Chiplet technologies have been fully embedded into the world of CPUs with Zen 4 and Raptor Lake but are yet to reach graphics cards. But that’s all set to change with AMD’s upcoming RDNA 3 GPUs. The RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT (opens in new tab) will bring chiplets to bear in gaming graphics, and to do so, the red team had to revisit its entire interconnect technology.
AMD might have mastered chiplets for CPUs, but squeezing higher performance out of a chiplet-based GPU has meant shrinking more connections into an even smaller space. That’s where something called Infinity Links comes in, which is a new fanout technology AMD is introducing with RDNA 3.
The Infinity Links fanout is used to connect the GCD die of AMD’s Navi 31 GPU package—the core graphics engine—to the MCD dies containing the GDDR6 memory interface and Infinity Cache, of which there are up to six. With this in tow, AMD is able to produce peak bandwidth of 5.3TB/s, and almost 10x the bandwidth density of the links used in Ryzen and Epyc CPUs.
“You heard the massive numbers tossed out this morning, 5.3 terabytes per second, which means we have on each one of these interfaces [MCDs] four, 64-byte channels going in both directions. That’s a lot of wires. And an organic package is not going to be able to host that number of wires,” Sam Naffziger, AMD fellow, tells me.
“We needed a new package technology and a new link technology. And that’s what we have implemented. We have named these Infinity Links and they are built on a new high performance fanout packaging technology that we have co developed with our supplier.”
(Image credit: AMD)
Infinity Links works by replacing the more traditional routing of traces—the layout of the microscopic wires hooking up multiple parts of a chip package—with a much, much smaller version. It’s actually quite baffling how much smaller the Infinity Link package is versus the standard solution.
Below: The traditional organic fanout is on the left, taken from one of AMD’s server products. AMD didn’t specify which, but assumedly an Epyc processor. The new Infinity Link fanout is on the right. The images are roughly to scale, according to AMD.
(Image credit: AMD)
“The bandwidth density that we achieve is almost 10x,” Naffziger continues. “And that’s with the bit rates that you can see here, 9.2 gigabits per second signalling across these interfaces. And with the finer pitches of the bumps, and single routes, we get a dramatic increase in bandwidth density, which is exactly what the GPU needs.”
I’m told the Infinity Links interconnect alone required the effort of hundreds of engineers to get right, but that was seen as absolutely crucial work—so important as the interconnect is to the entire RDNA 3 chiplet architecture, you know, working at all.
With a view to power efficiency with the entire RDNA 3 architecture, however, the Infinity Links needed to be power efficient too. And so they are, reportedly up to 80% more efficient than organic package links due to “aggressive clock gating” and a focus on low voltage operation.
The end result: 3.5TB/s for less than 5% GPU power consumption.
Yet in delivering a chiplet approach such as this, AMD does admit that latency has increased somewhat. Latency here means slower time to deliver a fresh frame to your monitor, which could threaten the gains from the chiplet architecture on a gaming GPU to begin with.
(Image credit: AMD)
To combat the latency increase, AMD focused on increasing clock rates to try and negate the latency increase when sending data off the GCD die and onto one of the MCD dies.
AMD feels it’s an effective trade-off, and with a view to higher clocks and efficiency on its two upcoming RDNA 3 graphics cards, we can only hope that it’s a gamble set to pay off when it comes to frames per second. The RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT will arrive on December 13, which means soon we’ll have every opportunity to see what the world’s first chiplet gaming GPUs are able to deliver for all their shiny new technologies.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/AMDs-Infinity-Links-is-the-unsung-hero-of-RDNA-3.png6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-14 15:04:202022-11-14 15:04:20AMD’s Infinity Links is the unsung hero of RDNA 3 and chiplet gaming GPUs
What is it? A narrative-driven mystery set in a 16th-century Bavarian village. Expect to pay $19.99/£14.99 Developer Obsidian Publisher Xbox Game Studios Reviewed on Ryzen 7 3700X, GTX 1080 Ti, 16GB RAM Multiplayer? No LinkOfficial site (opens in new tab)
There’s blood on the walls of Kiersau Abbey. Beneath a long mural of the Danse Macabre (opens in new tab) lies a jewel-festooned corpse: A visiting nobleman has been murdered behind the monastery’s doors, shattering years of monastic peace and jeopardising the surrounding village of Tassing, Bavaria.
It’s 1518 and Europe is teetering over an ocean of blood: Martin Luther is threatening a thousand years of papal dominance of western Christianity, Tassing’s peasants chafe loudly under onerous taxes, and the rich and powerful are—as ever—guarding their riches and power with rough men ready to do violence on their behalf. If there’s ever a good time to find a dead aristocrat splayed across the floor of your monastery, this isn’t it. To make matters worse, the most convenient culprit for the powers-that-be to pin the whole mess on is the person that found the body: Your friend and mentor.
(Image credit: Obsidian)
“You” in this instance is Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist who has taken up temporary residence in Tassing to work in the abbey’s scriptorium—a room for the writing and illustration of manuscripts and a relic of a bygone age, long since surpassed by innovations like the printing press. Andreas, as a relatively well-to-do outsider with little motive to bludgeon a blue-blood to death but ample reason to save his friend, takes it upon himself to find the true killer. You have too many suspects and not enough time to gather the evidence you need to convince the adjudicator—and yourself—that one of them is guilty. However you choose to spend your time, there are going to be stones left unturned and questions unanswered.
