Table of contents:

1. Windows 10 and 11 news
2. Windows Insider Program
3. Updates are available
4. Reviews
5. Gaming news
6. Great deals to check

Windows 11 and 10

Here we talk about everything happening around Microsoft's latest operating system in the Stable channel and preview builds: new features, removed features, controversies, bugs, interesting findings, and more. And of course, you may find a word or two about older but still supported versions.

On September 17, Microsoft announced that MDM-enrolled Windows 11 devices will be downloading cumulative updates during the initial setup experience, which is also known as OOBE. However, just a few days later, the company reversed its course and postponed that change.

Another important change is coming to Windows Server Update Services. Microsoft announced that WSUS is now deprecated, which means the company is no longer investing in new capabilities or accepting new feature requests. Still, current WSUS capabilities will remain intact, and Microsoft will continue publishing updates through the Windows Server Update Services channel.

Windows Insider Program

After two no-build weeks, we finally received a couple of new preview updates for Windows 11 and 10. Here is what Microsoft released this week for testing in the Windows Insider Program:

While there was nothing groundbreaking in the new preview builds, they introduced several interesting changes. For example, the Beta build now has a new context menu entry for Android users, which should make it much easier to send files from PC to smartphones. Also, the Snipping Tool app now lets you change the default location for screenshots and screen recordings.

Finally, Microsoft quietly updated Task Manager to make it show more precise information on what kind of SSD your computer has. It is a small but very neat improvement.

Updates are available

This section covers software, firmware, and other notable updates (released and coming soon) delivering new features, security fixes, improvements, patches, and more from Microsoft and third parties.

Microsoft has officially launched Office LTSC 2024 for business and government customers. The new suite will be rolled out to eligible users by October 1. It includes apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, and OneNote.

In addition, the company revealed quite a lot of information about bugs and fixes for some Office apps, namely Outlook. It announced what to do with the msls70.dll error and notified about fixes for crashes when typing in certain apps and sign-in issues in Outlook.

Finally, Microsoft sent out the final notice about Modern Authentication methods for the company's email clients.

On September 16, Microsoft dropped a series of Copilot announcements, which include more data protection in Copilot for Windows 11 for work and school customers, persistent, shareable AI-powered pages (Copilot Pages), new Copilot-powered features for Office apps, including Python in Excel, Copilot Agents for Microsoft 365 users (more information about it is available here), and more.

The new Windows app is now generally available on Windows, macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. It is designed to give both end users and IT admins a more unified user experience for connecting to remote, local, and cloud PC services such as Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, Remote Desktop, Remote Desktop Services, Microsoft Dev Box, and others.

PowerToys, one of our favorite Windows apps, might soon get a new module. The so-called "Settings Scheduler" was proposed by a developer to let users change various Windows settings on timers and other triggers. For now, there is no information on whether the module will make it to PowerToys, but you can track the progress of the proposal on GitHub.

MSN Weather, Microsoft's weather forecast service, received a new feature. It can now alert users about unusual local weather trends.

On the browser side, we have a new extension performance detector for Microsoft Edge. This tool gives you an overview of how your extensions perform and affect your browsing experience. You can toggle it on with a special flag on the edge://flags page.

Also, Microsoft released Edge 129 on the Stable Channel. This release deprecated the CryptoWallet feature and introduced some changes to the operating system requirement. Now, if you want to run Microsoft Edge on macOS, you need to update to macOS 11 and newer. As for preview releases, we received Edge 130.0.2835.2 in the Dev Channel.

Other notable updates include the following:

• Microsoft will use energy from the Three Mile Island NPP to power its data centers.
• Microsoft announced a new 3D Fluent Illustration style for its products.
• Hotpaching is now available in the Windows Server 2025 public preview.
• Dev Home 0.18 Preview is out with a File Explorer source control integration.
• Microsoft expanded AI for Good Lab in Abu Dhabi to support societal goals.
• Microsoft increased its quarterly dividend and announced a $60 billion share repurchase program.
• Microsoft announced a new HLK Refresh for Windows 11 24H2 and Server 2025.

And here are the newest drivers and firmware updates released this week:

• AMD 24.20.11.01 non-WHQL with Frostpunk 2, God of War Ragnarok, and The Sims 4 DX11 update support.
• Intel ARC 32.0.101.6077 non-WHQL with optimizations for Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, Final Fantasy XVI, Frostpunk 2, and God of War Ragnarok.
• AMD AGESA 1.2.0.2 with performance improvements for the Ryzen 9000 series processors.
• Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 received big updates with multiple improvements and fixes.
• Surface Pro 10 for Business got fixes for non-working keyboard and trackpad and more.

Reviews are in

Here is the hardware and software we reviewed this week.

Robbie Khan reviewed the Ducky One 3 Pro Nazca, a premium keyboard with great build quality, fantastic typing performance, an 8KHz polling rate, and more. While very good overall, the keyboard is a bit pricey. Plus, it has some quirks with its USB-C port, which leaves some questions about the bundled accessories.

Another NAS made its way to Steven Parker's lab for a review. This time, TerraMaster sent its F8 SSD Plus: a palm-sized powerful media-class 8-bay network-attached storage. Small, toolless, and with plenty of RAM, this NAS gives plenty of space for NVMe SSDs. However, it has only one Ethernet Port, PCIe 3.0 X1 lanes, and a pretty hefty price tag.

Moving from hardware to games, we have a review of Frostpunk 2 from Pulasthi Ariyasinghe. This grim city builder features stunning city visuals, solid building mechanics, brutal politics with tough decisions, and haunting sound effects and music. The game is fantastic overall, but look out for some UI glitches and FPS drops over lengthy gameplay periods.

On the gaming side

Learn about upcoming game releases, Xbox rumors, new hardware, software updates, freebies, deals, discounts and more.

Microsoft announced the end of the Xbox Ambassadors program. The program will cease operations on October 15, so members still have a couple of weeks to claim their remaining rewards. Before that, Microsoft will hold the final sweepstakes and send out a special "thank you" reward to all participants.

Overwatch 2 is now available in Xbox Game Pass. The best part is that the game arrived in the catalog with some benefits, such as six hero skins: Cardboard Reinhardt, Turtleship D.Va, Cyberdragon Hanzo, Street Runner Genji, Bee Mercy, and Cleric Lifeweaver. Every Game Pass subscriber also gets a 10% XP boost.

Speaking of Game Pass, there are some new games to play. Wargroove 2 and Frostpunk 2 are now available for Game Pass subscribers on Cloud, Console, and PC. On September 24, the catalog will get another entry—Ara: History Untold.

Bethesda is launching the first Starfield expansion on September 30, and we now have a gameplay trailer. The expansion features more than 50 new locations, enemies, weapons, and a brand-new quest line in the city of Dazra.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is coming on November 19, and Microsoft has now revealed what editions buyers will have to choose from. In addition to regular tiers, there is a whopping $199 Aviator Editions that includes a metric ton of various premium content, such as planes, airports, and more. If you are not into that, get ready to pay $69.99 for the Standard Edition. However, it is also coming to Game Pass as a day-one release.

In addition, Microsoft unveiled hardware requirements for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. If you want to play the game, you will need quite a beefy computer and a relatively fast Internet connection. The ideal specs include 64GB of RAM, a 100Mbps Internet connection, and more. Interestingly, the storage requirement was lowered to just 50GB, which is due to Microsoft's new asset streaming technology.

A remaster of the original Red Dead Redemption may soon be available on a PC. The latest update to GTA Online (which also now has built-in anti-cheat) revealed traces of metadata of the potential remaster. However, since the information is not yet confirmed officially, take it with a reasonable grain of salt.

What is not coming is The Sims 5. Electronic Arts has shot down rumors about the upcoming sequel, claiming it would continue to update The Sims 4 to add features that people want from a "5." That will allow gamers to keep their progress while enjoying new features and capabilities.

However, a new installment of Skate is launching soon. The game's official account on X announced that Skate would hit Early Access in 2025, and developers plan to unveil more details in the coming months.

