For grumpy old Final Fantasy 14 enjoyers like myself who won’t stop banging on about how the game doesn’t have midcore content—good news! The game has midcore content now, and we can finally shut up until patch 8.0. Released in Patch 7.25 today, the Occult Crescent, a new Bozja-style exploration zone, is now open to the public.
In case you’re unfamiliar with what these are, an exploration zone (officially dubbed a “field operation”) is a piece of large-scale world content, typically accompanied with its own levelling system. You enter them solo, but will be passively thrown into large boss fights and FATEs with other players. In terms of difficulty, they’re often in a sweet spot: You’ll absolutely die if you aren’t paying attention, but you won’t wipe the entire group if you do.
Because of their relative lack of required organisation, but emphasis on personal responsibility, exploration zones are the most midcore of midcore content that FF14 gets, taking the world quest model of a game like WoW and fleshing it out into its own proper progression system—with a few zone-specific grinds to keep you invested.
The Occult Crescent is no different. As the patch notes explain, you’ll be able to grind EXP for both your “knowledge level” and your “phantom jobs” while inside the zone. Knowledge level is your overall power—letting you deal more damage to enemies of higher levels—whereas phantom jobs are their own separate system, giving you access to new abilities and passive effects.
These phantom jobs seem to be the core crux of the zone—we already know we’re getting chemist, ranger, berserker, geomancer, samurai, bard, freelancer, cannoneer, monk, oracle, thief, time mage, and knight. But the patch notes state that there’ll be more available either through purchasing them, or via critical engagements (boss FATEs you can get pulled into on occasion).
One neat element is that, apparently, maxing out a phantom job will give you “the Phantom Mastery status, which grants increased damage dealt and other helpful effects, and remains active even should you change to another phantom job.” In other words, if you want to reach bonkers levels of power while in The Occult Crescent, you’re incentivised to max out every job you can.
Once your knowledge level is 20, you’ll also be able to tackle The Forked Tower—an up-to 48 person raid that’s accessed via offering something called a sanguine cipher at a special reliquary. Given how busy the zone is bound to be at launch, you’ll probably be vying for a spot—you can offer more ciphers for a better chance at entry, and fortunately, if you aren’t picked to go dungeon delving, your ciphers will be returned to you.
There are other side-activities, as well, including treasure hunts at the behest of little goblin pots—but this all sounds like a jolly good time. My only gripe is that it’s taken this long for us to get something like this from ol’ Square Enix. Four years, in fact—nearly five.
Bozja, the last field operation, came out during Shadowbringers in October 2020. Square Enix skipped over the content type for Endwalker, electing to add variant dungeons instead which, while fun, were also one-and-done gauntlets you could knock out in about eight hours. I had a great time with them, sure, but if you’re playing an MMO? You gotta grease the wheels with a little grind.
Due to a combination of Dawntrail’s sluggish release schedule and weird prioritisation of raid tiers and extreme fights, The Occult Crescent—the most accessible and longest-lasting type of content the expansion will have to offer, bar none—has taken nearly a full year to arrive after the expansion’s release. Why? I couldn’t tell you.
On the plus side, this is a great expansion for something like this to arrive in. Square Enix has been popping off with its fight design recently, and despite my complaints about how long it’s taken, I can’t wait to get stuck in.
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Byond is an old, free game engine that’s been around since at least the early 2000s in games like Space Station 13, to cite one we’ve talked about recently. It’s also been the subject of a sustained DDoS attack, according to a MassivelyOP report, that’s now into at least it’s third week.
And why, exactly, would someone launch a DDoS attack against an obscure game engine, and keep it up for this long? According to a now-deleted Reddit post, available via the Wayback Machine, a group calling itself “the international free and open-source software community” is doing it to pressure Byond creator LummoxJR into making the software open source.
“Attacks on Byond servers are a symptom of your obstinance,” the extremely talking-like-Sephiroth message states. “They will persist as long as you ignore the voices of those who keep your platform afloat. We demand you voluntarily side with progress.