Better choose wisely then, eh? That’s the heart of Pentiment, at least on a mechanical level: Making your choices and watching the ripples spread out over the course of the game’s 25-year timespan. Yes, you have to solve the noble’s murder, but that’s only the first of a few scandals that unfold over the course of the game. This is still Obsidian, after all, even if the game was developed by a skunkworks division of the studio made up of 13 people and headed by Josh Sawyer, director of Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity.
It’s not an RPG: You won’t pour points into character stats at any point. But don’t worry, if anything that just leaves more room for narrative choices to agonise over and regret over the game’s 20-hour runtime.
(Image credit: Obsidian)
The Art of Murder
The bulk of those choices revolve around how you’ll spend your time. The people demand justice and lack patience. You’ll have to serve up a suspect in a matter of days, which means every hour counts.
That’s not as painful as it might sound. There’s no ticking clock. Exploring the town—which is rendered in an evocative style reminiscent of the era’s illuminated manuscripts and woodcuts—and most conversations don’t take time at all. Instead, each part of the day (divided into the major and minor hours of prayer, naturally) concludes when you make a significant decision. That could be exploring the old Roman salt mine on the edge of town, it could be sitting down to dinner with a suspect, but the game almost always makes it clear when you’re about to push time forward and, possibly, sacrifice an opportunity to pursue one of the other big leads you’ve uncovered.
It works well. You’ll always be left wondering what you might have uncovered if you’d picked option B instead of A, and the game is never so kind as to tell you if you got the right culprit. I remain convinced that the person I eventually served up to the headsman’s axe was just unlucky. I happened to focus on them instead of one of my other suspects and collected more evidence that pointed to them as a result. It’ll take multiple playthroughs and a lot of different choices to paint a full picture of how all of Tassing’s possible suspects really relate to the nobleman’s murder. Cold comfort to the poor guy I sent to lose his head before a baying mob.
The people demand justice and lack patience. You’ll have to serve up a suspect in a matter of days, which means every hour counts.
One qualm, though: While the game almost always gives you fair warning when you’re about to sacrifice a chunk of time or a potential line of inquiry, I did run into a couple of occasions where I only realised I’d made a choice after I’d made it. Not often, and not major, but frustrating in a game that revolves around your choices and their consequences.
There’s the odd minigame—including a variation of the card game Lansquenet (opens in new tab) that I liked so much I lost all of Andreas’ money on it—but don’t be fooled, they’re more about taking a break from interrogations than posing a real mechanical challenge. For the most part you’re going to be exploring, chatting, and experiencing the game’s rich and textured collection of fonts.
My god, the fonts. Never before has a game made such conscious and incredible use of fonts. With no voice acting (beyond a few achingly authentic bits of hymnal music), everything in Pentiment comes down to the stroke of a pen. How Andreas perceives someone’s status, social position, level of education: It’s all encapsulated by the font the game uses to represent their dialogue. Priests speak in an intimidating and laborious gothic script, peasants in a variable scratch, the highfalutin petit-bourgeoisie in a mess of serifs and curlicues, and people like Andreas in a sober and readable humanist style. Unpretentious, maybe even progressive, but distinctly an outsider.
(Image credit: Obsidian)
About the Artist
But when you’re solving a murder, an outsider’s precisely what you need. Not long after the game starts, you’ll get to make decisions about Andreas’ past before he came to the village. Where did he spend his gap year? What are his hobbies? What did he study at university?
In an effort to reflect myself in Andreas’ character, I made him an insufferable dweeb: a logic-minded bookworm who studied imperial law and oratory, and who spent his gap year flouncing about in Italy, meaning he could speak Italian. I could just as easily have made him a hedonistic occultist who spent a year in Belgium, or a petty criminal with a mind for Roman history.
(Image credit: Obsidian)
The choices you make about Andreas’ background add new options in conversations and decisions later in the game. My skill in oratory let me make impassioned, flowery pleas instead of straightforward requests, my bibliophilia gave me multiple chances to make borderline-worrying declarations about the sanctity and beauty of books, speaking Italian let me, well, speak to Italians, and so on. Those choices can cascade and give rise to new traits, too. My bookworm Andreas agitated so hard against the destruction of a heretical text that the authorities eventually let him keep it to shut him up. A few years later, he was wandering around with a new trait and some dangerously mystical ideas in his head.
There aren’t RPG-style speech checks, though, and it’s not always the right choice to default to clicking the dialogue option you unlocked through a character trait. By choosing imperial law as my main area of study at university, I may as well have ticked a box marked ‘Pretentious blowhard’. Every single time I showed off my legal knowledge, I annoyed the person I was talking to so much that I incurred penalties on subsequent persuasion checks, which work by totting up your positive and negative interactions and seeing if you cross a certain persuasion threshold, rather than by rolling dice or checking a character stat.
If you want to convince someone of something, you have to take into account their character and the context of your conversation. Sometimes the trick to persuading someone to help you out isn’t the super-special unique dialogue choice you got from your background, it’s one of the plain-Jane options that everyone gets, but sometimes the reverse is true, too. It’s a much more nuanced and rewarding system than dumping points into a speech stat, even if I was unjustly punished for my love of the law.
