Ahead of the Steam Deck’s launch on February 25, Tim Sweeney has confirmed on Epic Games doesn’t have plans to support Fortnite for Valve’s handheld gaming device. In response to a question by another Twitter user, Sweeney explained that Epic is working hard to improve Easy Anti Cheat’s compatibility for the Steam Deck–but just not for Fortnite.

Though Fortnite isn’t available on Steam, the Steam Deck is designed as an open platform, meaning users can install games outside of Steam’s storefront. Like other large, online multiplayer titles, Fortnite faces issues with its anti-cheat software on the Steam Deck’s Linux-based OS.

In response to a question asking whether Epic would update Fortnite “to make Proton/Wine be compatible with EAC and BattlEye anti-cheat on Linux.” In response, Sweeney answered that there were no plans to update Fortnite, but that there’s “a big effort underway” to improve Easy Anti Cheat for other games on the Steam Deck.

When asked why Fortnite was excluded from that initiative, Sweeney explained that it was mainly a matter of scale, with anti-cheat requirements differing vastly depending how many regular players a game gets.

When replying to users who pointed out that Sweeney didn’t seem to have much faith in his company’s own product, the CEO agreed that they were right, “with regard to anti-cheat on the Linux platform supporting custom kernels and the threat model to a game of Fortnite’s size.” In another reply, he pointed out that Fortnite’s 60 million active players made it a much different case to other games using Easy Anti Cheat.

While some players have suggested that Sweeney isn’t keen on having Epic’s biggest title playable on a rival’s hardware, it’s more likely that the Steam Deck is too niche for Epic to want to put in the effort to guarantee compatibility. “The market for non-Steam-hosted games on limited availability Steam Deck hardware is how big exactly?” Sweeney asked one user in the replies to his original tweet.

Not long after the Steam Deck was originally announced, Sweeney was one of its first outspoken fans. In a tweet, he called the device an “amazing move” by Valve, specifically praising Steam’s open-platform approach to the device.

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Coming off the intense battle with Sean, Sifu players might be terrified to take on The Museum’s boss, Kuroki (The Artist). Thankfully, this fight is a little easier than the previous, giving you many opportunities to attack, thanks to the way Kuroki telegraphs her moves. Still, even the simplest Sifu fight is challenging, so you’ll want to come prepared to make it as easy as possible. Here’s how to defeat the Kuroki boss in Sifu.

How to defeat Kuroki

This fight is taken right out of Kill Bill. We won’t spoil the movie here, but if you’ve seen it, you know exactly what we’re talking about. You can come equipped with a weapon, which will serve you well, but doing so will require you to block and parry, which is risky in this fight. If you choose to use a weapon, make sure you keep up with your Structure bar so you don’t get caught off guard.

The best way to get through this fight is to run up to Kuroki, stop when you’re around five feet away from her to bait her into attacking, and then run away in a counterclockwise rotation using the R2 button. Wait for her to finish her combo, which usually consists of five or more consecutive attacks, and as soon as she stops for a second, run up to her side and get a few strikes in. Since her combos vary in length, you’ll want to bait her and run back multiple times so you can get a sense of her full moveset. Typically, it’s easy to tell when her combo is over, but it might take multiple tries to remember which is which.

When you go in for an attack, make sure you run up to Kuroki’s side, because she sometimes likes to follow up with one more spinning attack towards her front. If you come in from the side, this move won’t hit you, leaving her wide open for an attack. Hit her three or four times, then back up and repeat the process.

Run around and wait for Kuroki to finish attacking before getting a few hits in yourself.

The key with this method is to ensure you’re far enough away to avoid getting hit, but close enough to be able to quickly rush in and strike her before she begins her next combo. Sometimes, she’ll surprise you and stop her combo earlier or later than you might expect, so be prepared to adjust your plan if need be. As always, we recommend being safe, so if you don’t think you can make it up to her in time, wait and start the cycle over again.

