Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is getting its first tier of raids’ Savage difficulty today, and you know what that means: It’s time to speculate on balance changes! Imagine me clapping for emphasis between those words at your leisure.

Patch 7.05 brings with it a few neat additions—the expansion’s first treasure map dungeon, for example—but it also adds the first avalanche of controversial job tweaks to help sand off some rough edges, just as statics begin their race to world first.

With the aid of the game’s Job Guide (that includes further explanations for these tweaks) I’m going to sum up each job’s changes in a broad overview. The boffins over at resources like The Balance are bound to crunch the numbers in short order, but for now, you’ve got me.

Patch 7.05 job changes

The most interesting part of these patch notes, by far, is actually the exclusion of the Pictomancer from them entirely. Everyone’s new best caster friend hasn’t been nerfed as e…

To me, Gord will never not be a very weird name for a videogame. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad videogame, and in fact based on the new gameplay trailer released today, Gord looks like it might be very cool—if not entirely pleasant.

We predicted that unpleasantness when we got our first look at Gord in 2021. “Horrible things are going to happen to your villagers,” we warned, adding that being eaten by a giant spider might not even be the worst of them. We got a closer look in September 2022, describing it as “a Diablo town manager,” and if you know anything about the towns in Diablo you’ll know that’s bad news too.

Today’s trailer doesn’t paint that picture any prettier. Gord is a singleplayer strategy game about the Tribe of the Dawn, who find themselves struggling to survive in forbidden lands inspired by Slavic folklore. On the surface, it looks like a fairly straightforward city management sim—build, upgrade, expand, and keep your people hap…

Focus Entertainment has unleashed another trailer for its upcoming retro shooter Warhammer 40:000: Boltgun, a game that I was genuinely excited for before I watched it. After watching it, I must confess I’m slightly less excited than I was before. Not because of the game itself, but because the trailer’s voiceover is actively off-putting.

The trailer’s clearly shooting for an attitude-eta, “John Romero’s-about-to-make-you-his-bitch” vibe that the classic shooters Boltgun is inspired by emerged alongside. Putting aside that this is the one element of mid-nineties shooters we don’t want back, the obnoxious narration and slightly lame metal backing track doesn’t fit with the gothic grandeur of 40k, even when viewed through the lens of a fast-paced, pixelly FPS. It smacks of a marketing department that only understands what it’s selling at a surface level, and as someone who has played pretty much every retro shooter since DUSK, it doused my interest in the game rather…

Keep your impressive Wordle win streak heading in the right direction with our help, no matter how many green letters you’ve revealed already. Give your guessing a boost with a clue written especially for the August 6 (778) game, or head straight for today’s answer (we promise we won’t tell anyone).

I only scraped by at the very end with a win today, with one letter in particular doing a fantastic job of thoroughly throwing a spanner in the works about halfway down today’s puzzle. Phew, I’m hoping Wordle goes a little easier on us all tomorrow. 

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Sunday, August 6

Dusting off your old biology school books might help you solve today’s Wordle, as the answer can refer to a small protruding cluster of cells growing somewhere inside the body they shouldn’t, as well as small and broadly tubelike sea creatures. There’s one vowel today. 

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Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle?&n…

Warframe’s next major story update, the 1999 expansion, will introduce plenty of new features to the mix, like ’90s boy bands and instant messenger clients. However, one thing that definitely wasn’t on my bingo card is a romance system that could end with a New Year’s kiss from any of the Hex, a new syndicate made up of Protoframes. 

“[I] always wanted to put some type of romance system into Warframe,” creative director Rebecca Ford says during an interview with GamesRadar. “[But] there was never an appropriate scenario to do it.” 

It took 11 years for the romance system to be added to Warframe, and it seems like one of the main reasons for it being greenlit was Baldur’s Gate 3’s success: “I think two things really gave us the courage to proceed,” Ford says. “Of course, the success of Baldur’s Gate and their romance system [made us go] ‘Okay, people do want this fantasy.’ It does help, there’s no doubt, but we did have ambitions of it that fit the Warframe arch…

I’m an old man. I’ve created many an autoexec.bat and config.sys file in my life, vividly remember plugging in my first 3D accelerator card with pass-through cables through a Matrox Mystique GPU, and have benchmarked practically every graphics card released since 2006. And the appearance of this gorgeous new Galax graphics card (via Videocardz) this morning was like snorting a hit of pure nostalgia, bringing all those memories flooding back.

Now I’ve gotten over the stabbing reminder that my brief youth has utterly gone— and that I am tumbling inexorably, and ever more rapidly towards the end—I can take some comfort in the fact that the spiritual successor to one of the best graphics cards ever made is coming. And I just hope I can find someone at Galax to send us one to play with.

The best graphics card ever is, obviously, the Nvidia GeForce 8800GT (fight me). It’s a single-slot beauty of the like I feared I’d never see again. It was affordable, punched abov…

Valorant studio head Anna Donlon says Riot Games is taking new steps to address toxic behavior in the game, and delivered a pointed message to the most egregious offenders: “If you need to make truly evil statements under the guise of regular shit talk to enjoy gaming, then please play something else.”

The video message (via Kotaku) comes after several recent instances of abusive conduct were shared on social media: In one clip that recently went viral, a player was repeatedly threatened with rape. In the video, Donlon said addressing that kind of behavior is a priority for Riot, and “one of the most challenging issues” it faces, and that Riot’s systems and technologies “have been making a lot of progress” in reducing toxicity.

At the same time, she acknowledged that those systems cannot catch everything: “At the end of the day, there are still some people in this world who want to take out their insecurity or their bad day or their hate or their whatever on some strange…

A patch for the open world survival game Valheim went live on the public test server back in June that, among other things, added world modifiers that enable players to change the game’s difficulty in various ways. With that update, called Hildir’s Request, now fully live, developer Iron Gate is celebrating in an appropriately viking-ish fashion with the Trial of Tyr, a speedrun competition that challenges players to race through the entire game—in hard mode—on their own.

Details on the competition are available in the full rules, but the basics are pretty simple:

• You play the full game, by yourself, from start to finish without dying.
• No dev commands or other forms of “external help” allowed.
• You must play in the official Trial of Tyr world seed: MX7L9GYcf2
• “Hard” preset in the world modifier settings must be used.
• Runs must be either livestreamed on Twitch or YouTube, or recorded “…
  

There is quite a lot of Starfield. A gajillion planets. A crafting system I still haven’t unlocked all of. An embarrassment of cowboys. But there’s one thing it’s relatively sparse on: voice acting, specifically for the game’s main character. Starfield opted for an unvoiced player character for its space-based antics, possibly because everyone made fun of the Fallout 4 dialogue wheel, but it turns out that wasn’t always going to be the case.

In a post on Twitter, voice actor Elias Toufexis (Starfield’s Sam Coe and Deus Ex’s Adam Jensen) confirmed that, once upon a time, Starfield’s main character was going to be decidedly chattier. In fact, he and fellow actor Cissy Jones (Starfield’s Andreja) worked on voicing the male and female version of the protagonist “for months” before Bethesda decided to toss the idea completely.

Not to worry though, because the studio clearly didn’t decide to cut the actors loose. Instead, they assigned them to Sam Coe…