Blizzard's original vision for Diablo 4 would have changed the franchise in significant ways, bringing the dungeon crawler to the realm of third-person gaming.

Jason Schreier's new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment chronicles some of the most interesting and pivotal moments of the game-maker's history. The book also discusses many of the cancelled projects and games, including Blizzard's own unique take on Minecraft.

One such story touches upon what kind of major departure that Diablo 4 could have been for the series. Blizzard sources tell Schreier that at the tail-end of Diablo 3's popular Reaper of Souls expansion, then-Blizzard president Mike Morhaime had put top leads in charge of pre-planning the next big Diablo game.

With the latest Amazon Prime Day sales underway, you can find several great deals on various PC hardware and peripherals, including GPUs. As of writing, you save a few dollars off the MSRP of most GeForce RTX 40 Series and Radeon RX 7000 Series cards - from the GeForce RTX 4060 up to 4K enthusiast options like the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

However, after reviewing most of the Prime Day GPU deals, the following two stood out for obvious reasons. First up is the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3X OC, an upgrade to the original RTX 4070 Ti that features 16GB of fast GDRR6X memory. Its Prime Day discount brings the price down to $749.99 USD from $839.99 - an 11% saving and one of the lowest prices we've seen for the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, especially for an OC model.

The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER is a powerful GPU that excels at 1440p and 4K gaming with ray-tracing, DLSS, and Frame Generation. And MSI's Ventus 3X variant runs quiet and cool even when stressed, which we highlighted in our review.

With PCs, laptops, smartphones, TVs, consoles, tablets, and a whole slew of smart home devices connecting to a home network, the quality or speed of the connection is often determined by how far you or the device is from the router. Most modern routers can handle small or medium-sized homes. However, it's not uncommon for apartments and houses to have that one area where the Wi-Fi is a little spotty.

This is where a Mesh System enters the picture. With two routers connected over a backhaul channel, you've got the power of two routers, creating a single seamless high-speed network. Having no Wi-Fi dead zones is fantastic for homes with multiple stories and rooms or backyards with smart speakers connected to a music streaming service like Spotify for that perfect summer barbeque.

An excellent mesh system is the key to unlocking a home network's full potential.

Previous reports indicated that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) could increase its stake in Nintendo's shares, but the wealth fund has actually decreased its amount of shares.

Two days ago, Japanese publication Kyodo News reported that Saudi Arabia could buy up more gaming stock in Nintendo, as per a small snippet of conversation with crown prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan Al-Saud during Tokyo Game Show 2024. As it turns out, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund has now reduced its stake in the Mario maker.

As per new regulatory documents filed in Japan, Saudi Arabia's PIF has shed an entire percentage point of its shares in Nintendo. The PIF now has 7.54% of shares as opposed to the 8.58% it previously had as of June 2024. This equates to roughly 97.6 million shares (worth about $5.3 billion) currently held by the PIF as versus the 111.45 million shares (about $6 billion) that it formerly held. This represents a decrease of approximately 1.69 million shares, or some $700 million in worth.

Halo moving to a multi-platform games engine could mean the franchise jumps over to PlayStation for the first time ever.

Halo is changing in a big way. 343 Industries has renamed the group to Halo Studios, and the franchise is now being developed in Unreal Engine 5. Now that the studio is no longer saddled with the development and upkeep of a proprietary games engine for its new games, Halo Studios can accelerate its production pipeline--and indeed that's what they plan to do.

There are now multiple new Halo games in development, and the leap to Unreal Engine 5 frees Halo Studios from the shackles of the archaic Slipspace engine. According to studio head Pierre Hintze, it's a shift-change for the team: "What we're doing right now is changing our recipe."

The noise from the grapevine around Intel's Arrow Lake desktop CPUs is now reaching deafening levels - with leak after leak indicating the chips are indeed imminent, as rumored - and now we've caught the (purported) full spec details of the processors.