(Image credit: Obsidian)
So Many Faces
But Pentiment’s real triumph is Tassing itself. As you traipse around town and butt into the lives of the village’s families, you’ll end up forming relationships with all of them. Over 25 years of chats, shared meals, and evening masses, you’ll watch children turn into adults, adults enter their dotage, and the elderly fade away (or stubbornly hold on, in defiance of natural law and common sense). That makes it all the harder when you want to condemn a family man for a crime he might not actually have committed.
The villagers too are shaped by your choices. Buy an encyclopaedia as a present for a precocious youngster and they could grow up to be an incorrigible nerd. Just don’t get them into imperial law if you want them to have any friends, I suppose.
It’s great, but it’s also related to my biggest issue with the game. While Pentiment is very good at defining all its weird, early modern terminology—you can hit the back button when pretty much any unfamiliar term pops up to get a quick definition—I found myself regularly losing track of Tassing’s myriad characters, especially because they kept inconsiderately getting older and changing appearance. You can hit the back button when a person’s name is mentioned, but all that shows you is their picture (which is extra unhelpful if it’s an adult picture of a character you’ve only known as a child). For some people, maybe that’s enough, but I certainly couldn’t keep track of the whole village based on their appearance alone, so I spent a lot of time rifling through the game’s character index to figure out just who the hell “Martha” was.
(Image credit: Obsidian)
The game’s era and setting aren’t set dressing, an early modern aesthetic to drape over a murder mystery that could have been set wherever, whenever. Tassing is a town riven with the contradictions of the 16th century. The peasants resent the priests, the priests are suspicious of the peasants, the town’s tradespeople vacillate between the two and absolutely everyone hates the stuck-up miller on the edge of town, who represents the first green shoots of a capitalism that will, a few short centuries hence, come to obliterate this land and its way of life entirely.
It’s a historical materialist style of storytelling that completely justifies the game’s quarter-century timespan. The people of Tassing make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please. The engine of class struggle churns away beneath the surface, accelerated by events and choices like the murder in the abbey and slowed by others, but never stopping. Tassing is still very recognisably Tassing after 25 years, we’re not talking the Scouring of the Shire (opens in new tab) here, but it’s been marked indelibly by history just like it has been a thousand times before, just like it will be again. The future arrives inexorably, but it only paints over the past. A pentimento, in case you’re wondering, is when painted-over elements in a work of art reemerge later on down the line.
(Image credit: Obsidian)
Layer Upon Layer
Pentiment is a rare beast: A relatively short, gameplay-light narrative adventure from a studio renowned for its lengthy, mechanics-heavy RPGs. Even stranger, the team pulled it off with aplomb. Yes, there are some mechanical quibbles, and it did take some coaxing to get me to accept the central mystery’s final resolution, but Obsidian’s tight grasp on its subject matter and thorough understanding of exactly what it wanted to do with Pentiment has produced a game that I wanted to launch again just as soon as I finished it. I want to see what happens when I pick a different constellation of background traits, pursue different leads, and pass the persuasion checks I failed (and fail the ones I passed).
At 20 hours, Pentiment is a short game compared to some of the hundred-hour titans we’ve seen this year, but it’s a game I see myself replaying a lot in the years to come. I get the feeling that I’ll need to spend a lot more time in Tassing before I even scratch the surface.
NCSoft is gearing up to release its next MMO. Currently titled Project LLL, the South Korean developer is touting it as an open-world third-person shooter set to release in 2024.
That release date is still a way out, but the developer has treated us to almost 10 minutes of gameplay footage in the meantime. It’s an awful lot of runnin’ and gunnin’ swaddled in an industrial sci-fi blanket—or in the protagonist’s case, a cloak. The first few minutes are very stealth-heavy as the main character saunters around dimly-lit concrete halls, tossing out a drone that scans the desolate building for enemies. They’re eventually spotted and the cloak disintegrates, transitioning into traditional run-and-cover shooting.
It’s all a little samey for the majority of its nine-minute run, though there are a couple of highlights. At one point the protagonist connects with a column-like statue, draining its light before it transforms into what appears to be a human hanging from the ceiling, a bomb strapped to its chest. The video’s dialogue is in Korean which makes it tough to get a full grasp on what’s happening, but our protag manages to leap out of the building and narrowly avoid the explosion. The end of the video shows off some mecha piloting, slowly plonking around grunts while firing missiles at vehicles.
(Image credit: NCsoft)
The most intriguing part comes right at the end. After being ejected from the mecha by another powerful hunk of metal, all focus turns to gunning it down. It’s successful and the mecha slumps before transforming into a terrifying cluster of spinning arms. The final few seconds have a wildly different vibe to the eightish minutes that precede it but are by far the most interesting.
In an interview with Gematsu, project lead Seeder Jaehyun Bae said that NCSoft wanted to “create a new genre that is completely different from the recently popular looter shooter or battle royale,” drawing inspiration from media like Dune, Blade Runner, and Total Recall for its themes. Strangely for an MMO, Project LLL will apparently have a predefined cast, each with their own name, background and motivations.