“Choose: Let Byond die as a proprietary relic, or let it rise as a free project. Time is running out.”
Whether or not that’s a legitimate claim, I cannot say. It certainly doesn’t sound like a good reason to throw up a sustained DDoS attack, but I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that ‘this sounds too stupid to be true’ is at best 50/50 when it comes to predicting whether something actually is true.
In a Reddit thread that went up not long after the attack began, appropriately entitled “What kind of maniac DDoSes Byond?” users suggested other possible rationales for the attack, most of them variants on “some guy got mad on the internet.” LummoxJr implied in the thread that they’re not sure about the real reason for the DDoS, but wrote that they’d “heard a rumor as to how this started, and it doesn’t really involve Byond; it was just a grudge between someone and a server that escalated.”
Whatever initially touched it out, the fires are still burning: The Byond website remains inaccessible, and as of the latest update to the DDoS Downtime Megathread, mitigation efforts are ongoing but there’s no ETA for a full restoration. In a separate thread posted May 23, LummoxJR said they’re “still dealing with the thing,” but also took a kind of bright-side view of the ongoing mess.
“I know the current situation has pushed a lot of us into closer contact than normal, and in many ways that’s a good thing,” they wrote. “But there have been some folks coming into new spaces hot, especially thinking they have a new idea that actually isn’t new. I know it comes from a good place. Let’s just all remember to show each other a little extra leeway and respect.”
And in good news for people who actually use Byond, it’s not out of reach: The website is down but some parts of it, including bug reports and downloads, are now being hosted on Discord.
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The longest recorded prison sentence served was just shy of 71 years. Charles Foussard was incarcerated in 1903 after murdering a man and stealing his boots. At the age of 92, he died in prison. Over in Oblivion Remastered, meanwhile, player Scribe_Of_Satire served a sentence of 55,284 years, or 20,178,790 days.
Spotted by our pals at GamesRadar, Scribe_Of_Satire shared this dizzying prison sentence over on the Oblivion subreddit.
To anyone wondering what’d happen if you went to jail with a bounty of over 2 billion, here ya go! from r/oblivion
Before the cops grabbed them, our heroic thief had amassed a bounty of more than 2 billion gold. And how did they do this? Merely stealing goodies. The most impressive thing about this crime spree is that they never trespassed, never assaulted anyone, never killed anyone, and never once pinched a horse. They hardly even engaged in any pickpocketing. They merely pilfered from someone’s pockets once.
But they also stole over a million items. Which is quite a spree.
To put this in context, 55,000 years ago Earth was in the middle of the last glacial cycle, the last ice age, and neanderthals were still stomping around. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, Bethesda did not choose to model the passage of time to such a degree, so doing a prison stint like this will not see you exit your cell and discover a new world full of new species. Your dreams of seeing 20-metre-tall argonians ruling Tamriel will go unfulfilled.
What Scribe_Of_Satire did discover was that being stuck in prison for so long gives the Tamriel calendar a bit of a stroke. When they were finally freed, it was the 5th of Morning Star, 3E -9,818. Clearly Bethesda just didn’t include enough numbers, and no matter how long you wait, you’ll never be able to leave the third era.
I guess there isn’t much of a downside to this kind of crime spree, then. Apart from the skill loss.
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Loot, Shoot, Scoot! 2nd Demo Coming Soon! | ESCAPE FROM DUCKOV – YouTube
Y’all ever see a chicken try to knife a duck to death? Y’all ever see a seagull try to beat a duck with a police baton? I hadn’t earlier, but now I have thanks to the demo trailer for goofily parodic shooter Escape from Duckov, which is getting a new demo on May 29 that’ll last until July 1.
It is, if you haven’t heard, a kind of singleplayer, top-down, extraction looter-shooter about odd little birds with guns and knives and such. You know, all the trappings of an ultra-serious mega-sweaty mil-sim-lite extraction shooter—no one game in particular I’m thinking of here. Anyway it’s that, but with ducks.