VideoCardz flagged up an Intel presentation slide aired by leaker HXL on X which is apparently from the Chinese media (after the press were briefed on the Arrow Lake CPUs which has just happened, ahead of their theoretical public revelation on October 10).

As previously rumored, we see that there are five unlocked (K series) models as part of this initial launch.

Like Goku collecting energy for an epic genki dama, Dragon ball fans have come together to make the latest Budokai Tenkaichi game the best-selling title across multiple storefronts.

Dragon ball: Sparking! Zero is now the top game across the industry's biggest digital stores. Bandai Namco's new Budokai game has become the #1 chart-topper on both the PlayStation Store and on Steam, and the new ki-blasting fighter is sure to supercharge the publisher's earnings to super saiyan levels and beyond.

Bandai also announced that the new Budokai Tenkaichi game has been released onto early access for users who pre-ordered any version of the game. Otherwise, Dragon ball Sparking Zero is due out on October 11.

A startling new bug in Microsoft Word can mean that saving a (certain format) file actually deletes that document.

Yes, this is a strange one indeed, and Neowin flagged up the serious glitch in Word that could potentially cause you quite a bit of grief - at least if you don't realize what has happened (it's not difficult to retrieve the deleted file if you do catch on, thankfully).

At any rate, the way Word is misfiring goes like this: if your document has a capitalized extension - such as .RTF rather than .rtf - and it's being saved to your local drive, if you quit Word with unsaved changes, and then click to save those changes on exit, the file ends up being deleted.

We knew it was coming, but now it's official: NVIDIA is teaming with Foxconn to build Taiwan's most powerful supercomputer powered by its new Blackwell AI GPU architecture.

NVIDIA and Foxconn announced the new Hon Hai Kaohsiung Super Computing Center at its recent Hon Hai Tech Day, which will be built around NVIDIA's groundbreaking new Blackwell GPU architecture. The new AI supercomputer will feature GB200 NVL72 AI servers, with a total of 64 racks and 4608 Tensor Core GPUs.

The company is expecting to see over 90 exaflops of AI performance, making the new Taiwan-based supercomputer the fastest on the island. Foxconn has plans to use the supercomputer once it's operational, to power breakthroughs in cancer research, large language model development, and smart city innovations, positioning Taiwan as a global leader in AI-driven industries.

After months of speculation, Rockstar finally announces Red Dead Redemption is coming to PC on October 29.

Rockstar's iconic outlaw western is coming to PC in time for Halloween, complete with its Undead Nightmare expansion. The PC version will come with all the bells and whistles befit of the platform, including NVIDIA DLSS 3.7 support and Frame Generation, tons of new settings to tweak, and performance up to 4K 144FPS.

Pre-orders will open up later this week, and Red Dead Redemption will be sold on the Rockstar Store launcher, the Epic Games Store, and Steam.

Nintendo's next-generation Switch 2 handheld will reportedly support all of the features baked into Unreal Engine 5, and possibly even Epic Games' just-teased MegaLights technology.

We're finding out some new information from the folks at Digital Foundry, where during their usual weekly podcast the staffers replied to a fan question asking if the Nintendo Switch 2 would support the latest UE5 features, including tech like Lumen, Nanite, and Virtual Shadow Maps. We could even see Nintendo Switch 2-specific versions of these UE5 technologies, allowing them to run with decent performance on the handheld, with some major power tweaks of course.

There is a huge amount of third-party support behind Nintendo and the Switch, so the new Switch 2 would be a huge focus for Epic Games and getting Unreal Engine -- cough, Fortnite -- ready to rock and roll on Switch 2. There's also the handheld side of thigns, with the Digital Foundry folks talking about handheld mode with the Switch 2 and the performance differences between Nintendo's new console and the Valve Steam Deck.

AMD has just unveiled its new Radeon PRO V710 GPU which has been designed for the visual cloud business, including Microsoft Azure, packing the Navi 32 GPU and 28GB of GDDR6 memory.

