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Earlier this week, Wudijo, who found Diablo 4 fame during the beta by soloing the world boss, became the first player to reach level 100 in the game’s Hardcore mode entirely on his own. But glory is short-lived, and so too was Wudijo, who has been killed in a throwdown with the game’s toughest boss.

Wudijo wasn’t the first person to reach Hardcore 100—that honor went to cArn_, who claimed the crown on June 5. But cArn_ did so with a supporting team—Zizaran, Steelmage, and Nugiyen—who helped him push past Wudijo and other players in the final stretch of the race. Wudijo, on the other hand, did the whole thing on his own, so even though he’s not first to reach the top, it is by some measures an even more impressive accomplishment.

Alas, the epic tale has come to an end. The good news, such as it is, is that unlike cArn_, who lost his Hardcore hero to a glitch, Wudijo went down swinging in Diablo 4’s toughest fight: The Echo of Lilith, an ultra-powerful pinnacle boss designed to give max-level, fully-equipped players something to worry about.

Which isn’t to say the death wasn’t frustrating: As soon as his character goes down, Wudijo asks, “What h…

Microsoft’s proposed $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard now looks very likely to go ahead, following last week’s news that the UK’s regulator has (provisionally) bought most of the assurances it’s been given. A specific concern allayed was over Call of Duty, the mega-popular series which Microsoft has spent the last several months offering deals on to any- and all-comers, with Sony’s pleas becoming increasingly desperate: To the extent that, around three weeks ago, it suggested Microsoft might sabotage COD on PlayStation.

Sony is beginning to sound like a bit of a whiner here, and Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has had enough. In an email sent to staff earlier this week with the subject line “A March update on the Microsoft deal,” Kotick addresses the deal’s progress generally, before going in on Sony with both feet. 

Kotick says Activision Blizzard and Microsoft have been doing the rounds in Brussels and London, and during various hearings “Microsoft proposed thoughtful, generous remedies to address regulators’ concerns,” including the new COD contract with Nintendo, and deals with Nvidia, Boosteroid and Ubitus. He also a…

I’m sometimes asked why we don’t often recommend Gen 5 NVMe drives (although, to be fair, we do recommend one). Alright, I don’t get asked it that often I guess, but the answer remains the same as it was when they first came out—they’re very fast, but so are Gen 4 drives, at least for gaming. 

More than that, they’re pricey, again compared to Gen 4. And then there’s the kicker—they also have a tendency to run very, very hot.

Team Group’s Computex 2024 booth had some fresh examples of the speedy little drives, including a T-Force Pro SSD with a quoted 14,173 MB/s read and 12,757 write rate, apparently soon to be available in 8 TB configuration. I asked how much it might potentially cost, and one of the booth reps laughed knowingly, before shaking their head.

That’ll be rather expensive then. Just a hunch. Anyway, speedy, pricey. Same old story, really. But what about the heat?

Well, Team Group does appear to have been iterating on cooler designs to beat the heat from Gen 5 drives, with some potential pre-production ideas on display. The problem is, none of them really get around the fact that to get the most out of a top spec Gen 5 drive, …

PC Gamer’s all-singing all-dancing all-action 30th anniversary issue is on-sale today, and includes a slew of major interviews with the creatives that have shaped our industry and some of the most important games in history. PCG’s editor Robert Jones sat down with Warren Spector and Paul Neurath, key members of the original System Shock team, which is generally considered the first game you could call an immersive sim, with its influence is still prevalent in the contemporary industry across the likes of Arkane’s various titles and 2K’s Bioshock series.

The origins of the game go back to its lead programmer Doug Church who, while Warren Spector was polishing up a proposal for something called Alien Commander, shared how bored he was with the then-industry’s over-reliance on genre tropes. 

“Doug Church was hanging out in my office one day, and we were both talking about how sick we were of fantasy games, and dungeons, and rescuing princesses, and heroes that were built like the Mighty Thor,” says Spector. “He and Paul [Neurath] were working—I didn’t know—on another similar project. They were sick of that as well, as I understand it. Doug came to…

Valve has released a new update for Counter-Strike 2, and changed a minor feature near the Counter-Terrorist spawn in the game’s most popular map, Dust 2. Per the release notes, the developers have “modified crate stack outside CT spawn towards bombsite A”, which doesn’t sound like much, but oh my is there some weepin’ and a-wailin’.

The change is to a spot just left of CT spawn and beneath the raised A bombsite on Dust 2, from which players used to be able to boost one another up to an area called catwalk: a common tactic in the first seconds of the round, because it helps the CT defending catwalk or short mid to get into position faster. Valve has changed the crate layout in this area, such that one player can now easily access this shortcut with a bit of jumping, without the need for another player to boost the spot.

So the change makes a common early round tactic easier to execute (particularly when playing with randoms), on top of which it opens up this shortcut throughout the round’s length. This is going to make a big difference in all sorts of situations, and most obviously it’s going to be a game-changer in certain retake situations, allowing both def…

Following Baldur’s Gate 3’s wildly successful PC launch and a few bug-squashing hotfixes, Larian CEO Swen Vincke says that the D&D RPG will get one more hotfix (there have been three so far) before its first big patch, which will include “+1,000 fixes and tweaks.” That patch will then be followed by—and you might’ve been able to guess this—another patch, one which’ll start to respond to player suggestions.

“We’re all very enthused by your feedback. It’s very rewarding,” wrote Vincke. “Our focus now is fixing any issues you report, but we are listening to suggestions. Current roadmap: a) Hotfix 4, b) Patch 1 (+1000 fixes and tweaks), c) Patch 2. The latter will already incorporate some requests.”

