Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin, the upcoming real-time strategy game with big Dawn of War 2 vibes, will launch with four factions. We’ve already seen the heavily armored Stormcast Eternals, swamp-dwelling Orruk Kruleboyz, and undead Nighthaunt, and now developers Frontier have revealed the mutated and magical Disciples of Tzeentch will round out the roster.
These Hosts Duplicitous serve the Chaos god of change, and count among their ranks daemons like the Horrors of Tzeentch, who begin as pink individuals and annoyingly split into pairs of gribbly blue dudes when defeated, as players of Boltgun will recall. Their flying melee troops are the Screamers of Tzeentch, joined in the air by Tzaangor Skyfires—bright blue beastmen with bows who can detect invisible troops—and spellcasting Magisters on shark-toothed flying discs. Their biggest unit is the Lord of Change, a greater daemon who looks like a skeksis from The Dark Crystal that hit the gym, which can summon an Infernal Gateway to damage and slow enemies in a wide area.
Overall the Disciples of Tzeentch seem like a force focused on ranged attacks, a predominantly shooty horde to contrast with thumper armies like the Kruleboyz and Stormcast Eternals—though they too have ranged options like the fireball-chucking Stormdrake Guard.
This latest video also shows off Realms of Ruin’s unit customization via the livery editor, which lets you personalize troops by either choosing from the official Age of Sigmar paint schemes or making one of your own. The color choices seem to come directly from the Citadel paint options too, with names like leadbelcher grey, straken green, and corax white.
Maps can be customized as well, with maps made in the editor shared among players via an in-game workshop. The map editor doubles as a diorama-designer, letting you place units and select poses before going into a photo mode to capture each scene.
Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin is scheduled for a November 17 release, and will be available on Steam and the Epic Games Store.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/1697769042_Age-of-Sigmar-RTS-Realms-of-Ruin-reveals-its-final.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-10-20 01:59:452023-10-20 01:59:45Age of Sigmar RTS Realms of Ruin reveals its final faction
What is it? Colossal Order’s urban city builder sequel Expect to pay: $50/£41.99 Developer: Colossal Order Publisher: Paradox Interactive Reviewed on: Intel i7-9700K, RTX 4070 Ti, 16GB RAM Multiplayer? No Link: Official site
Attention citizens! You may have noticed two exciting new features in our fair city. The first is the Large Hadron Collider, an extremely massive and expensive scientific facility that will inspire an interest in education and boost our tech industry! The second new feature is that, due to the heavy infrastructural demands of the collider, every sewer in the city is backed up and none of your toilets will flush.
Not to worry! To fix that I’ll just buy more land so I can build additional groundwater pumping stations and water treatment plants—or at least I would do that if I hadn’t spent every last penny on that big collider thingie. Time to mess with some budget sliders and take out a huge loan I’ll probably never be able to pay back, so expect higher taxes, fewer firefighters and ambulances, and please, please try not to use the bathroom for the next several years.
I’m highlighting my questionable skills as mayor because my multi-million dollar large hadron collider breaking plumbing is symbolic of Cities: Skylines 2 itself. Colossal Order’s new urban city builder is huge and impressive, a complex machine with tons of moving parts that improves on many of the systems and features of the original game.
But like a scientist who can smash atoms but not flush their toilet, it’s let down by some small yet important details. Cities: Skylines 2 is much bigger than the original, but unfortunately it’s not better—at least not yet.
City on the grow
As in the first game, you begin with a small square of land on a giant slice of map. You start laying down roads, zoning for residential, commercial, and industrial areas, and watch as little bitty homes and businesses begin to spring up. Then the delicate dance begins as you try to balance budgets and costs while expanding from a small town to a booming city to a mega-metropolis filled with towering skyscrapers, airports and harbors, and thousands of simulated citizens.
There are some big early game improvements over the original Skylines, like the ability to import electricity from another unseen city by simply attaching your power lines to theirs. Not having to immediately build a huge polluting power plant not only saves money but precious space on your starting map square. An even better perk: When I later had both the cash and the room to build a couple big stinky power plants of my own, I was able to export my surplus electricity back down those same power lines and make some extra money.