Mojang announced the date of the next Minecraft Live with a "new look and feel." It is set for September 28, and gamers can expect some "ever before seen" content. It will be the first Minecraft Live after the recent announcement of a significant rework of how the game receives feature updates.

In addition, Mojang is pulling the plug on Minecraft support for PlayStation VR. It will be discontinued in 2025. Sadly, those playing the blocky game on Sony's console will be required to move to the flat-screen experience in March 2025.

Finally, Nvidia added seven new games to its GeForce NOW cloud streaming service. They include the following:

• Frostpunk 2
• FINAL FANTASY XVI
• The Plucky Squire
• Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster
• Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak
• REKA

Deals and freebies

Steam's Planes, Trans, and Automobiles Fest sale is still live, so you have one more day to get automotive-themed games with big discounts. The sale ends on September 23, 10 AM Pacific Time. If you need more deals and some freebies, check out this week's Weekend PC Game Deals article, where you can find boomer shooters, legacy bundles, some publisher sales, a new giveaway from the Epic Games Store, and more.

Other gaming stories include the following:

• The final Ara: History Untold Q&A dev diaries are out before the game's launch next week.
• Cities: Skylines II DLC is further delayed as work on improving the base game continues.
• Diablo IV has reportedly generated over $1 billion in revenue since its June 2023 launch.
• Microsoft will release a documentary about the creation of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.
• A remaster of Horizon Zero Dawn may be coming soon to PC and PlayStation 5.

Microsoft Weekly background image by Lenzatic on Pixabay

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Slack has been keeping offices and organizations humming along since all the way back in 2013. And while it might not quite have fully replaced email, it's certainly made an impact for business teams working together.

The software has gained a lot of new features across the decade-plus that it's been around, and in the hectic day-to-day hustle of working life, you'd be forgiven if you haven't kept track of them all. With that in mind, I thought it would help to highlight four of the most useful features Slack has gained recently.

From Canvases to Lists, you should be able to take advantage of at least one of these tips, and improve your Slack experience. With the time you save, perhaps you could turn your attention back to achieving inbox zero.

Create a Canvas

Open up Slack on the web or desktop, click the More link on the left, then choose Canvas: You can then create a new document inside Slack, combining text, images, links to other areas of Slack, file attachments, and more. It's like having Google Docs or Notion built into Slack, and you can use Canvases in all kinds of ways.

At the most basic level, you can just jot down some notes that you need to refer to. If you're off on vacation and you need to leave instructions about how everything is going to work in your absence, that can be saved inside a Canvas document rather than left in a channel or a conversation thread.

With the ability to add rich media and other elements though, you can easily upgrade your Canvas to create a team newsletter, a product brief, or a technical document. Sharing, tagging, and collaboration tools are built right into the Slack Canvas feature, which means you're able to easily grant edit access to other people on your team so you can work on them together.

There's a Canvas button in the top-right corner of Slack channels and Slack conversations too, giving you even more ways to use the feature. You can use these Canvases to record important notes from a chat, for example, or to create a checklist document that everyone in a particular channel can refer to.

Any Canvases you create can be shared in other channels or in DMs as well—just click the + (plus) button in the field where you type your message, then attach a recent Canvas to the current conversation.

Don't Be Disturbed

Slack has some powerful notification management tools, and they include a Do Not Disturb mode that you may not have come across or explored fully. It's a useful resource for setting work-life boundaries and for working with colleagues in different time zones.

From Slack on the desktop or web, click your workspace name in the top right, then Preferences and Notifications. (On mobile, tap your profile picture in the top right, then Notifications.) Scroll down and there's a Notification schedule section, which lets you set the times you don't want any alerts from Slack. These will typically be the times outside your agreed working hours, and they can be customized day by day, if necessary.

What's more, Slack will round up all the notifications you've missed and send a reminder about them to your phone or your registered email address at the time you specify. The idea is you're not getting woken up in the middle of the night or having family time interrupted by pings from Slack.

You can also click on your profile picture (bottom left) to pause notifications for 30 minutes, an hour, the rest of the day, the rest of the week, or a time period you specify—very useful if you need to concentrate on something or step away from the keyboard (you can leave an away status message for others to see on the same pop-up dialog).

Start Building Lists

Slack comes with its own Slack Lists feature that helps you get a better handle on the tasks you need to do, from major to minor. There's lots of flexibility in terms of how you use them, but it's primarily a way of checking off what needs to be done.

There are plenty of to-do list managers available of course, but because Slack Lists is built right into the software, it's easy to get at and manage. In Slack on the desktop or the web, click the More button on the left, then choose Lists from the menu that pops up. (It's the same on mobile, but the More button is at the bottom, not on the left.) You can use one of the templates provided, or start from scratch.

By default, your list comes with fields for setting a due date and tagging other people on Slack, but you can easily add new fields via the + (plus) button on the right. You can set up a checklist, for instance, or a field to attach files in.

As you build up multiple lists with multiple entries, Slack gives you some helpful tools in terms of searching, starring, and filtering, so you won't get overwhelmed. List entries can have their own individual comment threads and notification settings too.

Save Everything for Later

One of the simplest but most useful features Slack offers is the ability to save stuff for later: It means you don't have to deal with everything coming your way immediately, and it helps you not to forget important information you'll need again in the future. It works in a similar way to read-it-later services for the web at large, which stack up articles you don't have time for right away.

The save-for-later tool shows up as a bookmark, and you'll see it as you hover over posts and links in channels—it's also available for any files that have been shared on Slack, though you need to click the three dots on the file thumbnail to see it.

Click the bookmark icon anywhere in Slack to save items to your own personal later library (no one else can see what you've saved for later). You can then get at all of these items by clicking on the Later button in the left-hand navigation pane.

Slack helps you work through your saved-for-later list too: Anything that's here can be ticked off an archived, so you know when you're done with it. These items can have their own reminders too, if you click the clock icon that appears when you hover over them.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Familiarize yourself with you craft in the skies. 

Xbox Game Studios and Asobo Studio's Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is on the way, bringing a vastly upgraded experience and a smaller installation client for pilots to utilize. Naturally, a new sim means new aircraft to fly, alongside some returning favorites. 

It's not just planes anymore however, as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 introduces a number of new missions such as firefighting or search-and-rescue. These different kinds of missions can be explored in the game's Career mode, and naturally, they require more specialized craft.

Below, you can find the full list of aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, separated into categories based off of which craft are included by default in different editions of the game. 

List of aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: Standard Edition

Paul's Hardware (1.48M subscribers)

September 22, 2024

Video length: 10m 59s

0:00 Welcome to Paul’s Tech News - Sept 22, 2024

1:29 Rumor: NVIDIA RTX 4090 & 4090D To Be Discontinued Next Month

3:40 Ryzen 9000 CPUs suffering 'worst launch since Bulldozer'

5:25 Intel Z890 and AMD X870/X870E motherboards shown in MSI product filings

TECH BRIEFS

7:05 Intel Core Ultra 200 desktop CPUs could do DDR5-10000 with CUDIMMs

7:46 Intel Core Ultra 9 285K box design has been leaked

8:25 Intel Core Ultra 200HX Series leaked: Core Ultra 9 285HX, 24c, 5.5GHz boost

9:10 BIOSTAR Introduces Radeon RX 580 White Graphics Card with 8 GB GDDR5

9:52 YouTube is now showing ads when you pause videos

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

This is quite surprising because YouTube Premium prices were already increased in multiple countries just a few months ago, with the US being one of them. The latest price increases primarily affect European countries, with some regions seeing hikes of up to 55%, which is quite substantial.

According to the Reddit thread, here is the list of countries along with their price hike information:

The price for subscriptions has increased in over 10 countries. In Switzerland, the Family plan now costs the equivalent of 39.88 USD.

