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Assassin's Creed: Origins is nearly here, and Ubisoft has released a finalized list of PC specification requirements so gamers can prepare their rigs.

In order to play AC: Origins in 720p 30FPS at the lowest settings, gamers will need minimum PC specifications including an Intel Core i5-2400 / AMD FX-6350 CPU, an Nvdiia GeForce GTX 660 or AMD R9 270 with at least 2GB of VRAM, and 6GB of RAM. Recommended specs for playing the game in 1080p at high settings include an Intel Core i7-3770 / AMD FX-8350 CPU, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 or AMD R9 280X with 3GB of VRAM, and 8GB of RAM.

"The PC platform overall is really important to us," Assassin's Creed global producer Jose Araiza said in a blog post. "That is why the PC version was developed in parallel with all the other versions by the main team in Montreal, in collaboration with our PC-dedicated team in Ubisoft Kiev. This approach was adopted while the game features were being designed, making PC and mouse-and-keyboard controls a full part of the equation from the get-go."

Monolith Productions has made good on its promise to make Shadow of War's lootboxes 100% optional, but this balancing act throws the progression off-kilter--and the game constantly tries to tempt players with buying lootboxes at every turn.

According to Eurogamer's Shadow of War review, the game showers you with enough loot, exp and content to make buying War Chests pretty much unnecessary. This echos previous words said by game director Bob Roberts just days ago: "In the game you earn resources at a regular pace and the systems are tuned to that so you don't need another option. At the same time, it's there as a player choice," he said.

But there's actually a problem with the game showering you with content left and right: it makes the game too easy, and you can become too powerful too fast. That's why the difficulty slider was put in--yet another balancing act to offset the affect of lootboxes, balances upon balances to ensure the game didn't become overwhelmed by frustrated gamers and get bad press. There's also another problem: although War Chests are totally optional, the game tries to tempt you every time you pause the game. With every pause, a carousel pops up to remind you that yes, you can spend real money on Gold to buy War Chests and further your adventures in the land of Middle-earth.

There isn't much wrong with PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, in fact the game has sold over 10 million copies and broke Dota 2's concurrent players by having over 1.6million concurrent players. Chinese players however do have an issue with PUBG and they have expressed their displeasure in the same vein that Firewatch and Dota 2 received backlash by flooding Steam Reviews with negative feedback.

Chinese players have received in-game advertisement, although they're only featured in loading screens and not in actual game play, it's still enough to upset the Chinese region and with great reason. The in-game ads promote a third-party VPN service that promises better internet connection for Chinese players when connecting to non-Asian servers. Steam Review show that in the past week over 29,000 negative reviews have been received, when compared to a total of 84,000 negative reviews since its release to Early Access in March this year.

Due to the fact that PUBG isn't free-to-play, why is there advertisement? Instead of promoting third-party services, shouldn't Bluehole use their resources to better support their Asian servers?

For all those fans of the Fast and Furious movie series, Rocket League developer Psyonix have announced that they're adding two new battle-cars from the iconic series.

Dom's 1970 Dodge Charger R/T and Brian's 1999 Nissan Skyline GT-R R34 are the featured premium Battle-cars that will transition into the Rocket League arena. Both cars will feature a new set of wheels and 6 new decals.

Available decals for the 1970 Dodge Charger R/T include- Alameda Twin, Flames, Good Graces, Rally, Sinclair, and Wheelman Decals. Meanwhile the 1999 Nissan Skyline GT-R R34 decals include- 2Bold, 2Cool, 2Tuff, Clean Cut, The Clutch, Home Stretch Decals

Intel is hours away from launching its new Core i7-8000 series of processors, with the new Coffee Lake CPU architecture being led by the flagship Core i7-8700K, which has now been officially delidded.

Intel's new Core i7-8700K was delidded by HKEPC, wherer we see that the new Coffee Lake-S processor has a die size of roughly 151mm2, making it longer than the die of the 7700K. This means that for the additional 2 CPU cores on the Core i7-8700K, Intel is using around 29mm2 more die area.

We should expect nearly all Core i7-8700K processors to reach 5GHz with some good cooling, think AIO coolers. If you want to go higher than 5GHz, you're going to want to delid the 8700K, to which we should expect delidding tutorial videos on YouTube any day now.

Tesla has most of the electric vehicle market in its hands, with so much of its marketing hype winning over the world for all the right reasons, and soon it'll be an entirely different industry... the trucking industry.

Tesla will unveil their new electric semi-truck on October 26, with a new photo of the purported truck showing up on the internet today. Someone posted the photo of the Tesla electric semi-truck, which looks absolutely incredible. It looks super thin and contained, versus the beefy front of a normal semi-truck.