Remember to use your Focus attacks when you can, as they’re a surefire way to deal additional damage. Make sure you use your Focus moves after her combo ends, just like you’ve been doing. Once you get the method down, it’s easy to do her first phase without taking damage. Though, the second phase plays out a lot differently.

If you mastered the fight with Sean, the second phase of Kuroki’s battle will be a lot easier. Here, you’ll want to prioritize avoiding her attack by holding L1 and tilting the stick in the opposite direction. This is different from simply running away from her attacks, so keep that in mind. Avoiding attacks involves you standing still while tilting your body away from the strike.

The reason this is so important is that it allows you to stay close to the boss, which is key. If you put distance between her, Kuroki will fire shurikens at you, which are a nuisance to deal with. Instead, stick close to her, avoid her strikes, and hit her a few times after her combo ends.

She will undoubtedly do a backflip at some point and begin throwing projectiles at you, and when she does, be prepared to avoid them just like you avoid her hand-to-hand maneuvers. Typically, ducking down is all you need to do to get around them. After you avoid one projectile, be prepared for her to throw more shurikens your way. She’ll do this a couple of times, and she’ll eventually dash back towards you, so continue avoiding her attacks like before and repeat the process. When she’s about to dash towards you, she’ll pose and give you a line of dialogue, telegraphing her next attack. Be sure to avoid this dash by holding L1 and moving the left stick to the left or right.

The key is to only hit her after you avoid her combos. If you start chasing her around, you’re going to get hit by her projectiles, so instead, try sticking to one spot, with the intention of avoiding her attacks by using L1 and the left stick. Her moveset might seem complex, but you can literally just avoid all of them the same way, making this second phase a lot simpler than it seems.

Not sure how long it’ll take to get through Sifu? Check out our dedicated guide here, along with our list of tips and tricks.

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There’s no denying that the ongoing semiconductor shortage has made it a challenging time to get your hands on a new GPU. Even if you can, you’re often forced to pay well over the recommended retail price for it, with demand heavily outweighing available supply and thus creating a lucrative market for some unwelcome price gouging. It’s what makes new releases of GPUs, such as the RTX 3050, so tricky. On paper, the latest graphics card from Nvidia delivers–it’s a good GPU for 1080p gaming at high refresh rates, with the bonus of ray tracing and DLSS support. But if you can’t find it for the price it’s meant to be sold at, does that even matter anymore?

The RTX 3050 sits at the bottom of Nvidia’s current line of new GPUs, positioned as this generation’s budget card alongside significantly more expensive options such as the RTX 3060 and RTX 3070. It’s evident that the price cut comes with its own share of concessions made on the hardware side. The GA106 GPU that the RTX 3050 uses is a slightly smaller version of the one in the RTX 3060, suggesting that Nvidia is making economical use of silicon it previously might have kept off shelves. That said, you’re not going to get close to the same performance, even with the 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM that is shared between the two tiers of cards.

Technical details

For starters, the RTX 3050 limits its memory to a 128-bit bus, drastically reducing its effective memory bandwidth to just 224GBps. This comes into play when trying to hit higher frame rates at 1440p, where the available memory on offer hits the mark but just doesn’t have the raw speed to keep up. Elsewhere, the 2560 CUDA cores and 12 billion transistors initially make the RTX 3050 sound more like a replacement for the RTX 2060 from last generation, but its much lower Tensor Core count and effective memory bandwidth keep it well behind in real-world applications.

RTX 3050

RTX 2060

GTX 1060 Ti

CUDA Cores

2560

1920

1280

RT Cores

20

30

N/A

Tensor Cores

80

240

N/A

ROPs

32

48

48

Boost Clock

1777MHz

1680MHz

1709MHz

Memory

8GB GDDR6

6GB GDDR6

6GB GDDR

Bus

128-bit

192-bit

192-bit

Bandwidth

224 GB/s

336 GB/s

192.2 GB/s

TDP

130W

160W

120W

Launch Price

$250

$350

$300

That isn’t to say that the addition of both Tensor and RT cores should be overlooked, especially if you’re planning to upgrade from an older GTX 1060. These are the bits of hardware that make ray tracing and DLSS possible, both of which are big features for a budget card. While ray tracing performance does require some sacrifices in other graphical settings (more on this later), it’s DLSS that continues to be the biggest benefit to even the weakest cards in Nvidia’s Ampere lineup. The RTX 3050 slightly outdoes the raw performance of older cards such as the GTX 1660 Ti (which we didn’t have to test ourselves), you’ll be able to get more out of it for longer thanks to the performance DLSS can claw back, even if you’re just running games at 1080p.

