Mafia39

World of Warcraft’s developers did an abrupt about-face after largely refusing to acknowledge player feedback during the Shadowlands expansion that nearly killed the game. With the MMO’s 10th expansion, The War Within, on the horizon, game director Ion Hazzikostas told PC Gamer that Blizzard is more willing than ever to re-examine WoW’s basic systems to stay in tune with what players want.

“The last few years really have been a time of introspection and reexamination of all of the building blocks, the design DNA, of WoW,” he said. “Turning over every stone holding it up to the light and examining it and asking ourselves, ‘This clearly served us well for a long time, is it still the right thing for our players in 2024?’ 

“And in many cases the answer is yes, put the ston…

Graphics drivers are hard. This isn’t news. But Intel has revealed some interesting details regarding its own efforts and struggles to get Arc GPUs running really fast. Intel’s candour also makes us hopeful for its next-gen Battlemage graphics, hopefully appearing later this year. It isn’t giving up.

While the complexity of graphics drivers and optimising GPU performance is a well-established thing, it’s also tempting to be exasperated with Intel and its Arc graphics cards.

Sure, graphics drivers aren’t easy. But, Intel knew that going in. So, surely it put in all the work necessary to do the job properly before it launched those first Arc graphics cards in 2022? 

In practice, Arc GPUs launched with frame rates all over the place and Intel has been catching up eve…

After repeatedly gloomy news about SSD pricing, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. South Korean outlet Chosun Daily reports that the big noises in NAND memory manufacturing are boosting production.

That should mean the upwards pressure on SSD prices for PCs in recent months will ease. Reportedly, South Korea’s leading chipmakers, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, along with Japan’s Kioxia, are now ramping up production of NAND flash memory having previously cut production due to an earlier a glut of chips pushing down prices.

It was reported in late 2022 and into 2023 that all the big South Korean producers had cut production by around 30% in a bid to firm up prices. Meanwhile, WD and Micron were said to have cut production by over 50%. 

More rece…

In scenes reminiscent of the game’s 20th century heyday, where dark rumours of subterfuge and sabotage swirled around countless Russian players, a chess player has been suspended from the game and faces up to three years in jail for poisoning her opponent… on camera. 

Everything happened at the Dagestan Chess Championship on August 2 and was first reported by a Russian Telegram channel before reaching government media. Amina Abakarova, a 40 year-old player from the Russian Republic of Dagestan, was scheduled to play Umayganat Osmanova, a 30 year-old longtime rival who had beaten Abakarova into second place in a tournament the week prior. The pair had known each other for years, and had recently been involved in a close-run match that was awarded to Osmanova.

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Songs of Conquest, the really quite good and really quite pretty Heroes of Might & Magic-like that first hit early access in 2022, has reached its final form. Well, kind of. The game has finally left early access for the sunlit uplands of a 1.0 release, but the devs promise more development to come: “This is merely the beginning of a new chapter in our epic saga,” they say.

If you’re not familiar, Songs of Conquest is a tactics game in the classic vein of stuff like Heroes of Might & Magic 3. You pick a faction and guide heroes around a sprawling world map, capturing resources, battling armies on a hex-based grid, and generally doing all you can to crush your enemies. At the same time, you have to defend your home base and guide it up a ladder of production from ‘dinky ham…