It’s an interesting enough concept, though I wonder if this is a project that will ever see the light of day. The gameplay demo is polished, albeit a little stuttery, but I feel like we’ve seen plenty of games announced this way that vanish into the aether soon thereafter.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Blade-Soul-developer-has-a-new-MMO-coming-out.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-14 12:07:252022-11-14 12:07:25Blade & Soul developer has a new MMO coming out in 2024
Here you’ll find a wide range of hints, tips, and tricks for your daily Wordle game, a helpful clue to point you in the direction of today’s answer, and the word needed to solve the November 14 (513) puzzle just below that in bolded capital letters.
Today’s Wordle was gracious enough to give me a nice and easy start to the week—the opener gave me a few top-quality hints, the second guess confirmed them and gave me a few more, and that meant the third go was a simple case of inputting the answer.
Wordle hint
A Wordle hint for Monday, November 14
I’m sure you’ll get this one quickly. The answer today is Canada’s national tree, famous for its sweet and syrupy sap.
Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day
If there’s one thing better than playing Wordle, it’s playing Wordle well, which is why I’m going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success:
A good opener contains a balanced mix of unique vowels and consonants.
A tactical second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
The solution may contain repeat letters.
There’s no time pressure beyond making sure it’s done by midnight. So there’s no reason to not treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you’re coming up blank.
Today’s Wordle answer
(Image credit: Josh Wardle)
What is the Wordle 513 answer?
Mondays should be winners. The answer to the November 14 (513) Wordle is MAPLE.
Previous answers
Wordle archive: Which words have been used
The more past Wordle answers you can cram into your memory banks, the better your chances of guessing today’s Wordle answer without accidentally picking a solution that’s already been used. Past Wordle answers can also give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle solving fresh.
Here are some recent Wordle solutions:
November 13: INANE
November 12: VALET
November 11: MEDAL
November 10: UNITE
November 9: RAINY
November 8: SPELL
November 7: BEGIN
November 6: STALE
November 5: DREAM
November 4: PHOTO
Learn more about Wordle
Every day Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes, and it’s up to you to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them.
You’ll want to start with a strong word (opens in new tab) like ALERT—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters. Hit Enter and the boxes will show you which letters you’ve got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn’t in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you’ve got the right letter in the right spot.
You’ll want your second go to compliment the first, using another “good” word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn’t present in today’s answer.
After that it’s just a case of using what you’ve learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there’s an E). Don’t forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).
If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips (opens in new tab), and if you’d like to find out which words have already been used you’ll find those below.
Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle (opens in new tab), as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle (opens in new tab), refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn’t long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures (opens in new tab). Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1668406867_Todays-Wordle-answer-and-hint-for-Monday-November-14.jpg6071200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-14 06:05:462022-11-14 06:05:46Today’s Wordle answer and hint for Monday, November 14
Microsoft is celebrating the release of the Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Edition, and with it the game is getting a huge update. Not only is there tonnes of new and improved content which includes new vehicles like a true-to-life Airbus A310 liner, but there’s also some interesting fixes in the list. Sure, we could get excited about the inclusion of the Spruce Goose or the 24 new classic missions, but what we’re really looking for is an even smoother flight sim experience.
Yes, using thermal pressure to ride around in gliders in the new 40th edition of Microsoft Flight simulator does sound fun, but did you know you can do it better in DX12 now? A new memory defragmentation system has been implemented, which should limit your maxed out VRAM. This should help with potential crashes from overloaded VRAM issues. The graphical artefacts on the cockpit screens that could sometimes occur in DX12 have also been fixed. A smoother ride from inside to out.
But it doesn’t stop there, this plane full of upgrades has barely even taken off. While you’re checking out those 4 new airports, you can get a look at the newly integrated AMD FSR2 for improved upscaling technology on supported machines. For those on NVIDIA hardware, DLSS3 is now supported. You should get a decent FPS boost with these implementations.
The hardware support keeps on going, with plenty of love for peripherals. Turtlebeach’s VelocityOne FlightStick, Honeycomb Alpha Flight Controls, and the Thrustmaster TCA Sidestick X have all been given the green tick on both PC and Xbox as officially supported devices. Honeycomb Charlie pedals will also officially work with PC. The Pro Flight Trainer Puma X and Thrustmaster MFD Cougar were also included in the list of supported controls.
Peripherals can be a huge part of the flight simulator experience, allowing people to really customise the feel of their experience. Some folks go for the super official options like the Thrustmaster TCA Yoke Pack Boeing edition (opens in new tab), while others prefer a more general experience. More compatible products means we might see a bit more competition in our best PC joysticks list (opens in new tab).
VR is one of the next big steps for immersive flight sims, and has also seen a few tweaks. Most of them seem like UI improvements like fixes to toolbars and other open panels and windows. It also fixed some rendering issues on canted displays used in wide angled VR. Flight Simming in VR can be pretty daunting to set up, but thankfully the Flight Simulator Association has put together a handy video (opens in new tab) for those looking to get into the fun.
Whether you’re into the new hardware tweaks, or the content it looks like there’s plenty to explore in the new 40th edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator. You can get a look at the full list of updates on the official Flight Simulator release notes webpage (opens in new tab).