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has teased before that the entire unveiling event for the electric semi-truck is going to be "unreal". The semi-truck will, according to Musk "will deliver a substantial reduction in the cost of cargo transport, while increasing safety and making it really fun to operate".

Samsung has been working closely with Oculus on its GearVR mobile headsets, but now the company has finally unveiled its new Odyssey headset, a premium VR experience for $499.

The new Samsung Odyssey VR headset is part of Microsoft's new mixed reality headsets, with some of the highest-resolution VR and current-gen OLED panels inside offering "one of the more pleasant VR experiences" one of Mashable's editors has ever experienced.

Samsung's new Odyssey headset rocks a 2880 x 1600 display, which is a higher-res unit when you compare it to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive with 2160 x 1200 resolutions. Samsung is also using OLED technology will is capable of superior colors, vibrancy, blacks, and is shaper than its LCD-based rivals.

Inno3D has finally released their cryptocurrency mining cards, with the limited 3-month warranty cemented in with the P106-based mining cards.

The new P106 mining cards are stripped down GeForce GTX 1060 graphics cards with their display connectors taken away, but without display connectors the mining-specific cards can't be used for gaming, ever.

As for specs, the P106-090 has 768 CUDA cores, which is way less than the 1280 CUDA cores on the proper GP106-400, the GPU that powers the GTX 1060. Anyone that mines knows CUDA cores don't do much for performance, it all comes down to memory bandwidth and speeds.

Obsidian Entertainment's Scott Everts designed the layout and built the worlds for every original Fallout game, including Fallout: New Vegas. So when he says New Vegas would've been a very different game if it hadn't been restricted by PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 hardware, we should believe him--and wonder what could've been.

Fallout: New Vegas is a contentious point for both Bethesda Game Studios and Obsidian Entertainment: the former feels spurned and somewhat jealous that fans regard New Vegas, a game that was made in just 18 months, as the best Fallout game, while the latter at Obsidian likely feel spurned that they didn't get their bonus and promised royalties because the game's Metacritic score was 1 point off (New Vegas scored an 84 on Xbox 360 and PC). While Bethesda typically won't talk about New Vegas, Obsidian will, and world-builder Scott Everts told PCGamesN some interesting things about the game being affected by console limitations.

"New Vegas would have been a lot different if it was PC only," Mr. Everts asserted. "We had a lot of plans early on. Like, 'Here's where the water is stored, here's where the farms are, here's where the government is centralized'. We had it all planned out - it wasn't just a bunch of random stuff." The master world-maker said that content was cut from the game due to these limitations--content is always cut from any game, but moreso when hardware restrictions come into play--and the team had to simplify the content that did make the cut so the engine wasn't overwhelmed.

Cuphead is a nice fit for Nintendo's new Switch handheld-console hybrid, and here's why.

After years of development and two delays, Studio MDHR's Cuphead is finally out in the wild, 1930's cartoon style and all. And it's since become a smash hit. Since Microsoft helped fund the project with its ID@Xbox program the game may not come to the Switch nor the PS4...but it's a perfect fit for the former.

With its enamoring style, Cuphead will instantly attract anyone in the room. I've shown Cuphead to about a dozen non-gamers in my life, and they all liked it--they smiled and asked me what it's from. They all wanted to know more about this delightful-looking visual experience starring two anthropomorphic beverage brothers. This folds neatly into a byproduct of the Switch: engagement.

Sources reportedly close to Capcom tell YouTuber "Gaming History Guy" Liam Robertson that Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite's budget was rather meager, and that the team recycled art assets and animations from previous games in the series.

There's something off about Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite. Gamers knew right away from the trailers, which were near universally panned by fans, but the fighter's actual release confirmed their suspicious--something weird was going on with the game. According to unnamed sources who are reportedly close to the developer (who affirmed their veracity by being right about the upcoming Monster Hunter DLC for MvC: I), this is because Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite had a restricted budget and developers had to make do with what they already had from previous games like MvC 3.

How much did Capcom spend on the fighter? The sources say the "shoestring budgeting approach" amounted to little over half the reserved budget for Street Fighter V's DLC.

Spec Ops: The Line is regarded as one of the best storied shooters on the market, but veterans at Yager who made the game happen aren't up for a sequel.