The RTX 3050 doesn’t feature a reference design from Nvidia, so the one we were supplied with for testing comes from Gigabyte. This RTX 3050 OC Gaming Edition is a dual-slot card, featuring a triple-fan design that is overkill for the 130W TDP of the card, even at its boost clocks. The design features a premium look, however, with a nice metal backplate and a cut-out over the furthest fan down the card to allow air to get flung upwards into your chassis for better airflow (a design Nvidia has been using on its own Founder’s Edition cards).

The over-engineered cooling does mean the RTX 3050 stayed whisper-quiet during testing, never going over 76 degrees Celsius on the core when stressed to its limit. The card also features a 0RPM fan mode when the GPU is idle, which is a nice touch in a budget offering. There’s even a splash of RGB with an illuminated and addressable Gigabyte logo on the side of the card for traditional mounting.

Methodology and test bench

Performance is where the real strengths and inescapable weaknesses of the RTX 3050 come to bear, especially if you’re hoping for a GPU that will power your gaming at 1440p for the foreseeable future. The short of it is that this new card is more suited to 1080p gaming in most respects, especially when you’re looking to run the most modern titles at above 60fps. The good news is that, on that playing field, it does remarkably well, as results in graphically demanding titles such as Forza Horizon 5, Metro: Exodus Enhanced Edition, and more show.

Our testing took place in the same machine as the one used for the RTX 3080 Ti (although we won’t be comparing results to that card, for obvious reasons). Because we didn’t have access to either the RTX 2060 or AMD’s latest budget offering, the RX 5600 XT, we couldn’t do comparisons to those either, but a GTX 1060 we did have on hand offers some context into the performance gains you can expect if you missed out on Nvidia’s last generation of GPUs. Testing was done on the following system:

MSI Mortar B550M MotherboardAMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-core/12-thread CPU clocked at 4.65GHzNoctua NH-U12S CPU CoolerCorsair Vengeance DDR4-3200, CL16 RAM (2x16GB dual-channel DIMMs)Corsair Hxi Series HX850i (80mPlus Platinum) PSUIntel 660p 2TB NVMe SSD

Testing was done across numerous titles, both modern and slightly older, all of which allowed us to test features such as ray tracing, DLSS, and more. These include Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro: Exodus Enhanced Edition, Borderlands 3, Gears Tactics, Forza Horizon 5, and Hitman 3.

If you are looking for a GPU that might just tide you over until the semiconductor shortage subsides, but want to make use of a new 1440p display, the RTX 3050 can fill that gap if you’re struggling on much older hardware. In the performance results for Forza Horizon 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it’s clear that you can enjoy frame rates higher than 60fps if you’re willing to drop down a handful of settings from their maximum. That isn’t the rule across the suite, however, with more demanding titles such as Metro: Exodus and Cyberpunk 2077 showing that, in some cases, you might be better off locking your frame rate to 30fps for stability.

That’s especially true if you plan on throwing ray-traced workloads on top of a 1440p resolution. This is where the RTX 3050 really buckles under the pressure, and it’s just not the right card for something this demanding. You can, however, claw back a lot of performance if you combine that with DLSS, which is where the RTX 3050 can make a lot of sense as an upgrade. In some cases, you can almost double your performance when choosing the Performance preset, which doesn’t hinder image quality too much at 1440p. Even at 1080p, there’s additional performance to be gained, although with such a low resolution already you’ll be best served by sticking to Quality and Balanced presets.