Smart new tools make drawing roads easier than ever. (Image credit: Paradox Interactive)
It’s instantly easy to see how much work went into creating better road tools for the sequel. Drawing roads and snapping them together is smooth and easy, as is upgrading those roads later with new features—lines of trees, grassy strips, and tram lines for public transportation can be placed directly onto existing roads with zero fuss. Toggles let you draw parallel roads and even entire grids with perfect angles and spacing. Even the world’s sloppiest mayor (that’s me, hello) can easily draw an attractive new subdivision or downtown area in seconds.
Progression is handled nicely, too. Instead of simply being based on population milestones, you earn XP by building stuff, attracting new residents, and increasing the happiness of your citizens. Each XP milestone automatically unlocks new city features but also grants you a handful of development points you can spend on more unlocks. If you want to upgrade your power station options from coal or gas to solar early on, you can spend points on electrical options, and if you want to attract tourists by building a huge observation tower, start dumping points into the parks department. The system is sensible, encourages planning and forethought, and gives you control over what you’ll be able to add to your city and when, reminiscent of a strategy game tech tree.
Clicking new modules into place on existing buildings is a tactile bit of fun.
Another big improvement is being able to upgrade service buildings like fire stations, schools, and industrial plants to increase their effectiveness. If you don’t want to build a second high school, for example, you can add modular extensions to your existing one that will increase student capacity. Rather than building a second wastewater treatment plant you can add on multiple additional processing units or an advanced filtering system to increase its efficiency and capacity. It’s a much smarter system than simply plopping down entirely new service buildings to address the needs of your growing population, and clicking new modules into place on existing buildings is a tactile bit of fun, too.
Farms can harvest resources miles from downtown. (Image credit: Paradox Interactive)
Weirdly enough, my favorite part of Cities: Skylines 2 takes place far from the skyscrapers and suspension bridges of the downtown metro area. Scattered across the map are resource nodes for growing crops, raising livestock, and mining for minerals and oil. As I earned new map tile unlocks I’d almost always spend them buying land far from the city’s hub so I could build farms and mining operations. Rather than just being a square you plop down, you can draw the outlines of each zone, pleasingly snapping the borders of your farms and mining pits to roads or other existing barriers.
Specialized industries mean more demand for homes and business in the city and, best of all, running a surplus of materials and products means they can be sold to other regions outside the map. Plus, I love survival city builders, and having farms, crops, livestock, and ore and oil mines kinda makes Skylines 2 feel like one, almost. The fact that maps are so huge that you can have these farms way outside the city lines makes the world feel more real, too.
Devil in the details
Frostpunk? Winter covers everything with snow as electric bills skyrocket. (Image credit: Paradox Interactive)
As my city slowly filled up with buildings and residents, it also began to feel a bit empty—especially when compared to the original game which has been fed with dozens of DLC packs over the past seven years. With a mere 20,000 citizens and the designation of “Small City,” the milestones had already run out of new features to unlock. There are only three different tourist attractions to build, and while there are several sports parks they’re all small, the sort you might find in an average-sized town. Skylines 2 has nothing like the huge gleaming sports stadium from the first game that feels suited for a major city.
Natural disasters like tornadoes and forest fires occasionally appear, but none ever came particularly close to my city and they’re enabled with a simple on-off toggle. There’s no slider for adjusting disaster frequency and no ability to specifically target parts of your city for destruction like I’d hoped—what better way to cover up my mistakes as mayor than with a targeted meteor shower? Alas.
Someone’s GPU got a little too hot. (Image credit: Paradox Interactive)
Zooming in close to spy on my city revealed a few other disappointing changes. In the original game it was fun to watch city services at work: firemen would race to a fire, get out of their trucks, and hose down the burning buildings with wee little hoses. Adorable and live-saving! For those less fortunate citizens, coroners would drive up to a house and then wheel out a sad little body bag to their hearse before heading for the cemetery. I was disappointed to see that in Skylines 2, fire engines and hearses pull up to the buildings they’re servicing but there’s none of those wonderful little animations. A moment later the fire simply goes out or the deceased citizen is teleported to the hearse, and the vehicle departs. Bummer.