 

• Ireland, Netherlands, Italy, Belgium:
  • Single: From €11.99 to €13.99
  • Family: From €17.99 to €25.99
• Switzerland:
  • Single: From 15.90 CHF to 17.90 CHF
  • Family: From 23.90 CHF to 33.90 CHF
• Denmark:
  • Single: From 119 DKK to 139 DKK
  • Family: From 177 DKK to 259 DKK
• Sweden:
  • Single: From 119 SEK to 149 SEK
  • Family: From 179 SEK to 279 SEK
• Norway:
  • Single: From 119 NOK to 169 NOK
  • Family: From 179 NOK to 269 NOK
• Czech Republic:
  • Single: From 179 CZK to 209 CZK
  • Family: From 269 CZK to 389 CZK
• Singapore:
  • Single: From 11.98 SGD to 13.98 SGD
  • Family: From 17.98 SGD to 27.98 SGD
• United Arab Emirates:
  • Single: From 23.99 AED to 26.99 AED
  • Family: From 35.99 AED to 48.99 AED
• Malaysia
  • Single: From 17.90 MYR to 20.90 MYR
  • Family: From 33.90 MYR to 41.90 MYR
• Saudi Arabia
  • Single: From 23.98 SAR to 26.99 SAR
  • Family: From 35.98 SAR to 49.99 SAR
• Indonesia:
  • Single: From 59,000 IDR to 69,000 IDR
  • Family: From 99,000 IDR to 139,000 IDR
• Colombia:
  • Single: From 17,900 COP to 20,900 COP
  • Family: From 26,900 COP to 41,900 COP
• Thailand:
  • Single: From 159 THB to 179 THB
  • Family: From 299 THB to 359 THB

According to other reports, Google has sent emails to YouTube Premium customers in the countries above, saying that increasing the prices will allow it to "continue to deliver great service and features and support the creators and artists you watch on YouTube. " This is similar language to that used in the price hike notifications for users in the US.

A Reddit user from Sweden has shared the screenshot of the notification showing a whopping 60% price increase. However, the notification suggests that it could be the tax paid for paying through Apple instead of directly paying through Google.

A user from Denmark says, "This increase makes YouTube by far the most expensive streaming service, clocking in at more than what I pay for Amazon Prime, Netflix, and HBO combined."

Let us know in the comments below what you think about this price hike in YouTube Premium subscription. If you reside in one of the affected countries, will you continue using the service?

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

What you need to know

• Recently, Microsoft conducted a new interview with License Global magazine, which revolved around the merchandising of Halo. 
• During the interview, Xbox head of consumer products John Friend revealed that Halo has raked in over $1.8 billion in consumer spending on merchandising and licensed products alone, excluding video games entirely. 
• Elsewhere in the piece, John Friend confirmed that Microsoft is planning some sort of 25th anniversary event for Xbox and Halo, which share a birthday. 
• Xbox's 25th anniversary would fall on November 15, 2026 — which would be an interesting time to launch a new console generation, no?

Xbox is in a bit of an odd place in 2024. With the game industry struggling to figure out where the next generation of growth is coming from, Xbox has been expanding its vast gaming empire across to PC, mobile, and even PlayStation. Armed with a range of acquisitions that include Bethesda Softworks of Fallout and Skyrim fame and Activision-Blizzard of Warcraft and Call of Duty fame, Xbox overall posted a huge 45% jump in revenue last quarter, while its legacy Xbox business suffered a bit of a dip. 

Core Xbox fans have been left concerned what expanding to competing platforms so aggressively might mean for the console business. If fewer people want to buy Xbox hardware, it'll be even harder for Microsoft to bring third-party developers into the fold potentially, potentially leading to fewer games. The original Xbox all those years ago suffered from a large library gap when compared to the massive global footprint of the PlayStation 2, and whether or not Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella has the mindset to sustain a shrinking Xbox console business remains to be seen. Although, both Nadella and Phil Spencer say Xbox has more players than ever, which should keep it at pace with increasing costs, at least for now.  

Regardless of the perception of Xbox in the core community right now, Xbox is still making plans for the future. Xbox President Sarah Bond unveiled a forwards-compatibility team earlier in the year, while confirming that the next Xbox will represent the "biggest technological leap" for the platform. Microsoft has a promising slate of upcoming Xbox games, even if there are questions about whether or not they'll remain exclusive. Microsoft is also gearing up for a large Xbox showcase at the Tokyo Game Show later this month. 

But we learned even more interesting bits about what Xbox is planning for the future in a recent interview with License Global magazine.

The report comes from The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources. The report adds that a deal for Qualcomm to buy Intel is "far from certain" so it may not come to pass. Specific financial details of this offer were not revealed. There were previous unconfirmed rumors that Qualcomm was interested in purchasing some of Intel's chip design divisions.

Even if such a deal is announced, it would almost certainly come under the eyes of government regulators to see if it would violate anti-trust law. Qualcomm could have to sell off parts of Intel in order to pass regulatory muster.

Intel has seen its fortunes go way down in the last year, as many investors believe that the once dominate chip designer and maker missed out on the current AI revolution that's being led by other chip companies, most notably Nvidia. Earlier this year, Intel revealed that not only had its financial number missed its forecasts, but that it was going to lay off 15,000 of its employees by the end of 2024. That number represents about 15 percent of its workforce at that time.

Earlier this week, Intel announced plans to make additional changes to save money. That included pausing the plans for constructing two of its plants, along with turning it foundry business into a independent subsidiary of the company.

Qualcomm continues to be the top third-party processor for mobile devices. However, its been trying to boost its PC business as well. Earlier this year, it announced its Snapdragon X series of Arm-based processors made specifically for Windows 11 PCs. Most of the major PC makers are now selling notebooks with some form of Snapdragon X chip, including Microsoft with some of its Surface devices.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

This week, the game's official X account posted its PC hardware requirements in a minimal, recommended, and new "ideal" category. That higher level will need at least 64GB of RAM and a 100Mbps internet connection, according to Microsoft. Here's what your PC will need to run the game at these settings:

Microsoft Flight Simulator PC Hardware Requirements

Minimum

 

• Minimal Operating system: Windows 10 (with latest updates)
• Direct X version: DX12
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X / Intel Core i7-6800K
• GPU: Radeon RX 5700 / GeForce GTX 790
• VRAM: 4GB
• RAM: 16GB
• Storage: 50GB
• Bandwidth: 10 Mbps

 

Recommended

 

• Minimal Operating system: Windows 10 (with latest updates)
• Direct X version: DX12
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X / Intel Core i7-10700K
• GPU: Radeon RX 5700 XT / GeForce RTX 2080
• VRAM: 8GB
• RAM: 32GB
• Storage: 50GB
• Bandwidth: 50 Mbps

 

Ideal

 

• Minimal Operating system: Windows 10 (with latest updates)
• Direct X version: DX12
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X / Intel i7 14700K
• GPU: Radeon RX 7900 XT / GeForce RTX 4080
• VRAM: 12GB
• RAM: 64GB
• Storage: 50GB
• Bandwidth: 100 Mbps

Oddly, the game's system requirements don't mention any monitor resolution settings for any of the hardware speculation levels. They also don't indicate if the game would benefit from an SSD. There's also no mention of any support for ultrawide monitors or if it will support a multi-monitor setup.

Another interesting aspect of these specs is that the storage amounts are relatively low, at 50GB. On an FAQ page, Microsoft reveals that it will be using cloud servers to stream content to the PC.

When users load into the sim, only the textures, meshes, and map data that they need will be downloaded to avoid unnecessary bandwidth and disk space usage. This will keep the minimum specifications of the sim as low as it is now and will also reduce update and load times.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will be released on November 17 for PC and Xbox Series X and S consoles. The Standard Edition will be a Day One release for PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Microsoft will offer four editions of the game, including an Aviator's Edition with 125 planes and a cost of $199.99.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

What you need to know

• During a preview event for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, game director Corinne Busche was asked about the possibility for DLC and expansions. 
• Busche says that the team's focus right now is just on delivering the base game as a complete experience. 
• All three prior Dragon Age games received post-launch DLC. 
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard is slated to launch on Oct. 31, 2024 across Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, and PlayStation 5.

