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CD Projekt says Polaris, the next game in the new Witcher trilogy—which we are calling The Witcher 4 until somebody makes us stop—is now the studio’s biggest project, both in terms of the number of people working on it and how far along it’s come.

“Over 400 people are currently working on the game,” CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said in a financial presentation, “and we plan to move on to the production phase in the second half of the year.” There’s also a handy graph illustrating the breakdown: No, it’s not a huge shift in numbers from the previous report and for now it remains in pre-production, but even so work on The Witcher 4 is obviously dominating CD Projekt’s efforts.

It also fits with a statement made by joint CEO Adam Badowski in January, when he said CD Projekt would “like to have around 400 people working on [Polaris] by the middle of the year.” Given that number was hit by February, optimists might even say things are coming along a…

In what may be a unique event in world history, a Something Awful forums user has posted so hard that it’s become news—returning from the void after a decade-long ban purely in order to pick up the exact same tabletop game nerd debate that got him banned in the first place.

Let’s begin at the beginning. The Something Awful forums are (in)famous and, god help us, genuinely culturally important. Despite—or maybe because of—a $10 registration fee, all sorts of memes, turns of phrase, and general ephemera of internet culture have sprung from them over the course of their 24-year existence. It also bears the burden of being at least partially responsible for the creation of 4chan, which was originally created by disgruntled members of SA’s anime subforum.

The SA forums are also famous for giving moderators free reign when it comes to laying down the law. It’s not uncommon for users to end up eating bans (which you have to pay $10 to get out of) or l…

The Land of the Magnates is described as an “epic adventure of love, betrayal, and sacrifice” inspired by Middle Eastern myths, and follows prince Malik Shahbaz as he attempts to save his kingdom, which is “shrouded in darkness and silence following the death of its queen.”

A new trailer for Land of the Magnates, debuted at the PC Gaming Show today. The game is an action platformer that sees the disgraced prince battle monsters, solve puzzles, and traverse “magical realms” in search of a cure for his father, who’s been poisoned, and his lightless homeland—he’s really having a bad day, isn’t he? 

“From the cursed Black Forest to the Land of the Sun shrouded in darkness, from the domain of the Water Princess to the marble lands of the Monkey Kings, Shahbaz will have to lift ancient curses, defeat vile minions of the dark with his trusty sitar, and solve complex puzzles requiring quick thinking—and quick fingers,” says the developer.

Some of th…

Postal 2 is a notoriously bad videogame. Some people liked it when it launched back in 2003: PC Gamer, according to a Metacritic roundup, scored it 79%, calling it “a nonstop tour de force of insulting insanity.” Computer Gaming World, on the other hand, handily summed up the more common consensus, rating it a flat 0 and declaring that “until someone boxes up syphilis and tries to sell it at retail, Postal 2 is the worst product ever foisted upon consumers.”

The situation is somehow clearer yet more confusing on Steam, where Postal 2 has amassed an “overwhelmingly positive” rating across more than 71,000 user reviews. Irony is obviously a factor in that, with user reviews like “better than Cyberpunk” and “you can piss on people,” which is doable when a game is regularly available for $1 (and sometimes free), as is the case here. Still, that’s a lot of people who own Postal 2, and according to Steam Charts it’s put up better player numbers over the past 12 months than Marvel’s …

This is the best worst idea in videogames I’ve seen in a very long time: Treyarch says Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will give players the ability to talk directly to the people they’re holding hostage and using as meat shields.

The meat shield, for those not familiar with the maneuver, works like this: A bad guy is stunned or wounded but still on his feet, so you grab his shoulder, spin him around, put your arm across his throat, and march him forward into the gunfire that would otherwise turn you into a sticky mess. Here’s a great example of the move from the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger flick Total Recall, which I will link but not embed because it’s pretty bonkers in the way that only ’90s action movies are. (I will also note that the guy in this case isn’t so much bad as just really unlucky.)

Anyway, there’s not a lot of space between the shield and the shielded, and someone at Treyarch has decided that forced closeness would be a great opportunity for people to get to…

Update: Twitch is now back to full functionality, at least on my end. Twitter Support said on Twitter that it’s still “working on a fix,” so you may still be see loading issues as the site comes fully back online.

Original story: Happy new year! Twitch is down, sorta. My homepage is looking especially wonky as of Tuesday morning, with several main elements of the site, like the homepage carousel, not loading correctly or missing completely. I also seemed to be signed out of my account, making the site more-or-less unusable at the moment. I can’t see who I follow, but I can watch clips that Twitch thinks I’ll like (I rarely do). 

Twitch announced on Twitter that it’s “investigating an issue preventing multiple areas of Twitch from loading,” so rest assured the powers that be are on it.

Interestingly, streams that are already live seem to be functioning as they were (mostly). Following a direct link to a live channel started pla…

Warframe: 1999 looks nuts. Prototype warframes, boy bands, dating—a lot of weird stuff is on the horizon. That’s all coming in winter 2024, but Digital Extremes is already gearing up for it with the next update, The Lotus Eaters, which is dropping on August 21. 

Expect a new quest, albeit a short one, where the Lotus calls on you to investigate “a strange but familiar sound” on Deimos. Maybe it’s one of the hit single’s from 1999’s iconic boy band On-lyne, which was introduced during the last TennoCon in July. 

It’s all connected to the past, naturally, getting players ready for a trip back in time where we’ll be able to live life to the extreme in a way only possible right before the turn of the millennium—with motorbikes, pop, floppy haircuts and chatting to your crush via IM. It certainly sounds like my experience of ’99, aside from the biking and the, you know, fighting monsters thing. 

On top of this prologue quest, Sevagoth Prime is…

Several versions of Doom were released back in the game’s heyday, though only one floppy version contained the hellish secrets of the lesser-known multi-monitor Doom mode. Having acquired Doom v1.1, presenter AkBKukU of the TechTangent Youtube channel has been messing around with some horrendously beige hardware and finally managed to get Doom running on not three, but four CRT monitors.

Man, is it a beautiful sight to behold.

After assessing the sorry state of four single-core Intel Pentium 4-powered machines, thankfully with only a few bulging capacitors on their motherboards, AkBKukU decided they were willing to risk powering them on for a Doom experiment. The Dark Lord commanded it, and so it shall be done.

Once he had all four up and running MS-DOS 6.22, AkBKukU had to do some networking wizardry to get each one working in tandem. The next step was to hunt down some LAN controller software, which proved awkward since those found on the Intel archives were impo…

“If Arm emerges, I want to be the foundry.” So says Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger when asked at his post-keynote Q&A at the Computex show whether Arm chips are taking over and eating into Intel’s market share of x86 chips for PCs.

Actually, Gelsinger gave two answers. First, he argued that Intel’s x86 product line up is super strong. 

“This is not the first Windows on Arm announcement, right? And the x86 market share has remained very hot, you need to have a reason to change. So, if you believe what I showed on stage today, literally the best CPU, the best graphics, the best NPU and very compelling battery life—why would you change,” Gelsinger said.

But he also hedged his and Intel’s bets. “That said, if Arm emerges, I want to be the foundry,” he explained. “We don’t say that cavalierly. We mean it. The partnership that Intel has forged with Arm is dramatically more powerful and beneficial for both companies than I could have even imagined when I took this…