I see a few citizens in the public parks I’ve built walking their dogs or practicing yoga, which is nice, but buildings like the skate park and high school football field never show any signs of life or activity. I’m not asking to watch an entire simulated high school football game while I play Cities: Skylines 2, but it would be nice to zoom in and see at least one little animated teen on a skateboard enjoying the half-pipe or kicking a ball around on the sports field—something to make it feel like my citizens are actually using them.
Decorative props are largely missing from Skylines 2, which means fewer ways to customize.
Another detail a lot of players will miss are props to decorate their cities with—you can plant trees (and enjoyably, those trees will slowly grow taller over time) but placeable items like park benches, trash cans, lampposts, fountains, and other decorative props are largely missing from Skylines 2, which means fewer ways to customize.
A bit of silliness has fled the game, too. I scanned my busy city streets for ages and never once saw a single truck with a giant hot dog or donut mounted on the roof. In Skylines 2, delivery vans, no matter what they’re hauling, just look like boring old delivery vans. The style and colors in general are muted, giving the game a more realistic and grounded look but taking away a bit of the fun and flash.
Very little of what I’m talking about here has a real impact on how the game actually functions, but it does have an impact on how I play. With fewer reasons to zoom in close to spy on the minutiae of the world I’m lording over, I find myself generally sticking to a bird’s eye view. That ultimately means I don’t wind up feeling as much connection to the city I’m building as I’d hoped.
Bottlenecks
Not a hot dog truck to be seen. (Image credit: Paradox Interactive)
As Colossal Order warned before the game’s launch, Skylines 2 has performance issues. Some tinkering with default settings improved my fps but at the cost of lowering the level of detail or disabling systems like depth of field. I experienced a lot of random fps dips, slowdowns and hitches, and sometimes complete freezes that lasted a few seconds, along with visual issues like irritating shadow-flickering on certain buildings. Sometimes just trying to place large buildings—and Cities: Skylines 2 has some stunningly large buildings—will tank my fps to single digits until I’ve clicked them into place. I also had several crashes to desktop in the past week of playing.
As you’d guess, the bigger the city gets the more severe performance issues become. When one of my cities reached a population of about 45,000—which isn’t even close to as big as these cities can get—I decided to abandon it and start a new one because my frames dropped to a choppy 30 fps, at best, when zooming in close enough to build. That’s disappointing—my CPU is somewhere between the minimum and recommended specs but my GPU is a brand new RTX 4070 Ti and I’d hoped for a smoother experience. Which isn’t to say I’m not optimistic for the future—I expect plenty of optimization of Cities: Skylines 2 to occur post-launch. But for right now, it’s a bit rough.
As for the game’s other shortcomings, I’m optimistic there as well. The original Cities: Skylines improved massively after it launched—yes, mainly through dozens of pieces of paid DLC, but there were also lots of completely free additions alongside them, not to mention the thousands of mods created by passionate community members. I’m hopeful Cities: Skylines 2 will someday become a better game than the original, instead of just a bigger one.
The answer to today’s Wordle is waiting below if you need it, ready to save one of those games where nothing seems to go to plan. Prefer to make your own luck? Then you’ll want to take a look at the clue for the October 19 (852) puzzle, designed to point you in the right direction without completely giving the game away.
I do love seeing almost an entire row’s worth of yellow letters flip over on my first go—whatever happens next, I know my Wordle’s had pretty much the best start I could have hoped for. Of course with an opener like that today’s game sorted itself out with little fuss, and that meant I enjoyed a quick and easy win.
Today’s Wordle hint
(Image credit: Josh Wardle)
Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, October 19
If you threw something wet or sticky at a hard surface, you’d probably use this word to describe the sound it made. Thinking of a popular paint-spraying Nintendo game might help.
Is there a double letter in Wordle today?
No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle.
Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day
If you’re new to the daily Wordle puzzle or you just want a refresher after taking a break, I’ll share some quick tips to help you win. There’s nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day.
A mix of unique consonants and vowels makes for a solid opening word.
A tactical second guess should let you narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
There may be a repeat letter in the answer.
