Latest News - Page 264

Battlefield Labs is only a day away from officially revealing the multiplayer for Battlefield 6, and ahead of the reveal, leaks are surfacing online showcasing the level of destruction players will be getting in the upcoming title.

If you are a fan of jumping in a tank and blowing up entire buildings, you will be pleased to know you can do that very thing in Battlefield 6, as a new gameplay video has leaked onto X from an early playtest of the multiplayer. The short 23-second video shows a player operating a tank in the pre-alpha of Battlefield 6, jumping into the first-person view, and firing blasts at a nearby building. The building takes a few blasts from the tank, then its entire side crumbles, revealing the skeleton of the building.

With Battlefield 6 being tested by the public, it has experienced numerous leaks leading up to the official unveiling, with the most recent being a full list of all the multiplayer and remastered maps, along with the campaign missions. Moreover, Battlefield 6's release date was semi-confirmed by its own website listing, which stated when pre-orders for the title would end, which is typically the day the game releases. If you are interested in any of those stories, check them out below.

The same group that discovered the release date for Battlefield 6 has now published more leaked information on the upcoming title, revealing the list of multiplayer and remastered maps, along with campaign missions.,

The leak was published by the Telegram group 1BF and states there will be 11 multiplayer maps in Battlefield 6, along with 4 remastered maps, and nine campaign missions/maps. The full list of each collection of maps can be found below. Notably, it should be stated that with all leaks, take them with a healthy amount of skepticism until the news has been officially confirmed.

As for official confirmations regarding Battlefield 6, Battlefield Labs is scheduled to officially unveil the multiplayer for the title on July 31st. We will presumably get a look at some of the multiplayer maps mentioned on the below list, perhaps even a confirmation on how many maps there will be in total.

Guerrilla Games' Horizon franchise has surpassed 38 million sales worldwide across PS4, PS5, and PC, Sony has revealed.

Sony is suing Tencent for copyright infringement, alleging that Tencent's new game Light of Motiram infringes on Sony's Horizon franchise. In that lawsuit, Sony gives an update on total sales for the Horizon series, which currently sit at 38 million.

To date, there have been four Horizon games: two mainline games, Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, both of which had expansions; one VR game called Call of the Mountain for the PSVR2; and the newer Lego Horizon Adventures spin-off. All of these games have released on PC, and Horizon Adventures launched on Nintendo Switch.

Grounded 2 is seeing huge reception on Steam and has topped Valve's store as the number 1 best-seller.

Grounded 2 hasn't even released yet and it's already breaking sales milestones. Obsidian just launched their survival sequel into early access today where it's making waves on Steam. According to Steam Charts, there are actually two versions of Grounded 2 that are taking up the top spots on Steam.

The base game is sitting at #1, and the Founder's Edition is at #2. What surprised me the most, however, was the Founder's Pack upgrade was actually at #5. This means Grounded 2 has taken up 3 of the top best-selling spots on Steam (but only two of these are actual versions of the game).

Tencent wanted to make a Horizon game, but Sony denied them...twice. Tencent went ahead and made their own game, and it's so close to the Horizon series that Sony is now suing Tencent for copyright infringement.

The 48-page complaint tells an interesting story about Tencent's desire to make a Horizon game and how Sony denied Tencent's offers on two separate occasions.

According to the lawsuit, Tencent wanted to make a mobile game based on the Horizon franchise. Tencent's Aurora Studios put together a pitch with the tagline "expanding the Horizon," aiming for a live service mobile title. Sony refused. Tencent went ahead with Light of Motiram, a game with quite stark visual similarities to Horizon. When Sony learned about Motiram, they approached Tencent and tried to get things ironed out behind the scenes. When that didn't work, Sony sued Tencent.

Sony is suing Tencent for the Chinese company's new game Light of Motiram, alleging that Tencent essentially copied the Horizon franchise.

