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We’re only a few days from the beginning of the festivities, so of course E3 2021 dominates this week’s edition of Headlines & Hot Takes. We break down all of the scheduled press conferences / media briefings / snazzy advertisements and what we might see at each of them. Microsoft need to go big with Halo Infinite to wash away the memory of Craig, it’d be lovely to get some gameplay of Starfield, Eidos is apparently set to reveal a Guardians of The Galaxy game: there’s a lot discussed on this week’s show, so get it listened....

You need to be a little bit careful if you’ve been messing around with The Witcher 3 on your PC before you transfer over your files though, as CD Projekt Red note that “mod-related bugs and blockers might get transferred from a modded PC game save file”. So you could end up with all the bugs that come with mods, but without the fun of the actual mods. Which is a shame because The Witcher 3 has loads of really great mods on PC....

In a test video this week, “Loki,” “LukeYui,” and a third player all conduct what they’re calling a “stress test.” They say that the in-progress Sekiro Online mod has yet to ever handle three players simultaneously. It’s still in early development, they say, but look! Three players. Nevermind the first few seconds where the game crashes. Nothing to see here, everything’s fine. After all three players are in and running about, proving their humanity by gleefully hopping around and squatting on top of whatever Sekiro calls its bonfires, they go on exploring the area together....

For such anti-riches I can’t recommend any other tenkey-equipped, fully mechanical keyboard more; indeed, it held the ‘best cheap mechanical gaming keyboard’ title on our best keyboards list well before this discount revealed itself. The only thing missing here is USB pass-through, but N-key rollover, a volume dial, a detachable wrist rest, macro recording and RGB backlighting are all part of the deal. If the Pyro isn’t to your tastes, there are many more gaming keyboard savings to be found in our guides to the best Black Friday mouse and keyboard deals, the best Black Friday Logitech deals and the best Black Friday Razer deals....

The two never run into each other because Frank(enstein) operates by day while Drake(ula) “works nights”. Throughout each character’s half of the day, you’ll click around different parts of the apartment and building, fiddling with puzzles, making choices about how the story will play out, and learning to live in harmony as unspoken roommates. All the while there are secrets about each of them to uncover related to their literary nicknamesakes....

Here’s a good tutorial by “polartt” that also shows you how the sausages are made. Create’s physical systems include things like rotation, conveyor belts, and moving grabbers, but with an additional programming layer that lets you define where items move around the map. So you can add filters to the conveyors and divert resources all over the place. Version 0.3 was released in December, and not long after “Ash” built this delightful cable car....

Get a Zotac RTX 3080 10GB for £660 (was £733) w/ code HOT10 Get a Palit RTX 3080 10GB for £670 (was £743) w/ code HOT10 The RTX 3080 is currently our top high-end graphics card pick, as its 4K gaming performance eclipses that of lesser cards while costing far less per frame than the RTX 3080 12GB, RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090 or RTX 3090 Ti - which are all only modestly faster for a massive price increase....

Get the Ryzen 5 5600 for £145 (was £210) RPS (and indeed Digital Foundry, from which I hail), haven’t reviewed the 5600, but looking at some online benchmarks (and the specs of the processor) things are laid bare. The 5600X has a 200MHz higher rated base and boost frequency, but AMD’s optimistic boost algorithms ensure that any differences are minimal at best. Otherwise, these are the same lumps of silicon! That’s borne out by reviews too....

Ed said in his review that The Ascent’s world is already a “feast for the robotic eyes”, but the detail developers Neon Giant have flooded the world with is astounding when seen in close-up. NPCs you’re only ever meant to see from above and far away have detailed tattoos. All the magazines, screens, and boxes have readable text. You can read stickers that they splattered across vendor booths. No wonder my frame rate dipped from time to time: he got close enough to see that the articles under the magazine titles were filled with lorem ipsum....

As spotted by Kotaku, Wirtual created the video below to explain the scandal and how the cheaters got caught. It’s a fascinating story that talks in-depth about how these hacks were possible, and it’s mighty impressive the amount of work Wirtual and Donadigo put into their investigation. They used a tool created by Donadigo to assess clips of multiple Trackmania speedruns, resulting in catching out seven racers. To be counted on Trackmania’s speedrunning leaderboards, players must submit a replay file of their run (which the game automatically makes when you complete a run)....