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1668410553_Microsoft-Flight-Simulators-40th-Anniversary-Edition-is-full-of-hardware.png6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-14 05:26:352022-11-15 03:24:47Microsoft Flight Simulator’s 40th Anniversary Edition is full of hardware improvements
The Razer Naga line of gaming mice constantly proves to be our absolute favourite series of MMO mice. It consistently tops the charts for its category in our list of best gaming mice (opens in new tab), offering a great customisable option for those who love having far too many buttons at their fingertips. Razer has just announced the latest in the Naga line-up with the Razer Naga V2 Pro and Razer Naga V2 Hyperspeed, and we are ready to be impressed once again.
The Razer Naga V2 Pro (opens in new tab) is the first of these upcoming MMO champions. It’s looking to be incredibly customisable with three interchangeable side panels offering different button combinations. This means you can swap out the side panel that features all those extra buttons, turning it into a simpler mouse that’s friendlier for games like FPS. These come in three options, the MMO option featuring 12 buttons, while the other two offer 6 and 2 buttons respectively.
The scroll wheel can also toggle through six different modes, including one which you can fully customise in the Razer software. This, combined with the standard buttons gives the Naga V2 Pro up to 19 programmable buttons in total and 22 controls, which will hopefully be enough for all your hotkey configurations.
Of course, the Razer Naga V2 Pro also boasts the latest features from the company including a Focus Pro 30k optical sensor, and mechanical mouse switches rated for 60 million clicks. It can connect via the HyperSpeed 2.4GHz or Bluetooth connections and should offer a battery life of up to 400 hours with a single AA battery. The weight of the Naga Pro is sneakily listed without the battery inside, and comes in at 95g, so we could be looking at another fairly heavy mouse like the Naga Pro Wireless gaming mouse. (opens in new tab)
Being a high end mouse, the Razer Naga V2 Pro has a pretty intense price tag to match all those buttons. In the United States, it’s going for $179.99 USD, and will be available in Australia and New Zealand soon for $319.00 AUD or $369.00 NZD.
So it makes a tonne of sense that Razer is also offering the cheaper Razer Naga V2 Hyperspeed (opens in new tab). This mouse cuts back on a lot of the customisation options and saves a lot of money doing so. Coming in at $99.99 USD, $179.00 AUD, or $209.00 NZD, you won’t get those interchangeable side panels, but you will get what is likely a very solid MMO mouse with a lot of the same features. If you know you’re going to be rocking that 12 button panel most of the time, it could be worth saving the cash and going for the Hyperspeed option.
Either way, if they live up to the Naga series name, both the Pro and Hyperspeed are set to be great options for MMO fans, so long as you don’t mind your mouse on the heavier side.
Tactics Ogre Reborn, a remastered version of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, itself a remake of a strategy-RPG classic, assigns a default party name based on your character’s date of birth. If your date of birth is between May 2 and May 25, that default name is Flamescale. As Twitter user Choojermelon points out (opens in new tab), even though it’s one of the names the game picks for you, trying to accept it results in the error message, “Text contains banned words. Please change your entry.”
Choojermelon suggested it could be because Flamescale contains the word “mescal”, an abbreviation of “mescaline”, as in the hallucinogenic drug. Others theorized it might be thanks to containing “lame” instead, but trying it myself “lame” on its own is fine while “mescal” is not. Also banned: cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, and heroin, though not marijuana.
It wouldn’t be the first time a profanity filter has been tripped up by an innocuous word because another word on a ban list was inside it. The Dark Souls 2 profanity filter was infamous for preventing players from having the word “knight” in their name because it filtered out anything containing the letters “nig”. Dark Souls 2’s banned word list (opens in new tab) has been uploaded, so you can read it and be baffled by the inclusion of such innocent strings of letters as “but” (surely just banning “butt” would do the job?) alongside longer words of bizarre specificity like “cockfucklutated”.
What makes the harshness of Tactics Ogre Reborn’s filter more notable is that it’s an entirely singleplayer game. We’re used to online games having chat filters, and resulting oddities like Genshin Impact censoring the words “Taiwan”, “Hong Kong”, “Putin”, “Hitler”, and “words”, but seeing a strict filter in a singleplayer game is more surprising. Is it a remnant of a canceled multiplayer mode, or was it included for the sake of restricting streamers and pranksters who might upload a screenshot of a rude word on social media?
It’s a long way from Fallout 4, which not only let you enter “Fuck”, “Fucker”, or “Fuckface” as your character’s name but rewarded you by having robot butler Codsworth greet you with lines recorded specifically for them. I tried calling my party “Fuckface” in Tactics Ogre Reborn, but it wasn’t having a bar of it. “Cockfucklutated” was right out.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-profanity-filter-in-Tactics-Ogre-Reborn-is-so-strict.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-14 04:30:062022-11-14 04:30:06The profanity filter in Tactics Ogre Reborn is so strict you can’t use one of the default names
Skyrim Extended Cut is an in-progress mod that aims to remix Skyrim’s main questline, with promised inclusions (opens in new tab) like “expanded third act, Dragonborn DLC main quest integrated with Skyrim main quest, more characterization for Alduin & Miraak, more Thalmor involvement, Blades faction overhaul, more stuff to do in Blackreach, mostly new core cast, focus on player agency, guild and side quest completion impact on main quest”, and so on. It’s intended to make the storyline at the actual center of Skyrim worth engaging with, the whole dragons-and-shouting thing so many players ignore in favor of sidequests.