Spec Ops: The Line's rough five-year development cycle has been chronicled many times in the industry, highlighting the game's unique narrative design and the toll the experience took on the developers. "It was a 5 year process, so that it would be hard to fully encapsulate that in a reply here. In short, it was hard, stressful, occasionally soul-crushing, educational, enlightening, and ultimately very rewarding. When development was over, I think a lot of us were left with our own lingering pain and trauma from the experience. But ultimately, were proud of what we'd made," Mr. Williams said in a recent Ask Me Anything post on Reddit.

But what about a sequel? Even if 2K Games' parent company Take-Two Interactive magically greenlit plans for a sequel, and sought out the original dev team to make it, Mr. Williams says no, it's probably not ever going to happen--he'd rather eat glass than do another Spec Ops game.

343 Industries exec Kiki Wolfkill is very, very passionate about Microsoft's new Mixed Reality platform--so much that we should expect to see more Halo games based in the new medium.

Mixed reality--the mystical combination of virtual and augmented realities--has been lauded by evangelists and challenged critics since its inception, but the Halo developers at 343 Industries are keen on using the fancy technology to tell Halo stories. The studio plans to release Halo: Recruit--a small slice of tech demo that's "not a game, not even part of a game" but a five-minute toe-dipping that represents 343i's very early adoption of mixed reality--this month on Microsoft's new Mixed Reality platform. The ecosystem sees major OEMs like Dell, ASUS, Acer, LG and even Samsung working together to further VR and AR technology while being tethered to the Windows 10 operating system.

I've talked to a few people who tried the Halo: Recruit demo and the consensus is it's pretty bad and meager--it's this weird combination of 2D and 3D tech that actually simulates a theater-like experience that sees players take on the role of a UNSC recruit who shoots enemies on a 2D screen. Halo: Recruit is a glorified target range and really shouldn't have the Halo name attached to it--It's totally not what you'd expect from a Halo Mixed Reality experience, and you're not dropping into Master Chief's shoes to blast enemies who are projected in your home environment, AR-style.

If enough gamers want it, Final Fantasy XIV MMO game director Naoki Yoshida says the game could go free-to-play one day--or at the very least he'll consider it.

Final Fantasy XIV is one of the best MMOs I've ever played because it adds tremendous value to your experience. The amount of effort Square Enix puts into this game is staggering, and you feel that your money is well-spent. The game is one of the last bastions of subscription-based gaming out there, and throughout its triumphant relaunch as A Realm Reborn, the team has opened the experience up with an expansive free trial and some microtransaction additions. But it never lost its high-quality focus for active subscribers. So far lots of gamers agree with my asessment: Final Fantasy XIV broke subscriber milestones this year and saw 10 million cumulative players.

But Yoshida-san is so ardent in his cause to serve the community that if enough Final Fantasy XIV players demanded the game to F2P to make it more accessible, he'd consider the possibility.

Forza 7 has gotten lots of flak recently for its "pay to earn" scheme that sees gamers optionally paying real-world money not to directly buy in-game rewards, but to boost the possible outcome of said rewards. But this isn't a new trend in gaming--far from it.

Pay to earn is actually an old staple of freemium microtransactions, but it's used in new AAA games too. Take Destiny 2, for example. Destiny 2's microtransactions are creatively tied with the base game to essentially whet the appetite of players who become locked into the game's addictive ecosystem--addictive because of the loot grind cycle that's freely available to all players, but mTX offers yet another calculated layer to the addiction. Destiny 2, a paid $60 AAA game, contains a pay-to-earn tick...although it's more indirect than Forza 7. In Destiny 2 players can buy Silver to exchange for Bright Engrams, which contain mods, cosmetics, emblems, and most importantly, shaders. But if you don't like what you get, you can dismantle the loot box gear for Bright Dust, which is used as a second currency to buy other items, including EXP and loot boosts. So essentially you can convert real-world money into loot boosts--or you can simply level up an get Bright Engrams for free.

The second and third examples are free-to-play games. Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm lets you exchange Gems, which are bought with real-world money, for stimpacks, which boost the XP outcome for a period of time. Star Wars: The Old Republic, another free-to-play game, lets players buy Experience Boosts to increase their EXP gain and level up faster. While the trend may not exactly be new, the inclusion of these schemes in full-priced AAA games kind of is.

With Dota 2's new competitive season about to commence, much of the discussion has been about Valve's new Minor-Major system that begins with StarLadder October 11. In somewhat of a slight novelty, MoonduckTV has announced a new concept entitled "Midas Mode", with the tournament commencing November 18. Midas Mode pits eight teams (4 North America and 4 European) against each other in somewhat of a Fantasy Football meets Dota 2.