If you're wondering whether or not BioWare's upcoming fantasy role-playing will expand past launch, the answer is currently unclear. 

My colleague Rebecca Spear recently played seven hours of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and she's been excited about everything she experienced. During the preview event, she asked game director Corinne Busche about whether or not Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be getting any DLC or expansions after it launches.

Busche replied, "Our focus right now is to make the best single-player RPG that's out there, so we're very focused on just making this featured content as complete as we can."

Every prior Dragon Age game received some DLC

What you need to know

• Dragon Age: The Veilguard is an upcoming fantasy RPG from developer BioWare and publisher Electronic Arts, and is the first new mainline game in the Dragon Age franchise since Dragon Age: Inquisition.
• During a conversation Windows Central had with game director Corinne Busche, she emphasized that buildcrafting will be an important part of the game, with the level cap of 50 — much higher than the Level 27-30 limit of previous entries — hopefully enabling players to "feel like they can outsmart us."
• "We want players to find emergent builds ... my goodness, nothing would make me happier than somebody outsmarting our best tuners," she said.
• Busche also confirmed that enemies will scale with the player so that the overall experience will remain challenging and engaging throughout, and noted that balancing the expanded number of buildcrafting options required "some really insightful forethought in how we were going to handle the underlying damage calculations."

From their deep, nuanced storytelling to their expansive, handcrafted worlds, there are many things to love about well-made roleplaying games (RPGs). For me, though, one of their biggest highlights has always been buildcrafting — putting together a harmonious, synergistic blend of equipment, character skills, and playstyle to conquer your foes with a high degree of efficiency. It's a huge part of why I fell in love with recent titles like Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring, and it's something developer BioWare wants to emphasize in the upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard as well.

Speaking with my colleague Rebecca Spear during a recent preview, game director Corinne Busche explained that the studio is hoping players will "feel like they can outsmart us" with their buildcrafting, as The Veilguard's shift from a Level 27-30 cap to a Level 50 one means you'll have more options to work with than ever before.

"We want players to find emergent builds. We want them to feel like they can outsmart us. Maybe not obliterate the game," she clarified, "so when we find those, we try and roll them in. But, my goodness, nothing would make me happier than somebody outsmarting our best tuners." In other words, BioWare is rooting for you to break the RPG a bit with your ideas, though it will likely rein in any wildly overpowered setups people cook up.

The increased level cap is certainly exciting, though Busche did stress that builds will still be challenged by a healthy amount of difficulty. Balancing the looser restrictions on your gameplay options "took a concerted effort" and "some really insightful forethought in how we were going to handle the underlying damage calculations," but BioWare sounds confident you won't be breezing through this long-awaited fourth mainline entry in its beloved franchise.

Notably, one way the developer is keeping the experience engaging regardless of what level you're at is with foes that level up as you do. "Enemies scale alongside you," she said. "There are moments where you feel like you're maybe overpowering them, and then they leap ahead of you to keep you constantly engaged and pushing forward."

Even with that scaling in place, however, I'm sure savvy buildcrafters will find ways to blow Dragon Age: The Veilguard wide open with ridiculous setups capable of flattening anything the adventure throws at them. From hack-and-slash titles like Diablo 4 to shooters like Destiny 2 and Borderlands, I've seen it happen in pretty much every type of RPG out there, and I doubt that's going to stop any time soon. Since this is a single-player game and adjustments can always be made after launch, though, I think that's totally fine.

A post on the Xbox Wire site, which also has a preview of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, mentions that anyone who pre-orders any edition of the game will instantly get the De Havilland Canada CL-415 firefighting aircraft to fly in the current 2020 edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Microsoft will be offering four versions of the game for virtual aviators to check out. The Standard Edition will cost $69.99 and will include 70 aircraft and 150 upgraded airports. The Standard Edition will also be available as a Day One release for subscribers of PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass Unlimited.

The Deluxe Edition of the game will cost $99.99. It will include everything in the Standard Edition, plus 10 more planes and five more airports. There will also be the Premium Edition for $129.99. It will have all the content in the Standard and Deluxe Edition, plus 15 more aircraft,

Finally, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will have an Aviator's Edition, which will cost a whopping $199.99. This version will have all of the content from the other editions of the game. It will also have 30 additional aircraft that Microsoft originally published for the 2020 version of the game between 2021 and 2024. That means the Aviator's Edition will give virtual pilots 125 planes to check out.

As we have previously reported, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will get a big graphical update and a revamped flight and physics engine. It will also offer pilots different types of aviation jobs and missions, including air ambulance, VIP transport, aerial firefighting, and more. It will even let virtual pilots get out of their aircraft and walk around their planes, helicopters, and other aerial vehicles.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

In a press release, Unity stated that Unity 6 will offer developers improvements in graphics and "simplified multiplayer game development." It will also offer improved tools specifically for developers who want to create web browser-based games.

Unity has also announced a launch time frame for the first update for Unity 6. The update, Unity 6.1, will be released in April 2025. It stated:

Unity 6.1 will build on the core Unity 6 capabilities and include new features like support for foldable and larger screen formats, Deferred+ rendering in GPU Resident Drawer, and new build targets and build profiles.

One of the first games that has been confirmed for Unity 6 is Den of Wolves. The co-op sci-fi first-person shooter is being made by 10 Chambers, who used an earlier version of Unity to make its first game, GTFO. Originally, the development team was going to use Unity 2022 LTS to make Den of Wolves. However, they were so impressed with the pre-release version of Unity 6 that they decided to switch engines midway through making the game. You can see a brief tech demo video of the game on YouTube.

The release of Unity 6 will come at a critical time for the company, which is still dealing with the effects of its previous decision a year ago to implement a per-install runtime fee for all games that used its engine. That caused a ton of negative responses from Unity developers, and the company quickly backtracked on most of those changes. Last week, Unity ditched the runtime fee entirely from its plans.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

The AI craze has taken over the world in recent times. This is fueled by AI (artificial intelligence) giving quick answers to complex issues in just seconds. Something which can take a human hours and days is solved by AI in minutes.

AI isn’t limited to just text, either. AI is being used in media generation and editing too. Including image and videos. One of the most commonly used AI tools are the tools which are used for image generation.

However, AI generated images and videos have their downsides too. Many times, AI generated images and videos are used to spread misinformation. This is because many of these tools generate images in such a high quality that it is very hard for common people to tell whether they AI-generated or real.

So much so that these days, AI-generated images have reached and sometimes filled the Google image search results. Looks like Google is doing more to make people aware about them.

Google To Mark AI-Generated Images

In an official announcement blog (via TechRadar), Google has announced that it will soon mark AI-generated images in the search.

But it’s not going to be as outright flawless as it seems. Some background: in February this year, Google joined C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) association’s steering committee.

C2PA is an association which consists of many companies, including the likes of Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, OpenAI, Sony and others. This association aims to develop technical standards to mark media content online to prevent spread of misinformation.

In this move of labeling AI-generated images, Google aims to implement the labeling via C2PA metadata containing images. In simple words, only images containing C2PA metadata will be marked as AI-generated or edited for now.

This is a flawed implementation in our view. As will be useful only every AI-generation tools and image editors join the C2PA or implement its standards themselves. For example, Twitter’s (now X.com) Grok AI doesn’t intend to support it.

How will Google show whether an image is AI-generated. It will be through About This Image screen that may require additional clicks.

Implementation

The official announcement states that it will be implemented over the coming months to Google Search, Google Ads and will later also come on YouTube when captured through a camera. It reads:

Over the coming months, we’ll bring this latest version of Content Credentials to a few of our key products:

• Search: If an image contains C2PA metadata, people will be able to use our “About this image” feature to see if it was created or edited with AI tools. “About this image” helps provide people with context about the images they see online and is accessible in Google Images, Lens and Circle to Search.
• Ads: Our ad systems are starting to integrate C2PA metadata. Our goal is to ramp this up over time and use C2PA signals to inform how we enforce key policies.

We’re also exploring ways to relay C2PA information to viewers on YouTube when content is captured with a camera, and we’ll have more updates on that later in the year.