Still, with DLSS you can count on breezing through ray-traced games at above 60fps at 1440p, as results in both Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro: Exodus show. You can run into some memory bandwidth issues, especially when navigating a world as detailed and large as Cyberpunk’s Night City, but DLSS at least gives you more room to customize your settings without sacrificing too much.

In truth, it’s the features that Nvidia has made standard across its RTX line that make the RTX 3050 worth it, even with its less-than-stellar traditional rasterization performance when compared to previous budget offerings. There’s no question that DLSS puts the RTX 3050 a cut above AMD’s latest budget option (with many other reviews of the RX 6500 XT indicating there’s many more problems in rasterized workloads there, too). The problem then is just whether you can find an RTX 3050 for the $250 that Nvidia is planning to sell many of them for, which skews its value proposition based on what the market eventually decides it’s worth.

Verdict

With cryptocurrency mining still alive and kicking (and the 8GB of VRAM present on this card making it an alluring option), there’s little chance that the RTX 3050 will fly low enough on the radar to be excluded from the current climate of scalping and price gouging. It’s impossible for us to know what it will eventually settle on in terms of price, but at its MSRP there’s a strong case to make for the weakest card in the RTX 30 series line depending on your current setup. It’s an easy recommendation if you held off on a 20-series card, with its latest hardware allowing you to finally take advantage of DLSS and ray tracing.

If you’re looking for an upgrade path from Nvidia’s last generation of cards, the RTX 3050 isn’t really a good option. Even if you’re still managing with an RTX 2060, the performance uplift won’t be noticeable in most cases, so there’s no reason to be thinking about paying more than retail price for a similar experience, and only a slightly convincing argument at MSRP given how the two cards can regularly trade blows. The RTX 3050 might have been the card to buy now because it’s one of the only ones you can find, but it shows that even when pickings are slim you need to think carefully about whether it’s worth the premium.

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Certain ideas and assumptions about what World of Warcraft is, ranging from character progression to faction rivalries, have long felt set in stone, baked into the game from its earliest days. It may have taken close to two decades, but some of those assumptions are finally beginning to change.

Blizzard’s landmark MMORPG is almost 20 years old. Plenty has changed in the 18 years since the game first released, both in-game and out. WoW has received eight expansions, new dungeon and raid difficulties, new classes, new races, cross-server play, visual updates, and more. But as much as various pieces of WoW have changed over time, much of the core design philosophy behind the game has stayed the same. Some of those core pillars that have long defined WoW are now changing, at what can only be described as a critical moment in the developer’s long history. Amidst ongoing sexual harassment and discrimination allegations at Activision Blizzard and a planned $69 billion acquisition by Microsoft, the WoW team is looking to forge a new path, one that challenges long-held ideas on what WoW is, how it’s played, and who it’s for. So far, the results are promising.

There is no better example of old assumptions that in recent years have held the game back than the divide between the game’s two factions: the Horde and the Alliance. For almost 20 years, WoW has been defined by the Cold War-esque battle between Azeroth’s two superpowers, so much so that the WoW portion of Blizzard’s annual BlizzCon convention would often begin with a competition among players in the packed convention hall to see which faction was the loudest. The faction rivalry, at least in Blizzard’s mind, has always been one of the most essential parts of WoW’s DNA. Never mind the fact that the Horde and Alliance teamed up in the game’s story to defeat world-ending threats time and time again, dating all the way back to Warcraft III. Never mind the fact that the leaders of both factions regularly cooperate and are even friendly with each other. The war between the factions, and the divide between the game’s two playerbases, needed to persist, because that’s what WoW was all about when it first launched in 2004.

Only a few years ago, this made the idea of cross-faction play unthinkable. Developers even said as much. Humans and orcs fighting together? Off the table, despite the game’s narrative supporting the idea and the fact that the game would benefit from a larger, connected playerbase when it came to enjoying endgame content. The idea was even popular with many players, but that didn’t matter. There were certain ideas that couldn’t be touched, and this was one of them.