The new AMD Radeon PRO V710 features the Navi 32 chip which is based on the RDNA 3 GPU architecture, so we're talking about the same level of GPU performance that we see on the consumer side of things with the Radeon RX 7700 XT graphics card with 54 Compute Units (CUs), 3456 Stream Processors, a 2GHz GPU peak clock, and up to 55.3 TFLOPs of FP16 and up to 27.65 TFLOPs of FP32 compute performance.

We have 28GB of GDDR6 memory on an interestingly spread 224-bit memory bus, providing up to 448GB/sec of memory bandwidth with 54MB of Infinity Cache. This is compared to the RX 7700 XT which features 12GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit memory bus.

Nintendo is known for throwing the legal book at any entity that is mispresentating any of its IP, and it's shown through recent actions its more than happy to crack down on any company providing the tools to pirate its games.

Nintendo filed a lawsuit in US courts in June 2024 against Ryan Daly, the alleged operator of Modded Hardware, a company that Nintendo claims provides firmware and hardware to create and play pirated Nintendo games. Additionally, Nintendo claims Modded Hardware also provided customers with "copies of pirated Nintendo games." The lawsuit states Daly was offered a chance to walk away from Modded Hardware in March 2024, and both parties agreed that Modded Hardware's business would stop completely.

However, that didn't happen, and in May 2024, Nintendo issued a final warning. The US court filing occurred in the following month. Now, Daly has appeared in court without a lawyer to represent himself against Nintendo's allegations, and according to reports, Daly has denied any wrongdoing. Daly responded to the lawsuit claims by citing a lack of sufficient information to either admit or deny the allegations, fair use, an arbitration clause, failure to state a claim, invalid copyrights, a lack of standing, and more.

Every day, more people are connected to the internet, and with the digital age becoming so engrained in our everyday lives, digital assets have become extremely valuable.

For example, Steam libraries can amass thousands of games which the owner has spent thousands of dollars to obtain. However, in the event of the owner passing, there are currently no laws that force Valve to transfer the account to the new owner if it's named in the original owner's will. In fact, this very scenario was proposed to Valve only earlier this year when it confirmed Steam accounts are non-transferable and that Steam Support is unable to merge account contents.

"I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will," wrote the representative from Valve. However, that might change as the European Law Institute, a non-profit organization designed to make recommendations and provide practical guidance on European legal development, has initiated work on a project that focuses on how to implement new laws that enable the succession of all digital assets, and any other "digital remains".

The next big jump in USB speeds is about to be here, and while it will take some time before we see or even need these kind of speeds in our everyday devices, the technology is now a reality.

Elecom has become the first company to certify its USB4 2.0 cables, which are slated to provide speeds that are double USB4 1.0 cables. Reports indicate that Elecom is looking to December to release two variants of the USB4 2.0 cable, and as per the specification, the base cable will be able to provide 80 Gbps throughput and 60W of charging, while the other variant is capable of 240W of charging at 48V/5A. Currently, it appears USB4 2.0 cables are limited regionally to Japan, but within the coming months, we can expect an expansion to other regions.

The 240W charging capability is more than enough to charge devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, handheld gaming devices, and power banks. Moreover, these cables will support DisplayPort passthrough of up to 8K at 60Hz, which means they should be capable of 4K at 120Hz. As for devices coming with USB4 2.0 ports, it will still be quite some time before we see widespread adoption.

The National Weather Service Tampa Bay X account has been firing off continuous warnings of the approaching Hurricane Milton, which is expected to cause a widespread loss of power across the west coast of Florida.

The National Hurricane Service has issued a warning for a Category 5 cyclone as the post states, "Milton Explosively Intensifies with 175-mph Winds" as it begins to approach on the west coast of Florida. Unfortunately, the wind speed increase has meant Milton has reached the top end of the hurricane intensity scale, with the hurricane jumping from Category 1 to Category 5 in just 24 hours due to "extreme rapid intensification". Kathryn Prociv, a meteorologist with NBC news, explained online. "Extreme RI defined as a 58mph+ increase in 24 hours. Milton has gone 90mph."