We will ensure that our implementations validate content against the forthcoming C2PA Trust list, which allows platforms to confirm the content’s origin. For example, if the data shows an image was taken by a specific camera model, the trust list helps validate that this piece of information is accurate.

These are just a few of the ways we’re thinking about implementing content provenance technology today, and we’ll continue to bring it to more products over time.

Google acknowledges that this alone isn’t enough. It’s encouraging more services and hardware to support the C2PA standards.

Google is also trying to bring SynthID, it’s embedded watermarking solution for text, audio, visual and video, to more AI-generation tools. It’s also joining other groups to improve AI safety.

Conclusion

This is a much welcomed move by Google in our view. Marking AI-generated images is a must when spreading of fake AI-generated media is so prevalent online.

But using just metadata to rely on labeling them is not enough. That metadata can easily be removed by editing those images. Provided that it had had any such metadata in the first place.

What is required is an implementation where a combination of metadata, forced watermarking and AI-identification tools are used. This combination will prove to be very powerful and more trustworthy.

Not only that, we feel Google should also come with its own tools to easily identify fake AI-generated images and even advertise those tools openly.

Still, it’s a long way ahead to reduce issues created by AI. Which itself is a great tool, but is always up for misuse. So this move is one small step to improve its usage for everyone.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Forum etiquette: A post that interests you enough for a comment, also deserves a reaction.

It's been just over a year since The Elder Scrolls and Fallout developer Bethesda Game Studios released the long-awaited space exploration RPG Starfield, and since then, the studio has steadily improved the title with technical enhancements, highly requested features, additional pieces of content, and official Creation Kit mod support. Now, though, the game is about to get its biggest shot in the arm yet: the Shattered Space story expansion. First announced way back when Starfield launched in 2023, it's now slated to drop on Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC (Steam and the Microsoft Store) in less than two weeks.

The developers have been fairly tight-lipped about Shattered Space until recently, and as a result, plenty of fans have plenty of questions about the DLC. To help them out, I've rounded up the most frequently asked questions I've seen and have answered them in this article. Below, you'll find everything you need to know about Starfield: Shattered Space's release date, price, Game Pass availability, story, gameplay, and more.

What is the Starfield: Shattered Space DLC?

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Forum etiquette: A post that interests you enough for a comment, also deserves a reaction.

Amazon currently faces disgruntled workers in every direction.

 

Office workers are raging against CEO Andy Jassy's return to office mandate, Fortune reported—which came just as a leaked document reportedly showed that Amazon is also planning to gut management, Business Insider reported. Drivers by the hundreds are flocking to join a union to negotiate even better work conditions, CNBC reported, despite some of the biggest concessions in Amazon's history. And hundreds more unionized warehouse workers are increasingly banding together nationwide to demand a $25 an hour minimum wage. On Wednesday, workers everywhere were encouraged to leave Jassy a voicemail elevating workers' demands for a $25 minimum wage.

Putting on the pressure

This momentum has been building for years after drivers unionized in 2021. And all this collective fury increasingly appears to be finally pressuring Amazon into negotiating better conditions for some workers.

 

Just last week, Amazon ponied up $2.1 billion—its "biggest investment yet"—to improve driver safety and increase drivers' wages.

 

Unionizing warehouse workers told Ars that they're seeking a similar investment from Amazon, which currently pays on average a $20.50 minimum wage.

 

"We work at a breakneck pace," Christine Manno, an Amazon Fulfillment Center worker at Amazon site STL8 in St. Louis, Missouri, who was injured and never expects to work again, told Ars. "We put smiles on the billionaire's faces, and we feel it's prime time for a real raise for the employees. There's too many of us struggling with food and housing, yet Andy Jassy took home over $14,000 an hour last year and Amazon is making billions in profit."

 

On Wednesday, Amazon seemed to finally bend to the warehouse workers' pressure, announcing a compromise on wage increases. The company said it was investing $2.2 billion to raise the base salaries of hourly fulfillment workers to "more than $22 an hour, and more than $29 an hour including benefits," Reuters reported. Amazon's spokesperson told Ars that STL8 workers' starting wage "increased to $19 per hour coupled with our industry-leading benefits" and claimed that the company's "biggest ever investment" in fulfillment workers was simply "part of an annual process where we review wages and benefits to ensure they stay competitive—and in many cases industry-leading."

 

But while workers claimed the victory, they're not going to sit back and take the pay bump. An STL8 worker on the organizing committee with Manno, Ash Judd, told Ars that workers "made this $1.50 raise happen through our tireless organizing, and we'll keep fighting until we reach $25."

 

Because of recent gains and the increasingly dire economic plight of workers, Amazon workers likely won't be easing off the e-commerce giant any time soon. Some office workers told Fortune they are seeking other remote work to avoid returning to the office, threatening to "soft quit" and claiming that Amazon is going "backwards" with a stricter office policy than pre-COVID times. “This is a layoff in disguise,” one apparent worker complained on Reddit. “Return to the office or you’re fired and we don’t have to pay any severance or unemployment.”

 

With so many workers upset, it could now be a question of when Amazon will cave to their growing demands—not if—according to Beth Gutelius, the research director of the University of Illinois Chicago's Center for Urban Economic Development.

 

"Research shows that the presence of collective bargaining agreements creates upward pressure on wages and working conditions, both in facilities that are unionized and those that are not," Gutelius told Ars. "Based on that evidence, I would expect working conditions at Amazon to improve."

 

Gutelius co-authored a May report documenting the financial insecurity of Amazon warehouse workers by surveying more than 1,400 across 42 states.

 

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Forum etiquette: A post that interests you enough for a comment, also deserves a reaction.

The A16 Bionic processor by Apple has a great track record and is used in the iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 series currently. Speculations indicate that these Made in America chips could potentially be used in future iPad models and even the next iPhone SE.

The fabrication unit in Arizona is part of TSMC's massive $65 billion investment, with ambitions to build a total of three fabrication plants in Phoenix that will utilize cutting edge technologies such as 4nm, 3nm, and 2nm processes. The fabs are also being funded by the U.S. government's CHIPS and Science Act, which is aimed at making the United States capable of producing advanced semiconductors domestically and reducing reliance on Asia.

The construction of TSMC's first fab in Arizona started three years ago, in 2021, with the initial target for production set for this year. However, various challenges such as COVID-19, labor shortages, cultural differences between Taiwanese and American employees, and delays in the construction of the fabs have delayed the timelines for chip production. Now, the high-volume production of the 4nm chips is planned to begin in the first half of 2025.

For the second fab, chip production was originally expected to begin in 2026, which has now been pushed back to 2027 or 2028, depending on consumer demand as Made in America chips will be costlier, by up to 30%, according to previous reports. A lot of it will also depend upon additional grants by the U.S. government. Although, TSMC has currently completed foundational work and initial infrastructure for its second fab.

via Tim Culpan

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Forum etiquette: A post that interests you enough for a comment, also deserves a reaction.

Although the listing does not mention what improvements the remaster will feature, a report from 2022 about a possible Zero Dawn remaster did spill some information. According to that report, character models, lighting, and animations are all being updated to make the first entry more in line with the visuals seen in Horizon Forbidden West, the 2022 sequel.

With the PlayStation 5 Pro now confirmed, this could be a launch entry for the newly upgraded system to show off its graphics muscles. Zero Dawn never received a PlayStation 5 native version, with the title still using backward compatibility on the current-gen platform to run the PlayStation 4 version.

The ESRB page does mention both PlayStation 5 and PC as targeted platforms for the remaster, though. Sony has been steadily pushing out more PC ports of its first-party exclusives. The latest of the bunch, God of War Ragnarök, is landing on PC tomorrow, September 19, with various exclusive enhancements.

Don't forget that the Horizon spin-off entry LEGO Horizon Adventures is coming to PlayStation 5, PC, and Nintendo Switch simultaneously later this year too. While it will be retelling the story from the original games, the tone will be much more humor-orientated to match other games in LEGO universes.

