Hogwarts Legacy director says there are ‘no current plans for DLC’



Hogwarts Legacy (opens in new tab) is a huge hit, but fans probably shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for DLC to arrive. Game director Alan Tew told IGN that developer Avalanche Software doesn’t have plans for it right now.

“We’ve been really heads down bringing [Hogwarts Legacy] to life, so at the moment there are no current plans for DLC,” Tew said over the weekend at IGN Fan Fest.



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Huge Elden Ring mod brings Hogwarts Legacy broom flight and spells to the Lands Between



By the end of my 50-hour Hogwarts Legacy (opens in new tab) playthrough, I’d had my fill of solving Merlin Trials (opens in new tab) and exploding poachers, but one thing I never got tired of was hopping onto my broom and going for a ride. It’s rare to get a sandbox game that lets us so quickly carve off in any direction with no obstacles. It’s an inspiring dose of freedom, which is probably why a dedicated Elden Ring modding team has been quick to bring some of Hogwarts Legacy’s magic to the Lands Between.

The modding team, known as Garden of Eyes, released its Hogwarts Legacy-themed mod pack last week for Patreon (opens in new tab) supporters (as spotted by Kotaku (opens in new tab)). The current iteration of the mod is packing seven spells straight out of the game (including a few unforgivable curses), a dopey-looking Harry Potter skin, an Elder Wand weapon, and of course, flying broomsticks.



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Destiny 2 cheat maker owes Bungie $4.4M after judge rules it violated the DMCA

Bungie has won a $4.4 million arbitration award against AimJunkies after a judge found that the cheat maker violated the DMCA by bypassing Destiny 2’s protections and reverse-engineering the game in order to develop cheats which it then sold to players.

Bungie unleashed the lawyers against multiple Destiny 2 cheat makers beginning in 2020, including PerfectAim (opens in new tab), GatorCheats (opens in new tab), and Ring-1 (opens in new tab). But it ran into a snag against AimJunkies in May 2022 when a judge dismissed the copyright infringement portion (opens in new tab) of Bungie’s claim: AimJunkies argued that its software was an original creation and so does not constitute an “unauthorized copy,” and the judge in the matter ruled that Bungie had failed to demonstrate otherwise.

The judge in the case gave Bungie leave to re-file the complaint with additional evidence to bolster its claim, however, and also determined that other, separate claims, including trademark infringement and DMCA violations, were sufficient to proceed. The bulk of those claims—everything excluding the copyright, trademark, and “false designation of origin” allegations—were referred to arbitration, as agreed by both AimJunkies and Bungie.

Following a hearing in December 2022, the arbitration process has now concluded with a big win for Bungie. In the ruling (opens in new tab) (via TorrentFreak (opens in new tab)), judge Ronald E. Cox found in favor of Bungie on all the stated claims: That AimJunkies violated the DMCA by making its cheat software and then selling it to the public, breached its contract with Bungie by violating the terms of service, committed “tortious interference” by messing with Bungie’s business, violated the state of Washington’s Consumer Protection Action, and committed “spoliation” by lying in its response to Bungie’s initial cease-and-desist order and destroying financial records and other relevant documents.

Despite AimJunkies’ aggressive and partially successful defense against Bungie’s initial lawsuit, it doesn’t seem to have put up much of a fight in the arbitration process. David Shaefer, the part owner and “managing member” of AimJunkies parent company Phoenix Digital Group, testified during the hearing but “was not a credible witness,” the judge found. AimJunkies also “failed to present any evidence to the contrary” against the DMCA violation claims, and to respond to a request for a briefing on the amount of the awards involved—in other words, to tell the judge what it thinks a fair penalty would be, which might mitigate the damage somewhat.

Here’s what that damage adds up to:

  • DMCA circumvention violations: $2,500 x 102 violations = $255,000
  • DMCA anti-trafficking violations: $2,500 x 1,361 violations = $3,402,500
  • DMCA violations total penalty: $3,657,500

That’s not the end of it. The judge also awarded Bungie $598,641 in attorney’s fees, $101,800 for expert witness fees, and $38,281 in “other expenses,” leading to a grand total of $4,396,222.