Sony Interactive Entertainment is suing Tencent for copyright infringement. The 48-page complaint alleges that Tencent's new game Light of Motiram bears a striking resemblance to Sony's trademarked and copyrighted Horizon video game franchise.

Sony has made three claims for relief across seven instances of harm, and seeks to have a judge force Tencent to admit its wrongdoing, to prevent Tencent from continuing this alleged copyright infringement, up to $150,000 per each work in the Horizon franchise that was infringed, to destroy all promotional materials of the infringing content, costs and expenses, and damages.

YouTuber Benn Jordan, a musician and acoustic scientist, has achieved what may be a world first: the saving of data from a live animal, specifically a bird.

That bird is a European starling, or a songbird that is able to mimic sounds extremely effectively through its vocal organ called a syrinx. Jordan explains that starlings are able to precisely produce multiple tones at the same time, meaning they are able to mimic almost any sound they hear. The bird in the video is shown mimicking sounds it wouldn't otherwise hear naturally in the wild, such as the sound a camera shutter makes when it opens and closes, or synthetic sounds created by humans.

Using a spectral synthesizer, which is a piece of software that shows a spectrogram, or the visual representation of how the frequencies that make up a sound change over time, Jordan drew an image of a bird. Essentially, this image consists of a collection of sounds that make up the image Jordan drew. He then played the sounds to the starling, who was able to mimic it. Jordan then captured the mimicked sound in the spectrogram to see if the image was correctly reproduced, and it was identical.

Reliable leaker billbil-kun, who recently predicted the announcement of Battlefield 6 has leaked the release date of the Xbox ROG Ally and Ally X, along with the respective prices.

According to billbil-kun, ASUS's upcoming ROG Xbox Ally X and Ally will open for pre-orders on August 20, 2025, and will be priced at €899 (Ally X) and €599 (Ally). These prices line up with ASUS's accidental leak that happened earlier this month when the company uploaded prices to the ASUS Store listing the consoles for the aforementioned prices. Now, the prices don't directly convert straight to USD, but it's likely both consoles will be priced anywhere between $599 and $899 in the US.

The leaker also says that both handhelds will be available at Gamescom 2025, located in Cologne, Germany, which coincides with Xbox's official schedule that was published on their blog yesterday. According to the blog, Xbox has a live broadcast scheduled for 3 PM (French Time) on August 20, with a segment dedicated to the Xbox Ally.

Roblox CEO David Baszucki said during a recent podcast that Roblox is more than just a game, it's a "wellness platform" that players who are lonely and disconnected from the world can find other people on Roblox. By extension, Baszucki said that "some day we'll have dating on Roblox".

40% of Roblox's player base consists of users under the age of 13, and to further illustrate how the title has attracted a large portion of children, it has faced allegation in the past for being a platform used to groom minors. For example, one pedophile groomed, abducted and sexually assaulted one 15-year-old girl through Roblox.

Now, the context of which Baszucki was suggesting Roblox eventually integrating a dating feature is the CEO discussing the wider impact of Roblox as a platform, where he said that Roblox is more than a gaming platform it's a "wellness platform" where players disconnected in real-life can find other disconnected players.

Monster Hunter Wilds is getting its endgame expansion a good deal more swiftly than anticipated - in fact, it's happening in a couple of weeks.

As announced on X (see the above post, which PC Gamer highlighted), the endgame work was going to be part of 'Title Update 3' debuting in late September going by Capcom's timeline.

However, as you can see, this is now arriving as part of the v1.021 update, on August 13. Originally, that update was supposed to be deployed early in August, so it's being shifted to mid-August to allow for some final polishing to be done to the endgame expansion.

WB Games is currently going through restructuring after some absolute flops of releases, which include titles such as Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, MultiVersus, and Harry Potter Quidditch Champions. These titles, and a myriad of other problems, resulted in the publisher losing as much as $300 million in 2024, with $200 million of that $300 million being attributed to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

With all of those titles being live-service games, one would think that WB Games would give the genre a breather and concentrate on honing the scope of their games to make consistent, profitable single-player titles. However, that doesn't appear to be the case, as WB Games is currently looking for an executive producer for an unannounced AAA live-service game based on DC Comics.

