Drop Bear Bytes doesn’t muck around. The release date trailer for the Australian developer’s upcoming CRPG lets you know it’s coming on November 14 right out the gate, and then gets on with highlighting its post-apocalyptic setting, morality system, and turn-based combat.

I spoke to the creators of Broken Roads earlier this year, and game director Craig Ritchie mentioned some difficulty the indie studio had finding a publisher due to the combat: “Publishers actually contacted us and said, ‘Hey, if you could remove combat from the game, then we’ll publish [it], look at Disco Elysium.’ They basically wanted us to change it completely. We were like, no, we are a traditional RPG. We are gonna have combat.”

Starfield is arguably this year’s most hyped game. At this point in time, the game runs well on AMD hardware thanks to its partnership with Bethesda, but Nvidia owners haven’t gotten as much love. Though the game runs well enough, Nvidia GPUs are uncharacteristically underperforming in Starfield, and official support for Nvidia’s bedrock technologies such as DLSS are missing.

Over time things will improve, as Nvidia and Bethesda release driver updates and patches. If you don’t want to wait, there’s an interim tweak you can do yourself, and if the early testing is to be believed, it can deliver major performance boosts for Nvidia owners playing Starfield.

AMD is preparing its first hybrid APUs, containing a mix of Zen 4 cores and smaller Zen 4c cores. Phoenix 2 will sit below the higher performing Phoenix and should appear in affordable laptops—though when that might be is an open question.

Twitter user @9550pro posted a Phoenix 2 die shot, and it reveals some interesting information. If you look at the picture above, you’ll see two full Zen 4 cores on the lower left, but at the top left is where it gets interesting. Those are Zen 4c cores, and they’re efficiency cores designed with low power consumption in mind. There’s a fourth Zen 4c core just to the right of the two performance cores. This makes it a 2+4 core design which is the kind of configuration you’d expect to find in a budget CPU.

As a developer, Bethesda Game Studios has become synonymous with a certain kind of RPG. We know what to expect: open worlds, faction quests, extremely familiar voice actors, jank. And, since Oblivion, we expect a prologue that includes a bit where you step out of a dark area into a well-lit area and see a world of opportunities and diversions placed in front of you like a cheese platter—only there’s a ruin you might want to explore and a settlement full of sidequests instead of some brie and a sharp cheddar.

Attempts to repeat this in subsequent Bethesda RPGs haven’t always worked as well, but it’s definitely become a thing. Which is why it’s time to consider all those things together and rank them from worst to best, like parents do when they think their kids aren’t paying attention.

Typically in Bethesda RPGs I’m a stealth guy. I’m the dweeb who spent 200 hours of Oblivion crabwalking through in the shadows, dispatching enemies with sneak attacks and poisoned arrows. Hell, I was so stealthy I once pickpocketed a scroll from an assassin’s butthole through a jail cell door without him noticing. I didn’t even have to take his pants off.

But in Starfield I’m not so much about stealth. I prefer a straight-up fight. And the best place to find those fights isn’t in abandoned research labs or pirate-controlled mining facilities or even massive orbiting space stations. The best place for firefights is aboard enemy ships.