The death late last year of 'Star Wars' star Carrie Fisher devastated fans around the world, and put a spanner in the works for the finale of the franchise which is due to start filming mid this year, for release in 2019. But according to the late star's brother, an agreement has been reached with Disney which will see Princess Leia reprise her role one last time.

According to the NY Daily News, the late actor's brother Todd Fisher confirmed that

both he and Carrie Fisher's daughter Billie Lourd had granted the studio the right to use her likeness for the final 'Star Wars' saga film. "Both of us were like, 'Yes, how do you take her out of it?' And the answer is you don't. She's as much a part of it as anything and I think her presence now is even more powerful than it was, like Obi Wan - when the saber cuts him down he becomes more powerful. I feel like that's what's happened with Carrie. I think the legacy should continue." The current plan is to edit in footage shot for the newest 'Star Wars' films and probably also use some light CG to have her as part of the narrative.

Ubisoft has lost one of the transformative forces responsible for guiding Far Cry 4's and Assassin's Creed III's development.

After seven years at Ubisoft, ex-creative director Alex Hutchinson has left the company to found his own independent studio. During his tenure at Ubisoft, Hutchinson helped bring major triple-A games like Far Cry 4 (which I liked a fair deal--Pagan Min is pretty awesome) and Assassin's Creed III to the market.

Hutchinson left the publisher to co-found his own indie development studio called Typhoon Studios and "build something new." The dev's departure brings to mind a very interesting question: is Far Cry 5 finished?

Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan reiterates that Overwatch on the Nintendo Switch probably won't happen.

"Getting Overwatch on the Switch is very challenging for us. But we're always open minded about exploring possible platforms," Kaplan said during a Reddit AmA last month.

Now in a recent follow-up with Express Online, Kaplan basically says the Switch isn't powerful enough to support Overwatch's minimum spec.

Now that Microsoft has confirmed it's new 4K-ready Project Scorpio console can indeed hit native 4K 60FPS at Ultra preset, there's been lots of speculation on how much the system will cost. Leading game analysts toss out their predictions, and we weigh each price point to see what makes sense.

First we have the outlandish $700 price prediction from IDC's Lewis Ward, who predicts Scorpio must ship at $700 for Microsoft to make any money.

"I estimate the basic hardware will cost around $650, so if Microsoft wants any kind of margin at all, Scorpio will have to retail for $700 or more," Lewis told Games Industry.biz. The analyst justifies his prediction by pointing at Alienware's VR-ready Aurora PC, which sports an RX 480 GPU and Intel i5-7400, which somehow equates Project Scorpio's specs. "If you look at the Alienware Aurora, which is a solid VR-ready PC, that currently costs about $1,000. I think Scorpio will come in below that, but how much below is unknowable at this point."

AMD launched its new Ryzen offensive into the high-end/enthusiast markets with the Ryzen 7 family, led by the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X processor - but the fight for the mid-range is going to be huge when Ryzen 5 launches next week.

AMD is launching 4 new Ryzen 5 processors, ranging from the Ryzen 5 1400 for $169 (offering 4C/8T @ 3.4GHz) up to the Ryzen 5 1600X for $249 (6C/12T @ 4GHz).

But now there's news from HardOCP that they've clocked their Ryzen 5 1600 processor up to 4GHz, or 3.975GHz to be exact, at 1.45V and LLC 5. They added that "Once you get past 3.8GHz on these processors, the voltage usage and heat emitted just gets exponential with them. So they get very hot, very quickly".

BioWare is slowly fixing Mass Effect: Andromeda and patching it to a state that somewhat resembles what it should've been at launch. The game released with tons of bugs, glaring issues, and horrible facial animations, proving it should've been delayed. But why delay the game when you can release it, soak up tens of millions of dollars, and then just "fix" it with patches later?

To BioWare's credit, they have made some pretty distinct changes to the faces in the latest Patch 1.05 update. And like any developer who wants to quickly sweep their mess under the rug, BioWare is keen on you downloading the patch and erasing those wacky faces from the public's mind--so keen that the game's update triggers twice on PS4.

A little bit of explanation here: I'm recording unpatched footage of facial animations to do some non-patch vs patched comparisons, so I don't want to update Mass Effect: Andromeda. Even with Automatic Downloads turned off on PS4, my console auto downloads any updates for any games I start, including ME: Andromeda. So I have to go and manually stop them (yes, I have all automatic downloads turned off on PS4 system settings). When I fire up the game itself, BioWare informs me there's an update and auto-triggers the patch download. So that's twice I had to cancel the update.

Earlier we reported that Microsoft's 4K-ready Project Scorpio console features a customized hard drive with 50% more throughput in order to speedily load native 4K textures and assets. Thinking on this a bit I came to an interesting question: if Scorpio's hard drive is so customized, can we swap the stock HDD out with bigger 2.5-inch hard drives?

Games are getting bigger and bigger, and 1TB might be enough for 1080p titles, but is that enough for Project Scorpio's native 4K textures? Now bear in mind we don't know how massive Project Scorpio's 4K asset and texture packs are for specific games--Xbox One games will need to download 4K asset patches and updates in order to play in native 4K on Project Scorpio--and depending on the type of compression used for these assets, the console's 1TB drive could fill up fast.

So this brings us to a simple question: can you swap out Project Scorpio's customized hard drive in favor of another laptop HDD? Let's take a look at the evidence.

Everything about Microsoft's new 4K-ready Project Scorpio console has been customized to a tee, and the internal components are meant to synergize with one another to fulfill native 4K gaming, faster load times, etc. We've already covered the system's 6TFLOP Polaris-derived GPU and 2.73GHz extremely customized Jaguar CPU in length, but now we should talk about one of the most important improvements: the hard drive.

Project Scorpio is all about pushing native 4K resolution. We've already seen the console is capable of hitting native 4K 60FPS at Ultra settings--a feat that certainly shouldn't be possible, but Microsoft has indeed done it.

Every component has to work together in order to hit that kind of performance, including the system's hard drive. Microsoft has tweaked Project Scorpio's 2.5-inch 1TB hard drive with 50% more throughput to ensure it can speedily load up 4K assets. Remember that Xbox One games will need to download 4K assets and textures via patches to run games in native 4K. Being able to easily load 4K textures--which can be pretty huge--at acceptable speeds is absolutely critical for Project Scorpio, or else gameplay is considerably interrupted.

LeEco is set to unveil the Le Max 3 on April 11th, and the company has posted a photo teasing the upcoming phone.

The image shows a robot with the tagline AI atop, suggesting that the Le Max 3 will come with its own AI assistant. This move would make Le Max 3 LeEco's first smartphone to come with full AI support.

LeEco's personal assistant should be able to understand voice commands and carry out functions like making a call or setting up a calendar appointment.

We know that Samsung is working on the Galaxy Note8. This has been confirmed earlier this year by DJ Koh, Samsung's Mobile Chief.

The Note 8 will likely debut this fall, but the alleged first images of the device have already leaked. The authenticity of the photo hasn't been confirmed, and as with every rumor, take this one with a grain of salt.

The aforementioned image shows what the source claims to be a Note8 with its display on. The design of the phone shows a striking resemblance with recently announced Galaxy S8 and S8+, which does make sense in a way.