Notably, this listing comes after WB Games closed Middle-earth Shadow of War/Mordor studio Monolith Productions, which was working on a Wonder Woman game using the famed Nemesis System. The job listing was recently discovered by Tech4Gamers and states the position would be responsible for "oversee post-launch content and live service strategy, ensuring ongoing player engagement."

AMD has a cheaper spin on the Ryzen 7 9700X that drops the integrated graphics, and ASUS has spilled the beans on the processor (at least in theory).

This was spotted by Italian tech site Bits and Chips (as highlighted by VideoCardz), which found the Ryzen 7 9700F - note the 'F' suffix meaning it lacks the GPU - on the ASUS website.

The Ryzen 7 9700F (which has been rumored previously) pops up in the CPU support details page for ASUS motherboards on the official site if you type in the model name, confirming its existence - and presumably the fact that the 9700F is not far off launching. (Either that, or someone has made a silly mistake here).

Razer has announced its latest wireless gaming headset, and the successor to the award-winning Razer BlackShark V2 Pro. According to the company, the new Razer BlackShark V3 Pro for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox is the "fastest pro-grade wireless headset" for competitive gamers and esports professionals.

You're probably wondering what makes the new Razer BlackShark V3 Pro gaming headset the fastest out there. Well, it all comes down to the wireless technology it features, which is optimized for ultra-low latency - right down to 10ms. This delivers "near-instantaneous" audio, making it faster than the 15ms of latency you'll find in other pro-grade gaming headsets.

That's not the only new feature on the menu; the Razer HyperClear Full Band Mic offers a pro-grade audio sampling rate of 48 kHz for "studio-grade voice capture," making it ideal for recording and communication.

We reviewed the original 4K-ready Elgato Facecam Pro a couple of years ago, and we were impressed by its pristine image quality, 4K60 capture capabilities, and ease of use. Earning an Editor's Choice Award, it's hard to think how a follow-up webcam could offer improvements outside of a few minor updates.

It seems that you can always trust the creators and streaming experts at Elgato to deliver something that sounds like a worthy upgrade. Meet the new Elgato Facecam 4K. It's the first 4K60 webcam with lens filter support, delivering DSLR-like quality and features powered by a pro-grade Sony STARVIS 2 sensor with uncompressed UHD or 4K output.

With support for 49mm lens filters, enabling cinematic effects such as diffusion and reflection reduction at the lens level, the new Elgato Facecam 4K introduces the capabilities of a professional camera to the webcam market for the first time.

A campaign led by Collective Shout, an Australian-based group that fights the sexualization of women, has led to the changing of Valve's policy for what games can be made available on the Steam marketplace, and the vanishing of hundreds of legal games/content from the platform.

Collective Shout pushed Valve to remove any games that contained depictions of rape and incest from the Steam marketplace, as the organization claimed Valve was profiteering off the normalization of violence and the abuse of women. Valve didn't respond to Collective Shout, resulting in the organization turning its attention to payment processors, such as Visa and Mastercard.

The open letter, which can be read here, attracted the attention of Visa and Mastercard, and resulted in Valve issuing a change to its "Rules and Guidelines" documentation, which states under the new 15th clause that developers are not allowed to have their game contain any "Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam's payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult-only content."

Windows 11, version 24H2, is the latest version of Microsoft's operating system. It introduces a wide range of new features and optimizations alongside changing the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) to Black. More than a color change, this update is part of Microsoft's Windows Resiliency Initiative, designed to help users and admins recover from "disruptions" faster, and with more control.

According to Microsoft, its change to the error and crash screen reduces the time spent on the screen from 40 seconds to 2 seconds, with enhanced error information, diagnostic tools, and options. Naturally, you can't help but wonder if all this talk about what you see once your PC crashes and needs a full restart kind of makes Windows 11 sound, well, unreliable.

