One of the most ambitious mods in history got even bigger today with the release of Tamriel Rebuilt’s Andaram expansion, the seventh major add-on for the 22-year-old Morrowind mod project that is, somehow, older than Morrowind itself.

Tamriel Rebuilt’s aim is to construct the entire mainland of Morrowind, the dark elf province of Tamriel on which The Elder Scrolls 3 takes place. Although Skyrim contains all of Skyrim and Oblivion contains all of Cyrodiil, Morrowind restricted players to the isle of Vvardenfell for its duration, leaving a big blank space for Tamriel Rebuilt’s modders to fill. Andaram is the latest chunk, focusing on “the middle Thirr River, and the dark secrets which lie under its waters.” 

At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s…

Marvel’s oozed-up AI credits sequence for Secret Invasion came out as horrid as you’d expect. Originally a comic storyline centred around the Skrulls—sinister alien shapeshifters—and their infiltration of the superhero community, a Marvel Cinematic Universe retelling could’ve been interesting. Unfortunately, the studio’s decision to work with an “AI Vendor” has left many fans furious.

“Imagine developing an entire show that is LITERALLY about displacing people and mimicking/imitating them with the goal of ultimately disempowering and replacing them, and then doing this,” dekubrush—a senior character artist at Blizzard—wrote on Twitter, going on to call it an “utter embarrassment” and an “absolute failure of the highest magnitude.” 

Jeff Simpson, …

The Intel Core i5 13600K is our current top pick for best gaming CPU, and it’s on Black Friday discount at Amazon right now for $270. That’s a super quick chip at a significantly cheaper price, and it’s worth reminding ourselves why it’s such a good shout for a top-end gaming PC.

The Core i5 13600K might technically be a mid-range chip, but its performance is absolutely mighty. In our Core i5 13600K review back in October of last year we found it matched the pace and even at some points out-performed the Core i9 12900K in gaming benchmarks, and even gets within a few frames of its successor, the 14600K. 

That’s margin of error stuff, and for my money it’s definitely worth getting this chip at a discount over its refreshed model. Both CPUs use the Raptor Lake architectur…

We’re reaching the business end of Microsoft’s huge heave to get its proposed $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard approved, and earlier this week it took a big step forward when the EU Commission approved the deal. The EU regulator noted many of the same concerns about the nascent cloud gaming market as the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which has said it will block the deal, but was ultimately persuaded by the remedies Microsoft proposed.

Microsoft offered the following commitments, all with a 10-year duration:

• A free license to consumers in the EEA that would allow them to stream, via any cloud game streaming services of their choice, all current and future Activision Blizzard PC and console games for which they have a license…
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A recently discovered Starfield bug makes the argument that a spaceship can be anything, even a cockpit with nothing else attached to it.

When Reddit user Denubtheredditor flipped the switch to launch their ship into space, Starfield decided to tweak a few things before liftoff. The ship’s UI confirms that all systems are ready to go and the engines burn bright, but most of Denubtheredditor’s ship stays behind as the cockpit lifts up into the air and floats toward space. It’s as if they smashed the eject button by accident.

The short clip ends before the loading screen that sends you to space, so it’s unclear what happens to Denubtheredditor once they break through the planet’s atmosphere. In the comments, Dieser paints a picture of their experience: “I naturally couldn’t mo…

Coming seemingly out of nowhere, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice delivered a PC gaming experience that nobody had experienced before. Slipping into the shoes of broken Celtic warrior Senua, gamers set off on a haunting vision quest into Viking Hell to fight for the soul of Senua’s dead lover. As well as being an audio-visual tour de force, Hellblade also deftly explored themes of psychosis and mental health.

View Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice on Steam

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, made by British development studio Ninja Theory, was rewarded by critics, too, bagging no less than five BAFTA awards, as well as being honored at The Game Awards and other events such as The Golden Joysticks. That’s why its sequel, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, coming later this year in…

On Wednesday, the 3rd of April, a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck Taiwan. It was followed by a series of aftershocks and there were fears that many of the Taiwanese based chip makers and manufacturers would see production disruptions as a result. In the week or so since, those fears look mostly unfounded.