You’re not up against a timer, so you’ve got all the time in the world—well, until midnight—to find the winning word. If you’re stuck, there’s no shame in coming back to the puzzle later in the day and finishing it up when you’ve cleared your head.
Today’s Wordle answer
(Image credit: Future)
What is the #852 Wordle answer?
Welcome to your latest win. The answer to the October 19 (852) Wordle is SPLAT.
Previous Wordle answers
The last 10 Wordle answers
Keeping track of the last handful of Wordle answers can help to eliminate current possibilities. It’s also handy for inspiring opening words or subsequent guesses if you’re short on ideas for the day.
Here are the last 10 Wordle answers:
October 18: MERCY
October 17: ADULT
October 16: GRAPH
October 15: LEAKY
October 14: AGENT
October 13: UNCLE
October 12: KNELT
October 11: SKUNK
October 10: SNAIL
October 9: TRUTH
Learn more about Wordle
(Image credit: Nurphoto via Getty)
Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes every day and the aim is to figure out the correct five-letter word by entering guesses and eliminating or confirming individual letters.
Getting off to a good start with a strong word like ARISE—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good tactic. Once you hit Enter, 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.
Your second guess should compliment the starting word, 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. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.
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, and if you’d like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.
Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, 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, 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. Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/1697696959_Wordle-today-Hint-and-answer-for-852-Thursday-October-19.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-10-19 04:04:072023-10-19 04:04:07Wordle today: Hint and answer for #852 Thursday, October 19
The new soulslike Lords of the Fallen got hammered pretty hard in its first few days on Steam, primarily over complaints about its dodgy performance. For some players it’s been fine, but others encountered issues with low frame rates, stuttering, and crashes. Some people on Steam said they weren’t even able to access the main menu.
In response, publisher CI Games posted some troubleshooting tips, and a handful of small patches have also rolled out. In the latest, which takes the game to version 1.1.203, developer Hexworks said it has “begun to implement more substantial performance improvements … aimed at freeing up VRAM to provide additional headroom for GPUs that are operating at the limit of their capabilities.” The process is taking time to implement, the studio added, “because we are committed to ensuring that you do not lose any quality.”
The reaction to the patch on Reddit stands in stark contrast to the “mixed” user rating on Steam. Not everyone is happy, which should come as no shock, but the general response to Hexworks’ ongoing efforts seems very positive. “I don’t know what they are feeding the guys at Hexworks but these are pretty big patches coming almost on a daily basis,” one redditor wrote. “I think we can all agree their response to post launch feedback and issues has been amazing.”
“It’s been great. I haven’t gotten to play as often as I’d like since release but every time I do, there’s been an update and the game runs better. Honestly it’s fine at max settings for me now,” another replied.
“I have never seen this speed from any dev ever,” a third said. “A lot of things I [dislike] got fixed and I hope a lot more will come. Kudos to them.”
So who knows? Maybe that Steam rating will turn around quicker than anyone expected.
Hexworks also announced today that studio head Saul Gascon will be taking part in a live Q&A session on Twitch, which will take place on October 19 at 10 am PT/1 pm ET/7 pm CET.
The full Lords of the Fallen 1.1.203 patch notes are below.
Stability
Fixed a crash that could occur when an NPC was talking, under very specific conditions.
Fixed a rare crash that could happen when enemies were targeting players when using some of their abilities.
Fixed a rare crash that could occur when interacting with certain in-game elements.
Fixed a crash that could happen with some Niagara particles that left a trail behind them.
Fixed a crash that could occur when running out of ammo and trying to perform an action that consumes ammo.
Fixed a rare crash related to player spawning in multiplayer by the host when the client is still not fully ready.
Fixed a rare crash that could occur when resurrecting at an anchor.
Fixed a crash when being invaded by a player who happens to lose connection at the right frame.
Moved 2 parameters from local saves to settings save to provide more configurable options to GeForce Experience.
Performance
Adjusted Soulflay texture sizes and materials to make them easier for the GPU to handle VRM-wise.
Reworked some UI elements to free up memory.
Reduced memory allocation for environment interaction to free up approximately 16MBs of memory.