WoW is no longer defined by orcs versus humans

Now, in 2022, it’s finally happening. Cross-faction support is coming, allowing Horde and Alliance players to team up for dungeons, raids, and rated PvP. It’s a monumental shift in the idea of what WoW is and can be. The initial response speaks for itself. Players largely seem ecstatic about cross-faction play, proving they are ready for change. While rethinking the iron curtain between the Horde and Alliance is just one assumption the team took a hard look at, there are other changes that have been made or are in the process of being made that reexamine other ideas that were once thought to be untouchable.

The seeds for this kind of change were planted months ago, prior to the release of the game’s 9.1.5 patch (a patch that notably reworked or removed certain systems from the game’s most recent Shadowlands expansion that were widely unpopular with players). It was around that time game director Ian Hazzikostas said the team has, at times, clung too closely to old traditions instilled in them by some of WoW’s original creators.

“It’s patterns we’ve been trained to think in and accustomed to think in,” Hazzikostas said in an interview with GameSpot prior to patch 9.1.5. “Working on World of Warcraft this long, that can lead to what seems like stubbornness to the outside, and I get that and I get that is frustrating.”

One of those patterns, the idea that progression in WoW is largely on a per-character basis instead of account-wide, is now being reevaluated.

“World of Warcraft at the start was rooted in the paradigm of ‘you play your character,’ and you switch to a different character, going back to Classic in 2004, nothing was account-wide,” Hazzikostas said. “Everything lives on your character. If you played an alt, it was a brand-new journey, you’d have to earn everything and do everything from scratch. And that’s pretty standard across RPGs, single-player or otherwise. You make a character, this is your character’s journey.”

However, as the game aged and new classes and races were introduced (and Blizzard began to offer level boosts both free and paid), more and more players had a number of characters to play. Having “alts” became less of a niche part of the game and something a majority of WoW players do. Despite that, few aspects of the game’s progression carried over to multiple characters, resulting in players having to repeat pieces of content or reputation grinds that were not designed with repeated playthroughs in mind.

Whereas the WoW team once looked at most game-system decisions from a character-first perspective, only occasionally unlocking things account-wide, the inverse is becoming true. Evidence of this change in mindset is already evident in WoW’s most recent patch, which introduced alt-friendly changes that were praised by the game’s community.

“I think now increasingly we are asking the question in regard to almost every reward, every piece of content, is this something that holds up for multiple playthroughs?” Hazzikostas said. “Is this something that’s going to feel meaningfully different on a different character? Or is this something, and depending on the answer to those questions, we’d like to make more and more things account-wide or easily accessible to alts from the start?”

As for what’s next, the team has continued to update various elements of the game that could be seen as offensive, problematic, or that have otherwise aged incredibly poorly. These changes have ranged from reworking achievement names to altering quest dialogue, all with the mindset of creating a more welcoming and inclusive game world in the wake of the shocking allegations that have surfaced as part of ongoing investigations and lawsuits into Blizzard’s workplace culture. Whereas altering older in-game content might have once been off the table, that is no longer the case, and Blizzard seems committed to making sure the game in its entirety is reflective of the current development team and playerbase’s values. The current team taking ownership of what WoW is and should be in 2022 is a good thing, even if some of the changes made to older content may seem frivolous to long time players.

It’s clear that Blizzard is looking to chart a new path forward for the MMO that made the developer a household name, one more informed by the modern needs of players and their feedback and less dictated by decade-old ideas about how the game must be. Whether Blizzard is able to chart that path successfully remains to be seen. Fans are still eagerly awaiting news of the game’s next yet-to-be announced expansion, hoping that what Hazzikostas has said “is a new perspective going forward” for the team since patch 9.1.5 will translate into new ideas and a new era of success for the MMO. It’s still unclear what the next year and beyond of WoW will look like, but if nothing else, it’s refreshing to see Blizzard cast off old assumptions that have long held the game back, one update at a time.

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