(And pigeons and geese and seagulls and chickens, etc.)
Escape from Duckov’s first limited-time demo shot to fourth place on the most-played Steam demo charts mostly because it’s a very approachable, accessible twist on the greater extraction formula. In between forays into the wide and violently bird-based world you use supplies to improve your basement lair, where you can upgrade and stockpile weapons.
Now developer Team Soda and publisher Bilibili are going to deal out another demo round of Duckov. Which you may be interested in if you missed it last time, for example, because you were playing roughly 83 other game demos at the time.
Or if you prefer to play via the Epic Games Store, which alongside Steam will be an option for this demo period and for Duckov’s launch proper later this year.
For now, you can find Escape from Duckov on Epic Games Store and on Steam.
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Frank Azor, AMD’s Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions and Gaming Marketing, shared a post on X (formerly Twitter) last week in response to a gaming account questioning why AMD is still offering GPUs with 8GB of VRAM in 2025.
“Majority of gamers are still playing at 1080p and have no use for more than 8GB of memory,” Azor wrote. “Most played games [worldwide] are mostly esports games. We wouldn’t build it if there wasn’t a market for it. If 8GB isn’t right for you then there’s 16GB. Same GPU, no compromise, just memory options.”
Majority of gamers are still playing at 1080p and have no use for more than 8GB of memory. Most played games WW are mostly esports games. We wouldn’t build it if there wasn’t a market for it. If 8GB isn’t right for you then there’s 16GB. Same GPU, no compromise, just memory…May 22, 2025
There’s data to support Azor’s claims—according to the Steam Hardware Survey, over half of gamers (55.27%) are playing on 1080p monitors. The survey data also suggests plenty of people are holding out for more budget GPUs: One of the top five GPUs among Steam users in 2025 is still somehow the GTX 1650, which only has 4GB of VRAM. The number one GPU as of April is the RTX 4060 laptop version with 8GB of VRAM.
Limited VRAM has become a bit of a sore spot during the current, Nvidia-led GPU doldrums, with 8GB already proving an issue in the biggest, most graphically advanced games.
It’s even an open question whether the 5070’s 12GB of VRAM is sufficiently “future proof,” and the $379 MSRP of the 8GB 5060 Ti is a hard sell before you even get to the endemic price bloat from AIB partners.
But with a $299 MSRP, the 8GB RX 9060 XT is a different beast—that is approaching a truly budget price. With so many gamers sticking to 1080p, and some of the biggest games in the world being less demanding “esports” picks like Marvel Rivals, or otherwise dark horse indie phenoms like Schedule One, REPO, and Palworld, the 9060 XT is shaping up to be an 8GB card that makes a good deal of sense, one on the more expensive side of “budget.”
Azor’s stance is in line with my personal gaming experience, too. I’ve been gaming on an 8GB Radeon RX 6600 for a couple of years now and have yet to run into performance issues, even running most of my games through a compatibility layer on Fedora Linux.
Most gamers don’t need a top-of-the-line GPU, and for some time now, it’s felt like all the buzz has been around Nvidia’s prohibitively expensive 30, 40, and 5090 cards, while the sub-$350, 1080p set has had to settle for hand-me-downs and mediocrities.
Those budget cards are not meant to be hooked up to high-end monitors, and the people who can afford a 1440p or 4K gaming monitor need to be realistic about the GPU they’ll need to power it.
There’s no harm in offering budget-oriented GPUs for those who need that option. It serves to keep PC gaming more accessible for those who want to play less demanding games like Fortnite or Minecraft, or the treasure trove of fantastic indie and retro games on PC.
If you’re not in that crowd, there’s always the 16GB version of the RX 9060 XT, along with plenty of other 12GB and 16GB cards. Now the only issue is making sure those juicy MSRPs are actually reflected in reality.