I find it a little bit ridiculous that a five year old game can look this good.

You can see a summary of the changes over on Steam. There’s nothing there that would make you instantly start playing, I don’t think, but there’s a lot of nice things if you’re already a player. The interface can now be scaled to whatever size you want, rivers will now look more natural, and there are several dozen quality-of-life improvements in the full changelog. More broadly, it’s just worth reminding you that OpenTTD exists, given that it’s one of the best building games and management games of all time....

Trombone Champ was actually announced two years ago, but its release date trailer is just hysterical enough to have caught the imagination of the Internet over the past few days. Cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer got things rolling with a, uhh, beautiful rendition of Beethoven: Let’s get one thing out of the way though – some people are genuinely good at this game. I’m not sure that’s the point, but congrats to them for mad trombone skills: In a darker turn of events, Cursed To Golf dev Liam Edwards may be plotting some kind of supervillainous plan against Holy Wow....

As Middle East Eye reported in November 2021, suspicions were raised following the huge Twitch leak in October which included earnings data for streamers. People combining over the numbers found that some streamers were receiving ludicrously large donations relative to their viewing figures. It’s suspected that they were part of a criminal network where wrong’uns would coordinate with streaming wrong’uns to launder money. People would allegedly use stolen or scammed credit card info to buy Bits on Twitch, donate Bits to the streamers, and the streamers would cash their Bits out of Twitch into real money, then pay 80% of that money back, allegedly as cryptocurrency....

So, as the AI running the last colony ship to abandon Earth (Ubisoft optimistically think we’ll make it to the year 2057), we’ll be jaunting through star systems, building probes that can pilot to explore, mining, scavenging, researching new technologies, trading, completing quests, and such. Explore, power up, don’t accidentally destroy a sizeable portion of the surviving population. Gotcha. Easy. And Ubisoft claim it has “innovative controls for a motion sickness–free experience” so you shouldn’t sick up all over your cybergoggles while spinning around the cosmos....

Now Ubisoft say that they have cancelled it. “We can confirm we will no longer support the development of Project Q in order to focus on priority projects, to which our teams are being reallocated,” an Ubisoft spokesperson told VGC, after leaks over the cancellation earlier in the week. Project Q was first revealed via a GeForce Now leak in November 2021, before alleged footage (since removed) leaked out the following year....

It seems like that will change soon. A recent, hastily-removed update to the collection’s Epic Games Store page declared that it would release on October 19th. The revision to the store page wasn’t up for long, but was captured by Twitter user Wario64. “The Uncharted: Legacy Of Thieves Collection, remastered and optimized for PC, hits Epic Games Store on Oct. 19th, and if you pre-purchase it, you’ll get a snazzy new Fortnite glider in the shape of Sully’s seaplane,” says the text on the image....

Since building a castle is an important quest in V Rising, we’re here to help. In this guide, we’ll explain how to build a castle room in V Rising, and offer some tips on improving and defending your castle. How to build a castle in V Rising To start building a castle in V Rising, you must place down a Castle Heart. This is a small fountain of blood that powers everything inside your castle and allows you to mark the boundaries of your base....

Our Valheim Bonemass boss fight guide will explain exactly how to locate, summon, and kill Bonemass. We’ll also walk you through the unique rewards you’ll earn after slaying it. On this page: Valheim Bonemass boss location How to summon Bonemass in Valheim Valheim Bonemass boss fight guide Bonemass Forsaken Power & loot drops Valheim Bonemass boss location Bonemass, like the other Valheim bosses, does not appear somewhere in the world at the start of a game....

Our Valheim Elder boss fight guide will walk you through how to find, summon, and beat the Elder, as well as the rewards you’ll reap after defeating this legendary foe. On this page: Valheim Elder boss: location How to summon Elder in Valheim Valheim Elder boss fight walkthrough Elder Forsaken Power & loot drops Valheim Elder boss location Like all the bosses in Valheim, The Elder must be summoned at a Mystical Altar....