Each team is given a set amount of virtual currency, or "Moonbucks", this currency is then used to purchase actions in every aspect of the game. This includes picking and banning heroes, playing as Radiant or Dire and pausing in game will all cost you Moonbucks. This adds an extra level of strategy to the game as popular heroes will cost more, in fact hero prices will fluctuate depending on their win-rate and popularity. Do you spend Moonbucks picking popular heroes? Or do you spend your Moonbucks banning opposition comfort picks? It is up to the team's captain, he just has to make sure there's enough Moonbucks to pause for toilet breaks!

What happens when the bank runs dry? When a team is out of Moonbucks, penalties will occur. They will be forced to pick from a hero-pool of the worst performing heroes, they won't be able to ban, choose sides or even pause. Teams do have a chance to make their Moonbucks back via the Bounty System. The Bounty System is where the viewers can suggest challenges for the pros to attempt so they can earn Moonbucks. Simple right? The harder the challenge, the more Moonbucks to be earnt. A challenge may consist of something simple like winning a game as Techies, or a little more challenging like drafting a lineup consisting entirely of flying heroes, it's up to viewers to set the bounty.

MSI have introduced an all-new series of gaming controllers specifically designed for multiple platforms. MSI's new Force range introduces the Force GC20 and Force GC30.

Compatible with Windows, Android and consoles, both the GC20 and GC30 controllers feature an 8-way D-pad with a replaceable metal cover kept in place by a premium magnetic design that allows the user to adapt their controller to the genre of game they're playing. These controllers feature rubber side grips on both handles that assists grip during those long gaming sessions and also feature haptic feedback that is able to enhance gaming experience.

The difference between the two controllers is due to the GC20 being a wired model, while the GC30 supports both wired and wireless modes. Set for Q4 2017 release with pricing not yet announced.

Microsoft has surprised with the announcement of Halo Recruit, a new Halo experience that uses mixed reality technology inside of the Windows Mixed Reality platform.

Microsoft's Mixed Reality boss Alex Kipman explains Halo Recruit as "It's a fun, brief introduction into the world of Halo. You'll see a variety of iconic characters in mixed reality for the first time". 343 Industries worked on Halo Recruit, but other than that we have no idea what to expect from Halo Recruit just yet.

Halo Recruit will be available on October 17, with Microsoft explaining on their own Windows blog that Halo Recruit is a "fun, brief introduction into the world of Halo - where you'll see several iconic characters in mixed reality for the very first time".

Western Digital have announced the world's first 14TB harddrive, the HGST-branded Ultrastar Hs14. Perfect for cloud-storage and hyperscale data centers, the HGST Ultrastar Hs14 combines HelioSeal and host-managed shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to offers 40 percent more capacity and more than twice the sequential write performance of its SMR predecessor and features a 2.5million hours MTBF rating.

This 3.5-inch HDD helps address Big Data challenges and the emerging sequential write workload segment in data centers by focusing on total cost of ownership (TCO). Prioritizing key factors including capacity per rack, power consumption, cooling, maintenance, and acquisition cost, the combination of SMR and HelioSeal Technology is able to deliver impressive watt/TB power efficiency, resulting in a low TCO. These mature, field-proven technologies provide the foundation for delivering efficient, quality and reliable performance required by cloud-storage and hyperscale environments.

"Over 70 percent of the exabytes Western Digital ships into the capacity enterprise segment are on helium-based high-capacity drives and continue to support customers with outstanding reliability, performance and value Quality of Service (QoS)," said Mark Grace, senior vice president of devices at Western Digital. "The TCO and reliability benefits of our HelioSeal platform are the foundation of our leadership in high-capacity enterprise storage."

Patriot have today added a new mouse to its Viper V570 gaming mouse range, introducing the Viper V570 RGB Blackout Edition Laser Gaming Mouse. Featuring an innovative MMO+FPS hybrid design, this high-performance mouse accounts for gamers who demand versatility and customization across a vast array of games.

"We are excited to announce the launch of the new addition to our innovative and bestselling Viper V570 RGB laser gaming mouse series."said Roger Shinmoto, Patriot's Vice President of Product Development. "The unique FPS and MMO hybrid design allows gamers to dominate a wide array of games."

The Viper V570 RGB Blackout Edition is equipped with an Xtreme precision laser sensor and Omron switches for reliability and speed, the Blackout Edition also includes a dedicated sniper button for those FPS gamers. The Viper Software allows the user to program four sensitivity levels up to 12,000DPI that can be changed on-the-fly during gaming and to also set custom RGB lighting profiles. The customization doesn't end there, users can add up to 34.2 grams of weights that allow the user to fine-tune every aspect of their mouse.