In an interview with PC Gamer last week, Vincke also confirmed that official mod tools are on the way, which is slightly juicer news than ‘game will get patches.’ We mentioned that tidbit in an article last week about Larian’s absence of expansion plans, but I didn’t shout about it too much because I’d hoped to get clarification on what kind of mod tools we’re talking about.

I’m still waiting on that, so for now I’m not sure whether Vincke was talki…

Remember that last Matrix movie? The one about capital subsuming all critique, turning it into a trendy and infinitely exploitable set of meaningless images and signifiers divorced from their original context? How it laments the way the culture industry can’t let a good thing lie, instead pounding every last inch of profit out of any marketable property until there’s nothing left but a tasteless grey mush?

That was cool. Anyway, they’re making another Matrix movie.

Per Variety, The Matrix 5 (which will surely become The Matrix: R-something at some point during production) will be the first entry in the series without one of the Wachowski sisters directing. Instead, it’ll be helmed by Drew Goddard, the screenwriter behind The Martian. Goddard will also write the script and produce the film alongside Sarah Esberg, who also served as producer (IMDb tells me) on the quite excellent Moonlight.

And, well, those are all the substantive names you’re getting. Lana Wachowski is kind of involved, but only in the sense that she’s going to get an executive producer credit, which I’m pretty sure is basically what Hollywood calls the process of paying someone to be a…

Need some Wordle help? Keep your win streak safe with our daily dose of hints and tips. There’s a fresh clue for today’s game waiting below if you need a bit of guidance, some general tips if you’d like to improve your guesses, and of course, the answer to the January 9 (934) puzzle if you need it.

Talk about a game of extremes. My first guess was a bit of a dud. My second was one letter away from a win. As was my third. And my fourth. And my fifth. It took all six rows before I finally found today’s Wordle answer—I’m just glad you won’t have to go through the same ordeal. Not unless you want to, anyway.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Tuesday, January 9

Today’s answer can unhelpfully mean one of several unrelated things. In some cases this is an ocean-going passenger ship so large it’s almost a holiday destination in itself, in others it’s a pen, pencil, or brush used to apply shape-defining makeup around the edges of the eye area. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every…

As We Descend, a pretty stylish-looking upcoming deckbuilder from new studio Box Dragon, will be published by Coffee Stain, the same folks publishing hits like Valheim and Deep Rock Galactic.

Describing itself as a “roguelike deckbuilder with the soul of a strategy game,” As We Descend has a nice aesthetic that seems to blend magic with technology in a desperate, dystopian city-vault that is humankind’s last outpost on a devastated world. 

As We Descend will have a roguelike structure, with each expedition out of the city having you compose your unit of several squads of specialist units, with retrieved tech from outside the vault giving you more types of units to access. Combat will have two zones for your units to move between: A forward defense area and a rear support zone. The key to success will be in moving them between the two in response to enemy intents.

The other part of the game will be exploring cityscape of the vault in order to “make contacts, gather forces, scavenge ruins, and find valuable resources to gain an advantage over the deadly monsters threatening humanity’s existence.” You’ll use those resources to beat back attacks by the monstro…

At GDC, CD Projekt Red is showing off the future of ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, one bouncing neon light at a time. It’s set to arrive with a new graphics preset, Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, which will come to the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 on April 11. This gives you enough time to track down an RTX 4080 and its powerful frame-generating magic. You’re going to need it.

In what Nvidia calls a “technology preview,” Overdrive Mode will feature path tracing, aka full ray tracing, announced last year, that’ll “accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene.”. Light sources will now cast “physically correct soft shadows,” and colored lighting will bounce multiple times in a scene. In a game like Cyberpunk that’s drenched with neon lights, it’ll create more realistic direct and indirect lighting.

You can see in this video exactly what Nvidia is talking about, with various light sources bouncing off multiple surfaces like water and metal in ways that are closer to real life. Nvidia says improved physically based lighting should remove the need for other occlusion techniques, which can be taxing on a GPU. 

Path tracing has been around for a while and …

At this year’s Gamescom event, two forthcoming games heavily feature ray tracing as the means for producing the best possible graphics. Star Wars Outlaws and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle both have graphics features, either exclusively developed by Nvidia or are so demanding that only high-end GeForce RTX cards can really handle it.

Nvidia was the first GPU vendor to bring real-time ray tracing hardware to the gaming masses at another Gamescom in 2018, with its GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards. But since then, AMD and Intel have both followed suit, and all new gaming PCs and consoles are more or less capable of ray tracing. Most PC gamers are well aware that Nvidia’s GPUs can do ray tracing faster than the competition but three games show that Nvidia is doing its best to push the technology to new heights—and very much in its favour.

Take the recently launched Black Myth: Wukong. Its graphics are spectacular but to get the very best visuals, you need to enable a setting called Full Ray Tracing. The game runs on Unreal Engine 5 and it uses Lumen ray-traced global illumination by default. However, ‘full ray tracing’ is a path tracing algorithm.

If …

If you’re looking for a new Wordle angle, hoping to refine your game or want to win today’s Wordle at all costs, then you’ve clicked through to the right place. You’ll find everything from our extensive Wordle archive to hints, tips, and clues just below. If you need the answer to the January 21 (581) puzzle, then that’s just a quick click away too.

I almost came unstuck at the end of today’s puzzle, as I found myself staring at four greens, and all of the most obvious consonants had already been used or eliminated. Luckily there’s no time limit on Wordle, so a quick break gave me the fresh perspective needed to finally see what I’d missed the first time around—and kick myself for not spotting it earlier.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, January 21

Today’s answer is used to describe a short piece of text often found on the back of books, usually praising the work and designed to attract someone’s attention and encourage them to open their wallet. 

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Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wo…