While work on the Extended Cut continues, a separate sub-team released an example of the kind of thing we can expect from it—only instead of the main quest, they’ve focused on one of the Creation Club add-ons bundled with Skyrim Anniversary Edition, Saints & Seducers. The biggest Creation in terms of stuff, it added quests, creatures, weapons, armor, and a tileset all referencing much-loved Oblivion expansion The Shivering Isles.
Like most of the Creation Club additions, Saints & Seducers involved NPCs who suddenly became shy, communicating via letters and books so new dialogue didn’t need to be recorded. To begin the quest you had to track down one of the khajiit merchants travelling back and forth between Whiterun and Markarth, who then handed you a piece of paper like he was sneaking you a note in class. After enough repeated scenes like that, the Anniversary Edition stopped feeling like it was worth breaking half my mods to install.
The Extended Cut version of Saints & Seducers (opens in new tab) has a radically different questline, beginning dramatically with an earthquake in the city of Solitude. You investigate the sewers where the quake originated, finding a portal to to part of the Shivering Isles called The Asylum and meeting the first of several fully voiced NPCs.
Here’s where I had my doubts about the Extended Cut project. While a handful of mods like The Forgotten City have shipped with high-quality voice acting, plenty of others struggle with uneven recording quality, characters who sound jarringly modern, and a general out-of-place-ness that prevents them from feeling like they belong in Skyrim.
(Image credit: ECSS Dev Group)
(Almost) Everything Elder Scrolls
Thankfully, that’s one of the places where Saints & Seducers Extended Cut is at its best, with multiple talkative characters who sound like they belong. Even the voice actor playing the madgod Sheogorath (well, a shopkeeper whose name is an anagram of Lord Sheogorath) nails the character’s abrupt pitch shifts and drift between Scottish and Irish accents. The new worldspace is impressively accurate too, resembling a slice of The Shivering Isles as it looked back in 2007, all giant fungus and glowing puffballs.
It really shows what a mature mod scene is capable of. As well as incorporating Creation Club add-ons (when installing the mod there are options to shift other Creations like the magic weapon Shadowrend to The Asylum, where it becomes part of a sidequest), Saints & Seducers Extended builds on existing mods. Returning Shivering Isles monsters, including grummites (opens in new tab) and flesh atronachs (opens in new tab), come from the Mihail Monsters and Animals mods, while a bust of Sheogorath comes from a mod that’s part of a series adding Daedric Shrines (opens in new tab) to Skyrim, and several other assets are borrowed with permission from existing work.
(Image credit: ECSS Dev Group)
That’s given me more confidence in what the full Extended Cut will be able to achieve. Though an ambitious project, its subject is the heart of Skyrim, part of the game that’s already been resculpted in more piecemeal ways by plenty of other mods. Where Saints & Seducers Extended finds room for an appropriately quirky existing mod called Merlin the Corgi (opens in new tab) (a magical dog follower who can be recruited if you have both mods installed), the full Skyrim Extended Cut will have years’ worth of overlapping mods to borrow from and collaborate with. The trailer (opens in new tab) already sneaks in a cameo for popular mod follower Lucien (opens in new tab), and apparently care is being taken not to contradict the world-expanding of Beyond Skyrim (opens in new tab).
I had several fun hours playing this sequel to the best expansion Bethesda’s ever made, and it convinced me to try the full Skyrim Extended Cut whenever it’s finally finished. It sounds ideal for the kind of vanilla-plus playthrough where, rather than completely changing Skyrim so it looks like anime and plays like Dark Souls or whatever, you refine the stuff that’s already there to make it more to your taste.
(Image credit: ECSS Dev Group)
One downside to Saints & Seducers Extended is that it recommends starting a new game before you try it for the sake of stability. (Even doing that, I had to re-load a save to fight the final boss a second time when the NPC I needed to talk to afterward fell through the floor.) It also requires a player-character who is at least level 20 and has completed the Mind of Madness sidequest in Solitude.
I recommend using an alternate start mod like Skyrim Unbound Reborn (opens in new tab) or Live Another Life (opens in new tab) to skip the tutorial and set Solitude as your starting location, then use Skyrim’s console commands to level up. You can either improve your skills with player.advlevel [skill] [#], where skill is the name of the skill (although the console seems to be based on an early build so archery is called marksman and speech is speechcraft), and # is the amount of experience you want to add to it. For example, player.advlevel speech 9999 should give you enough speechcraft to get you through Mind of Madness. If you want to fine tune, the console command incpcs [skill] will push whichever skill you choose up one level at a time.
Do you have fond memories of Erathia, the setting of several games in the classic late 1990s, early 2000s Might and Magic games, including famous spinoffs Heroes of Might and Magic. Specifically, did you enjoy 1999’s Heroes of Might and Magic 3 most of all?
If so, I have great and extremely specific news: The nice people at Archon Studios are making a licensed HOMM3 board game, complete with miniatures, monsters, and an approximation of the tactical battles that made the Heroes of Might and Magic games so popular.
Is this a thing now? Are we doing board games based not just on a franchise in spirit—like the Company of Heroes (opens in new tab) or Crusader Kings (opens in new tab) board games—but on specific throwback fan-favorite games in storied franchises? What’s next, System Shock 2? Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos? Mechwarrior 4? Fallout: New Vegas?
