Staciemayer

Helldivers 2 got its first round of balancing today in a patch that buffed a handful of underperforming support weapons and significantly nerfed the Railgun—the one-shot killing machine that’s enjoyed the undisputed top slot for the first month of the game.

Leading up to the patch, all eyes were on Arrowhead as vocal corners of the community lobbied for a “Don’t nerf, only buff” approach to balancing the co-op PvE shooter, the idea being that a co-op shooter with no PvP doesn’t need to nerf certain guns when it can just buff the underpowered ones instead.

Arrowhead explained the reasoning behind today’s patch on Discord, but in a separate blog post published later, head of product testing Patrik Lasota expanded on Arrowhead’s approach to balancing, gently shutting down the notion that Helldivers 2 shouldn’t have nerfs and exploring how players perceive weapons versus what data actually shows. It’s a great read for fans, and in this humble journalist’s opinion, a ma…

Despite a rough release and not many people remaining to play it on Steam, Redfall is not yet Deadfall. On Friday, Arkane put out a large update to the game that addresses performance and stability concerns, bugs, accessibility and QoL shortfalls, and even adds new combat encounters and player actions.

The performance improvements most notably include “Improved PC performance and stability across a wide range of hardware configurations,” and that’s certainly welcome here. I didn’t find Redfall to be a rough ride on the order of Jedi Survivor on the frame rate and graphical fidelity side, but it was far from perfect.

The juiciest stuff in the patch, to my eye, is under the combat section. The patch adds stealth takedowns with “staked weapons” (ones you’ve got a vampire-slaying stake strapped to like a bayonet), which is a nice addition, if a strange one to have been missing in the first place. “Increased open world enemy population and mission encounter balancing” and “Ad…

Helldiving hero Harvey Randall said last week that things need to change at Arrowhead, because the blistering pace of Helldivers 2 updates is starting to take a visible toll on developers and players alike. Apparently Arrowhead agrees: In response to an inquiry about the release of the next patch, community manager Twinbeard said it’ll be out “when it’s done.”

It’s been genuinely remarkable to watch Arrowhead build Helldivers 2 into a game experience that feels genuinely alive. Eschewing a regular schedule of updates, Helldivers 2 developers appear to just do things, an embrace of chaos that keeps everyone on their toes. For the most part it’s been a smashing success, but it’s also led to some criticism as fast-and-furious balance changes, sometimes bringing unexpected results, have frustrated some members of the community.

Personally, I’m inclined to agree with Helldivemaster Morgan Park’s assessment that the meta doesn’t much matter in a strictly PvE game, but I’m also…

There’s something intriguing about islands floating way up in the clouds, especially if you can connect them with massive chains, pull them together, and build a city on top of them. That’s the idea in Myriads: Renaissance, a turn-based strategy game that’s got everything from city building to 4X to tower defense systems. There’s a free demo you can try now, and the full game is planning a Steam release on June 1.

I had a little go of the demo, which lets you play for 60 turns. Things went great for… well, about 50 of those turns. I began by building on the small collection of sky islands that comprised my airborne kingdom: a market to serve as my city center, a farm to generate food, a sawmill in the forest for wood, and a mine on a mountainous island to produce gold. Along with my small cluster of floating islands I also had a galleon, which I could send sailing through the air to explore the fog of war (or maybe at this altitude, it’s the clouds of war), revea…

Way back in January 1999, the Washington Post got wind of what it declared to be the infamous “Furby Alert”. Now official documents proving the story was indeed real have been released. Yes, the NSA really was worried the fuzzy toy that parroted back whatever it heard, which was all the rage back in the late 90s, was powered by an “Artificial Intelligence” chip and represented a security risk. And yes, an official alert was issued.

As reported by 404 media, the official documents were released in response to a somewhat speculative Freedom of Information request by an X user going by the @dakotathecat handle. Apparently, on a bored whim dakotathecat decided to have a punt at requesting the first official confirmation since that late 90s Washington post piece.

The result, reportedly, was a manilla envelope containing 60 pages of documents including employee discussions about the security threat posed by Furbies, an internal memo attempting to manage media coverage followin…

Of all the cyclical videogame debates that crop up on social media, few get me as riled up as whether or not developers should be painting objects yellow. Making interactable objects more noticeable by painting them a distinct color isn’t a new thing for games, but the specific trend of choosing bright yellow streaks to signpost anything and everything—doorways, breakable boxes, levers, ledges, rocks—has awakened a backlash from some who believe this level of handholding works against games by stealing opportunities for players to discover things on their own.

While developers are often quick to counter this feedback by reminding players that yellow paint is the result of testers getting lost in early playtests, Ubisoft Massive has come up with an interesting workaround for its upcoming Star Wars Outlaws that just might make both camps happy: an “Explorer Mode” that turns off the “guiding color on core navigational elements” in th…