It's a lot better now, with Microsoft's Monika Sandhu stating, "Windows 11 24H2 is our most reliable version of Windows yet. Compared to Windows 10 22H2, failure rates for unexpected restarts have dropped by 24%."

It's always interesting to see what game is climbing the ranks of the most-played games on Steam, as it's almost impossible to predict what gamers will be sinking their teeth into next. That new game is Mage Arena, and it lets players scream magic spells at each other.

Mage Arena is developed and published by solo developer jrsjams and is currently in early access with a humble price of $3. For this meager price tag, players can step into the shoes of a mage and enter into a 4v4 voice-controlled battle between sorcerers and warlocks, or test their spellcasting skills in the Mage Colosseum in a 1v1.

Mage Arena is currently popping off on the Steam charts, with the title reaching its all-time peak in concurrent players only 1 hour ago (13,450). Mage Arena was released on July 24, and at the time of writing, it has 12,552 players in-game casting spells via voice commands.

Australian YouTube creator TrashBench wanted to create a video showcasing that the eight-year-old GeForce GTX 1080 Ti still had some life left in it. The goal was to overclock the 1080 Ti (with a complete liquid cooling mod) to the point where it would outperform the current entry-level GeForce RTX 5050 GPU, which is built on the four-generation newer RTX Blackwell architecture.

Using the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, tests were also conducted with Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider running in 1440p. The initial results indicate that the GeForce RTX 1080 Ti lags behind the RTX 5050 by approximately 5-15% in gaming performance. And this is without DLSS and RTX technologies like Frame Generation, which would further increase the 5050's lead.

It turns out that, after trying a few different GeForce RTX 1080 Ti GPUs, he was unable to see a significant performance difference, with only Shadow of the Tomb Raider running notably 6% faster. The initial plan didn't include overclocking the GeForce RTX 5050; however, once he applied an extreme OC, boosting the clock speed to 3.3 GHz, the RTX 5050 saw a massive 17% increase in performance.

Microsoft has launched a new experimental and free Copilot Mode for its Edge browser, which integrates AI features and grants AI access to view your tabs. Microsoft says that it's designed as a collaborator that "cuts through clutter and removes friction" while being built with the "highest Microsoft standards" for security, privacy, and performance.

How does it work? Well, once you open up a new tab in Edge with Copilot Mode, you'll be presented with a clean and straightforward page containing the Copilot input box that combines "chat, search, and web navigation." Yes, the AI will also have visibility of all the tabs you have open, so you can ask it to do things like compare and answer questions about the things you're looking at.

One of the earliest examples in Microsoft's videos explaining the new Copilot Mode feature includes a traveller looking at a variety of hotels and wondering which one is located closest to the beach that also includes a full kitchen.

With the popularity of white-colored components, cases, and cooling, it only makes sense to pair an all-white build with an all-white GPU. And with that, Palit is introducing new GeForce RTX 5060, RTX 5060 Ti, and RTX 5070 WHITE Series graphics cards, with all models listed as OC variants shipping with GPU Boost Clock speeds that are overclocked out of the box.

The line-up includes both GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB and 16GB models, with Palit noting that the 8GB variant is "well-suited for iCafes" and competitive title performance where the VRAM limitation won't be a bottleneck. All models feature compact dual-fan designs, except for the Palit GeForce RTX 5070 WHITE OC, which has three fans with the same two-slot thickness.

The Palit GeForce RTX 5070 WHITE OC is the flagship model of the line-up and is positioned as a 1440p 120FPS GPU for AAA ray-traced gaming thanks to DLSS 4 and the arrival of Multi Frame Generation. The mainstream GeForce RTX 5060 WHITE OC 8GB model is described as an entry-level 1080p gaming GPU and an "ideal entry" point for next-gen PC gaming.