My amusement aside, Archon Studio’s game seems pretty dang thorough. The HOMM3 experience was very specific, and not so complex that it can’t be recreated spiritually on the tabletop. Each player will take up the mantle of a hero, explore a 4X-style hex map, build up their own tableau of a town, and gather magic and an army to take the fight to the other factions.
It’s full of the charming little art pieces that make Heroes so entertaining, little sprites and icons denoting various powers. The rainbow, dice, clover, and horseshoe of the luck spell. The sneering grimace of the stoneskin’d mage. The quaint fantasy cheese of the 90s is all over this and I’m low-key enjoying it. Sometimes a cool angel dude or a knight are just that. Sometimes the vampires are the bad guys.
And sometimes, just sometimes, Sandro the Necromancer’s hood still doesn’t fit, 23 years later. You can find the HOMM3 board game on its website (opens in new tab), with a Kickstarter to launch on November 15th, 2022. Archon Studios has previously released a few board games, including the Wolfenstein adaptation, and a series of tabletop terrain sets.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Heroes-of-Might-and-Magic-3-specifically-has-a-board.png575760Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-14 01:33:422022-11-14 01:33:42Heroes of Might and Magic 3, specifically, has a board game adaptation on the way
Looking to brush up on Skyrim console commands to streamline your adventures in the land of the Nords? You’ve memorized Bleak Falls Barrow so well you dream about it. But have you turned yourself into a giant to loom above the scurrying townsfolk of Whiterun? Have you flown the friendly skies from Riften to Winterhold just to catch a newly created aurora? Have you sat atop a freshly-spawned pile of hundreds of wheels of cheese, or spread holiday cheer as Skyrim’s very own Santa Claus?
Skyrim console commands can do all that. And more traditionally useful things, like making yourself unkillable, maxing out a tedious skill, or unlocking a troublesome door when you’re fresh out of lockpicks. All good thieves bend the rules now and then, after all.
To enable the console, just hit the tilde (~) key and enter one of the appropriate codes, which are listed below. You can turn on more than one in a row, so you can become invincible, fly, and teleport all at the same time.
Be warned, some of these console commands may cause glitches, problems, or crashes, so it’s definitely worth saving your game first. You don’t want to make some change and get stuck with it.
Many of these console commands require specifying an NPC or item or place with a reference number. If you’re specifying an item or NPC in front of you, click on them while you’ve brought up the console to get their code immediately. Otherwise, here’s a quick cheat sheet of reference pages where you can find those codes. Remember, CTRL+F is your friend!
Most useful Skyrim console commands
While we’ve listed the full range of Skyrim’s console commands further below, these commands are probably the ones you’re looking for if you’re in need of some quick Skyrim cheat codes.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
tgm
Enables God Mode, making you invulnerable and giving you infinite stamina and magicka.
tcl
Toggles collision, putting you in a no-clip state where you can fly around and move through the environment.
unlock
Unlocks selected door or chest.
tcai
Toggles NPC combat AI, making all NPCs passive.
tdetect
Toggles the ability for NPCs to witness your crimes. They’ll still get upset if you fail to pickpocket them.
player.additem [Item ID] [#]
Adds item to player inventory. For example: “player.additem 0000000f 1000” adds 1000 gold.
player.modav carryweight [#]
Sets your maximum carry weight to specified amount.
player.advskill [skill] [#]
Level up skill by adding skill experience. Replace [skill] with the skill you want to advance, and [#] with the amount of experience you want to add. You’ll need numbers in the thousands to actually make the score go up. Skills are specified via their in-game names, apart from Archery, which is “Marksman,” and Speech, which is “Speechcraft.”
incpcs [skill]
Level up skill to the next level. Not as fast as using player.advskill and adding 9999 experience at a time, but more fine-grained.
player.setcrimegold [#]
Sets your current bounty level. Set to 0 to clear your bounty.
player.placeatme [Item/NPC ID] [#]
Spawns desired number of specified NPC or item at your location.
Toggled Skyrim console commands
Toggle commands for Skyrim turn various game features off or on. You can turn off the UI for taking great screenshots or turn off detection from NPCs to make yourself the perfect thief.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Code
Effects
tgm
Good ol’ God Mode—enables invulnerability to all damage
tcl
Enables noclip, which disables collision with the environment so you can move through anything.
tm
Toggles all in-game menus; good for screenshots. Note that this also hides the console commands menu, meaning you’ll have to type it again without being able to see the console.
tmm [0/1]
Followed by 0 or 1 turns all map markers on or off.
tfc [1]
Toggle flycam, detaching the camera from the player character. Great for screenshots. Follow it with a 1 to pause.
tai
Toggles AI on and off, which means NPCs won’t interact with you, or do anything at all.
tcai
Turns combat AI on or off, turning dragons into placid beasts who act like you aren’t there.
tdetect
Disables NPC ability to detect your crimes by sight. They’ll still catch you pickpocketing, though.
tfow
Turns off the fog of war on your local map, filling it in completely.