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The Witcher games are one of the clearest examples of improvement over a series in videogame history. No backsliding here: The Witcher was a mess, The Witcher 2 was genuinely quite decent, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was a masterpiece. The Witcher 3’s success put CD Projekt Red on Sony’s speed-dial, but it had other consequences as well.
The Witcher 3 at 10
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, all this week we’re looking back on The Witcher 3—and looking ahead to its upcoming sequel, too. Keep checking back for more features and retrospectives, as well as in-depth interviews with the developers who brought the game to life.
“It gave us confidence that we can deliver a truly ambitious and engrossing RPG of a big scale,” says Michał Nowakowski, joint CEO and member of the board, speaking to PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens. “And that we can punch above our weight and we can get head to head with the big ones. I remember, I was like, really, really afraid of the standard that Dragon Age: Inquisition’s going to set,” Nowakowski recalls.
While the two did duke it out for RPG of the Year awards (“I thought it was a fantastic game,” Nowakowski says of the competitor), The Witcher 3 was such a smash it changed expectations at CD Projekt Red. “That gave us confidence,” Nowakowski says. “Maybe in many ways even too much confidence looking back, to be honest, because I think that was the beginning of a bit of magical thinking for the company, which only stopped after Cyberpunk.”
Or as Adam Badowski, CD Projekt Red’s other joint CEO and member of the board puts it, “We turn from underdog to the company that is visible in the industry.”
The idea of magical thinking brings to mind BioWare magic, the idea that a troubled videogame will inevitably come together during the final stage of development because that’s what happened last time. And while the concept’s been torn apart repeatedly, it persisted because so many videogames do come together at the last moment. Even a classic like Thief: The Dark Project wasn’t fun to play until it was almost finished.
“I do remember, for The Witcher 3 specifically, seeing a version of the game that was put together, I think it was like February, 2015?” Nowakowski recalls. “I remember I walked up to Adam and said, ‘How are we in a good shape? Because that looks really not that great.’ You know, like, ‘Don’t worry. We’re gonna make the final push with the patch. That’s gonna be a day-zero patch.’ I remember talking to some of the key tech people, and they were tired—exhausted, to be honest—but it’s OK. We’re gonna make it happen. And they did. Of course there were a lot of patches afterwards, but the whole thing was like a force of nature. Lots of chaos, and a lot of final-moment efforts over there, without I think proper planning.”
The fact The Witcher 3 came together in that final push didn’t help the way the studio thought about things. “Everybody felt I think for a few moments that whenever something’s going on, we’re gonna have a magic fairy at the end that’s gonna come down and sprinkle some dust, and things are gonna be OK,” Nowakowski says. “I’m of course exaggerating, but there is some truth in that. So that’s a negative change. The positive change was that confidence, which I think helped us to build the ambition, which I still think is a big value of the company.”
Cyberpunk 2077’s development demonstrated both the benefits of ambition, and the risks of overconfidence. Even as the studio got bigger, Nowakowski says, “A lot of things were developed in almost isolation, as weird as it may sound, so we sometimes didn’t see the actual effects of how it actually interacts until it was put together.” If those things developed in isolation don’t magically come together, you end up with a game full of disconnected systems, and sidequests that feel like they don’t mesh with the main questline. Which is to say, you end up with Cyberpunk 2077.
The Witcher games were developed in a similar way, Nowakowski says, but the issues that resulted were easier to fix. “It was probably never fine,” he says, “but it worked when the scope of the games were smaller. Like for Witcher 1 and 2. But I think at The Witcher 3, we could already hear the boat is creaking a little bit.”
Following the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, the studio worked to tear down that isolation. “I don’t want it to sound like it was all chaos, you know, burning cart on fire, because that would also not be true,” Nowakowski says. “We had great producers, and there was a lot of planning involved that made sense.” But the processes at CD Projekt Red in need of addressing finally were, “and that’s a big change that happened after Cyberpunk.”