Anchor images are now loaded only when interacting with vestiges.
Fixed several textures used throughout the game to reduce VRAM consumption by approximately 10MBs.
Bosses
Crimson Rector’s parasites will no longer trigger heavy reactions on the player.
NPCs
Sparky has received some additional lines of dialogue.
Balancing
Balancing adjustments have been made for NG+ bosses and regions, especially in the almost end-game stages of NG+. We felt we were too enthusiastic and the previous curve was too steep.
Molhu has decided to reduce the price of seeds in his store from 2,500 vigor to 1,200 vigor.
Gameplay
Fixed player behavior during interactions with NPCs and vendor screens, which could lead to weird orientations.
Modified Vestige interactions to allow camera movement while interacting with the vestige.
Collisions
Fixed a small collision bump that could cause AIs to get stuck near Agatha’s vestige.
Fixed a missing Umbral navmesh in Pilgrim’s Perch East section that would make umbral inhabitants stop pursuing players.
Fixed a small ground issue at Skyrest bridge.
VFX
Umbral nail attack from a secret boss has been optimized for AMD cards.
Adjusted banners FX angle that could sometimes be rotated too much.
Reworked both poison and Umbral mists to look better, addressing issues with pixelization observed on some streams.
Optimized Barrage of Echoes spell.
Steps VFX now disappear when off-screen instead of being frozen but still calculated.
Improved the Lightreaper jump attack particles to make it even more spectacular.
Fixed skinning issues for the sword of a very important person.
Crossbowmen now have more noticeable and persistent arrow trails for increased visibility and directionality.
UI
Modified the maximum length for online session passwords to 8 characters, as players typically use 4-6 character words.
Added additional sounds to the splash screen.
Now, if you equip ammo or a spell that cannot be used, the (X) button is also displayed in the widget.
Fixed a bug where the character name pop-up couldn’t be closed with the gamepad when spamming (A) or (B) while opening it.
Reverted the “any button shows (A) to skip” in cinematics, as it wasn’t working well on some devices.
3D Photo Mode
Fixed an issue where the camera of a saved 3D scene in 3D Photo Mode could be in the wrong position, adding failsafes to prevent this from happening.
Fixed a bug where the state of doors (opened/closed) and a few other interactables was not being saved in the 3D photo.
I’ve seen some weird and wonderful gaming chairs in my time as a tech writer. From those with fancy footrests, to one with a fan-laden backrest, and even a McDonald’s gaming chair with a heated nuggie holder. But none have distilled the utilitarian essence of ergonomics into a premium gaming chair quite like the ThunderX3 Core.
I discovered this chair after a long day of trudging around Computex in the Taiwan summer heat, and while any chair would have sufficed in my bedraggled state, I stumbled upon this—one of the most innovative gaming chairs I’ve seen to date. But how could a gaming chair possibly improve upon a heated nuggie holder, you ask? Well, for one thing it has a wiggly backrest.
Hear me out. I know it sounds like a gimmick, but something that hit me when I sat down in this chair was that I’ve never actually sat up straight in a gaming chair. No one does. We wiggle around, we lean forward, we pull our legs up. But the ThunderX3 Core loft’s many mechanisms are able to adapt to all this tomfoolery, and I honestly don’t think I’ve had this much support for my bones since I was a wee baby coddled in my mammy’s arms.
Seriously, though, ThunderX3 has put a great deal of time and effort into forcing ergonomics on even the least ergonomically inclined. Aside from the Lumbar 360° tech backrest feature that moves around with you as you shift in the chair, it’s got smashing, well-padded, 4D armrests, and a Sync6 mechanism I’ll explain in a moment with plenty more ergonomic tricks than your average gaming chair.
ThunderX3 Core specs
(Image credit: Future)
Seat type: Racing seat Tilt: ⁓45 degrees Features: 360° lumbar tech, Sync6 mechanism, 4D armrests, multipurpose footrest (included in the UK, sold separately elsewhere) Weight capacity: 150kg / 331lbs Available colours: Grey or black Warranty: 3 years MSRP: $399
That little black Sync6 box provides something called synchronous tilt, which essentially keeps the chair seat more level so even short queens like me can keep their feet firmly on the ground when they lean back. The only issue there is that the armrests don’t come with it, so leaning back you have less support for your arms.
