The Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty expansion is coming on September 26, but before that happens, CD Projekt will release the major Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 update. That’s potentially an even bigger deal, because it makes major changes to the game’s systems, including an overhaul to the skill trees and the addition of new perks, proper car combat, a new police system, revamped cyberware, combat AI improvements, and more.
In a way, it’s a bit like an expansion for a Paradox grand strategy game: There’s a free-for-everyone patch that makes fixes and gameplay tweaks, and DLC that adds various sorts of new content and systems. Everyone benefits, but some people—those who pay for the expansion—get more.
That’s where the potential confusion with the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 expansion begins. “Do I need to pay to get all the better gameplay?” you may be wondering. “Will my Cyberpunk experience really be improved if I don’t have Idris Elba in it? What exactly do I get if I p…
Cities: Skylines has had a fantastic run: 8 years of mods and DLC, inspiring an incalculable number of cities. But with the sequel coming, it’s time for the greatest city builder around to finally rest. On May 23, it will receive its last expansion.
Hotels & Retreats is a mini-expansion that will, unsurprisingly, let you plonk down more tourist attractions and accommodation in an effort to get rich from holidaymakers. You’ll start out with a wee hotel chain, just one star, but you’ll eventually unlock more specialised and luxurious buildings. To give tourists more to do, you’ll also be able to construct new parks, cafes, playgrounds and restaurants.
On top of that, you’ll be able to build your tourism empire on five new maps: three European maps, one tropical map and one temperate map.
It’s pretty low key for a final expansion, and to be honest I was hoping for something a bit more exotic or weird for this last hurrah. That said, with work on …
Seven leading AI outfits, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, Meta, Inflection and Amazon, will meet President Biden today to promise that they’ll play nicely with their AI toys and not get us all, you know, dead.
And this is all coming after a UN AI press conference gone wrong where one robot literally said “let’s get wild and make this world our playground.”
All seven are signing up to a voluntary and non-binding framework around AI safety, security, and trust. You can read the full list of commitments on OpenAI’s website. The Biden administration has posted its own factsheet detailing the voluntary arrangement.
But the highlights as précised by TechCrunch go something like this. AI systems will be internally and externally tested before release, information on risk mitigation will be broadly shared, external discovery of bugs and vulnerabilities will be facilitated, AI-generated content will be robustly watermarked, the capabilities and limitations of A…
With the Steam user reviews now comfortably at “Overwhelmingly Negative,” it’s fair to say that the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection has been a disaster. Pilloried by players as “Probably one of the worst launches of all time” within hours of release, the collection has been a black eye for Aspyr after last month’s well-regarded Tomb Raider remasters (weirdness regarding the momentarily better Epic Games Store version aside).
In the wake of all that, the company has released a (stunningly brief) statement on where it plans to go from here. Thanking the Battlefront community for its “overwhelming support and feedback” for the Classic Collection—which is certainly one way of phrasing it—Aspyr cops to the fact that it “experienced critical errors with our network infrastructure” that caused “high ping, matchmaking errors, crashes, and servers not appearing in the browser.”
Yep, makes sense! Those are all issues that players have been complaining about s…
For me, League of Legends “ended” somewhere around 2015 when I realized ranked play was just making me upset and that there were other games I wanted to spend my time on. Whenever I’m periodically reminded that the game’s still bigger than god and transforming in unrecognizable ways I get the same sense of vertigo as when I hear that Grey’s Anatomy is still on the air—sans the Grey. Enter Bandle Tale, a cutesy pixel art “crafting RPG” spinoff for the immortal MOBA that releases next month.
We previously covered Bandle Tale’s announcement in September, but the RPG just got a new trailer with a release date of February 21. I’m still not entirely sure what its whole deal is—it definitely has that Stardew twang with its pixel art, cultivation mechanics, and developer Lazy Bear Games’ history on Graveyard Keeper, but it also looks like Bandle Tale tasks you with rectifying some kind of portal calamity in the titular Bandle City, home to League’s Y…
Google’s streaming dream died in January this year: the Google Stadia streaming service joined a laundry list of projects the company has canned over the years. Google could open a Ben & Jerry’s-style flavor graveyard for them all. We know the streaming platform struggled with market share since its release in 2019, and I never was a fan of its business model, but today we do have some insight into why Google closed Stadia down, from the person in charge of doing so.
A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google’s position leading up to Stadia’s closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.
“For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one …