Keep in mind that Sony has yet to confirm a remaster for Horizon Zero Dawn, so take this rating with a grain of salt until something official comes through.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Forum etiquette: A post that interests you enough for a comment, also deserves a reaction.

The first trailer for the documentary, titled War Game: The Making of ‘S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, is now available to watch on YouTube as well. It shows team members from GSC GameWorld dealing with the real life events of the Russian invasion while also trying to finish the long awaited game.

Variety has more info on the documentary. It interviewed the game's creative director Maria Grygorovych on how they wanted to share their story with the world even if it might be hard to do so. She stated:

It’s not about like, I really want to share something from my personal life, or for our team, as well. We are really not public people and it’s hard to share something personal. But when this opportunity comes to us from Microsoft, we thought that it’s important to share with the world a little bit more about how difficult it is to live in a wartime from the personal side.

The new documentary was directed by Andrew Stephan, who also directed the multi-part Power On: The Story of Xbox that Microsoft released for free on YouTube in 2021.

After a number of delays, some for obvious reasons, GSC GameWorld will finally release S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl on November 20. It will be available as a timed console exclusive for Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S, and it will also be released for the PC via Steam, GOG, Microsoft Store, and the Epic Games Store. The game will be a Day One exclusive launch for Microsoft's PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Forum etiquette: A post that interests you enough for a comment, also deserves a reaction.

However, as AnandTech found out during its review of the Ryzen 9950X, the new Zen 5 parts are seeing very high latencies, double that of Zen 4 (Ryzen 7000 series), especially the inter-CCD latencies. AnandTech noted:

Compared to the Ryzen 9 7950X, we are seeing a slight increase in latencies within a single CCX. The SMT "advantage", where two logical cores sharing a single physical core have a lower latency, appears to be gone. Instead, latencies are consistently around 20ns from any logical core to any other logical core within a single CCX. That average is slightly up from 18ns on the 7950X, though it's not clear what the chief contributing factor is.

 

More significantly – and worryingly so – are the inter-CCD latencies. That is, the latency to go from a core on one CCD to a core on the other CCD. AMD's multi-CCD Ryzen designs have always taken a penalty here, as communicating between different CCDs means taking a long trek through AMD's Infinity Fabric to the IOD and back out to the other CCD. But the inter-CCD latencies are much higher here than we were expecting.

 

For reference, on the Ryzen 9 7950X, going to another CCD is around 76ns. But in Ryzen 9 9950X, we're seeing an average latency of 180ns, over twice the cost of the previous generation of Ryzen.

However, this latency problem appears to have been fixed with a new AGESA (AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture) firmware update. Members of the Overclock.net and AnandTech forums tested the core-to-core latency of the Ryzen 9000 series CPUs using CapFrameX's MircroBenchX tool.

With the new AGESA 1.2.0.2 BIOS, the Ryzen 9950X showed a latency of around ~75 ns whereas with a previous firmware version, AGESA 1.2.0.1A, the number is around ~180 ns, indicating an approximate 58% reduction, which is statistically very significant. (This AGESA version is different from the one that increased the TDP.)

As for real-world improvements, a user claimed they found that their Cinebench R23 score went up slightly.

Y-cruncher developer added to the discussion that AMD was apparently aware of these performance regressions and it was a consequence of a conscious effort from AMD. However, the change is being reverted:

.. One of the lead architects told me that the latency regression was because they changed a bunch of tuning parameters for Zen5. It helped whatever workloads they were testing against, which is why they did it. But now that the reviews are out, they realized that the change looked really bad for synthetics. So they were going to roll it back.

In case you have not been following, AMD's Ryzen 9000 series processors did not impress reviewers all that much. And there have been some legit performance-related bugs in the chip and Windows 11 itself may have to share some of that blame too.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Forum etiquette: A post that interests you enough for a comment, also deserves a reaction.

"What we’re really working with our community on is this a new era of ‘The Sims,'" says Gorman, speaking to Variety. "We are not going to be working on replacements of previous projects; we’re only going to be adding to our universe."

When directly asked about not releasing The Sims 5 in the future, Gorman had said the focus is to keep updating the now free-to-play fourth entry and keep player's content and progress alive. As fans of previous entries should know, a new game would mean starting over with expansions and features too:

"What this means is that we will continue to bring HD simulation experience and what people would want from a ‘5’ — but it doesn’t mean that we’re going to start you over, reset all your progress, and really feel like you’re going to lose all of that amazing play you put into ‘4,’. I think as we think about the future of it, we want you to continue all of those families and generations. Those creations are your progress, your attachment."

While the game already sells expansions and small DLC packs filled with new features and cosmetic content developed by Maxis, a new variant called Creator Kits will be landing soon. These community-created content will be published by EA as paid packs in-game, while also giving the original authors a cut of the proceeds when players purchase them.

One of the biggest features of the next generation of The Sims was touted to be online features, letting players join each other in their Sims worlds. It seems that project is still being kept alive, though it's unclear if it will be implemented into The Sims 4 or arrive as a spin-off multiplayer experience. A playtest for Project Rene will happen in fall of 2024, and sign ups can be found here.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Forum etiquette: A post that interests you enough for a comment, also deserves a reaction.

Although I do play most games in the city building genre as they launch, they don’t tend to stick with me for very long. I've realized I am not very good at the money making and destroying old parts of the city aspects these titles. Frostpunk's insistence of needing constant supplies and its rebuilding initiatives hits different though. Instead of the game bankrupting you, vast swathes of your population die off if you are slow to act. The survival of the human race depends on grim decisions, and my clueless butt is the one making them for this steampunk city. Perfect.

After spending almost 20 hours in the frigid lands of Frostpunk 2, I think I've seen enough of the game to give my thoughts on the experience. It turned out to be a gorgeous game with fresh and interesting mechanics built on top of the original’s brilliant ideas, though with annoying technical irritations. I've kept campaign spoilers to a minimum in this review.

Going wide or tall

The world has come to an end under a blanket of snow and ice. Except for a tiny city still being kept alive by a giant generator and stragglers in the wastes, everything is considered dead and gone. But now, with decades of surviving under its belt, the city of New London is finally ready to grow, and you’re the one in charge of this revolution. It’s a captivating setting from the start.

If you’ve played the original game, just knowing that the community you saved (hopefully) has managed to survive for this long is a satisfying feeling on its own; if you’re a new player, the premise is kept simple, and throughout its lengthy campaign Frostpunk 2 gradually introduces its new mechanics to slowly overwhelm you in the best way possible. The game is part city builder, part survival game, and part policy manager. Juggling between those aspects while making sure humanity survives is the end goal.

I’m not exactly sure who elected me to lead the final civilization of the world, but what’s the worst that could happen, right? Thankfully, 11 bit studios has a slow and steady start planned for players like me and brand-new arrivals to the series, showing off the new mechanics piece by piece.

To start, snow must be dug through hex by hex to make space for constructing districts of housing, food production facilities, coal mining shafts, and parts production factories. Building these in close proximity to each other can give benefits or negatives, like better heating or workforce, depending on the type of facility. Nobody likes living next to a fume spewing industrial plant, but close to the furnace or food crops is always appreciated.

There are separate hub buildings you can plonk down to further expand on this bonus stacking venture, with some skilled, almost organic, snake-like district placements being the most effective in my experience. Larger districts can also house buildings, which tailor the district for more specific tasks like having hospitals, watch towers for reducing crime, housing built straight into factories, and others.

Every decision comes with upsides and downsides, and you’ll be swapping these buildings out semi-regularly when the need arises.

Finding the possible answer to these challenges has you choosing between two paths early on: go deeper to access the larger reserves buried under everything, or go wide, and set up major outposts to create more supply for the main city. This even affects what kind of fuel you prefer for your ever-hungry furnace. You need at least a couple of playthroughs to see what could have happened choosing the other path of technologies. Whatever behemoth task you choose to take on, it’s filled with harsh lessons.