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) used weather satellites to capture the below footage of Milton. The footage showcases the increasing size of the storm over such a short duration. Officials estimate Milton will reach landfall on the west coast of Florida, specifically around the Tampa Bay region, on Wednesday. If it does reach landfall at its current speeds, it will be the worst storm to impact the Tampa area in over 100 years, according to the National Weather Service.

Mother nature truly is remarkable when you look closely enough, and a team of researchers has stumbled across another example of that as explained in a recently published study in the journal Current Biology.

The team was carrying out standard research on comb jellies, a group of more than 100 species of marine invertebrate creatures that inhabit seawaters around the world. The team discovered one of the test subjects was missing from its tank and then noticed the significant size increase of another test subject. The team further inspected the suspiciously large comb jelly and found it was made up of two individual jellies but didn't have any noticeable "separation between them."

The scientists began testing to see if they could replicate the previously unknown quality of the jellies. The team removed small sections from the bodies of 20 individual comb jellies and paired each of the pieces up. Out of the 20, nine pairs successfully fused. Researchers found the fusion process doesn't even take long either, as jellies were fully combined within 24 hours. More specifically, after just two hours some jellies bodies were completely fused and their nervous system demonstrated synchronicity.

The new device comes from four teen students at STEM School Highlands Ranch, a suburb just outside of Denver. The students have begun building a new device that combines infrared sensors and artificial intelligence to create "Project Deer."

As outlined in reports, the students aimed to reduce the number of collisions between cards and large animals, which the Federal Highway Administration reports are between one and two million instances every year. On a more local level, Colorado's Department of Transportation reports approximately 4,000 wildlife collisions in the state every year, which costs local drivers $80 million every year. Most of these collisions involve deer and elk.

The students outlined their plan, saying the device would leverage the power of an infrared camera to detect heat signatures created by the body heat of animals and, in this case, deer. Once the camera detects the animal, an algorithm tracks its heat and motion. That data is then placed into AI machine learning, which categorizes the data and logs the animal. In practise, once the device detects an animal, it will send a signal to another device that is located within the inside of the car that will warn the driver that there is an animal nearby. The warning will be both visual and audible.

SpaceX has launched the Hera mission on the back of a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on October 7.

The Hera mission is the European Space Agency's first planetary defense spacecraft that is on route to the crash site of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) that proved a kinetic impactor, or high-speed spacecraft, can generate enough energy to alter the orbit of an asteroid. The success of the DART mission unlocked Earth's first planetary defense weapon against asteroids, and now the ESA is sending a spacecraft to go inspect the crash site in hopes of gathering more data to unravel some of the remaining mysteries surrounding the event.

Hera will be conducting deep-space technology experiments such as the deployment of two twin shoebox-sized "CubeSats" which will be tasked with flying closer to the asteroid and hovering in ultra-low gravity before eventually landing on the asteroid's surface. One of the CubeSats will be attempting "self-driving" navigation around the asteroids based on its visual input.

Meta has just released a new pair of AI-powered sunglasses with Ray-Ban, and now we have an idea of what Meta plans on doing with the images and videos captured by the glasses.

For those who don't know, Meta's AI-powered Ray-Bans have a camera located in front of the glasses. The camera can be used for taking photos and video, but it can also be enabled when the user initiates an AI feature through saying a keyword such as "look" and then requesting Meta AI to analyze what the wearer is seeing and provide an answer. An example of this would be looking at a mountain and asking MetaAI what the name of that mountain is its height.

When prompted, the Meta Ray-Bans will then capture a selection of images that will be scanned by MetaAI, and the answer will be read out loud to the wearer via the speakers. However, what happens to the captured images? TechCrunch queried Meta on this and discovered the company was being cagey about the process of using captured images and video, but since then it has provided more clarity.