There’s also forward seat tilt, so you can lean in when you realise your opponent is better than expected. Adjustable seat depth also means you can slide yourself forward to get in closer. The latter might be the least useful of the lot, but it comes in handy if you gotta get cosy with your PC but can’t roll any closer.
The head cushion is super plush, and has side support for all my dodgy sitting positions. And the multipurpose cushion is a fantastic addition, too. It gives a little attention to the fact that not everyone will be able to touch the floor when their chair is at the right height. Not only does it have a rounded side so you can rock your feet, it also separates into two cushions and can double as an armrest, for when you want to use a controller or put your laptop actually on your lap.
Image 1 of 2
(Image credit: Future)
(Image credit: Future)
You can also lock the ThunderX3’s backrest at four angles, and while you can’t lean all the way back like with a lot of gaming chairs, I don’t think it takes away from the practicality. I’ve never used those full recline features anyway, except to show off.
The Sync6 mechanism is an oddly simple solution, considering how versatile it is, and one that had me expecting a much more complex assembly process. Usually it takes me about 45 minutes to put together a chair. This one? Just over sixteen minutes, unboxing and all. That’s partially thanks to the arms already being attached, and the packing foam not being sellotaped on tightly enough to strangle a boar like some. There was also no need for those awkward cover plates you get on a lot of chairs to hide the mechanisms and joinery. I didn’t even have to worry about the deadly spring mechanism a lot of gaming chairs threaten me with, since the backrest just slotted in neatly to a little sleeve—there were no bare mechanisms at all, in fact.
Somehow the ThunderX3 Core Loft manages to look sleek, and aside from the ridiculous, throne-like wings on either side protruding as if to say “Oooh, look at me”, it’s not an ugly chair by any means.
Image 1 of 2
(Image credit: Future)
(Image credit: Future)
Buy if…
✅ You need versatile ergonomics: If you tend to sit awkwardly, and suffer from back pain as a result, this chair has enough adjustability to keep you supported in any dumb sitting position you choose.
✅ You’re looking for something refined: The ThunderX3 manages to capture that swanky, kinda industrial look, while still being super practical.
Don’t buy if…
❌ You’re happy with the basics: This chair goes above and beyond but the mass of features could be overwhelming if you just want a simple, straightforward gaming chair.
It comes in three styles: Racer, with an embossed pattern on the backrest and seat, comes in plain black or with turquoise go-faster stripes; Modern, which is a little more refined and consists of three muted colourways; and Loft, coming in either black or grey. The Loft and Modern are the plush fabric versions, whereas the Racer comes wrapped in a stark leatherette. All are relatively restrained—even the Racer, considering some alternative gaming chair designs.
There are a few more colours on the way, including a white version, says ThunderX3. For now there’s at least some choice—and all Core styles come in at the same price, too.
Price was also my main concern when I initially sat in a chair with this many greebles.
Slap an ergonomics label on anything, and you can usually expect it to cost a premium. Somehow, though, the ThunderX3 Core has kept that price down to $399. It’s not cheap, but consider that less ergonomically superior chairs have been priced over $600—I’m looking at you, Noblechairs Legend. Generally something with as much comfort and adjustability as the ThunderX3 Core would set you back more than a grand, like the Herman Miller x Logitech G Embody for example, so it’s impressive to see this one coming in at under $400.
Set the ThunderX3 Core Loft against our current best gaming chair, the Secretlab Titan Evo, and it becomes even clearer why this is a best gaming chairs contender. Not only does it come with the same three year warranty, it’s oozing with features the Evo couldn’t dream of, thanks to that Sync6 and Lumbar 360° wizardry.
Moreover, while it doesn’t have the magic of magnetic pillows, for me the ThunderX3 actually manages to surpass the comfort of the $520 Titan Evo. And that’s really saying something when it comes in at $120 less in all its styles.
There used to be a game called Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. You might’ve heard of it—one of the most popular games of all time, played by hundreds of thousands of people every day for over 10 years, the reason every shooter has gun skins now. Anyways, Valve deleted it last month and replaced it with Counter-Strike 2.