Skyrim player console commands
Skyrim player cheats can set different values for your Dragonborn. You can change your level, your face, your carry weight, and a bunch of other things. For commands that require an item or NPC ID, check our linked lists above.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Code
Effects
psb
Adds every shout and spell to your spellbook (including developer and placeholder spells, adding a lot of clutter).
player.advlevel
Advance one level without gaining a perk.
showracemenu
Bring up the character creation menu to adjust the way your character looks. If you alter your race this will reset your level and skills, but any other change is safe.
AdvSkill [skill] [#]
Adds skill experience. “skill” is the skill you want to advance, and # is the amount you want to add. Skills are input via their in-game names without spaces, apart from Archery which is “Marksman”, and Speech, which is known as “Speechcraft”.
player.additem [Item ID] [#]
Adds a specified item to your inventory.
player.additem f [#]
Adds gold to your inventory. Replace # with desired amount.
player.additem 0000000a [#]
Adds lockpicks to inventory. Replace # with desired amount.
addshout [Shout ID]
Adds specified shout to player’s ability list.
player.setcrimegold [#]
Adjust player’s bounty level. Set to 0 to remove bounty entirely.
player.setlevel [#]
Up or down your player level as you see fit.
player.setav speedmult [#]
Set player speed multiplier. Set this number to anything more than 100 to speed up movement.
player.modav carryweight [#]
Sets your maximum carry weight to desired amount.
player.setav health [#]
Sets your max health level.
sexchange
Change your character’s gender.
player.placeatme [Item/NPC ID] [#]
Use this to spawn NPCs and monsters at your location. Just replace actor/object ID with a Base ID (not a Ref ID). Note that this command spawns new creatures, rather than moving old ones, so if you use it on an NPC, you’ll clone them.
player.moveto [NPC Ref ID]
Use this to move yourself next to an NPC. Use the Ref ID (not the Base ID), the opposite of placeatme.
setrelationshiprank [ID] [#]
Select two NPCs and set the relationship between them, the values range from 4 (lover) to -4 (archnemesis).
player.setscale [#]
Changes the size of the player or NPC. You start out at level one, which is normal sized, while zero is small. It goes all the way up to an absurdly huge ten.
player.drop [Item ID] [#]
Forces the player to drop items, even usually undroppable quest items. Try just ‘drop’ to drop absolutely everything you’re carrying.
coc [Cell ID]
Teleports you to any specified cell in the world.
Targeted Skyrim console commands
Targeted Skyrim commands will have an effect on an NPC or item that you select. They’re perfect for unlocking chests, instakilling enemies, and bringing them back to life again.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Code
Effects
unlock
Unlocks selected door or chest.
lock [#]
Locks selected door or chest (or NPC?), with a difficulty from 1-100.
kill
Instantly kills selected NPC. Important NPCs will be knocked unconscious.
resurrect
Resurrect targeted corpse. Follow the command with a 1 to resurrect them with all items intact.
removeallitems
Target a character and type this and you’ll get all their items—including their clothes and equipment.
addtofaction [Faction ID] [#]
Click on an NPC and use this command to add them to a faction. It’s not just about Stormcloaks and Imperials though. Using 0005C84D will add a character to the follower faction, giving them the necessary dialogue to join you, while 00019809 will add them to the ‘potential spouse’ faction, allowing you to marry them. Doesn’t work on NPCs with unique voices.
disable
Makes targeted NPC invisible, disables their collisions, and prevents AI from interacting with them.
enable
Undoes the effects of the Disable command. Disabling and then Enabling your follower will reset them to your current level, which is a handy way of making sure they stay useful in combat.
setessential [NPC ID] [0/1]
Sets an NPCs essential status. “0” means they’ll die when their HP hits 0. “1” means they’ll go unconscious. Useful for keeping cherished NPCs alive, but be careful with making important NPCs killable.
setownership [Item ID]
This command sets you as the owner of the targeted item, letting you pick it up without stealing.
unequipitem [Item ID]
Forces an NPC to unequip specified item.
dispelallspells
Dispels all spell effects on the target NPC.
MarkForDelete
Permanently removes selected item when current area is reloaded.
Quest-related Skyrim console commands
Skyrim quest commands can help you get around bugged issues in quests by automatically getting yourself to the next quest state or just let you cheat by moving directly to your next objective.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Code
Effects
caqs
Automatically complete all the stages of every quest. Perfect if you hate playing games.
movetoqt [Quest ID]
Teleports you directly to your quest target.
setstage [Quest ID] [Stage #]
This allows you to move the quests you’re playing back to a prior stage or forward to a new one. Useful if you’ve somehow broken it by murdering the wrong NPC. UESP.net has a useful list of quests, along with IDs and stages.
Other Skyrim console commands
These are all of the odds and ends of Skyrim console commands. Do make sure you try out that secret developer room with all the toys.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Code
Effects
csb
Clears the annoying drops of blood that linger on the screen after fights.
help
Lists every single console command.
coc qasmoke
Teleports you to Bethesda’s debug room with every in-game item. It might take a while to load—there are thousands of items here. Type “coc Riverwood” (or any other location) to return to the game.
qqq
Quit the game without having to go through any of those pesky menus.
fov [#]
Sets your field of view. The maximum is 180.
set timescale to [#]
This defaults at 20. Drop it to 1 for real-time Skyrim, up it to experience crazy timelapse-style Skyrim.
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