The same day the arbitration ruling was issued, Bungie submitted it to the court presiding over the still-ongoing copyright infringement case, with a request that the court use the ruling to impose a permanent injunction (opens in new tab) against AimJunkies, and to apply the financial judgment in its favor. Assuming the court does (and it apparently has no standing to refuse), that will effectively end the case.

The day after winning the arbitration case against AimJunkies, Bungie also filed for a default judgment of $6.7 million (opens in new tab) against another cheat maker called LaviCheats. Bungie’s case against LaviCheats actually began in 2021, but LaviCheats has refused to acknowledge or respond to the complaints. LaviCheats did remove Destiny 2 cheats from its website after Bungie emailed the company and posted a message about the legal action to its forums, but Bungie believes that LaviCheats operator Kunal Bansal simply moved the business to a different site called Cobracheats.

I’ve reached out to Bungie and AimJunkies for comment on the arbitration ruling, and will update if I receive a reply.


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This implant lets those with severe paralysis send texts and use the internet with just their minds



The brain-computer interface isn’t a new concept: the idea’s been floating around since early ’70s sci-fi, anticipating a future where we can control computers and machines with just a thought. (opens in new tab) However, one company’s approach to BCIs doesn’t involve the expected intensive brain surgery and is meant to allow people today with disabilities to text message or use social media to communicate with friends and family. 

The Synchron Switch is inserted through blood vessels and works its way to the vein next to your brain’s motor cortex; the stent is outfitted with tiny sensors that collect ‘raw brain data,’ which connect to an antenna implanted under the skin of the chest.



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Atomic Heart has launched without ray tracing despite featuring in multiple Nvidia tech demos

Whatever your take on it, there’s no denying Atomic Heart is a very pretty game (opens in new tab). So pretty, in fact, that it’s been the subject of several Nvidia showcases demonstrating the latest and greatest in the GPU-maker’s graphics tech, including an “RTX On” demo (opens in new tab) as recently as a month ago. But now Atomic Heart is finally here, and it seems RTX is not, in fact, on.

As spotted by RPS (opens in new tab), it seems that Atomic Heart developer Mundfish has yanked out ray tracing support from the game in the last stretch of its development. That’s a bit of a surprise, given all the aforementioned Nvidia demos and that Mundfish doesn’t seem to have ever announced that Atomic Heart’s rays wouldn’t be traced in the run-up to its release. But no matter how deep you go into the graphics options, you won’t be able to turn on ray tracing mode in the game’s current build.

Mundfish seems to be suggesting this is a temporary situation. When PC Gamer reached out to the studio, it told us that “Ray tracing won’t be available at release,” but that it would “revisit the needs of [its] gamers” in the post-launch period. Mundfish also told RPS that it would be “looking into implementing [ray tracing] post-launch”.

That’d all be fine and dandy—it’s not as though Atomic Heart is an eyesore with bog-standard rasterized lighting—but it is a bit curious that the feature’s absence wasn’t publicised in advance of the game’s release. After all, Mundfish did let everyone know that the console versions of the game don’t support the feature (opens in new tab). Atomic Heart has been marketed with a heavy focus on its lovingly-rendered Soviet aesthetics, with a particular focus on how well it plays with Nvidia tech like DLSS and, well, ray tracing.

If the game’s subreddit is anything to go by, there are some players who feel hoodwinked by the lack of ray tracing support. “Hasn’t the game director had opportunities during interviews to mention that RT won’t be day 1 on PC,” asks user DavidUpInHere (opens in new tab), lamenting the lack of lighting tech, while another user named Exa2552 (opens in new tab) asked “Wtf happened?” after Mundfish “[focused] marketing around raytracing for years”. At least one user just never got the memo, and plaintively asked how to “fix” the lack of ray tracing (opens in new tab) options on their 40-series Nvidia graphics card.