Campaign

Most city builders give you ample time to sit back, grab a drink, plan a bit for the future, evaluate buildings, and remake parts that weren't working out, all probably accomplished in the highest game speed available.

In Frostpunk 2, you’ll be hitting the space bar, which pauses the action, like it’s your favorite button. It is vitally important that research teams, the exploration teams, the snow digging teams, the construction teams, and every team you can think of, isn’t ever idling. Speeding through the world as weeks flip by in the always visible giant counter on the top left of the UI is always possible, but it will end up with either a dead city or an ousted leader quite rapidly, especially on higher difficulties.

This is a city builder that needs careful decision making, and there aren't many opportunities for do-overs unless you like reloading saves from hours ago. While you can also make many quick and rash rulings, like putting workers into overtime, dangerously overloading the generator, and perhaps passing an emergency law, it’s a tough battle to recover from spiraling issues. Still, going with the flow and finding solutions to survive by the skin of your teeth has a thrill of its own.

Nearly nothing in this post-apocalyptic landscape is unlimited. Crops only grow for a certain amount of time in the barely fertile soil, mines run out of resources, living quarters are miniscule, and the parts you salvage are from destroyed structures of the past. Everything has an expiry date, and if something’s usefulness runs out, it best be recycled, whether it be a building or a person.

Let’s not forget about the constantly frigid weather and sudden periods of cataclysmic cold, titled Whiteouts. All work stops and outside connections go dark until these deadly storms relent. Stocking up for these moments is crucial. I'd have my city finally in a state that's precarious but going towards stability, but just the announcement of an impending Whiteout will send my blood pressure up.

Hundreds of citizens freeze to death weekly, tensions rise to historic levels, talks of riots pop up from factions, and the city itself is about to implode from overusing the generator for squeezing out just a little bit more heat. And all that is happening in the first few minutes of a Whiteout, and they last for, at least what I felt like every time, forever. Surviving one feels amazing, like the world has thrown everything it can at my work, and even with its parts barely hanging on, my city and its people have come out the other side.

Sending out parties to map out uncharted areas outside the city is a necessary gamble. It's exciting to send scouts on their missions, carving out through the frozen wasteland, making trails, and seeing what's buried under everything. It could be supplies that can make the city last a few more weeks, some wildly valuable Cores that are needed for the most powerful upgrades for districts, or more people to bring in or turn away. Entire outposts can be set up in some instances, letting you build camps in gorgeous, mountainous landscapes.

Politics only happen in the main city, thankfully, but the outposts still need resources and heat to remain steady and provide resources for all. The game also lets you swap between your main city and these outposts rapidly. You can zoom out of your main city, swipe over to the other end of the wasteland, and zoom into an outpost’s structures seamlessly. An impressive feat.

Outside of the campaign, Frostpunk 2 also has the Utopia Manager, a number of fresh scenarios to tackle set across fresh landscapes with customizable factions and difficulties. Don’t let the name fool you though, the only utopia you’ll be building is a frosted over one if my experiences are anything to go by. Political battles and whiteouts are just as brutal in these massive levels, but scenarios (which can even be played in an endless mode) provide plenty of more content for anyone looking to continue their frigid city building escapades.

Faction politics and decisions

A major departure from the original game’s city management aspects is that you aren’t the absolute leader behind all decisions anymore. Changing laws requires a majority vote to happen from the council, a group of individuals representing the different political parties that have formed in our meager city.

No longer can you put chemicals into the food or have children work in the mines without at least some pushback. I was happy to see that, just like in real life, you can grease the palms of the opposing forces by promising extra funding or a future favor to tilt the votes in your favor. Frostpunk 2 has a range of communities, and you start with only a few, like the tradition following Lords or the technology averse Foragers.

As more and more pressure is put on the populace from natural elements and your political decisions, though, they can break off into new factions with more… fanatical outlooks. It's these new factions that can give very enjoyable but painful gameplay experiences in Frostpunk 2.

At points I was simultaneously dealing with protests against my leadership and campaigns praising it, from two different factions of course, as I had favored one a bit too much in my technology-focused march to save my city. I even sent my supporters to counter protest the other group, which ended with bloodshed and even more recruits joining from the larger, less aggravated, but sympathizing communities. If city stability falls too low from all this chaos, it’s game over. The passable laws section does have several ‘authoritative options’ available to cull any major opponents if you want to go that route.

Almost all decisions, may it be a technology, political, or even a simple choice regarding a random event, has some sort of curveball later. This could be a civil event pressuring that a harsh law has to be amended somewhat – like giving parents visitation rights to children being raised by the state – or pressure from another faction to elect their version of the law instead, such as one that discourages machine usage in factories to give regular people more jobs.

What I really liked to see was that sticking to your guns even with opposing forces telling you otherwise is still a valid tactic. When the going gets tough, it also becomes time to force the city and its people to push themselves as hard as they can. This can mean opting to enable overtime across factories, passing laws that harm health but increase production or heat, overcrowding houses, and even overclocking the one thing that's keeping everyone alive: the generator. All these can have massive consequences if kept up long enough, but if that means saving the city and civilization, would it be worth it? That's what the game asks of you. There aren't any wrong decisions here, just whatever is necessary.

While you must cater towards the existing population’s factions in the early game, when the city slowly grows from fresh arrivals from the wastes outside, you have to evolve and perhaps shy away from old alliances. The decisions aren’t solely political ones either. When I needed to increase the number of active workers and production efficiency in a pinch, the suggestion to enact Mass-Produced Goods law was a great one.

Focusing on the quality of goods at that point seemed insane. However, once things stabilized later, opting to switch to Durable Goods law that ensures goods last longer was the better idea. Of course, the parties in favor of the original idea can add this as another reason to hate me for this decision, making me look towards the new generation that I had dismissed before in a new light.

Games like Cities: Skylines can have small little text pop up from time to time with snippets like how garbage is filling up in streets or there's a lack of parks, but Frostpunk 2 has much more "cheerful" messages like '300 workers lose limbs from too much overtime' or '12 children pass away from street brawl'. Always very motivating messages to come back to when managing a city.

Visuals, audio, and performance

Frostpunk 2 is absolutely gorgeous. From the moment you start the game, the frosty theme is implemented beautifully across the visual style and even the UI. The snow-covered landscapes with tips of mountains still peaking through. The steampunk technologies light up New London as citizens and robots light up New London’s tight streets. Even the gorgeous map that you send your scouts to navigate is always a visual treat.

The music is industrious and slow for the most part, giving you an appropriate cold and haunting tempo to build your cities and pass your laws with. When temperatures rise and fall, laws come into effect, or new matters require your attention, the sounds used for notifications are more like groans and deep thuds, as if the next decision you make is your last one.

Actual announcements from megaphones ring out across the city when a major decision has just been made. It's satisfying simply to hear the slow churn of the instrumental track when the game is paused. But it's when Whiteouts hit that everything kicks into high gear. Violins pick up as the tempo of the music slowly increases, giving you the sense of urgency as the city hunkers down, sounds deaden, and only emergency lights appear as the blizzard conditions worsen. This is easily the best sound and visual design I've in the city building genre.

Performance can be a little troublesome though, but not at first. I ran the game on a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro RTX 3060 Laptop GPU. It has 6GB of VRAM, an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, and 16GB of RAM, with the game running at 1440p while installed on an NVMe SSD. Even looking over the most taxing cities with dozens of hours put into them, I was managing to get around 40FPS easily running on a mix of medium and high graphics settings when starting a save. But as the hours go by, the frame rate slowly tanks to the 20s, making a restart the fastest option to get back into the smooth action. Even brand-new cities’ 70FPS start drops to 30s in the same time frame. Hopefully some future updates can alleviate this issue.

I had a love and hate relationship with the UI. On the good side, the black on white aesthetic is clear and concise, with almost every option having tooltips and further explanations at the press of a button. While district buildings can be a little fiddly at times, the color-coded areas are easy to learn.