That is absolutely wild to think about. One of the biggest games of our time has essentially been swept under a rug, or more accurately, banished to the properties tab of CS2 with broken matchmaking and nothing but community surf servers left to maintain a pulse.
Years of living in the live-service era have conditioned us to embrace change in our favorite games. We herald the arrival of reworks that transform how games are played, celebrate when longtime bugs are finally squashed in patches, and sometimes have to accept the permanent removal of features we like.
Sometimes we’re happy about changes, sometimes we rail against them. But what happened with CS:GO and Overwatch—entire games being swallowed up, diminished, or outright deleted in favor of a sequel—is not good for anything, except keeping costs down at some of the biggest and most successful publishers and developers. It’s a nightmare for PC gaming preservation and a huge disappointment for the dedicated players who keep these games funded in the first place.
Some of the biggest games of our time are being wiped off the internet for no good reason, and it’s time to raise the alarm.
🚨🚨stop it🚨🚨
The worrying trend of throwing games into the virtual incinerator once their sequels come around began with Overwatch 2. Blizzard spent three years failing to accurately explain what a sequel to its live-service FPS would look like, which in retrospect probably happened because Blizzard itself wasn’t quite sure either. At first, Overwatch 2 was to be a completely separate full-priced game with a singleplayer campaign, co-op missions, and multiplayer backwards-compatible with Overwatch 1. We all know how badly the PvE stuff went down, but as we learned more about Overwatch 2 over three years, Blizzard began to indicate it saw no distinction between Overwatch 2 and its predecessor.
March 2022: Blizzard changes its mind, decides to decouple Overwatch 2’s PvE and PvP content so it can release the game sooner. This confuses everybody. It’s still not clear which parts of Overwatch 2 will be paid content, and if all PvP content is compatible with Overwatch 1, what is the point of having an Overwatch 2?
April 2022:Overwatch 2 holds its first PvP beta, and we notice that not only does Overwatch 2 seem like a patch, you literally launch it as a patched version of Overwatch 1. Interesting…🧐
June 2022: Blizzard announces Overwatch 2’s PvP will be free-to-play when it releases in October. That answers one question.
June 2022: It’s not until later in June, during a Reddit AMA, that game director Aaron Keller finally says it plainly: “When OW2 launches on Oct 4th, it will be a replacement for the current live service.”
Pretty big news for a Reddit comment, if you ask me! I remember thinking Keller’s word choice of “live service”—no “game,” as if he sees Overwatch more as a service than a videogame—sounded cold, but honestly, this didn’t bother me as much as it should have. I had accepted that Overwatch 2 was basically just a big patch, and I was used to my favorite service games removing some stuff while adding new stuff.
I regret that, because players lost a lot more with the death of Overwatch 1 than a game mode and a tank slot. We lost an opportunity to bottle up a moment in time and preserve it to be enjoyed later. Even if I think Overwatch 2 is better, it’s valuable to be able to look back and experience old hero designs, combat dynamics, and entire maps that can no longer be played. But what really rubs me the wrong way is how Blizzard went about it—the studio Trojan-horsed the bad news in with the good and set a terrible example for game preservation in the process.
(Image credit: Valve)
Valve uses Blizzard’s playbook
The case of Counter-Strike 2 is some ways worse, and other ways better. Valve exercised its preferred communication style of “whenever the hell we feel like it” with CS2 to the extreme, teasing big Counter-Strike news for weeks before randomly dropping a Counter-Strike 2 announcement post back in March. The sequel to CS:GO would have a prettier engine, backwards compatibility with skins, less server latency, and puffier smoke grenades. Nowhere in the announcement did Valve mention that it planned to replace CS:GO with CS2. In fact, that wouldn’t be clear until the day CS2 launched and the CS:GO Steam page disappeared.
That’s pretty messed up. Unlike the Overwatch 1 to 2 transition, CS2 could not be described as a “CS:GO patch.” Just like CS:GO was for CS: Source, CS2 reimagines familiar maps and weapons with significant overhauls to graphics, level design, and mechanics. Look at both games side by side and it’s immediately obvious how they’re different, so why bury CS:GO as if it never existed?
