Paradox Interactive ate a $37 million loss on Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 after the game flopped harder than they expected. CEO Fredrik Wester straight up admitted the publisher screwed up and said they don't really know how to handle action RPGs since their bread and butter has always been grand strategy stuff like Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis. The Chinese Room finished the game after the original dev Hardsuit Labs got canned, but it still ended up with mediocre sales and mixed reviews.
Wester said Paradox is gonna stick to what they actually know going forward and figure out what to do with the World of Darkness IP later. The two planned DLCs are still happening, though, with players getting to control former...
A modder named D3DNieR dropped a playable Rufus Shinra mod for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on PC that lets you control the boss character with all his signature moves intact. The character functions pretty well based on gameplay footage, though one ability called Thread Softly can freeze certain enemies for the rest of a fight if they lack specific animations.
D3DNieR already made the Turks playable back in April, with Rude and Reno getting released first before Elena and Tseng got added later. A Zack gameplay overhaul is coming that will beef up his moveset to match what a 1st Class SOLDIER should be capable of, like in Crisis Core Reunion. Director Naoki Hamaguchi mentioned at Tokyo Game Show that DLC for the third game in the remake...
The B850 chipset from AMD has been eating into B650's dominance in South Korea's DIY market. Data from Danawa shows B850 sitting at nearly 29% market share while B650 holds onto first place with around 38%, though that lead keeps shrinking each month.
What's driving the switch is mostly price. B850 boards dropped 21% in average selling price this year to land at 263,285 won, which is still about 70% pricier than B650's 155,929 won average. The catch is that people are grabbing standard ATX versions of B850 boards while B650 buyers stick with micro-ATX builds.
The vendor race got weird with ASRock jumping from under 5% share to almost 20% after launching their Challenger B850 lineup. ASUS leads the pack at 37.64% and MSI takes second...
Erying dropped new MoDT motherboards that stick Intel Core Ultra 200H mobile chips onto desktop boards, ranging from the 225H up to the flagship 285H with 16 cores pushing 5.4 GHz. These boards let budget builders grab laptop silicon running at 120W instead of the usual mobile power limits, paired with better cooling than any notebook could handle. The mATX design packs dual DDR5 slots supporting 128 GB at 5600 speeds, a couple of M.2 slots, and basic expansion through PCIe 4.0 lanes.
Pricing starts under $140 for entry models, while the top-tier 285H setup lands around $300, which beats traditional desktop chip and board combos by a solid margin. The Arc 140T integrated graphics got a massive boost over last gen, and Erying even...
MSI rolled out a fresh BIOS tweak called PBO BCLK Booster for their 800 series MAX boards that juices performance on Ryzen chips through base clock adjustments. The feature works as a one-click profile that bumps the base clock generator settings, with two different boost levels depending on how aggressive you want to get with overclocking. Performance gains hit around 15 percent in games when combined with tighter DDR5 memory timings, though MSI warns about potential stability issues since you're basically overclocking the chip.
The tweak lands on MAX series boards plus some higher-end models like the MEG X870E GODLIKE and B850M POWER. You can stack it with their X3D Gaming Mode for extra performance on chips like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D...
Rebel Wolves ditched the traditional main quest setup for their upcoming game, The Blood of Dawnwalker, according to game director Konrad Tomaskiewicz. Players get total freedom to tackle their enemy whenever they want, either solo or after building up gear and recruiting allies through side content. The studio wants to replicate tabletop RPG vibes where you chart your path instead of following linear story beats.
Tomaskiewicz compared the structure to the original Fallout games rather than Kingdom Come: Deliverance since those still had central storylines guiding progression. His team went for a clear objective with optional paths to reach it, letting players wander and choose their activities without mandatory quest chains. The...
Samsung's apparently going full black on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, which sounds cool until you realize the dark frame blends with the display edges and makes the bezels look way thicker than they actually are. Ice Universe dropped this detail about the uniform color scheme that basically creates an optical illusion working against the phone's sleek design.
The selfie camera hole grew about 4mm wider for a better field of view, but that also hurts the overall look. Samsung's keeping the camera setup nearly identical to the S25 Ultra with the same 200MP main sensor and similar supporting lenses. The phone gets more rounded corners, a 6.9-inch screen, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 silicon and a 5200mAh battery.
Qualcomm is splitting its chip lineup with two versions, where the regular Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 gets a weaker GPU compared to the Pro model, according to leaks from Digital Chat Station. Both chips apparently use the same 2nm process from TSMC and share a redesigned CPU cluster that swaps the current setup for a different core arrangement.
The standard version might land in phones around the $565 price point, which could help Qualcomm grab more market share from MediaTek. Fixed Focus Digital disputes some details about which specific 2nm node gets used, but agrees on the basic manufacturing process. The strategy makes sense since the Pro variant will probably cost way more than the current flagship silicon, which runs close to $280...
Nvidia apparently stopped bundling VRAM chips with the GPU dies it ships to board partners because memory suppliers like Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix can't keep up with AI demand. According to leaker Golden Pig Upgrade, the company told its AIBs they need to source their memory themselves going forward. Big manufacturers probably won't sweat this much, but smaller vendors without solid supplier connections are gonna get wrecked trying to secure GDDR6 and GDDR7 stock.
The memory crunch hits both system RAM and graphics memory across current-generation cards from AMD and Nvidia. Samsung kicked off mass production of 3GB GDDR7 modules running at 28 Gbps, but those chips will likely land on RTX 50 Super cards that got pushed back because...