One of the most impressive decisions 11 bit studios have made is to have a handy contextual shortcut that can pull up a page on what you're pointing your cursor at. Just hovering over any menu item, map resource, district, or any point of interest and pressing T will pull up this in-game encyclopedia with the relevant page already selected. It's genius, and I wish more city building and strategy games would have a feature like this.

At the same time, the UI loves to fight with me now and then. Some elements that pop up, like district information, can go halfway out of the screen when I click to open them, making me wrestle with the camera to find an angle to see what the hell I am looking at. Next, pressing one of the options available in the build menu usually sends you to the research tab instead because the buttons are somehow overlapping.

Building upgrades also requires a separate menu instead of selecting one from a district I’m already looking at, and no information is given on how many of any building or upgrade already exist in the city. Information is also delivered with words like marginally, significantly, or something is slightly increased or decreased. An actual number or a slider to show how much things will change with actions is what I’m looking for.

It’s little things like this that can get frustrating while playing such a well-built game.

Conclusion

The hunger for more warmth, stability, room, and hope is what drives this final civilization, and the Steward, that’s you, is what’s guiding them. Picking sides with the factions that rise to the top of the food chain to lead their populations adds an additional amazing layer to what made the original Frostpunk great, showing how a council in turmoil can bring a city down faster than the actual end of the world.

Everything from the new district building and managing multiple outposts, to the exciting council votes, Frostpunk 2 delivers plenty of innovation that takes you to the edge of being an overwhelming experience but keeps being a joy to come back to. I don’t want to know how many harsh decisions I agonized over about children, workers, and technologies in my time with the game, but seeing my city slowly become a place worth living in was a proud achievement.

The game isn’t without its share of issues. Like I’ve talked about, the UI is something I was fighting with. The camera cutting off elements, buttons overlapping causing misclicks, and just the lack of solid information on city statistics was annoying to say the least, especially for a city builder. The performance issues with frame rates slowly going down as the hours went by was another sticking point. The gameplay and storyline were so engrossing though, I didn’t mind pushing past these issues.

Frostpunk 2 gets a massive recommendation from me. I have never seen such unique gameplay and storytelling aspects to appear from a city building entry. The studio has expanded and built upon almost everything that made the original game a great one without lessening the impact.

Frostpunk 2 launches on September 20 on PC via Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store, and Microsoft Store with a $44.99 price tag. It will also be available on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass as a day-one launch on Windows. Those pre-purchasing the Deluxe Editions can jump into the game three days early starting on September 17.

This review of Frostpunk 2 on PC was conducted on a pre-release copy of the Steam version provided by 11 bit studios.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Forum etiquette: A post that interests you enough for a comment, also deserves a reaction.

Fans of ultra-viral mobile gaming hit Flappy Bird who were stunned by the game's sudden removal from the iOS App Store 10 years ago were probably even more stunned by last week's equally sudden announcement that Flappy Bird is coming back with a raft of new characters and game modes. Unfortunately, the new version of Flappy Bird seems to be the result of a yearslong set of legal maneuvers by a crypto-adjacent game developer intent on taking the "Flappy Bird" name from the game's original creator, Dong Nguyen.

 

"No, I have no related with their game. I did not sell anything," Nguyen wrote on social media over the weekend in his first post since 2017. "I also don't support crypto," Nguyen added.

 

"Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed," Nguyen said in a 2014 interview after removing the game from mobile app stores. "But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It's gone forever."

“A decade-long, convoluted journey to get here”

So how can another company release a game named Flappy Bird without Nguyen's approval or sale of the rights? Court filings show that a company called Gametech Holdings filed a "notice of opposition" against Nguyen with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in late 2023, seeking to invalidate his claim on the "Flappy Bird" name. When Nguyen, who lives in Vietnam, didn't respond to that notice by November, the US Patent and Trademark Office entered a default judgment against him and officially canceled his trademark in January, allowing Gametech to legally claim the name.

 

But Gametech's efforts to legally acquire the Flappy Bird name seem to go back much further than that. Back in 2014, an outfit called Mobile Media Partners tried to claim the Flappy Bird trademark in a filing made mere days after Nguyen pulled the game from the App Store. Coincidentally enough, the specific New Jersey address listed by Mobile Media Partners on that 2014 application matches an address used by Gametech Holdings in the paperwork for its 2023 legal efforts.

 

Mobile Media Partners' 2014 application makes reference to a (now-defunct) FlappyBirdReturns.com and asserts that the company had "reserved/acquired the name from Apple in their Apps Store [sic]." It also claims that "Flappy Bird" is "not being used by any other companies and/or people," taking quick advantage of Nguyen's decision to take the game down.

 

With this "evidence," the USPTO actually granted Mobile Media Partners a Flappy Bird trademark in 2018, a fact that Gametech cited in its successful 2023 opposition to Nguyen's use of the mark.

 

In a press release, a spokesperson for the newly formed Flappy Bird Foundation—which acquired the trademark from Gametech—summed this all up as "a decade-long, convoluted journey to get here." The new company said it also acquired the legal rights to Piou Piou vs. Cactus, a little-known 2011 web game that seems to have heavily inspired Flappy Bird.

 

The newly launched FlappyBird.org website proudly refers to "the decade-long mission" to revive the game, which "involved acquiring legal rights." The post also mentions "working with my predecessor to uncage me and re-hatch..." in phrasing that seems to imply a link to the original Flappy Bird but which could also reference the Piou Piou vs. Cactus acquisition.

$FLAP-py Bird?

 

The Flappy Bird Foundation said in its announcement that it is "committed to preserving the Flappy Bird IP and expanding the legacy of Flappy Bird." The organization's social media promises the game is "100% FREE TO PLAY and always will be," while linking to a playable version on messaging app Telegram, of all places (native mobile versions are being promised for 2025).

 

But despite the organization's nonprofit-sounding name and promises, there are multiple signs the new Flappy Bird is planning some tight integration with the very profit-focused cryptocurrency industry.

 

Michael Roberts, who's listed in the press release as "the chief creative behind Flappy Bird’s return," is listed on LinkedIn as "Head of Studio" for 1208 Productions. Its website describes it as a mobile game developer and production studio that is also "a pioneer in the web 3 space" and "Web 3 OG’s launching back in 2021."

 

The main crypto-related project listed on the 1208 Productions site is a set of NFTs based around the "Deez Nuts" joke/brand. The webpage for that project also lists Roberts (aka "Papa Nut") as a partner of The Doge Pound NFT project.

 

On social media, Roberts recently posted an approving link to a Blockchain Reporter piece touting the new Flappy Bird's "strategic collaborations with chief names in the Web3 sector." That piece mentions letting Flappy Bird players join in a "free-of-cost mining event" on the TON network, that will "[blend] the entertainment [of] the classic gameplay of Flappy Bird with the Web3 innovation." The Blockchain Reporter piece also cites Roberts asserting that "embracing TON ecosystem and Web3 target guarantees the further development of the game."

 

• 

• 

• 

The new FlappyBird.org webpage doesn't mention any of those crypto links publicly. But web developer and cybersecurity researcher Varun Biniwale found quite a few such references while digging into the site's hidden, unlinked content. That includes a (now-deleted, but archived) page promising the new Flappy Bird will "fly higher than ever on Solana as it soars into Web 3.0... Artists, developers and creators can build, play and earn from the legendary Flappy Bird IP... Flappy Bird will now be the world’s first open-source, community owned Web 2 and Web 3 game."

 

Biniwale's discoveries also include a rough WebGL version of the game, which has references to a $FLAP Token that can be stored on a linked crypto wallet through the TON Network.

 

The Flappy Bird Foundation has not responded to Ars Technica's request for comment, so it's hard to get any clarity on the new Flappy Bird's seeming plans to engage with the crypto world. What seems clear, though, is that the current claimants to the Flappy Bird legacy acquired the name through a rather hostile legal takeover and seem more than intent on milking the brand for all it's worth.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Forum etiquette: A post that interests you enough for a comment, also deserves a reaction.

Source

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of August): 3,792 news posts

Forum etiquette: A post that interests you enough for a comment, also deserves a reaction.