When you’re spending $81 million to make a game like The Witcher 3, and $320 million on Cyberpunk 2077’s launch version, you don’t get to be the underdog any more. It can be hard to let go of the idea you’re the upstart rebels disrupting an industry and approach work more responsibly, though. “It was cool to be underdog,” says Michał Platkow-Gilewski, VP of PR and communication. “Yeah, it’s sexier.”
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The Independent Fallout Wiki and the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) have announced a new partnership joining the two endeavors. Both sites’ curation, expansiveness, and, crucially, user experiences with minimal/unobtrusive ads make them cherished resources on the internet of 2025.
“We’re now proud to be the host of the Independent Fallout Wiki,” UESP wrote on Bluesky. “We don’t want to become one of those wikifarms that tries to trap sites, so we’ve also set things up to allow for them to freely change hosts in the future if they ever wish, without us leaving a zombie site behind.”
That last bit was a fairly direct jab at Fandom, formerly known as Wikia, the hosting service behind the majority of well-trafficked pop culture wikis on the internet. Fextralife is another prominent wiki host gamers will be familiar with, with a specific focus on RPGs and Soulslikes.
There’s a long, complicated history behind the hosting of wikis, but as a reader, it’s impossible not to notice the way their user experiences have degraded in the past ten years.
Fandom wikis tend to be saddled with enough ads that they become slow to load, particularly on mobile, with autoplay videos taking up half the screen—and that’s when they load in after a delay, partially resetting the page.
Fextralife, meanwhile, has more user-friendly pages but a serious curation/manpower issue: I’ve found incorrect information, links to missing pages, and placeholder text on its wikis years after games launch. Wikis for Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and even explosively popular games like Elden Ring and Divinity: Original Sin 2 all have frustrating gaps in information.
These detriments allowed the more well-maintained BG3.wiki to supersede Fextralife’s pre-existing Baldur’s Gate 3 wiki, which was started at the time of early access, after the game’s 1.0 launch.
Both Fextralife and Fandom tend to dominate the search engine optimization (SEO) of properties in their portfolios (Google search: [Insert Game] Wiki), making it difficult for competitors to become visible. There’s also a legitimate question of long-term maintenance.
Many wikis turned to Fandom hosting in the first place for the stability and continuity of a large organization. For more niche games and topics, a wiki farm is insurance that a site will not be entirely abandoned if interest in the subject wanes. There’s also the question of upkeep costs for hosting such large websites.
Even still, many wikis have chosen to migrate away from Fandom in recent years, a process outlined in a Medium editorial from 2023 by Wikipedia enthusiast Linden Clayton.
A previous great migration from Fandom to the hosting service Gamepedia had an awkward ending, however, when a portion of parent company Curse was bought by Fandom in 2018, bringing the schismatic wikis back into the fold. We come full-circle back to Fallout, whose Fandom wikis seem to have had a particularly long and complicated history.
UESP, meanwhile, has been independent since 1995, and has recently expanded its offerings to include podcasts, a fan Discord, and Elder Scrolls merch drops while accepting reader support through Patreon.
UESP’s retro, no-frills interface looks much as it did when I first went there around the releases of Skyrim and Oblivion, a stalwart old friend who has survived the years unchanged. The Independent Fallout Wiki looks to be in good hands.
PCG weekend editor Jody Macgregor shouted out Bulbapedia and the Team Fortress 2 Wiki as notable independents in his recent love letter to UESP, and I’d also like to praise the Baldur’s Gate 3 Wiki one more time: It really is an amazing resource. I’ll also always carry a torch for the Souls series Wikidot wikis, even though Chrome flags them as a security risk—I still haven’t gotten a virus there yet!
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Bem vindos a Shadows
Entra numa aventura no Japão com Naoe e Yasuke, não te vais arrepender 😁
Acompanha os próximos episódios de AC Shadows AQUI 👉 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDowRCnCZ6UKvixy-Kq7_TxyetIR127ja
Espero que gostem, deixem o like, subscrevam, partilhem e ativem as notificações para não perder nenhum episódio!!!
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