‘It’s time to rebuild some foundations’- Shadowlands forced Blizzard to rethink World of Warcraft’s oldest ideas to make it a better MMO, director says-
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…
Read moreIntel explains why making GPU drivers is so hard but isn’t giving up-
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…
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