made”. GenAI seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue at the moment, and a recent flashpoint involves Embark’s ARC Raiders, which uses an AI-based text-to-speech system to generate spoken dialogue trained on the voices of human actors. Embark caught some flak for this approach (which was also used in…
The lull before a new expansion hits World of Warcraft has been dragged out for months in the past, but this time Blizzard isn’t going to hold back the new stuff for very long. A patch is coming on December 2 that will act as a prologue to the Midnight expansion, and it’ll mark the…
Valve announced a new range of hardware overnight, in the form of the Steam Frame, Steam Machine and Steam Controller. It’s probably the biggest PC hardware news we’ll see in 2025, but Australians can be forgiven if they feel a little unenthused. After all, Valve is famously slow to release its hardware into Australia: the…
A colleague and I recently travelled to Valve to get a behind-the-scenes look at the company’s upcoming product launches. Before we entered the building, we were already discussing one of the products yet to be announced, the Steam Frame. For many, this announcement will not come as a complete surprise, as intrepid detectives glean information…
It’s not exactly a surprising outcome, but it is now official: RuneScape players have voted overwhelmingly to remove the game’s ‘Treasure Hunter’ microtransaction system, and so it’ll be cut out completely on January 19, 2026. “January 19th is the start of a new era for RuneScape, powered by a shared desire to see this game…
The Steam Frame has a heap of new features to dig into, but I want to focus on one here: foveated streaming. It sounds like a medical issue but I assure you, it’s all about ensuring the Steam Frame’s wireless connection is strong, stable, and appears high quality. The Steam Frame offers a few ways…
In case you somehow missed it, the big PC gaming news of the day is Valve’s new slate of hardware: The Steam Controller, Steam Frame VR headset, and most notable of all (I think, anyway), the Steam Machine, a cubical, console-esque little PC that aims to bring Steam libraries to the living room. It’s a…
With the launch of the Steam Frame, Valve’s new VR headset, SteamOS will be made available for Arm-based systems. This is required to support the new headset, which is using a Snapdragon processor to run games without requiring a tether to a gaming PC. However, it’s also a sign that times are changing, as systems…
Have you ever been bored? Have you ever been like, really bored, bored in the way where it feels like you’ve been removed from participating in the rest of the world, like time is moving differently for you than it’s moving for other people? How about depressed? Have you ever felt like everything you do…