Our own Atomic Heart will be up soon, and probably before Mundfish can issue a ray tracing update. Before then, though, you can get a taste of it from our preview of the game (opens in new tab) last month, and if you’re interested in the non-tech-related controversies surrounding the game and its Russian developer, we’ve got a lengthy breakdown of the reasons why people are arguing about Atomic Heart (opens in new tab).


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Blood Bowl 3 is a hot mess, and not just because of its game-breaking bugs

I was planning to have a review of Blood Bowl 3 (opens in new tab) ready for you by now, but that’s proved impossible. In part because of a brief review period that included significant server outages and no less than three resets of my save, but also because the game is too fundamentally broken to make meaningful progress. With its release date coming up fast on Thursday, I’ve got serious concerns about the state of the game at launch.

For those unfamiliar, the Blood Bowl series is essentially American football with the fantasy creatures of the Warhammer universe—orcs and goblins in helmets and shoulder pads tackling elves and halflings, that sort of thing. It’s a direct adaptation of the tabletop game by Games Workshop (opens in new tab), a tense and exciting turn-based duel of violence, dirty moves and, occasionally, ball control. Blood Bowl 3 translates the latest edition to digital form for the first time. 

Fans have been waiting a long time for this. Announced in 2020, it was originally planned for release in early 2021—but despite a two-year delay, it’s still sorely unfinished. The review build feels like something just about ready for Early Access, not a 1.0 release. 

Every match is plagued with bugs. Some are merely irritating—such as players gliding around the field frozen in a pose or sprinting back and forth between the same two squares instead of moving, or even appearing in a different space from the one they’re actually in. Others mess with the flow of play, such as the ball indicator vanishing so you have to search around to see who has possession, or the outcome of an action being displayed before the animation for it has actually played out. 

But there are much more serious issues. For example, when the game hits what I call ‘decision points’—moments when an action triggers a choice for you or your opponent, such as whether to use a dice re-roll or a special ability—it can take minutes to resolve while you sit there staring at a frozen pitch. And that’s if you’re lucky. In about a third of the matches I’ve played, particularly in singleplayer where the AI has to make choices, one of these moments has completely failed to resolve at all. That leaves the match locked up with no way to break out of it.

The turn timer is another oddity—in singleplayer it counts down but never does anything, and in multiplayer it seems to stop working every other turn. (Image credit: Cyanide Studio)

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To make matters worse, even in singleplayer there’s no way to save and quit out of these often 40 minute+ matches—if you leave, you’re conceding the match, and that’s it. That’s infuriating enough in a one-off friendly, but it’s ruinous in the competition sets that make up the campaign mode. One bugged match can mess up your overall results and, thanks to the upgrade system that requires gold and XP earned in matches, put you at a disadvantage for the whole competition. Needless to say, this makes progressing through the campaign an exercise in frustration. 

I am admittedly playing a pre-release build, but it received several updates and server resets during the period to no noticeable improvement, and it seems to me like there are more rough edges than a day-one patch can realistically smooth over. But the real problem is, even if all the bugs are quickly fixed, there are more fundamental problems at play.

The game defaults to being always online, even for singleplayer, and you have to create an account on their server to play. If you want to go offline you can, but everything is totally separate—none of your progress or teams carry over between the two. That’s awkward enough even without the frequent account problems and server instability I’ve run into so far.

Some of the animations are fun, but quickly get repetitive. (Image credit: Cyanide Studio)

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Once you do manage to log in, you’re confronted with a messy, awkward UI that hides core features in unexpected places and forces you to keep moving between different areas just to perform basic functions like managing your team. Similar issues carry over into the matches themselves—readability is poor, and key information is lost in random menus. It’s constantly telling you about events without making their results clear or showing you where to find out more. Oh, one of the teams got a bonus—which one, and how is it applied? It just started raining—what does that mean? Er, why have giant tentacles emerged around the arena, and what do they do? The info can be hunted down, but never easily.

