Dragon Age: The Veilguard is out today, and if you find yourself stressed and aggravated because you’re waiting for it to download—no preload on PC!—and it’s going so slow and all your friends are going to be hours ahead of you by the time you get into it, I have just the thing to help you chill out and take the edge off: Dragon Age ASMR.

Yesterday I built a new gaming PC inside a compact chassis and using one of Asus‘ latest tiny motherboards, the ROG Strix X870-I Gaming WiFi. To my surprise, this cutesy PC booted first time. To my even greater surprise, the BIOS erupted onto my screen with a gloriously crisp finish.

“Wow”, I thought to myself as I glared at the sharp edges that replace the fuzzy 768p interface of decades gone, “they finally did it.”

Despite the fact that we’ve sort of universally agreed that NFT games aren’t going to happen, the nature of game development makes it so we’re bound to be seeing doomed projects fly their unwanted freak flags high on the proud ship “Sunk Cost”. See, videogames take a few years to make, so whatever trend was popular a few years ago will only be surfacing now, unless you’re willing to go all Early Access about it (which plenty of NFT projects have).

Ubisoft has gotten a big run up and leapt onto the bandwagon already halfway to Oregon with Champions Tactics, a Web3 (that’s “NFT” in tech bro speak) PVP game which, looking at this trailer, has an art department that’s utterly wasted on it.

Champions Tactics – Launch Trailer – YouTube

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In 2011, the idea of a game from No More Heroes developer Grasshopper Manufacture being published by EA felt like a total odd couple situation. For years before making Shadows of the Damned, director Suda51 had been talking about a survival horror project called Kurayami inspired by the works of Franz Kafka (it was mentioned in a 2006 issue of Edge magazine; that’s how far back we’re talking). Eventually God Hand (and Resident Evil, I guess) creator Shinji Mikami joined the Kurayami team, and the two embarked on an expansive pitching tour across the US. The game landed at EA, which—to its credit—then had a far more diverse publishing lineup than it does nowadays, but even then Grasshopper was a surprising collaboration.

The survival horror focus took a back seat in the time between signing with EA in 2008 and the release of Shadows of the Damned in 2011. The original concept for the game had the protagonist, Garcia Hotspur, ‘basically naked with nothing but that torch as a lantern,’ according to Shinji Mikami. The EA shoe would eventually drop.

Path of Exile 2 Delayed Three Weeks – YouTube

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Path of Exile 2 will launch into early access three weeks later than planned due to last-minute “server side infrastructure work”. More specifically, it’s to do with making sure microtransactions work seamlessly across both Path of Exile and the forthcoming sequel, a long-promised feature that will, according to game director Jonathan Rogers, require a lot more load testing before it can go live.

In other words, it isn’t that the game itself still needs work. “One of the key promises we made is that all your microstransactions will work across Path of Exile 1 and 2,” Rogers said. “In order to do that, we have to integrate the account systems for not only Path of Exile 1 and 2, but also for the console realms as well. This meant changing a lot of things: not only do we have to create a bunch of new systems, we have to make sure that all the old data is backwards compatible with them as well.”