Honestly, why are sequels to service game sequels treated differently than the rest of videogames at all?
We lost an opportunity to bottle up a moment in time and preserve it to be enjoyed later.
Sure, maintaining old service games is a logistical problem: It wouldn’t be simple or easy to operate a legacy version of Overwatch or CS:GO, and there’s the added wrinkle of maintaining parity with premium cosmetics earned in the sequel. Valve and Blizzard might also say it makes more sense not to split the player base by unifying under one game.
But so what? We didn’t used to have to ask that the games we love not be shut down once they got slightly old. If billion-dollar companies like Activision Blizzard and Valve really wanted to keep Overwatch 1 and CS:GO around in their proper forms, they absolutely could. Whatever it’d take—establishing a cutoff point for updates, running fewer official servers, or moving entirely to community servers—it’s all possible, it’s just not convenient or perhaps profitable work. By hacking off CS:GO’s matchmaking and making it unintuitive to access, Valve has done worse by its community than ever before in this regard, and Blizzard hasn’t even tried with Overwatch.
It also speaks to a lack of confidence in CS2 and Overwatch 2 by Valve and Blizzard. Are they really that worried we would prefer the decade-old shooters and not make the switch? Yikes.
(Image credit: Grinding Gear Games)
The true “live service” sequel
You know what upcoming sequel is exuding confidence right now? Path of Exile 2. Around the same time that Overwatch 2 was unveiled in 2019, Grinding Gear Games announced that Path of Exile 2 would be an expansion that consumes the original game. At the time, the pair of pseudo-sequels had us pondering what “2” even means anymore.
If Activision Blizzard and Valve really wanted to keep Overwatch 1 and CS:GO around in their proper forms, they absolutely could.
Earlier this year, as if Grinding Gears took its time and maybe witnessed how the overwriting sequel strategy went down with Overwatch, the studio changed its mind. Path of Exile 2 will now be its own separate game. The news went over great with fans, largely because Grinding Gear’s explanation for the reversal made a whole lot of sense.
“This thing is just freaking huge,” said studio co-founder Jonathan Rogers. “There was a point where we realized that our plan to replace PoE1 with PoE2 would essentially be getting rid of a game that people love for no real reason. So we made a decision: Path of Exile 1 and 2 will be separate, with their own mechanics, balance, endgames, and leagues.”
It’s almost silly that it has to be said. Preserving games that undergo massive evolutions is important, and while games change weekly and individual patches aren’t archived like they were in the old Quake days, sequels are the perfect opportunity to create a time capsule that lives on. When Destiny 2 came along, Bungie did right by the original Destiny by establishing a never-ending “Age of Triumph” event that continues today. More recently (and ironically), Blizzard retired Diablo 3 with one last big patch and plans to recycle past seasonal events indefinitely.
(Image credit: Activision)
One series that deserves partial credit is Call of Duty. Activision has done a commendable job of keeping old CoDs alive and active over the years, which is great, because a lot of people still play those games. I wish the mega-publisher had as much sentimentality for its free-to-play battle royale spinoff, Call of Duty: Warzone. When Activision released Warzone 2, it took the long way around with replacing the original.
For a while, the original Warzone was available as the standalone (and renamed) Warzone Caldera. Then earlier this year, Activision shaved off the “2” and the sequel just became Warzone again. Finally in September, Warzone Caldera was quietly shut down.
It’s nice that for every example of a poorly handled pseudo sequel there’s also a pretty good one, but I’m worried that replacing games will still become the new normal. Publishers have successfully chipped away at the idea of videogame sequels by recontextualizing them as no different than the latest refresh of the YouTube video player or Twitter homepage—uncomfortable at first, but things you’ll get used to after a while, before you forget what they used to look like altogether. I truly, deeply do not want to get to that place with videogames.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/1697588716_The-new-worst-gaming-trend-killing-our-favorite-games-to.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-10-18 00:49:402023-10-18 00:49:40The new worst gaming trend: killing our favorite games to replace them with sequels
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