The teams themselves have their own presentation issues. By default, all players of the same type look identical—so, for example, your six elf linemen are all exactly the same, down to their faces and hairstyles. There are no customisation options at all, other than changing your whole team’s uniform colours and emblem. For a game based on a tabletop game that’s so much about making your models your own, it’s disappointing, but it gets actively insidious when you discover the shop. 

In this menu, what should be your basic customisation options are sold as individual microtransactions—here a new headpiece, there an individual left glove, and so on. All of them are only applicable to one player type. The review build suspiciously does not reveal what any of these items cost, and it hasn’t allowed me to try out buying any of them—but even if they’re inexpensive, it’s a galling approach. Similarly concerning is the absence of many iconic teams from the pretty small roster, surely to be sold as DLC down the line.

Yes, that’s 7 pages of individually purchased left hand gloves in the shop. (Image credit: Cyanide Studio)

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When it’s working, the core game is great—but what’s great about it is the rules written by Games Workshop for the tabletop. Blood Bowl shows its age a little even in the new updated edition, but it’s still a clever tactical puzzle that wonderfully emulates the drama of sports in a distinctly Warhammer package. Cyanide’s job wasn’t to tweak any of that core experience, but to translate it faithfully to digital form and build all the necessary functions around it—and based on what I’m playing right now, they have seriously stumbled in that effort.

It just feels very rough and fundamentally unfinished. All the little things, such as mutations not appearing visually on your players, or the small amount of badly written commentary lines immediately starting to repeat incessantly, or the strangely lifeless atmosphere of the stadiums—it all adds up to an experience that not only doesn’t serve the tabletop game well, it feels actively worse than its own predecessor.

Many of the player types look better in 2015’s Blood Bowl 2—and you can actually tell them apart! (Image credit: Cyanide Studio)

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Heading back into the now eight-year-old Blood Bowl 2 (opens in new tab), I find a better game on almost all fronts. More polish, more customisation, more teams, easy offline play… even the visuals compare favourably, making up for their age with clearer readability and charming details, such as player helmets being knocked off when they go down. The core game is still smooth and very playable—and though it’s based on the previous edition of the tabletop game, the changes there are minor enough that I don’t feel like I’m missing out. 

My advice to even the most hardcore Blood Bowl fans is to stick with BB2 for now. This new sequel is shaping up to be a disaster on launch—and if it doesn’t receive some significant overhauls and a U-turn on its business model and server structure, I don’t see how it can become a worthy digital platform for the beloved wargame. 


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The Walking Dead is being turned into a tabletop RPG by the creators of the Alien and Blade Runner RPGs

The shambling corpses of The Walking Dead refuse to rest, and now the zombies will be gracing tabletops (though not for the first time (opens in new tab)) courtesy of Free League and The Walking Dead Universe RPG. A Kickstarter (opens in new tab) will be launching soon, on March 14, and while the finished game won’t be appearing until this autumn, the core rulebook will be available alongside the crowdfunding push.  

Swedish publisher and developer Free League is pretty damn prolific, and has lately become synonymous with quality adaptations of notable licences like Alien, Blade Runner and Tales from the Loop. I don’t have as much time for TTRPGs as I used to, but even when I’m too busy to play, sometimes I’ll just gawk at the books, which are all lavish, dense tomes. 

The pedigree of the design team suggests The Walking Dead Universe RPG will be another one to keep an eye on, as it includes designers, writers and artists behind the Alien, Blade Runner and Tales from the Loop adaptations, as well as the excellent Symbaroum, Vaesen and Twilight: 2000 games. 

It’s a survival RPG romp, naturally, with Free League promising high stakes and high stress misadventures, where players will need to “not only hone their physical skills, but deeply explore what makes them tick.” It ain’t a zombie apocalypse without a lot of emotional and mental toil. A spin-off of Free League’s Year Zero engine will be fuelling the thing, though it looks like we’ll have to wait until next month to see how exactly it’s been adapted for the new setting. 