Thankfully, most of Taiwan’s population centers and semiconductor manufacturing facilities are not located in the mountainous eastern regions of Taiwan, where the earthquake’s epicenter was located. TSMC was quick to resume operations following an assessment of its critical tools. As much as 80% of its production capacity was back online within just 10 hours of the quake.

TSMC isn’t the only chip maker with Taiwan-based facilities. According to Trendforce, DRAM manufactures…

When US presidential candidate Kamala Harris announced Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, it meant something different to the varsity Valorant esports team from Apple Valley High School in Minnesota. It meant they’d now been endorsed by the man who might soon become the vice president of the USA.

“Congratulations on an undefeated season and winning the Minnesota Varsity League State Championship in Valorant!” Walz wrote in a letter shared on the Apple Valley High School Esports Twitter account in 2022. The idea of a state governor knowing what Valorant is, even if just for the time it takes to sign a letter passing across his desk on a Tuesday morning, seems wild to think about, but welcome to the 2020s I guess.

Walz went on to applaud the “mental fortitude and…

There are few videogame legends more famous or enduring that than of the Diablo cow level. There actually isn’t a cow level in Diablo (1997), but rumors of one were so persistent and pervasive that Blizzard included one in Diablo 2, and later brought cow-themed levels to Diablo 3 and even World of Warcraft. There’s even an entire Wikipedia entry dedicated specifically to the cow level, including a section on its “impact and legacy.”

In light of that, at least some fans were no doubt surprised and disappointed when Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson said that there’s no cow level in Diablo 4. “We’ve been really focused on trying to keep it as grounded as possible,” Fergusson said in a May interview with Kinda Funny. “And because of that, there’s no secret level in Diablo 4 that p…

After pulling off a Darktide redemption arc last year, Fatshark’s not resting on its inquisitorial laurels. Secrets of the Machine God, Darktide’s latest update, arrived earlier today, bringing a new mission to revive an abandoned Adeptus Mechanicus foundry and a set of new weapon types. If you’re not already thrilled, you should be: It’s never a bad time when the tech-priests are around.

The new mission, Clandestium Gloriana, will have strike teams descend into a derelict “Foundryplex”—a massive production facility where the AdMech tech-priests once worked their fabled wonders, which the Inquisition hopes to reawaken for its war effort. The mission will feature some new tech from Fatshark, like a mission-giver who will accompany the players and a variable end-of-miss…

Update (3:10 pm PT): And just like that, Reddit is back. It’s still not clear what happened but Reddit announced just before 3 pm PT that a fix has been implemented. Reddit says it’s monitoring the situation to ensure that all is well, but based on my own quick poke around the site, everything seems good. 

Original story:

Don’t be alarmed if you can’t load any pages on Reddit, because it’s not just you: Reddit is reporting major outages impacting both desktop and mobile sites.

Downdetector is also reporting a massive spike in user reports indicating that something, somewhere is very wrong.

It’s not clear what the issue actually is at this point, but it may be related to Reddit’s account system. Pages seem to load without tro…

There was a time when ICQ—that’s “I Seek You”—was as ubiquitous as mIRC and a good FTP program. But after nearly three decades of operation (much of it, I’m sorry to say, in obscurity), the end has finally come: A message posted on the ICQ website (via PCMag) says the software will stop operating on June 26.

It’s hard to overstate just how big ICQ was at the turn of the millennium. It was released by Israeli developer Mirabilis in late 1996; I came to it in ’97 by way of an in-the-know friend who breathlessly regaled me with tales of this exciting new program that let us talk to online friends anywhere, at any time—no more having to wait for your pals to show up on Undernet! Believe me, this was huge.

At one point ICQ had more than 100 million registered us…

When it comes to PC gaming one of the biggest trials is keeping things cool. You can have all the power in the world packed into your case, but it’s for naught without cooling. More power often means more heat thanks to that big jerk physics, and plenty of builds bottleneck due to temps, rather than capabilities. This is why we see overclockers do wild things like douse their CPUs in liquid nitrogen or use about 8 lbs (nearly 4 kgs) of solid copper.

Copper is an amazingly conductive material, great for cooling, but it’s also hideously expensive. This is why I was in no way prepared to see a honking tower of solid copper sitting casually on top of one enthusiast’s CPU. The awe-inspiring, yet wallet-crushing image was posted to Reddit by That Desktop User and was also shared by Fanl…