While I got a bit worn out on The Walking Dead half-way through AMC’s initial TV show and haven’t enjoyed any of the game spin-offs since Telltale’s fantastic series, a TTRPG is still a pretty seductive prospect. I look forward to making terrible decisions that will undoubtedly piss off my mates.


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Where to use Sea Treasures Tokens in Warzone 2



Sea Treasures Tokens are found all over the new Call of Duty: Warzone 2 (opens in new tab) resurgence map, Ashika Island, but you might be wondering what they’re for. As it turns out, you can use these tokens in specific vending machines dotted around the island, and I’ll explain where you can find these below.

You’ll be able to pick them up from the places you’d normally find loot—chests, shelves, or just lying in the middle of the floor. Once you have a stash of them, it’s time to start spending. Here’s where to use Warzone 2 Sea Treasures Tokens, and what you can get with them.

Warzone 2 Sea Treasure Tokens: Where to use them 



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Randomizer mod for RollerCoaster Tycoon breathes life into a bonafide classic



To my profound horror, there are probably people reading this article who haven’t been around as long as RollerCoaster Tycoon, the classic theme park management sim from 1999. In the decades it’s been with us, every square inch of RollerCoaster Tycoon has been picked apart and mastered. There’s nothing left to discover and no surprises in store. RollerCoaster Tycoon is a solved game. Or it was, anyway.

Enter the RollerCoaster Tycoon randomizer mod from Die4Ever, the same creator who’s brought us such bangers as the randomizer mods for Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, and Shadow Warrior (opens in new tab). Using it, you too can enjoy being buffeted by the uncaring winds of fate as the mod mucks around with your scenario goals, length, starting money, and ride stats. You could, for example, be tasked with attracting 10,000 guests on a budget of $1000, or you might find that all your coasters have been altered to possess an OSHA-violating level of intensity.



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Shocking but not surprising: The average price of a GPU at retail has doubled since 2020

This is not surprising, but it is still pretty shocking to see the numbers laid out like this: According to figures sourced from German retailer Mindfactory.de, the average price graphics cards are selling for has doubled since 2020.

Wind back the clock to February 2020, and AMD cards were selling for an average of just over €295. Nvidia’s GPUs, meanwhile, commanded a higher average selling price of €427.

Jump forward three years and the numbers make for some ugly reading unless you run a graphics card-making business, I guess. The average selling price for AMD has leapt up to fully €600, while Nvidia GPUs are now selling for an average of €825 on Mindshare.de. So, that’s near enough exactly double for both brands.

To put those numbers into context regarding exchange rates, the dollar figures are $315 for AMD in February 2020, increasing to $640 this year, and $455 increasing to $880 for Nvidia.

That’s for all GPUs and so includes both the latest Nvidia RTX 40 series (opens in new tab) and AMD’s new RX 7900 (opens in new tab) boards. For clarity, the figures are said to be Mindfactory’s sales numbers (opens in new tab), but are posted second hand on Twitter with no primary source links provided. It is also just from a single retailer, but it still shows a quite clear trend in the industry.

Given the way advertised GPU prices have inflated in the last few years, the numbers are not exactly a huge surprise. And yet they still make for tough reading.

Broadly, the assumption is that AMD and Nvidia must know what they are doing. But we still find it very hard to compute that an average selling price of nearly $900 for Nvidia GPUs—which is the dominant player with the majority of sales—is sustainable for PC gaming.

Does your average PC gamer have $900 for just a GPU, never mind a CPU, RAM, SSD, motherboard and monitor? And if they do, what does that say about PC gaming?

It’s certainly interesting to note that pricing for many kinds of gaming-relevant hardware hasn’t gone into orbit. CPU pricing remains within touch of historical norms and you can buy a high refresh gaming monitor for $150.

So, for now, we’re sticking to our expectations that this GPU price spike will eventually restrict sales so severely that some kind of adjustment is inevitable. But as the months and years tick by, it’s certainly harder to argue against the notion that a new “normal” hasn’t arrived. But we’ll keep doing that. For now.


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